On July 11th, 2010, after a tearful goodbye to my husband and puppy, I flew to California for a month of training before deployment. We spent a week at NMPS Port Hueneme doing admin and getting issued new uniforms and tons of extra gear.
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| My new uniform |
Then we took buses down to Camp Pendleton, CA where the actual training would take place. It almost felt like coming home since I have lived there numerous times over my dad's military career. And then I saw the seahuts where we would be living for the next 3 weeks....
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| I learned to love my little cot |
Over the next three weeks we did a variety of training evolutions. A lot of the training was hands on but we also had classroom training. We learned how to set up a field hospital:
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Some of the Nurse Corps officers in front our field hospital
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We also practiced rolling over in a Humvee and successfully egressing from the vehicle. This was kind of like being on a ride at a theme park except you were wearing about 40 extra pounds of gear and holding an M16 weapon in between your knees.
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| Getting ready to rollover |
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I'm setting up a perimeter after successfully egressing the HMMV. They had smoke and heat inside the vehicles to simulate an actual explosion.
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We also got to practice our shooting and then qualify on different weapons. I qualified on the M9 and M4 which was surprisingly fun.
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Me with my friend Nate at the gun range
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We learned how to put on our MOPP Gear in under 8 minutes. This gear is to protect us in the case of a chemical or biological attack so we won't inhale deadly poison. My partner and I were the fastest in our group! I know, who knew I would be so talented at donning protective gear.
The food at training was pretty awful. We had 'field rats' or field rations. This means they made one main dish and two sides and that was all there was to eat. Needless to say there were not a lot of vegetarian options so I ate a lot of peanut butter and jelly. The Vegetarian MRE's were not bad actually and sometimes you would even get lucky and find candy in your MRE.
Finally we finished training and on August 6th we headed to the airport to wait for our flight. After 48 hours of traveling we arrived at our destination in Kuwait. It was 2 am when we landed so we got to wear our stylish new glow-belts. It's mandatory that we wear these between sunset and sunrise. I'm still looking for the pink one.
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My friend Emily and I
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