Last week, we visited the Dornier museum with work. Apart from stories and scale models from famous boat seaplanes like the Dornier Do X, my favourite was the experimental Dornier Do 31, of which only three were built (one was in the museum) and only the last of which had VTOL (vertical take-off and landing) capabilities. Not the one shown in the museum, but who cares. To see it fly one has to refer to old videos anyway, but pretty impressive for late sixties technology, I’d say!

Edit: More precisely, Do 31 was a series of three protoypes, of which only the last one had the final specifications. The one we saw had also VTOL capabilities, but was five tons lighter.

Friday: week 4, day 5, LAST DAY!

I got up with a so-so head and started packing. Just before the morning roll call, I went downstairs for a few bites and to start solving a few issues from yesterday:

• One of the trailers we had in Grolley was supposed to be returned in Bière.
• A little generator and some pieces of radio equipment were missing in Grolleyon Thursday, we wanted to take them with us this time.
• I had to get service booklets for all drivers, mechanics and radio specialists coming with me, plus their pay.
• I had to make sure all the cars, trucks and trailers were taken care of.

After calling back one guy who had left without his trailer, giving papers to people here and there and saying good bye to many, we were on the road – to the bakery, because our lunch sandwiches were there.

We still were among the first ones of our company to arrive. All we had to return today was 1 car, 3 jeeps, 2 small trucks, 8 big trucks and some trailers and containers. Around lunch time, we were almost done with all of them.

“Being done” means “waiting for the federal employees to come and give their blessing”. Of course we didn’t make it before lunch time and had to leave for another 90 minutes.

After lunch, we were done pretty fast. From 2 pm on, we were waiting, first for the traffic and transportation captain to give his okay, then for the army vehicle place to say okay, and finally for the okay from Bière. Which came around 3:30 pm, so now I’m in the train and will arrive in Zurich in about half an hour.

Negative point of today: before lunch, I was called by the staff sergeant and asked to send three of the drivers back to Bière. Apparently, nine of them had gone out in Lausanne the evening before (they weren’t allowed to, of course), ran into members of the battalion staff (because there’s only one place to go inLausanne, apparently) and behaved really stupid (i.e., almost got into a fight, as I heard). They now all face a trial, which is really annoying. I hope I won’t have to do any paperwork for this, as they’re all from my platoon.

Anyway, the service is over and I’m happy. Guess I’ll write something like an overall review in the next few days. It was fun keeping a daily journal, and I hope you, who read it from time to time, now have an idea what I’m doing when in the army.

The picture shows the soldiers waiting to go home :)

Thursday: week 4, day 4

Theoretically, the most interesting part of this day should be the “company evening”, some kind of party for the soldiers. I was all day long busy returning vehicles in Grolley, a place next to Payerne where I did my recruit school and 31 more weeks of service. Payerne is the F/A-18 main base of Switzerland, and we happened to see two about to start when we passed by (see picture). Looks like quite a nice job, fighter pilot. Still.

Returning the vehicles is always very stressful. Last year, we realised that a trailer was missing and we couldn’t find it for hours, while everybody had to stay. We wanted to lay the base for this not to happen again. Everything went quite smoothly, but the day is really hard work for me, as you’re constantly asked stuff, looking for people, getting phone calls and trying to do some paper work. The highlight of the day is over lunchtime, when the place closes down for 90 minutes and troops are kicked out. Very efficient.

We came back just in time for the company evening. After some problems with finding drivers for the vehicles to get us to the party location, we finally got there and enjoyed a short, but intense evening.

Company evening is also the evening where promotions among the soldiers (to private or private first class) are announced, as well as the first timers are christened. And the unit commander has to suffer a little.

Let’s just say that I hope that no film and/or photo material from the evening will surface, ever. (And our evenings aren’t even rough.)

I got to bed a little after midnight, ready for one last day of service.

Wednesday: week 4, day 3

Like yesterday, I slept until noon because I had stayed up most of the night. Can’t complain though, I ended up with quite some sleep. The exercise was more or less over for us, I had to go back to Bière, attend some rapports, then more rapports, and at 5 pm we had the exercise review with the brigadier general, brigade staff and the battalion commander.

The review of our unit was awful, the worst of all six involved. The guy who checked on us was quite obviously looking for the bad things, but who cares.

