The big day finally came!

My wonderful wife gave birth to a ridiculously handsome baby boy!

 

Bryce is going to be the coolest kid in the neighborhood once he learns everything I have to teach him about baseball and the Army!

 

This might get people thinking a bit...

http://seanlinnane.blogspot.com/2013/05/benghazi-story-behind-story-behind-story.html

Tomorrow begins a new phase of my Army career. I officially sign into Armor school and have one week to kill time before Armor Basic Officer Leader Course begins. I also only have 3 weeks remaining until I find out my first duty station as a Lieutenant. I'm still pulling hard for Fort Carson in Colorado, and hopefully the emails I've sent to certain individuals will bear some fruit.

In other news, future little baby Maurer still has not made an appearance.

This is sad news

Another sad loss for the police community.

I don't know if Tamerlan Tsarnaev is actually guilty or not of the Boston bombings, but his death is at least providing plenty of comfort to the families of the killed and injured.

This is "interesting" to say the least

This article sure does make Afghanistan seem like a lost cause.
 Afghan Army in the Tangi Valley
The video is also very interesting. It's slightly uncomfortable to see places that I've been at. I also recognized the old Afghani man at 4:32 in the video and actually have a photo of him from deployment.

Another school knocked out!

 Today was a great day for me. After 29 sometimes mind-numbing and sometimes absolutely exhausting days I graduated the Reconnaissance and Surveillance Leaders Course held here at Fort Benning. To save myself some typing, here's the link to the school website that describes it a bit:
http://www.benning.army.mil/infantry/rtb/rslc/

There was of course the initial tests designed to weed out those people who don't belong in the school. We started with 37 students, and 8 days later we were down to 24. The land navigation written exam and actual out in the woods test took out 9 guys, 2 guys for some unknown lame reason failed the physical fitness test, and the radio communications exams took out another 2.

I knew very little about communications going into this course, but now I have a very solid understanding of 3 different radio systems, radio wave propagation and antenna construction.

It is amazing what you can do with a spool of old claymore wire and your imagination. It's ridiculous to think that I can use basic materials to construct an antenna that allows me to communicate with someone in Hawaii. Prior to this course I had no idea how radio coms worked, and now I understand how to bounce radio waves off of different layers in the atmosphere....pretty crazy.

We also did some pretty high-speed training events during the course. We conducted 2 UH-60 airborne operations(one with full combat loads, which included a stupidly heavy ruck sack) with steerable parachutes, which are very nice. I have discovered that I love doing Blackhawk jumps. They are extremely enjoyable once you get over the initial fear of the wind pulling on your legs and sucking you out of the helicopter.

 My first jump without any equipment went perfect. My second jump was an entirely different story. I was unable to get any push out of the helicopter due to my rucksack and weapon, so myself and everyone else basically ended up just falling head-first out of the door towards the ground. The weak exit also usually results in a whole bunch of twists in the parachute risers, and it took me almost my entire descent to untwist myself just in time to lower my rucksack and weapon and crash into the ground. Fun times.

We also conducted some FRIES/SPIES operations. I've never fast-roped before, and I enjoyed it despite the fact that there is nothing very fancy about it.

We then moved into our graded patrols out in the woods. To say that the field time was difficult would be an understatement. I averaged 30 minutes of sleep a night and at one point went 30 hours without any food. The rucksacks(sometimes weighing right around 100 pounds) and walking through some very crappy terrain made for long slow movement and exhaustion.

A normal patrol involved the initial planning, a usual start time of 1500 for movement towards your objective area, and by midnight we usually began digging/constructing our subsurface surveillance site. We usually finished digging/constructing by 0600, and then the awful boring task of surveillance on the objective began. Guys would always be droning during site construction too from being so tired. For those who don't know what droning is, it means you are basically in a state of sleep walking. One extreme example that we had occurred on our first night out in the woods when a Corporal from Ranger regiment on our team suddenly just disappeared from our digging site. Luckily we noticed his absence quick and found him walking straight towards the enemy position 300 meters away. When we caught up to him and grabbed him he had absolutely no idea where he was or what was going on. My own experience occurred on the 3rd night/morning. I woke up from a short nap in the morning and discovered 2 claymore(anti-personnel mines) triggers next to me. I asked the guy next to me where the heck they came from, and he told me I had set them up last night after we had built up our site. I literally had not one memory of putting out the claymores the previous night.

