Delta Company OCS: Week One in Brief

I'm a week late summarizing week one, but there is only so much free time in a week, and I like to write my dear friends at home when I can. Here goes it!

Below you can see a small clip from our water survival course. We had to jump off a high platform without losing any equipment, swim 35 meters (still holding our rifle), and the last station was an underwater equipment ditch. That last task was only difficult because some people took a while to remove their load bearing vest (LBV). You can't really make it out in my picture, but it also carries some attached water bottles.

This is my roommate Trevino. He's pretty sharp. He's from the Marine core originally (7 years enlisted) and doesn't ever have anything out of place. He's 29 years old, and he has a fair bit of experience in deployments. I was at first expecting that prior service candidates would stick to themselves and either help us college ops as mentors or not at all. To the contrary, Trevino has been extraordinarily helpful, has asked for assistance / advice from me as well, and he's become a good friend. I'm happy to have him as a roommate. Overall, I'm serving with some pretty good soldiers in Delta Company.

Every single personal space area needs to look the same from one soldier to the next. This is true across the Army, but in OCS, we set our own Standard Operating Procedures (SOP) on things like this. For issues like laundry room usage, cleaning tasks, and other small things, I wrote the official memorandums (basically simple SOPs) and people were thrilled, saying I did a very good job. I'm embarrassed to say I actually enjoy paperwork and procedure.

Overall, the first week is somewhat boring. Nothing unexpected or avoidable, though... mostly we had safety briefs, sexual assault briefs, financial briefs (they make pay really complex here), and other really really long meetings. We also had an initial physical fitness assessment. I wore myself out over the weekend in the gym and didn't do so well. That was disappointing.