Thursday, June 07, 2007
The tense moments (2 more days to commissioning)For today's parade, the insensitive 2WO Subra took us today, very unlucky man. He doesn't even know what are our weaknesses that in the parades that we've been rehearsing for these 2 weeks, has only turned up once and has nothing good to say, and for in a wry twist of unlucky fate, he has to turn up today when everyone is still feeling blue and down. He punished us when we were trying to prompt each other about our mistakes, and made us run 4 rounds around the parade square when we protested that we should be practicing the March-past instead of static arms-drills.
Fuck, he was unhappy with that and without understand we ran, we're all so damn tired and were the only arm running around the square whilst others were given the chance to practice on their own! Then immediately after that we did so many march-pasts that we were so exhausted we didn't improve at all but instead got progressively worse! Then the SSM told all the Sergeant-Majors to give us a break because we needed rest and water too, and we're the last contingent to return to the gallery.
Today we had a full day of parade, wake up at 5.30am, draw our weapons, go for a rushed breakfast, then parade, then another rushed lunch, and then back to parade, then an early dinner and back to parade! I am feeling extremely weary of parade, feeling really utterly exhausted because of all the daily parades. It's so sickening, just pure exhaustion and fatigue. It's not the normal kind of exhaustion from a strenuous exercise or lengthy deployment.
It's just that every breather we have, doesn't seem to be sufficient rest, I am really tired, and I felt as if I was in "punching bag mode" today, whatever command was given, we just did it with our minds completely blank and in limbo.
But we have been having parades continuously now for close to 3 weeks! It's taking a toll on everyone. People are losing their temper and getting irritable from stress caused by the continuous and unrelenting parade rehearsals. Nothing in my previous NPCC experience has come close to the level of intensity that these parade rehearsals have reached and I've been in the GOH before!
Today is the first commander vetting, and also our first No.1 full dress rehearsal. We did it, and it went quite smoothly, except for one or two who were dreaming, but the whole rehearsal wasn't fluid. And when it all ended and OCS Commander gave us his debrief, he said it was like shit, but continued with his pep talk. He gave us encouragement, and even managed to make us laugh and turn the tense atmosphere from everyone into a very humorous one and later SSM also gave us a debrief on our mistakes before we retired back to our bunks for the day.
We were all equally tired, and when we had to fall in again, people took their own sweet time and the normally tolerant and easy-going Zj cracked. When people are tired or hungry, they get irritable, they get frustrated, they get pissed, they argue and friction produced threatens to blow up. I've hardly ever seen him angry and it's harder to make him angry than to get an SOH! He punished us for being late, getting everyone to do push-ups. He's angry for the first time at the whole cohort, even knocked a guy down because he tried to be funny by being sarcastic. It's the first time the SOH got angry with everyone. I can totally understand what he's going through, the SOH has to go through so much more than the rest of us, the SOH rehearsals, the disseminating of information to everyone etc.
That was a very tense moment and everyone kept quiet. The night went by very quietly, no one had much to say to anyone else.
Two more days to commissioning!
8:21 PM
