Finally out of Fort Hood

So I am finally done with Fort Hood, TX and prowling the deserts of Southern Iraq. Since I have been unable to update the blog in a while here is some catch-up info. First off....small pox vaccination is no joke. That sucker hurt and itched for a month and I still have a scar and will probably have it for a long time. Although small pox has been mostly erradicated world wide, it still exists in weaponized form so we soldier types have to get vaccinated against it. This is what it looked like during the second and third week.


The sore was white and nasty, then it turned black, scabbed over, and eventually fell off. I had to keep a band-aid on it at all times because if the puss got onto another part of my body or onto somebody else it could have spread. Nasty!


Well, we finally made it to the Ex-Eval. This was our flight line at Camp Bowie. Although I am in D company, I am assigned to support the maintenance needs of C company as they will be split from the rest of the Batallion in Iraq. I get to be the Officer in Charge of all the D company personnel at that split location.

Here are my maintenance tents set up at the end of the flight line. This whole week it was sunny and HOT! 105ish with Texas humidity. Yuck. Luckily we did not have any of the drama that we had during the Pre Ex-Eval, so I got to fly some missions instead of just doing maintenance stuff the whole time.

These next few pictures are just so you can see what the facilities at Fort Hood were like, and so I can remember looking back. This was our hangar where we worked on the aircraft.

This was the door to the maintenance shop in the hangar. Delta company is known as the Delta Dawgs, so the "Beware of Dog" sign is to warn other companies not to mess with us. It didn't always work, as Army guys love to mess with each other. One day I came to work and the lock to my flight locker was pro-sealed (super sticky stuff we use on the aircraft) to my locker. When I found out it was another Lieutenant messing with me, I plotted my revenge. I changed his rank on the sign to his office, so he thought we were even.....little did he know that I've never been one to get even, I get ahead. He was on nights and I was on days at the time, so one day I changed the clock in his room, his watch and his cell phone ahead 2 hours. He woke up at his usual 5:00pm, but he thought it was 7:00pm. He thought he had missed his ride to the flight line (which leaves at 6:30pm) so he called 3 different people as he was scrambling to get ready trying to arrange a ride. They were all confused at why he was so desperate for a ride so early, and he was confused at their confusion. He finally figured it out, and told me he wouldn't mess with me again. Good thing too, because the next step would have been the kool-aid on the towel prank, and that one is pretty bad.

Here is my office in the back of the shop. Hey, don't judge, I'm busy working, not much time to keep things tidy.

This is me on July 13th, 2009. I am on the bus leaving Fort Hood to go to Gray Army Airfield where I hopped on a Charter flight to Kuwait.

We had to wait a little while to board the plane. This old lady was from some church group. She gave all of us hugs and said she has hugged every soldier who has deployed out of Fort Hood in the last ten years. That is tens of thousands of soldiers.