but i'm not a soldier

don't give up your day job

2011-01-12T23:19:00.001+11:00

Have you ever gone to a dodgy public toilet, where the cubicle's door doesn't quite shut properly? Either the whole toilet block is left wanting for doors with fully functional locks, or you're busting to go so badly that you're willing to take a chance on the cubicle that no one dares to try lest the door swings open on them mid-pee. So what you end up doing is bolting right in there and going about your business in as efficient a manner as possible, whilst stretching your non-dominant arm out in an effort to pre-empt someone else accidentally barging in. The result is typically a rushed and forced visit to the ablutions, and even though the job gets done, you're left feeling a little more stressed than relieved.

That's kinda what it's like to be on very short notice to move.

For three to six months of the year, because I'm part of an expeditionary combat support squadron, a select few wind up with the (un?)fortunate task of being online. This means that if some kind of situation occurs where assistance of a military nature would be beneficial, we're the people that are supposedly lined up and ready for action within about 12-24 hours. There aren't many restrictions on personnel during the online period, but I suppose that the main ones are that we must remain sober enough to drive (< 0.05 BAC) and able to report back to base within twelve hours (or generally stay within a three-hour 'radius'), which is somewhat harder to manage during the holiday season.

I don't drink very often, and have found that when I do, I'm better off only having a couple anyway. So it's really no big deal for me to avoid imbibing alcohol when I'm on annual leave. The tricky thing for me about a week ago was that when I initially got a message/call about flooding in Rockhampton, I was in Melbourne... about a twelve hour drive from Newcastle. I wasn't given much information initially, but as soon as I was told I was on 12 hours notice, my already warped holiday sleeping patterns got slightly more erratic. It's like trying to sleep whilst knowing that your front door is wide open, or with your last thought that it's only four hours until your alarm goes off. You just can't put these facts easily out of your mind in order to get a decent night's rest.

Fortunately, a couple of days after the Rockhampton message, one of the Corporals called me back and said that if they were going to send any cooks up north, it would only be three or four and wouldn't be me because I was one of the furthest away from base at the time. I got to sleep easy that night, but after looking at the news reports I figured that they'd need able hands to help out with the search and rescue process, and maybe the clean up once the rain had gone away if anything. Not cooks. We're usually the last to be sent anywhere, so I wasn't going to get my hopes up. Yes, I am one of those freaks who actually wants to be deployed somewhere to assist wherever I can. I don't see the point in being online if we're seldom called up to do what we're on standby for in the first place.

A couple of days ago, Toowoomba was flooded. With storms equal or greater in severity to those that came through the area in the mid-seventies, Brisbane was next on the list with extreme flood warnings. Dams that had been built to circumvent flood damage mere decades ago were fit to burst, and just as I was settling into a lovely corner of the Blue Mountains (about three hours away from base), I got a phone call.

'Hey there, where are you at the moment?'

'I'm in the Blue Mountains, still on the way home from Melbourne. I think I'm about three hours away from base, but I'm heading back tonight.'

'Oh good. Because as you know, you're on the short notice to move team. We've now been told that sixteen of us, including you, are now on three hours' notice.'

'I'd better start driving, then.'

'Be safe, and speak to you soon.'

I drove back to base last night, and figured that I should just try to get a decent night's sleep instead of staying up to dye my hair back to black and pack things that I wasn't sure I needed. Got up this morning and made an appointment with the derby girl who put red in my hair in the first place, and while I was in the midst of normalising my hair colour again I missed a call.

It was work, informing me that there was a 5% chance we could be flying out tonight, so I should get my affairs sorted for a quick departure. Failing any further phone calls, we were to be meeting at 0630 the next day in cams, with an echelon bag packed and ready to roll. There was a 95% chance that a hundred people (including a selection of motley cooks) from our squadron will be flown north to help out with flood relief. That's pretty good odds of me not knowing where I'm going to be this time tomorrow, or next week, or even next month if it comes to that.

The thing is, you know that dodgy public toilet door feeling I was talking about before? That's what it's like when you really don't know what's going to happen and whether anything will even happen. I'm sort of anticipating things now, and I don't feel nervous so much as impatient about the timing of stuff. There's a small part of me that's enthralled by the logistics of organising such a massive rescue/cleanup effort, but I also don't want to get too keyed up about everything because there is still a chance that I won't get sent anywhere to do anything, and this time next week I'll be back in a kitchen about fifty metres from here, feeding the masses. I also have homework to do, laundry to sort out, and obligations to pull out of at very short notice... but that's a very tiny part of the bigger picture.

