Outdoor Adventure Training Weekend from Hell
Alright, I was at cadets all weekend at a thing called OAT(see title for full name). It's a camping trip we do every year with Defiant, a corps from Cardinal(apparently where's everyone's the product of inbreeding, so says James). Ok, here we go.
I got up early Friday morning and headed down to Counnaught Ranges, where OAT would take place. OAT didn't actually start until 6:00 or something that evening, but I went for the advance party to get everything set up. We had loads of people on the advance party this year, even some Defiant people came down, so we finished early. The kinda things we had to do were get sleeping bags and ruck sacks from stores and get them ready for the cadets. I was in Ian's group and our job was to go into the field and set up everything. Part of Cameron's training required him to find the campsite on his own with a map and compass. I so proud because I found the campsite, not him. They were all walking around in the forest looking for a mark that marks where HQ is going to be. I was like, "What the hell, they're not going to set up HQ in the middle of the forest. Oh look, a clearing with a peg sticking up in the middle of it. Hmmm." So then we set up the Modular Tent and crap.
(ok, it's been alwhile since i typed this so i'm just going to sum up the weekend before i completely forget what happened)
K so, blah blah blah, we set up stuff. We went in the van and shoved people in there and this one guy was sitting against the dashboard between the two seats, and ian was up front, kneeling over him directing the driver. But kids aren't supposed to be riding in the back of a big empty van like that with no seatbelts, so when we saw someone coming up the road, Ian ducked and had his face right over Matt's crotch, so he started bobbing his head up and down, making it look like he was giving him a blow job. Other crazy things that happened in the were james on top of ian boucing up and down in the back, Sakar twisted a plastic bottle with it's cap on until it popped up and it was bouncing off the walls and yeah...much more.
So finally it was 7:30 and we all left on our hike. Us advance party people didn't have to carry our sacks but we had to be pointed vest people. So I had to walk up and down the line of people yelling at them to stay to the right and stay in their twos...didn't work out very well. Me and Ian were the only ones doing it and they wouldn't listen so I just got so frustrated that I went and walked beside Chris, who was supposed to be doing the same job as me, and Soph. Ian told me that if I didn't bitch at them, he'd bitch at me, but I just couldn't take it anymore. It was a long walk, but Cheif Tupin's boom box made the trip a bit more enjoyable.
So when we got there we were put into our tent groups. It went by rank this year, which meant that all us Petty Officers were in the same tent. That would be me, Soph, Zanna, Batty, this other really whiny girl who stole zanna's stuff, and Nat would join us in the morning because she had a basketball thign that night. But she went to the carp fair so we were mad and said we wouldn't talk to her. So yeah, our tent was already set up for us but me still had to help all the little people with their tents. We stayed up for a bit and brushed our teeth, and Soph and Zanna took a piss behind some trees...they were proud of themselves. So I finally got to sleep pretty early into the morning, I think...couldn't really tell what time it was.
SATURDAY MORNING!
YAY! Oh god, it sucks waking us to that happy cheerful voice of an officer. So we crawled out of our warm sleeping bags into the freezing morning air. The heads(out houses) were so far this year! 150m down the road, and that damn far to walk to take a piss in the morning. I used the head like any normal person would, but no, Soph had to do it NEXT to the head. Not inside, right next to it. It completely defeats the purpose of the heads! And when we got back, we got a delicious hay box breakfast. In other words, cold leftovers from the mess. Well at least the milk wasn't chunky...yet.
