About bloody time I wrote on this thing. So PDT is finally over. And what came out of it for me? Two concussions, one case of mild hypothermia, two visits to the hospital, 3 x-rays of a suspected arm fracture (it wasn't), and numerous cuts and bruises all over my body. Still, I managed to survive all that. But lets do this week by week hmm.
Week 1. Range shooting and briefs. I finally got to fire the pistol and of course fire the rifle and gun lots more. I gotta say, as a shooting coach for some of these troops you'd think it was the first time they had held the weapons, loading rounds upside down, screwing up the drills. this was accompanied by numerous briefs on a range of subjects, the majority of which I can't even remember now.
Week 2. Ex raven and riot training. The second week started with basic urban drills including building protection, vehicle checkpoints and the like. this culminated on the wednesday which was the Exercise. A whole day of rotating through Security, patroling and Quick reaction Force. I think this was primarily a means of finding out our starting point. After Raven we started on our one day of riot control training before we were thrown to the wolves that are 1st batallion. The riot action lasted about half an hour. In this time we sustained about 10 casualties and two broken shileds. I guess thats what happens when the enemy have axes and whatnot. This was followed by a weekend of leave which I think we all needed.
Week 3. Live fire in Waiouru. The first day in the field was pissing with rain and cold. We went through basic field shooting and instinctive/ reactive stuff. Luckily on day 2 the weather cleared up and we got into fire and manuvuer starting in pairs and over the week build up to section strength in close country. We also covered vehicle ambush drills and on the saturday we did this moving with live rounds and high Explosive 40mm grenades. Pretty awesome stuff.
Week 4. Wanganui, boating and Ex Solomon Step. The first day in Wanganui was once again shit weather and this was the day we did boating, including man overboard and capsize drills. All I can say it this, the water was cold, damn cold. After a day or two of rehearsing of stuff we got into the Exercise. Similar to Raven but over 4 days, and for some reason it was nearly always 2 section that got called up to action. One stand out action was when we got called out to resond to a brawl. The enemy players got angry and attacked the boss, he shot one of the enemy and from then it go ugly. We walked away from that one with a mud splattered vehicle that had a shattered windscreen and a missing drivers window. This being after we had evacuated two enemy casualties to the hospital.
Week 5. Admin week. This week involved tidying up everything from the past month, loading our gear for the plane and basically getting drunk every night. It culminated with the course function which found me walking back to Ohakea from Palmerston North at 4 in the morning as I didn't want to pay the $70 for a taxi.
I am now on leave for the week and If I get things sorted out will spend the remainder tripping around the North Island before I fly out monday.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment