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[21 Mar 2009|12:12am] |
It is fucking cold outside, and it is difficult to live only sleeping in the back of your LAV between the RV and the attack position.
Furthermore, using Russian mechanized brigade level tactics as a template then renaming everything to sound more Arabic does not make training relevant to the current threat environment, it's actually just kind of a racist. A T-72 with a turban, I get it.
Finally, I may have missed Baked Maple Desert. 550 calories of amazing, wrapped in tinfoil, and irradiated with love.
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[03 Feb 2009|09:53pm] |
As much as I complain about the army, there are certain aspects of it that I've really come to love. There are definitely a lot of things that I would never get to do in any other job. Of course I'm talking about more than just the obvious. Being mechanized infantry, you get the best of a lot of worlds; we get to play with the vast majority of small and crew-served arms in the inventory, as well as work with big, fun, deadly vehicles. The only thing we really don't get to do is blow stuff up, I mean, in the proper, fancy, know what you are doing kind of way like the combat engineers - that and fire artillery, which isn't much of a loss, unless you're really into doing math, carrying heavy shells, and pulling lanyards.
Obviously if I was going to write a resume to go back to civvy street, it would be hard to transfer a lot of these skills over. Granted I'm a dedicated employee and a trained leader, but I doubt even the most aggressive capital firm is going to hire me to lead raids and ambushes against their corporate opponents, especially in this economy. Nor am I likely to get a security job anywhere that would allow me to deploy the number of machine gun emplacements and wire obstacles that I have become accustomed to.
But when I think about other jobs I could be doing, even without the serious perk of being around things that go bang, whiz, and boom on a daily basis, there are a lot of serious advantages to this. I have degrees in Human Rights and International Relations. I enjoyed them immensely; I wrote a lot of really long papers and got in a lot of heated arguments. I would say I am immensely qualified to run my own small island country. The odds of achieving that however, are quite low, which makes it rather difficult to put my degree into practice. Most of my fellow graduates have worked around this significant limitation by getting jobs in government, public advocacy, or remained in academia. And really, whatever you're into, good for you. But I never could see myself as a professional protester - oh, right, I mean, activist - or a paper pusher in some government department dreaming of the day I finally get a transfer to the job of my dreams. I also was not ready to go back to school for another degree, let alone a PhD, and I was sure as hell never going to teach.
The thing about most jobs is that you end up choosing between something cerebral or something physical. PhD student, or personal trainer. Policy Officer or construction worker. It's much harder to find something with a balance. Granted, I spend a lot of my time doing PT, at the gym, in the field, manoeuvring tactically, attacking, withdrawing, what have you - but it's rare that I'm not also planning, commanding, and communicating at the same time. Or sitting in a class, having knowledge jammed in my brain. Or sitting at a desk, applying that knowledge to a combat estimate.
And yeah, that's awesome. Since I got back to work after Christmas, I've been crawling around 17 ton armoured vehicles, tearing apart state of the art weapon systems, and fighting a virtual war inside the biggest video game controller ever. But at the same time I'm learning tons of new information - statistics, theories, drills, and being tested on my ability to apply them in practice. It's high speed and the learning curve is a bitch, and I end up filthy, exhausted, and brain dead every day, but at least I always feel like I've done something with the day.
The other thing about the army that I would definitely miss now that I've lived with it for so long is competition. Granted, there's a lot of competition in regular life, but I'm not really into fighting over girls, or trying to be the coolest cat at the bar, or write the best paper, or make the best argument, or wear the coolest clothes, or listen to the most obscure bands anymore. University was fun, but it's over, thank fuck. There's a thousand friendly competitions on the go in the army, and none of them are about being the best among your peers as they are about becoming as good as you can be.
How fast is your 5km? Your 10? How many pushups can you do, situps, chinups? How many times a day do you workout? How fast can you strip and assemble a C7? C9? C6? How fast can your crew assemble and mount a 25mm? How fast can you and your gunner engage and destroy a moving target? How fast can you do a combat estimate? A hasty attack? How heavy of a ruck can you carry? How light of a ruck can you live out of for a week? How much candy and morale food can you bring out for a week in the field? How little can you sleep in the field? How much in garrison? How many girls can you strike out with at the bar on the weekend? How many times can you covertly rub one out a week?
When you're competing with your friends, the people you love, it's never really about who's the best at anything. It seems like it is, and there's always going to be a little gloating, and a few sore losers, but we're too busy to have much of an attention span, and at the end of the day we're all taking a bite of the same shit sandwich.
It's really just hard to imagine going back, after living in an environment when you are pushed every single day to achieve the maximum of your potential in every single thing you do, to a world where so many people only do the minimum required to get by.
Or worse than that, after living in a world where everyone gives everything they have to support a team; people that they care for, rely on, and are accountable to, to go back to a world where so many treat the people in their lives as amusements, distractions, property, tools, or trash.
That's the thing about friendly competition. The intensity is real, but there's no glory to be won. We need each other, but we also need to be the best we can for each other, so we push each other, and we push ourselves.
If you're just competing to be the best, what are you going to do once you get there?
