This week (week 5 DCC) was patrolling.  It started off with us going into the classrooms to learn the basics of patrolling via power point presentation.  We learned were certain people stand in movement formations and why those weapons go in those locations.  How large fire teams are. 3 different movement formations and how to cross roads and what not.  The next 2 days we went out in the woods and practiced this over and over using blanks and a blank adapter.  Blanks are much dirtier than actual rounds, and because of that, some of us were trying to fire as little as possible since we knew we would be done with the weapons on Thurs and have a serious cleaning to do.  So for those two days we were out in the field practicing.  The second day the cadre brought out grenade and smoke screen simulators and threw those in the mix to liven it up.  The first time we heard the grenade noise go off everyone jumped.  On Thurs got back to late to clean and turn in our weapons, but the CG of the installation decided to give everyone Friday off.  For us, that meant we had the day off, but we were stuck with our weapons for the weekend which meant supervising them.  A few people rented out their cleaning and observation services for 20-50 bucks a weapon for the weekend and made a lot of money.  The cleaning was extremely thorough this time with them inspecting them on Monday.

When Monday rolled around, we had our final APFT.  Despite the lack of PT we did, my push-ups increased into the 90’s.  However, like others, my sit-ups and run time went down a little.  After the APFT we had the day off to prepare for the Star Course.  The last big event on our calendar before graduation.  We got divided into 5-6 man teams and everyone had a packing list of items to load in the ruck sacks and then some other items that could be divided however the team chose.  Some of these items were things like sandbags.  I got stuck with a sandbag and when we set out my ruck weighed around 53 lbs.  The star course is basically land navigation at night with 5 points that must be completed in order and a task at each point.  If you fail a task, you can’t win the star course.

We started off when it was still light around 7:30pm and made our first point which was disassembling and reassembling an m4 in less than 3 minutes with a system check.  We complete that and moved on.  Luckily for us, it had just rained on our way out to the course so everything was soaked and muddy, worse than last time.  As the night progressed it became more and more miserable as we were all covered in mud and sweat and tired.  We completed the course around 3:00 am and were in about 4^thplace as there was a group (that may or may not have had a GPS system J) that got done around 1:00 am.  Either way, we were happy to be done.  We were required to change clothes so most of us just stripped out in the assembly area.  Then everyone either ate or fell asleep.  The last groups rolled in about 6am and by that time it was getting light outside.  In all, it was about 13 miles again with tasks being m4, the SAW, another larger machine gun, calling in a medevac using the radio system, and doing combat light saver.  Despite all that, the buses then didn’t start when it was time to leave so we got to wait on new ones.  The rest of the day we had nothing to do but sleep and recover.  All of our feet were torn up (6 blisters for me) and backs were hurting.  By the end of the night, my ruck weighed around 75 lbs as I had to start caring others things as one of our group couldn’t make it with her weight…which was substantially heavier proportionally considering she weighs about 100 lbs—although she did eventually take back her ruck and finish everything!  HOAAH!

The next few days we had a few PT sessions in the morning, paper work, equipment turn in and cleaning, and a visit to the military museum (which was awesome).

Then it culminated with a brief in door graduation and we left Fort Benning behind!