So for our classes as PO2s, we had to do taskings. Our PO group consisted of me, Zanna, Soph, Nat, Chris, Trevor, Brad, Batty and that whiny girl...and the French guy cuz he had to stick with Trev. He was a foreign exchanged student from France named Nichola. He didn't talk much. So anyway, basically, Sarah picked a leader, pulled us aside, agve us a task and we had to get the other PO2s to do it, as if they were our cadets. Brad went first and his tasking was to make a shit hole, aka lantrine, aka makeshift out house. But what we came up with was really a shit hole, that's all we did, find a hole and make it pretty by added sticks, saying it was a wall...but it wasn't, we all know it wasn't. My tasking was to make a game using stuff found in the woods. It was so stupid. I had a horrible tasking. We sat there, wrote down teh rules for man hunt, and called it survivor. There, that was our game. Next was Chris, he had to make a house with a window, door and that was wind and water proof. Our house was so awesome! We asked if we could seriously sleep in it, but they wouldn't let us. There was this swamping field of giant ferns and we picked those and plastered them all over the stick walls. It was great. I think it was Zanna who had the next task. We had to make a chair for every one of us, 10, and a table. Trevor came up with the brillant idea of stacking the sticks and sitting on them. Our table had four legs and everything too. It was AWEsome(that a joke that was going on all weekend. I don't know why, but randomly someone would say, "That AWEsome!" out of no where). So yeah, it became the official PO hang out. Nat joined us and we didn't not talk to her. Her task was to get a survival kit thingie together and she did it all by herself because we were all too tired and lazy by then to do it. Trevors task was to make an obstacle course. We had this cool web thingie and we had to pick people up and carry them through it. The whiny girls task was to make a meal, and we had to make a whole new chair and table, but we just used our own and Sarah borrowed Ian's comfy chair. While all those tasking were going on after the chair and table one, Sarah complained that we weren't creative enough in making our chairs and decided to show us up. She got Ian to help her and she was making a chair with four legs and everything. It took them a couple hours and they were so proud, Ian was going to sit on it and then...BANG! It broke and cit his back open. He had a pretty nasty gash on his back. So yeah, back to the meal. Stupid little cadet kids were invading our house and sitting in out seats and stealing our ferns. We had the meal set our on the table and we were done being evaluted for it when someone comes up, I forget who, and Chris yells, "THROW A MUSHROOM AT HIM!" So he grabs one of those giant mushroom pancakes and tosses it at this kid. Mushrooms were flying everywhere. it was crazy. Batty's task was then to make a stretcher, and when we were done we had to find Ian. He was dying somewhere in the forest. We made our stretcher hastily out of sticks and string. We found him lying face down in a bunch of moss. Zanna starting picking the moss and covering him with it. They were putting it on his face an everything. It was awesome, looked like he had been that we years. Too bad no one had a camera. So yeah, we rolled him on the painful stretcher that was falling apart and lugged him up the hill. It was falling apart so bad. Then our taskings were done.
We spent the rest of the day just hangin out at our PO hut, and the PO1s and Chiefs came and joined us too. Sophie had brought a behemoth bag of marshmallows so we shared those. People started throwing them into each others mouths and stuff. It got out of hand after a while. There were marshmallows everywhere and blah. So then we had some delicious IMPs for supper. I'm being sarcastic if you can't tell. Those things are so gross. They're seriously like 30 years old. There little packs they boil until they're cooked, and the stuff inside is crap. The mac and cheese and is like a thick paste and there's a whole bunch of other stuff. I force it down because I know by now that one those weekend you have to keep your strength up. That good part of IMPs is all the other stuff inside the bags. It's like Christmas, I swear. There's like Kitkat chunkies and ritz crackers and life savers and gum. Everyone trades their stuff off. And you always keep the juice powder! It's a whole lot better than water. And in the breaksfast ones it's good to take the cereal, makes a good snack later on. ANYWAYS...