For all my whining, I am immensely grateful that I have the opportunity to do so from a position of emotional and physical safety. I've never had to deal with disasters of this scale before, and I'm not too sure what to expect. I hope to stay in touch with people over the next 24 hours, and may have access to my netbook while we're placed in transit accommodation, but there's no guarantees. In the meantime, take care of yourselves, and if there is anything you can do to help, please do.

Hang in there, Queensland.

the spice of life

2010-11-12T23:49:00.001+11:00

Hello civilians, look at your recipe, now back to me, now multiply your serves by a hundred, now back to me. Sadly, you’re only serving 4-6 people, but if you were a military cook, you could be prepping for hundreds like me. Anything is possible with All Spice and bulk cookery. I’m on a function.

it's not what you know, it's who you know...

2010-08-02T20:37:00.000+10:00

For those who don't really know what's involved with Geospatial Intelligence, I sort of liken it to playing with Google Earth for a living.

The weird thing is that for a job which is clearly quite important, yet requires a specific skillset which people might not necessarily know they actually have, I think that the RAAF struggles for numbers because it's kind of obscure and also requires a ridiculously high security clearance which can take 18+ months to obtain.

So the Chief of Air Force has established a new program where Any Airman (ANYA) roles in this area have been created, involving a three year posting that includes training as a Geospatial Imagery Analyst (GIA) and deployment to the Middle East to carry out relevant duties. Depending on one's performance in the ANYA role, this could also facilitate a future remuster (changing of job) to GIA.

I've missed the boat for the first intake of ANYA GIAs, but it's definitely piqued my interest. Strangely enough, it was the reservist Logistics Officer that I spoke to a few times last year who first got me considering the possibility of intelligence related jobs. Perhaps if I collected more university units to do with international relations or counter-terrorism (yes, they do exist!) I could get a taste for secret squirrel business, and seem like I have a relevant degree.

I wonder how people get recruited for these jobs, if they supposedly have no previous experience and thus no evidence of how good they'd be at spying? Personally, I like the idea of analysing and scrutinising things for a living... it'd probably mean that I'd be too mentally exhausted at the end of the day to philosophise about the minutiae of my own life.

There's also something kinda Sim Cityesque about looking down on the world like some God whose subjects have no idea that they're being watched. Or maybe that's just me.

Test your skills at the Defence Imagery and Geospatial Organisation Imagery Analysis Quiz!

origins of an ironed chef

2010-06-06T22:50:00.002+10:00

When I was growing up, Mum worked in a Chinese restaurant some nights, so Dad chipped in a lot with the cooking at home. I have plenty of fond memories relating to dishes that both of them made, which I never learned how to replicate for myself.

Mum’s from Taiwan, and a lot of the dishes she makes involve pastry or dough. I have a feeling that she won’t tell me her dumpling recipe because she knows deep down that it’s the one thing I’ll always have to go back home for. That, and she’s been making them for so long that she probably doesn’t even know how much of each ingredient goes into the mix. I don’t remember having measuring cups or jugs in the house – it must have been a combination of muscle memory, and the ratio of whatever felt right in her hands alone.

I used to love watching her make the wrappers for the dumplings – money was probably too tight to lash out on manufactured ones, or she was of the thought that processed wrappers were a waste of money if all it took was time to invest in rolling out homemade versions. The rhythm of the rolling pin, which was nought more than a thick dowel, would mesmerise me as I watched the small ball of dough become a circular shell for a dumpling. Then the steadily growing stack of wrappers would each receive a dollop of filling in its centre and be sealed off with several deft pinches from fingertips dipped in water.

Whenever I tried to help Mum out, on the very rare occasions that she’d let me have a go, I’d almost always stuff up somehow. Whether it was cutting out noodles and rolling too enthusiastically with the machine, or waiting to crack an egg into batter and clumsily landing some shell into the mix, or not sealing the ends of a spring roll adequately… Mum would sigh in exasperation and take whatever task I was attempting out of my hands. I was more of a hindrance than a help, no matter how good my intentions were.

As I got older, I was allowed to assist with basic prep tasks. The kind of stuff Mum would do while watching the television – taking the tops and tails off snow peas and beans. I remember a few times when there’d be a big function coming up at work, and Mum would have to take stuff home to prep for the next day. Maybe I was a little too excited at the prospect of threading thousands of satay chicken skewers, but there was something that just felt good when I was being useful in the kitchen and not just a pain in the butt.

