Page 39 - The Wish Stream Year of 2022

and a gentle breeze for most of our time there. My platoon, 19, were the reserve, and were sited on a nice two-foot seam of rock that became my sworn enemy. The main effort was 21 Platoon to the front right, and so we spent the majority of our time in their trenches, before confronting our own troubles later on.
toon Sergeant’s. By the end I was swimming in my own sweat.
The next few hours were spent decontaminating and crucially helping one another. It’s an environ- ment where your friends to the left and right are very important. CBRN is another feature of war made more acute in recent times with activities in Syria. It isn’t difficult to imagine putting these skills into practise at some point in our careers.
The exercise culminated in a dawn attack by the enemy on our position. Prior to this, we were afforded brief minutes to divvy up sleep between our sections. When my time came to rest my head, an Apache helicopter decided to perform manoeuvres 20 feet from our trench. I’d have thought it to be a hallucination had my sentry partner also not been staring at the loud and
Given only a brief stint as section
commander during the exercise,
my time was mainly spent study-
ing the geological trends of Thet-
ford with a pickaxe, paying hom-
age to my South Wales mining
heritage. By virtue of my natural
gifts, I was perpetually stuck at
Stage 1 of the trench process,
moving between shallow holes while others put in the illusive ‘wriggly tin’ that I only ever heard about but never saw. Still, I found the exer- cise taught me a lot about physical and mental robustness and working well as a team. It had echoes of Junior Term’s Ex LONG REACH, and I’d like to think I pulled my own weight for the section, the platoon and company. I have also enjoyed the step change of moving from offen- sive to defensive scenarios in the course, and all the planning considerations that come with it.
Saying that, a key part of defensive strategy is offensive spirit, and to that end we also went on standing patrols and raids, hitting back on any enemy incursions into our MDA. As the exercise progressed, we were exposed to a CBRN attack, going through several levels of dress state before finally a 4x4 in the near distance started pour- ing out a suspicious gas and we went 4 Romeo: jacket, trousers, gloves, boots, and respirator. You have nine seconds to don your respirator, purge your mask before administrating yourself. Unfortunately, one member of our section didn’t make the time and the rest of us were sent per- forming a CASEVAC from our trench to the Pla-
When my time came to rest my head, an Apache helicopter decided to perform manoeuvres 20 feet from our trench.
dusty spectacle. While impressive, it meant I missed my precious 45 min- ute sleep slot.
19 Platoon had been promoted to the front for the defence and I was heroically killed immediately at dawn as our trenches were overrun to allow our own prescribed counterattack from the reserve. However, I was then resurrected to play enemy for a
brief moment, and I took great pleasure charg- ing my friends with a section of Gurkhas, letting out some grievances that had naturally built up over five days of close quarters digging. With the attack seen off and the exercise closing down, we then spent a few hours filling in a selection of our recently built trenches, a Platoon of people deleting two days of hard work in under an hour. It was a satisfying metaphor for this English stu- dent, as we had managed to see off eight weeks of camp and field challenges, and now the next week we could enjoy the sunny French coast on Ex NORMANDY SCHOLAR.
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