Saturday, May 16, 2009

back to the real world... in SAF PROVOST. Went for the most shag exercise for the MP basic trainees, EX MM or Moonlight Marshall. Effing hell.. went back to tekong again! Godamn outfield lasted around 2 days and 1 night. Sounds as slacker than SITEST right? Well it hell isnt! Like you dont get to sleep, at ALL.Most of the tasks we had to do involved sandbags and constertina wires. Pre-MM preparation involved filling up 500++ sandbags which turned out to be quite shag. I can honstly tell you, MP basic is all about sandbag+con wire saikang. If you wanna know how heavy the sandbags and con wires are, I improved from 8 to about 12+ pullups over my time in SAF PROVOST.In Tekong we had 3 missions to complete: Build a BTOC (Battalion Tactical Operations Command), a PW (Prisoner-of-War) Cage post, and setup a TRC (Traffic Regulaton Control) Route. BTOC and PW Cage posts involved a MG pit, and where there are MG pits, there are LOTS of sandbags! I tell you unloading the sandbags thenselves were hell. After each mission, we had to dismantle the con-wires and MG Pit and load them back into the 5-tonner. That was hell as well. So we basically had nothing to look forward to.God I hate MG Pits. For starters, the GPMG itself is 11.4kg. Really pity the MG Gunner, coz he runs around with a MG instead of a rifle! The MG assistant has this freaking huge MG Tripod, carries the MG Gunner's rifle and spare MG barrels.But the worst thing was the sandbags. On day one I did one MG Pit, so I had sand inside my No.4 (those sandbags are more leaky than you think). On day 2, it was worse. I had SAND IN MY UNDERWEAR. It isnt a pleasant experience mind you. Plus after we finished everything at around 5pm on day2 (yes 3 missions concurrently for 1 and a half days), we had to sleep in a training shed near the ferry terminal (S1-S4). GOD! Can't we freaking take a ferry back? I have never slept with sand in my underwear in BMTC. And those chao recruits get a hellalotta lot more sleep than us bloody hell!!!!Oh yea and cleaning a GPMG is HELL. And I thought cleaning a rifle was difficult. The GPMG cleaning wallet is freaking the size of a briefcase, with all sorts of stuff inside. It took half an afternoon to clean it after GPMG live firing. In ex-MM we fired BLANKS, which means carbon-madness. My morale sank everytime I heard a burst of fire from the GPMG thinking about all the carbon clogging up the feed tray.The con-wire also did stuff to my boots. You should see my chiongsua boots now, bits of leather sticking out everywhere. The edges on them are freaking sharp, and someone got cut deep. Its lucky coz that means he did not do anymore con-wire saikang, but bad coz he may OOC (Out Of Course) and do EX-MM AGAIN!!! LOLZ.I now understood I wouldn't run away from fighting a war because of the fear of death, it was the fear of sandbags!!!I enjoyed my bookout watching the first episode of the first answer arc of Higurashi (Maekashi-hen, or the detective arc which answers Watanagashi-hen). Turns out I was right and wrong. Oh wells.Anyway EX-MM is juz a bad memory now, and we have finished all our major exercises (including EX-INJECT which was on tuesday). Now I'm left with P226 Live Firing (which is tommorrow). Heard the recoil of the pistol is siao, so if u put it too close your face and fire, u'll end up at the Medical Centre. I also got EX-Confidence which exposes u to tear gas, not very happy about that. I thought only commanders got to do that.Anyway Hell, tml is bookout day after the SAFTI MI range,