Dad was particularly overprotective of me when I was a kid, which frustrated me to no end because I think he must have known that I’d inherited some of his inquisitive and adventurous nature. I was never allowed to cut anything, or cook anything, while I was growing up. Sometimes I wonder whether my fear of knives and fire is actually something that I’ve always had, or whether it came from having so many lectures drummed into me about how dangerous a place the kitchen was. Of course, Dad probably had no idea that all his warnings against me messing about in the kitchen were like the psychological equivalent of a ‘Wet Paint’ sign.

I can’t remember how old I was, when we first got a microwave. It wasn’t long until my brother and I were allowed to graduate to two-minute noodles cooked on the stove, and I became a little more curious about expanding my repertoire. After much begging and pleading, Dad finally let me pick out some ingredients for a stir-fry, promising that some day in the week he’d show me how to cook it all up.

It was school holidays or something similar, and no one was home when I decided it was the perfect time to try and guess how to cook a stir-fry. Just imagine how impressed my folks would be that I had made lunch/dinner all by myself! I couldn’t wait for Dad’s vital masterclass on stir-fries, so I cobbled together whatever memories I had of the steps my parents took when cooking one. As it turns out, I probably should have paid more attention, and I believe that up until that point I had never seen them actually cook a stir-fry from start to finish – possibly because I had always been booted out of the kitchen for being annoying whilst they were trying to get dinner ready!

The good news? Well, I didn’t burn the house down. The bad news – it was a minor disaster. I had way too many vegetables, none of which were consistently sized enough to cook at a similar rate, I think I used too much sauce and not enough oil, and threw in uncooked rice for good measure. Oh, and my solo cooking adventure was also the first and last time I was allowed to do anything in the kitchen that didn’t involve the microwave, toaster, or two-minute noodles. No unsupervised use of knives and open flames for me!

I never got that lesson on stir-fries. Perhaps my folks decided then and there that hospitality was definitely not my calling. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve always loved food, and was certainly more interested in what was for dinner and how it was made than my brother ever was, but neither of my parents thought it was a good idea to encourage me to cook. I actually didn’t learn a proper stir-fry method until I went to TAFE a couple of years ago – shameful, I know.

It often baffles people to hear that I can’t stand doing stir-fries, and although I love to eat a lot of different Asian cuisines, I get this weird mental block about trying to cook them. I suppose it’s comparable to how I feel embarrassed and uncomfortable whenever I try to speak the pitiful amount of Mandarin that I know. I went to classes for years to try and learn it properly, but often got tongue-tied even though in my head I knew what I was trying to say. Yet after studying Italian in school and working in a couple of Italian restaurants, I had no qualms about slipping in the odd Italian phrase here and there in conversation with customers and colleagues.

Perhaps it’s never too late to learn. Maybe I should go back home some time and spend an afternoon cooking with Mum or Dad, and take some notes on what they do and how. I don’t mean to lament that all their recipes are lost forever, because they’re not, but I guess it saddens me that they never saw it as particularly important to pass any of their culinary knowledge on to me. They were always happy enough to feed me, and even take requests, but now that I’m older and my visits to Melbourne tend to be more fly-by-night, it’s more likely that I’d stop by Mum’s just before dinner with friends… or I’ll catch up with Dad at our regular yum cha hangout.

Sometimes I wonder whether they’re proud of the fact that I made it somewhere in hospitality, despite all their efforts to keep me out of the kitchen. There are times when I’ve been chuffed yet still surprised to receive compliments about my cooking, almost as if I’m still that kid messing about with a wok while home alone, trying to prove something to myself as well as my folks about the kitchen not being the place for me.

I’ve been cut, bruised, soaked, splashed, and burned in the relatively short time that I’ve been cooking. I’m no longer scared of knives and fire – it’s the cutting and burning that I’m more worried about. What’s amusing is that a couple of birthdays ago, I received knives as gifts from three people, and last Christmas I got a blowtorch. Maybe I’m the most dangerous thing in the kitchen?

Well, I can’t say my folks didn’t try to warn me.

strategic reform - a cook's view

2010-05-29T12:33:00.002+10:00

In another time, another world, the words 'strategic reform program' would probably send me to sleep. Defence's overall plan for SRP (we do love a good acronym to throw around like confetti) has been the talk of the town for the past few months, and with its implementation will come various changes, most of which will no doubt irritate the old boys' club.

