Samstag, 7. Juni 2008

13th week: Becoming a diagnostician soldier

This week we've got the grade of a soldier and our (most of it) technical recruitment as a radio device mechanic / diagnostician ended. The exam in diagnostics we had consisted of building an antenna, installing an army car with the antennas, checking some stuff on the radio facility of a tank if there are any errors and searching some specific radio components.

If someone is interested in the swiss armed force grades: All are listed plus a short description (translated by Google Translator) here(click). And for sure, our cadre got a new higher grade as well. They became sergeants this week.

The week ended by playing with a thermal image camera and using some special field-glasses to find out a distance. On week 14 we will have military class as we had in the first few weeks. Read more next week! ;-)

Sonntag, 1. Juni 2008

Week 11 & 12: Marching to the radio tanks!

These two weeks were somewhat hard because it started with a 25km march. We've started on a village fully packed with our combat bag and our weapon. This is a picture of our combat bag (containing the tent unit, gamelle and our man cleaning utensils):



It took us 5h to ar
rive the destination, our casern. A lot of people hat a lot of blisters and it caused lot of pain and blood. While marching the stronger people helped the a bit weaker people by wearing his/her weapon or other parts of the combat bag. After the first 5 to 10 km I already though I'm not able to continue marching, but then I simply switched off my brain and "concentrated" on the march, so I've been able to stand the whole march.

The 12th week we were gone to a car/tank pool to learn some fundamental things about several military tanks. It was fun to turning the tank tower, playing with the canon and its camera. Most people tried to track some specific personnes with the canon ;-).
After the introduction day we wer
e repairing the tank radio devices in shift operation. Some detachements containing approx 6 people had to work for 4 hours, then sleep 4 hours and so on. During the day we had to entire day.


The two weeks ended by attendin
g a course in our army weapon called: training in inspecting weapons. First we learned about the details of our weapon, about the possible broken things and how they look like and how to find them. After this we had to analyse several components and telling whats wrong with it. Now we are able to control weapons of a entire military company!