Friday: week 3, day 5

After the morning roll call (I don’t really know the proper English military term, sorry), the battalion commander visited our unit for a little speech towards the soldiers. The infantry recruit school in the building next to ours had made national headlines, because somebody – most probably a soldier of our unit – sent a little movie of the promotion of the recruits to soldiers. To this end, they had to run around for about half an hour (not as in jogging, but as in sprint intervals, with boots), do countless push-ups, sing the national anthem, start all over with running and push-ups, singing, and so on.

Because this all took place directly in front of our building (about one week ago), we got premium seats to watch the whole show. I had to go inside to get a fewthigns done, just to miss the highlight of the “ceremony”: the recruits got their rank insignia, complete with a fist punch to the shoulder, and after that, six of them got whipped. The video is by now also online, check it out here.

The responsibles later said that it was all staged, including the video. That the whip was no iron chain, but just a piece of fabric. That it actually weren’t recruits, but officer candidates.

I haven’t seen all of it, but quite enough to say that this is complete and utter bullshit. All staged? Yeah right. By now, a second video has surfaced, showing the fist punching, so the “all staged” version is even less credible now.

Anyway, the battalion commander came to us to explain that he wanted to talk to the creator of the video, because sending something like that directly to the press is of course the wrong behaviour. In principle, taking pictures and videos is not allowed in the army, but it’s very common that people do it anyway. See this blog. The idea is to prevent the spread of media that would cast a damning light on the army, which I don’t think mine do.

Nobody stepped forward, but the battalion commander left his number and encouraged contacting him.

The rest of the day was not very eventful: the truck drivers drove around, I finished up some paperwork, and we prepared the big final exercise of next week. Not really, but we should have.

Towards the evening, our favourite recruit school set up another show for us: the daily cleaning of shoes and rifles was combined with walking across each othersstomachs, with boots and everything. Because the idiots now know that somebody of us made them look pretty bad nation-wide, they greeted us with their trademark shout, “Auf die Dauer – MINENPOWER!”, roughly “in the long run – mortar power!”, because they’re mortar soldiers. For the last shouts, the head shouter even turned around to us, so flattering! Friendly as we are, we gave a round of applause, but only earned a bird flipped at us. How rude.

Because we did some terribly good work, we were sent into the weekend on Friday evening already. Everybody was ready to go, only the captain was missing. He was busy with one last interrogation. Awesome timing, sir! After about 20 minutes, also this was over with, and we could leave.

One more week to go!