Don't get me wrong, I'm no expert on reform, let alone strategic reform, or even Defence strategic reform. However, I've been around for long enough to acknowledge that the kind of people that bang on about 'the good old days' and how they're over, are exactly the sort of people that wouldn't necessarily hold back, yet wouldn't exactly embrace changes to the status quo. No matter how strategic they may or may not appear to be.

What I found particularly amusing the other day is that one of the agencies responsible for supervising the implementation of SRP is Defence funded, and has supposedly fudged budget predictions to show false or exaggerated numbers relating to proposed savings. I don't know how you'd be able to prove either way whether proposed savings are realistic or not, because it's essentially all conjecture. I think that if actual changes were rolled out and then the data relating to real savings came out from that, it would be slightly more encouraging to the general public.

Defence is a massive organisation in Australia, and as with any business, the little savings that can be made every day don't seem as important or noticeable as slashes to departmental budgets or staff cuts. I believe that we've probably gone for too long thinking in this mindset, and because we're such a large group of people, we have the numbers that mean if the majority of individuals take some positive action most days, it really can make a difference.

With all that said, I have a few suggestions that could contribute to savings for Defence. I don't imagine they'll actually get considered let alone implemented, but you know, I've been saying for a while that if I had my own military, I would run things quite differently. :)

Once a month, across all Defence establishments, run a vegetarian-only day. If my base is a typical example of meals that are offered in accordance to SUPMAN (Defence policy on food entitlements), every meal period has a choice of five meat dishes and one vegetarian dish. One of those meat dishes is usually a roast of some kind. Meat is expensive, and not a compulsory requirement for one's daily nutritional intake. Even if the roast choice was changed so that the slab of meat could be used for the equivalent of two or three other dishes, there would be significant savings, as well as a greater appreciation for when a roast dish is available.
Remove valuable Defence members from inflight kitchens, and outsource the provision of sandwiches, morning teas, inflight meals, barbecue packs, etc. to civilian contractors. The amount of money that is invested in training deployable catering staff which is then wasted by tying them up with tasks that civilians are capable of doing is indicative of the irrationality that governs certain Defence resources.
Buy in enough raw ingredients to produce sweets for all meals. At the moment we don't usually have the staff time available for constant large-scale sweets production, but if you compare the cost of having a permanent sweets position versus buying in frozen sweets to cut up and garnish, the former may actually be cheaper in the long run. One of my colleagues believes we should just spend the money on buying in individual frozen sweets that don't require cutting/garnishing/plating, but his method saves Defence catering time, while my idea cuts down on the cost spent on sweets.
While I'm on the sweets thing, perhaps there should be a review of what SUPMAN has to say about having sweets available for lunch and dinner. Is cake really an essential part of one's daily diet? Even back in rookies, when we were exercising most days of the week, we were advised to take it easy with the dessert bar. Imagine what some people are like once they have moved into more sedentary roles, and still have the same access to sweets and ice cream? I don't think it would kill anyone to have a sweets-free day once in a while, or to only have sweets available with lunch or dinner, but not both.

These are only a few ideas that relate to catering, which I've managed to come up with straight off the bat. I'll mull over a few more that may apply to more than just my section, but I figure that any change to what people eat or are allowed to eat would no doubt be unpopular. Unless they somehow find a way to feed people more.

I think that the key to improving things in the catering section is to increase the quality of the food, work on realistically altering people's expectations of what's available in 2010 and beyond, and then meet or exceed them.

Sparrow, Barrie, ze militoire and me

2009-11-09T21:10:00.001+11:00

I'm in the middle of a book entitled Killing: Misadventures in Violence by Jeff Sparrow, who I saw at the Festival of Dangerous Ideas. Sparrow gave an intriguing talk about Why We Enjoy Killing, which was partial allusion to some of the themes he explored in his book, and also an incredibly passionate source of food for thought in these times of war and seemingly inescapable violence.

