First of all, enjoy the bike or jeep course at SOT. There won't
be much harassment there. Once you are in SMI, prepared for PT
exercise which involves power PT, animal PT, fast march, your bread
and butter recce (all sorts of it). Also included will be
navigation and operation exercise. There will also be lots of map
work. Depending on your luck, you could even turn operational by
participating in other unit exercise. I had my last stage of
training in Thailand where there was a reservist armour battalion
ready to pounce on us. Following that, you will recieve your jungle
hats either from the instructor or from your S2. Anyway, just keep
your chin up. Your mental power is far more stronger than you
think. Think positive and all will go well, afterall no training
will last forever.
There are some items to bring along for your course:
1) OHP markers (non permanent)
2) survival kit in a small plastic box (sewing kit, fishing line,
small watch compass, safety pins, waterproof match, small mirror,
fish hooks, comdoms, water purifying tablets, small surgical blades
etc)
3) pace counter (if you hate tying knots for navigation)
4) silva compass (even if you are not TC or DY)
5) lots of black tape
6) tatical torchlight (tape up the lens, so that only a small hole
remains)
7) ranger eye (get some of those self-luminous strip to sew on the
back of your jockey cap)
camouflage stick or
cream
9) scarf
10) gloves (half finger)
11) extra water bottles
Items (1-10) should be part of your SBO. Do cultivate the habit to
secure every of your items especially the optics and signal
equipment if you don't want to sign 1206. Silence all moving parts
as sound invites enemies. Use comscord to tie the lens of NVGs to
its main body before move out.
During the course when moving out for exercise or training, it is
almost exclusively FBO. With FBO, you will need to paint your face
including your lips and keep your mouth shut unless you want to
paint your teeth.
I was trained under the course commander callsign "dragon". But you
people in the later batch are lucky, as far as I know, the
frequencies of power PT has decreased. As for combat survival, I
guess it will be a washed down version in light of the recent
mishap.
Most important is that as long as you tell yourself you can do it,
you will be able to do it. Let us all know how you are coping with
the training. Welcome to the family, trooper.
