From a week after my last post until last weekend, I've been out in the field, training up for Korea. Frankly, I think half of the field exercise was useless, but you can't really tell the Colonel that. We did a lot of drills on our equipment (I honestly hate Air-Defense Artillery line units now, by the way) and went to the range a lot. Can't complain about the ranges, because I got to fire my M249 Machine Gun a lot, but that thing sure is a bitch to clean. Carbon and sand and dust get everywhere inside it. Not to mention we had to clean them to inspection standards for the Battalion XO (Executive Officer) when we got back, so I spent several hours on mine as well as those belonging to other people who didn't want to spend their valuable time cleaning their own weapons.
I honestly don't remember what I did half the time I was out there. I was so tired the whole time from working from 5am to 9pm. Then after that, half the nights out there I had overnight guard duty. I've been exhausted and this weekend has been my first chance to really relax. It feels so nice to sleep in 'til 9am. :-D
On a more fun note, I went to play some paintball today. Everyone was going nuts over my paintball gun -- a Tippmann A-5 with a Tasco Red Dot Sight (which I mount on my M249) and a BT 3-position M4 buttstock. Also, since I've done a bit of tactical training, I appear to know what I'm doing out on the paintball field. ;-) It's pretty fun. There were even a few other soldiers out there. All of us had on camouflaged pants -- they were in their desert (DCU -- Desert Camouflage Uniform) pants and I had on my woodland camo (BDU -- Battle Dress Uniform) pants. We played a series of 10-minute games, and the kids out there kept coming up to me telling me how awesome my paintball gun is and one of them even said "hey, you're the guy nobody can hit!" That made my day, 'til I got lit up. One game someone shot my gun, so I raised my gun in the air to show I was eliminated, and when I stood up, someone absolutely tore into my chest with a barrage of paint! The funny thing was, not a single one of them broke. Well, it was funny because it wouldn't have eliminated me, but it sort of wasn't funny because it hurts more when they don't break.
All in all, a fun day was had in paintball. Definitely a lot more fun than being out in the field. Sometimes I wish they'd let us use paintball guns to train. :-) I'm really getting into it.