A full belly

It was back to the base and back to the field. By the end of the week I had spent 14 of the past 18 days in the field. Given this statistic it is impossible for the blog post title to be related to food. People are amazed that I am always hungry, especially in the field. We now have a few weeks break from the field before we head back, so its a much needed break. I was supposed to do a number of tank exercises but there wasn't enough time so I mostly did nothing. The one thing I did end up doing was a test of sorts for the loaders. The test was called loading the full belly to simulate loading all the shells in the tank. The test itself is more difficult than doing it in reality since practice ammunition is used so in addition to loading the shell, I also have to unload it. I had to load and unload a 25 kg (55 lbs) shell 46 times which totals 1090 kg (2398 lbs) as fast as I can. My time wasn't that great, but OK - 14 minutes and 50 seconds. To date this was without a doubt the hardest thing I have done in the army. Afterward I had a half hour break before it was back in the tank to do a half hour exercise which included loading the 25 kg shell with a gas mask on. After the previous test being completely out of breath, barely being able to catch my breath with the gas mask on didn't seem that bad.

We had another practice for a test two days later that also completely kicked my ass. The test was for the entire company. It involved a 1500 meter run in full gear (including vest) plus another 500 meters with someone on a stretcher. We had a lot of people missing for various reasons so things didn't look good from the get go. Our company was split up evenly into 4 different 'teams' - each team was designated to one stretcher. How was our company split up evenly? "Who can run fast and is light?" 4 people raised their hands and the commander said ok, your job is to run with the stretcher as fast as you can to the 1500 meter mark and then strap yourself in - then your job is done. Next question - who else can run well? 5 people including me raised their hands. At this point I thought - shit, there is no possible way of this ending well. The bad and average runners were split up afterward. So I ran with Ben, the small fast guy because it took 2 people to carry the empty stretcher because it was open. After running as fast as we could for 1500 meters we strapped Ben in, but then I still had another 500 meters to run while taking turn running with the stretcher. After 2 shifts with the stretcher and about 250 meters left I couldn't keep up with the lead group and had to fall back to the middle of the pack. I was totally spent because I had to keep up with someone who was only running 1500 meters so that when the main pack made it to the 1500 meter mark Ben would already be on the stretcher and ready to go. For our first time doing this our time wasn't that bad, but we have much to improve.

I was supposed to stay on base this weekend but because they owed me a weekend off, and also my phone was still broken they let me go home on thursday. This was awesome because I'm missing the entire weekend of doing guard duty on base. We are guarding the base until next thursday, so basically its going to be a fairly boring week - I'm going to have to think about something to blog about.