Camp Atterbury Day 1

We rolled into the airport last night around 2000hrs after a rather rowdy flight into Indianapolis. I had a bit of whiskey before getting on the plane compliments of a few guys at the bar, and I was feeling pretty good about the coming plane ride. There was a lot of turbulence on the flight over, but I was given a few more drinks on the plane by the stewardess and I fell asleep. The bus ride from the airport to the Camp was a quiet one, taking us about an hour to get to the front gate. That’s when the shit hit the fan.
By this point, about 2130 or 2200, we had all been up for over 48 hours, we had all been traveling all day, and we were all feeling the effects. I don’t know why, but some of our NCOs were pretty grouchy, and that makes for a bad night. Nobody likes being yelled at, nobody likes being disrespected, and nobody likes these two combined after 2 days of being awake and a day of traveling. The night went pretty late, and we really didn’t get much done but unpack and receive a pretty jacked up welcome brief from our advanced party.
There is obviously a large amount of money that has been set aside for this mobilization site. The barracks sparkle and the latrines are huge with ten million stalls, sinks, and showers. The bunks are nice and new, and the wall lockers have full shelving systems and working doors with locks. They have a huge gym here with all sorts of equipment, along with a full baseball diamond and soccer field across the street. There’s green grass everywhere, and all the buildings are well maintained. The Camp itself seems pretty nice, but the command here is a different story.
We’ve been told that way too many units have come through this mob site and been way too jacked up. The command here has decided to fix that by making a shit-ton of rules and regulations. Let me just say, I feel like I’m in Basic Training again. I’ll just spout off a few of the ridiculous rules here, before I smash my keypad out of frustration. We have to wear our neon orange PT belts at all times, distinguishing us from the regular units here. We have to wear eye protection at all times, meaning if I go outside to talk on the phone at night I need to have clear lenses on my sunglasses. We have to check in, check out, ask to pee, ask to eat, ask to sleep, and ask to fart. It really sucks, and I hope for the sale of the detachment’s morale it all loosens up as we go through training here. For now, we have to play the game and put “sergeant, staff sergeant, sergeant first class, or sir” on the end of every single sentence. This is really the reason why I hate regular units, but at the same time we are under the microscope.
We are an experiment from what I understand. All these rules and regs they have here are a result of the previous units, but they might be cracking down early just to see what kind of unit we are. Our reputation has always preceded us in the past, but we have never done anything at Camp Atterbury or in Indiana. I think the closest we’ve ever been to here is in Wisconsin, and that was an easy mission that any mid-sized unit could have handled. It just so happened we did it with 20 soldiers instead of 75. All that aside, we are being watched closely and if we screw up, it’s our commander’s ass. Everyone also knows, as they say, “shit rolls downhill”. Hopefully none of these kids decides to do the wrong thing just to get out of this deployment, but I’ve seen it happen before and it really sucks for all the rest of us.
These next few days we have some really crappy stuff to go through. Tomorrow we have a lot of paperwork to update and complete, and I think we have a dental exam also. I could use a good cleaning. It’s supposed to rain and a few thunderstorms are coming our way, which might make the next few days a little tougher, but we were issued some high speed rain gear at FHL. We are supposed to get another welcome brief from the command here, and hopefully that is a little more extensive.
I’m still adjusting to the time zone here, as we’re 3 hours ahead of California. It really doesn’t feel like 2030, but I better rack out as best I can and get some sleep.

-Mac