Tree to the Knee

As promised, I started writing this immediately after my previous post. It took me a minute to remember what I was supposed to write about.

Almost exactly one month ago (did you see what I did there?) I had a go at the demo for the tryouts for the Estonian SpecOps group. It was supposed to be 30 hours of gruelling, almost action packed, unadulterated fun. And pain, sweat and a touch of lack-of-sleep. Simply put, fun for the whole family. Oh, and it took place over the weekend, meaning I couldn't go home. She LOVED that part (not).
Here's what was planned, pretty much in the same order we did them:
- Half an hour of morning exercise. A tenth if us almost died here.
- SpecOps general physical test, which entailed push-ups, pull-ups, leg-ups, sit-ups, push-ups on parallel bars, climbing up a rope, bell-bar reps with a large percentage of one's body weight, and a 10km run to finish. We all almost died.
- Three hours' orienteering. We all got lost and I took a tree to my knee, or something. I was out for the count after this one.
- 300 word essay writing. Or was it 200?
- A quick intro to SpecOps.
- A boat rally. Where they (see what I did here?) took an inflated boat and..... ran up and down and everywhere else, making sure the boat didn't touch the ground or vegetation.
- Crawling for two hours.
- Counting. To 500. With push-ups every time someone gets confused. Did I mention the time? Around 3 a.m.
- Song memorization. With something unpleasant with every failed attempt.
- Sliding down a rope. And trying in vain not to slam into the brick walls all around.... at least not TOO hard....
- And a nice long trek to finish.

'Nuff said.

Off to the Sanatorium

Heya, It's been a while (understatement, yes, I know). There's been stuff happening and I haven't had the time nor the energy to write a blog post.
However: I am off to some sanatorium soon, thanks to what I might call a testosterone overdose. I'll write a post on that when I'm done with this one.

I thought that this would be a perfect time to rant about our medical care. Our med centre, also called our Laatsaret (Laats for short), is where we go whenever our bodies complain against the strain we put on them. One would think that Laats is good at what they do, bearing in mind that they are part of a military institution. One would think that these people can handle any medical issue with efficiency and aplomb. Hell, one would even think that they performed miracles. One would think wrong.

Here's how Laats works: you talk to your higher-ups, telling them you need to head over to Laats. The higher-ups book a time. If youcre lucky, the booked time will actually suit you, instead of, oh, I don't know... errr.... demand you find some way to get from the middle of some random forrest a couple of tens of kilometers away to Laats, or interrupt an important part of training just to let the ladies at Laats throw a peak at whatever's bothering you. That aside.... You get to Laats, after booking and rebooking and hitching a ride from the middle of nowhere to get there. Let's say, for the arguments' sake, that your knee is fuukèd (took an arr... ahem, BULLET, no I wasn't about to say arrow[who would say that in this age?], to the knee or something). You wait in line for half an hour or longer (because the fact that YOU booked a time doesn't mean the others did, neither does the fact that YOU showed up on time mean the others did either), depending on the luck of your draw. You finally walk into the nurse's or doctor's office (also depends on your luck and how convincing you or your higher-ups are) and have a seat. They type at their keyboard for a minute or five, after which they ask what brought you there. "My knee has been giving me hell for the past two weeks, see..." They have a look at your [insert offending body part here], ask questions and irrespective of your answer, they prescribe some painkillers and excuse you from physical exertions for a week, telling you to come back a week later, when they will do the same thing again. On the n-th iteration, they might consider taking you to some diagnostics or MRT scan and if they're lazy, they'll just send you off to a sanatorium.

So the wonderdrug we use around here is the awesome Walkitoff inhalator. Given time it fixes everything. Add a touch of Negotiatewithhigherup and you're fit as a fiddle! Yay!

Lessons from the forest - Part 4

Our last forest camp. It ended with a bang.

