Page 101 - Wish Stream Year of 2018

Ex LONG REACH is part of Sandhurst folklore – a 70-kilometre ordeal through the Black Mountains. It appears that LONG REACH
has not changed since God was a Lance Cor- poral. Every officer seems to have
OCdt Skrine
we devised elaborate cranes, cantilevers and stretchers in order to accomplish our aims, and hopefully earn a good report.
a memory of what the weather was like on checkpoint X-ray, and curi- ously, the weather always seems to have been a little worse than it was for the previous person who men- tioned it.
As the sun rose on the second day, everything became a little easier.
As the sun rose on the second day, everything became a little easier. The sleepiness of the early hours lifted, and the sense of optimism returned, as did the warm weather. The command tasks continued however, and became more difficult due to lack of sleep. The scrabble command task was a par- ticularly odd one. I found myself sitting, trying desperately to think of a nine-
For us in 7 platoon, it was all look-
ing rather nice as we set off on the
exercise. The warm winds and the late Autumn sun lulled us all into a false sense of security, and saw call sign C7C removing their smocks and moving the first hour in t-shirts. However, it was not to last, and night fell as we were pass- ing the hill fort on our way up to the infamous checkpoint X-Ray. After night fell, the weather took a turn and a bitter northerly wind whipped across the tops of the hills, causing everyone on the mountain tops to button up in warm kit and arctic hats, whilst some of the poor interna- tional cadets suffered in temperatures far lower than any they had encountered before. OCdt Taremwa had a spectacular fall on an icy road. Having never encountered such a thing, he had no idea it would be slippery.
We pushed on through the night, slowly ticking off hilltop and valley checkpoints, encountering command tasks involving ever more bizarre and tangentially military scenarios. Inevitably, these included some form of bucket containing deadly radiation in the form of a ping pong ball, and
letter word while my teammates manoeuvred giant letters over a bridge of ammunition tins and planks. Sandhurst can be very odd sometimes.
As the second night came in, each patrol had only a few more checkpoints to visit, but the lack of sleep was manifesting itself in more ways
Exercise LONG REACH
SANDHURST 99