Thursday, November 24, 2011

School of the Americas Protest




Thousands of protesters descend on Ft. Benning for a weekend every November to protest the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (WHINSEC), formerly known as the School of the Americas. My BOLC class was warned we'd be ticketed my MPs if we tried to drive on Ft. Benning Road - though if you did that, you'd have more serious charges to worry about, since you would also have had to drive over fences and a number of protestors. My friend in the Armor School was advised that military personnel discovered at the protest would be arrested by MPs - which would have raised some interesting legal issues, since the protest was held outside of the installation, and also the Bill of Rights.

There were no MPs there.

Saturday, November 19, 2011

Most Butch Safety Brief Ever




This happened.

Other officers told me that IBOLC would fly by, and it truly has - probably because we spend most of the time doing nothing. At school, five weeks felt like five weeks, full of papers, labs and OPORDs, evaluations, parties, etc., and even then I tried to keep pretty lazy! As long as I can look at myself on graduation day and say, "hey, I've actually been trained!" (Don't care if it's true or not, as long as I can fool everyone else - that's leadership!)

I'm not going to chronicle the entire IBOLC process here, that's been done, and thoroughly so, by a number of other LTs and also the Ft. Benning website - but memorable moments will still get posted. The course is speeding up a bit (or we're at least learning things that seem useful, like OPORDs), and despite my last post I really am enjoying it (feels like a frathouse with guns most of the time). I'll have to draw something about the parts of IBOLC I do like. Have you noticed how many of my posts end with me pledging to expand on my subject in a future post? I'll have to draw something about that.

Tuesday, November 15, 2011

Infantry Basic Officer's Basic Leader Course B



Haven't posted in a while, IBOLC's kept me pretty busy (I kid) - actually it just made me lazier. More posts coming, faster. If I got kicked out of IBOLC tomorrow, I'd still have enough material for years. And that's a distinct possibility, given the quality of the homework (overlays!) I'm bringing in tomorrow (I drew this instead of some extra avenues of approach). It can't be helped, nothing encourages artistic effort more than the possibility of having to exert regular effort.