Happy but exhausted

It seems an age since I posted any updates on here.  Connor was been home a couple of weekends but is now away for the next few weeks.  I managed to spend a good 45 minutes with him on the telephone last night and can report that he was in extremely high spirits!  They've had a busy week and he's pretty exhausted but he had loads to tell me.

He seemed particularly pleased with his performance during the escape and evade activity.  This is the army's version of hide and seek.  Basically the juniors are required to get from checkpoint to checkpoint whilst being chased and must evade capture at all costs.  Connor's description of this was something along the lines of "well good, but hard" with the highlight involving him diving over a barbed wire fence head first, puncturing his hands on the razor sharp barbs as he did so.  Apparently, his section were the only ones to evade capture, so he was pretty pleased about that, you know how competitive he is!

He was really suffering though when I spoke to him last night.  During the course of the week they'd had navigation exercises, night navigation, escape and evade, and the army's version of circuit training.  Roughly translated as a number of 1.6 kilometre runs with or without full kit, carrying various objects such as tractor tyres, interspersed with team challenges and the snipers alley.  Basically, snipers alley refers to the long pits of mud, water and ice that soldiers are often seen belly-crawling through on tv, covered in camel nets.  They then had a stretcher run followed by assault course in full kit then a work-out on the rifle range.  I was exhausted just listening to him!

For anyone who's unfamiliar with modern day army life you might be surprised to learn that the barracks that the junior soldiers ordinarily live in are very much like university halls of residence in modern multi-storey buildings, only instead of them having individual rooms they share 12 to a room.  It's all very civilised I have to say.  This week however, the JSs have been to an old-style barracks for the week where they stayed in the long single-storey wooden buildings.  I thought this might have been a challenge for Connor, given that he does find it difficult to share space with 11 others in his section but he seemed to really enjoy it.  In the old barracks there are up to 30 soldiers in one room and he seemed to thrive on the camaraderie and the chance to be with new people. 

Today he's out on cross country, so there's not much time to recover from the previous week's activities.  He won't be home for a few weekends because he has to fit in voluntary service as part of the Duke of Edinburgh Award and a skiing trip, but at least it sounds as though he's picked himself up after the Christmas break and has settled back into army life, which is great news.