1-82 FA Organizational Day

For the last 6 weeks, Nathan has been in charge of planning the battalion organizational day. For those of you unfamiliar with this term, it is basically a day for the soldiers and their families to come together and enjoy sports, fun activities, food and some friendly competition. Nathan was tasked with this job while he was still in Bravo Battery. While doing his normal platoon leader duties, as well as filling in for the XO and 2nd PL, he had to weed through all the extravagant ideas that the colonel threw at him to make $7,000 work for a 700 person catered event. Nathan raised $2,200 of that money by auctioning off prime parking passes, days off, staff duty exemptions and pies to the face. Nathan has been working really hard to make sure that everything ran smoothly. Even though Nathan just started his FDO job on Monday, this was his first real tasking in his new position and he wanted to make a good impression. I must say he impressed me. Every one showed up at the Belton Lake Recreation Area (BLORA) at 0830 for the start of the festivities. After a battalion formation and a briefing by Nathan and the colonel, the battery and spouse competitions began. The Battery competitions consisted of volleyball, basketball, dragonball, tug of war, projectile relay and child soldier competitions. The spouse competitions consisted of timed unit patch identification, 3 legged race, wheelbarrow race and tug of war. There were only about 12 spouses who chose to compete. I did okay on the unit identification, with 5 0r 6 out of 9 identified. My partner and I dominated the 3 legged race. We were first by a good 10 meters (it was a 50m race). We got second in the wheelbarrow race, and we lost the tug of war ( the teams were quite lopsided). Overall, I placed 2nd in the spouse competition which I was pretty happy about. After we were done competing my partner and I headed up to the dunk tank to watch people get dunked and then over to the snow cone machine and pavilion to cool off. Once we were cool and rehydrated we headed down to watch the dragonball finals. Once the battery competitions were over we tried to dunk the battalion commander in the dunk tank and then headed up to eat a yummy lunch of hamburgers, hot dogs, BBQ chicken, smoked sausage, baked beans, coleslaw, potato salad, and pasta salad. After lunch we headed down by one of the large shade trees where they awarded trophies for the competitions, raffled off door prizes, Toyota raffled off a GPS, farewelled the Command Sargent Major, and the colonel cut the cake with a sword. I was very impressed with how smoothly everything went. We stayed on schedule almost to the minute and everyone really enjoyed themselves. LTC Brown was so happy with how the whole day went he gave Nathan a battalion coin for excellence. I really enjoyed myself but I didn't get to spend much time with Nathan because he was so busy making sure everything went as planned. Luckily, my 3 legged race partner's husband was just as busy as Nathan, other wise I would have been either really bored or in Nathan's way.