Tuesday: week 3, day 2

The day was full of short periods of not so much to do: all the soldiers were at work and I fought my little paper battles. In the morning, I drove a truck to a shooting range; I haven’t been driving truck for a while now and I hope the people on the bridge weren’t hurt too much. It was a short drive, I should add. At the range, we did some machine gun shooting with the howitzer 12.7 mm machine guns. I’ve never shot anything bigger than my assault rifle until now, so that was pretty impressive.

The afternoon was for me mainly about the little march for which I’ve done some recon work. We managed to assemble 50 people to walk; we’re actually not interested in bringing the ones that really don’t want, because why should we drag along some whino who just annoys everybody. Our captain didn’t make it to the start of the march as he was still with the battalion staff.

We were lucky with the weather, and the landscape in the region here is absolutely beautiful. We were a bit earlier than anticipated at the place where we’d planned dinner and dinner was a bit late, so we had to wait there, with a few not so happy people who would have preferred to continue walking. During dinner, we were joined by the captain (who was actually co-responsible for delaying the dinner) and the two staff guys from Friday who wanted to check on how we’re doing. I have to say that our captain really makes an effort to improve relations to the platoon leaders.

After the march, we had a talk with the soldiers, mainly about the same things as always: they do good work but expose poor behaviour in terms of how they wear their uniform, plus the last two nights there was trouble around “bed time”, i.e., we didn’t know whether everybody was around or not. Today, everything worked fine (except one guy who thought he could just leave us for football training) and I think people try to improve on things.

As do we, we invited the captain for our bed time beer. We’re so kind.