So, skipping ahead to Operation Northern Lights. That's what they called it this year. For the past years, our night exercises have been playing capture the flag at midnight. It's really fun, oh yeah, and we have to call it "Retrieve the Doiley" because capture the flag is too agressive. This year, we pretty much did the same thing, but they changed it around a bit. This year the divided us by our ranks and mades us go one at a time. Officers would be out in the field and if they spotted you, you were out. The object of the was to get the glow stick. The OCs were so dumb. They went down the field in a giant group of like, 20 people. While we were waiting, Me, Chris, Nat, Soph and Jess were laying on top of one another talking. Nat started singing and everyone went silent, it was funny. She's so good, everyone crowded around to hear her sing. Then we started giving each other piggy back rides and catching each other. Chris intentionly dropped me into a group of LCs. -_-' So yeah, then it was our turn. All the officers were at the end of the field, so it was easy to move around. Me, Soph and Jess stuck together and we got so close that we could see it. Soph ran like mad toward the glow stick as a distraction while me and Jess crept closer and fast as we could without giving away our position. You could see the officer's heads sticking up out of the grass at the end of the field. We knew they could see us. I was just about to make my move when the game ended and an officer found us. Later we found out the no one had actually got the glow stick, but Trevor had gotten so close. He had been crawling in a ditch 2 feet underground. That's AWEsome! When we got back to the meeting place dealie, we were in for it.
So we sat down and waited for them to start up a normal game of retrieve the doiley, when all of a sudden, we're called over by the chiefs. They make us fall in and double(run) back to HQ. Then they made us pack up all our kit except our sleeping bags. When we fell in again, they confinscated our flashlights. They seemed really mad at us. I remember then that last year, the POs and disappeared for awhile, so I assumed this was that same thing. They gave us each a nickname on a piece of tape that we had to put on ourselves. The names went as such:
Me-Mouse
Soph-Pip Squeak
Nat-Browner
Chris-Keener
Brad-Stoner
Matt-Crack Head
Cameron-Spaniel
Pencil-Wiener
Trevor-Pansy Boy
I forget Ryan's, the whiney girl's and Batty had one but she fell out and refused to do the hike. They also gave us these little hats we had to wear. They were little butter tart aluminum foil things with string attached to them. They told us that for every one we lost, we had to do 20 push-ups. THey gave me the damn radio. I was the only one allowed to use it. I was so scared by now, I didn't know what to expect. They also gave us a riddle. We got it right away though. I asked if it was a paragraph with no Es, and there was a long pause, and then James said no, but we were right. So the next couple of hours consisted of us walking back anf forth down the roads, every now and then having to get down to do 10 or so push-ups on the gravel road. It hurts the hands A LOT. And with the packs on, it was hell. Brad had to carry a board with the principles of leadership on it, and we had to read it without our flashlights together. It was diffcult, even with the light of the moon. I had to tell everyone when to stop and where to turn around and when to go again, and it sucked. I was screamed at if I didn't relay a message, even if Sarah was right there and they all heard her, if she spoke into the radio, I had to scream it out. Apparently the reason we had to go back and forth like that was because there was a cadet missing and the could've get too far from HQ. Once they found him, Sarah stopped making us turn around all the time. Instead, she made us carry her on the stretcher, but at least we were going somewhere now. We finally march out into a clearing and we were allowed to put our packs down. Unfortunately, they shoved us into a porta-potie, every single one of us. They had to hold someone small up on people's shoulders. Outside, they were banging on the walls and shaking it while we had to sing Heart of Oak, and the non-existent 3rd verse. When we finally got out, our packs were gone. By now, everyone was saying the same thing. "This is fucking bull shit." "I am so quitting." We had to go find our packs. But then Nat fainted. She's hypo-something rather, and she was out of pills. She couldn't breath out at all. It was so scary. While Zanna and Ian tried to help her, Sarah talked to us all about what we were doing. She gave up the act, told us they were never mad at us. We were supposed to gte a lesson in life out of it, and you may think I'm, crazy, but I did. You can't see it unless you really go through something like that. You really know what it feels like to be treated like shit, and it sorta changes your outlook. Anyways, so then we went back to HQ, Nat was fine, and we went to bed. Oh yeah, and before, another thing that happened was we had to arrange ourselves into a sentence according to the letters on our hats, but we had lost a lot of hats, so Sarah put us into order and we had to scream out the sentence many times. It was: "DUMBASSES R US!" Yeah...pretty stupid.
Ok, so we got up, ate some IMPs, got all the stuff packed up. Our fort had wilted over night, all the leaves were dried up and dead, it was depressing. So yeah, HQ was busy getting everything taken down and loaded. Did garbage sweeps and everything else. It was a long walk back. It was nice to finally get home. There, my tale is finally over. Farewell!
