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.