We ended our field training with an evasion and escape exercise after being compromised by the enemy. We had a fairly long evasion movement through the woods towards our rescue/pick-up site, and of course we ended it with a one mile long 100 pound ruck sack "run" to the rescue location.

Our final event was a SPIES extraction. We set up on our pickup site and waited for the Blackhawk to arrive, and then we hitched a ride home by being attached to a long rope connected to the helicopter.

Once I got over the fear of either the rope or my harness snapping, the ride was actually really cool. We flew 500 feet above the ground at approximately 80 mph for 13 kilometers, so the ride wasn't very long. And I might as well clarify this and say that there is not one thing remotely comfortable about wearing that harness, especially with a rucksack.

And that's about it! Overall, I'm really glad I went to the school and especially happy I passed. RSLC physically punished me much more than anything else has since my deployment, and it felt great to be challenged again. My inner infantryman really enjoyed it a lot, and I take pride in the fact that I functioned much better on no sleep than most of my peers in the school. In fact, one of the peer evaluations about me said "he is always awake and still functioning effectively". That comment really made the misery worth it.

So that's it for recent news. I am really hoping my experience and military schools gets me a good and challenging/demanding job at my first unit. Hopefully somewhere out there is a Battalion commander who wants a sniper/airborne/pathfinder/rslc/prior service infantryman to run his sniper or scout platoon.

On a completely unrelated note, I am very much looking forward to the arrival of our newest family member sometime in May. He or she is going to be the coolest kid in school once I start teaching him/her all of the high-speed things I've learned so far in the Army!

No more Special Forces in Wardak Province

So much for making any progress in my old stomping grounds.

http://www.stripes.com/news/middle-east/afghanistan-us-special-forces-must-leave-province-1.209486

Finally back on jump status!

It's been over 2 years since I last jumped, but the long wait is finally over. I've never jumped the T-11 parachute, so here's to hoping that I don't hit the ground like a sack of rocks later this afternoon.

There's a new officer in town

Finally done with an interesting 12 weeks of Officer Candidate School. It was a bit of a challenge, but not nearly as much as I was expecting. I ended up picking Armor as my branch, so I'll have to do something about the name of this blog if I want to have any sense of legitimacy on here.

A quick side note: I actually was sad while turning in my ID card that had my NCO rank on it. I worked awfully hard to earn my stripes...

Anyways, on a very positive note, I finally was "with a dumber group of guys"(that quote is courtesy of JihadGene from my Pathfinder post on here) and managed to earn the Academic Honor Grad award for my class with the highest overall score on all written exams throughout the entire course. Not bad for someone 5 years removed from college and competing against people with Masters degrees in sciences and engineering.
So here's to hoping I have an exciting future in the Armor branch!

Tomorrow is a big day

Officer Candidate School begins tomorrow. Should be a fun time.

Pathfinder graduate!

Graduated Pathfinder school today after 3 weeks of mostly academic stress. I dominated the sling load hands-on inspections and did well enough on the written exams to once again finish 2nd in class honor grad standings. One of these days I'll figure out what I'm doing wrong and finish in the top of a class.

I stumbled on a blog recently, and this last post the soldier made prior to his death really hit home. He really spoke the truth.

http://myfriendthemedic.blogspot.com/2012/07/coming-home.html

He was killed by indirect fire 6 days after that post, while making his way back home from Afghanistan. He died at FOB Shank, which would have been his last stop before getting on a plane back to the States.

So many options for one important decision

I've been trying hard to narrow down my most desired officer branches to choose during Officer Candidate School, and let's just say that it has been somewhat difficult. There of course are the distinct few that I absolutely do not want: chemical, adjutant general, transportation and quartermaster. In the middle are ordnance, engineer, air defense artillery, finance, field artillery, signal and aviation. At the top are infantry, armor, military intelligence and military police.
This also completely depends on the available #'s of each branch and my class standing when we pick our branches during week 6 of OCS. I guess all I can do now to ensure I have an early pick is to get in the best shape possible and start studying.

