The day I have been waiting for.

SO!!!! It happened. I finally got my flight school dates. I have my initial BOLC II training, which is a 7 week course that all new officers go through. That starts on April 5th. Then my actual flight school starts on 26 May. I can't believe that it has finally happened. It feels good to have a date to look forward to.

Now this doesn't mean that I couldn't leave earlier. I am still on the short list, so if anyone drops I can go next week. This just means that I will be going no later than April.

Man! I am so excited. It is finally piecing together.

I will update you all on more to come.

BEAR

Life is a crazy thing

So, you know how you make plans for your future and you get excited when they are about to unfold. Yeah, that was me about a month ago. I had these plans to transfer from Aviation to Medical Service and become a MEDEVAC pilot. HA HA HA (That's a higher being laughing at me).

If you haven't heard, my life has taken a completely different turn recently and I am still in the process of sorting it out. About three weeks ago I was at this conference for my recruiting job and I was talking to my Battalion Commander. I told him of my plans to switch branches in an attempt to get qualified and deployed quicker. He kind of laughed at my plans. He told me it would be committing career suicide because the unit I was going to was deploying this month. This means there would be no unit for me to be with and I would be stuck in the rear with no training opportunities. Well, that kind hit me like a ton of bricks. Here I was working on this transfer for the last four months and planning my future, and I get told that I am smoking crack. Needless to say, I was not too happy. I had a huge decision to make. Stay course or pull my packet and continue in aviation.

Well, I pulled my packet. I talked to my Battalion Commander and he told me he could get me to flight school sometime this year. So I am staying with my aviation unit in Los Alamitos. I have finished putting my flight packet together and I have to appear in front of the board. Then I will probably go within the next 6-8 months. Yay!!!

In other news, I am no longer employed full-time by the National Guard as a recruiter. The Guard took a lot of budget cuts so they got rid of 8 out of 10 Lieutenants that were working with me. This kind of sucks because the pay was pretty good for the area. This means that I have to find a job to help pay my bills. I made a few phone calls and tomorrow I start my first day at my new job. I am working for Compass Health at Mission View Board and Care facility. I will be working maintenance for the time being. The pay is nowhere near as good as what I was getting before, but it's a job.

That's what's new and exciting in my life. I'll be around SLO for a little while longer. I hope to get to flight school soon to start all of my training.

Keep you posted on any new updates.

BEAR

Adventures of Ben & Bear Video

The Adventures of Ben & Bear

As I mentioned in the previous post, Ben and I traveled across the country to Ft. Benning, Georgia because Ben had to report to the first phase of his officer training. So, he drove down from Ft. Lewis, Washington to hit up San Luis one last time for awhile and then we took off on our adventure.

Day 1 - Monday

We planned on leaving to go down to Ben's house in Claremont at around 1000 but we slept a little later than expected because the weekend caught up to us. We eventually hit the road around 1130 or so and made our way down south. It took us about 4.5 hours because of traffic in Santa Barbara and LA but all in all an uneventful trip. Went out to dinner with his family in Balboa. We went to PJ's; real good pizza and beer. Towards the end of dinner I started following the UCLA/Tennessee on my phone. After dinner we headed out to Balboa Island to check out the houses and get coffee. The houses over there are awesome. As we walked by Ben and I would stop at every house that had the football game and watch for about five minutes. Then we would catch up to his family and find the next house to watch. It made it real exciting to watch the game, especially when it went to overtime. Tennessee eventually lost, :( but it was a good game.

Day 2 - Tuesday

Tuesday was a lazy day. Ben and I sat around his house just watching TV and getting ready for our trip. We changed our destination plans about 10 times because of the hurricane and women, yes women. Our final plan was to hit Las Cruces, Austin, Nashville, and then Ft. Benning. We hit the sack early to get ready for our departure.

