Well Monday kicked off with the usual Monday morning blues of a latest rise as possible but still allow me to get a shave, into breakfast and then back to the luck now ante room for the morning brief. As with any other Monday morning there was a kit inspection to be had, which meant re-ironing all your kit to make sure it was in good nick and then smashing a quick layer of polish on to the boots. From here it was back into tracksuits and over to the gym for another 4 hours of morning CV work. Due to my injury I am only allowed to do lower body work outs and as you can imagine 4 hours of this every morning can get pretty tedious. So I cracked on with a session on the cycling & running machines then on to all the cabled weights for an hour.

After our naffi break where I devoured yet another mocha and muffin and as the guys where heading off to the pool for some water polo I managed to cut away back to the lines to do some “admin”. In the afternoon we were meant to be having 2 lessons. Firstly we were meant to be getting a lesson from the signals wing about various bits of kit (all stuff that I had already covered in juniors) and then the second lesson was on BCD – Battlefield Casualty Drills. As usual the first lesson was cancelled which meant we had from 1230 through till 1500 to chill out and work on our presentations for the BCD lesson. We had all been assigned a certain drill out of the hand book and mine was to be heat and cold injuries. Luckily the other guy I was doing it with was of the same mind set that we would just free style it. It quickly became apparent that the whole platoon had also decided this is what they would do! Needless to say that the Staff and Colour Sergeants were not too impressed. Post the “I’m very disappointed” speech I headed back over to New college and had dinner, beer and an episode of Inbetweeners with the guys from my old company.

Tuesday was ear marked as a pretty important day as it was when I would find out how long it would be before I received surgery on my wrist. First things first it was off to the gym for the usual 4 hours of CV bits and pieces, but luckily again as they were heading into the pool for the second session I managed to slope away and head back to the lines to get some more admin done. Post lunch it was off to the hospital. All in all it was a good visit as I only have to wait 3 weeks for the surgery and that as my wrist was effectively still broken and they would “fix what eve r I break” they kindly left my cast off! So I have 3 weeks of freedom to do what ever I like without having a horrible sweaty cast on! Back to camp for some more admin mid afternoon then over to new college again in the evening for some catch-up beers.

Wednesday was to be the start of what others had called a 10 day holiday! The majority of my platoon were to head out on exercise in Longmoor and act as part of the civilian population for the Seniors urban exercise. I had also been dicked with being the village elder and local governor called Daoud! So whilst all the other guys got to go and kick off about sheep being lost and wives being raped by ISAF forces I was to try and quell the masses and also keep them on the side as much as possible so as to get them to vote! Firstly I had to attend a physio appointment which was pretty standard stuff. She wiggled my wrist around for a bit and insightfully told me “yup that still looks broken as your movement is pretty restricted” – brilliant.

Tuesday afternoon myself and Mr Small beezed down to Longmoor for kick off at 1400. Our accommodation was to be a derelict house but one with electricity so that was a bonus and to my utter surprise there we’re also portable showers with hot water just outside our house! Once down and all the kit into our house it was down to EXCON (exercise control) to find out when my first serial was to be. Kindly they had given me the rest of the afternoon of, unfortunately they had also setup 2 shura’s for Mr Daoud – one at 0200 and another at 0500! For the first couple of days I was to be relatively quiet in terms of discussions and rioting, as I had to seem as impartial as possible.

After pretty minimal sleep and a pretty rough breakfast I again had the best part of the morning off to do not a lot other than sit around drinking tea and playing Fifa on the PS3 one of the guys had brought along. The afternoon consisted of a couple of meetings with various security teams around the village and a couple of meetings with the leaders of the other tribes! Thankfully a full 7 hours solid sleep was had even though their were people kicking off through the night and a bit of gun fire!

Thursday things were starting to pick up for myself in terms of intensity and aggression towards the ISAF troops. A couple of the serials involved Irish, so called as he is from Ireland. Unfortunately due to his past he seems to have an uncanny knack of handling himself in situations involving violence, aggression and arguing! Some of the one liners had me bent over double but at the same time not trying to show it and ruin the situation that was unfolding for the office cadets that were being assessed and for Irish who was now clearly into his character! Thursday nights sleep was not so great with a number of Shura’s to be sat in on and being pretty quiet in and also a couple of mini riots to attend.