1. Enjoy the easy forest camps. They are few and far between. I'll probably never have a camp that easy.
2. Icy roads are flipping slippery. You don't want to realise that as your Jeep knock off makes its unstoppable way towards the gutter or tree at incredible speeds.
3. Never trust the artillery fire control centre to know where you are. Even when you give them coordinates accurate up to 10m. They will still fire shells at you if your rival team (or the enemy) is able to contact them. We lost three whole spotter teams on three different days because they didn't keep record of our positions and the fire targets they were given.
4. My ability to generate fire assignments for the artillery squads is impressive.
5. If you run out of shells to fire, exaggerate the importance of your target and you just might get some Cluster Bombs, which in some cases are better.
6. If the enemy takes over civilian buildings, good luck getting Control to fire on their positions. You might as well consider the war lost because Vladimir just set up shop in Uncle Joe's rickety wooden barn.
7. Artillery squads will fire off a barrage of around 40 shells with only four educational, inert shells and two educational, inert detonators; no sweat.
8. Tell Control, "Fire on MY order" and you're assured that the squads will receive the order, "Fire at will". Don't you love Broken Telephone? If you have them repeat the assignment you gave them and you hear them say, "Fire on your order", then it's guaranteed that the shells will be in the air before you even contemplate telling them to fire.
9. I HATE THE WIND.

Lessons from the Forest - Part 3

We were given the chance to pay a small visit to our new recruits' forest camp and have a look at how they fared against a "real" enemy. I might be pestered into recollecting the experience, but here is a concentrated view of what I got from there. Enjoy!

1. Compressed snow with a touch of ice is flipping slippery. And the ground is hard. If the ground were covered by banana peels, it would be more firm and less painful.
2. Winter camo (white sheets) are effective as f**k. Either that, or our new recruits are blind as f**k. How else do you explain the inability to see your enemy sneaking around less than 20 metres away from a patrolling recruit and the inability to see a crouching enemy throwing snowballs in your face from 10m away?
3. Snow has magical lighting capabilities. During my forest camps, which took place WITHOUT snow on the ground, I could barely see two metres. Cover the land in snow and suddenly you see at least one kilometre into the distance.
4. Our recruits have a thing for light. It seems they are incapable of doing anything without the use of some form of lighting, despite the fact that it betrays their position.
5. I am weird for liking mock battles, because I did not have to wait in line to go on the "attack trip", and apparently the recruits didn't want to be attacked in the first place, preferring to scream, "Don't shoot! Go away!", instead of returning fire.
6. I need to practice my Swahili. How else can I scream elaborate profanities when I don't want people to make sense of a word I say?

Wake-up call!!!!

Caught you in the morning with another one in ...... Hang on. Wrong start.

But I might as well let that sentence stay. It doesn't do too much harm anyway.
Now, who here can say that they know how a morning wake-up call works in the EDF? It's really simple really. Oh, hands down. It's not like I can see you raising your hand to answer my question or anything! :P
Where was I? Ah, yes. Wake-up calls. There are many different ways of getting a platoon up in the morning. The most common is the old fashioned foghorn-into shout routine, where a nice loud foghorn pierces your dream, roughly propelling you back into your bed, closely followed by some idiot on the corridor shouting the Estonian equivalent of "Wake-up Call!" just in case you didn't get the message with the horn. It is standard operating procedure, from there on in, that everyone gets up and out of bed as fast as they possibly can and throw on their tracksuits for the morning exercises, the purpose of which is to get us awake. In my early years as a conscript, I didn't quite get the reason, why we needed exercise, as the foghorn-scream routine was super effective. Being much older and experiencing how every passing day muffles the foghorn even more and the call to wake up much further away, I must admit that I cannot count how many times morning exercise has gotten rid of the sandbags in my eyes. However it is only a matter of time before Dreamland completes her upgraded defence systems.

