The Journey

Today is the day we packed up what was left of our possessions in order to move across the world. With our two suitcases and one backpack each we headed to the Atlanta airport this afternoon in order to fly to Seattle. We also had our kitty in her sharp new carrier. She had to leave said carrier when we went through security. TSA insisted that I carry her through the metal detector. Despite the new and original sounds she was making in the car as we neared the airport, she was silent and still in my arms. I hoped the silence would last through the entire flight, but it did not. We hit turbulence halfway through our flight. Tilly started crying. Loudly. I draped my jacket over her carrier in order to provide her a smaller, more comforting space. It incidentally also  helped to muffle the meows that continued until the plane leveled out.

We flew commercial today since the military flight to Okinawa only leaves from Seattle once a week. We chose Delta as it was the only nonstop flight, but I was shocked when they did not feed us! If you have met Matt and I you know that we require sustenance every two hours. Even though the flight was five hours long, they only provided peanuts to eat. We had to pay a ridiculous sum just to buy snack foods from the flight attendants as our stomachs began to grumble. For our super long flight tomorrow we better have food every few hours or else someone will face the wrath of a hungry Amanda. Speaking of our military flight tomorrow, we have to check in at 2:30 a.m. local time. I am signing off in order to sleep a few hours. Tomorrow....Japan!

The School

So let's start off by stating that this post isn't by Amanda, it's by her husband, Matt. You probably know me as the one who got her into this Okinawa mess or that one guy who keeps popping up in the photos. Amanda asked me to do a guest post about Engineer School, so here it goes.

My class, CEO 5-13. I'm the one in khaki.

A huge amount of the Combat Engineer Officer school is devoted to academics because the field is so wide and deep. There are so many areas that fall within the MOS that it's a little mind boggling. Vertical construction, horizontal construction, route and area clearance, explosive obstacle reduction, demolitions, urban mobility and breaching, bridging and gap crossing, roads, obstacle planning... and it goes on. The phrase that got tossed abound a lot was "it's like drinking from a fire hose," and everyone concluded that this was pretty apt.

Out of all the new things I learned at the school, hands down my favorite was the demolitions and breaching- but that's kind of a given, right?

BOOM!

There were a lot of other awesome highlights- obstacle planning was a lot of fun because it's all about ruining somebody else's day and being mean about it. Gap crossing and standard bridging was interesting because building bridges is what Engineers have been doing for their commanders since rocks were soft. The survivability classes got my inner ten year old all fired up because a large part of my childhood was spent building forts, and the Marine Corps has some pretty awesome capabilities as far as bunkers and base camps go. And, as always, near and dear to my heart are the robots.

I made a friend!

So school is done now. Like, for good- at this point, there is nothing between me and this thing called "the fleet" that everyone keeps telling me about. That's good, because at this point, after four and a half years of college, OCS, TBS, and MOS school, I've started to think that it's all a myth...

The MOS Graduation

All smiles at graduation

Today marked the end of classes morning and afternoon over urban mobility or route and area clearance. Today marked the end of late nights studying for tests over explosive hazard identification. Today Matt graduated from his MOS school. He is officially a Combat Engineer Officer.

I am so proud of Matt. He learned many things in just a few short months, and he graduated first in his class. Now we have to leave these Marines and meet new ones. Many of his classmates have been through TBS and MOS school together, but now everybody is heading to different parts of the globe. We are traveling to Okinawa, but others left for California directly following the ceremony. A saying that I have heard to be true is that it is a small marine corps. We have made friends here that we will see again sooner than we think.

The view from Courthouse Bay