| OCR Text |
Show AMMON R. GRANT 0 leader, I could tell right off the bat that there was a Jot of jockeying, w uld be the appropriate word to use, for status, regardless of rank. There was a lot of, as we ve aid before, hiding behind the rank things that took place that was only the beginning, I realized, of what would cause a severe amount of frustration as time would go on. But we ended up training pretty hard. I realized that from my perspective they weren't as tough as everyone made them out to be and they were a far cry from the conditioning that I was told they were at. I felt as though somewhere along the line everyone had kind of dropped their guard and they were no longer in the perfect shape that I was made to believe. JCW: Do you remember what the training was? ARG: Oh, we did like eight [unclear WAV 4, -5:26] runs, we went to the range a couple of times. It took us all night to just BZO the saws and they were still wrong (laughs), stuff like that. We did several, I think we did at least two PFfs. We had one PFf and then another one right after. It was a makeup one, but we all still had to do it, from what I remember. But we did a lot of kind of range run type things. Ran up to the top of Recon Ridge, or whatever. Just exercises, basic conditioning exercise that I was grateful that I had worked so hard because, relatively speaking, they weren't in as in good condition. But I'll tell you what they did know, what knowledge [they had]. Their expertise had developed over that eight months, ten months that they had been there to a point where they were very, you could sense now, finally, the influence of a fire team leader or squad leader and what their abilities were. So we started learning personalities and making friends with different guys and started meeting guys like Gerrard and Patterson and Lobello and Kolarko and just some of the characters that were in there and who I became real good friends with, particularly 16 |
