Page 14 - Demo

UNPRECEDENTED TRAINING
& SERVICE DURING THE PANDEMIC
Major Jawara Hinkson
To say unprecedented is an understatement but I guess we have been waiting for the big one for a while. The big one was always supposed to be predictable, an earthquake in LA, the ozone layer depleting, Y2K, or more recently global warming. We thought we would see the danger plain as day but we were wrong. It came and it remains an invisible threat. And like so many times when there has been a threat to the sanctity of Canada, the Black Watch has risen to the occasion.
As the call was put out for aide from the Canadian Armed Forces, one must remember that an infanteer is usually good at a lot of things, but seniors care was not in their repertoire. Prior to that, neither was staying and training from home. One can surely imagine how steep the curve was for so many. The countless parts of what we do in the army has nothing to do with staying home. We are a dynamic force that when combined with our brothers and sisters in arms resemble the unstoppable force of Voltron. We train together in close quarters, ride MSVS’s (our to-date troop transport trucks), and sleep in 2-man hoochies in summer and 10-man tents in the winter. Just as we worked hard, we played harder after work in our respective messes. All of that was gone in the blink of an eye. We had to do what the infantry is famous for and do it better than anyone else: remain flexible and adapt. The Watch did that in large numbers with more than 80 members, all ranks, joining the rest of the Canadian Armed Forces efforts to tackle COVID-19 in the mission dubbed OPERATION LASER.
Many roles were tasked to the Black Watch: some directly in the CHSLD, some in a reserve force, and some in a force to train our troops. I was tasked with the latter. Distance learning has its challenges, but for those who do not know infantry tactics it is a particularly hard sell through teleconferences. Think of teaching a football team winning plays while never having an actual practice. We therefore became innovative and creative. Overnight it seemed we became super tech savvy as many others did. We “Zoomed”, “Facebook Messenger(ed)”, “Google” met, and we “Slack(ed)” (the app not for real lol). Somewhere amidst all that, we landed on Microsoft Teams. We communicated all the way through one way or the other. Power point was used as a primary means of instruction, along with videoconferencing to help soldiers further understand concepts. As the days passed and things began improving nationwide, plans began to shift to resuming in-person training. That meant staff and candidates would be back to bases all over Canada. The how was the big question.
Everyone’s protection during training was of paramount concern. So the army rolled out a plan to protect both instructors and candidates. The plan would take a very high integrity approach where all involved would disclose whether they possessed symptoms before or while training was taking place. Pre-screening assessments and wearing masks were to become the norm. Once we were cleared to resume, it was off to train and I landed in Canadian Forces Base (CFB) Valcartier as the course commander
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