Land Nav the the worthless classes to go with!

Yesterday we went to two classes that took all day. the worst part was that they could have scheduled it for the morning and we could have gotten it done before lunch. to make things worse, the classes that we had to take had nothing to do with the things that we were doing today or anything that we will be doing over in Iraq. The first class that we had was the PLGR (plugger as we call it) it is the old army version of a GPS, but it is the size of a 1980's cell phone and ways just about as much as my laptop. The other class was the ground singars class. Singars is the secure radio that they use in the ground vehicles and by infantry men. it is a nice radio compared to what they used to be like, but we will never use it. we have radios built into the aircraft and emergency radios that we have in our vests if we ever go down. after both classes we had a very long time before we got to leave the training area because the buses only come at chow time and we were done at least an hour before chow for both of the classes.
Today we did our land nav training. there are two parts to the land nav training. Mounted and dismounted. Mounted is using a humvee to navigate around a map. we had a DAGR (dagger) which is the new version of the PLGR. it works very well, even though we really had no idea how to use them. That part of the nav was really easy because the GPS took us to right where we needed to be. the second part of the nav was a lot harder, we had 3 hours to go about 5 km on foot over rough terrain and we had the hardest of the point combinations. we took almost the whole three hours to get the points. all three companies that went through that were done by about 2 and we had to sit and wait because the instructors had thought that because we were the largest group that they had ever run they would need to get chow for us because we would be there late. once that was done we couldn't change what was going on. if they would not have changed the training schedule we would have been able to get back to the barracks by about 2 or so and be done for the day. but instead we sat around for an hour then they made some random points for us to go find walking around with the DAGR to kill time. then we had to wait for another hour for chow to get there. the only thing that really made that better was that the buses showed up early because the battalion commander started looking into why everything had got screwed up.
Other than sitting around all afternoon in the hot sun, it wasn't a bad day.
I hope that everyone at home is doing well and that they are having fun
Signing off