CRC at Ft Benning
Before heading to the Middle East, I was at least able to acclimate a little bit to the hotter weather I would encounter by spending a week at the Combat Readiness Center (CRC) at Ft Benning, GA. I’m truly glad that the whole administrative process was a little bit faster than the last time I went overseas, but the whole thing could still be described as a painful, Army hurry-up-and-wait style mess.
The simple way to put it is that everyone does everything as a group. In some cases, this makes sense. There are a number of mandatory classes. One class, which was a brief on the CRC process, showed a video of people waiting in line and looking at presentations! That would be a prime example of how empty some of these classes were.
Sometimes, this doesn’t work out logically quite as well. With a little creative effort, they could very well schedule individuals or small groups of people into appointed blocks of time and rotate them through separate stations, such as equipment issues and medical checkups, but instead, they’ll show up with a massive group of people and take the whole day to get them all through. Additionally, they could locate the required employees and facilities right by the bunkhouses where everyone says, but instead they have even the CRC specific training facilities (only used by CRC mind you) about a mile up the road. The location of the CRC site is a little ridiculous too – it’s way out in the middle of the forest. So, they have to have dedicated transportation to get everyone to and from many of the required sites located at the main post.
To their credit, they at least had smaller huge groups than what I’ve experienced in the past, so the logic center of my brain wasn’t quite at a lifetime high level of excruciating disbelief.
I did manage to set a lifetime experience record in one area however. One of my contractor roommates (there were four people per room in this temporary housing) snored louder than anyone I’ve met in my entire life. It was so bad that the other two people in the room moved out the day after we got there. Now, I’m a heavy sleeper, so I thought I could take it. I could not sleep unassisted through his snoring though. I think it’s because he really sounded like he was dying, suffocating right there in his bunk. I did stick it out though by wearing ear-plug type ear buds with the music set on repeat.
Finally, after shuffling papers and having my papers shuffled for a week, I got on the flight over to the Middle East (without my boss since he was held back for a medical review). Sixteen hours later I landed in Kuwait, drove for an hour to the transition site, waited for my bags for an hour, drove for an hour to Camp Arifjan, and spent another hour checking into my bunk-cubicle in a huge room at the I-Building. It was quite the journey to get to my hovel away from home.