It was particularly interesting to hear Sparrow talk about the inevitability of war/violence after attending the preceding talk by Rear Admiral Chris Barrie, which presented and outlined a proposition to bring back conscription. One of Sparrow's points that resonated with me from his talk at the Festival was that a country such as the US has spent literally billions of dollars funding their efforts in the War On Terror, a war which implicitly has no real end/solution in sight. He posited the idea that if the US decided instead to use this money to provide potable water to everyone on the entire planet, it would probably do a lot more to win hearts and minds than any sort of nation-building action that has taken place thus far. Would something like this ever actually happen? Probably not, because despite the clear logic behind taking such a purely positive action with a vast sum of money/resources, there are too many people/organisations that have vested interests in maintaining the status quo.

Of course, I'm paraphrasing and simplifying what Sparrow was saying, and leaving out everything that he said before he reached this point in his talk. Another pertinent point of his was that if you took everything that was said about the Iraq War by even the most conservative of opinions (it will be controlled, it will be short, it will be targeted/specific and minimise any effect on civilians), you could spin it around 180 degrees to get what actually happened/is happening. Not that I know anything about Operation Iraqi Freedom in general or particular, apart from the fact that the ADF's contribution in Iraq (Operation Catalyst) ended in July this year, and that's only because I chose to read my email carefully that day.

I don't know if it was the mood I was in that weekend, from the come-down of being in the soapbox finals (after ranting about women in the military and having more than a healthy dig at Greg Sheridan, no less), or from spending a rainy couple of days in Sydney by myself... but I felt a bit strange about being who I am, and where I was. On one hand, I was getting all fired up about how conscription (no matter how innovative and 'fair' Barrie's new program may have seemed) would possibly be to the detriment of the next generation of young Australians, while I was a serving member that didn't feel compelled enough to care about international affairs, to know anything apart from ADF press releases about what part we had to play in wars on the other side of the world.

I remember when I first started talking to people about enlisting, and how I'd end up having by-the-by conversations with people about their reasons for not following a similar path to me:

Oh, I couldn't possibly join the military...

I'm a total pacifist. The idea of being told to fight in someone else's war goes against everything I believe in.
I don't think I could just do whatever I was told to do. The idea of blindly following orders because I had to, scares the bejeezus out of me.
I question everything too much. I don't think I'd last too long in a military environment without speaking up about something that wasn't adequately explained or justified.
I'm too much of a control freak. The idea of submitting to anonymous authority figures and the decisions they make is the last thing I'd want to do.

Personally, I think I am a combination of all of these points. By signing on the dotted line, I accept that I have agreed to serve Queen and country for four years of my life, and to remain on call to serve further if someone higher up sees fit. I didn't enlist because I am pro-violence or in favour of any war - rather, if all shit hits the fan, I'd rather be in uniform and doing my bit for my nation than taking a back seat and bitching about how war's good for absolutely nothin'. Don't get me wrong, I am not foolish enough to believe that the ADF's participation in wars around the world is anything like that of countries like the US, nor do I think Australians in general have any real concept of what it would be like to have war/violence as a constant feature of one's culture.

For the record, I do question things, and I am a bit of a control freak. I don't know how I manage to avoid getting into trouble more often for having this sort of attitude, but after not getting kicked out thus far for the things I have said and done, I can probably safely say that it is possible to survive within the ranks (as lowly as I may be?!) without becoming a mindless drone. There have been many times in my life when the authority that I have answered to has been a lot less defined or structured, and I believe I have been more damaged through the control I have given to others during my civilian life, rather than in the time I've spent in uniform.

If anything, prior to my enlistment, I probably wouldn't have had the nerve to get on a soapbox and rant about women in the military (or anything similar that would get me into the finals and voicing my thoughts in front of hundreds of strangers). I wouldn't have formed opinions about the ADF and conscription to ask serious questions of Rear Admiral Barrie after his talk. I may not have even come across Jeff Sparrow (apart from perhaps through the Overland literary journal that he edits), let alone his book on killing. I definitely wouldn't have cared to pay more than accidental attention to the ADF's involvement in Iraq.

I had numerous reservations of my own about enlisting, and about becoming a part of something much, much, bigger than myself for the first time in my short and somewhat sheltered life. Although I can understand why it is generally believed that there's more bad than good about joining the military, I'd like to say that it has made me a better person. You could say that I'm spouting just what the ADF wants me to, but let me also add that although the ADF can be a great option for certain people, it's definitely not for everyone. I think I had a point to make about the relation between making hundreds of sandwiches and holding a gun to someone's head, but that might have to wait until I've finished the book...

do something, before we all get taken over by Asians!

