CONUS Replacement Center (CRC)

I am down at Fort Benning, Army Base in Columbus, GA. I flew down here yesterday with three other people who are working on the Task Force with me. We will be here until Friday, preparing for all that we will need during out time in Iraq. This is something that ideally you should go to BEFORE you get into the country, but we were not able to get a place in the course until this week. It is VERY interesting here. I believe I can now relate to what my father must have gone through when he was drafted into the Army. This place is right out of the 40's-50's. The barracks were probably built around then and nothing has changed. The people who are going through this class are definitely diverse. We have active duty military - mostly Army, reserve and guard (once again primarily Army), civil servants - like myself, and contractors. One of my workmates summed it up by announcing "it's a NASCAR environment". One of the briefings we attended stressed the need to wear closed toe shoes and no sleeveless t-shirts!

They process anywhere from 400 to 500 personnel a week through this place. We have like 458 people in our group, so you can imagine that there is a lot of the "hurry up and wait" going on. They ask that you do alot of the paperwork before you get there, but you still have to go through the class where the people who didn't do it ahead of time are going through it, so it doesn't really save you anytime at all. I didn't do anything in advance and now I'm glad. Some of the training they have here includes : Online training classes on cultural awareness, sexual harrassment, the Uniform Code of Military Justice, Anti-terrorism training and more. We will be going through a full medical and dental screening tomorrow.

The barracks I am in has 4 people to a room. I started off with only one other roommate, she is going to Afghanistan, but we got one more tonight, who has just returned from Iraq and is heading back home to California. We have bunkbeds and I'm lucky, I am on the bottom bunk and have no one on top. The guys had a huge snorer in their room and didn't get any sleep last night. I was asleep before my person came to bed last night and didn't notice snoring, but now I hear it. Nothing too loud though, so I am lucky in that respect. The bathrooms are down the hall and there is a tv room across from where we are in the next bldg over that looks like a prison lounge.

I started my workout this morning. There is a small gym across from where we are and I am planning on going there at least once day. Since there are so many people, they stagger the groups and I am sooo lucky - I get to go in the 0900 group each day. The earliest is 0600 - yuck. Well, needless to say, after staying here I will not complain at all about the Villa in Iraq - the conditions there are actually better than here in GA, and the food is much better as well!!