Special Forces ultimate hell week

Naggdefy wrote: »

Number 4. If he can get through he'll earn it. Hearing all that from several comrades would be harder than any task I'd say.

Number 4 is the 'heat seeker' at the moment, but he can recover.

What's a 'heat seeker', he/she is the soldier who comes up on everyone's radar for the wrong reasons. No.4 is the heat seeker right now.

The opposite of the heat seeker is 'The Grey Man'.. He/she doesn't excel at anything really but they're not the f*ck up or the mouth piece either, they just get on with things and fly just below the radar.

I haven't heard it used yet but something you'll hear in the DF is 'be the grey man'.. If at the end of the course and no one really notices much about you you're the grey man.

Now that the field is being thinned down we're starting to see who the heat seeker is and who might be the grey man. The grey man will likely to be there if not at the end he'll be pretty close.

Who's your grey man?.. I have the guys face in my mind but can't remember his number, a Dublin lad.

Mantis Toboggan wrote: »

Did Jason Black get the rib broken in the fight?

That's how it seems.

Fractured or bruised ribs are agony, you can't breath, laugh, cough, sneeze, fart etc etc.. Every movement is agony with injured ribs.

You can be the fittest and mentally toughest but injuries are injuries and feck all you can do if its bad enough.

Mantis Toboggan wrote: »

No offence to the defence forces but they don't really protect us from anything apart from the army bomb disposal team. Irish army would rarely if ever be involved in combat.

Well we've served and been in combat in places such as Lebanon (I think 46 of us have been killed there and many others injured), Somalia, Liberia (where Irish soldiers brought the warlord Charles Taylor to trial), Chad, Mali (three pers were injured in an IED explosion last week), Kosovo, Syria etc.

I'll take just one of those missions, Lebanon. Because of our services and sacrifices there is now a whole generation of children in Lebanon who have never known war, and that's remarkable in a country which has seldom known peace in the last 50 yrs.

But we'll just look at back home, we do a lot but I'll concentrate on the DF EOD that you seem to have familiarized yourself with.

How many EOD personnel are involved in an EOD call out?. Who drives them to the location, who provides them for their needs (comms, rations, medics etc?), who secures the location once they're on scene?.

Its reckoned it takes between 4-5 logs pers to support one front line soldier. I read that the EOD were called out to over 170 devises last year.

When you put the numbers together it starts to get very big.

There are lots of other in country things to do, like securing Portloaise prison, escorting the countries most dangerous prisons too and from there to court, hospitals and other essentials.

Then there are other things like aid to the civil authorities, the lads from Sarsfield barracks are busying providing flood relief in the mid-west for example.

For other examples of what the DF do (I'm including the navy and air corps in this) you can check out their roles on military.ie The DF also have a very informative YouTube and Twitter channel's .

We don't have to be involved in combat to be an effective DF, but we're ready to a level with the best in the world.

There are very few soldiers sitting around doing nothing, for a tiny organisation we more than punch above our weight.

Btw, no offence taken. Most civilians with no connection with the DF have no idea how busy we are and what we've done in the past, the present and what we're preparing for in the future. Our political masters ensure you're kept in ignorance so we're treated like a nuisance, we don't enjoy the support of much of the population in terms of our demands for pay parity (for example) and why should we (be supported)?, you're purposely kept in ignorance.

So no offence taken.