I lost a bet for Air Assault school lol. I got to Campbell as a SPC, less than 2 months before deployment. I told them during the deployment that I would be getting out of the Army as an E-4 without my wings lol. Let’s just say I made the mistake of re-up’ing and ended up stuck there with my 5, Air assault wings, and my orders killed for M6 school smh.
I initially didn’t want to do airborne because I was scared of heights (still am). I only went to Air Assault school because Battalion was about to green light me for additional duty BS. Every time I thought about quitting or not wanting to fast rope out the birds I thought about how badly they were smoking the shyt out of the guys from my brigade, who quit or failed, until the next class date lmao. By that time I actually became interested in Airborne school and regret turning down pathfinder school. By the time I started the pre-ranger selection stuff at Lewis I was about to start getting med boarded. In the end, I was happy with my little double stack (Combat medical badge, AASLT).
When I had to look at my requisitions, to leave Irwin, my only choices were Bragg or Campbell. I looked at my NCO’s from both. All the ones that were by the book dikks were from the 82nd. All the cool ones that believed that you could get in a little trouble as long as you did your job came from the the 101. Under Col. Luong 3/101 was allowed to have fun, be reckless, and mean AF but we were also really on point with our shyt. If I remember correctly our brigade TF (though we were scattered out and undermanned) had the highest kill count in Afghanistan all 2010. The only part that sucked was how everybody else got to have whole BCT’s covering a province. 3/101 was so broken up and scattered we only had battalions covering whole provinces across the East (Khost, Logar, Paktya, Paktika, a battery in Helmand and later a battalion in Kandahar to help 2/101 out.