Proud Infidel ranting about the ongoing war against democratic and secular values (Don't fool yourselves)! Maybe a voice of sanity in a wide ocean of madness.

20070408

When I was a boy- part three- Redux

When I did my obligatory military service in the Arctic Rangers, we very seldom slept in our baracks over at the regiment. 90% of the time we were out in the fields (that meaning the arctic tundra of Sweden). There we bunked in heavy canavas tents with a wooden heated stove to keap us from freezing to death. I know, in this day and age, burning wood in a stove is not the smartest thing to do; but this was a while ago after all.

The eight- man patrol tents we were issued with managed to keep us from freezing to death in the arctic temperatures, ranging down to -54 centigrades, but had a serious shortcoming. They were designed for people with a lenght under 170 cm. Me being 186 cm in lenght had to lay in "fosterposition" to fit in there, and even doing so I burned up thre sleepingbags against the red hot stove during my service.

When doing fieltrips back then, food was hard currency. You never could get enough calories to burn against the harsh wether conditions. And because our backpacks allready weighed in at up to 70 kilos (with radios and extra ack´s), a can of food was more valuable than even tobacco or the latest issue of Playboy. The only thing more valuable than food was sleeptime.

After being out on an 21 day long excercice I had traded a lot of sleeptime against food rations. This in an outfit that aimes at giving it´s soldiers three hours of sleep for every 24 hours! The lack of sleep- but more importantly- the constant dehydration you are being under, after a day or so get´s you to what we call "field coma".

After 21 days of sleepdepravation and to little fluid to drink; I was- well kind of beaten up, so to speak.

Anyway, we got back to the regiment (the base). Did the maintenace of all our equipment, and around 11:30 PM was ready to hit the bunks.

For some reason our platoon commander (I do not remember what it was) ordered a full locker inspection at that time (yeah- he was a sadistic a-hole). A full locker inspection means that everyone has to bring out all their gear out in to the corridore, place it in exact order on the floor and damn you if something was not folded or placed to millimeter preciseness.

Then you have to put all the stuff back in the lockers with millimeter precision again for the morning inspection. Needless to say- this was not... something we wanted to do there and then.

I started to think over the exact orders we had been given. He had shouted to us that he wanted "TO SEE ALL OF OUR LOCKERS OUT IN THE CORRIDORE IN FIVE MINUTES!"

Hmm, I thought. Why not then. So I made an arragenment with my mates; and the whole platoon dragged out their lockers out in to the corridore and then waited for inspection.

When the PC finally made his entry through the swinging doors, he took a step in and then froze almost in the position of a pointig dog. We were all standing in attention, expressionless faces, staring straight ahead.

Ten seconds went by. Then the PC turned on his heels and went out. Even through two closed doors we could here the hysterical laughter from his office. We had to send our platoon sergeant out to se if we were to be released for the night. When he returned, he told us that he had found our PC laying under his desk giggeling. Five minutes later I was firmly asleep.

Good night everybody. Sleep well!

1 Comments:

Blogger Highest Infidelity said...

Excellent post. I copied and linked to it.

You need to index these so we can see all the posts that relate to your time in the Swedish Army.

Keep up the good work.

Monday 9 April 2007 at 00:19:00 CEST

 

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