That little 6oz ball packs a punch

July 11, 2009

We get in trouble if we are caught writing letters during training, but writing helps keep me awake! So my letters will be shorter from now on.

If we fall asleep in training today we don’t get to throw a grenade. If we don’t throw a grenade we don’t graduate!!

I actually didn’t like today! Same deal…about 10 hours of nothing for 10 minutes of fun. The actual grenade throw was cool. Live fragmentation grenades with a killing radius of 5m, causality radius of 15m, and debris carry up to 230m. That little 6oz ball packs a punch.

We got to throw two each. You’re in a bunker and here are the very easy steps. Stand up, pull the pin, prepare to throw, and throw. There is an NCO there with you so if you do anything wrong they let you know. We had our IBA and Kevlar helmets on also. But the rest of the day sucked. It was hot and boring.

We did our 10K march this morning…it was tough. We had our 50lb Ruck, LBV (Load Bearing Vest), and Rifle. It took us 2 hours to complete the 10K (approx. 6.25 miles). We have one more 10K and a 15K still to do. They have some big hills here. We went down the hill called ‘Misery’, it is about a mile long at a 14% grade. If I’m not mistaken that means every 100 feet it goes down 14 feet…that doesn’t seem like a lot but it is. ‘Heartbreak’ is a 20% grade. We saw the sign for it, but haven’t traversed it yet.