Oh hey. Long time no post…I see there’s a series I started and then didn’t wrap up. Both time to sketch and internet access can be sparse when you’re in the army, who’d have thought.

Well, time to remedy that deficit.

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BOOT CAMP

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The week we went out of the barracks and into the forest camp.

+ It was nice getting out of the all too prison-like barracks and into the nature. Sleeping outside, staring at the the starry sky, listening to nature sounds was a very welcome change of environments.

- Night alerts. As in, wake up in the middle of night to gunfire, put all your gear on and run to your trench. Those kind of alerts. Repeat that several times every night and our lieutenant’s claim about getting 8 hours of sleep over 5 days and having noodles for brains no longer sounds like a joke…

+ The dumb joy of making gun go boom. We had quite a few excercises which involved lavishly firing off blanks, like one where 80 people were put on a line with 15 rounds per face and told to just fire them off in burst fire. Rat-at-at-rat.

- Being woken up at 2am by gunfire, sitting in a man-sized trench until 4am and then being given orders to fill up said trench (that you spent the whole previous day digging!) by 7am. Breakfast? What’s that?

+ Meals had a nice forest-camp feel to them. There’s a certain delight to sitting on a tree stump, lighting one’s ethanol burner and warming up a can of goulache that a diner meal simply cannot replicate.

- Hygiene. Or the lack of such. Of course I wasn’t expecting a shower or anything, but…theoretically, a bar of soap is all one should need to keep clean. In reality, that just didn’t happen as a tight schedule kept up a merciless the time pressure. And when you take a shit, eat your meal and smear camouflage on your face without getting to wash your hands, you tend to feel quite icky.

- All the gear, all the time. Weapon, flak jacket, backpack, the whole deal. Everywhere you went as a squad. That was to train us for the 50km hike we’d have to take a few weeks later. Okay, reasonable. What was not reasonable was that everyone had to have all their gear with them. Including those sick or injured. So everybody else got to carry their +30kg of stuff in addition to their own, despite everyone being untrained and inexperienced with the load of carrying full gear. By the end of the week we had two fresh injuries that would prove so severe that these men would be later dismissed from service as cripples. Yikes.

- The camp ran out of water. I have no idea how you look at 5 days with scorching heat and don’t think to yourself: “Y'know, we’ll probably need more water than we think.” But someway, somehow, somebody buggered up the water supply issue and on the last day the tanker providing our water ran empty. It was refilled within 3-4 hours, but seriously now…

+ I suppose it gave me plenty of new thoughts. That nice, I guess?