You’ll have to forgive me for my tardiness. Life has definitely got in the way. I know only a few people read this blog anyway, mostly people getting ready to go to BCT. But its all good. I’ll press on anyway. You’ll also have to forgive me if I miss some details. AIT was a long time ago. I have found my journal so we will go off that. Here we go.
I want to preface this by saying there isn’t a whole lot of detail in the goings on for AIT. For us, everyday was basically the same. We got up, did PT, went to breakfast, then went to “course.” Course is the schoolhouse basically. It felt a lot more like a 8-5 job than training. But once again, I’ll get to that. AIT means Advanced Individual Training. It’s where they teach you how to do things good. Like soldering if you are in the infantry, computers if you’re Signal, and in my case, how to operate heavy equipment.
At the end of BCT, we all got held over because the class schedules got jacked up. So for a week we got to sit around/clean/stay out of trouble. That is hard to do for a bunch of privates that are ready to move on. The DS’ were on cycle break, so they wanted nothing to do with us either. There came the stay out of trouble part. Basically we just existed for a week. Didn’t do a whole lot of PT, just ate and cleaned the barracks. That Friday, armed with duffel bags and a packet, I shipped to AIT. And by shipped I mean I got on a bus and went right down the road. Eight more weeks of FLW goodness. I hit the lottery.
We got to what can only be described as very “soviet” looking. Cold, dreary, overcast, and windy. Of course we had to do a gear layout when we got there, hands freezing, but everything had to be dumped. Once that was over, we got hustled into out bay and met out PLT Sergeant for the cycle. Of course, he had to establish himself by smoking us. And we were all kind of like “here we go again.” Gotta love TRADOC-land. Turns out he was pretty cool and that only happened once. So before we started anything, we were assigned “squad leaders.” The next few days were dedicated to taking a PT test and getting things ready for class. We got up at 0400 for the PT test. There was a storm coming, but it hadn’t hit yet so we pressed on with the test. Take this to heart, you have to work on your PT on your own. We went 3 weeks without doing any PT and it showed. A lot of people failed because of the lack of PT and the cold weather. I being one of them.
In true FLW fashion, blue skies turned cloudy and the sky opened up. Snow/freezing rain/hail started coming down and sticking to everything. They shut down post and we didn’t go to class. At this point, we were 3 days behind. Get ready for anything in AIT. Especially having to wait or catch up. Especially when your classes are outside. We were all eager to get started.
The weather was so bad at FLW we didn’t do anything for a week but sleep and do PT. You start to get a little stir crazy after a while even though the break was welcome. Part two coming soon.