I got up early Friday morning and headed down to Counnaught Ranges, where OAT would take place. OAT didn't actually start until 6:00 or something that evening, but I went for the advance party to get everything set up. We had loads of people on the advance party this year, even some Defiant people came down, so we finished early. The kinda things we had to do were get sleeping bags and ruck sacks from stores and get them ready for the cadets. I was in Ian's group and our job was to go into the field and set up everything. Part of Cameron's training required him to find the campsite on his own with a map and compass. I so proud because I found the campsite, not him. They were all walking around in the forest looking for a mark that marks where HQ is going to be. I was like, "What the hell, they're not going to set up HQ in the middle of the forest. Oh look, a clearing with a peg sticking up in the middle of it. Hmmm." So then we set up the Modular Tent and crap.
(ok, it's been alwhile since i typed this so i'm just going to sum up the weekend before i completely forget what happened)
K so, blah blah blah, we set up stuff. We went in the van and shoved people in there and this one guy was sitting against the dashboard between the two seats, and ian was up front, kneeling over him directing the driver. But kids aren't supposed to be riding in the back of a big empty van like that with no seatbelts, so when we saw someone coming up the road, Ian ducked and had his face right over Matt's crotch, so he started bobbing his head up and down, making it look like he was giving him a blow job. Other crazy things that happened in the were james on top of ian boucing up and down in the back, Sakar twisted a plastic bottle with it's cap on until it popped up and it was bouncing off the walls and yeah...much more.
So finally it was 7:30 and we all left on our hike. Us advance party people didn't have to carry our sacks but we had to be pointed vest people. So I had to walk up and down the line of people yelling at them to stay to the right and stay in their twos...didn't work out very well. Me and Ian were the only ones doing it and they wouldn't listen so I just got so frustrated that I went and walked beside Chris, who was supposed to be doing the same job as me, and Soph. Ian told me that if I didn't bitch at them, he'd bitch at me, but I just couldn't take it anymore. It was a long walk, but Cheif Tupin's boom box made the trip a bit more enjoyable.
So when we got there we were put into our tent groups. It went by rank this year, which meant that all us Petty Officers were in the same tent. That would be me, Soph, Zanna, Batty, this other really whiny girl who stole zanna's stuff, and Nat would join us in the morning because she had a basketball thign that night. But she went to the carp fair so we were mad and said we wouldn't talk to her. So yeah, our tent was already set up for us but me still had to help all the little people with their tents. We stayed up for a bit and brushed our teeth, and Soph and Zanna took a piss behind some trees...they were proud of themselves. So I finally got to sleep pretty early into the morning, I think...couldn't really tell what time it was.
SATURDAY MORNING!
YAY! Oh god, it sucks waking us to that happy cheerful voice of an officer. So we crawled out of our warm sleeping bags into the freezing morning air. The heads(out houses) were so far this year! 150m down the road, and that damn far to walk to take a piss in the morning. I used the head like any normal person would, but no, Soph had to do it NEXT to the head. Not inside, right next to it. It completely defeats the purpose of the heads! And when we got back, we got a delicious hay box breakfast. In other words, cold leftovers from the mess. Well at least the milk wasn't chunky...yet.
