Friday: week 1, day 5

Friday was another quite busy day: with a few transport NCOs from the other units, we drove at 6am to Grolley, the place where the logistics base of the armed forces has its nearest vehicle center. The artillery units had their drivers start their service on that day, so unit 1 to 4 received their vehicles, and I was responsible for the “repetitorium”, a small practical refresher so people get used to driving army vehicles again.

The picture shows the train with the nine recon vehicles for the battalion. They just arrived when I was setting up the little course, see the little cone to the left.

I even got a list of the vehicles our unit is supposed to get on Monday - something we didn’t have until now, but wanted to have so we would know how many people we needed on Monday to move all our vehicles.

I arrived back in Bière just in time for lunch. After lunch, I discussed the Monday with my transportation sergeant, what people we needed where, when we had to leave and so on. Interesting detail: our commander ordered the people starting their service on Monday to be in Grolley at 8.30am. The logistics order of the battalion says that vehicle reception starts at 10am. If I followed that order, people would start their service with 1.5 hours of waiting. Our unit commander says, when asked about things like that, that “he was aware of differences between his orders and battalion orders”, and decided to “accept them”.

But telling us? No, no, no need for that… we would find out sooner or later, it seems.

Anyway, at 3pm on Friday, we had a last coordination rapport for Monday, and it looks like it’s organised now. I wonder what will go wrong.

We were then supposed to leave for the weekend at 5pm, people assembled outside at 4.30pm. The soldiers were supposed to put the breechblocks of their rifles into boxes; the captain told me to check if they were all there. That was close to impossible to check, since until now we haven’t received lists of how many people should be around; I don’t know who exactly has a rifle and who hasn’t, which officers have brought their pistol and their rifle, and so on. We just decided that it was okay and started to put the boxes away ;)

The captain then wanted to see the authorisation of the people who took their rifle home (they had to shoot the annual compulsory program). Of course he knew that only one of them had one, because he signs them personally. The others then had to write an application for an authorisation, and because of that it got really close for many people to catch their train, I don’t know if they did it. In any case, they certainly love our captain even more now.

And then weekend!