The High Guard

Me with some of my comrades debriefing with the General after doing the Royal High Guard (guarding the castle of Stockholm) in 2005.

(More later on)

When doing the high guard, you start off at the Army Museum in Stockholm; marching through the streets accopmanied by an army brass band.

The march towards the royal castle goes through some of the heaviest trafficed roads in the city. Well there, you are up for a couple of nights with almost no sleeptime. But the royal cooks make some pretty deascent grub atleast.

Standing guard in the midst of Stockholm over a weekend can be said to be... interresting at the least. Civilians do not know that we are armed hot with live ammunition, and with the legal right to actually shoot any perps advancing on our positions.

My guard stand was "Logården" Logården being situated right in front the streem adjacenting the castle. It was also one of the heaviest trafficed streets bearing along the nightcrawlers, coming from the pubs and nightclubs just over the stream.

Anyway, at about three a clock am. A pair- a guy and a girl- came strolling by our guardpost. There are some stairs leading up to the garden; who are barred off by ropes, and it was my job to see that nobody got through. The pair started to walk up the stairs, and I walked down to meet up with them.

The pair were- well, sort of under the influence- so to speak- and started chatting away with me. They asked where I was from, what unit I belonged to- and all the other usual questions you get when being formal. The guy- I noticed- was looking really hard at my rifle, and after a while popped the question. "What´s that thing on your rifle?" I understood that he meant the optic sight, and said to him "It´s an Aimpoint red dot sight!" "What does it do?" he asked. I turned up the brightness to maximum, in the darkness of the night it was allmost like a flashlight.

He took a hard long look at my rifle, then took a step down the stairs and said: "Honey! We better not make any fuzz with these guys. They got lasers!"

That´s it for now. Have a nice one everybody.