2009-10-05T22:06:00.001+11:00

As part of the Festival of Dangerous Ideas over the weekend, Rear Admiral Chris Barrie spoke about the prospect of bringing back conscription. He opened with an introduction that was pretty much along the same lines as this opinion piece in the Sydney Morning Herald, then continued to flesh out some of the finer details of his proposed scheme, and what made it different to the conscription programs of the past.

Mr Barrie has been retired from the Navy for about five or six years now, but listening to him speak showed that forty years of service still manages to shape his words a certain way. In the first part of his talk, there was mention of all manner of statistics and numbers drawn from various reports, to support a somewhat bleak view of what Australia could be like by 2050 if we go on about our merry way. That way being the maintenance of voluntary participation in military, emergency, and community service jobs, and addressing the lack of skilled workers in civilian employment by hiring appropriate employees from overseas. While our Asian neighbours continue to increase in population and improve their standards of living through increased industrialisation and our old pal capitalism, Australia will struggle under the increasing burden of an ageing population and a lack of production from the nation's brood mares, neigh, women.

So I guess what Barrie was trying to say (to the predominantly older middle-class white intelligentsia gathered in the Utzon Room at the Sydney Opera House on NRL Grand Final day) is something along the lines of we're going to hell in a handbasket unless we sort out today's young people with a good dose of national service. For every old person in the Australian community some time in the frightening pre-apocalyptic future, there'd only be 2.4 young people in the workforce that would be able to provide some sort of care or service. Clearly not enough slaves to do the bidding of all the pensioners of Australia! But I digress. The question of whether China is a real threat to us and our way of life, or if we're really going to be okay with Indonesians having a better lifestyle than us in the future, or the possibility that Australia will lose its identity amongst a mass of immigrating cultures, is swept aside and rolled up into the phrase Australia's positioning in the Asia-Pacific region by 2050. Or something like that.

How does Barrie's AUSSIE (Australian Universal Service Scheme - Individual Experience?) conscription program intend to address this? Well, the idea is that by taking part in various tasks of a community/nation serving nature, Australia's young people will gain points towards the completion of the scheme. For example, every young man and woman will be required to sign up and work towards 1000 points of 'service' within ten years. This service is not necessarily military, and the jobs that are available will be flexible and varied enough so that some Australians may wish to continue employment in various fields, even once their 1000 points are completed. Rewards and incentives such as gaining a passport (true citizenship à la Starship Troopers, anyone?), wiping off HECS debts, or achieving advanced standing within public service and military career paths could also be incorporated with the scheme.

I agree with Barrie that Defence is always going to have a problem with recruiting the numbers it requires to make up for natural attrition, as well as to expand in the areas it needs to as the forces grow in the future. There will also be no doubt that the strain on resources required by the ageing populous will only continue to increase. The idea of implementing a universal conscription scheme that incorporates services to the community in multiple forms other than in merely a military environment is definitely worthy of public debate. I appreciate that by making 'conscription' universal rather than selective is quite different to how troops were signed up in the past, and I also believe that by offering a range of jobs to suit people's varying preferences and aptitudes, most people can be accommodated for.

However:

I believe there is an inherent danger in employing people in the military if it is not entirely of their own volition.

I question the effectiveness of a group of young people that have been coerced in any way to serve in such positions, and I worry about the consequences of trying to get AUSSIE troops to work alongside people that have voluntarily chosen military jobs.

Instead of throwing $500 million at Defence Force Recruiting to figure out how to entice more people to enlist in the forces, why can't the ADF work on retaining as much staff as possible, and taking constructive steps towards making it an appealing enough workplace that people actually might want to work in without all the flashbangwaheynowwhizzery?

Military stuff aside... why should a whole generation of young Australians be forced into service jobs that for the most part involve taking care of a generation that wasn't forward-thinking enough to find a less uh... Communist(?) way of tackling the messed up babies-to-oldies-ratio problem?

If it takes about ten years to clock up these 1000 points of service, with the potential to keep a whole generation locked in to various jobs in the local community (especially if you can't get a passport!), will we end up with a mass of socially retarded, cultureless, unchallenged thirtysomething Australians left to write some pages in our nation's glittering history?

Perhaps the true danger behind Barrie's idea lies in the inevitability of such a program being hatched by those who have been shrouded in matters of Defence and politics for too long. This can only mean that the return of conscription in this sense will no doubt be fundamentally flawed, to the detriment of yet another generation of Australians.

nine out of ten feminists recommend...

