The EOD pipeline, for reclassing soldiers, was a little bit different in that we had the added bonus of OJT before going on to Phase I. There wasn't much G2'ing going on as far as the course went, because you weren't allowed to putz around with much of anything until you demonstrated your understanding of 60-A-1-1-22 (EOD Safety). That was, and is, the bible for us when it comes to knowing what we can and can't do with different ordnance. No comprehension of explosive safety? No demo ops for you, and good luck getting through the course.
That was a leg up that we had over the EOD babies and failed 18X's, but it also depended on how squared away the unit was where one did their OJT. However, in the rush to fill billets at the height of OIF/OEF, there were some reclass soldiers who only got a couple of weeks of OJT before shipping to Eglin, and several more who didn't even finish Phase I before Mother Army said "Good enough, we're sending you to Phase II." So, in that case, they were all on the same level. The classes ahead couldn't G-2 the following classes about practical tests. With class sizes being as small as they were, pinpointing an info leak was very easy to do, and all parties involved would get the boot for academic dishonesty. We had to get by on what we learned, when we learned it. The instructors made sure of that with great efficiency. I wouldn't have had it any other way.
As far as what I had to go through to get there, it was definitely trying. Being a soldier was a life goal for me from the time I was eight years old, tucking hospital corners on my bed. I had enlisted in February 2001, and made the colossal mistake of following the dollar signs for a signing bonus as opposed to the MOS's I originally wanted. My first unit after AIT wasn't bad; it wasn't great, but it was better than the rest of the battalion.
Then came 9/11, and when OIF eventually kicked off, my company got chopped up and fragged out throughout the battalion to support the initial push. The level of callousness, failure, fame-chasing, and ineptitude present in the leadership from company -- and in some cases, platoon -- level up to the top was the kind of thing that people wouldn't believe possible until they had seen it for themselves. A unit from Germany started a web page just to chronicle all the fucked up shit that the 16th Circus BN, 3 Ring BDE leadership foisted upon its soldiers on an hourly basis. Working in the III Corps building one day, a major recognized the specific combination of my unit patch and combat patch, and said "I feel sorry for you. Your battalion deserves to be deactivated, and the lower enlisted sent somewhere where they can be taught how to do something other than fail."
By the time I stepped foot in Kuwait to start OIF 3, 60% of the battalion had the same ETS date (yaaaay, stop loss), and my disillusionment with life in the Army was of epic proportion. I was ready to get out and never look back until a friend of mine put me in contact with another friend of hers who was an EOD officer. He put the bug in my ear, and didn't sugar coat shit when it came down to what EOD was up against. I had already received, and blown off, the recruitment emails, but talking to Steve changed my mind. I quit being a whiny bitch and started preparing myself.
When I made the choice to reclass, I had given birth just 6.5 months prior, and while I had passed my first PT test after the post partum recovery period (180 days from delivery/end of pregnancy), I most certainly was in no condition to even attempt the suit test. I made friends with another specialist who had just recently built himself from "special pops to special ops" in about the same amount of time I was looking at, and he agreed to be my PT partner. I had a lot of work to do on that front, as I'd never been in worse shape in my life, but damn if I didn't make it happen. High heat, sand storms, and long shifts be damned, I wanted out.
For as sorry as my physical condition was, the PT was the easy part of the process. When word got out that I was preparing to reclass, minds were made up that there was no way in hell that I would be allowed to leave the commo plantation. My platoon sergeant, section sergeant, and PL all supported me, but I think they were in the minority. Certain elements in the battalion were more than a little dismayed when they found out that I had gone over from Diamondback to Marez for my commander's interview, never mind that it was with my platoon sergeant's blessing. When my trip ticket was submitted to fly back up there for the suit test, it changed from "EOD suit test" to "EOD suit fitting," which the S-3 SGM promptly denied because, and I quote, "She doesn't need to come up here on the Army's time to expand her wardrobe." The 1SG of the EOD company told me when I called to update him that my unit was the laughing stock of the compound at that point.
