Tuesday: week 2, day 2
The morning started with an hour of sports; I would have loved to go running a little, but a) I forgot my shorts and the package with them hasn’t arrived yet and b) I wanted to work on the list, the document that would enable me to know where all my 88 people are.
Around 0830, I had to bring the people to a refresher about basic soldier skills. I brought them and went back to work on the list and some more paper stuff. Suddenly, I was called to the captain’s office where two captains from the battalion staff expected me. To tell me how awful it was of me not to be where the soldiers were, how could I leave the NCOs alone without an officer around and so on. That a platoon leader has to be around his platoon all day long.
- That wasn’t “my platoon”, it was the whole unit.
- Hmmm, what would I probably prefer… working on boring paper stuff all day long or being outside with the people?
When I told them that actually the battalion staff is asking very much paper work from us, one of the guys told me that “the day doesn’t end at 5pm for a platoon leader, you know”. Oh my god. Really?
They said something like “Geez, are you angry now? Well, unlucky for you that it’s you this time, we hear you’re actually a good guy blahblahblah” and then they asked how the course went overall. Well, since I was angry anyway I told them how lousy I thought everything was, and I thought you two guys can just go screw yourselves.
The afternoon consisted of a rapport (1 hour), an extra rapport about risks of tomorrows trainings (1 hour) and the battalion flag handover. The risks centered around extremely dangerous activities such as the head of the kitchen crew presenting the kitchen (“Does he handle hot stuff during the demo?”) and a medic NCO saying something about the medic team of the unit (“Do they show recovery of wounded soldiers? We should have medics around then in case something goes wrong.”)
The handover started with 30 minutes of counting people, ordering them according to height and lots of waiting (see picture). The handover was boring as always, and the parade was embarrassingly bad. Well, if you have music but you command the step not according to the beat, you have to live with people out of step starting with the first row. Not my problem.
After that, I cleaned my rifle and pistol (didn’t go shooting today, but two weeks ago), both pairs of boots and finished the list. And wrote this here.
