Well, I was thinking of quoting Lao Tzu, but I'll paraphrase and say the journey of a thousand blog entries begins with the first one. I know it's pretty trendy to have a blog, but I did think about making one starting a few years ago. I hope to make things interesting for you, dear reader, and we'll start with some information about my trip to the NTC (National Training Center) near Barstowe, CA. It was in Fort Irwin in Death Valley, and I went in order to understand more about what soldiers need in their communications systems.
I was in the field for two days in total. Some highlights included:

• Eating MREs (meals ready to eat)
• Watching a cordon and search on an "Iraqi village"
• Entering a cave system
• Visiting a FOB (foward operations base)
• Riding around in Hummers in the desert
• Seeing M1-Abrams in action
• Talking to a brigadier general for about an hour and a half

The NTC has a few fake Iraqi villages and real Iraqi actors (who are there for 3-6 months at a time) to train soldiers who are a month away from deployment. In this case, one of the men entered the women's building and pissed off a lot of the village. Due to poor intelligence and communications, the captain and interpreter got "shot" (they use blanks and laser tag essentially). Here's a picture of a bunch of angry Iraqi's chanting at the center of town:














I realized that a lot of soldiers are kids, who can't always deal with complicated equipment, especially while under fire. On top of all that, equipment has to deal with heat, vibration, and dust. A lot of radio systems require people to wet them and wipe them down.
It was a pretty cool experience, and if people want I'll hook you up with more content later.