the ego has landed, part 2

so the execution starts in a few hours after my dressing-down session... and boy was i discouraged and a little frightened by the enormity of the situation...

now if you had read Guang Yi's blog, you'd have gotten a glimpse of how this war-gaming system works... but well.. he was just a small controller of the game (sorry to him if he feels offended by that =)) akin to like the DyS4, who moves several elements of the battalion (like DyS4 land rover) to different places on the computer-map...

and really, as a controller, it IS pretty easy... u sit there, u wait for orders from your S4 or C0, you move the troops accordingly, and you wait for other effects or instructions... and if any problem, you feign ignorance and blame your S4..

-_-

but as an S4 in the war-gaming, it is TERRIFYING... the first hour when the game started, I was nervously prancing around, not knowing what would happen and even though the game was running in real time mode, it just felt so FAST, so rushed, like swiftly spiralling down into disaster...

and when I heard my troops getting ambushed whilst on movement, I just stun for a moment, and didn't know how to react, my verneer of confidence completely falling apart... it was then i realised how ill-suited I was in reacting to scenarios and commanding troops...

it is one thing to KNOW stuff and like have book-smarts, but it is really another to make critical decisions within a short time and to really practice what you learnt...

in the first hour I was sweating it out, not knowing what decisions to make as the attrition rate of my forces grew and just panicking... and then I was completely blur on how to go about writing a real chart and so on... (the irony being that I presented those topics)

so yeah, the ego has landed... HARD

thankfully.., I was only S4 and whilst i stunned, the CO took command, albeit quite unsure of what to do as well, as went about trying to grasp the situations...

but wow.. what a mess of mistakes and mishaps that occured...

1. one controller sent some support troops first straightaway into the river crossing point, in front of all the fighting troops, and kena bombardment .. 8 medics, 2 MO died and both ambulances are wiped out.. -_-

2. I went according to my time charts and sent the resupply trains out waaay too early, resulting in them waiting at the staging area... (and this earnt me a second scolding, this time by a seemingly-friendly indian old fart whom just completly changed his tune when the exercise started... he ranted on and on about how I didn't have control over my elements and that the monitoring and command over the troops was terrible)

3. the boats that were supposed to come didn't come, and my troops were stranded at one side of the river until the rafts came...

4. because of the delay of the boats and the delay of the projection of my troops across, my other forces, which were across the river in enemy territory, was being hammered HARD from 4 fronts...by the time we reached them, a company had been decimated to a section... oops!

so as you can see, I was in pretty deep shit within a few hours, and was like a lunatic run around, getting pelted by scoldings and the various calls from my various controllers, and struggling to exert command and shout instructions to them... jia-lat man...

finally, i decided really, ENOUGH was ENOUGH, and when we were given a succesive dressing down by the indian fella, I went about a massive upgrading at the monitoring, placing charts after charts monitoring the various locations of the CSS elements, and just listing the critical tasks TO BE DONE and doing them...

i also realised I could no longer rely on my pwetty time chart (well, it became pretty ugly especially after the my bloody instructor pointed at it and said it was useless and was covering more important information -_-), and instead had to really MONITOR the situation of my own Bn as well as other Bns and then tigger the next sequence of actions correspondingly...

so well.. things became much better lah, and also becomes the instructors realised we were getting ripped pretty hard and were really quite frustrated, with Danny tearing his hair out trying to figure out the movement schedules, Michael shouting through the phone some instructions to his seemingly perpetually inept OC, and me sitting there ashen faced trying to work out my equipment status as well as answering the many phones calls...

wow...

but yeah, it was a good fight and it was fulfilling and at times really pretty realistic and fun...and in my heart i knew it was ending soon liao cos they would be changing the appointments and the 2nd night...

so guess AGAIN what appointment I got...

CO

0_0 (x 200000)

how nice man... just when i wanted a break from 2 hectics days...

but well, thankfully, my Bn was the reserve the next day.. and I had like zero problems except the mysterious "civillian stragglers" which that dratted person misinterpreted and made his own decision to send a truck to pick those civilians up and put them under military arrest... and when the DS came flying to ask what the hell I was doing, he argued with our DS for about one hour...

it was at that point I felt like dragging him to one side and using my CO power to give him a good dressing down and warn him NEVER EVER to make decisions without telling me... but well, being the hypocritical mr. nice-guy, and not wanting to burn any bridges, I just told him nicely to tell me before he decided to do things next time...

so well.. it was smooth sailing and at one point I even made a command decision (haha!), and by doing proper considerations, realised that there was no point waiting for 2 more hours for the correct timing to start the attack of another objective, and hence asked higher HQ for permission to launch the attack earlier, since other objectives were already captured...

hmm... i'm pretty proud of doing that =)

oh well.. so all well ends well.. I'm pretty surprised I survived and well.. thank god!

frANk