The Blog of Photographer Jacob Vorpahl.
Sorry, everyone. I don’t mean to be depressing with the headline when you read this, it was just horrible. Almost everything that could have went wrong yesterday did. We were doing a live fire exercise with covering fire from our heavy machine guns (the ones in the video from the other day) with advancing behind their line of fire. The training was great, everything else was horrible. We were out their far too late than we should have, it started raining on us, the leaders in our platoon started treating us like children because they were getting angry, which, in turn, makes us angry, so that was a mess.
Lots of other stuff ensued that would take too long to mention, we get on and off the bus to leave 3 times because they keep putting us on then needing us off, and on the way home our bus goes off the road into a ditch. So, we grab all of our gear and heavy machine guns and road march out the main road to wait for another bus to come and get us. By now its 1am Sunday morning for a training day that started at 0545 am Saturday morning and we’re still not done. We turn in our weapons and don’t have the proper lube to clean them so they are all probably rusting over right now because of the rain (oh, we’ll be cleaning those tomorrow, don’t worry) then we get to the barracks and they let us know we need to be in formation at 0845 am this morning (Sunday) on our only day off for the next three weeks so we can go back to the range and police call (pick up all spent casings, links, and trash) the 500m long, 200-250m wide range we were on. Police calling wouldn’t have been that bad, but, everyone was far beyond their last nerve and now we were working on our day off.
I almost lost it. Just being honest. But, I learned last night that I never will snap. I have too much self control. That’s a very good thing here. Sometimes you REALLY just want to speak your mind to the leaders here but, you bite your tongue and do what needs to be done. I ended up just getting loud and shouting off the random things about hating this place and lack of ability of certain people, but, it was just venting. We all do it, some more than others.
The one big bummer though was we didn’t get back here to get released until 1245pm today. So, no service. A lot of people were going to come but now everyone just wants to get off base and away from here for the afternoon. I can definitely understand, but, it is a disappointment, especially considering that we don’t have another Sunday off for two or three weeks.
I did take some cool pictures of the night part of our training last night though, some of them came out really good and kind of artsy. There’s also a couple of videos there that’s a decent watch. I’d videotape more stuff, and this may seem to be a little paranoid, but, if by some chance someone did come across this material and it could hurt us by them knowing, I wouldn’t want them finding out because of some dumb Lance Corporal who wanted to show off some cool video clips on his website.
Love you guys!
This one is my favorite. Click on it to see a full size version (I made sure this one had a full size version put). You might not be able to tell, but, the shapes you see is a squad advancing into a tree line with illumination leading their way. Good stuff.
Love your pillow fight!! Stay safe and lighten up!!Don’t let practice lead you to believe that the real thing is the same…They get real serious when you are in country, and will not play the mondane games they play in practice.
With this unit, I don’t know about that.