I'm Back from LDAC!

Just a few days ago I completed the biggest training event I will participate in until after I commission. LDAC (Leaders Developing and Assessing Course, I think) also known as Warrior Forge is a 33 day long training session designed to help prepare future officers in the ROTC program to lead as well as to determine if they have the potential to be an officer in the US Army. Honestly it wasn't that hard to complete, but it was a good learning experience. We did a bunch of training including such events as BRM (Basic Rifle Marksmanship), Cultural Awareness (training focused on what it takes to operate successfully in a foreign culture), Land Navigation, and a ten day "deployment" to the field where we did battled drills, patrolling missions, and patrol base ops.
The weather was perfect. The entire time I was there is rained three times, and none more than a drizzle. As Ft. Lewis is only 39 miles from Mt. Rainer, we often had great views of that mountain. It was impressive how there were small mountains around Mt. Rainer, but Mt. Rainer was so much larger that they all looked like foot hills. While we were in the field, we were operating in single canopy rain forest which was pretty, if not that different from the swamps in East Texas. The most notable differences were that there was moss on almost all the ground and the monster ant beds. The state of Washington decided that they needed some way of controlling the pine needles other than routinely burning the forest, so the introduced these monster ants. These ants build mounds several feet tall out of pine needles and twigs. From the mound they will travel back and forth in "superhighways" collecting building material and dead insects. Invariably I would be in the prone behind some decent cover only to find one of these superhighways running over of under me. Thankfully these ants are fairly harmless, requiring a significant amount to provocation before they sting, and not possessing an especially painful sting. All in all the training was good, but it is nice to be home, sleeping in a real bed and largely off a schedule.