Well... this past weekend I did my first FTX for ROTC. Friday morning we left Dayton for Camp Atterbury, IN( AKA Hell on Earth). Once there we immediately went into land nav and did 2 more iterations. One of which was a night land nav. The night one was terrible b/c we were stuck in a large forest in pitch darkness trying to find specific points on a map shooting asmuths(terrain association became uselss even though it worked perfect for the day ones).
The second day we did various lanes in the same forest( Recon, Movement to Point contact, Squad attack, FLRC... all of it was hell). That particular day were in the forest for 10 hours straight getting consumed by the thorny vegetation and fired upon by the OPFOR placed in the area prior to the exercises.
The last day was easy enough. We shot the M-16 all day. My only issue was I never was able to zero in my rifle. Had dead center shots but the last one always was off. I not sure if it was my breathing, trigger pull or just changing sight, but i did fix it near the end. We ended the shooting with a qualification course of 40 targets. I managed to hit 28 of 40, which is passing at least.
We stayed in barracks where we only had about 3 hrs of sleep total both nights there and time from that was taken away b/c of night watch. As far as food, the MRE's were complete shit. The entire fucking weekend i was constipated as hell, some of the MRE's were just plain not edible( the veggy Omlet im particular
) I really ended up just munching on the snacks that came with the MRE's.
Overall I learned a lot( esp. land nav and shooting). FTX was hell but worth while. We will be doing one more this year and it will be at the same place sometime in March when it is still Winter in Indy, so im quite certain itll be a bit worse.
The second day we did various lanes in the same forest( Recon, Movement to Point contact, Squad attack, FLRC... all of it was hell). That particular day were in the forest for 10 hours straight getting consumed by the thorny vegetation and fired upon by the OPFOR placed in the area prior to the exercises.
The last day was easy enough. We shot the M-16 all day. My only issue was I never was able to zero in my rifle. Had dead center shots but the last one always was off. I not sure if it was my breathing, trigger pull or just changing sight, but i did fix it near the end. We ended the shooting with a qualification course of 40 targets. I managed to hit 28 of 40, which is passing at least.
We stayed in barracks where we only had about 3 hrs of sleep total both nights there and time from that was taken away b/c of night watch. As far as food, the MRE's were complete shit. The entire fucking weekend i was constipated as hell, some of the MRE's were just plain not edible( the veggy Omlet im particular

Overall I learned a lot( esp. land nav and shooting). FTX was hell but worth while. We will be doing one more this year and it will be at the same place sometime in March when it is still Winter in Indy, so im quite certain itll be a bit worse.