The team was all supposed to arrive at the beginning of April for two weeks of in-processing and initial training before our primary training began. Unfortunately, only six of us were there on time. Of the other five members of the team, some were slated to arrive later and other slots hadn't been filled yet. Worse, one of the six of us had a medical issue that rendered him non-deployable, so after three days together our eleven-man team was down to five. Not an auspicious start, but we were prepared to make the best of it. And, while it has taken some time, we're now up to ten of eleven, with the eleventh man on post set to join us shortly. Human Resources Command (HRC) has to juggle the careers of hundreds of thousands of officers and NCOs to fill all these slots, and they've done a pretty good job of balancing those competing requirements to fill these teams.

The biggest task of our first two weeks was getting all the equipment we would need for our mission in Iraq. That meant drawing new uniforms, body armor, helmets, weapons, and countless lesser items deemed useful in country. That could have been a really painful process, as issuing a large number of items to a lot of people can mean a lot of sitting around if it's not planned right, but I'll give credit to the logistics people at Fort Riley. While there was some down time, we drew our gear remarkably quickly.

And what an impressive amount of gear it was. I joined the Army when we were given used equipment that looked like it was leftover from Vietnam. At Fort Riley, almost everything we were given was new, and most of it looked like it was pretty close to the state-of-the-art. A lot of the reason for this is the Rapid Fielding Initiative, an Army program that allows the military to buy useful gear faster than normal procurement. While some of us have bought a few additional items to augment the gear we've been given, the basic load of equipment we've be given is more than adequate for our mission.

At the end of our first two weeks we moved down to Camp Funston, where soldiers trained to deploy for the First World War. Fortunately, the housing is of much more recent vintage. We are billeted in eight-room buildings with four to five people per room. It's a little crowded, but not intolerably so by any stretch, and it puts us into a good environment for team-building, as we all get to learn each other's foibles and habits. The only real down side to Camp Funston is that it is on a flood plain, so when it rains it gets really sloppy, but that's an inconvenience that doesn't undermine our training.

In the five weeks since we arrived at Funston, we have been doing little more than training. We've fired hundreds of rounds through our weapons, learning how to engage targets in varying terrains and circumstances while being sure we identify our targets before firing. We've learned about Arabic and Iraqi culture, and tried to learn at least some basic Iraqi so we can work with the people more smoothly. We've learned how to operate the various high-tech equipment we're being given, from radios to global positioning systems and more, all of which is designed to maximize our ability to perform our missions without mundane problems distracting us.

The training hasn't been perfect. Too often the class sizes are too large, making it difficult to get as much hands-on time as we'd like. But the information provided in the classes has been excellent, and the willingness of 1-5 Field Artillery (FA), the unit assigned to shepherd us through this training, to find time and instructors to give us additional training when we ask for it makes this training very valuable. As the team leader, it is my responsibility to make sure that we're ready to go to war, and I am very confident that the opportunities we've been given here at Fort Riley will have us more than ready.

Which catches us up to where we are now. Next up, I'll get into some of the details of the training we're in now.