2009-09-23T23:29:00.000+10:00

...knowing what a feminist is before claiming to be one.

According to Wikipedia:

Themes explored in feminist theory include discrimination, stereotyping, objectification (especially sexual objectification), oppression and patriarchy.

I think that's what I'll be getting at when I rant about something to do with Greg Sheridan's view that equality for women in war is lunacy:

All societies have recognised that they therefore need warriors. The warriors are not barbarians. They are brave, skilled, disciplined individuals who risk their lives for something bigger than themselves. The overwhelming majority of people who have lived, and the overwhelming majority of people and societies today, recognise that the warriors are men. This is something that most people know, even if they deny it.

As with so many issues, normal people are smarter here than intellectuals. Is there a home in Australia in which, if attacked by a burglar, the husband would not respond first?

Hello discrimination - surely society at large doesn't really believe you need a penis in order to be a brave, skilled, disciplined individual that risks their life for the greater good? I'm guessing that Sheridan's view of what it takes to be a real warrior in this day and age is whatever image he's got in his head from reading too many SAS books/novels, and he's willing to look past all of the women that have fought/died for their cause and/or country.

As for stereotyping, well it seems that the overwhelming majority has no choice but to agree with Sheridan's logic, which supports that warriors are men. I wouldn't want to seem bitter or anything, but I'd like to point out my doubts as to whether despite his job as foreign editor, Sheridan really knows what most people out of the general population (living or dead!) typically identify as warriors. Assuming he is correct in that I know that I recognise society's warriors as men, even if I deny it, I can't really begin to question whether the glorification of men on the frontline throughout the course of history has anything to do with the fact that women haven't been allowed anywhere near such roles until quite recently, can I?

I'm not too clear on the boundaries of definition for objectification and oppression, but I can't help but twitch a little when I read the last sentence quoted above, referring to a husband's first response. The underlying implication that a woman's place in the home is not only as a wife, but as the second responder, or even worse, the passive bystander whilst the man of the household does all the dirty work of counterattacking burglars (and what mighty warrior work you do, husbands of Australia!) bothers me too much for me to not mention.

I might have winged a distinction in statistics earlier this year, but I don't know what the real facts are on what the typical Australian household is made up of, how many burglaries occur whilst people are still at home, or whether more males than females are first to respond to a break-in. I could probably look these up, after spending a couple of captivating hours researching on the Australian Bureau of Statistics website, but I think I've sacrificed too much time to it already for my marketing subject last study period. But I digress. It wouldn't have taken a seasoned professional (such as Sheridan) particularly long to figure out whether The Husband™ is really the ultimate first responder to crime in an Australian household.

As for patriarchy, well...

Many practical considerations arise from the special nature of military culture and the extreme demands of battle. In close combat male soldiers will try to protect female soldiers. This is a law of human nature. The unit's effectiveness will suffer.

A military unit is bound by common identity, by deep traditions of comradely bonding. The romantic liaisons that inevitably develop in mixed gender units militate against the absolute teamwork, group identity and lack of favouritism that characterise military units in combat. A lack of knowledge of military culture leads to a lack of respect for it and then to policies that compromise effectiveness.

I guess the mother of all patriarchies would be inherent in present Australian military culture. After all this time without anywhere near a 50% female representation in the ranks, is it any wonder? Doesn't it make sense to send young boys and their fathers to war whilst girls stayed back to learn how to babysit and sew, whilst their mothers manufactured and packed parachutes, and filled in jobs that were left empty from all the conscriptions? To a certain degree, this situation is difficult to get around, you know, the whole preservation of the species thing. I've got to say though, lumping all women into the 'stay home and breed for the nation' category without giving them the option to not have children, and fight alongside men for their freedoms is almost insulting in 2009.

The real kick in the teeth from these telling paragraphs from Sheridan is the overall message that with his thorough understanding of military culture, women are a hindrance to the effectiveness of military units in combat. Who would have thought that despite modern training techniques, improvements in battle equipment, and access to wartime intelligence that our forebears could only dream of... the most highly developed of our military warriors could be so easily compromised by a female in the ranks?