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[25 Jan 2009|02:20am] |
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( Year 3 )
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[12 Jan 2009|08:49pm] |
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I'm so smitten it's disgusting. Can I quit the army now and be a real person? That'd be great =(
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| Rumours of my Coup have been greatly exaggerated... |
[02 Dec 2008|08:19am] |
We don't get a lot of news out here in Shilo, Manitoba - especially since our best messenger penguin was run over by a drunken snowmobiler hunting for deer out on the 84mm anti-tank range.
So, when I finally fired up the ol' Facebook and started reading about the coup d'etat that threatened my beloved Canada - I have to say, I was kind of confused. I mean, sure, just in case I packed my rucksack, cleaned my rifle, and started gluing googley eyes to hand grenades, but I thought it was kind of weird that the whole base wasn't gearing up. I just figured that if there was going to be a sudden and decisive change of government illegally or by force, someone might have invited the Army.
For a second I thought, oh no, maybe it's just the Vandoos, the Royal Vingt-Douzieme, and that the French were finally taking over the country by force! But then I realized, it was Monday at noon, and there was no way they were at work yet.
Just to be sure, I called several of my friends in Ottawa, begging them to tell me - had the rebels reached Parliament yet? Was my beloved city in flames? Alas, no tragedy was unfolding in the crowded streets leading to Centre Block - though over at Foreign Affairs someone had forgotten to make coffee, and dozens were depressed.
So there I was, all geared up for civil disobedience, and not a single government being overthrown by a military faction. Shame on you Canada, for getting a bored soldier's hopes up!
To prevent future tragedies of this nature, I have compiled a quick and dirty guide to determining whether or not there is in fact a 'Coup d'Etat' violently overthrowing your nation. Though it is hardly definitive, it is my sincere hope that by following this simple mnemonic, misunderstandings of this nature can be avoided in the future.
Slogans - Has intelligent conversation been entirely replaced by pro or con slogans? This is a bad sign. Unless it's a Facebook status update of course, because that is an absolutely retarded way to express your political beliefs, and should instead be used only to inform people you are sad and/or your girlfriend, ex-girlfriend - listen, whatever, it's difficult, we were on a break - slept with another guy, but cleverly through a song lyric or whatever.
Heads - Are heads rolling down the street in a river of blood, betrayal, and corruption? No? Then it's a pretty weak coup without some violent purges. Typically Canadian!
Unconstitutional - SO, if you want to be a traditionalist, and by that I mean, use words in accordance with their established meaning as per the purpose of language - a coup has to be unconstitutional and thus illegal. If something is constitutional - like forming a coalition party that has more votes than the current government and taking over, then it's legal, and by definition, not a coup. Granted it may be an opportunistic power grab by a group that would be better off perfecting a clown car act, but that's just a shitty thing to do, not a coup. If you insist on calling it a coup, you're a sore loser, a whiner, or an idiot, but on the plus side, your clown car probably has way more people squeezed into it, so you're a winner after all!
Tanks/Teamsters- OK, so if there is a coup, this will just let you know who's doing the couping. If there are tanks - right wing. If there are teamsters - left wing. Side with the winning team as appropriate - remember; it's better to be wrong and alive than right and dead! If it's too close to call, say you work at a tank factory.
Uninformed- Does anyone have any idea what they are talking about - or are they just spouting random partisan bullshit and quoting comments on cbcnews.ca? More specifically, are people referring to what 'Canadians' do or do not want - totally ignoring that only 39% of the population voted for the current government, or 61% for the opposition, totally precluding any definitive claim to represent an inclusive 'Canadian' opinion? This likely suggests that there is not in fact a coup going on; as in a real coup, these individuals would either be up against the wall, or on the firing squad, depending of course on which side got more people to join their Facebook group. Either or.
Pathetic – Is the whole thing really kind of pathetic? Do you feel that nothing would change either way, and that you wish people cared as much about politics during an election as they do now that something seems kind of scary and different? Yeah, then it’s definitely not a coup; it’s just Canada politics, and it’s always this pathetic. Sad face.
So, the next time you hear someone talking about a coup, just remember, SHUT UP, and get on with your life!
/End shameless Facebook cross post
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[20 Apr 2008|11:26pm] |
It's the last week of course and I'm at a loss as to where the previous 10 weeks went. But that's how it always seems to go on course, you lose your entire life to it, and then you wake up on the other side with a bunch of stories and some new skills but no real appreciation of what just happened to that little sliver of your life. This course is no exception.
SO I threw hand grenades and I fired machine guns and I ran ranges and I lead patrols and I dug out and built a battle trench and lived in the stupid thing for 9 days taking turns sleeping in the covered protection with my fireteam partner and burned a hundred or so little tea lights for warmth and I taught classes and ran far too much and rucked a little too long and hurt myself in more places than I'm ever going to admit or seek medical attention for. And of course I was inspected and succeeded and failed and did pushups and marked time and all the other standard bullshit of courses. But I didn't care, and I never worried, and I started to feel comfortable in command and never be at a loss for what to do.
