Diss Con 6 - Hillocks

Strategy for today was:
7.15AM - Spin Class
6PM - an hour on the bike at home.

Did the spinning...about which the only real thing to say any more is a) Freakin' ow! and b) Christ, they have a crappy taste in music...

Then back for a quick shower, a taking of blood - 6.2 this morning...hmm...and a weigh-in.

15 stone 12.25. Exactly the same as last week.
It would be colossal error, though, to assume this represented a flatline, a state of no movement. What this actually represents is a hillock. If you take a wave form, it'll go up, and then it'll come down again. If you take a snapshot at the start, and another at the point when it returns to its previous level, that's the situation we find ourselves in today. For most of this week, when I've done random weigh-ins, I've been 16 stone. At one point this week, I was 16 stone 6 pounds...So the apparent stasis is evidence of an early loosening of control - Indian meal, Chinese takeaway etc - followed by a rigid rod-of-iron get-the-Hell-back-down wrestling over the course of really just the last couple of days. All of which gives me a good platform to go further down if I maintain Diss Con status over the next six days (and beyond!).

Grabbed a quick bite of breakfast (previously negated by the ass-numbing pedal-power of the spin class), then was out the door, up to Sennybridge, near the Brecon Beacons, to play with the RAF. As it happened, I was able to play with the RAF, Navy and Her Majesty's Army to boot (army...boot, see what I...oh never mind...). They were all there, as far as could be ascertained, to torture young people.

Never let it be said that I'm averse to a day spent torturing young people.

I was there to see the final test of a bunch of young engineering officer cadets from across the three services. Over the course of five days, that includes:
1 eleven kilometre night navigation-hike (no GPS, thankyouverymuch) over boggy, marshy, hilly, freezing hillocks.
1 three day round robin of brutally demanding tests and situations, with only the sleep they can snatch.
Over 90 kilometres of 'yomping' - which is like marching, only over the aforementioned 'evil bastard' terrain.
A final assault course.
A final, competitive hill climb.
Annnnd a final sketch show, where they attempt to find the funny about this positively barbarian practise.

Today, we casual observers (there were a crowd of us), travelled around in a minibus to observe these poor, tragic youngsters. The first task we dropped in on was a simulated helicopter evacuation, with two live casualties and one dead. The young cadets had to take a bunch of co-ordinates, correlate them on a map, then split into two teams, grab stretchers and run up and down hillocks, trying to find two 'casualties' and a thirteen stone dummy dead man.
As the teams disappeared from view, the officer who set the task pointed out to us where the casualties were.
"There's one just down the bottom of this hillock," he explained, "and one over there-" he pointed down to a riverbank on the left.
"Really?" several of us said simultaneously. "Then...erm...why are both teams hiking up that hill over there...?" Two teams of three were disappearing over a distant hill..."
"Time to move on," said our guide-sergeant quickly.

Next, we moved on to a purely intellectual challenge - a structured debate on the future of the Trident nuclear deterrant. In a small, 12x12 tent, where a new team had been living, on and off, since Sunday. In, very often, the pissing-down rain.

Nose hair is a strange evolutionary gift. If you want to get rid of yours, don't bother with tweezers, or clippers, or any of that palaver. Just spend an hour in a 12x12 tent where 10 young steaming, soaking squaddies have been living in the pissing-down-rain for three days.

Their debating skills were pretty good, though not sparkling...but then again, they hadn't slept for days, had yomped innumerable miles, and, on the task before this, had been creating a multigym from nature at 4.15AM. As we watched them, it began to piss down again.

We left them, all bright-eyed with hysteria and sleep deprivation, and went for lunch.
Everything in me pretty much expected to be greeted by three Masterchef contestants on their semi-final...which is proof of nothing except that I've watched too many cooking shows - it's the culinary equivalent of the Friends gag where after watching too much porn, the guys are surprised when the pizza delivery girl...jussssst delivered the pizza.

In place of a three course culinary banquet, we got a small bowl of a kind of chilli - pasta shells with red kidney beans and mince. Basic squaddie-fodder, in other words.

