So, Rivrdog picked it.

The promotion board came out a little bit ago, and I got picked up.  But that's no longer a sure sign that you get promoted; the Army has moved away from instant promotions for NCOs, and that's a good thing.  It's now Select, Train, Educate and Promote.  STEP.  Which means that you get selected, but then you have to go to school and graduate from whatever level of NCO education before you actually pin on your new rank.  And trust me, there's a lot of people who get selected who won't make it.  There's always been people who you look at and wonder just how the hell they got promoted.  This helps weed them out.

So I just spent a couple of weeks at an un-named Army base going through my level of NCO education.  The higher up you go, the less important it is that you can run through a forest with a rucksack, and more important that you understand the operational processes and information preparation of the battlefield.  So this class was created, and implemented this fiscal year for the first time.

Take my word for it, it's no joke.  This class was like getting raped by an entire library of doctrine and regulation until you could repeat it verbatim.  We started with twenty-nine students.  We finished with twenty-four.  And these guys weren't some slack-jawed privates, they were serious troops with plenty of experience.  They had all the scare badges.  About one-third of my classroom worked for SF, or a Ranger battalion, or they taught at one of the various schools.  Multiple deployments.  And five of them got dropped.

This school is going to re-shape the senior NCO levels in a few years.  And I think a lot of dead weight is going to be trimmed.

So anyways, I graduated.  Which means that I will eventually get promoted, once a few things shake out.  It won't happen immediately, but it's guaranteed to happen now.  It was a great day.