Page 8 - The Wish Stream Year of 2022 CREST

anthem. It seems so trivial, but after five weeks, the tradition becomes the lynchpin of discipline. The concept of waking up, making your bed, and singing the anthem with 29 other people, keeps you in order. You stop singing and then you don’t need to get out of bed earlier, and so you forget to make your bed. Without pushing yourself to get up as you would to sing, it can be a slippery slope to dropping your admin. However, at the time, all I could think about was getting back in those covers and getting another three hours of sleep. The first week was a calm blur, with lots of introductions and tutorials. A sense of anticipation is never-ending. “This can’t be it? It’s too calm, they talk of a slow but steady increasing pace, but surely come Monday, then it’ll really begin,” I said to myself. The shouting and panicking over room inspections will begin on Monday, were the thoughts we all had, but as I woke to sing the anthem on week two, still waiting for the starting pistol to go off, my spring tightly wound ready to bounce, it did not hap- pen. Instead, the pace slightly increased. Ever- so slightly.
Week two was when it truly begun, with personal administration as prepared as possible, introduc- tions to the Platoon planned and a busy sched- ule to follow. Despite my doubts, our training staff were true to their word. The gun didn’t fire, the pace increased, but the emphasis on learn-
ing was still there. It was on this week we were introduced to the term the ‘coiled spring’. When marching, our Colour Sergeant explained: “You must be ready to move on a moment’s notice, ready to push out like a coiled spring when it’s released.” He spoke of its implications in drill, but over the weeks I’ve found that it applies to many aspects of military life. You find yourself suddenly waiting, poised and prepared, ready to go, like a coiled spring – but then there is a sudden 20-minute wait for no reason. Or is there a reason? You are prepared and then the duty OCdt or Staff tells you to move, and like a spring, you push out and are in motion, fast and full of energy. This style is very different from normal life, where you can plan out your days and know the exact timings of everything. It is this constant tense and then release that hits OCdts hardest, but it also trains us well for exercises in the field and, I imagine, operations.
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