More CAST

We learned so many great ground movement concepts... convoy operations, tactical casualty care, weapons familiarization, urban and small unit tactics, and land navigation. The course was awesome because we would spend the morning in the classroom being briefed the concepts. Then we would go outside and the instructors would demonstrate the concepts, then we would demonstrate to the instructors with their input, and then we would do it on our own. The whole course was crawl, walk, run and it really made sure that we understood the concepts. The other awesome thing was that our instructors have an incredible amount of experience in the deployed theater with these concepts in real-life scenarios and were really able to convey to us the importance of these concepts.

This is my workspace in the classroom. I have my M-4 rifle that we had to carry with us wherever we went. I had my burts bees chapstick (with SPF :), my perscription for Indocin I had to get the second day there to try and help with my shoulder blade pain (it was pretty much as if I never had the nerve block injection, so incredibly painful), an ace bandage to help put ice on my back. I had my little vera bradley notebook to take all of my class notes and an array of Meals-Ready-to-Eat (MREs) parts to eat throughout the day. More on those later.

This is me and the other girl in my squad Senior Airman Corpuz in our paintball gear. We used paintball guns during our urbanized terrain training. A week later and I am still nursing some pretty gnarly bruises.


This is a wide shot of the classroom where we had our daily briefings and ate our meals. We also watched movies here while we ate dinner.

The first couple of days we were there, we had unbelieveable thunderstorms. Luckily it would rain in the morning while we were inside for lessons and then by the afternoon it would still be overcast but really nice out and a little cooled off. Our third night there we had to be woken up from our tents and come up to the classroom because of a lightning warning. We can't stay in the tents if there is lightning within 5 miles. We got up there around 10pm and after about an hour I just decided to sleep in the classroom. So I took my sleeping back and laid it out on my table and slept with my blanket over me... best sleep I had had there yet.

More to come!