The Gresham's Blog: Brandon Gets the ESWS!!!

Brandon passed the Murder Board for his ESWS on Sunday. It was 4 hours of intense drilling. They find your weekest area and they drill you on that area. Then today he did the Oral Board which is where you get questioned by all the chiefs on the ship. He passed!!!! He is now ESWS qualified and he is so happy and relieved. He has been working on this for over 2 years now. It has been a very hard, long and stressful thing for him to get. There is a lot of work entailed in getting ESWS qualified. I am very happy for Brandon and I'm very proud of him!!! He is getting pinned with the ESWS metal today on the ship. I have included Brandons notes of todays events.

"OH YOU HAVE NO IDEA HOW HAPPY AND RELIEVED I AM RIGHT NOW! Yes, you guessed
correctly, I passed the oral board! The terms the Chiefs used were "You did
outstanding" and "You blew it right out of the water!".... hehe... anyways,
I guess that means we did really well. The first half of the board everyone
was friendly and accomodating but serious. By the time we were about
half-way through though they all started laughing often. I was wondering
why all throughout... it seemed like a good laughing, but unexpected. I
later found out from them that by then they were very happy b/c they knew we
already earned it and they were a lot of times asking us lame questions just
to get through the requirements and they were trying to come up with B.S.
trick-type of questions to stump us b/c they were bored so they would be
laughing in their heads about some of the questions they were coming up
with... anyways, I am done, finito, acabo, termino!!! I am so relieved! I
am having Hall pin me on the missile deck this afternoon... once I get a
photo back I'll send it to you, ok???"