Fourth Weekend of Basic Training

Again, I walked from home to the armoury with all of my kit on me to start my fourth weekend of basic training.  Friday evening, we had some marching and weapons drill practice.  We also had to meet, one by one, the course warrant officer and the course officer to let them know how we were doing and to get some feedback from them.  The course officer used to be a software engineer so he was interested in my civilian career.

Saturday morning, we had physical training outside in civilian gear.  It was -7 Celsius.  This is outrageously cold for Vancouver.  Many people didn't bring more than a t-shirt and a pair of shorts for PT.  After experiencing such cold, I'm sure they will bring more gear next time.  We jogged and did sprints for about 40 minutes before coming back in.  After PT, we had breakfast followed by our morning inspection.  Then, it was a whole day of class.  Topics covered varied from ethics and military ethos to dealing with interpersonal conflict and basic radio communications.  That night my section volunteered for fire picket duty so that we would have time to clean our weapons while being night sentries.

Sunday morning, we had a light rucksack "forced march".  The morning inspection was done by the course warrant officer and was done to a uniform standard across not only sections, but the whole platoon.  That didn't go too well as one section was completely different from the others.  Since it was the first section to be inspected though, all the other sections were deemed to be out of standard.  The rest of the day was spent revising marching drill, learning how to deal with hazardous material, learning new marching drill with weapons (which managed to get me confused) and learning how to deals with rifle stoppages.