Cadet Annual Camp

Just a quick update. First week of the holidays was the Cadet annual camp that was up at Puckapunyal. All the senior army people had come up with this scenario
where terrorists had stolen nuclear warheads out of a plane and decided to do nasty evil things with them.  Actually the senior people didn't come up with the idea, apparently they nicked the idea off some TV show called 24. It didn't really matter, they still managed to keep us running around the place. Most of our activities were different. We did a couple of searches around different areas of about 500m2 looking for people, containers and signs of enemy activity. An assessment of a roads suitability for different types of transport at night. (I decided that we should just get them to bring in one of those Hagglunds from Antarctica, the road was really badly eroded.) A walk that was interrupted by a call to go to the site of a mock car crash involving nine people, one of the warheads and a couple of terrorists. An activity where we had to build a bridge that we could go across with our gear, we failed that one. As the final part of the 24 hour exercise, out of 6 sections ours was the one selected to go to a road and sit by the side of it waiting to see if we could see anyone. The mission statement was that we should sit there and if we saw anyone who was obviously a terrorist then we were supposed to follow them. So we sat there and waited for about 5 minutes until they appeared. Then they started walking down the road and we hadn't been given the signal to move. It took about 10 minutes for our leader to decide to put the signal out and by then we were about 600m behind them. So we started to run after them with a lot of stopping and starting. Some people had decided not to run and where still creeping along about 100m behind us, so someone went back and told them to hurry up. I was up at the front so I ended up as one of the company's scouts (It was a company now because we had realised that there were sections from other companies there with us.) I have now worked out that my favourite thing in cadets other than navigating and night games is scouting during the night. It was brilliant knowing that we weren't marching along having to get down on the ground every 20m because the two little people scouting for us
told us to, because that was what we were doing. There was this huge YAY inside me during that activity, I found it even more fun than the live firing the next day, that might of been because I had no idea why I was doing things to the gun during the practice. It made much more sense during the actual firing and we didn't have to do half the things they taught us, so it was this huge anti climax of us sitting there worrying for about half an hour. I think that I got a reasonable score in the first round because all three of the shots hit the target just to the sides of where it was supposed to land. The other two rounds were terrible though because they put a time limit on them and I needed a lot of time to aim properly because I was using my shoulder to aim it and resting the front of it with my left hand underneath the trigger guard because my arms were too short to reach the grip at the front, not exactly the best way to get it aimed at the target properly. It turned out afterwards that I had a better score in the first round than most of the other people that were firing for the first time did, so I guess I'm not that bad at it, I still prefer the night exercises to shooting, they're a lot more fun than lying down on the ground creating loud noises. The last night of the camp was brilliant. We got to do a Kangaroo Court which is a mock court which is really just there so that the senior guys that are on the court can get out of their punishments and the others get even more embarrassed. We had that whole day to just sit there and not do anything once we had packed up which only took the morning. We had been told a couple of days ago to start looking out for bad or annoying things that people had done so that we could nominate them to do something stupid in front of our whole company. I found my first chance on the second day of the camp. Our CUO who is in charge of the entire company had just given us all a lecture on why you shouldn't throw plastic into the fire before breakfast. Then after breakfast he couldn't be bothered going up the hill to put his rubbish in the bin, so he got one of the Sergeants to talk to us when he realised that we had noticed that he was about to throw it in the fire. Then he just gave up trying to get our attention away and threw it in.

Kangaroo Court - CUO Brown
For: Throwing rubbish into fire just after giving us a lecture on not doing it.
Suggested punishment: Stand on one foot, with pack and webbing singing 'Mary Had a Little Lamb'.  The CUO had to check the nominations before they read them out so he burned most of them that had anything to do with him. He missed one of them that I had deliberately given to the Staff Sergeant knowing that he would make sure that one of them was saved. So mine was the one that got read out. He got out of it but I think it was only because my punishment was so torturous. They actually looked at the punishment before sentencing him. I think that he probably had to pay the rest of the judges afterwards. I don't think he's found out that it was me that put the punishment in yet. I might tell him on his last night if he hasn't found out by then, only this whole term to go.  I'll have to time it well. So much for a quick update.

I can't help going on and on.