the ego has landed, part 1

this has been the most busy week for me in BLOC... but hey.. it HAS been fulfilling, somewhat like those weeks in OCS where I came home weary yet prideful with the knowledge that i fought a hard battle and learnt much from it... =)

I'm talking about the finale exercise for my BLOC course...

guess my appointment?

S4.

-_-

which was honestly pretty turn-offing at first because I was already pretty tired of all the planning involved with the many exercises that were thrown at us the previous week, and was yearning for some long deserved break... but yeah, I was thrown this shitty burden whilst others were given stuff like Provost PC (yeah you know who) and DyS4 (which just REEKS slack)...

but aniwez, I accepted it with a game face (haha!) and well, soon realised one thing...

It is a DARN TOUGH JOB being an S4.

Honestly, the various elements you had to consider, the amount of connections you had to liase with and the people you had to deal with all made for one hell of a tough 3 days...

First was the planning, where we basically had to regurgitate what we learnt in Log AOS exam... (which i scored pretty well, just not as disgustingly high as Mike Rod, who scored a inhuman score of 92.5... HOW CAN ONE SCORE SO FREAKING HIGH for a written paper!? )

But as me and the rest of the S4s were to realise as the night dragged on, things WEREN'T SO SIMPLE... for one, each of us had to handle two attacks, whilst I was saddled with an additional armour elements, had to detach one company for frontal assault, and had to plan for river crossing...

and well, planning is one thing... cos it is darn simple to say "A Coy will be trooplifted from Position X to Position Y", just like previous exercises...

but well, this time ops what, so everything becomes REAL.. and so the convoy movement has to be planned, the trooplift timing has to be calculated, the liaise with the transport side at the Bde had to be done, and the return of the transport elements had to be considered as well...

all for a simple movement from one point to another...

and mind you, this does not include the surprise enemy ambushes, civillian problems, and all the injects those seemingly-friendly instructors threw at us... but that's during the real execution, so i innocently did not factor them in...

so i went about carefully finshing my charts and calculation plans and was pretty proud of myself for finishing first at 0130 odd and was even flaunting around to the other S4s... hee hee... then proceeded to sleep, with my verneer of confidence still intact...

but WELL.. the next day was a completely different issue... for the first time since becoming an officer, I was blasted at by my instructor (coupled with a few other misnomers who butted in and gave their irritating comments as well) for like half an hour over ONE STUPID MISTAKE THAT MY SURBORDINATE made..

-_-... just because I placed the certain not-very-important elements to cross first in the river crossing schedule, the bloody instructor caught on to that and blasted on about priority of crossing, and how there is no point in placing them, and why I didn't place armour first to project in, and why this and that...

and all the while i tried to stop the onslaught by trying as discreetly as possible to cover the crossing schedule chart and say I would change it.. by the idiot sais "No wait.. I haven't turned you all blue and black yet"... and proceeded on and on about the same mistake

gee whiz... how nice... so I stood there and faced the machine guns, with my verneer of confidence slowly being ripped apart...

when he FINALLY finished, I was pretty white faced and proceeded to change my chart with a pretty stunned face...

that was when Mike came to tell my how badly he was blasted for drawing his overlay quite hap-hazardly and how he was screamed at with a "Even my 3 year old son can do a better overlay than that!"

....

i never knew these old fogeys here at SOL had so much anger in them -_-

but well.. this was just the start of all problems... tell ya abt it later..

frANk