Saturday, August 30, 2008

Catch Up Time

So I guess I've got two months to catch up on. FYI the second video I mentioned isn't going on the internet, it was just a little to big. It will be brought home to watch at Christmas. Anyways with the video post aside I'll go back to the last week of Second Language Training (SLT) or in some people's case Strenous Liver Testing. Not so much mine, I balanced drinking with fine dining and other adventures (ie. bike trip, Vermont trip, Jazz Fest, etc). So the last week of Language Training proved to be about as exciting as the other 4 and that's it.

After Language Training it was straight into Basic Officer Training Period. To prove the point I'll say we ate lunch in the beautiful officer's mess and ate supper in the less beautiful recruits mess all within the same day. We also gave up our RMC cap badges, our nice name tags, rank slip-ons, etc in exchange for the accroutments officer cadets wear on training at the lovely Mega. Fortunately we got that weekend off and all of the others to follow though we had some close calls. The next 7 weeks consisted of some fairly interesting military training and in my opinion far from grueling training. The course in my opinion was relatively easy and my platoon of 63 had some amazing staff. To skip out on long drawn out descriptions of the entire thing I'll just do a quick overview of everything I learned over the course. The bulk of the course was leadership and battle procedures, which honestly was the only stuff I had a hard time staying awake in this year. Last year everything put us to sleep but we weren't as well conditioned back then. The leadership and battle procedures stuff is pretty self-explanatory. Simply put it's the bread and butter of being an officer in the CF.

The stuff that I definitely didn't fall asleep for and found to be a lot of fun, despite the liters of sweat that came out of me from, was CBRN (Chemical, Biological, Radiological, and Nuclear) training. Thankfully in the 90 or so years since World War 1, scientists developed gas masks and suits so we didn't have to put urine soaked rags over our faces to go into the gas hut. So what we did for this was about 1 day of classroom stuff, followed by about a day or so of practicing the procedures in suiting up and masking up. Then we spent a morning fully suited up waiting for our turn to go into the gas hut to practice masking up in a gas filled room (don't panic it was just tear gas). I actually had a lot of fun doing it, except for the sweating.

The other fun thing I did was a morning of bayonet fighting. Since it was only an introduction it was only about 2 or 3 hours one morning but it was lots of fun. It was really exhausting and by the end it was hard to stay coordinated with all the different moves. Plus we all lost our voices from the war cries we had to yell out as we pretended to slash and stab our imaginery enemies.

Fortunately drill was pretty much NIL this year. PT was fun and enjoyable for the most part. Weapons training was an hour long refresher. The other classroom stuff was fairly interesting as well.

We had two 5 day excercises in Farnham. The first one being Pre-Vimy. 5 days of living under 3 ground sheets with two girls in my case, learning about how to utilize battle procedures in a field environment. We also learned how to do basic section attacks, patrols, relearned road blocks, etc. It was pretty good with the exception of the extremes in weather. It was either bright and sunny (like the day we did missions in CBRN suits which meant tons of sweating and a feeling of impending fainting) or raining (usually when we had to do something involving hiding in grass or walking through bush). At the end of the excercise there was a pretend attack on our bivouac and we had to defend it. We were each issued 150 rounds of blank ammunition for the week and we didn't have many oppurtunities to fire them all week. When the orders came to fire them all off, they went pretty fast. We finished the week off with a maritime crossing, which equalled to about an hour or so of waiting with a rope tied around your waist and crotch quite firmly, and 30 seconds of sailing across a river on a cable. Lots of fun, but I walked funny for a few hours after getting that rope off.

The following week was Excercise Vimy, the final test of whether we learned anything about the 16 steps of battle procedures. We lived in what is called a Forward Operating Base (FOB). It's supposed to be a simulation of overseas operations. They have them in Afghanistan. It's sort of like a M*A*S*H type setting for those of you who have watched the show. For those of you who have no idea of what a FOB looks like or never watch M*A*S*H, just imagine some green modular tents, a few sea containers, and a watch tower. Take all of this and surround it by concertina wire (aka razor wire), take some people in green walking around with assault rifles, throw in some oil drums, a gatehouse, a flag, and some outhouses. That my friends is a FOB. That was home for about 5 days. The 4 sections of the platoon conducted concurrent 4 hour long missions out of our FOB (FOB Atlantic/Atlantique) for the majority of the week, with one section performing FOB security when the other 3 were out on missions. These missions were non-stop round the clock missions, meaning sleeping and eating had to be done when time was available (usually when the section commander for the mission was taking orders from the platoon commander). I was in charge of FOB security during my tenure as commander of 1 Section, I had to deal with 4 refugees being chased by insurgents. All of the characters in the missions are played by actors and they fit into a peacekeeping story line that we are provided with the week before the excercise to give us the feeling of being on an overseas deployment. Needless to say during my mission some shooting happened in order to protect the refugees and the FOB. On one mission my fireteam and I were tasked with protecting an imbedded journalist who also happened to be a little suicidal. Not only did she annoy us with stupid questions, she ran towards the firefight when our section was engaged. We tried to chase after her but to prevent becoming casualties ourselves we had to give up chase. We later found out that in the 3 years our platoon commander had known this certain actress she had only been prevented from dieing in this scenario once when two guys much bigger then me and definitely bigger then my two lady fireteam partners literally sat on her. So hopefully that gives you a feel for how realistic the scenarios are made. So it was both an exciting and stressful weak, with some laughs and some snapping depending on the occassion. To end the excitment off and finish off the ammunition we'd been issued 3 of the sections attacked my section, while we protected the FOB.

The last week of BOTP was grad week. Lots of drill, one amazing course party, and lots of sitting around to sign paperwork.

The weekends of BOTP, were always enjoyable with at least one birthday party, multiple trips up the road to the Dix Trente in Brossard for a stroll around the shopping center, a weird trip to the Jewish sector of Montreal in search of an English movie theater, and one visit to a cornfield. The exception being the 3 duty shifts I ended up with on 2 Friday nights, and a Saturday. C'est la vie!

Now I'm back in Kingston, and getting excited to start school!

Wednesday, August 27, 2008

A Taste of my Summer in Quebec

Well not sure if anyone still looks at this anymore, because my lacking in Internet connection prevented me from posting. Anyways, don't really have the time to get into long drawn out details of my summer, but I can show you a video of one my weekend adventures on Second Language Training courtesy of my friend Jeremie, he's seen in the video. Stay tuned for more later on this week.....hopefully!