The 2nd week: stupid leaders

Welcome to the second week. Before I start telling you about the week I want to tell you something about our leaders first.

These are the people who are responsible for us at our recruitment. A lot of them are doing jobs like electricians, shop assistants, baker, brick layers, hospital nurse, butcher ... et cetera, in the civil life. Usually you can recognize them by just analysing their behaviour, because they are just arrogant, unfriendly, discontent and behave like pseudo-heros. They find it cool to just walk from one side to the other once and check if lower-grade people have saluted them. If someone didnt, they point us out of this by shouting at us. Since I do not look for the grade of every single person I walk by on the army place, some of them "correct" me. Sometimes you just cannot see the grades because they are shown on one side only and I don't want to walk around a person to see if its a higher grade or not. Every normal person would understand this but our leaders do not. Such bastards decide, too, if your military time will be fun or will be the hell.

A friend of mine was once chief of our room, and every evening the chief of the room has to tell to a specific higher grade person how many members are in the room, how many are in the army hospital and how many are detached. When he has saluted this special higher grade person and informed him like "1 person at hospital, 8 people here" he has just shouted at him because the order was incorrect. Correct it would be "8 people here, 1 person at hospital". How silly is this? I'm afraid, this is military.

This week we've learnt a lot about the military weapon and we were shooting finally ;). When we were at the shooting place in the forrest we had to eat in our army mess tin (=special box for food, "Gamelle"). After eating we had the pleasure to clean the army mess tin. This process was a bit inconvience, tedious and annoying. The water was used by approx. 50 people. Now you can think of how clean it really was after 10 persons have washed their army mess tin. :D

Besides, we 've learnt the (very) fundamentals about the gas mask and the gas protective clothes (aka overall). They've made a test like, we had have to being able to dress us with a gas mask (taking it out from our bag, which was closed) within 10 seconds! It seems, they really think the next world war will be like the first/second world war.

Before ending this blog entry I want to inform you that I will be unable to write an article about my military time on the next weekend because I have to guard the army place :-(.

After having some more unnecessary stresses they 've let us entering the weekend.

See you in two weeks again. Have fun.

the first week & presentation of myself

Welcome to my Swiss Military Time Blog. I'm 21 year-old swiss guy who is being forced to go to military recruitment for 18 weeks. I'm afraid I didnt want to go there, but I try to write about my current life here. Actually I'm a computer scientist - interested in programming, networking, operating systems and lot of different things - but here in the swiss army, I have to work as a device mechanic. They did not tell me what I have to do exactly as a device mechanic, but as far as I know I will (first few weeks are basic recruitment) be responsible for repairing everything which does not have wheels (or "cars" like tanks). Since I cannot really make notes on my daily life I'll just write what I still do know ;-).


On the first day I got known the chief of our section, had to fill in some forms and got all papers, documents which were and will be necessary for my military recruitment. We had to learn how to salute other army-members of all grades. It was a hard and sucky day, because our waiting has begun! The swiss army has its motto "You run to wait and you wait to run!" Therefore, we stood around for about 3 hours until the very last member of our section arrived. While waiting, we trained the formal salutations. A bit later - when everyone was there - we collected all our clothes and finally the swiss military weapon. Below is a picture:

When it was 10:30pm, we drove from one military place to another one (where we stayed finally!) with a truck and we were sitting on the truck floor. It was very rainy and damn cold :-( Happily, after another two hours we were ready to go to bed. On the next day we waked up at (approx.) 5am. The rest of the week we had to learn for our week exam which decided if someone is able to go home early or rather late. I was able to go home in the middle, so I'm quite happy. In the swiss military you have to switch off your brain, because you do lot of useless shit like following: If you walk by someone who has a higher grade you always need to salute him. The type of salutation changes of the type of how many personnes are walking by and if they are all or if there are 8 or less than 8 personnes. If you want to talk to a higher grade person, it becomes funny, let's say - you are a recruit and the other person is a sergeant - you would need to salute him like "sergeant, recruit *my second name*" first, and then you can ask your question. When you've finished, you have to check out, like: "check out myself". When doing this check-in/check-out/salutation thingie, you need to be in correct positions, see here:



Since my free time is very much limited I will only write some parts of it. See you later,


Salutation,

The anonymous swiss recruit