The trip to Saint-Jean was very relaxing. The latest I had to report on was Monday morning but of course most people either arrived on Saturday or Sunday. I left Ottawa Saturday morning to have plenty of time settling in and getting to know my new platoon friends. The drive was only about 2 hours. I took this photo on the highway between Montreal and St-Jean:
Here is a note from my boot camp diary: Saturday, Sep 10, 2005. "I arrived in St-Jean at 0920 hours. On arrival, they immediately confiscated my UMM magazine and some caffeine pills, probably more pills will be taken away tomorrow (I came prepared with pain killers, uppers, vitamins, etc). Instructions on where to report on arrival were not clear so it was a big cluster f*ck. They finally located my platoon commander and I was shown to my room. My platoon consists of 41 people, mainly guys (future pilots). We are still in civilian clothes but are already required to march properly (which looks so unsynchronized and ridiculous). The "platoon commander", by the way, is one of the recruits. He was the first one to arrive and that's why he got so "lucky" to get this responsibility. This is a position that rotates between platoon members. You get to command the whole platoon for the full day. In this case, however, he got stuck doing the job for 3 days, just because it was start of the course and there was a lot of confusion." Here we are lined up in the basement (notice we still have hair on our heads):
Food is very good and refills are allowed on anything, including main dishes and deserts. My room is the last one in the pod (imagine a small apartment with 6 private rooms, one shared washroom and a small common room which you can see in the picture below). The rooms are so tiny there is barely any space for my suitcase. However, the smaller the room the less stuff to clean for inspections so I'm not complaining ;)
And here is a picture of the mess:
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6 comments:
No, they were not taking the phones away while we were in training.
Oh yes, be patient. They are so busy all they can think of is sleep (which they don't get much of during training like this).
Hello Martin,
I see in the pictures that there are some women also. I was wondering if they were well treated, if they had difficulties to fit in since the majority are guys.
Yes, majority are men but to my surprise (and delight) they were very well treated. If they had any issues with the fact of being outnumbered by men it was not obvious. The ones I knew were quite happy and integrated with the team quite well.
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