My wife and I at our table.
Well if there had been one day I had been looking forward to throughout OCS, it would be Thursday. However, today definitely would take a close second, as today was the day my family came down, and tonight was the night of the formal.
We really only had one major goal for today – getting a supplemental issue of ACU’s. We also finished up our presentations of our professional reading assignments, including mine.
And that was the last weekend of OCS.
This morning we accomplished the final graduation requirement for OCS: the graduation run. The grad run is a 4 mile run, at about a 9:15 or slower pace. Generally we do it in under 38:00 minutes, so it is not at all a hard run, especially after all the running we have been doing during the course. Again, it was no problem, but still great to accomplish knowing that it was the final event of the course. I can now say I will graduate next Thursday. I will get my commission.
Tonight, as I mentioned yesterday, was the night of our social. But that was tonight: I’ll start at the beginning.
You can just tell things are really winding down now. We are beginning to be treated more and more as adults, and soon to be 2nd Lieutenants. Things have never been that bad, but for example today we could start carrying cell phones on us, we were able to drive over to the Central Issuing Facility to turn in our field gear, and starting tonight once we are done in the evening we can get into civilian clothes and go off post if we so choose.
We have a phrase for ‘regular soldier’ in the Army. We call them Joes. So the lower enlisted soldiers in a platoon are referred to as Joes. And here at OCS, if you aren’t in a leadership position, you are generally referred to as a Joe. So let me say this: it was nice to be a Joe again.
Well the inspection today went about as well as I could have hoped for. It certainly wasn’t perfect, and we had quite a few issues with locker standardization. That is, most people had slightly different things in their locker set-ups than the SOP, or other candidates. But we had almost no problems with our cleaning, outside of some dust here and there in wall lockers, so overall I think we did quite well at the inspection. And, oh yeah, I passed the PT Test as well.
It was a nice weekend after the busy last week. It would have been even nicer had I not had this inspection tomorrow hanging over my head. But hopefully that will go well, and it was a good weekend.
Today we finished the final academic course requirement in the History 2 test. We also did a ‘practice’ graduation run.