A few weeks ago, I was almost assigned a detail to drive down to Kaiserslautern, a town close to an air force base, but at the last minute was nixed. I wasn't so lucky this time around. Pete was spending the weekend with his fiancee and Captain Chadwick tasked me with the task of filling his deployment push duty or whatever it's called.

Screw up number one came when I was given a seven seater van when we had nine soldiers...

I ended up taking my POV knowing most likely that I wasn't going to get any $$$ back for gas and other expenses. Since I was the only person who hasn't been to the training for this event I got to hear the whole story about how it sucked that no one was getting TDY and how other units were and how Vogelweh air force base was 1000x better than Bamberg, etc.

Anyway we arrived Sunday around 9pm and I bedded down for the night while the rest of the crew decided to go downtown and get stupid. No major incident except a few late wakeups but nothing that interfered with mission. In fact after we showed up at 9am we found out the unit we were pushing wasn't even there yet and wouldn't be there until 10:30. When they finally arrived at 10:30 they didn't have a commander's sign off on safety so one of their soldiers ended up driving back to their base for that. We didn't start working until after lunch; we should have been leaving before lunch!

The job was a joke and a complete and utter waste of everyone's time. Here we have artilleryman, people who shove shells into cannons, supervising a transportation unit on how to properly pack up a connex to be sent downrange. And of course the kicker is, they couldn't even do that correctly. I can't even remember how much paperwork they were missing not to mention the utter mess they had on one of the bigger connexes. If it was up to me, if they don't give a crap about their own stuff, why should I? But I guess some poor fellow in Kuwait would have gotten a very painful surprise if things got banged up and out of place. SPC Mayo ended up doing the damn job for them!

Then came screw up #2, and this was my fault. - I drove the wrong way for an hour! I actually knew I was going the wrong way so I found the nearest exit and made an about-face. However I must have screwed something up because I continued going the wrong way after that. I knew my gut was telling me something was wrong since we were not supposed to be headed north (since I found the sun to my left) but I went on for a little bti anyway. Yep that sucked. 2.5 hours to get down there and 5.5 to get back; we stopped at Wurzberg for Taco Bell.

I need a break. I'm need to take a four day pass soon...