Dear Editor

I must tell you that since I got laser eye surgery done last month, you have gotten quite a bit uglier.

Your Secret Admirer

Well perhaps they made a mistake with the eye surgery because, if I do say so myself, I am a VERY handsome wolf-beast.

Dear Editor:

I was at a nude wedding last week and me and my ‘egg roll’ were within 1/2-inch of being the best man.

Chen Kenichi
Iron Chef Chinese

Dear Snoot: Whenever I sit down I get shooting pains through my butt. Is there any kind of cure or ointment I could take for this? – Ruffled Rump

For the last time, Manny, stop sitting on cactus in the field, damn it!

Dear Snoot: Last month a friend came back home after a few months of being away. He was very upset with his new job and didn’t really want to drive back to Ontario. His incessant complaining drives me crazy but I want to be a good friend. What should I tell him? – Mini Me

This PERSON should never have left the Island as it is the centre of the universe and anyone who leaves must be mentally challenged and the Air Force to boot!!

Dear Snoot: Recently my friends seem to be ignoring me a lot more. In the past they would call me to go out all the time or they would come over to my house and we would have a few laughs. Now to have a social life I am forced to park outside their houses and wait for them to leave so I can join in the fun. At the pub when I talk to them they say the music to too loud to hear me but even outside we have the same problem. What should I do? Should I continue to stalk them or just burn their houses down and forget about it? – Ralphy

Walts… er Ralphy, just accept the fact and move on. No one likes a whiner.

FOO Tech Course 0401
by Myles Mansell

Shilo, MB – This summer WATC ran a FOO Tech course. Some think that it wasn’t the right course to run but that is neither here nor there. It was run in the 1 RCHA lines, utilizing the IFT they possess. I was on this course along with a few other Five Fielders; in fact, save the 1 RCHA instructors, the whole course was Five Field. MBdr Chris Shillington, Bdr Brian Walts, Bdr Richelle Orze and Bdr Kelly Perpeluk were the other candidates as well as our very own MBdr Darrell Stubbington, the shining light of reason, as the only Reserve Instructor.

The course started on the 12th of July, running for 14 days of training. Most of the time was spent in the IFT but there were also several classroom lectures along with a few deployments to the field. Being in the IFT is a great assist to a soldier’s learning. You can have the IFT Operator make up several scenarios that let you call in fast air attacks, have moving convoys to shoot at, all tied in with all kinds of weather and wind factors. Since it is all electronic there is no worry about the cost or availability of the rounds. You also have all other types of rounds at your disposal that would not be allowed or available in normal situations.

We were housed in L103 which brought back memories of Basic for Shillington and myself. Up on the 3rd floor it was scorching hot and there was no sign of abatement. Putting in TSRs for fans was priority but it was apparently damnation without relief. The hot, prairie breeze blew through the barracks and made being in Shilo for 2 1/2 weeks even more unbearable. During the day we escaped the beating sun by retreating to the solace of the 1 RCHA lines and the glory of air-conditioning.

Finally it was the end of course and we were deploying to the field. Shillington and I were designated ICs for Call signs 11 and 12. 12, me, led the convoy out into the field. We deployed in Deilenhoffen, just south of Round Plain. Misjudging my map slightly we overshot the turn to head off-road. As we backtracked I dismounted and ran ahead of the vehicles to guide them in. The most we had to go was about 900 meters. Small hills, or mountains to prairie folk, are all that lay ahead of us and I wasn’t totally sure of a good OP base. In our convoy we had the 2 OP parties, the Instructors’ vehicle, and the Firefighter ML. I crested a small hill and brought the vehicles into a bit of a tabletop. I could see we were within 400m of the grid I was given and that was within my orders parameters. As I decided we could drive a little ways farther I was about to order the trucks down a steep, but do-able, hill I was shut down by the DS. Apparently I had led the vehicles on the wrong way in and now I was going to have some issues. 200 or so meters from this position were some blue rockets and that was our grid; as for my punishment we had to dismount where we were and move all our stores by foot up to our new home for the next 24 hours.

The two OPs were collocated on a inside lip of a light depression on the top of a hill. Visibility was excellent over Round Plain and the tree that was to be named ‘Killer Tree’. Several hulks were out in the Plain which were excellent targets but due to the new safety circle, a whooping 800m for all weapons, were unable to be fired at. Stupid new CIG directive. My first target was one of those hulks but since we couldn’t do any drop corrections we cancelled that target and MBdr Stubbington gave me ‘3 stripes on hill’. Now it got interesting. First off, unbeknownst to me, I had picked the wrong grid on the map and was off a ways. There were 2 ridges, one close and one far, which sadly I picked the close one. As I started to adjust onto the target I became very aware of the dead ground that was out there. Then we had a strange occurrence. One round fell right of the target so I gave a left correction, and it fell on the other side of the target. Hmmm, a little too far apparently. I gave a right correction to get on for line and the round went farther left. WTF! Those guys at the guns asleep?! We carried on with the mission and I was shut down for wasting rounds. C’est la vie; but later Bdr Orza had the same problem which we diagnosed to be a problem with one of the guns. Damn B Bty.

