Month 9 Day 25

Notebook entry

Hedgehog, camp rearrange, $18,000 leave flight.

Journal entry

So the coolest thing about coming back in the wee hours of the morning was the hedgehog, that’s right we had a hedgehog, but before I oculd even get a picture of him in the morning the Gunny Made Lcpl Lekic set him free.  He was too cool and he loved to eat the giant black beetles that we had around here. I don’t think anyone bothered to look up whether or not hedgehogs carried disease, but that was the ostensible reason for his liberation.

We also got back to a nicely rearranged camp.  I thought so anyway, the COC was nice the computers were moved around, the MWR was clean everything was great. They even had a whole box full of hot trays for us when we got back.  That was cool.  It was like Maj Davidson really planned for us to come back and put some thought into what we would like to see.  That was very kind of him. Unfortunately, the other marines didn’t take it that way, they were looking for continuity, and looking to come back to exactly the same thing they left, so some of them were really offended by the changes and acted like they were trying to piss them off personally.  This was especially true for the chore list that Maj Davidson had come up with.  The other Marines were openly hostile to it.  It was admittedly a bit juvenile, but that’s ok at least stuff wouldn’t be forgot about.  I feel kind of bad for him.  He is still the new guy to them and he will probably never gel with the group, I hope that he doesn’t give up. 

I also found out that the real cost of the leave flight was $18,000 not $20,000 per flight.

The RCT promised that they were going to come over and teach a class in the afternoon, but once they found out that the combined Ops-Intel was cancelled they didn’t want to come out anymore. They didn’t even realize that I had been gone for about a month now. This makes sense because while I was gone they taught precisely 0 classes to Salim.  Apparently the Gunny has gone over to the CCOC to try to teach one of the guys from S-1 who is filling in for S-2 some map-reading.  It was 1600 by this time so I didn’t give Salim a class.  He is the only one here. Qais is on leave, Jabar has been moved to his kandak, more hours of training down the drain.  Sigh