FOB Living at BOLC II

A more pictorial view post than normal for me. As I have mentioned I attended BOLC II this Spring from April to May 2008. My Company spent 1 week (4 days and 3 nights) at the FOB, while others spent more (the other Company spent 3 weeks out here, heading home on the weekends).

Rows and rows of tents in the admin area. Yes, apparently they actually sprayed something on those first 2 tents (they serve as the TOC, Tactical Operations Centers for the 2 Companies when they are there). There are about 8 tents in a row from this point. As well as a row of "changing tents" (not allowed to change in the sleep tents.... silly rule and not really paid attention to) and shower tents (4 of them, pictures of the insides to follow).

The outside of the Sleeping tents. They are about 50 meters long on the inside and as you can see from the people in the foreground pretty tall as well. There are 3 of them here, 2 for the males of each company and 1 for the females (that is forbidden to men due to some indiscressions in earlier cycles of this course).There are 120 bunk beds in each tent. As you can see its not too bad. It is air conditioned and this is by far the best trip I have ever made to the "field". Everyone is pretty much allowed to set up as they see fit so long as no food is consumed in the area. This too was ignored by a lot of people.
My messy bunk. As you can see I was a smartie and took along a pillow.
This is the MWR/Mess tent. As you can see there are plenty of places to sit as well as a couple of TV's that are hooked up to satellite. AC'd as well.

In addition in the MWR tent we had a bunch of computers along one side.

The shower tent. Plenty of showers (gotta love that during the week). I am a big fan of taking showers in the field. They help me more than sleeping at times. PS those aren't real mirrors, they are polished stainless steel plates.


Not a bad shower. But anything would have been good. This was still better than what I had during OCS (pretty much any phase).

The FOB's parking lot. You can barely make out the guard tower (on of 8 on the FOB) on top of the red CONEX.

Some of the many vehicles that we used during out time at the FOB