Tent City - Part 1

NTC - the National Training Center in Fort Irwin, California....  That's one place that I have no desire to EVER return back to.  It's in the middle of the Mojave Desert.

Our unit, since it had just been stood up a few months prior, went to NTC during July.  Given that it was set up to simulate deployed environments and large quantities for soldiers going through, we were living in tents and sleeping on cots.  Before we actually 'deployed' we had different training events that we had to complete before we headed out into the box. 

The 'box' was the deployed representation of our training.  This part of the training started out rough...  I was a command team driver and we were lined up for the convoy to the box, only somehow the individual of the command team that I was driving lined us up in the wrong convoy.  We ended up going out with an infantry unit that was going to a completely different location in the 'box' than we did.  By the time the infantry guys realized we were following them, they had lost half of their convoy.  Somehow we managed to run into the other half of their convoy and they had us follow them back to their FOB.

We tried to radio the rest of our convoy and found that they were not too far from where we were, so some of the infantry guys drove us out to meet them (since we were simulating deployment - vehicles aren't allowed to leave the FOB alone).  We waited for a couple of hours and our convoy still hadn't showed up.  By this point in time, I had been up for over 24 hours, as had quite a few of the other soldiers.  Come to find out that was why our convoy was taking so long to get to us.  One of the soldiers had fallen asleep and hit one of the other vehicles in the convoy.  The infantry guys finally got tired of waiting and just drove us to our FOB.

We got there before the security team came through to 'clear' the area.  They looked extremely surprised to see soldiers sitting in there when they kicked in the door and got ready to engage any individuals who might be in there.  We had only been in the box for about 18 hours and everything was already going wrong - we still had another two weeks of this to look forward to...