Swompdonkey

Sleep deprivization

My main squeeze and I went to the Remembrance Day Ceremonies at the National War Memorial last Friday. I was quite pleased to see how many people had shown up. This year being the Year of the Veteran, I suppose people were more inclined to take a little time to honour the sacrifice of those who fought and died for Canada.

What started off as a spontaneous, completely unscripted show of respect in 2000, the year the tomb of the unknown soldier was unveiled, has now become something of a tradition: Again this year, at the conclusion of the ceremony, once the barriers came down and the VIPs had left the cenotaph, crowds of people paraded by the large bronze tomb to deposit their poppies on the bronze lid. In minutes, the tomb was completely carpeted with the bright red flowers. I found that strangely touching.

Later on, I bumped into one of my old militia buddies from my days with the
Lake Sups, now a Sergeant in an intelligence unit. The encounter made me a bit nostalgic and got me to thinking about the good times I had with that unit. They weren't all good times, of course. I remember times on summer course in Wainwright, Alberta or Gagetown, New Brunswick, when things got really tough.

One of my abiding memories is the torment of sleep deprivation. Every soldier who has experienced this misery could tell you stories of the games your mind can play on you when you are five days into a week-long exercise and you are trying to function on a hour's sleep a night. Field exercises on leadership courses, in particular, are deliberately structured so that it is impossible for candidates to get more than one or two hours of sleep in any twenty-four hour period. This is meant to simulate the reality of living under combat conditions and test your ability to cope with physical hardship in a high-pressure environment.

One exercise in Gagetown sticks out in my mind. My platoon was in a defensive position, and we had been attacked and gassed repeatedly over two days, so everyone was in Top-High, meaning we were wearing full Nuclear/Chemical/Biological Warfare (NBCW) gear and gas masks. It was the phantom hour of four-thirty in the a.m., the time when attacks usually occur, and I was in a bad way. My fireteam partner was grabbing some shut-eye in the bottom of the trench and aside from the sound of his shallow breathing through his gasmask, there was complete silence.

Suddenly, as I felt myself drifting into a dozy state, I heard a distinctive metallic thump, very close by. I tensed, cocking an ear a peering into the darkness to try to discern some movement in the killing zone to my front. There was nothing. I relaxed a tiny bit, and gripped my C-7 rifle. Then, a couple of seconds later, I heard the sound again. I was sure that I had heard something, but once again, I couldn't see anything moving to my front. I looked through the optical sight, scanning my surroundings. Nothing. In the minutes that followed, I heard this sound several more times, and each time, I got a little more nervous. I began thinking that maybe one of the psychotic directing staff was nearby, and had decided to fuck with my head.

There was a story, circulating around that time, that a few weeks back, one of the candidates from another platoon had spotted a pink bunny rabbit and a giant yellow duck frolicking in the field in front of his defensive position, and had reported this to his section commander over the radio. At first, this was written off as the twisted hallucinations of a sleep-deprived idiot, and the exhausted troops overhearing this situation report over the company frequency had shared a good laugh. An hour or two later, another candidate reported the same thing. By the time the third report came in of an identical phenomenon, there was no longer any laughter, and some candidates began speculating on the onset of some form of mass hysteria, a madness brought about by sleep deprivation. The story goes that the Regimental Sergeant Major and Commanding Officer of the Infantry school had rented some costumes and gone out into the field as a lark, just to throw a mind-fuck into the poor buggers who were on the exercise.

Now this story is probably apocryphal, and in subsequent years, I'm certain that I heard a couple of variations on that little tale, but at the time, it sounded plausible, and as I stood in my trench, listening for more metallic bangs, I began to convince myself that I too, might soon be visited by pink bunnies and yellow duckies. Finally, after several more minutes of anxiety, I discovered the answer to the mystery. As I rested my face against the coolness of the rifle propped on a sandbag at the lip of the trench, I heard an even louder bang, and immediately felt a sharp pain in my knees. Shaking my head to clear out the cobwebs, I noticed that I seemed to be hunkered in the trench a bit lower than I had been a few seconds before.

It turns out that I had been passing out from exhaustion every few minutes, and as I drifted off, my knees would crumple, and hit the front of the corrugated iron of my trench. This was the metallic banging sound I had been hearing. The sound would then jolt me out of my daze momentarily and I would spring up and scan the training area for a few minutes until I began to fade out again, at which point my knees would hit the front of the trench again, startling me awake. Did I feel stupid? What do you think?

A few days ago, I came across this exchange on some web board, and it made me laugh:

Want to practice sleep deprivation?
It's called college dude...
Do what I did- take a full course load at college(at least 16 units), juggle intramural sports (I did crew), and pledge a fraternity (preferably one that hazes) and you'll come closer to the FUN of sleep deprevation =)

-Bro


Been both places (college/work/fraternity/IM sports life versus BN) and can compare. They don't.

While I am sure you may feel sleep deprived with your collegiate/life pursuits, you "only know what you know". The next time you are going to crew practice or enroute to your next class and are so tired that you have to sprinkle Copenhagen speckles in your eyes to stay awake as you pause to borrow a couple quarters from a talking cheeseburger so you can stick them into the nearest tree to get an icy cold Coke to come out the bottom of it, come back here and tell us about it. We'll be able to relate.


Unless you have gone through sleep-deprivation, military-style, don't talk to me about how tough those grad-school all-nighters were!