Tuesday: week 4, day 2

It’s past midnight again and I’m sitting through my shift in the civil protection shelter for the second night in a row. After writing this, I’ll make a tour of the outdoor guard posts and try to upload to tumblr – quite difficult with my network coverage here around.

Today started with me sleeping until noon, because I stayed awake all night. My breakfast was lunch, and after that we tried to fix the radio connection problems from yesterday. Without success, by the way.

Around 3 pm or so, we got a visit from a member of the brigade staff: a lieutenant colonel who happened to be my unit commander when I did my first repetition course in 2002. Funny to see him again. He told me to update a few things on the “leadership board”, among other a little drawing of our area set-up.

I went outside to start drawing; when I had reached the place where we’ve put our trucks, about 250 metres from the shelter, I got a call from the lieutenant who was still there, that they had about twelve “OPFOR civilians” there: soldiers in civil clothes who acted as the opposing force. Directly after the call, I saw how the two guards next to the trucks were kidnapped by more “civilians”. Strangely enough, they more or less ignored me, so I went back to the shelter.

The civilians were sitting in front of the entrance, blocking the gap in the barbwire. I went inside, and after a few minutes, their leader approached me with three demands: he wanted to have the truck keys within five minutes, connection to the battalion commander within ten minutes and within some hours that all the military would leave the area. Otherwise he’d kill the two hostages and blow up the vehicles.

Since I didn’t even have connection to the battalion myself (the radio problem, remember?), I had to call my captain with a cell phone. He happened to be near us but told me to ask for some more time. The “terrorists” returned, about 20 by now, and armed. Another leader repeated the demands and I told him again that we have to wait for the captain. The latter appeared after some time and was taken hostage, too. We handed out the keys and were ordered to disappear except two people who could stay outside.

Here, the lieutenant colonel halted the exercise and said that we now stay inside, the “terrorists” leave and we just wait how long it’d take the battalion to react. After some time, the situation was handled, the battalion would have asked the civil police to send special forces. In this type of operation, the armed forces are subordinated to the police.

Anyway, I was mainly annoyed at how it was impossible to react well. Apart from not being trained at all in these matters, our rules of engagement and non-existent equipment made the whole thing into a farce. Not to imagine how stressful it would be for a military (active reserve) leader to decide about people’s lives when put under such pressure.

In the evening, I had to do some recon work for tomorrow, which we hopefully won’t need, because the exercise ends tomorrow and changing place with this many people is just not much fun.

The picture shows one of the “hostages” after liberation, a bit sleepy, on the roof of a truck. Weather was okay today, by the way.