Back to the office

As much as this past week really really stunk due to being back in the office, I did manage to bust two high ranking officers who were wearing Ranger tabs despite not finishing the school. At least I did something fairly useful for the rest of the Army this week. Nobody likes a faker.
On the bright side, I am on the wait list to attend Pathfinder school in the near future. Really looking forward to that school, especially since it's actually one of the few useful and relevant Army schools these days.

Sniper graduate!

Had a short and simple graduation this morning from sniper school. My sniper buddy ended up being the Top Gun(highest shooting score) of the class, which means I did a pretty decent job as his spotter giving him his ranges and wind calls. I ended up placing 2nd in the class overall for the class Honor Grad. I was only 15 points behind the 1st place guy(we were the only 2 students to have over 700 cumulative points from the shooting, fieldcraft, and academic portions of the school). Not too shabby for someone who came from an office and hadn't touched a real gun since my deployment in 2010.

Current Events

I am happy to say that things are going well as of late. I got picked up for OCS and will be headed there this fall. I also just finished week 4 of sniper school and am planning on graduating next Friday. My time spent in sniper school has been the most enjoyable time in the Army for me since returning from deployment.

An OCS update

I am anxiously waiting for the end of April to arrive. My Officer Candidate School packet should be 100% complete after some minor corrections this past week. Now I just have to make sure everything is accepted and that it goes before the Army OCS board in April, and the results will be posted in July/August. Only 130 people in the entire Army submitted a packet for this fiscal year(compared to over 400 last year).....I sure hope I get selected. If only there wasn't such a long wait to see the results.

A short photo recap: 2001 - 2011

2001: golfing in Estes Park, Colorado with Jeff

2002: hiking at Devil's Lake, Wisconsin

2003: Me and my two best friends on our high school baseball team

2004: Hiking outside Estes Park, Colorado

2005: pitching for the UW-Whitewater club baseball team

2006: spring baseball against UW-Madison

2007: my first beer after returning home from basic training

2008: my room in the condemned(yes, they still had signs in the windows saying so) barracks for SOPC at Fort Bragg

2008: my dad drove from Wisconsin to Fort Benning to pin on my airborne wings

2009: in Italy watching my brother Jeff's wedding on skype 

2009: home for leave before my deployment

2010: in the Tangi Valley of Afghanistan

2010: after our engagement, outside our favorite coffee shop

2010: photographic evidence of our first "secret" wedding

2011: vacationing in Destin, Florida before I attempted Ranger school and ended up breaking/dislocating an ankle

2011: with Duke, our favorite family addition

2012: after welcoming in the new year at a martini bar that was far out of our price range

I sure do miss Italy

I hope this is me someday

I saw this picture today while wasting time on the internet at work.

There are lots of mornings when I look in the mirror while getting ready for work and reminisce about time spent deployed. I have a fantastic photo of COP Tangi that sits on my wall in my desk area at work that I find myself looking at more often than not. There is an Afghanistan flag full of bullet holes(from bullets shot at me and my company) mounted on the wall in my home. One of the frames on our wall also has copper wire from an IED found 15 meters away from me while setting up a blocking position in the green zone in the valley. All of those bring back some rather vivid memories of my time spent in Afghanistan and the Tangi Valley.

It seems I've done a fairly good job of setting up things to force myself to remember the best times I've had so far in the Army. I just wish I could add onto those memories. I still want to go on another deployment, but I have a bad feeling I will never get that chance.

An ankle update

Well it turns out that I will need to get one screw removed from my ankle. X-rays showed that one of the screws was too long and had gone through one bone and was scraping another. The doctors said I wouldn't really be bothered by it now, but in 6 or 7 years it could cause some serious discomfort issues. So sometime in April I will be in the ankle clinic watching as they slice open my ankle and remove a screw from my fibula. I will have to remember to take my camera for that one.

Life can be so difficult sometimes

Nothing quite ruins your dinner like pulling a freshly baked pizza out of the oven and setting it on the counter to cool, stepping into the living room to turn on the TV, and then returning to the kitchen to find your 6 1/2 month old black labrador on the counter eating the pizza.

He is lucky that I love him.

Scenes from the holiday trip to wisconsin