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[Pnx]

I've never had an ID that had a good looking picture of me on it... Then again most don't.

On the subject of Ski's I went to some snowboarding lessons at an artificial slope with my family and some of their friends... All of us did of course fall over almost immediately when going down the slope. And then to sharpen our balance we had to do "head, shoulders, knees and toes" while snowboarding to help out... Which of course made things worse, but oddly enough I actually managed to do slightly better than everyone else and once made it to the bottom of the slope before falling over (without doing the head, shoulders knees and toes thing).

I've been told that a lot of soldiers find cleaning their gun relaxing, especially those that have to use it. Probably similar to how I found painting models to be relaxing.

[Zrk2]

Never, I look stoned in my drivers licence, and simply retarded in my student card.

[Kagus]

Well...  Lessee here.

Since Tuesday morning I've had a total of about 7 hours sleep, of course not consecutive.  Since we're taking off to set up the big bad field command next week, we needed to have a little practice.  The solution?  Practice, of course.  Set up a semi-field command inside the barracks, run it for a bit, then take it down and set it back up again.

This was also our first time with the new lineup of squads, going from five to three.  I wound up on squad Charlie, which unfortunately always makes me think of this charming story of a mentally lacking janitor when I hear it mentioned.  This is due primarily to the composition of our team, which is made up of whatever was left over after the other squads were decided.

It was gonna be rough and tough, but I figured "Hey, at least I'll get to do something else than setting up goddamn barbed wire".

That's when the sergeant said "...squad Charlie will be in charge of barbed wire.  Also, the way we tend to do things is that each squad sticks to their assigned area throughout their service year so they become specialists and do things bigger, harder, and faster."


Damn.  Wellp, looks like I'm gonna be teaching Daniel the Death Slinky to heel and stay whenever we're out picnicking from here on out.  Joy.

Alright, so enough about the Mutant Bedsprings From Hell...  What happened was we spent eleven hours setting up Camp von Shite, got a bit of griping from the sergeants for it, and then started running the thing.

The way it works is that we have three different shifts...  Work, Ready, and Rest, one squad on each at any one time.  Charlie got the awesome luck of starting off as the resting team, so we were allowed to run back across the barracks to our sleeping quarters and snooze from 10 in the evening to 1 in the morning.

The catch?  We learned about this at 11:15, giving us enough time to go back, take off all our equipment (we were not allowed to sleep in our clothes, like the dudes who started on Ready), sleep for half an hour, put our things on again, and make our way back to the camp.

Fresh and rested, we hobbled back to command to take the whole thing apart.  Five hours later, we're good to go.  No rest for the weary however, because we need to set it up again, and beat our previous ridiculous newbie time.  Time to roll out the wire again...

Again, several hours pass.  Finally, we get things set up (actually in fairly decent time this go-around) and start running it.  Starting where they left off, Charlie got to go straight into four hours of keeping the place alive and running.


Yeah...  By this time, I've been awake and working for so long I've actually gotten nauseous from lack of sleep.  Good times, man, good times.

But, hey, we had the awesome stretch of 8 hours sleep ahead of us!  Why should we complain?  We powered through our four hours at post and nearly cheered when we got the signal to head back to the Ready Room and sleep on the floor.

What I wasn't aware of just then was that the Ready team also has a guard post they need to man.  Just the one though, the rest of the shift is naptime and eating-time.

I got paired up to take the second shift, which means I'd be going from hour 2 to hour 3.  This means an hour of sleep before and two after, right?

Well, you still need to make your way back through the barracks across truly evil ice and then into the rec room.  When we got there, we slacked about for a few minutes before someone came in and started giving us a detailed brief of what would come next.  Then I ate my packed breakfast.  Hour of sleep?  Didn't happen.  The other dude on my hour got 15 minutes.

Then we head out and take an hour (plus a little, since we were so cavalier as to meet up 5 minutes before hour 2, as we had been instructed) on watch.  The cold, dull, sleepy duty is made worse by the relief including a dimbulb who overslept and extended our shift by another 10 minutes.

