Post by Bruyns (Barrie) on May 2, 2016 13:42:58 GMT -5
Since we have some down time before the draft and I had a request to share some details of where I have been I decided to write up a bit about my experiences of 14 weeks of Canadian basic training for officers.
I think most or all of you know I am now a pilot in the Canadian Armed Forces. It was about a 22 month wait time from the day I walked into the recruiting center in Barrie until I started basic training. The first major hurdle was a 2 day air crew selection testing in Trenton Ontario that determined if you had what it took to continue in the process. It was the hardest test I have ever done and was all computerized and focused a lot on memory, spatial recognition, hand eye co-ordination and math. I'm good at those things but the test still felt like it kicked my ass so I was very happy to find out I was one of 3 out of 24 people that passed during that testing period. I still had to be chosen by a selection board based on test scores, my interview and my resume and last July I got my official offer to start basic in January.
I arrived at basic training along with 56 other officer cadets and was given my room in a pod with 5 other rooms, one bathroom and one common room where I would live for the next 3 months. Right away we started with 5AM wakeup and full days of class until 7 or 8 and then other tasks to do until lights out at 11 but no one ever got to go to sleep at 11 since there was too much work to do. One of the cooler things was we had the JOTEP program which was a joint training program with other countries so we had a a guy from Belize, Colombia, Jamaica, Jordan, Ukraine, Mongolia, 2 from Dominican and 2 girls from the Philippines it was really interesting getting to know them and they were very impressive in that they were doing the same program as Canadians with university degrees in their first language.
The first 5 weeks of basic was known as the indoctrination period and that was to try and break us of bad habits and get us use to military life and discipline. This period we did not get our weekends off and still worked long hours every day. There was also a disciplinary system called swipes where you would swipe your card for some sort of screw up and then would get a punishment. I didn't get many, but some got a bunch and the punishments really snowballed and would take up all your time. For example someone in our pod left garbage in our washroom so all 6 of us had to write out 10 pages of the standard operating procedures for how bathrooms should be kept. That took about 3 hours and some people had multiple things like that or had to memorize things etc. We also had to sew our names on every piece of kit issued to us in the first few weeks and there was A LOT of kit issued to us.
After the first 5 weeks time went by a lot faster and things felt a little easier, getting your weekends to do whatever you wanted mad the weeks go quicker as you had something to look forward to but we had our weekend taken away in week 7 and were confined to barracks with work to do and that was a big hit to our platoon's morale at the time and really sucked when Friday afternoon rolled around and they made everyone rip up their leave passes and told us we lost our weekend.
Early on in the course we had a lot of lectures on military topics and the first practical things we did were first aid training, drill and weapons handling. Drill is precise timed movements that are executed in unison and it is actually pretty tough, I struggled a bit and actually failed my first drill test which was my only failure on the course. Weapons handling was obviously pretty cool, we were trained on a C7 which is a modified M16 and the weapons handling classes were how to safely load, unload and how to deal with the 3 different stoppages you can encounter. We only got to fire one afternoon at the live range, but we also got to use state of the art simulators that simulated kick back and everything and was almost indistinguishable from the real thing. We also learned radio procedure and topography and continued to get lectures everyday on military topics that we were tested on regularly. The other constant throughout the course were room inspections where every room had to be to a certain standard and all rooms had to be the same. It was so detailed that a shirt had to be folded into a 20x20 square and jackets 30x30 and every sock rolled a certain way, everything hung in the closet in the same order and way, boots all polished etc. There was a lot to do to keep your rooms in order.
The 2nd half of the course was all about preparing for our final week long field exercise. The final test is a 4 hour mission where we were given orders and took notes and then used those orders to analyze how we would conduct our mission and prepared orders to give to our 15 man section and then conducted the mission. That exercise was 15 four hour missions straight with no sleep and I was the 11th to go so I was pretty sleep fucked and physically and mentally exhausted. They have actors that help make the missions realistic and play their part as insurgents. My mission was to travel to an intersection, set up a vehicle check point with barrels and constantina wire and then stop and search a vehicle and its driver where we found a shotgun and then detained him. All the missions we also wore our tactical vest with extra ammo, helmet, ballistic glasses, back pack with rations and change of clothes and carried our rifles. It made you feel pretty bad ass shooting blanks and looking like a soldier but it was pretty heavy walking around with all that equipment at all times. Leading up to that we did practice missions 2 weeks earlier and one guy actually got bad hypothermia since we slept outside in the cold and wet and he had to be recoursed back to an earlier week. Over the time I was there we lost about 12 people to failures, injuries and voluntary releases.
Now I am on OJT (on the job training) with 400 tactical helicopter squadron in Borden 30min from my house. So far I just sit around but I will get to fly in some griffons this summer which is pretty cool. My next course starts in September for 3 months but this is a course just for pilots and we will live in a hotel so it will be much more relaxed then basic training where it was a mix of officer trades and I will have my computer and free time unlike what I just went through. I could talk more if anyone had any further questions they could PM me but it was the toughest, most stressful and most rewarding thing I have done so far.
