Part 2

To continue on the last post, after dinner the night navigation section of the exercise began. By this point, a rugby injury to my knee I had sustained had began to act up, conveniently when we had to march 5 kilometres to the next training area for the night exercise. As twilight set in, I gritted my teeth against the pain and made it to the final event for the day. We began to navigate to our points in the pitch dark through farmers fields, looking for everything from dead trees to hay bails. For me who navigated early in the rotation, this exercise consisted of me trailing at the rear, consistently stopping, taking a knee, and keeping an eye out for "threats" through the scope of my weapon. This lasted for hours as the head navigator attempted to locate a black sign in the dark, one of our last points. Craving water and sleep, we pressed on looking for this sign in the dark of the night. To our joy at around 1 am we saw our pickup on the way. We had done enough to reach the forces standard for navigation, now we were headed back to base for the most joyous moment that can be experienced by a soldier. Sleep.

Training Excercise

If I were to recall one of the most vivid memories I have so far experienced from my training, it would be my second field exercise in the woods at the Connaught Range training area. We arrived on the weekend our rucksacks filled with what we would need to survive the next two days in the woods. After being bussed out to the training area in the pitch dark around 11pm we were told to "go to ground" we set up our shelters and slept. We awoke around 5:30 am, received breakfast and began to march 3 kilometers to the training area where we would start our navigation exercise. In the forest, it became our mission to navigate ourselves using a compass and map to 12 different locations during the day and 12 at night. We patrolled through the forest, sometimes encountering knee deep swamps that spanned for hundreds of meters. 3 hours into the exercise, we ran out of water with 7 points remaining to be found. Under the heat and weight of our vest and weapons we trudged on. Dehydration began to inch closer as we did to finding out final points. After our last point was found, we speed marched 2 kilometers to the area where there was dinner. After 7 hours of patrolling we finally got to drink water. Water had never tasted so good in my life.

Closure

My year is essentially done now, nothing big to look forward to as my time in the Armed Forces is taking me away for the summer. It is heart wrenching in a way, to not have a final goodbye with all my faithful friends that I have enjoyed the company of for the past 4 years. Many I will never see again and this in itself makes me sad. I know the ones I have been closest with will keep in touch I have no doubt, but the people im friends with that I do not see out of school I fear I will lose touch with. In the end that is all that matters though. But I will miss all my friends dearly.

Summatives

How can one project summarize all the knowledge you have been privileged to receive in a semester? Over the course of a semester we just learn so much and there is such a significant amount of material covered. To fit such an impressive amount of work into one summarizing assignment cannot be done as the amount of material covered cannot be justified in merely one project. I am not saying there should be more summatives, but I feel they should not be as heavily weighted as they are, because they do not get the results they are aiming for. Just a thought.