A Few New Hats

The next fun and exciting adventure in the life of an Ensign is my latest assignment, to run the Battalions Mount Out Control Center. In a nut shell, the MOCC is the “brain” of the battalion for movement of troops, gear, and equipment. As the Officer In Charge, I am responsible to track every piece of equipment (ie fuel truck, Hummers, Generators,etc) as well as track the packing of pallets of gear and lastly track the people that would be deployed. This is all driven by several factors including, where we are going, what we need to take with us, and who needs to go. These are all prioritized and arranged to fit on planes, which we call birds. TRANSCOM tells us which type of planes we will receive(C-130, C-17, C-5, etc) and when they will be here and planning starts so the birds aren’t on the ground longer than 6 hours.

MOCC OIC (Officer in Charge) and Embark officer(trying to make an "E")


My job in the MOCC is to oversee the flow of information, and follow a checklist that tells me who should be doing what, what time they should be doing it, and in what order. Based on information flow from higher and knowledge of what going on in the battalion I proceed to make the mount out run as smoothly as possible. This is accomplished by a team of people, with me “steering the boat”.

NIGHT VISION!


My other new “hat” is being the battalion weapons and ordinance Officer. This means that I am the controller of all individual and heavy weapons, bullets, and explosives….also some really neat night vision. I have included a couple pictures of the crew served weapons we use; the 50 caliber machine gun, the 240B machine gun, and the m-19 automatic grenade launcher. I would tell you how many I have of each, but then I’d have to kill you.

50-Cal


Auto-Grenade Launcher


Also decided to take the “RAMBO” picture, now that I can. ENJOY!

"It is not the critic who counts: not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming, but who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself for a worthy cause; who, at the best, knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who knew neither victory nor defeat!"
-Teddy Roosevelt

Snow in Southern California

So all of the 18 hour days and working through the night could not keep us down. Last Sunday, after a week of rain here is Southern California, we looked at the mountains to our North and saw snow.

These are the mountains(the goal), as seen from Port Hueneme.


Snow capped mountains don’t just look nice, they also make for a great hike. That’s just what we decided to do.
We climbed the tallest mountain we could find, somewhere inside of Las Padres National Forest. We knew there would be snow on the top, but never expected to have to hike through 4-6 inches of the stuff. Starting altitude was 2500ft above Sea Level, final alt was 5000+ ft. The hike to the top lasted about 3 hours.

(Playing in the snow)


Some Snow...and a beautiful waterfall.




After catching a great view and taking a bunch of photos, we climbed back to the bottom in about an hour and a half. Overall the hike was exhausting, but it felt great to get back into hiking, something I have not done much of since Boy Scouts.

Beautiful view off the front dash of our Chevy Pick-up.


We grabbed a quick dinner on the way home, and passed out about 8pm. Let’s just say that Monday morning PT and it’s 2 mile run was NOT fun.