I went out for my first exercise with Alvin just last week, wasn't supposed to be the one going but Aaron happened to sprain his ankle quite badly so I replaced him instead. We went into it blind, having been "briefed" that it would be a simple one day affair, no need to draw weapons, forceprep our fieldpacks or anything like that; apparently we just needed to be there with our L2, chopchop go out, come back and that was it. We had no rations, didn't know the order of move, signal set frequency etc, totally unprepared. Things gradually worked out, though, as I managed to link up with our temporary PC, but it was kinda nightmarish, as we drove along with the convoy, or stoned in the tank when we halted, often for long stretches of time, watching night inexorably fall, and with it all hope of returning to camp that night completely extinguished.
What followed were a couple of firsts. Our first proper night launch, where as V.Comm I had to do a proper bridge site recce along with the PC and a security party, examining the far bank with his NVD, eventually picking a spot that turned out to be quite inappropriate...and my first time guiding vehicles across the bridge at night, from 9/10 all the way till 12 midnight. It's freaking stressful and tiring as well, I pretty much lost count of how many vehicles I guided over that night, straining to see in the darkness, where I could only make out faint silhouettes, making it completely impossible to align them properly to the bridge. Being blinded by the BO lights, the torchlights of the supervisors on the near bank and the occasional flashes from the retard who kept on taking pictures didn't help much either. Must have been a pretty perilous experience for the drivers haha.. There was some mixup in instructions after that was done, and I kept on having to guide my L2 from the side where we were parked into a position to retrieve the bridge, only to be instructed to guide it back again. Parallel parking ftw. I was chastised by some Captain after that for my choice of launch site, then finally got to retrieve the bridge after 4 hours of waiting, after which we rejoined the convoy to Charlie Mike.
Blah blah blah, I just realized that maybe I shouldn't be posting so much about it, suffice to say we drove around, halted for long stretches of time, had to constantly monitor our fuel gauge, which was dropping to dangerous levels; we were in constant fear that we wouldn't be able to make it back to camp if the exercise carried on any longer, as it threatened to do so when we went into hasty deployment at some large clearing. I was freaking starving by then, had conked out idk how many times in the tank during the many halts while waiting for the next instruction. At that point we were miserably contemplating having to perform our camouflage drill - just the two of us - in pitch darkness in the middle of the night. Luckily however, when the OC gathered everyone for a briefing, he basically said that they were just screwing with us, and that we'd be returning to camp that night.
So, it was a tiring, but also a positive experience I guess, in showing how our MEC fits in military exercises, and I also got to see how our military operates on the ground. Although the organisation itself is ponderous in nature, with so many inefficiencies so glaringly visible, it's also obvious that our soldiers aren't just for show. Our commanders have a pretty decent situational appraisal ability, and the men are competent in carrying out their instructions as well. It was pretty cool to listen in on their signal transmissions as well, hearing the signallers and commanders use militaryspeak, what punch through Malcom axis, link up idk what, concentrate forces along somewhere XD
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