Fort Leonard Wood. Three words.

I’ve lost sight of my mission! As the heading promises, A Day in the Life of the Army, I should provide more insight than I have been! We are nearly settled in, leaving half our boxes packed and closeted; our house looks nearly occupied! We only put two things on the walls throughout the house: A clock in the living room, and the calendar in the kitchen. Bare walls…I think yuck, Josh thinks wonderful. I told him he should live in an institutional facility.

The last few days we have gotten very little accomplished in the house due to a wonderful term the Army calls “In Processing”. I was explaining to someone the other day “Out Processing”. Trying to search my mind for an example, I recalled senior year of high school. Remember when, in order to graduate, you had to go to all your teachers, and get signatures which pretty much meant that you hadn’t stolen your text book, or your gym locker was clean…etc. Well, that’s what it’s like. At Leavenworth we had to go to the medical clinic and take our names out of the system, forward our medical records....etc, we had to go to post housing and sign out (which was easy because we never lived on base there), to different departments like the sales store, AG (Adjutant General), personnel, DEERS, a billion other acronyms. Blah blah blah. Or as those in the military say, blasé blasé blasé. Say that with a straight face. Actually just listen to that with a straight face. I crack up every time, what is that! So we are cleared to PCS Leavenworth. Permanent Change of Station.

So now we’re here and have to “In Process” to all those same places only now we don’t know where they are, and we’re on a MUCH bigger base so there are forever long waits wherever we go. What makes it a little frustrating is most places we go all we need is one tiny signature…takes 5 seconds. And we have to wait in line for everyone with actual issues. I’m not against waiting my turn, but seriously. Today we went to the ID check and Josh has to simply show that he has his dog tags, get a signature, and we leave. We had to get a number….105. They were on 78. We would have waited over 3 hours. We left.

So what’s new about living here? Well, Ft. Leonard Wood is a BCT base. Basic Combat Training. AIT and ANCOC and BNCOC and OBC and CCC are also here. Those are all schools. All the Army’s Military Police, Engineers, and Chemical personnel are trained here at many different levels. Since Josh is an MP we come here for school! Get it? Well anyway, three Army branches make this base pretty busy. And there are Marines here…and Air Force, too.

You’ve all heard of the 12 o’clock whistle, or maybe a 6 o’clock whistle. We have a 1700 cannon. (5pm) And every day at retreat (when they take down the flag and the cannon goes off and the bugle plays a little tune) all soldiers in uniform or otherwise have to stop what they are doing and face the direction of the flag and salute. Well, not if you’re indoors. But if you are outside and hear it (you can’t NOT hear it), you stop your car, get out and salute, or stop whatever you’re doing and salute the direction of the flag that’s getting lowered. I forgot all about this. Mostly because we didn’t live on Leavenworth so I didn’t hear it and Josh tried not to leave work until after 5 to miss it. Ha ha ha.

So with BCT troops here comes many wonderful side effects. Our house in near a major training area and even though it’s probably a block or two off the major intersection, there is nothing in between us an the main road besides a few trees and a tennis court parking lot. So, that means whenever the soldiers leave their training area (moderately often) they march in formation yelling “singing” cadences. Now, let me tell you, this is a large amount of soldiers, it sounds like a mob or possibly a riot. And many times you can here the yelling much before they are in sight and that’s always funny too. Imagine being about 20 blocks from Memorial Stadium during a game and hearing that distant roar of voices sporadically all the time.

Today Josh came in and asked me if I heard the artillery fire. I didn’t. But I had heard it the day before. So that’s new.

I love it.

PS- I asked Martha yesterday what was larger than a flock. Because I think we have the equivalent of 5 flocks of birds living in the trees behind our house. They need to start using their inside voices. Or just hurry up and migrate. Or fly over the artillery range.