The rest of the day carried on well enough and we went to ground around 2330. Sentry. Shillington took charge and tried to work out some kind of weird, drug induced, overlapping sentry shift. Only the criminally insane would have been able to figure it out; even Shillington couldn’t. So we made a quick COMMAND decision that him and I would have the first 3 1/2 hour shift and we would wake up two others to do the other 3 hour shift before reveille. 3 1/2 hours? Sigh. Ah well.

The next morning brought promise that the exercise would soon be over and we would be able to leave the geographical abomination that was Shilo; all that was left was Fire Planning. Bdr Walts and I were up first and got off our plan pretty much without a hitch. We were done. We could pack up, fill in the trench and get ready to go. Once we had finished we sat on the ridge and watched the rest of the shoot. OIC WATC decided to make an appearance out at the OP so it soon became a dog and pony show up at our beloved ridge. On that note Murphy showed up with all his wacky laws and decided that at that moment 11 would lose comms. A gong show erupted and within fifteen minutes comms was restored but not without a small loss of face for the course staff.

Once all is said and done we return to camp. As we went through our kit back at M102 we found we were missing an antennae for the man-pack and were contemplating trying to put the radio back into stores on the QT. Alas, it didn’t work out that way and we had a nice kit inspection on the parade square inside M102… are we recruits? Its an antennae!! In neat, perfect lines we had all our kit, webbing, weapon, helmet et cetera and then the staff didn’t even look at it – PACK IT UP – They were going to take us back out to the field and dig up our old trenches. At the last minute they cancelled that and just chewed us out for a bit.

Thus ends my FOO Tech Course. In summary a good course if you enjoy the OP; next year the course has expanded to a 5 week go as opposed to 2 and a half weeks.

From Gagetown, With Love
by Boris Sark

So there I was getting up at “O-dark-early” in this lovely place called Gagetown. It was a regular Monday morning around 6:30am when my name was called out by the sergeant in charge of morning PT that day. The taking of attendance was a regular thing though it was redundant at times. I mean where else would one rather be but out on the track at 06:30 on a Monday waiting to be beasted by a senior NCO who’s been running for 15+ years with the army…

We started off easy, a quick run for what we later calculated to be about 6+KM or so. The funniest part was that only 2 or 3 reservists kept up to the regular force runners, the others did their crawl on their own time. After this jog we talked about making up t-shirts that would say “MO-POWER” as a motivation to all the reservists of W-battery who actually outnumbered the regs by a 2-1 ratio. (the shirts never got made, but the joke still is among those that were there in the rainy and warm days of the summer of 2004).

As life went on, PT runs became easier even for those who aren’t made to be runners, the names of those I cannot recall. The working days in garrison were spent prepping for the field exercises that were guaranteed on a weekly basis. There were troops who would spend more than half their contract time in the field, and boy was that great. Most reservists get shocked when they think “… Oh God, five days in the field, how am I gonna do this?”

But the simple fact is, you get used to it, after your first 4 day exercise one gets immune to being in the muggy field where nature can’t decide weather to rain or shine on you, and eventually everyone learned how to deal with the field.

Also one always knew that regs don’t like missing their weekends, so one was guaranteed to be out on Monday back by Friday, and the weekends were ours to do as we pleased. Fridays were usually quite the same in nature, we get back to D-25 have a quick clean-up shower and crack a bottle of beer to heal the accumulated mental and physical wounds. A lot of “Ungodly” deeds were done on weekends, but who can help the fact that Fredericton’s female population was so friendly to the boys from BC…

Saturdays were movie days, until it got dark and the booze was on peoples’ minds once again… Sundays were recuperation days, go to church, get ready for Monday and plan the coming up weekend. On that note I can add that those of us with the soul of an adventurer decide to go as far east as this country spreads, and managed to see the “Tall Ships” in Halifax as well as to visit some old members of this regiment who now serve out in Greenwood, Nova Scotia.

Out of all the experiences of the summer of 2004, I can only describe mine as the best time away from home on tasking. Good friends were made out there, a few great minds discovered, and a lot of gun drill practiced by people like myself who really needed it. And now it’s over and the memories of the people and good times are only captured on pictures and in the minds of those who got to “serve the weapons of W Battery from July 2004 to August 2004.”

UBIQUE