Arrived in Theatre

Hello all,
I haven’t written much because of the pace of training. With Navy deployments the training leading up to the deployment is always much more rigorous than the actual deployment itself. Since I last posted, the main body of 300+ sailors arrived. Prior to that it was just our advance party of leadership working to put together all the items needed to support the training of those sailors. Before the Navy will let us head overseas we have to complete a Final Evaluation Problem (FEP), which is essentially a wargame where we are presented with various scenarios and our responses are evaluated. We set our equipment, work areas and manning to match exactly that in theatre and then inspectors (wearing red hats to identify themselves as such) will provide inputs to simulate those scenarios. Those same inspectors then grade our response. What is even more rigorous is that these inspectors are graded as well. So we not only have to prove that we can perform the mission, but we must prove that we can continually train ourselves to improve our performance.
Now we have arrived in theatre and so we have more time so I’ll get more posts up.
The biggest thing to tell you all is that whatever you have heard about the firm Kellog-Bear and Root (KBR), they run an outstanding dining facility. This morning I had scrambled eggs, bacon, hash browns and cantaloupe. The other options were omlets maid to order (with or without egg yolks), sausage, hard boiled eggs, waffles, applesauce, cereals, juice (orange, apple, strawberry kiwi which is my favorite, lemonade) sweet tea, unsweetened tea, strawberry poptarts, blueberry poptarts, apples, bananas, kiwi, honeydew mellon, and much more. And it all tastes very, very good.
Brian