Now, I mentioned many different ways of getting a platoon awake, didn't I? Who here can tell me some other ways I've been dragged, kicking and screaming, from Dreamland? Some of the more interesting ones are from the forest. Put your hands down, now. I'm not expecting you to answer my questions! :P
Mmmmm.... ah, yes. The forest! I remember, vaguely, my first forest wake-up call. Someone shoved their head into my tent and told me to wake up. As far as waking up is concerned, I didn't have a problem with that, despite having been up freezing by my post, in the middle of the night, as a rain cloud had fun irrigating everything in The Polygon. No, waking up wasn't a problem. What was a problem, however, was getting out of my sleeping bag. As soon as I opened the zipper and let in the crisp morning air, I realised that it was FLIPPING FREEZING outside. August, with all it's warm days and stuff was practically mid February that morning. Of course our Staff Sargent made us understand the error in our paradigms that day and the morning after that, but still. The wake-up calls in that forest camp were followed by a morning run from hell, courtesy of our battery commander. After one week of his runs, even the weakest runner among us was fully capable of winning any marathon you could throw at them.
During the previously mentioned forest camp we had a few other interesting wake-up calls. After having a go at missing targets from 200m away, thanks to the fact that our fluorescent night sights were horrible to aim with, we spent the night at the shooting range ("Shooting Range" might be a lot for that flat grassy field in the middle of the forest, but that's what everyone else called it. :P . The following morning I was woken up by the side of my tent. It was smacking my cheek with a wet "splat" with annoying regularity. My first action was to cover my face with my sleeping bag, then tell my partner, "Some bastard must have tripped on our ropes and collapsed part of our tent." His reply (or what I understood of his reply) was, "Yeah, I noticed."
"I'll take a peek and see how bad the damage is." I tentatively opened one of my eyes and saw that the whole thing had collapsed. "Hey man, the whole thing is collapsed. Some clumsy bastard must have taken out the main support."
"Yeah, it was the Staff Sargent."
"Oh, the Staff Sargent." It took a minute or two for that to register. "Wait.... What?"
I'll cut off the story here, because the rest of the conversation is quite boring. Suffice to say, the dreaded Staff Sargent went around the camp, pulling every single tent to the ground. Nothing was left standing.

Of course, this was a rather annoying silent wake-up call. There aren't many silent ones to speak of. All the others were very noisy. The noisiest to date is when, during the very same forest camp (the last day) our battery commander's aide pierced his way into Dreamland shouting, "Cover your EARS!!!" and that was closely followed by the sound of a storm-match lighting. Of course it wasn't a storm-match. It was him arming an "educational" grenade. The loudest little buggers out there, the dreaded "PIL-10". That little Cuban cigar sized blue stick of pain packs a punch so strong, tossing it in a trough of water results in a pillar of water around 3-5m high and a lovely ringing in your ears (and probably a broken trough, depending on what it's made of).

I lost my train of thought and decided to finish here.

Lessons from the Forest - Part 2

Boom. Let's begin:

1. Bradleys are not subtle. Neither are they stealthy. You can hear the things from kilometres away. The droning sound actually reminds me of bees. Hundreds of bees converging on your position. Needless to say, we got ample time to prepare for an American attack simply because we heard them coming from kilometres away.
2. Digging in is dirty work. Don't throw spadefuls of sandy soil on or near your rifle. Getting said rifle clean with only a toothbrush and very little oil is almost impossible.
3. MG3 machine guns don't work. Or at least ours doesn't, ours here being the one our squad was issued. I was the machine gunner's aide and, essentially, being his aide meant I did most of the shooting, while the machine gunner swore at the MG3, trying to make the thing fire off a burst.
4. Estonia doesn't sell any black tea worthy of my thermos. However, due to incredibly cold weather I am forced to taint my thermos with fifth rate "black tea", simply in order to have something hot to drink. Honestly, the tea isn't even worth the water it's made with
5. The above also goes for the powdered milk. I mean, yes, powdered milk has nothing on real milk, but even when desperate for something creamy to put in "tea", it's still not worth the bother.
6. And cocoa.
7. Plastic sporks are amazing. Lighter than tourist sets (metal spoon, fork and blunt knife) and with better knives. Right up until they break. Then you'll wish you brought the tourist set along.
8. Feed soldiers nothing but one-time food rations and you'll have deserters in two weeks. 24h rations are advised.
9. The cafeteria is a 5-star restaurant, even when they deliver.
10. Always have a secret food horde that even you don't know of. It raises morale like nobody's business when it's finally found.
11. You can never have too many pockets. What you CAN have, however, are too full pockets.
12. If your feet get sore in the first 8km of your 45km trek, you're one sorry soldier. It's going to be a s**tty trek. Pray you don't get hedgehogs.
13. If you get hedgehogs on the first 10km of your 45km trek.... Heh.
14. If after both points above you end up in an American ambush, you better hope they're using live rounds. If you're not so lucky...... I think you get the picture. Hopefully you don't get another ambush. If you get another ambush 5km away, the world dislikes you.
15. Americans are immortal. Not even 6 Carl Gustaf High-Explosive rounds can kill a Bradley at point-blank range. And a 100 round belt of MG3 rounds will not kill your average Bradley gunner either, not even when you add a clip some 5.56mm rounds and aim for the head.
16. Americans are blind. Seriously! 5m further and you, Sir from Texas, would have fallen right on top of me! Can't you see me standing here shooting at you?! How about the MG3 right here to my left? No? OK, what about the guy, 3m tall, swearing like mad at the afore-mentioned MG3? No? OK.
17. American night-vision is OP. I died twice, as the Americans tiptoed past my position in the darkest of night and shot from behind.
18. Mornings are made by ice demons. Nights too. And days.

