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...