I think most or all of you know I am now a pilot in the Canadian Armed Forces. It was about a 22 month wait time from the day I walked into the recruiting center in Barrie until I started basic training. The first major hurdle was a 2 day air crew selection testing in Trenton Ontario that determined if you had what it took to continue in the process. It was the hardest test I have ever done and was all computerized and focused a lot on memory, spatial recognition, hand eye co-ordination and math. I'm good at those things but the test still felt like it kicked my ass so I was very happy to find out I was one of 3 out of 24 people that passed during that testing period. I still had to be chosen by a selection board based on test scores, my interview and my resume and last July I got my official offer to start basic in January.
I arrived at basic training along with 56 other officer cadets and was given my room in a pod with 5 other rooms, one bathroom and one common room where I would live for the next 3 months. Right away we started with 5AM wakeup and full days of class until 7 or 8 and then other tasks to do until lights out at 11 but no one ever got to go to sleep at 11 since there was too much work to do. One of the cooler things was we had the JOTEP program which was a joint training program with other countries so we had a a guy from Belize, Colombia, Jamaica, Jordan, Ukraine, Mongolia, 2 from Dominican and 2 girls from the Philippines it was really interesting getting to know them and they were very impressive in that they were doing the same program as Canadians with university degrees in their first language.
The first 5 weeks of basic was known as the indoctrination period and that was to try and break us of bad habits and get us use to military life and discipline. This period we did not get our weekends off and still worked long hours every day. There was also a disciplinary system called swipes where you would swipe your card for some sort of screw up and then would get a punishment. I didn't get many, but some got a bunch and the punishments really snowballed and would take up all your time. For example someone in our pod left garbage in our washroom so all 6 of us had to write out 10 pages of the standard operating procedures for how bathrooms should be kept. That took about 3 hours and some people had multiple things like that or had to memorize things etc. We also had to sew our names on every piece of kit issued to us in the first few weeks and there was A LOT of kit issued to us.
After the first 5 weeks time went by a lot faster and things felt a little easier, getting your weekends to do whatever you wanted mad the weeks go quicker as you had something to look forward to but we had our weekend taken away in week 7 and were confined to barracks with work to do and that was a big hit to our platoon's morale at the time and really sucked when Friday afternoon rolled around and they made everyone rip up their leave passes and told us we lost our weekend.
Early on in the course we had a lot of lectures on military topics and the first practical things we did were first aid training, drill and weapons handling. Drill is precise timed movements that are executed in unison and it is actually pretty tough, I struggled a bit and actually failed my first drill test which was my only failure on the course. Weapons handling was obviously pretty cool, we were trained on a C7 which is a modified M16 and the weapons handling classes were how to safely load, unload and how to deal with the 3 different stoppages you can encounter. We only got to fire one afternoon at the live range, but we also got to use state of the art simulators that simulated kick back and everything and was almost indistinguishable from the real thing. We also learned radio procedure and topography and continued to get lectures everyday on military topics that we were tested on regularly. The other constant throughout the course were room inspections where every room had to be to a certain standard and all rooms had to be the same. It was so detailed that a shirt had to be folded into a 20x20 square and jackets 30x30 and every sock rolled a certain way, everything hung in the closet in the same order and way, boots all polished etc. There was a lot to do to keep your rooms in order.
The 2nd half of the course was all about preparing for our final week long field exercise. The final test is a 4 hour mission where we were given orders and took notes and then used those orders to analyze how we would conduct our mission and prepared orders to give to our 15 man section and then conducted the mission. That exercise was 15 four hour missions straight with no sleep and I was the 11th to go so I was pretty sleep fucked and physically and mentally exhausted. They have actors that help make the missions realistic and play their part as insurgents. My mission was to travel to an intersection, set up a vehicle check point with barrels and constantina wire and then stop and search a vehicle and its driver where we found a shotgun and then detained him. All the missions we also wore our tactical vest with extra ammo, helmet, ballistic glasses, back pack with rations and change of clothes and carried our rifles. It made you feel pretty bad ass shooting blanks and looking like a soldier but it was pretty heavy walking around with all that equipment at all times. Leading up to that we did practice missions 2 weeks earlier and one guy actually got bad hypothermia since we slept outside in the cold and wet and he had to be recoursed back to an earlier week. Over the time I was there we lost about 12 people to failures, injuries and voluntary releases.
Now I am on OJT (on the job training) with 400 tactical helicopter squadron in Borden 30min from my house. So far I just sit around but I will get to fly in some griffons this summer which is pretty cool. My next course starts in September for 3 months but this is a course just for pilots and we will live in a hotel so it will be much more relaxed then basic training where it was a mix of officer trades and I will have my computer and free time unlike what I just went through. I could talk more if anyone had any further questions they could PM me but it was the toughest, most stressful and most rewarding thing I have done so far.