A week or so later, I got a knock on my door from my section sergeant, telling me that my name had been moved up on the leave roster. Instead of going on leave in the middle of September, I could be home in time for the 4th of July so long as I could have my bags packed in 48 hours. Knowing that this meant another trip to Diamondback, I got on the phone with the EOD unit and, with the help of my BN retention NCO, set another time for my suit test, which we deliberately withheld from the rest of battalion. Normally, the turnaround for those waiting to fly south was two days. I had been on Diamondback for seven hours when I got word that I was manifested for the flight to Kuwait that night. I told the S-1 clerk that I simply was not going to be on that flight, and I didn't give a shit how long it took for me to get another seat because some things were more important. Dude looked at me like I had a 10' rubber dick growing from the middle of my forehead, but he didn't say shit else and started working my space A ticket the next morning, after the reup NCO snuck me over to Marez again, and I had passed the suit test.
While I was away, word got around that I had passed the suit test with flying colors. The night I stepped off of the bird at Q-West after leave, I was duly informed by my platoon sergeant that I was headed to the promotion board. This struck me as odd, because my 1SG at the time hated me with every fiber of his being. To put his opinion of me in perspective, when he was a SFC (my PSG, in fact) and I was barely a PV2, he accused me of faking a miscarriage to get out of going to the field for a month, never mind the stack of paperwork, prescriptions, and 11 hours I spent in the emergency room to get that diagnosis. For him to suddenly decide that I was NCO material was dubious at best, until my PSG told me that there was a one-year time in grade limit for E-5's to get into EOD. That certainly explained my sudden presence on the fast-track to stripes when he had originally wanted to see me chaptered out.
My presence at the promotion board carried the caveat that if I did anything to get myself kicked out of the board, then he was going to hammer me with UCMJ for disrespecting an NCO and other bullshit charges. So I did the only thing I could do, stopped whatever correspondence courses I was doing, and only submitted just a hair above the bare minimum in my promotion packet. I smoked the board just to spite my 1SG, and I only had 410 points to my name. The points for my old MOS had been stuck at 798 for a hot minute, but dropped down into the 500-600 range right after I submitted my packet. So every month, up until I got back to the States, I was the only soldier in the BN who didn't want points to fall. It became the running joke in the platoon office.
When I redeployed, my troubles certainly weren't over yet. Even though the battalion was slated to be deactivated, those of us who weren't due to ETS on 30April 2006 knew we had to move fast to avoid a lateral move to our sister battalion and a fencing date of 6/6/06. I waived my stabilization before I even made it home just so I could start my OJT with the EOD company at Hood the moment block leave was over. Once I started OJT, my place of duty was with the EOD unit. That meant PT, work call, end of day formation, even a week long field problem. That didn't stop my old 1SG from threatening me with negative counseling statements and UCMJ action for constantly being out of ranks at the 16th SIG. I was harassed daily, but I stuck around the EOD shop anyway. I knew what direction my career needed to be headed in, and 16th SIG belonged in my rearview mirror.
The straw that broke the camel's back came in mid-March, when my section sergeant called my cell phone at 1SG's orders, to ask me just exactly what in the fuck EOD needed 90 days to teach me that I wasn't going to learn at Eglin, and to inform me that if I wasn't standing at HIS desk by 1300, then I was definitely going to get UCMJ action and I could kiss EOD school goodbye. I walked into the ops sergeant's office, and handed him my phone so he could talk to my section sergeant. After he hung up the phone, I provided him with my 1SG's phone number, and I was asked to step outside his door for a moment. To his credit, he never raised his voice, so I don't know exactly what it was that he said to my old 1SG. Whatever it was, it put the fear of God into everyone, because the next call I received was from my former TL saying I was not to show up anywhere near the unit until the day I was to start clearing post. Oddly enough, I was the only one whose PCS orders didn't get lost and I was able to beat the fencing date by a month.
After all the bullshit I went through just to get to the schoolhouse, failure simply was not an option for me. I didn't party with my classmates every night, I made the best of my time at study hall (we weren't allowed to take home any notes to study), I continued to PT my ass off even after I screwed up my knee at Phase I, and I did my damnedest to get everything right the first time. It wasn't a fear of failure that motivated me, it was a fear of what I would have to go back to if I failed the course. To top it off, there was the pent up anger that I channeled into my performance just to prove wrong every last one of the rat bastards in the 16th SIG who either wanted to see me fail, or worked to deny me my chance in the first place. Yeah, the amount of information I was expected to learn was like drinking water from a fire hose, but damn I was parched after years of bullshit. I wasn't the only soldier my old unit tried fucking out of bigger and better things, I was just the one who fought back on my terms and won. I wasn't going to squander that opportunity.