So for our classes as PO2s, we had to do taskings. Our PO group consisted of me, Zanna, Soph, Nat, Chris, Trevor, Brad, Batty and that whiny girl...and the French guy cuz he had to stick with Trev. He was a foreign exchanged student from France named Nichola. He didn't talk much. So anyway, basically, Sarah picked a leader, pulled us aside, agve us a task and we had to get the other PO2s to do it, as if they were our cadets. Brad went first and his tasking was to make a shit hole, aka lantrine, aka makeshift out house. But what we came up with was really a shit hole, that's all we did, find a hole and make it pretty by added sticks, saying it was a wall...but it wasn't, we all know it wasn't. My tasking was to make a game using stuff found in the woods. It was so stupid. I had a horrible tasking. We sat there, wrote down teh rules for man hunt, and called it survivor. There, that was our game. Next was Chris, he had to make a house with a window, door and that was wind and water proof. Our house was so awesome! We asked if we could seriously sleep in it, but they wouldn't let us. There was this swamping field of giant ferns and we picked those and plastered them all over the stick walls. It was great. I think it was Zanna who had the next task. We had to make a chair for every one of us, 10, and a table. Trevor came up with the brillant idea of stacking the sticks and sitting on them. Our table had four legs and everything too. It was AWEsome(that a joke that was going on all weekend. I don't know why, but randomly someone would say, "That AWEsome!" out of no where). So yeah, it became the official PO hang out. Nat joined us and we didn't not talk to her. Her task was to get a survival kit thingie together and she did it all by herself because we were all too tired and lazy by then to do it. Trevors task was to make an obstacle course. We had this cool web thingie and we had to pick people up and carry them through it. The whiny girls task was to make a meal, and we had to make a whole new chair and table, but we just used our own and Sarah borrowed Ian's comfy chair. While all those tasking were going on after the chair and table one, Sarah complained that we weren't creative enough in making our chairs and decided to show us up. She got Ian to help her and she was making a chair with four legs and everything. It took them a couple hours and they were so proud, Ian was going to sit on it and then...BANG! It broke and cit his back open. He had a pretty nasty gash on his back. So yeah, back to the meal. Stupid little cadet kids were invading our house and sitting in out seats and stealing our ferns. We had the meal set our on the table and we were done being evaluted for it when someone comes up, I forget who, and Chris yells, "THROW A MUSHROOM AT HIM!" So he grabs one of those giant mushroom pancakes and tosses it at this kid. Mushrooms were flying everywhere. it was crazy. Batty's task was then to make a stretcher, and when we were done we had to find Ian. He was dying somewhere in the forest. We made our stretcher hastily out of sticks and string. We found him lying face down in a bunch of moss. Zanna starting picking the moss and covering him with it. They were putting it on his face an everything. It was awesome, looked like he had been that we years. Too bad no one had a camera. So yeah, we rolled him on the painful stretcher that was falling apart and lugged him up the hill. It was falling apart so bad. Then our taskings were done.
We spent the rest of the day just hangin out at our PO hut, and the PO1s and Chiefs came and joined us too. Sophie had brought a behemoth bag of marshmallows so we shared those. People started throwing them into each others mouths and stuff. It got out of hand after a while. There were marshmallows everywhere and blah. So then we had some delicious IMPs for supper. I'm being sarcastic if you can't tell. Those things are so gross. They're seriously like 30 years old. There little packs they boil until they're cooked, and the stuff inside is crap. The mac and cheese and is like a thick paste and there's a whole bunch of other stuff. I force it down because I know by now that one those weekend you have to keep your strength up. That good part of IMPs is all the other stuff inside the bags. It's like Christmas, I swear. There's like Kitkat chunkies and ritz crackers and life savers and gum. Everyone trades their stuff off. And you always keep the juice powder! It's a whole lot better than water. And in the breaksfast ones it's good to take the cereal, makes a good snack later on. ANYWAYS...
So, skipping ahead to Operation Northern Lights. That's what they called it this year. For the past years, our night exercises have been playing capture the flag at midnight. It's really fun, oh yeah, and we have to call it "Retrieve the Doiley" because capture the flag is too agressive. This year, we pretty much did the same thing, but they changed it around a bit. This year the divided us by our ranks and mades us go one at a time. Officers would be out in the field and if they spotted you, you were out. The object of the was to get the glow stick. The OCs were so dumb. They went down the field in a giant group of like, 20 people. While we were waiting, Me, Chris, Nat, Soph and Jess were laying on top of one another talking. Nat started singing and everyone went silent, it was funny. She's so good, everyone crowded around to hear her sing. Then we started giving each other piggy back rides and catching each other. Chris intentionly dropped me into a group of LCs. -_-' So yeah, then it was our turn. All the officers were at the end of the field, so it was easy to move around. Me, Soph and Jess stuck together and we got so close that we could see it. Soph ran like mad toward the glow stick as a distraction while me and Jess crept closer and fast as we could without giving away our position. You could see the officer's heads sticking up out of the grass at the end of the field. We knew they could see us. I was just about to make my move when the game ended and an officer found us. Later we found out the no one had actually got the glow stick, but Trevor had gotten so close. He had been crawling in a ditch 2 feet underground. That's AWEsome! When we got back to the meeting place dealie, we were in for it.
