Today, we started with the big final exercise for this year’s course, lasting until Wednesday. It’s called “PARABEL” (parabola) and of the operation type “area security” (Raumsicherung), as opposed to defence type operations, i.e., it’s not a classical war scenario with a symmetric opponent, but an “asymmetric opponent”, a “threat below war threshold”. This means usually boring guard shifts for us.

The morning was full of preparations, getting equipment, assigning people to different platoons and so on, and around 1 pm we were ready. A little later, we left for our assigned location. Difficulties we met underway:

The route we chose crossed a 3.5 tons weight limit, and we brought a truck with trailer of about 26 tons overall. He had to find a slightly different path then.

Once we were settled in the new spot, we realised that we had no radio connection to the base whatsoever, because we were behind quite a hill. We had to send the radio vehicle so far away that now we’re having a motorcyclist in both places to convey important messages.

It’s raining and very cold. I don’t even want to start to think about the pool water of next Sunday’s triathlon.

In the meantime, the battalion communications officers passed by and told me a few secrets about the networks they’ve set up so tomorrow we can bring the vehicle back and stop torturing the motorcycle boys.

Anyway, it’s a pretty boring night in the shelter here and my highlight is going to be just now when I’m about to leave and try to find a decent mobile signal to upload this here.

The pictures show some of the vehicles we have in the exercise, see separate captions.