Day 0: Reporting Day

Well reporting day was quite interesting. Woke up today and drove out towards Fort Jackson. Before leaving Atlanta I made sure to stop and eat Chick-Fil-A again. I need as much of the Lord's chicken to sustain me as possible for this training. I got to Fort Jackson around 1030. I'm glad I got there that early because it took me forever to figure out that I needed to check in at one of the hotels on base and then drive over to the hotel I am staying in.

The best way to describe my lodging is that it is an old Apartment ran by Holiday Inn. Its pretty nice. I attached a photo of the living room and kitchen area. I have a full kitchen excepting an oven. I have a little desk to do work on, a tv, a couch that folds out into a bed and then a bedroom with a queen sized bed. I really like it and it seems like a nice cozy place to wind down at the end of the day.

I reported to the Chaplain school at 1300. From the very beginning of the day until the end of the duty day it is slowly sinking in how strange of a BOLC this is. I learned the technical reason why. So every officer has to do two phases of BOLC. BOLC A and BOLC B. BOLC A is almost always your commissioning source. That would be either ROTC, Officer Candidate School, or West Point Military Academy. You can look each of those up to figure out what it is. I did ROTC. Technically that is supposed to be my BOLC A. But the Chaplain Corps does BOLC A during the first four weeks of their BOLC. This is because most chaplains are direct commissions. This means that without needing to go through a commissioning source like ROTC,OCS,or WP, all they need is a graduate Master of Divinity, an endorsement and apply for the position and if they are accepted they are off to CHBOLC. So they get their BOLC A during CIMT (Chaplain Initial Military Training). They are actually changing the name to reflect this. Its going to be Direct Commission Course, or DCC.

So part of BOLC A is learning the discipline and environment of the military. So that includes normal TRADOC stuff like standing at Parade Rest when an NCO is speaking to you. Ensuring you do the proper greeting of the day to NCO's and all officers. So there will be these random moments of yelling (and I presume in the future, smoking) but then they go back to talking to you like an adult right after. Also for the first four weeks we can't leave post and we can't go ANYWHERE without a battle buddy. That is probably going to be the only thing about this whole ordeal that really is going to be a downer for me is that in order to go anywhere I need to take someone with me, which requires planning. Supposedly if we don't, bad people will come after us or something.

If you have been in ROTC before, there are some very big Advanced Camp vibes, except at some point in the day I am allowed to go back to my hotel room or go anywhere on post with a battle buddy. But during the duty day, very big Advanced Camp vibes.

So that's the environment so you know what it felt like to go into the meeting. I'm surprised we didn't get a hair cut. I had seen pictures of CHBOLC before where everyone had their hair buzzed off. Although there was still a mild threat that we had until the end of the weekend to all be in regs with our hair "or else."

There's about 100 students. The chaplain center and school is gorgeous. It has a library and museum attached to it. You can tell there is a lot of pride in the chaplain branch. I know that later on one of our assignments will be to make a storyboard presentation on a chaplain or 56M in history.

I think most of the first four weeks we will be learning things I already learned in ROTC so hopefully I am able to pick up on everything really quick. Things like Troop Leading Procedures, OPORDs, Planning, Customs and Courtesies, Drill and Ceremony, combat maneuvering etc. Army values, ethos, song etc. Our cadre seem extremely talented. They all are highly qualified. We even have some special forces NCO's that are going to be platoon sergeants. They will definitely know their stuff and I will likely learn a lot from them.

This is also a unique class of Chaplains because over half of my classmates are prior enlisted. I am definitely one of the youngest here, if not THE youngest chaplain here. If these former senior NCO's can deal with being yelled at, I have no excuse to not play the training game here.

It was a somewhat shorter day, 1300-1700. It was mainly listening to the course manager speak to us generally about the course and what to expect while simultaneously going through different stations for inprocessing. Sounds like the long days are going to be the hardest thing. I understand though because I am writing this and am going to go straight to sleep because I am going to be waking up at 0420 tomorrow morning and I don't even have any assignments to do right now.

Looks like the bulk of tomorrow will be inprocessing. I should be meeting my platoon (or inprocessing groups) and we are supposed to get time to go buy uniforms and get them sewed. My hope is that I can take some of my uniforms that I already own and get the patches I need sewn on. I am guessing things are gonna get a little more physical once we start wearing our uniforms as well.

When they let us out a couple of the chaplain students and I went to dinner at Zoe's Kitchen. It was good getting to meet other chaplains and hear their stories. The ones I ate dinner with were all from the same faith tradition as me and even went to seminaries very similar to DTS. Probably going to be great people to keep me accountable for practicing my spiritual disciplines. The only issue is they live in a different hotel which means if I want to hang out with them, its going to take some coordinating cause of the whole battle buddy rule. I really need to get to know some people in my hotel cause its going to be more convenient for me and I need people to walk with to the chaplain center and schoolhouse. I'm probably going to wake up early tomorrow and wait in lobby for people walking over so I am not walking alone and get written up.

Emotional Intelligence Lesson Learned Today: Emotional Intelligence is the single biggest predictor of performance in the workplace and the strongest driver of leadership and personal excellence.