Safety and the military

The Army got fined two hundred grand today for allowing a soldier to die of heat stroke whilst on an exercise up north. Not enough safety regulations in place to stop it from happening.

When civilian safety standards start getting applied to the military, you know we are fucked. As we used to say, the more sweat on the training field, the less blood on the battlefield. Training has to be tough, nasty and hard - so hard that when battle is joined, the troops are conditioned enough to stand up to the awful stresses of combat. You don't want half your troops going to water when they "see the elephant" for the first time.

I got heat exhaustion once during an exercise. It was summer, we were at Northam (I think) and it was a typical WA hot day - really hot and really dry. I think it was over 40. I had the M60 as usual and we were doing attacks up a bare and stony hill in the midday heat. Although I was guzzling water like a fish, I couldn't sweat enough to keep my temperature down, and after about 5 attacks, I went down like a log. Splat.

It was an awful day. As I found out halfway through one attack, the hill was covered in patches of broken glass. I discovered that when I found that I was lying in one patch and blasting away, and the glass cut my elbows to shreds. None of the shards were large enough to make a big hole in oneself - it was more like ground up glass than broken glass, but it was nasty to lie on it with a big, vibrating machine gun thumping away into the shoulder. There was also very little soil, so when one did an "up, run, down, crawl" manouvere, it involved landing on rock and then crawling on rock.

Not pretty.

The medics were prepared though - they simply plopped me into an old bath tub that they had found at the tip and filled with ice. Within a short period, my core temp had dropped enough for them to haul me out, and I then had to flop in a comfy chair for a while and drink isotronic drinks. (Gatorade was not on the market at that time).

So I can appreciate what it is like to go down with heat exhaustion on exercise. It's nasty. Dying of it is even worse.

But it would be even worse again to have to put in a proper attack against a live enemy on a hill like that in some foreign country, and not to be prepared and conditioned for the assault.

The Army has guns. Why don't they shoot some of these safety nazi's and be done with it.

Better yet, shoot the lot.