Day 3 - Wednesday

We got up around 0630 to be ready to leave by 0800. Ben's mom cooked us a great breakfast of eggs and bacon, we packed the car, and headed off. About one block in, Ben realized he forgot his Bluetooth so we had to turn back for that. We hoped that would not be an omen for the entire trip. We headed out I-10, which we would be on until about Austin. We hit traffic in Redlands area because a burned up Brinks truck. I would later hear that someone in the same traffic jam had seen bullet holes in the truck and that it was stolen. Who knows, but cool story.

Our trip was sponsored by Red Bull, David Sunflower Seeds, Aquafina water, and Wintergreen Lifesavers.

Well, we drove through a lot of desert. Arizona had some pretty parts to it. We stopped for lunch in Phoniex at a BBQ place called El Paso BBQ. (Our goal was to eat at places we have never heard of and preferably non-chain restaurants) It was really good food. They had jalapeno corn bread. We almost felt like hanging out there for a few days that food was so good. But, we hit the road again, headed to New Mexico. Let me tell you. New Mexico is nothing special. At one gas station we stopped out, there was absolutely no one there; at 1900. The pumps were working so we filled up, but is was scary. It felt like we were about to become the opening scene of the Hills Have Eyes III. There was also a car that had about 10 cop and boarder patrol agent cars around it. We think that they busted coyote trying to run illegals across the boarder.

We finally arrived in Las Cruces around 2100, checked into our hotel, and looked for a place to eat dinner. We were pretty full from lunch so it was alright that the only thing open was a place with just bar food. The place was called Farley's and it was pretty cool. Kind of like Applebees but a little better. For some reason though, they were huge Steelers fans; in New Mexico. It was a little baffling. After we had some bomb nachos and good beer, we headed back to the hotel to get sleep for the next leg of our trip.

Day 4 - Thursday

We left the hotel at around 0630 to allow ourselves more time in Austin. After hitting El Paso, there was absolutely nothing until we got about an hour outside of Austin. That part of Texas is boring and long. It is so empty that the speed limit is 80 mph. We saw tons of roadkill and got stopped at a boarder patrol checkpoint. Nothing too exciting happened during this leg because there was nothing around us. We got into Austin at around 1700. We checked into our hotel and then took a walk downtown. We was the capital building, 6th street (with all the bars), and the Colorado River at the south end of downtown.

We ate dinner at a BBQ place called Stubs. They had some good food too. I drank Lone Star beer. The state beer of Texas. I actually like it more than Coors Light. We watched the Giants vs Redskins game at the restaurant and met a guy who lived in Austin. He told of a couple of places to hit up to line dance and have fun. So, we headed back to the room to change and headed out at around 2200. The first place we went to was the Broken Spoke. It was an old fashion honky-tonk. The did nothing but two step and a few swing dances. They did not allow any actual line dances. It was a great atmosphere though. People were nice, but it was a little older crowd. After Ben danced with a couple older women, we decided to head to a place with people our own age. We took a cab to the Midnight Rodeo, or as the locals call it, Midnight Rope-a-Hoe. It was a crowd of people our age and it was huge. It was a little like a mix between the Grad on a Wednesday night, hip-hop, and the Grad on Thursdays, line dancing. It was a lot of fun and we met some interesting people; a couple of Longhorn girls, arena football players, and soldiers from Ft. Hood. We closed down the bar and dreaded getting up the next day to drive 14 hours to Nashville.

Day 5 - Friday

We got up at around 0800 on Friday morning, feeling the effects of the previous evenings activities. We jumped in the car to start moving and stopped for breakfast a little north of Austin. It was a small hole in the wall BBQ that has some good breakfast tacos. After getting some good grease in our stomachs we head back on the road. This was going to be our longest leg of the trip. It took us by Dallas and then we stopped at some random western wear place to check it out. Ben got a hat band and we kept moving. We passed through Texarkana on the Texas/Arkansas border. The drive through Arkansas was pretty uneventful as well. It was green but I really wasn't impressed by Arkansas. We finally passed over the mighty Mississippi in Memphis. It was beautiful. We were hungry because we didn't eat lunch so we looked for a BBQ place in town. Our GPS took us through a scary part of the city to a place that did not exist. So we moved a little north and found a place in a safer neighborhood. The food was good like every place we had been before. We talked to the waitress for a while and she said we should got out with her and her friends but we told them we were headed to Nashville. We still had a three hour drive ahead of us. The last part of Friday felt like it took 10 hours. It was dark and I really could only see the road and the cars around us. We arrived at our hotel in Nashville at around 0100 in the morning. We checked in and went straight to bed, knowing we had all day to explore the city.

