Right Behind You

Chapter Thirty-Eight: Dirt and Grime

"Dirt and grime, and filth inside

The story of my lifetime
And my dirty, filthy habitat
Is where I got my habit at
Of cheating, stealing, never feeling
Pain of a brother, your dirty mother
Ha, ha, ha, look how far we are

We means me and me seeks free 

I'm one step closer than I used to be 

Step by step, slowly I turned to give you the message

Learn, baby, learn, baby, learn, baby, learn
Though it may be too late then
You may already be in the lion's den
From outside, see me grin."

-Father's Children (Dirt and Grime)

Kae:

Our hair started growing back. That was the first thing I noticed once we began phase three of our training. Little by little we were no longer egg heads, but we still looked a bit weird; we were living with it though. The director was right though, compared to our two prior phases this one had to be straight cake because it was focusing on land warfare. I liked this phase we worked with basic weapons, demolitions, land navigation, patrolling, rappelling, marksmanship, infantry tactics, and small-unit tactics.

For our testing they were going throw us in a random area offshore, some sort of mini-island, that we would be practicing on for the final five weeks of the phase; we were going to be putting those skills we learned into practice. The task was to work on less to minimal sleep handling firearms and explosives. As much fun as it sounded blowing up things, I doubt it would be fun when we were struggling to keep our eyes open. But that's how it went when it came to real-world situations when we worked with no sleep to our name. We had to tough it out for the sake of completing the mission.

Trying new guns for the first time was really exciting for me, I had only had ever practiced using a Glock 19 which was a semi-automatic pistol, but with this new training, we were using M4 carbine, M24 snipers, M240L machine guns, M107 long-range semi-automatic sniper rifles, and more. During this phase I pretty much turned into a gun snob, learning how they worked, how to disassemble and assemble the parts back together in a timed manner. We did a lot of practicing shooting at dummies and the targets posted for us, honestly, it was a stress-relief from all the PT we were doing on a regular basis.

When we weren't shooting dummies in training, we were in the classroom learning the Farsi language. It was the official language of this militia. I think it was safe to assume that the director was from Iran, I mean she had an accent and everything, but her English was damn near perfect you almost really couldn't tell. But I did grow up in a multi-language household so I could pick up on things like that quickly. That also came into play when learning this language as well; I did pride myself in mastering things with speed and this was one of them.

"I'm going to be honest with you.... I'm not sure if I got this Farsi thing down." 12 muttered as we left the classroom finishing up for the day. I had my notebook filled with notes and I was going to do some studying after dinner in the dorm. We got moved from the pods soon after we completed phase 3. We were all in one room with bunks beside each other. Our group was also allowed to talk to again since we were going to be working with one another. Teamwork after all.

"You're telling me!" 43 said as she shook her head sounding frustrated at the workload being thrown at us. This was nothing like the physical activity we were doing prior because we could handle that; it didn't take much brainpower to run, or swim, or march with rucks. But now we were stuck having to pick up a foreign language and quick too because there was going to come a time where the director was going to switch everything spoken on this facility to straight Farsi and we would have to keep up.