Finally with sleep close at hand, we head back to the Ready Room and await our just reward...

...which doesn't come, because the two hours we would've had happened to bump into breakfast in the mess and the usual morning gathering at 7:30, which we were ordered to attend.  Hello 30 more minutes of "sleep".

We stare down yet another usual service day of fixing up the field command, all hands on deck.  Late in the evening, we get a real live field brief regarding the night's shifts.

Gagging for some Z's, we practically shouted in glee when the sarge announced that we would continue where we left of and go right into 4 hours of real bedtime.  Sounds great, right?

Well, complications arise...  There's a bit of uncertainty, and we get the order to sit in the briefing area and await further orders.  No running off to bed here.  Time slips by...

...and continues to slip by...

...until finally we get the go-ahead for a full 4 hour shift at sleep, starting immediately.  In the meantime I'd managed to catch a minute or two of uncomfortable shuteye while propped up in a chair, so I'm ready for the real deal.


Well...  Yeah.  This is the last leg of the field command's life, so we need to do something special.  All normal posts are cut so people can get some sleep, but the base still needs a couple dudes to run maintenance on the various systems.  Lucky me, I get first shift (midnight to 1:00AM).

We spend an hour doing an actually quite decent job of fixing up the place for staff inspection the next day, and then finally our relief arrives, including the squad leader we borrowed from Officer School.

This lovely chap came bringing a message...  Namely, that one of the men on our team had other standing orders and would not be able to take his hour at maintenance.  The question now was which one of us would take the extra shift.

Not content with losing the second round of Rock-Paper-Scissors (a surprising number of military decisions are made this way), I inquired about a couple of the other squad members, who I couldn't remember being ever given a shift.

As it turns out, the squad leader couldn't remember giving the one chap a shift either.  So it was decided then that I would head back, inform him that he would be taking the shift from 3:00-4:00AM, and start sleeping like I meant it.

I did as asked, relaying the message and the crawling into bed to experience the most painfully beautiful sensation I've ever felt...  Namely, lying in bed with the prospect of multiple hours of sleep ahead of me (we got the okay to sleep all the way to 6 in the morning, since we wouldn't be needed for another shift, but we would be required to meet up for the briefing at 7:30), without five layers of essential equipment.


...around 2:15AM, someone from Charlie comes in and relays the message that I've got the 3-4 shift again, since the other dude actually did have an assignment.

Bad vibes, man...  Bad vibes.


Yeah, I think that's about all I wanted to gripe about just now...  Gonna head off to bed pretty soon here so I can devour as many hours of awesome as I can manage, now that we're back on normal schedule and the base has been dismantled for the last time (this week).

[Jackrabbit]

Jesus Christ. Do they have a plan in place for when you finally drop dead of sleep deprivation?

Also, is this continuing for the rest of your time here or just until whatever's going on is over? I'm slightly unclear about that.

[olemars]

There's always a crunch before big exercises (and 1-2 days right after), particularly the winter ones since they have a lot of international participation. The rest of the time it'll be mostly 0800-1600 "workdays". At the end of the year there's so much downtime that people end up sleeping too much.

I didn't know they were so big on barbed wire. I didn't even see a single bundle of it during my year. What do you do with it afterwards? Roll it up neatly or just dump it in a convenient nature reserve?

[Kagus]

From the looks of things, I'll be working with barbed wire for all other similar operations throughout the rest of the year.  Yay me.

As for how it's used...


When we set up field command, the area we take up needs to be properly guarded.  This area needs to be ringed with first one, then two, and then finally three rows of barbed wire (the third roll is stacked on top of the other two, making it an utter hell to detach later on).

In addition to this, there are a couple checkpoint areas that need a few extra rolls to make things look pretty.

After a day or two of sitting there and getting freeze-fused with the ground, all the wire needs to be separated, packed back into neat little rolls (damn difficult if it's one of those many, many rolls that's decided to go berserk and twist itself out of shape), then loaded onto the barbed wire pallet in such a way that everything can be strapped down tightly, evenly, and without all the wire rolls getting stuck to eachother.

