I have been out at training in Yakima, Washington. Yes i said Washington. The state not DC. Without bashing the ARMY or what we do this was a wasted mission. We trained a lot of soldiers but none of the problems we have encountered were worth the training.
First the drive out here took 4 days. Four days in a day cab Freightliner with an empty trailer. Bouncy doesn't describe it. The drive wasn't too bad but it was long. Once here at YTC (Yakima Training Center) we set up and got ready for an inspection by civilians on our tankers. This had to happen before we hauled fuel. Well it just so happened that our first mission couldn't start until we had enough tankers cleared. Guess who was in charge of the first mission?Yup me. I was in charge along with one of our brand new Lt's. Here is some back story. We weren't running missions with our own platoon. each platoon had sent a squad of soldiers about 10 or 11 to make up four teams that would each handle a specific leg of the missions. So i had a new LT and only 10 out of 30 soldiers that i knew. Needless to say all hell broke loose. Nothing we could have foreseen or avoided. 4 tankers leaked once fuel was pushed in, 2 tankers came back dirty( as in had sediment that would cause bad fuel, and our Humvee broke down.
That's not all! Oh yeah it gets better, still on my mission we find out Congress hasn't passed a certain bill and now all of our funding has been cut. Yes we had no money for fuel. So at 9 o clock at night after getting up at 5am the LT and i are trying to find out how we can repair the Humvee, repair the tankers, get our soldiers to sleep( we had to leave at 3am) and find a way to purchase fuel so we can keep our tractors running. Well we came up with a plan but none of our plan was used. I will just say other factors took over. The factors that took over were corrected later and that will never happen again. We made it back, it wasn't pretty, it wasn't perfect but it was accident free. I was patted on the back for my job well done, then i slept and got up and did it again.
So on the cutting of funding. i want to speak about this for a minute. We actually lost a ton of funding. We stayed in a hotel once on the way out here, well that's gone, the ARMY credit card used to rent a van to drive people out here was blocked, our fuel cards were cut from $20,000 to $10,000 without warning. Now the unit is half convoying home and half flying and the convoy is praying the fuel cards they have will get them home. Congress please get off your fat ass. We need to train and we need money to do so. I understand there are a million things that get added to a bill but, Military funding should never be compromised, not while we are at WAR.
Okay thats my rant. I should be back this sunday. I cant wait to see Jessica and the boys.
