But it was worth it to get out and get a good meal and hit a club for cheap drinks. As much as I respect the Dutch Marines...they don't know dick about food. muselix and yogurt is NOT breakfast. at least not by itself...especially when you're burning thorugh several thousand calories a day.
anyhow. we stumble back onto the base, hung over and hurting and find ourselves a couple hours later on a small pitching and rolling amphib landing boat on our way to rendevouz with a larger Naval ship. We dock INSIDE the vessel and it takes us out to the island of Curacao.
Curacao is interesting. It's not as famous a tourist spot and pretty much the only other people that we saw who didn't live on the island were Dutch. The island is larger and also, it seemed, poorer. It would take forever to talk about everything we did on the island there. The training was thrown together at the last second. We were originally supposed to take part in a large joint training operation with the Dutch and some other smaller contingents. But apparantly the Dutch Army (who was mainly responsible for the operation) forgot to write us into their training plan. So we were given a remote area of the far Eastern end of the island with a nice beach and a nearby mining operation and told to have fun. we didn't mind. when we were on base we were crammed into a gymnasium with another few hundred visiting Dutch military.
at least while we were out in the field we had some neet tents to live in.
though some people seemed to be confused by them. Poor Pat took the enclosed area with the inevitable piles of sand inside it to be a litter box and was shocked, SHOCKED when we told him that it was not.
The beach right at our training area was pretty nice though. it was enclosed by a small isthmus that basically made for a protected lagoon.
It was incredibly hot and sunny the whole time we were there, with nary a tropical storm to be found. neccessitating the reemergence of my worn out...welll... er calls it my gardening hat.
Most of the training was conducted in an abandoned village that had housed the mine workers back when the mine was prosperous. Abandoned houses always make me a bit melancholy. They were really beautiful at some point but had fallen into serious disrepair. There was also this neet lighthouse. or what had once been a lighthouse before it had crumbled. It stood over our bivouac area and put thoughts into my head of Roland's Dark Tower or the Rapunzel tower from The Brothers Grimm.
We also did some small boat training. We worked with small rubber Zodiac boats, practicing capsize drills to right the boats again and paddle them in open surf. We also did some amphibious assault (we are Marines after all) drills with the larger rigid hull boats.
the best part was in the evening, getting to swim in our lagoon.
We trained our asses off for those last two weeks, spending the vast majority of the time out in the field.
We did get one day off to spend in Curacao at the end of training and again we headed out. I spent most of the time in the hotel room, resting. The one club we went out to was a big disappointment and I think I was too worn out to really do much.
The last day before we flew home the Dutch Marines through us a beach party...on a topless beach.
those Dutch...what a great bunch.
the main event at the party was...well drinking...and secondary to that was a beach vollyball tournament of mixed US and Dutch Marines against other teams of the same. My team went undefeated and won these weird little medallions and...a flashlight. I'll never understand those Dutch.
I guess this is enough to write for now. I just had my first day back at work since getting home in Saturday and it was a fifteen hour day...hence this late journal entry. There's a lot going on in my brain and life....maybe one day the journal will catch up to it. til then, hope y'all are well...and I guess I'll be around.
