Ungulates Attention!

Officer Candidate Liedt has returned and in one piece (barely). My back is in a fiery pain, my knee feels like it's scraping against bones, I can barely lift my arms over my shoulder, and my feet are like hamburger; but I passed the course. Pretty high ranking too. I finished 1st of the 8 Candidates from from the great state of Illinois, and am sitting in the top 10% of all other candidates from across the midwest. What I didn't know was that Illinois, Wisconsin, Iowa, Michigan and Minnesota all send their candidates to the same place (Camp Riley, MN) for combined mass training. We started with 134 candidates and finished with 97 graduating to phase 2.

My phase 2 started today. For the next 12 months I'll be attending courses at the Illinois Military Academy in Springfield, IL. Fortunately I only need to go for 1 weekend a month, just like regular reserve's drill duty. Then, next year, in August of 2011 I'll ship out again to Ft Lewis in Washington, and once again all the Midwest candidates get together to complete our phase 3 and final step towards our training. Immediately after phase 3 in WA, we return to our states and will be honorably discharged from the enlisted ranks of the National Guard to be sworn in, that same day, as Commissioned Officers.

So I completed the first and hardest step in the process with honors. I won't say its all downhill from here, but at least it wont be much harder. Thank you all for your earlier support as I went off to go chase down a dream.

On a side note, while I was conducting my Land Navigation practicals and exams out in the woods of Minnesota, I saw a lot and I mean a lot of deer out there. Every time i saw one near me, I of course had to yell out my tag line of "Ungulates Unite"! But, seems I only scared them off, wasn't able to recruit any of them, yet.