...in other words, through impossible force of bullshit.

[Jackrabbit]

On the bright side, if you ever get invaded for some ridiculous reason, you'll be much quicker at setting up defenses than your enemy.

Cold comfort, I'm guessing.

[Kagus]

Cold comfort, I'm guessing.

You've got a real friggin' amusing vocabulary, my friend.


Special note:  There's a very interesting compound effect caused by the restrictions against sexual relations (including with yourself), the low chance of finding anything outside the barracks (short time on leave, and women seem to know better than live in a small town that's 50% military base), and the very small population of women that were part of January's batch of recruits.

This effect is made all the more interesting by how almost half of the students who entered into officer's training last year are incredibly attractive girls.  It's like a death wish with benefits.

[Siquo]

Sounds like you get to fire your gun after all.

[olemars]

Only once. After that you'll be rolling and unrolling barbed wire at Jan Mayen (Population: 18).

[Zrk2]

Sounds like you get to fire your gun after all.

I thoguht that was some unfortunate implications...

[Kagus]

Well, that was interesting...  Couple weeks out in the field, with 16-hour days and generally poor sleeping conditions, with our eight-hour "rest" period having a couple hours shaved off of actual naptime due to our having to make all preparations during that period.  That means brushing your teeth, attending to the call of the wild, shoving your stuff into the tent, organizing it so you don't lose it, running the nightly inspection of feet (yes, really), rolling out your sleeping bag, and then tucking in.  And, of course, running the process in reverse when you wake up so that you're standing at your guard post the instant the clock hits the eight-hour mark.  Preferably a couple minutes before.

You get to experience some truly amazing smells during that period, I can tell you.  You also come out looking like you've just glued shrubbery to your face and then rolled around in some clay.


And, since we're all a bunch of dudes in the 19-21 range, spending a couple weeks without proper hygiene while pounding down vast amounts of sugar thanks both to the field rations and to the "candy patrol", where someone takes one of the military vehicles and drives down to the local store to pick up sweets for the other soldiers, those wonderful pubescent pustules we know as "zits" have made a massive comeback amongst the armed forces.

Speaking of sugar, I think I've finally figured out the recommend diet in the military.  Sugar and caffeine are both known for providing a high degree of "fake" energy for a short amount of time, after which the physical strain of pretending to be more active than it is will cause your body to crash.  Hard.

Every serving of field rations contains one small packet of coffee, one large packet of "energy mix" (you know how some people say soft drinks are pretty much just sugar with artificial flavorings?  Well, this stuff literally is sugar with artificial flavorings), one large packet of some other sugary drink (either cocoa or blackcurrant toddy), a serving of gum, a bar of chocolate, and one other sweet thing like a pack of raisins (I call them raiSANDs due to the fact that they taste like gravel) or a cereal bar.

The idea here is to just pace your consumption of candy and coffee so that you're playing a continual game of keepy-uppy with energy spikes, and then cut out right before your rest period so that you hit the bag so hard you wind up sleeping through just about anything, regardless of whether you're lying on ice or not.  Pretty much the soldier's version of an on/off switch.


In the beginning, things were a little tricky to get into.  We weren't used to running a serious field command, so the various watch positions took some getting used to.  And trying to adapt your sleeping rhythm to dropping down in the middle of the day and then waking up later that same evening also required a certain amount of flexibility (one interesting note about field maneuvers like this is that you have absolutely no frickin' clue what day it is).

Things eventually hit a rhythm, and we realized that running a field command is actually pretty chill stuff.  The hours are long, true, but in general the worst thing you'll run into is "pit" duty, where you have to stand in essentially one place outside the command center's entrance.  This is especially fun for our squad, since we start work in the evening.  It's chilly work, and can quite often get spectacularly dull since there aren't any other people there to talk with.

But, of course, no good thing lasts forever.  Soon it was time to strategically shove all our junk to another position.  Suddenly, our 16-hour workday bumped up to 48 sleepless hours of stress, cold, rain (and/or snow), and hunger.  Good shit.


