Days 57 - 59 Victory Forge

11/8 - 11/10

I'm combining the 3 days of Victory Forge into one post for a couple of reasons: 1) There's not a lot of exciting day to day details. 2) We just got back from Vic Forge, it's late, I'm tired, and there's not enough time to sleep, so I'm writing.

First, let me tell you about the setup of Vic Forge. The area that it's held at is set up like a forward operating base (FOB) similar to where we'd stay if deployed. We slept on cots in large 20 man tents. There were at least 80 of these tents out there. It's meant for a whole battalion (1400+ soldiers) to stay at one time. Since our battalion only has about 400 soldiers, there were a lot of empty tents.

Unfortunately for us, the tents were not heated and the temps were in the 30's every night. As long as I stayed in my sleeping bag, it wasn't too bad. It sucked to get out of the bag to go to the latrine in the middle of the night or when it was time to wake up in the morning. Once the sun came out, the temps got up into the 70's so the daytime weather was nice.

The training at Vic Forge was just a combination of everything we'd learned at BCT. Most of the time we were given missions to attack or defend against 2nd Platoon. I think everyone had fun during these missions. All of the missions were good tests of our skills and knowledge we picked up over the past 8 weeks.

The final task for Victory Forge and BCT was the 12 mile ruck march back to our barracks. We We started the march at 22:30 on Wednesday night. The march lasted a little over 4 hours. It was a pretty tough march, especially since we were marching at a time when we were used to sleeping. The thing that kept us motivated was knowing that our training was over once we finished the march.

Once it was complete, we had a ceremony to change our banners from blue to red, white, and blue. This symbolized the change from blue phase to graduation phase. After the phase change, we watched a slide show of pictures from different events we completed throughout the cycle. It was cool to see some of the pics from the first couple of weeks of BCT. We've definitely all changed over the course of 9 weeks.

After the slide show, it was time to head upstairs to our bay, take a much needed shower, unpack of gear, and get ready for the next day.