So we sat down and waited for them to start up a normal game of retrieve the doiley, when all of a sudden, we're called over by the chiefs. They make us fall in and double(run) back to HQ. Then they made us pack up all our kit except our sleeping bags. When we fell in again, they confinscated our flashlights. They seemed really mad at us. I remember then that last year, the POs and disappeared for awhile, so I assumed this was that same thing. They gave us each a nickname on a piece of tape that we had to put on ourselves. The names went as such:
Me-Mouse
Soph-Pip Squeak
Nat-Browner
Chris-Keener
Brad-Stoner
Matt-Crack Head
Cameron-Spaniel
Pencil-Wiener
Trevor-Pansy Boy
I forget Ryan's, the whiney girl's and Batty had one but she fell out and refused to do the hike. They also gave us these little hats we had to wear. They were little butter tart aluminum foil things with string attached to them. They told us that for every one we lost, we had to do 20 push-ups. THey gave me the damn radio. I was the only one allowed to use it. I was so scared by now, I didn't know what to expect. They also gave us a riddle. We got it right away though. I asked if it was a paragraph with no Es, and there was a long pause, and then James said no, but we were right. So the next couple of hours consisted of us walking back anf forth down the roads, every now and then having to get down to do 10 or so push-ups on the gravel road. It hurts the hands A LOT. And with the packs on, it was hell. Brad had to carry a board with the principles of leadership on it, and we had to read it without our flashlights together. It was diffcult, even with the light of the moon. I had to tell everyone when to stop and where to turn around and when to go again, and it sucked. I was screamed at if I didn't relay a message, even if Sarah was right there and they all heard her, if she spoke into the radio, I had to scream it out. Apparently the reason we had to go back and forth like that was because there was a cadet missing and the could've get too far from HQ. Once they found him, Sarah stopped making us turn around all the time. Instead, she made us carry her on the stretcher, but at least we were going somewhere now. We finally march out into a clearing and we were allowed to put our packs down. Unfortunately, they shoved us into a porta-potie, every single one of us. They had to hold someone small up on people's shoulders. Outside, they were banging on the walls and shaking it while we had to sing Heart of Oak, and the non-existent 3rd verse. When we finally got out, our packs were gone. By now, everyone was saying the same thing. "This is fucking bull shit." "I am so quitting." We had to go find our packs. But then Nat fainted. She's hypo-something rather, and she was out of pills. She couldn't breath out at all. It was so scary. While Zanna and Ian tried to help her, Sarah talked to us all about what we were doing. She gave up the act, told us they were never mad at us. We were supposed to gte a lesson in life out of it, and you may think I'm, crazy, but I did. You can't see it unless you really go through something like that. You really know what it feels like to be treated like shit, and it sorta changes your outlook. Anyways, so then we went back to HQ, Nat was fine, and we went to bed. Oh yeah, and before, another thing that happened was we had to arrange ourselves into a sentence according to the letters on our hats, but we had lost a lot of hats, so Sarah put us into order and we had to scream out the sentence many times. It was: "DUMBASSES R US!" Yeah...pretty stupid.
Ok, so we got up, ate some IMPs, got all the stuff packed up. Our fort had wilted over night, all the leaves were dried up and dead, it was depressing. So yeah, HQ was busy getting everything taken down and loaded. Did garbage sweeps and everything else. It was a long walk back. It was nice to finally get home. There, my tale is finally over. Farewell!