April 13th

So today was the dreaded "Battalion PT" day. Excuse my french but that was the larget single cluster-fuck of an evolution that I have ever experienced in my entire career. And in 21 years, I've seen a few. Get up at 0345 to do a couple of windmills, stretches and run 1.2 miles? Seriously? Not only that but there are two companies worth of people out there which amounts to about 185. Try to do anything organized with that many people and yes it's challenging. But add in the fact that these idiots have a van on site at the PT field that is blasting something along the lines of Seether and you're starting to get the idea of where I'm going with this. No one can hear anything. Now add to that the fact that in the Navy, we simply don't do drill. "Drill" for the uneducated is "march-and-make-pretty-like-all-in-step" because if you can't fight well, you might as well look good. Navy folks don't do this and it takes practice. Doing a Battalion Fun Run means running (i.e. drill) in formation with nearly 200 people. So here's the scene: you have a transition zone where everyone gets out of the water at the same time, all carrying M16s and 9 mm's, gear flaying everywhere, and now we want to get all those bodies out on the road out of T1 all at once...in an orderly manner...in the pitch black of a cloudy moonless morning. Good luck. Chock up three more hours of my life courtesy of the Army that I will never get back. And no workout to show for it. The funniest thing is that we weren't 1000 feet down the road before the weak were already falling out of our 11 min per mile "run". Not that running fast is a required qualification for being a good human but you'd think that in the military at least, physical fitness would be higher up on the priority list. Mix a little Navy and Army incompetence together and you get a recipe for disaster. Did I mention this was all at 0430 in the am? What a great day. The silver lining on this cloud is the fact that we got done early today - 4:30 in the afternoon. Tomorrow I'm going to voluntarily pistol-whip myself by getting up at 0330 and doing my workout before training since we'll be at the firing range shooting M16's all day. Dragging myself to the track every afternoon after the fact is killing me. Last week I did 52.5 miles of running out of sheer desperation and the need to vent steam. By working out in the am, I hope to 1) get my body clock on Hong Kong time just for kicks and 2) get to the end of the day so impossibly exhausted that I no longer have the energy to bitch. Tomorrow will be the test bed. I'll let you know...