When we got back on the bus, our guide apologised for not being available for interview over the mincefest. He explained -
"Erm...you may be aware that there's actually a live firing range in the middle of this 12 acre expanse of hillocks." We were - avoiding thefuck out of it had been part of our safety briefing before they allowed us onto the minibuses.
"You're also aware that all the teams have to yomp from exercise to exercise, without GPS," he added. Yep, we were aware of that too.
"One of the teams has apparently...erm...gone a bit wrong, and yomped into the live firing range. They've bivouac'ed down and gone to sleep. We've had to suspend the exercise for the time being."
As it turned out, the task they were taking us to wasn't suspended for long. We turned up at what looked like a van.

It was a van. As it turned out, the team who were supposed to do this challenge hadn't arrived yet - they'd been suspended. In the meantime, the officer in charge of the task gave us a walk-through.
"They'll come up here and have a five minute briefing about mines. There's gonna be a 'new kind of mine' somewhere in a clearing through the woods. They have to get it. Before they can do that though, there'll be a flash-bang and a smoke bomb," he said as an opening gambit. "The two people in the front of the van will go mad, screaming. They've been 'wounded by an IED - that's a roadside bomb to you," he added with a twinkle.
"The cadets will have to triage them at the roadside. One of them will start screaming about Mike, where's Mike. Normally, it takes them a minute or so, they open the back of the van, and there's Mike, with a sucking chest wound, as though he's been shot. More triage. They then have to get their three casualties to an evac zone." He grinned.
"That's just the beginning," he said.
"Then they have to go through the mud puddle here, and into the woods. Follow me..." We did. The path the cadets would take was ribboned off.
"Now...we'll be putting pressure on them to get their casualties to the evac zone. Which means they probably won't see the first tripwire." He grinned again. "The tripwire will launch a firework. If they launch that, the person who gets it will have had their leg blown off. One more casualty. Normally, that makes them proceed with caution....so they tend to see and avoid the second tripwire. If they don't...oh dear...that's another leg. Follow me..."
We goggled at him, and walked, very cautiously, in his footsteps.
"Then they come to this open field," he said, like a magician claiming he had nothing up his sleeves.
"Then we let off another smoke bomb, there's a call of 'gas, gas, gas!' and they have to scramble to a crate of gas masks and get them on. now they have limited vision, and limited communication potential...and possibly two of them only have one leg...Now they have to go looking for mines." He grinned again.
"You're gonna like this bit," he promised.
"What?" I thought, "garrotting-wire at the far end of the field?"
"They're looking for big white blocks of polystyrene, with 'MINE' written on it in big, black letters," he said.
"What they won't be looking for is these..." he said, holding up what turned out to be a fake mine filled with white powder and a CO2 cannister. "Step on one of these...and you lose a leg," he said. Grinning. "These are hidden all the way around the exit."
"Hmm...not far wrong then..." I thought to myself.
"Then there's a bit more forest...but with a wire-maze in it," he added. "Got to go through there on your belt-buckles. Which means they're gonna have to go verrrry carefully, cos there's another 16 of these hidden there. Same deal - trigger one of these, lose a leg."
Many of us were laughing now at the absurdity of it all. In the real world of course, this would mean death, bone, blood and carnage, coming to young squaddies.
"That's it - after that it should be straightforward," he said.
The team had arrived during our walk-through, and we got a handful of minutes to talk to them before the mayhem began. Turns out they had started out as a team of nine. Now there were four. They'd also been extra late because they'd yomped an extra 10 kilometres in the wrong direction, and had to yomp all the way back. They were exhausted and blistered and down.

And that was before they entered the Maze of Death.

As it happened, when it all kicked off, they didn't find Mike at all, ran through both tripwires, lost a third leg in the wire maze....They were down to four legs between the four of them when we made our move and left them to it...

Came home, biked my ass off, or at least biked the pasta off my ass. And on we go. Diss Con 5 tomorrow - heavy exercise day. Thursday has rather opened up, as I'm not going up to the folks' place any more. But today has really put the whole thing into some kind of context for me - my own trials, tribulations and efforts are frankly utterly mediocre...

There are still about 200 squaddies up on Sennybridge right now, doing complex, exhausting things in the dead of night. I'd rather be a Disappearing Man than one of them any freaking day...