Mud

The rain started at dawn. We had cancelled the LFX (live fire exercise) for the local guards two days earlier beause of rain, and posponed it until today. We still decided to have a try, because the weather forecast here is wrong more often than it's not. At the range, the weather seemed fine at first. The rain turned into a light drizzle and the air was warm, clean and smelled of juniper. We gave a radio to the police CP (checkpoint) near the shooting area. A convoy of Americans almost scared us when they started testing their HMG (heavy machine gun) at the roadside. When the guards arrived, the rain started pouring, and soon we realised that there was no point in continuing. It's not that we mind the rain, but the guards won't learn anything from training in the mud, and we might get stuck on the way back. In fact, it was very close that we would have gotten stuck in the mud. The tread of the tires fills up instantly with extremely sticky mud, and the tires become slimy slicks on the slippery surface. It's actually quite amazing how a 4,5 ton car can move sideways when all wheels are driving it forward! All of us were getting wet and quite cold, too, so it was just as well to go back anyway. There was mud all over.

In the city there was a dog in the road with a fractured pelvis. It looked like an Alsatian, but it was extremely skinny. Its backbone was bent and it was dragging its rear legs behind it. Someone must have just hit it with a car. We stopped and took out our shotgun to put it down. It dragged itself a full circle around our car, and P went after it with the shotgun, looking for a safe direction to shoot in. Then it started moving away in a direction in which it was impossible to shoot, and too quickly for us to go around it. We couldn't grab it or it could have bitten us. There was nothing we could do but to get back into our cars and watch it disappear in the rain. I suppose that other dogs will take care of things soon enough.

At the PO the logistics transport had arrived with a new water processing container for us. The only problem was that the crane that was supposed to lift it into place was 4 hours late. When it finally arrived, it turned out that on of its hydraulic pumps was broken. The operators went into town to look for a mechanic who could fix the old, Soviet-made crane. The mechanic had a long beard and he was mostly working on the machine with a handspike. After a 3 hour struggle, the crane finally started moving and we got the container into place.


Just then the rain had stopped, but it soon started raining again.