I spoke to a Captain in Leonardwood yesterday at the Training Support Battalion (TSB) where I”ll be for my stay there. She was able to answer a few of my questions. I'm welcome to bring a laptop to FLW but she has no idea where I'll be billeting or whether I'll have the ability to get to the Internet (she knows I won't be allowed to use a personal laptop on the army network). She also wasn't so sure it would be wise to bring the laptop to wherever I'm going, depending on where that might be (Michelle found a link to these Pelican Laptop cases which I guess many soldiers in Iraq are using, though).

I got some idea for who I'll be training with and what I'll be doing, too. Basically, I arrive on a Saturday and I'm pretty much free through Monday morning with some restrictions. Michelle will most likely stay the weekend (off-post) and get her ID card Monday, then head home to Ohio. For me, Monday will mean lots of paperwork, shots, and medical exams. I'll be going through the process with 4 or 5 other lieutenenants, whom I'm assuming are all engineers as well. After the first couple-three days of in-processing, I'm switched over to the TSB where I'll get some CTT (common task training) refresher training (weapons qualification, chemical warfare protective measures, basic soldier skills). The CTT training takes about a week, then we'll be at the Engineer School (where I went for 5 months for Engineer Officer Basic Course (EOBC)) for a couple of weeks of refresher engineer training.

Around the last week of all of this, I should receive orders for my destination unit, and at the end of the training in FLW I will be shipped to a CRC (CONUS Replacement Center, I think) where I'll get my weapon and the last of my field gear. Most likely that will be Ft. Sill, OK, which is where I went for basic training in 1995. That would be around late June. From there, I'll be going wherever I'm going.