2015

So as 2015 began, I was still in the one man armory. Things were going well, but as said in the last post, I wanted a change, both for the reasons I listed, and because I had an 8 and a 6 year old, and I wanted to be closer to my family in case of emergency, not to mention, to be closer to them in general, we have a close relationship.

In February, even though we have our own annual trainings to go to with our respective units, all of the Company AGR's within the Battalion were required to go to the Battalion HQ's annual training. No one in HQ is required to go with any of the other companies to their respective annual trainings. This really set a lot of people off, and spoke volumes about the AO (area officer in charge) and his lack of understanding about what is important to the Soldier.

While on that annual training, I interviewed to come back to the previous position I had, teaching for the 88M MOS school at the state regimental training institute. I did the interview by telephone, and found out about a week later that I got the job. So back to the side of the state that I came from!

I luckily was able to find a house to purchase rather quickly in the same area we had lived in before, but I still had to drive back and forth for about 45 days because we couldn't close and move in until May 15th. So got a storage unit, and each day brought back a load of stuff in my little Chevy Cruze and put it into the storage unit.

Come May 15th, the kids and I came back together in a large truck we borrowed, did a ditty PCS move, and got everything into the house. Had to buy a new air conditioner right away, but oh well, those things happen. The house was really nice, a little smaller than the one we lived in when I was married, but we actually in some ways like this house better.

Not a lot changed at my old job, except now instead of being ADOS I was AGR. One new guy there, "SG" we'll call him. The job I took was for another guy who had been there long term, "BA", he took an E7 position with another unit and moved on. One noticeable factor about this particular unit, teaching this school, is that people rarely leave, and given the opportunity, if they get a chance, they come back to this unit. That speaks volumes for, not only the job itself being a great job, but also the atmosphere and people who we work with there.

Now, that being said, the E8 (Master Sergeant) in charge of the section was not the greatest. Found out shortly after coming back that they were getting set to shut our school down. And worse, it appeared that he (the E8) let's call him "ND" had done very little to promote or save the school with the powers that be. It felt, at the time, like the Commander had also really done very little to try and save the school. That was all due to change shortly... more on that in 2016.

Unfortunately, one of the instructors was non-retained during the quality retention board, and I had known him since he joined us around 2009/2010 time frame. Losing him stunk, but that's what the QRB does once in awhile, you can't really predict how the outcomes will be. Thankfully we picked up a pretty good guy who had also taught with us before to replace him.

I pretty much picked up where I left off as far as instructing, not too much had changed, a few upgrades to equipment, but everything came back to me relatively quickly. As 2015 got close to an end, I started hearing our E8 "ND" rumbling about how he'd "been in this came position for too long" and complaining about how he hadn't been promoted or moved anywhere. That culminated in him ending up being laterally moved to another E8 position, and they brought in a different E8, "WJ". WJ ended up being fantastic. He also noticed that the school was on the chopping block, and immediately set to work to try and save it.

That was pretty much where we ended up in December 2015.