tristane

I find it hard to write nowadays. It is as if the words have all run out. This education takes the best of us. We sleep, we eat, we do push-ups, we learn first aid in battle, we run, we eat, we clean, we excercise, we thrown ourselves in the muddy snow and yell "Cover!", we eat, we pick our weapons to pieces and put them back again, and again, and again, we polish our shoes and we sleep. Lather, rinse and repeat.

Wednesday was the worst day by far. We thought last week was terrible, with those seventeen hour days and crammed schedules. Last week was nothing compared to this week. Nothing.
We were woken up at six and did our usual morning chores. For the first part of the day we were to do the KompI test, to see if we had all understood the reglements and rules for the regement. (Incidentally, as we would find out later, none of us passed the 40 question set of "mark the correct answer"-questionaire. The Lieutenant was rather upset as he asked us if his pedagogical lecture the previous day, with all the important facts nicely marked in red, had been to hard to study by. None of us dared to point out the fact that from the moment he let us go we had been busy until ten-fifteen in the evening, with the test at eigth-fifteen the next morning.)
After the test and a quick lecture from one of the sports teachers and the usual morning visitation we were ordered to take our battle vests and our weapons and headed to a field nearby where we were to practice battle positioning.
Battle positioning would, as we thought, be a rough guide on how to take cover and move in the quickest possible fashion from one place to the next without being noticed. It turned out to be a crash course - litterally - on how to throw yourself to the ground in very painful ways and crawl yourself up only to do it again. To this should also be added that the equipment we carry (kevlar vests, uniforms, battle vests, water bottles plus AK-5C) altogether weighs around fifteen kilos. If you still think this doesn't sound that bad, consider the fact that this is Sweden in the wintertime. We have ice. Ice and mud does not go well with knees, or elbows. Trust me.

When we had walked in a circle in the woods for an hour, throwing ourselves on the ground right and left, trying not to get too much crap into the AK-5's mechanisms, we continued by crawling back and fourth over a field nearby in all possible manners, each of them even more painful than the other. Sneaking, crawling, sliding, pulling ourselves over the ground towards the other side of the field that seemed to only come marginally closed with each desperate thrust.
For seven hours we were tourtured out in the cold. Nose running, throat aching, fingers numb by cold. Knees shattered, elbows crushed, eyes seconds from crying. When we finally staggered in to the regement again we were so tired we literally fell into bed.

The next day was longer, but not as bad. After the morning visitation and chores we were told to get our battle bags and pack with everything listed. After that we got our fifteen kilo battle gear and threw the bags on our backs (probably somewhere down the lines of an additional six kilos) and headed past the Field of Pain and down to the shooting range. We spent all morning and afternoon practicing the battle positions while acctually shooting. It was cold and a lot of wait, but shooting was fun and when the sun came out it turned out to be a quite pleasant day. Cold, yet with the appealing tingle of the sun against your skin. It was the very first tendency to spring.

Even though it was quite fun we were completely exhausted when we returned to the hallway afterwards for cleaning of our weapons. It took us slighly longer than an hour before all the pieces were ready for visitations. After the deadline was passed, Captain C. came down to the room all sweaty and flushed. Apparetly he had used the time to go to the gym, and had headed directly to us afterwards. He looked at us and said;
"Well, there are two ways you can do this. Either the officer will go from weapon to weapon and check all pieces before he moves on to the next..." He paused and looked down at his wrist watch. "Or he can just call out the part he wants to see and you can all hold it up and let him have a look at it. If you want to save some time, you do the latter way."
At his command we held up the part he asked for, and he started to go down the line, grunting to each piece he was handed. After having come about halfways and given home work to some three or four people he added,
"Of course it might be a little bit easier to pass the inspection of the officer in question has a cold beer waiting in the fridge..."
A couple of minutes later he was finished and sternly told us to work on that next time, and then had us lock up our weapons and sent us off for the night. It was not even eight o'clock. All the unexpected spare time made our circuits short cut and in lack of better things to do we all went to bed at half past nine.

(Suck on that for a moment. Eight people in their early twenties willingly going to bed at nine-thirty. In what other place in the world does that happen?)

This has been our life the past week. It will continue to be our life for the upcoming thirteen weeks. I have already lost aproximately two and a half kilos. My next bed neighbour has lost six since we started, but he was pretty big. We work, we eat and we sleep. There is no other world than that. Work, eat, sleep. We have no time for thinking, no time for reflections. No time at all.
This is probably why it is so hard to write nowadays. We are to busy running to ponder about our existance. The only reason we are sure we have one is the cuts, bruices and constant muscle ache.