Prior to my deployment I completed 10 days of Combat Airmen Skills Training (CAST) at Camp Bullis outside of San Antonio, Texas. The biggest takeaway from this training for me was exposure to concepts and building confidence with equipment and tactics used in the deployed theater, especially the confidence part. I usually feel great anxiety from the "unknown" of a new adventure. Not being able to picture where I am going or knowing what to expect causes me stress. This training really helped me to build a little muscle memory and get used to wearing body armor all the time and living in a deployed environment.
For those of you who don't know (even I forgot until I got there) San Antonio is beautiful Texas hill country. The instructors say that this summer has been unreasonably rainy so everything was green and lush. This is a view of the Camp with some of our tents in the foreground.
This is the female shower tent. Inside there were 6 showers and the sinks in the picture below.
This is inside of the tent we stayed in down the hill from the classroom. We were lucky enough to get beds in our tent, we were the first class to not sleep on cots. Also, lovely, lovely air conditioning.
Don't forget that Texas has snakes... rattlesnakes to be exact... hanging out around the tents. This headless monster was found near one of the guy's tents and the instructors went ahead and took care of it for us.More to come!
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