3rd Light Armor Reconnaissance Battalion is closing in on a year of training comprised of hundreds of field ops, classroom hours, PT, and spectacular live fire quals. It is finally our time.

For 3rd LAR, this will be the third trip to the sandbox. The rub? This time around the Wolf Pack has a boot-to-veteran ratio of about 3 to 1. In other words, we’re comprised of mostly all new guys; myself included.

If that reality is the high stakes room, the possibility of pulling offensive missions in the towns and cities we’re rumored to be in… well… that’s the double down. The specifics have been and will remain closely guarded, however the likelihood is high that 3rd LAR will be dusting off the “lessons learned” from the 2004 Fallujah offensive and applying them elsewhere.

Is there a noticeable nervousness among the boots (not to mention the combat veterans who have to rely on them) during the last few weeks of the Wolf Pack’s pre-deployment workup? No. As hard as the Marine Corps has tried to deliver a training package that most accurately mirrors the reality on the ground over there, it remains tough to lose that sense of make believe.

Maintaining an attitude of fear and nervousness for months on end, in the rear, is boring and silly. There is just no use for it. Now when we first time boots roll out of the FOB with a combat mission and full ammo upload, all bets will be off! There will be fear and there will be nervousness however it will not be mission-crippling because of the caliber of men in this company.

How do we know that? We are Marines. That’s how.

Speaking to morale issues is pointless. You do not want to hear about it from a boot Marine. We have not sustained any serious long-term hardships to date for us even to discuss changes in morale. Commitment is a better word for our attitude.

Myself along with all the other boot Marines had joined the Corps well into the Iraq campaign, and knowing full well that we would be deployed over there. We were committed to going then and we could not be more committed now, just weeks away. It is time for that battle test; it is time for the rubber to meet the road!

For 3rd LAR dismounted scouts, it means seven months of kicking doors in and tying up Enemy Prisoners of War. For our drivers it is seven months of eating, drinking, sleeping and pulling lifesaving James Bond power-moves under fire inside the driver’s hole. Vehicle Commanders are popped up exposing their vitals half the time to get a better vantage point from the turret of this bullet magnet in an effort keep the crew from being smoked in a kill zone that the rest of us cannot see. For us gunners it’s seven months of white-knuckled, sweaty GI-Joe-kung-fu-grip around the joystick controlling the most vicious 25mm chain gun this particular battlefield has ever seen.

So now here we are chomping at the bit. The horseplay is martial arts. The jokes are in broken Arabic. Our thought processes during these last couple weeks are probably as unorganized as this essay. However we are rounding third going for home plate. This last year of training was our one look back. There will not be another, and that’s exactly the way we want it.