6 April 2011

(The alternate title "Like Ripping off a Generic, Non-Brand, Adhesive Bandage" didn't have quite the same ring to it.)

      I suppose it was inevitable.  Although I’ve managed to avoid the new PRT program so far, and happened to be in a group that has done the same, that changed today.  For anyone unfamiliar, PRT is the Army’s new and improved PT program, which includes an overhauled warm up and cool down portion, as well as new “drills,” which can be used to form the meat of a PT session. 

     For those like me that served for a substantial amount of time under the old regime, this is a bit of a culture shock.  That’s not to say the new program isn’t an improvement.  Despite my old school adherence to static stretching before a workout (despite all indicators that this is bad for you), I still do it, and it feels weird being led through a warm up that doesn’t include them.

     We crawled through the PRT warm up drills together today, and we were learning as much as our cadre leader.  From a distance, I’m sure we looked like some foreign army being trained, and making little progress (especially on the ‘high jumper’).  Once finished, we released on a 3.75-mile run into campus, which ended up being fairly challenging due to a strategically placed hill right in the middle of the route.

     0810 brought on the moment we’ve all been waiting for to get through: the fiscal law exam.  It was another 50-question multiple choice test, and we were allowed to have our deskbook and powerpoint slide notes with us.  There was no outline prep this time on my end, but I instead went through and tabbed and highlighted pertinent portions of the deskbook so that they were easier to find during the test.

(Thanks to Total Recall, you now know what I looked like heading into the exam.)

     I was honestly worried about the difficulty of this one.  I had missed some class, and some of the material had just been flat out difficult to decipher.  Fortunately, the exam was challenging, but fair.  I didn’t feel like any of the questions “hid the ball,” and I didn’t have to skip over too many questions and come back to them later, which is always a good sign.

     I finished in about an hour and 15 minutes (out of 2 hours allotted), which once again left a decent break on the back end.  Once the exam wrapped up, we rolled straight into an exam review, which was handled by breaking down into small sections.  A professor was tasked to each section, and walked us through the exam questions and answers, stopping to answer questions from students along the way.

     Lunch was a change of pace, as we ate with current students of the NCO Academy at the school.  The Academy is housed at the school, and is made up of JAG NCOs who have come back to C-Ville for advanced training before heading back out to their units (both active duty and reserve component) to assume additional responsibilities.

The lunch was voluntary, and those attending were broken down into small groups to sit with NCOs who were either currently at our next duty assignment, or had served there in the past.

**PUBLIC SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT FOR FUTURE AIRBORNE PT GROUP MEMBERS**:  A chunk of your OML score (which ranks the group to determine who gets slots at the end) is comprised of “leadership” points.  This is a vague category, but it includes things like participation in events that officers ought to take part in.  Skipping an event like this can and likely will cost you valuable points on the OML.  We had 2 skip it from our group (they both had their reasons), and they paid a heavy price for doing so.

     I was lucky enough to eat with a NCO currently serving at 3^rd ID, who’ll be there when I arrive.  In the short time I got to talk to him, he was an outstanding source of information, and got me even more excited about getting to Fort Stewart.  If he’s an accurate sample of what the rest of the office down there is like, I’m in great hands.

The afternoon session was pretty mundane, and involved a mind-crippling session on the overview of the contract process (important information that was unfortunately placed into the worst time slot ever created: post-exam, post-lunch).  We wrapped things up with a fiscal law AAR, which was fairly uneventful.

Tomorrow will mark the start of a topic that may not be the most high octane, but is definitely the most relevant for my purposes: legal assistance.