And now I'm hanging around avoiding sleeping, avoiding the start of the last week of courses. All courses wind down in the last week with administration, dotting the last Is and crossing the last Ts of paperwork, signing course reports, returning kit, etc. No one really cares anymore, the staff even less than the candidates, because for all intends and purposes its over. I've learned what I was required to learn, past all the tests, met the standards. Anything past this has no training value. They can punish us all they want, but no one cares and there's no training value. By now we've all perfected the art of shutting down. I can stand there or kneel there or mark time or do pushups till infinity, but I'm not really there. My enthusiasm for the army has waned dramatically since I began, and my anxiety has all but disappeared. I understand the rules of the game now, because for almost a year and a half now, the game has been my life.
But that's just what is distressing me now, when I should be enjoying what little opporunity I have to relax. Course ends on Friday, and we're graciously enjoying a week off before we start our next course. Recovery and recuperation are luxuries that we don't have time for, hell, we're too tough, this is the infantry, we're infantry officers, we're tough beyond physical constraints, we only know the job, we only stop when the mission is accomplished - and our mission, to become trained, useful, deployable members of the Canadian Forces, is far from achieved.
Well, fuck that. A year ago, I wanted nothing more than to learn my job and go overseas, and do my part for my country. Today? I want to have a fucking life, for once, I want a real life. Not a fantasy life measured out in 48 hour weekend leaves between 5 days of reality. No, I want the real thing. I want to wake up and go to work, not wake up there already. I want to go home at the end of the day, I want to live somewhere, have personal effects, cook for myself, hell, I want to come home to someone. I want to stop hurting people because I think I can be someone or something for them, that I can sustain the energy I can put into a weekend over a real relationship when there is no way I can. Or maybe I just don't want to wake up every morning staring into the plywood floor of the top bunk, or sleep in my PT gear, or eat anymore artifical scrambled eggs at the mess.
Or maybe I've just been a transient, untrained, useless junior officer for so long that I forget what it's like to have a place in the world, and definently, I just don't know who I am anymore. And I don't even need to know who I am. I just want to do my job, or I want out.
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[18 Mar 2008|10:17pm] |
Never before have I felt so far away from everything I ever had, everyone I ever knew, and anyone I ever was.
Going to Ottawa for Easter leave, almost wish I wasn't. I keep exploring new places to forgot the places I wish I really was, and the people I wish I was with. But it doesn't work.
At least I'm down to 5km in 21 minutes, there's always that.
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[23 Feb 2008|03:20am] |
Dear guy I couldn't punch in the face,
You had no idea how close you came to the end of your life tonight. You have no idea of the kind of aggression and hostility that builds up spending 12 hours a day getting kicked around by sergeants, spending every day training and preparing for combat. But more than that, you will never know what it's like to give up so much of your life to go and serve something because you want to make your country a better place, to pay a huge and constant price for that decision, and then to see someone who has done nothing but take from his country treat someone else with so little respect. And you will never understand what it's like to never see women, to almost never talk to women, to miss them and long to spend time with them and to treat them like a man does when he doesn't know when he will ever have that chance again, to watch some little punk piece of shit like you drag a girl out of the bar, not even letting her get her coat, into a cold winter night like a piece of property, a piece of meat, like some lost piece of your bullshit ego you have to collect and take home and abuse and mark and refuse to let go.
And it is thankful for you that the men who understand what this is like are well trained, and that they are motivated and truly dedicated to their careers, so that when they feel that anger swelling inside them, and when they begin to ball their hands into fists, and size up you, and and the area, and the entrances, and the exits, and prepare to destroy you, that they remember what their mission is, and that they can hear in their heads their sergeants voices'; their sergeants who know that this will happen and what they are capable of, reminding, no, ordering them to stand down, to let it pass, to let an injustice go for the sake of the big picture.
So go to sleep tonight, content with the brutality on your hands, the oppression of another person's soul, mind, and body; and be glad that you can sleep safely at night, because those who protect this country are forced to look to the threats from without and are forbidden to cut away at the cancers within.
But take this advice to heart: learn to appreciate what you have, or let it go, because a clever soldier can rationalize his actions, and play to his commander's compassion, as swiftly as he can assemble his rifle, and as perfectly as he polishes his shoes, and one day someone will take that slap on the wrist, those extra duties, that slight career delay, in exchange for your broken bones.
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[16 Feb 2008|01:20pm] |
So I spent last Valentine's day in a hole in the woods, and this year, I spent Valentine's day...in a hole in the woods!
So much for progress, heh.
Winter Warfare is over, despite the fact that I already did the course last year, I now officially have the qualification at least. It was interesting though, as interesting as dragging a 200lb sled, carrying an 80lb pack, and wearing snowshoes ever is.
At least...some new IMP rations are in the system!
Sheppard's Pie: not so good, but meaty, needs at least 4 ketchup packets, ask your buddies.
Zesty Turkey Stew: delicious, add 2-3 tobasco sauces, depending on personal preference.
Back to work!
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[02 Feb 2008|08:47pm] |
Squares, puffed-rice, camouflage, for consumption by humans
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