Again I am on my way to the barracks. This time it will be only half a day there, for in the evening I will hop to another bus that will take me to new base. A dude who wanted to serve for half a year will start 98 days of platoon leader training. Halfway through the December I should receive promotion to second lieutenant, vänrikki and be moved to the reserves.

On Thursday I was promoted to the rank of aliupseerioppilaskorpraali so something along the lines of a lance corporal. Tomorrow I'll become upseerioppilas, student officer (yes, it is actually a rank in the finnish system) and I really don't care. Or at least I don't want to care.

Let's just say that I strongly dislike being in the army. To say that I hate it might be too much so I won't say more than that. Why am I in the NCO training in the first place if I really don't want to be here? Because I cannot let go. When I do something I must do it as well as possible. I have grown up into always doing my best and it is biting me in the ass now. To give you guys a picture of this I was ill for six weeks of our seven week long NCO-course part one. I should fall behind in training, right? I scored the highest marks out of the 40ish guys and girls who are in the mortar training. Only thing holding me from being top of the whole course was a skiing competition that I had to do when I had an ear infection and had had fever for six days just before. Also forgive me my language if it is incoherent, I am writing this on my phone and haven't spoken or written English very much recently.

Back to the topic, to conclude it I guess. I'll try to not to let my frustration and lack of motivation to show, I think those aren't things you'd want from someone that will train corporals from the next conscripts. That's actually some kind of a goal for me here. If I get there I'm at least supposed to work with some of the smarter and more motivated guys then when I've finished with the platoon leader course.

Guess I'll leave it here for now. Can't figure out what else should I say still. I'll try not to worry too much and so forth.

fusefuse

Estonia4644 Posts

April 21 2014 18:24 GMT

Have fun!
platoon leader course will be more challenging mentally than NCO training!

I remember our nco training was pretty boring in that regard and it was not difficult at all to shine out there!
I did take part of officer training, atleast the air defense part of it, since i was a platoon sergeant, but still had to know what to do in case my direct superiors would perish 8)

I did not enjoy the army at the time but just like you i was intent on making the most of the situation and giving my best just for the sake of it! And that got me on a challenging job/position that was exhausting but so damn rewarding. Taking care of 30 people and making sure they have everything they need is gruelling but great. And I did not have the responsibility of "calling the shots" when it came to leading the platoon, I just offered my input and advice ^_^

Try and have fun, it'll be over soon!

pebble444

Italy2500 Posts

April 21 2014 20:21 GMT

you should ask yourself, why can' t you let go? why do you feel the need to to the best always in life?

its all about prospective. Isn' t there some superior in the army you can talk to about these things?

I remember i used to feel like i had to do my best always. I would study math and grammar until i could study no more and then either get sick from it, physically or just study some more to ignore it. If there was a math problem to solve i would not fall asleep until i had solved it, and even then sometimes i would just resolve another couple of problems to increment my skill. What made me change this is love i guess. The first time i fell in love, i felt that everything was perfect for once, and did i had done my best without even trying.
GL man, when you feel too much just take a few slow steady deep breaths and relax your body

Oukka

Finland1683 Posts

April 21 2014 22:40 GMT

To fusefuse: it'll probably get harder and more rewarding as well in the platoon leader course. And it looks nicer in one's CV to have that instead of "just" NCO or something. But I still really feel like things could be done a bit differently and everything would run so much smoother. All the time I think that here we are wasting our time, drilling something irrelevant or just doing absolutely nothing. We may have breaks of few hours and we are basically not supposed to do anything there. But then when we are doing something I'm just hoping that it would end as soon as possible and I'd get back to lying on my bunk and complaining how boring and senseless it is to do nothing.

Pebble: I guess it has been my way to gain attention. I was never nor am I now the funny one, or the one who'd do something stupid or cool. I am there with others, but it's always me hanging with them instead of them hanging with me, if you understand what I am saying.

About the love part, I know the feeling. I felt accepted, I was good enough and didn't have to prove to be anything more. But just two weeks before my service begun we broke up with her. She had her own issues and unfortunately for me felt that she would deal with those rather without me. It's about four months from that now and it still brought tears to my eyes. And I'll probably push it away again and tell myself that I'll deal with it later.

fusefuse

Estonia4644 Posts

April 21 2014 22:52 GMT

On April 22 2014 07:40 Oukka wrote:
To fusefuse: it'll probably get harder and more rewarding as well in the platoon leader course. And it looks nicer in one's CV to have that instead of "just" NCO or something. But I still really feel like things could be done a bit differently and everything would run so much smoother. All the time I think that here we are wasting our time, drilling something irrelevant or just doing absolutely nothing. We may have breaks of few hours and we are basically not supposed to do anything there. But then when we are doing something I'm just hoping that it would end as soon as possible and I'd get back to lying on my bunk and complaining how boring and senseless it is to do nothing.

Yes, it is definitely a great addition to a CV.
And thats also something I realized during my service. The deeper and higher up the ladder I got, the more i got to know how the system works and the more i realized how badly the system works. The Defense Forces here has to be the best funded but most inefficiently run govt. institution there is.

The timewasting and irrelevant drilling sounds familiar but only from the basic training. I'm glad I had reasonable superiors and that our time was usually (cant have it too good can you) well filled. For example after we had completed our NCO and our future subjects had completed basic training, the latter then had to go through the specific training we had already gone through as part of our NCO. So there were several options. Either we do the same shit over again which wouldve been demoralizing. Or we help give lessons ourselves. Which was fun because - a) it was simply fun :D b) preparing lessons and giving them took plenty of preparation - time filled, c) I was driven by the motivation to make sure that the lessons on these boring topics would actually be interesting and practical, with experience from our outdoors exercises, instead of the way our professional superiors taught us, lacking any sort of finesse, motivation or interest in doing things well. Infuriated me so much that I just had to do a better job with my future subjects 8)

And then were those times where we didn't have many lessons to give so we just played cards from 8am to 5pm for days 8(

but yeah. The real life began when we completed NCO training and got our stripes. We were actually treated as more of humans and given actual responsibility.