Exercise Spade

I seriously can't believe that ex. spade is over. This has got to be one of the milestones of OCS life as many seniors would say, but here i am, coming out alive to tell ya the tale.

It couldn't get any worse than if you were exercise PC for ex. spade. Just imagine, when everyone's slacking in their trenches, you've got to be going round, co-ordinating stuff. To make matters worse, you've got ur real PC right beside u at the command post, constantly being such a nag and hollering at you to do stuff and finding fault with every little bit of shit.

Digging the fire trench was quite a culture shock at first. Its a good thing Reubs was digging with me. The trench just seemed to stagnate in depth when we reached knee depth. There after, it was quite a struggle to stay awake to continue digging. Just as we were about to "concus", LTA Gerald appeared out of the blue with a carton of red bull and said "here...2 cans per person." He rocks.

Couldn't have finished the command post without the help of the platoon, esp people like Darren, who got high on a can of red bull and started thrashing away wildly at the dirt. We couldn't even keep pace by emptying the baskets! Actually we were pretty fortunate, some unit had come here 2 weeks ago and dug a defence camp too, so the soil was pretty much loose now and all we had to do was to scoop em out, and dump em somewhere else. In the end, we ended up filling countless sandbags.

The FOPK turned out to be the spoiler, just as i had a gut feeling, the soft soil couldn't take the weight of the tons of sandbags and the thing just caved in, much to our horror and disappointment. I must say that we were pretty proud of our shapely staircase though.

Attaacking platoon 2 was a bit of a disappointment too cos those cowards retreated to some safe location before we could even reach the top of the knoll. Some poor guys had grenades lobed right nicely into their cosy trenches.