Tank crew test

This week we headed straight to the field. As I mentioned last update that I had 3 minutes to pack my bag for the weekeend and the folowing week. I also mentioned that I hoped I didn't forget to pack anything that I needed this week. Well, I didn't forget to pack things I needed but one of my bags din't make it to the field. The bag had 3 very important things I needed - my hat, gun cleaning equipment and food. Once we got to the field we startd to set everything up for our final test in the tank. The test covered everything we had learned on the tanks. There were several parts to the test including an oral section where I had to answer questions about the tank maintenance and how to fix specific problems in the tank. The main part of the test was firing lots of ammo during a course that we hadn't previously practiced. Another aspect of this test was that the company comander was command my tank and not my regular commander. This was because at the beginning of the training 4 months ago I had been chosen to be in the company commander's tank crew, and he would be commanding us during the test as well as during the company wide exercize.
Surprisingly I wasn't nervous or overly excited that he was commanding us for the first time. We have practiced all the drills so many times that it doesn't matter who is in the commander's seat or any of the other seats for that matter. It's very much business as usual and I know what my job is so I just have to do it like I was taught. Another advantae of bein with the comany commander was that we got to go first. This was advantageous because it meant the guns were clean and less of a chance of gun jams. The course went well with few jams therefore we were able to fire all of our ammo. I shot about 100 bullets from my MAG and finally emptied a magazine (29 bullets) in automatic mode from my M16. I still think the MAG is more fun.
Thusday when we got back to base late in the evening they hada BBQ for us as a sort of congradulations for finishing the test. The best part of it was that ther were chicken wings! It wasn't like what Iwas used to back at home but after eating shit for a week in the fild it tasted incredible. I can't unbiasedly determine if food tastes good or not naymore because my definition of fresh food now includes anything that has been eaten from a can within 5 minutes of the can benig opened. I often nd a second oppinion as whether the fod I eat actually tastes good.
Friday we had the last part of our test which was a multiple choice test on the computer. There were 5 different topics to the test and each section had about 20 questions. Each test had a time limit but they removed the time limit for me, becuase of my difficulty with hebrew. Most people were done the tests within an hour. I completed 4 of the 5 tests in 2 hours and 40 minutes. I managed to complete most of it on my own without any help but from time to time I needed to ask for an explanation on a number of things I didn't understand in hebrew.
With the completion of our crew test we are now advancing to the levels of platton and company exercizes. A single tank never goes out fighting alone - tanks always fight at the minimum level of the platoon which is 3 tanks. We started to have classes about the strategies and tactics in fighting as a platoon which was very interesting to learn.