Waking up early each morning gives me time to myself to write home, record stories for Jeffrey and generally go undisturbed by the radio I have to carry with me at all times. Later in the morning and on until the last hours of evening I never know when Assassin 21 can get a call. Waking up early on a consistent basis makes it easy for me to be prepared for early morning missions that come up on occasion.
I had a fun time taking the lead on a dismounted mission. I studied the map the night before of the places we would be visiting to get to know the terrain features to look for while out. I also put key locations in my Garmin GPS to give me extra guidance while out on the move. It is fun being the lead element because I get to choose how we will get to the objective and I have more to offer the LT when making decisions about where to go next and how to get there.
My two new soldiers did pretty well while out on the movement. It was a humid day; so much that I had to take off my eye protection, which kept fogging up on me. Both of them were drenched in sweat from boot to neck by the time we returned, but they managed to keep up with our pace and stay at the proper place in the formation as we moved through villages, farms, fields and streams.
After lunch, I opened up the scriptures and read from 3 Nephi 12, in which Jesus gives the people the Beatitudes. Reading through them, I reflected on what they mean to me as a military leader. I think that a good leader can be strong, even rigid, and yet be caring. I prefer to have a high state of discipline in my squad, but I do not like to obtain it through yelling, demanding or making others actually fear me. I have found an effective style of setting a standard and holding to it without resorting to a loud voice or berating others.
“And whosoever shall compel thee to go a mile, go with him twain.” 3 Nephi 12: 41.
There is a lot of information that I have to share with my team leaders and squad members. To keep everyone on task, and yet give as much freedom to my team leaders to decide who will perform which work, I have begun a new system of information sharing. Each evening I create a Word document with a prioritized task list, a calendar of upcoming events, and a detailed set of notes of general information to share. Rather than pulling everyone away from what they are doing, be it work or a hard earned rest, I only have to find my team leaders for a few minutes and hand over the printed copy of the document and let them go from there. At the end of the day we can come back together and collaborate to find out what was accomplished and plan the next day.
Just when I thought I was going to get an hour to myself a health and welfare inspection popped up. This is when the leaders go through the barracks and have all of the soldiers dump all of their bags out to ensure no one is hiding drugs, alcohol or other prohibited items. No contraband turned up, but I did find that my squad had all of their winter gear under their beds taking up a lot of needed room. When they put their rooms back together all of that gear will be going outside to the storage containers until they need it in a few months.
I put on the boxing gloves for the first time and took them to the gym for part of my work out. Just outside of the gym hangs a beat up punching bag that gave me a work out for 20 solid minutes. I had a fun time working on several short routines of punches, jabs, upper cuts and moving around the bag.
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