I thought that waiting at the land nav was bad!

So i thought that the waiting for 3 or for hours at the land nav course was bad. we were at the 9mm range on friday, and there were three companies which is around 150 people. we woke up at 5 so that we could draw our weapons before we went to the range. We had just enough time to get get our weapons before we went to chow and then straight to the range. they only had 1 bus for all of us to get to chow so they shuttled us to chow. from there they managed to have enough buses but because they were shuttling people and we weren't the first group to go over we ended up being the last group to get to fire. we arrived at the range at about 8:30 and waited around until almost 3 pm before we fired and then we spent about 20 minutes on the range firing and then we spent another 5 hours waiting. until 8 pm. the only thing that we did besides eat in those time periods was clean up the casings for the spent rounds. now normally at ranges when you expend ammo you have to pick up the expended ammo, that is just fine, clean up after yourselves. but at this range they wanted you to be 100% accountable for the brass that you expended. that means that we had to pick up rounds for 150+people at 57 rounds a person and account for every single one of them. let do the math shall we... 150x57=8,550 rounds and that doesn't count the people who had to re-qualify. when we collected them all off the ground we had to put them back in the foam containers of 50 rounds. that is a lot of foam containers. then when we were all done with that we ended up just sitting around until it was dark out. to go along with all of this, the range safeties are telling us that when we are sitting around in the parking lot (nowhere near the range) that we can't take out helmets and vests off, and we can't lay down even though we have been out there for forever. we waited until 8:45 to do the night fire and they ran that extremely slowly. The army gave us a whole new definition of hurry up and wait.
Saturday was not bad at all we did some of the hurry up and wait, but we were done with everything by about 3 so it wasn't as bad, especially after what we had the day before. We did EST training and it is basically firing the m16/m4 video game style. we got to the trainer about 8:30 like normal, and again had to wait until after lunch to get to do anything.
yesterday was a little bit better version of the m9 range. we were on the m4 range and we had to zero the m4s so there were two stations that you had to go through for qualifying.
the zero part of the range went pretty fast for most people. i had my m4 zeroed in 12 shots. there are 15 hole in my paper because on the second three rounds the guy next to me accidentally shot my paper instead of his own. once you were done zeroing you had to walk down to the qualification range. i was lucky enough to get out to the qual range pretty quickly and be in one of the first firing orders. When we got out onto the lane i was all ready to go. i was shooting great at the zero range and I was all excited to shoot and get my expert for the 2nd time. the ranges were a little different because instead of the old foxhole supported we did prone supported. and instead of doing 20 rounds in prone unsupported we did 10 rounds prone unsupported and 10 rounds in kneeling. i wasn't too worried about any of the new stuff because the kneeling only fires at the 150m and closer. But when we got out and started firing the first two targets went down without a problem. they were 50 and 200 meters not very hard targets. the next one goes out at the 300 and i miss it. i was thinking ok, that is a hard target to hit and i missed it. i deal with and move on thinking that i will hit the next one, i catch a few of the closer ones and go on to another farther target and i miss it again. it starts to worry me when i am shooting these targets and they aren't going down. the spotter that i have is telling me that i hit the target but they aren't going down. i ended up hitting 14 targets that round needing 23 to qualifying. when i got to concurrent training i saw a few people there that i never thought would be in that building. we went through all of that and when everyone who had qualified was done we started talking and we got to talking about the 1st seargent and one other guy in the company who are u.s. competition quality shooters, both of them had streaks of shooting expert for at least 13 years. both of them barely qualified. so i started thinking that it wasn't as bad. we were out there all until about 8 waiting for people to qualify. the people running the range thought that we were doing awesome with qual rates at about 50%, that is worse than most basic training ranges. and on the last firing order we went through we had a bunch of open slots for people who had already qualed. and when we made it through those orders the guy came down and thought that it was amazing that we had that many qualified and that it proved that there couldn't have been anything wrong with their system because that many people had qualed. little did they know that we stacked the firing line with some of the best shooters. when we got all of the got out of the day qual we had to do night qual, this range was ready to do this really fast. so we managed to get out of there at a relatively decent time.
to make it even better we are starting our flight training tomorrow so we had a reset day today to get the rest that we didn't get the last three days. it was nice i slept until 10 and didn't have to get to anywhere so i just sat around. it was nice!
tomorrow i have my first flight
i hope that everyone is doing well at home
signing off