After the review, we returend the battalion flag. Like last year, only a handful of our unit could make it to the ceremony, and we were referred to as the “logistics platoon”. By the other company commanders. Jerks ;)

After the flag return, we had a last get together of all officers of the battalion, and later we returned for dinner and lots of setting up for tomorrow and Friday, because we’re returing all our material and vehicles.

A symbol of how well organised we are at the moment: the computer pictured is a $40’000.- piece of equipment, and nobody knew where it came from. Not until one of the radio guys said that they’ve unmounted it from their vehicle, because they thought it should be like that.

We also don’t really know where we have to return that stuff tomorrow… fun times guaranteed!

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.

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.

Weekend week 3

A rainbow dismissed us into our well deserved weekend. I didn’t sleep as much as last weekend and even managed to fit a short, but really nice bike ride into Sunday. And because my first triathlon takes place coming Sunday, I also went swimming, for the first time after two weeks.

Let’s just say: breast stroke it is for Sunday. Why kill myself with crawling and gaining 10 seconds on the first 50 metres, just to drown afterwards? I still want to learn front crawling, but it’s just not my time to shine until T1 yet ;)

Friday: week 3, day 5

After the morning roll call (I don’t really know the proper English military term, sorry), the battalion commander visited our unit for a little speech towards the soldiers. The infantry recruit school in the building next to ours had made national headlines, because somebody – most probably a soldier of our unit – sent a little movie of the promotion of the recruits to soldiers. To this end, they had to run around for about half an hour (not as in jogging, but as in sprint intervals, with boots), do countless push-ups, sing the national anthem, start all over with running and push-ups, singing, and so on.

Because this all took place directly in front of our building (about one week ago), we got premium seats to watch the whole show. I had to go inside to get a fewthigns done, just to miss the highlight of the “ceremony”: the recruits got their rank insignia, complete with a fist punch to the shoulder, and after that, six of them got whipped. The video is by now also online, check it out here.

The responsibles later said that it was all staged, including the video. That the whip was no iron chain, but just a piece of fabric. That it actually weren’t recruits, but officer candidates.

I haven’t seen all of it, but quite enough to say that this is complete and utter bullshit. All staged? Yeah right. By now, a second video has surfaced, showing the fist punching, so the “all staged” version is even less credible now.

Anyway, the battalion commander came to us to explain that he wanted to talk to the creator of the video, because sending something like that directly to the press is of course the wrong behaviour. In principle, taking pictures and videos is not allowed in the army, but it’s very common that people do it anyway. See this blog. The idea is to prevent the spread of media that would cast a damning light on the army, which I don’t think mine do.

Nobody stepped forward, but the battalion commander left his number and encouraged contacting him.

The rest of the day was not very eventful: the truck drivers drove around, I finished up some paperwork, and we prepared the big final exercise of next week. Not really, but we should have.

Towards the evening, our favourite recruit school set up another show for us: the daily cleaning of shoes and rifles was combined with walking across each othersstomachs, with boots and everything. Because the idiots now know that somebody of us made them look pretty bad nation-wide, they greeted us with their trademark shout, “Auf die Dauer – MINENPOWER!”, roughly “in the long run – mortar power!”, because they’re mortar soldiers. For the last shouts, the head shouter even turned around to us, so flattering! Friendly as we are, we gave a round of applause, but only earned a bird flipped at us. How rude.

Because we did some terribly good work, we were sent into the weekend on Friday evening already. Everybody was ready to go, only the captain was missing. He was busy with one last interrogation. Awesome timing, sir! After about 20 minutes, also this was over with, and we could leave.

One more week to go!

Thursday: week 3, day 4

I slept until almost noon (the exercise, remember?) – on the floor of the rapport room. Very uncomfy. But I got a few hours of sleep in.

The rest of the exercise was very uneventful for us: we delivered some ammo, ordered parts of our unit back because it was obvious that they should come back (even though the battalion forgot them) and around 5 pm called it a day.

After the, we had the exercise “GRILLIERO” – barbecue with the whole battalion, see picture. From where we were eating, you could even see Mont Blanc in France!

Later in the evening, we went out with a few officers and the two quarter master sergeants – one of the platoon leaders and one of the quarter master sergeants had their last day. It was going to be a short night!

GPOYW: I’m definitely going to sleep very very soon edition