Douches

Conscripts in the EDF come from all walks of Estonian life. It's , to quote my lieutenant, "A very accurate cross section of the Estonian society."
From what I've understood, most people complain that their served time was a total waste and absolutely horrible, mostly because their supervising officers were ass-holes, or the people serving time with them were annoying to the extreme. I'm not sure how much of this is simply Estonians being hateful Estonians (and they REALLY know how to be hateful, no doubt about that) as I can't say that my time has been annoying; on the contrary, the crazy fools I serve time with make sure there is no dull moment. Death by laughter is more probable right now than and shell, shrapnel or bullet, and all insults are given and taken with enough humour to make it feel more like a fluffy pillow smacking your face than a sucker-punch to the gonads.

Of course, this is a rant post! Haven't heard of one? Perhaps you should have a look at posts from one of my other blogs. "Thoughts of a Slightly Disturbed Gentleman" should do the trick. What? Doesn't feel like a rant post? Wait for it....

Growing up in Kenya has developed some reflexes that come in handy at times. The one that currently seems most appropriate and necessary is the "Turn off the bloody TAP!!!" reflex. It is unbelievably unnerving how much water Estonians waste during their morning ablutions. Take the simple act of brushing your teeth and then shaving off the stubble trying to conquer your face. An act that takes about 10 minutes, depending on how much of a hurry you are in (or aren't..... up to you). Now, a water-loving nut can boast that they succeeded in doing it with just a glass of water. I'm no such nut. I let the water flow, but only as long as my hand is beneath the tap (i.e. I'm using the water). Some (and I don't mean one or two) don't see the need to do so, leaving the tap running on full pressure as they brush their teeth and shave, wasting around 10 times more water than they use. On confronting one, in the early days of my basic training, one such douche replied, "But it's not me paying for the water," leaving the "...so what do I care?" part to my imagination. Another would say, "What, you expect me to close the tap when I'm not using the water?!" [A quick interruption here: Estonian taps, unlike the common taps found in Kenya work with a very easy to use lever that you pull up, and water flows. Push the lever down and the water stops flowing. To turn off the flow of water takes about as much pressure and energy as turning off the lights or pressing a button on your keyboard] And while you might see me as being weird, trying to conserve water in a country where water isn't a problem, I might rebut with the same old, "Water shortages are a global problem," or, "It's in the principle of it." I could also say that these are the same douchebags who complain of low water pressure every morning, leaving me thinking, "Well, if every third soldier here leaves the tap on while they shave, then I'm not surprised we have low water pressure, hell I'm surprised the entire town doesn't complain of pressure drops every morning and evening!" But, hey. Who am I kidding? It's Estonia!I'm practically the only one who sees this as a douche move. How about what other Estonians think about douchebags?

I share a room with a person even the Estonians feel is a real douche. So this guy is lazy and complains every time he is given an assignment, saying that he is the only one doing any work here and that everyone else keeps picking on him. Of course, his portfolio is very impressive, when it comes to achievements. Here are a few: losing practically every piece of equipment he is issued, left his phone on a bench at the railway station (said it was stolen), lost his expensive earphones (stolen, again), lost elements of his uniform, including two pairs of gloves and a jacket (essential in the winter, nobody has any idea how he succeeded), slacks off on every assignment (leaving the rest of us to deal with the problem), arrives late EVERYWHERE, the list is practically endless. All the while he sits with his thumbs and nose in his brand new phone and innocently complains that we pick on him, whenever anyone feels it necessary to pull him out of the phone and into some work. Most enjoyable is his carefree attitude and the fact that he makes it perfectly clear to all that he has no interest in being here. But that's just everyone else's opinion. I'm sure he feels misunderstood and is actually innocent of all charge.
There are others closely following the previous gentleman's methods. It seems that despite my optimistic view of my comrades, even I can't ignore some actual douches.

Now I feel like a complete fool and will stop this post right here. (What can I say? I forgot how to rant! :( )