Day 6 - Saturday

Because we had gotten up so early the day before, we slept in till about 1000 on Saturday. We then got up and decided to walk downtown. We hit up the Country Music Hall of Fame. It was awesome. Got to see the progression of country music, see cool memorabilia, and listen to some good stuff. Ben and I both got a shirt to remember the trip by. We then walked around Broadway. This street is awesome. Every five feet there is a bar or honky-tonk that has live music, good food, and great people. We stopped in to a few western wear stores and got new cowboy hats. We also went into a boot place that was having a sale on cowboy boots. It was buy one get two free. Yeah! Buy one pair of boots and get another two for nothing. So, Ben and I chipped in together and got some boots. Ben got 2 pairs and I got a pair of $300 boots. That's $900 worth of boots for $300. That is a steal. The are freakin' nice too. After that we ate lunch another great BBQ place that had Peyton Manning's University of Tennessee jersey on the wall.

We headed back to our room to drop of our stuff and take a power nap before we went out for the evening. Around 1900 we went back out dressed for the evening. We were in search of a bar or restaurant that would be showing the UFC fight. Our hometown hero Chuck Liddell was fighting. After a couple of places saying that no one would show that in town we found one. We paid the $5 cover and went upstairs and waited. We were about an hour and a half early for the fight so we watched a little college football and got to know the people around us. Of course being who we are, Ben and I talked up Chuck and how he was going to dominate the fight. His fight rolled around and we were cheering our guts out. Until the fatal punch. Chuck took one right on the chin that knocked him harder than I have ever seen him get hit. Ben and I looked at each other with open mouths. We needed to leave now!

We headed back onto the strip and jumped in one of the honky-tonks. We met two bachelorette parties and hung out with them for a while. We then moved to another bar and stayed there till closing, 0300. Again we made friends easily and partied with our third group of girls there for a bachelorette party. As the night drew to a close we walked back to our hotel room and crashed, dreading the drive down to Georgia.

Day 7 - Sunday

We planned on being out of the room by 0900. We woke up; again feeling the effects of the night before worse than ever. We both took showers and were getting ready to go when Ben found out he did not have to report till midnight. That gave us plenty of time to make the 5.5 hour drive. So we made the decision to go back to sleep for a few more hours. Greatest decision of our lives. We eventually got out of the room at 1100 but sat outside the hotel for an hour waiting for the valet to bring the truck. Everyone was trying to leave and there was only limited space and people to help. Finally, we got in the truck and headed out to Ft. Benning. We stopped along the way for lunch because we needed some grease in our empty pit of a stomach. We tried Hardees. It is owned by the same people as Carl's Jr., but everything is completely different. Either way it was a God send for the body.

We rolled into Georgia around 1800 or so. Ben checked in to the headquarters and they told him to report to housing. He decided to wait till after dinner so we went to Applebee's to get some food and watch my Colts play. Yeah, that didn't turn out too well. We left at the end of the third quarter. We headed back to base at around 2330 and Ben went to check into his room. When he got there, he found out that he was really supposed to be there by 1200 and not midnight. That caused a little problems, but he eventually got a room. Unfortunately, that meant I had no where to crash. So, with my infinite wisdom I decided to sleep in the back seat of the truck. It would only be for a few hours, he was taking me to the airport at 0400, so it would be no problem. Wrong Answer! I have never sweat so much in my life. I had almost every window down to get air through the truck but it didn't help at all. I could only sleep for 15 minutes at a time and then I would wake-up again. Finally, 0400 rolled around.