Friday was the day we’d all been looking forward to! It was the day of the main act, the massive riot. Through the day things were getting progressively violent with the CIMIC centre being over taken a couple of times and a number of sections trying to attack the main FOB. At 2130 I had to attend a health and safety briefing on the riot that was to follow at 0200 at 2230 I then had to attend a DS briefing where all the instructors are told exactly how to manage their cadets and what and when things need to happen. Was pretty interesting being on the other side of the exercise like this to see just how much work and planning goes into our exercises and also at times when we don’t realise it our DS are doing a lot more work for us than we think. By the time all the briefings were complete and the company had been through a walk through talk through of how the riot is meant to pan out I had about 50 minutes to try and get my head down. As Daoud I was the only one from Luck Now platoon that would be attending the riot as we’d heard it can get quite violent and casualty’s can be quite high. So whilst the rest of my platoon were catching up on their beauty sleep I was watching 90 cadets dressed from head to toe in riot gear take on and control 90 cadets armed with nothing but a pair of safety glasses, a sharp tongue and as many potatoes as they could physically manage and a couple of lucky cadets were chosen as the petrol bombers. As the riot unfolded each platoon was pushed down a certain alleyway all until they were all pushed tight up against the rear of the village. Whilst this was all going on I was stood to the side of the rioters chanting and shouting down my mega-phone to try and whip them up into a frenzy! This was all going swimmingly until the mega-phone broke. I thought I had a reasonably load voice; turns out it is not loud enough to shout over 180 rioting cadets, 30 DS all cutting about shouting at the cadets getting them to do things. So at this point I become pretty redundant and merely watched it all unfold. Once all rioters were pinned back a fire team dived into a house known to be housing some potential Al’Queda suspects and once the rest of the riot force saw this it was their signal to start de-escalating the situation and withdrawing. The crowd remained in place taunting and shouting at the company who now looked like something out of a horror story being covered head to tow in potato, set on fire and their helmet visors wither splattered with potato or so steamed up they were tripping over each other! Once the rioters had disappeared off it was my signal to finally go and get some shuteye. It was now 0330.

Saturday kicked off with a couple of early serials – my first was to go and beg for food. As it was only the company’s 3^rd serial of their hole urban cycle which was to last 3 days then the aggression and violence was to be at a low and it was to stay at a calm conversation level. This may have gone out the window when they didn’t stop me when I went to walk through security and straight into the OP’s room! After a bit of pushing and man handling I was ushered out in to the guarded area where I continued to have an argument about how fat all the ISAF forces look and why couldn’t they give me some food.

The next was a pretty easy one telling them that I was a refugee of a certain tribe and needed some accommodation for the elections to be happening within the next couple of days. What the were meant to do was press me for information to find out how many others there might be and whe mthey might turn up. They didn’t and just fobbed me off with a crappy ecuse so I just walked off leaving them in the dark.

Another of my serials so far was to head straight into the CIMIC centre without being searched and kick off as I was blaming the ISAF forces for raping my daughter. So I went in pretty irate and wanted to kick off, but unfortunately the cadet dealing with me was pretty good and as such calmed me down to a point where I just had to walk away and tell him if he didn’t sort it out within an hour and hand me the officer that did it I would come back with the rest of my tribe and murder every last ISAF soldier. I didn’t. I headed back to my house for a brew and another game of Fifa!!

For the third and final spin of the exercise I was back to being Governor Daoud for the next 3 days, which meant going back to being relatively calm and carrying out pointless shura’s at stupid o’clock when every one else was asleep. The next few days very much followed the same schedule as my first 3 days apart from the very last morning and the final riot. As the DS have to keep the students guessing they have to try and make each 3 day slightly different so the guys who were civilians in the first spin don’t get it easy on the last. So instead of just having 3 platoons rioting in 3 different places then being forced into one mass then the crowd just dispersing because they had been told to by the DS in the final riot on Thursday morning once the 3 platoons got forced together the riot continued for a further 20/25 minutes and it was company Vs company; so effectively 95 people on each side trying to knock seven shades out of each other. What made this one a little different was that the cadets in the public order kit were the company made up of 70% guys and 30% girls. Any sexism aside the company didn’t really stand a chance! As the riot continued and turned into a 95 Vs 95 riot more and more people where picking up injuries and having to drop out, with the standard weapon of choice was the potato some being the size of large stones, there were a number of blue-on-blue incidents but due to the amount of testosterone and adrenaline rushing round these seemed to cause relatively few casualties! Within 30 seconds of the final riot kicking off one cadet ran flat out at the public order cadets and unfortunately for him said cadet decided that the best form of defence was offence and smashed the cadet in the face with a form arm smash with his 6ft shield! Cue lots of blood and 2 front teeth missing!

By the time endex came around the rioters looked pretty spent and the cadets in the public order kit, the ones that had survived, were either badly bruised, covered in blood or in many of the females cases in floods of tears! As a spectacle it was great to watch and gives you a good taster about what to expect come seniors! From here it was back to Sanditz to clean up sort kit out and then straight back out on a long weekend. As I’m now writing this in Decemeber I have no idea what I did with my days off!