Dispatch 7.1: First day back in Valcatraz

8 March 2010

Typically, we’ve all assembled for our brief, and as the majority of we augmentees for this Roto are English pig dogs, we are doing our training separately.

After the initial brief, we Anglos assembled in a separate theatre for armament (mines) and IED training. The first thing we noticed was all the PowerPoint slides were primarily in French. It seems the English slides were not available, but the instructor apologized and said he would translate everything, and just to make sure, he asked, “Is there anyone here who doesn’t understand English?”

And our resident smart ass said, “Maybe you should ask that in French.” After the laughter died down, the lectures went well. Our instructor was an infanteer who’s been in Afghanistan, and he knew which teaching points were important. But, knowing how to read French, I couldn’t help but notice how he couldn’t bring himself to talk about the part where children are used as a delivery method in suicide bombings.

This part of the lecture was interesting, as it demonstrated how not to deal with possible IEDs. This comes from a CNN report from Iraq, and shows how Americans who usually go for a year, after being on tour for too long, tend to lose perspective and are much more loosy-goosy with what is safe in a misplaced sense of expediting the mission. At just the start of the following video is a demonstration of how not to clear an IED, where in their haste to keep moving, they decide to push a relic rigged with an IED.

And, no lecture is complete without some humour.

Having talked to an Image Tech who went outside the wire every day with coalition troops on patrol, he explained that after the first couple of weeks, the acceptance of unimaginable horror, pain or death can occur, then washes over and you become numb to it. He felt sorry for those who only have to go out a couple or dozen times during a tour, as someone in that situation only ends up being more stressed each time as there is no indoctrination to release the pucker factor.

Our first day finished with a beer call at the host Squadron so each of us could get a coin specially minted for this operation.

There sure are a lot of young folks doing Battle School training here. I don’t envy their possibility of putting their boots on the ground before Canada leaves Afghanistan. I’m so glad I’m in the Air Force.

I don’t have any internet here, but I do have my Sirius radio. In spite of the Beeb being a mouth piece for the left, and that the CBC doesn’t do full hour news shows unless you catch it at 5 PM, my news has been limited.

I did notice a specific slant on the reporting of the massacres in Nigeria, as they completely avoided identifying the religions of the latest attackers, tending to blame a cultural reason rather than the obvious tensions that Muslims create wherever they have enough numbers to carry out violence against non-Muslims.

And for some reason, the fact that seal will be on the Canadian Parliamentary Cafeteria menu this year is news.

And on yesterday’s Cross Country Check Up on CBC, Rex Murphy’s replacement was fielding calls about the budget. Whoever was feeding the calls during the one hour I listened made certain that all but one bashed the Government, took them to task for not addressing environmental concerns and global warming, or basically accused them of ruining Canada without stating any facts to back their story. When one caller who did support the budget and explained how what was being done was fair, considering the options taken, which the Liberals never did while they created a surplus by canceling transfer payments, the host perceptively raised her voice in agitation in trying to point out something irrelevant. In fact, it seems this show had been hosted by the Anti-Rex Murphy.

I wonder what percentage of the western population who listen to this, if they notice the purposeful ideological manipulation of radio MSM.

Tagged as: anti-Government CBC, Anti-Rex Murphy, IED training, pre-deployment training, radio MSM