Day 8 - Monday

Ben woke up and took me to the airport at 0430 for my 0600 flight back to LAX. The flight from Columbus, GA to Atlanta, Ga was only 25 minutes long and I had a whole row of seats to myself. The flight from Atlanta to LA was miserable. I sat in the middle seat for 5 hours next to a drunk. I slept for part of the flight due to my lack of sleep from the night before. The rest of the flight, I did my best to look busy so I didn't have to talk to the crazy drunk guy.

I finally arrived in LA and then took a bus to the train station for my final part of the trek. I was taking a train from LA to San Luis because it was only $27 for the ticket compared to the extra $200 to fly. I got to the station with a 4 hour wait for my train. I thought I would check in early so I could just sleep and have no worries. I wanted to keep both my bags because the train has a lot more storage space than a plane. But the guy at the ticket counter convinced my to check in my one bag. Well I did against my gut feeling. Turns out...listen to your gut. The train left on time and I found a seat by myself. It was a long trip, about 5.5 hours, but it wasn't too bad. I just read and slept. When I arrived in San Luis at around 2100 I waited for my bag to come off. Yeah, it wasn't there. They had lost my bag somewhere along the route. This upset me a little because I knew I should have brought the bag on with me and it also contained my $300 pair of boots, or really $100 pair. The guy at at the ticket counter said he was sorry and he filled out a form and said he would let me know when it came in. (As I write this now, I am about to leave to pick up the bag). My mom was there to take me to my house. I grabbed some food and called it a night. Work started back up the next day.

Overall, great trip. Saw some cool places, met some cool people, and did some cool things. My favorite place overall was Nashville. I can't wait to have the opportunity to go back there.

Road Trip

So, as some of you know, Ben and I are taking a road trip across the country to Ft. Benning. Ben has to report there on the 7th of September. We are going to leave on the 3rd and stop at a few places along the way. Our major stops include Las Cruces, Austin, New Orleans (if it ain't underwater), and then Ft. Benning. I was trying to think of cool things to do in each state we travel through.

So, I am taking any ideas. Drinking is kind of out because of the whole driving thing. And no Mariana I will not sleep with Ben in each state. I am really excited about the trip and I will try to fill you in along the way if I get Internet. If not, I will post our experience when I get back.

And, if any of you have cool places that we should stop and see along the way, let us know too.

Warrior

The National Guard just put out another promotional video like "Citizen Soldier." This one is called "Warrior" by Kid Rock. The video has both Kid Rock and Dale Earnhardt Dr. I thought it was cool because some of my candidates were involved in the filming. Check out the video at the link below.

http://www.nationalguardwarrior.com/

Quick Update

So, I haven't posted anything in awhile so I thought I would give everyone a quick update on my new developments.

This last week I got notice that the National Guard Medical Board approved my transfer from aviation to medical service. What the means is I only have one more step until I am able to go to my officer training in Texas. I just have to wait for the Cal Guard send in my Federal Recognition packet and I'm in for sure. This should be done around early to mid September. So... I could be leaving for Texas as soon as late September or early October.

As my medical recruiter said, "almost there, downward slope." I am just excited to have the opportunity to get some training.

In other news, turned the big 24. (I think most everyone who reads this knows already) I just can't believe I am almost at my quarter life crisis.

Also, looks like due to budget issues, I may not be continuing my job as a recruiter for the National Guard. So, if I don't take off to training in October, I should be looking for a job. Anyone want to hire me...wink...wink.

Well, hope everyone is doing great and I'm sure I will bump into you soon.

Bear

Songs About Me

So, not sure if it's just me or if others have the same thought. Have you ever just been driving down the road or just listening to music, and thought, "Man this song would go perfectly as background music to my life." You imagine certain aspects of your life as a music video with the song playing. I have these day dreams a thousand times a day. It seems that every time I hear a song I picture myself as part of it. Whether the song is Metallica's Enter Sandman or Brooks & Dunn's Days of Thunder, it doesn't matter. I picture either events that have happened in my life or make up some that could happen in the future. Crazy or not, it helps me pass the time during the day. I love to do it and don't think I could ever stop.