Generally I've been fairly sour and less-than-thrilled with military labor, but I found myself in surprisingly good spirits once I fit myself into the field routine.  I was actually rather impressed with how I handled everything.

For the most part, we just kept up appearances and put the base through its usual paces, hearing about all the exciting things happening on the front lines, but we actually had a spot of excitement right near the end of the exercise when the base was attacked by a fictitious terrorist group.  Unfortunately, I didn't get to see much of the action...  Every soldier is assigned a specific role or position for when all hell breaks loose.  As luck would have it, I was assigned a firing position on the opposite side of the base from where the attack was, meaning I was left staring wildly at a bunch of trees with a couple crows in them.

What's funny is that I was just sitting around in the general serviceman tent when it happened.  This tent's placement was a spot shoved directly into the corner where the attack took place.

This means that when I got the order to get to my position, I wound up tossing my gear on and then running like hell away from all hostile forces without even knowing it.  Seems appropriate.


After that wild ride things were buzzing for a while.  Kinda worked like a wake-up call for us, that there really was a chance for stuff to happen during the exercise (we weren't exactly the priority target).  Our perimeter patrols started pricking their ears up at everything and checking out every shadow for lurking Swedes.

However, one night as I was pricking ears and checking shadows late at night, I ran into one of the guard posts for another division of our troop, who had a sister base right next to ours.  We stopped to chat for a little while, and during that time I was informed that our patrols were essentially useless since we wouldn't be attacked.

We had apparently stumbled upon a hilarious and unexpected defensive advantage in our placement of the base...  As we were set up right in an area with a number of private homes, the laws stated that it was illegal to fire off any rounds after a certain time in the evening, something the play-acting enemy forces had to respect.  This partially explained why the one time we were attacked was in the middle of the day...


Aside from that, my days generally consisted of chewing fat with the other soldiers at my watchposts, taking the trash out from the "inner sanctum" of tents that housed national secrets and absent-minded lieutenants, filling up all the heaters and generators with truly staggering amounts of diesel, and using brooms to futilely wipe the accumulated white layers off of tents during a snowstorm.


It was during one of the moves that I realized I should've applied for a position in Armored Cavalry...  It takes us almost two days to fully kick up a base camp.  Armored?  Park your car and throw a canvas over it.  Congratulations, you're done.  Tents with friggin' wheels.


But, of course, we get more chances to shoot the shit with majors, captains, and lieutenant colonels.  Always good fun, that is.

[olemars]

one other sweet thing like a pack of raisins (I call them raiSANDs due to the fact that they taste like gravel)

Little, grey nondescript packages right? Those are malt drops, rocks of pure, crystallized malt sugar (unless you're talking of the actual raisins which are red sunmaid boxes). I have a theory those were all produced in the 50's and 60's.

I remember the actual food rations (the bags of freeze-dried dinners) were quite good though. They were good currency when trading with visiting US marines since they had only 3 flavors of MRE and we had 28.

[Kagus]

I've also been quite surprised by how palatable the actual meals are, or at least the few I've tried (being pescetarian limits available options.  I actually managed to get a few special-order vegetarian meals during this trip, which contained an otherwise exceedingly rare lunch type that everyone else envied gruesomely.  It's kinda like the food equivalent of pokemon).  One thing though is that the cod-and-potato stew smells exactly the same coming out as it does going in.  More than just slightly disturbing.

And the field raisins I'm talking about came in little silver baggies that said "raisins" on the outside.  They also looked and tried to taste like raisins.  We had an ultra-special treat at one point where we were dealt out a loaf of bread each and our choice of sandwich makings, plus a box or two of Sunmaid raisins (which are absolutely hilarious, since they have the best-before date printed on the inside of the box.  This is to keep you from noticing that they went over about six months ago).

[Kandi Apple]

Long haired men, pescetarian, armored amphibious polar bear cavalry...hats that crawl onto your head and ...die... 
I'm intrigued!!