OCS Day 9 (Tuesday, 16/JUN/09)

June 30th, 2009 Doug Posted in Journal Entry | No Comments »

This is a classmate disassembling an M240B.

A classmate places a dummy claymore mine.

As I mentioned yesterday, we had a tough first day of PT. Well, it didn’t get any easier today. As I’m learning, and as the cadre warned us about, PT ‘ain’t no joke’ at OCS. Today we had what they called Combat PT. I’m really not too sure why they call it that, but I have a guess. Basically we wear our ACU’s with tennis shoes and no cover (military speak for cap.) Our Platoon Training Officer (each Platoon has a E-7 Sergeant First Class as the Platoon Trainer and O-3 Captain as the Platoon Training Officer assigned to it) is very much into alternative PT’s and workouts, and is also very much into intense PT.

So the first thing we did different was instead of static stretching, what I’ve basically done my whole career in the Army, we did dynamic stretching. This consisted of doing various ridiculous looking but probably effective, stretches, fowwed bhy things like doing high knee sprints and kariokee’s. I’m not going to try to explain the stretching, but a quick Google search of dynamic stretching should give you an idea.

He is also very much into a strength and conditioning program called ‘Crossfit.’ To give you an example, we did three sets of ‘Cindy’s’ (all crossfit exercises apparently have girl’s names.) A Cindy is 5 pull-ups, 10 pushups, and 15 squats, doing them as quickly as you can. It is a good workout and the concept is interesting. After that we did a rotation of jumping walls, monkey bars, and log bench presses. The last was the most interesting. Basically, three or four guys would lay on the ground, grab a log, and bench press it. This quickly gets tiring, but again, good tough PT.

After that we went to do some Warrior Skills and Battle Drills (WSBDs.) These are individual tasks that all soldiers need to be proficient on. Specifically, we did weapon WSBD’s. The four we had to do was Place and Recover a Claymore mine and disassemble, reassemble, perform a function check and clear an M16 rifle, a m249 machine gun, and a M240B machine gun. I am more or less familiar with all three, so it didn’t take too much, but the practice was nice. WE get tested on the drills on Thursday.

Finally, I also got placed in charge of the CQ roster. CQ is something all military units do, and is especially big at schools. Basically, it is manning the phones and the front desk. So once every four nights we have company CQ, and once every four nights we have Battalion Staff Duty, which is essentially the same thing. We have one hour shifts, and CQ and Staff Duty runs all night; CQ whenever we occupy the barracks, and staff duty during the night, as it is manned by candidates not yet in a class during the day. So I got in charge of doing the roster. The Student Platoon SGT had been doing it, but it is a somewhat big task, and she had too much else going on and didn’t have the time to devote to it, so it was getting messed up. I spent the better part of my personal time doing it, but now it is set till Friday night.