And, what's even funnier as a write this blog, Trace Adkins's song Songs About Me just came on.

It's a sign.

Well, there's a little glimpse into the head of Bear.

Deployment

A lot of people, after my last post, have asked why I want to have the ability to be deployed. "Wouldn't you be happy not being sent overseas?" Well...yes and no. Of course I would be happy not having to experience war. No one in their right mind really wants to take another person's life. And no one wants to be put in a situation where their life can be taken. I feel the same way. However, I have been trained and prepared to support our current military effort for the last five years. Part of me feels that by not having a chance for deployment will completely null and void the training I received. I know that isn't an entirely true statement, it's just how I feel.

Another part of me doesn't want to be one of the only ones that didn't have a chance to make a difference over there. Whether or not we went over for the right reasons means nothing. We are there and many individuals have given their life in an effort to better this world. I would like that chance too. So many of my closest friends are over there right now. It's the least that I can do to thank them.

"Aren't you scared of being deployed?" Hell yeah I scared! If I wasn't a little scared then I wouldn't be human. I have plenty of dreams about being over there and things happening. I just have to trust myself, my training, and the others around me. And I do.

"Aren't you worried about who you will be when you get back?" Of course I am worried that I will not be the same Bear before and after a deployment. And to be honest, I won't be. No one is completely unaffected by those types of circumstances. In talking to be friends that have been and returned, they are all relatively the same, just with a little different outlook on life. And that is all I can hope for.

I know that not everyone agrees with my thoughts on this subject. And you have every right. I just thought I owed it to you to let you know how I felt. I feel extremely blessed that I have many friends and family members that want to keep my out of harms way. And as my mother always told me growing up, "When it's your time to go, it's your time to go." I could be walking across the street and be hit by a car, or I could be patrolling the streets of Iraq. All I can do is have faith in God that he uses me for whatever purpose.

So thank you all for your concerns. I truelly appreciate and love everyone one of you. You have all been some of my biggest supporters and I hope you can continue to stand by me.

In Beginning

So I did it. I finally started a blog like everyone suggested. I figure it can have a few purposes. One, it allows me to keep everyone updated on my crazy life and ever changing plans with work and the Guard. Two, it gives me something to do while I am bored at work. It's not that I don't do work. It's just that I can only take so much of it at one time. Three, it gives me a place to talk about random thoughts and ideas.

So, let me fill everyone one in on my current state and future plans:

I am currently working for the California National Guards Accessions Task Force as an Officer Recruiter. My job is to recruit individuals into the National Guard as Officers. This can be through ROTC as well as OCS. My office is on the Cal Poly campus in the ROTC Department. I can't complain too much about being on campus still. Part of the duties of this job is traveling down Los Alamitos and training potential candidates for OCS. This is completely different than ROTC because we have to ride the candidates pretty hard. We can yell and scream at them to get them ready. It took me awhile to transition into this Drill Sergeant mode, but it can be fun sometimes. Tiring, but fun.

My future plans seem to change on a day to day basis. As most people know I Commissioned as an Aviation Officer and knowingly took a two year wait to get to flight school. Well, two years is a long time. So, in an effort to get trained sooner, as well as have the ability to be deployed, I am making the transition to the Medical Service Corps as a 67J. Basically this means that I am going to become a MEDEVAC pilot. In order for this to happen, I have to wait for my transfer to go through, got to Medical Service Corps training, go to a MEDEVAC unit, and then still wait for flight school. The wait for flying will be roughly the same but I will be at least qualified as a MSC Officer. This allows me to be promoted as well as deployed. Both good things. If my transfer goes through soon, I could be taking off to MSC school as early as end of Sept. I will go to Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio, TX for about 10 weeks. I am actually looking forward to it. I want the training and also love Texas.

Well most of you knew this info but for those who didn't, there it is. Hope to keep everyone updated as much as possible.


BEAR