Thursday: week 2, day 4

I got up early to do the recon work together with the motorcyclists. They’re three and really convenient to work with. If only all soldiers had their attitude.

I had to do drawings of the deployment of the whole unit with four platoons, down to the level of a single vehicle. Of how to set up protection, defined paths for leaving our positions, configuration in case of enemy contact, how to secure placement of the vehicles. Four places to refuel the whole battalion at once.

Our captain used to be intelligence officer in the battalion staff, so this kind of drawings is totally his thing. Spoiler: we actually needed about 5% of the information and my work could have been done in half an hour. Hooray.

Also, I delivered half an hour too late. I couldn’t have cared less after the captain told me in a manner that tends to drive everybody here around mad.

The rest of the morning I spent with additions to the drawings, corrections and more unnecessary perfectionisms.

In the afternoon, I had a rapport concerning material and vehicle return in two weeks. The first half hour was only about material, so I dozed off a little. The vehicle part was of more interest to me, but the guy who presented really didn’t make any sense, created lots of confusion by contradicting himself constantly and was generally annoying. The take away message from 90 minutes blah blah was: “Wait until you get the written order Monday evening.”

After that, I gave some instruction material to the transportation NCOs of the other units, before our unit rapport started at 4:45 pm.

In the evening, we were supposed to go out to have dinner. The rapport lasted for a bit more than two hours, so we took a break to dismiss the soldiers. After the break, we continued. Our captain understands to create an atmosphere of tension and general bad feelings like no one else, my heart rate must be at 160 constantly just from sitting there.

Afterwards it took more than two hours to do the setup of Friday’s exercise – down to the detail level of vehicle numbers and radios for the platoons. The former deputy commander of the battalion joined us and helped clarify some things that weren’t clear from the orders issued.

Anyway, it was 9 pm and the platoon leaders were still swamped with things to get done, all paperwork. Some deadlines naturally passed because of the ultra long rapports, and when our captain had to leave with the former deputy commander, we put requests for moving some deadlines to the next day in his box, put on the dress uniform and went to dinner. The first time this service, nota bene: it’s not possible to finish a day’s work before midnight with all the paperwork the captain asks from us. Which doesn’t stop him from complaining about all the paper he gets from us.

When we got back around 0:30 am, the battalion commander expected us. Wanted to know if all the soldiers were around; the officer responsible for the day hadn’t been around when the soldiers had returned, so he didn’t know. We woke up the deputy staff sergeant, but he had been asleep then already so didn’t know either. The staff sergeant was on personal leave, so the battalion commander told us to check all the rooms. Turns out we knew where everybody was. And it was after 1:30 am again.