Graduation

TBS Graduation is a little more than 72 hours away. 6 Months of tough training, learning tenets of basic infantry tactics, officership, espirit de corps, leadership, and so much more. This is just about as exciting as OCS Graduation, but nothing will ever compare to that. Pinning those lieutenant bars on for the first time will always hold the most special place. But TBS graduation is a greater accomplishment and means more professionally. A graduation from The Basic School signifies that your superiors feel you are ready to hit the Fleet Marine Forces and begin leading Marines. Most everyone that starts graduates. However, there are always one or two from each platoon who aren't quite ready and are forced to do the program again. Not being "that guy" is a huge relief.

As glad as I am to have this over with, there are certainly things I, and just about every lieutenant here will miss. First the friends we all have made. Hardship molds friendships and comraderie unlike anything else. Doing things like spending five days in the field in smoldering hot weather, hiking back twelve miles with 110 pounds on your back on 12 hours sleep in the past week, the endurance course, and the myriad of other phyiscally and mentally painful tasks we completed here forged some serious friendships. I'm going to miss all that. But I will see these devil dogs in the fleet, and we will take the fight to the bad guys, together, here in a few months in Afghanistan.

For those keeping track at home, I ended up becoming an 0402 Logistics Officer. I will be in charge of a platoon that will be assisting the infantry and other Marines on the front lines, getting them what they need when they need it to effectively fight. I am going to be station in Camp Lejeune, NC for the next three years.

OO-Rah!

David

The Basic School - Close to Halfway

We are about halfway through here at The Basic School and we have already learned a ton. It's nothing like Officer Candidate School; it's harder but at the same time so much easier. You get to be yourself, talk to your friends, get some free time, but the training events are more difficult on every level. Endurance events are longer, land navigation is spread out across kilometers of dense woodland, it is absurdly hot everyday and tests are much more difficult. But the great thing is that the whole time you are learning skills absolutely essential to being a leader of Marines. So far we have learned Martial Arts, basic markmanship with a rifle, pistol, and machine gun, fairly in-depth day and night land navigation, and are getting started into Combat Orders and beginning to learn how to lead a group of Marines with rifles and machine guns into combat.

So far I have loved it. I despise the training most of the time while it is occuring, because it is so detailed, tiring or downright painful but at the end of the day it is a great feeling of accomplishment most of the time. And the longer we are here, the more we realize how this training is important not for us, but for the Marines we will lead. We are essentially just a medium of information for the enlisted Marines that will be under our charge in the future.

Coming up in the future are a lot of time operating outside of the classroom. The next two months will be filled with about 70% of our time being spent running around and sleeping outside, attacking bad guys and defending against attacks from them. It will get progressively more complicated each time with the addition of more personnell to lead, the introduction of fire support from outside your platoon, and a progressively more difficult enemy, among other things.

Also coming up in about seven or eight weeks is job selection. By the beginning of September I should have a very good idea, if not know, what job I will end up in. Right now I am leaning towards the intelligence fields or logistics, but I'm keeping my options open. There is still a lot to learn.

Thanks for reading.

Initial report from The Basic School

Here is the first post from The Basic School (TBS). Right now I am attending the Basic Officer Course at TBS, whose mission is to "train and educate newly commissioned officers in order....to prepare them for duty as company grade officers in the operating forces, with particular emphasis on the duties, responsibilities, and warfighting skills of a rifle platoon commander". In other words, TBS trains officers to lead Marines, and most of this training in centered around being a group of Marines with rifles. Every Marine, at the most basic level, is a rifleman, and every Marine Officer is a rifle platoon commander.



TBS is nothing like OCS. Just because I'm being trained by Marines doesn't mean I'm getting screamed at everyday. It's very much the opposite. At it's core, TBS is a learning institution, and the teaching here is extremely high quality. I was told the material we cover is 10th grade material, but the amount of infortmation is equivalent of two and half years of college. It's basic stuff, but it is a lot of basic stuff. Of this information, most of it will be learned in classroom (60% of our time at TBS) and then applied in the field (40% of our time at TBS). We are continually taught how to be professional leaders who are grounded in warfighting, and care for their men by holding them to the high standards established by the Marine Corps. Honestly, there is no officer school in the world quite like TBS. I don't know if it is the best officer school or not, but I know we are unique in that aspect.



So far at TBS we have done Martial Arts and are just beginning our work on the Rifle Range. Martial Arts were extremely interesting, albeit very basic, and gave us a good foundation on the basics of Marine Corps Martial Arts. We were taught how to hurt people and how to avoid being hurt too badly if caught in a bad situation. The Rifle Range portion of training are long days, but overall pretty fun. We learn how to accurately shoot both a service rifle (from 200, 300, and 50 yards) and service pistol (from distances between seven and twenty-five yards), and have some of the best instructors in the Marine Corps to instruct us.



Another mission of TBS is to assign newly commissioned officers the job specialties in the Marine Corps, from Infantry (the position with the most spots) to Intelligence, to Supply, Logistics, and many more. We are assigned these based on three things; our interests, the needs of the Marine Corps, and what our superiors believe we would be suited for. It is an extremely competitve process and it is something we think about a lot.



My goals for TBS are as follows: 1) To finish in the top 30% of my class
2) To graduate knowing I gave a complete effort
3) To be prepared to lead enlisted Marines

If I do the first two, the last one will take care of itself. Thanks for reading. Semper Fidelis.

For any more information visit www.tecom.usmc.mil/tbs. For pictures of training visit www.tecom.usmc.mil/tbs/student/Delta/galleryi.html.