Alone in Alaska

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After 17 hours, my overnight trek from DC to Ft. Richardson, Alaska came to an end. It was 3am Thursday morning, and I was climbing out of a van packed so tight that I had another soldier sitting on my lap.

During my trip, I had run into some Alaskans; and I must say that I was impressed. They were so nice. One man even gave me his card and told me to call if I needed anything. Unfortunately, my warm welcome to Alaska was about to get chilly.

There was a somewhat grumpy sergeant on duty who felt like taking his frustration out on the incoming soldiers (including me). Seventeen of us had been arriving that day, and I was in the last group of nine. He had smoked everybody that day. He started picking on guys with 1/4 inch of hair for not getting a hair cut. He got on one guy for not being clean shaven, nevermind it was 3 am, and most of us had shaved almost 24 hours earlier.

We were tired of traveling, starved for sleep, and just wanted a bed. Instead, he had us doing push-ups, low crawls, and grass drills. I am of the firm opinion that if you treat a man like a professional, he will generally act as such. Unfortunately, this NCO had yet to learn this. He treated us like dirt, and he wasn't even good at smoking us. He spent an hour at it, and I bearly broke a sweat. He did end up getting in trouble because he made one group do low crawls on that carpet and insisted that they dig their faces into the ground until they got rug burns. The brigade commander and sergeat major personally apologized to those guys and promoised to "handle" the situation.

Thankfully, the rest of the Ft. Rich community has prven to be much nicer. The place is gorgeous. Not as breath-taking as my wife, but very pretty. And the people are so helpful and kind. The jury is still out, but this place may have Texas beat as the friendliest state. The post is really small, but very well designed and orderly. It's very easy to find you way around post.

It's not that cold right now, high 30's. This time of year is called "break up" because the ice and snow that has covered everything for the last 4 months is breaking up. It's really wet, muddy, gray, and slushy; but despite that the majestic Chugach mountains tower in the background. It's really pretty.

On top of that, the recruiters from the battalion scout platoon interviewed us yesterday. They are the best platoon (about 40 guys) in any battalion (about 600 guys). They dismissed people left and right; and at the end, I was standing there with my best army friend Murphy. Everyone else had been eliminated from consideration, so they're going to put our names in for the scouts, which is exactly where I wanted to be.

The only glaring hole in an otherwise wonderful place is the lack of my wife and daughter. Laura and Jeaden are still back in DC, and I miss them terribly. We know it won't be too long before the Army brings them up here, but we don't know how long, and that's really hard. I miss them very much. It's harder for Laura, who hasn't had a permanent home in several months. Living out of a suitcase stinks even for a few weeks. Please keep us both in your prayers, especially Laura and Jaeden.

I'll post again soon; and when Laura get's here, I'll post some pictures. Until then consider this interesting Alaska fact:

Interesting Alaska Fact #1: Moose poop looks like a bunch of brown ping pong balls. At least I think it's moose poop. It's everywhere.

God Bless,
Tony

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