Perhaps after seeing the group dynamics of typical military units today, it is difficult for people like Sheridan to imagine the existence of a hoo-ah sisterhood. Despite the ADF discussing the possibility of providing women with more job opportunities if they can meet the physical and psychological requirements, they are working against years of ingrained thought regarding what a woman's place is and/or should be in times of war. Although I see no point in debating which gender would be more effective in close quarter combat for as long as women are actively discouraged or prohibited from the frontline (the word of the day is moot, kids!) I would be interested to see if there was some kind of research into whether 'comradely bonding' is strictly the territory of heterosexual males in the peak of conflict.

So I guess what I'm saying is... does this make me a feminist? :)

zen and the art of sandwich making

2009-08-02T00:26:00.005+10:00

My paperwork has been submitted for my competency log stuff, which means I'll be a Leading Aircraftwoman soon. I'm rostered on to work a weekend in a couple of weeks, which is the real sign of promotion. A whole kitchen to myself for five meals! What's the worst that could happen? I'd better not dwell on that too long, because I'll get too nervous.

It's strange, knowing that it's been just over two years since enlistment, and I've broken the back of my service obligation. When I first signed up I thought that four years was an eternity in a job I had no real idea how to do or what to expect. I guess I'm not all the way there yet, and I feel like I've spent a year just learning how to do what I do comfortably enough to tell people with confidence that I'm a cook.

Yet when I speak to the people that have started a year or more after me, and watch the way the new cooks work, I can notice the difference between them and myself. I've been wearing the same rank as them for all this time, but it seems that suddenly they're asking me for help and instruction, and more often than not it's my name on the board where it says 'Duty Cook'.

The other LACs have been joking about how I'm more likely to get a reprieve from sandwich bar, now that I've moved up in the world. I don't know why making salads and sandwiches comes with such a stigma, perhaps because there's little to no cooking involved, or because you have to deal with customers face to face at the Officers' Mess, as opposed to hiding out the back if you're doing cook to order stuff or even just plating up the food. Working on sandwich bar actually makes me miss the buzz I get from dealing directly with customers, the same sort of energy I'd pick up on when I was waiting tables. It's too easy to forget that you're feeding fellow humans, rather than just producing food that gets taken away on plates by the stewards.

I still find it more stressful being duty cook than not, even though it shouldn't be anything to stress about. I guess it's that feeling of not being able to relax entirely until the whole shift is done and dusted. Anything that goes wrong on your watch is your responsibility, and I've already had my share of things go wrong that have not necessarily been under my control, but should have been. On the other hand, it's also tricky to hand over the reins and delegate tasks without worrying about whether they're going to get done properly. I'd still rather bite off more than I can chew and screw things up myself, than have nothing on my plate and be left worrying about whether everyone else can handle the things I've handballed to them.

I've realised that I went through a similar phase when I became a shift supervisor in waiterland. There were the benefits of being able to get other people to do my bidding, but sometimes it was just easier and less frustrating to do something for myself, because I knew I could get it done efficiently and effectively the first time around. I think I'd be a terrible teacher... I simply don't have the patience and tolerance every hour of every working day of the week. I'm at a weird in-between phase right now, where all the other LACs are far more established in their rank than I am, and I am nowhere near the calibre of the ACs that have all just started in the mess this year. Although I enjoy taking charge of a shift and being responsible for its smooth running, sometimes what I'd really prefer is the gentle art of following rather than leading.

I have a feeling that as time goes on, and more ACs come through the mess, I am going to miss making sandwiches.

soon to be replaced by robots

2009-06-17T22:16:00.003+10:00

We've got some brand spanking new combination ovens at work. They're pretty freaking Gucci. The more expensive model has got its own computer control panel, and is worth about $35,000. I bet a lot of people would be thinking, whoa, what's so good about a freaking oven that makes it the same price as a sweet new car? Or, why would anyone want to bother with a computer that's attached to an oven?

Because good cooks are hard to find. That, and it won't be too long until our entire mustering can be done by trained monkeys.

Seriously, the SelfCooking Center® is an utter smartarse. It's like the Hermione of ovens, and I'm sure once you've worked with them for long enough, going back to the old school combi where you have to choose from limited and archaic options such as steam or dry heat, time, and temperature, would be like returning to the dark ages.

Say you want to cook some bar snacks to fatten up the Officers on a weekday afternoon. You've trayed up some party pies, sausage rolls, mini pizzas, dim sims, and chicken satay meatballs. Trouble is, they all take slightly different times to actually cook, so it's a bit tricky to avoid overcooking one type of snack whilst undercooking another. Never fear, genius oven is here! Simply load up the trays into any of ten racks, and via the Finger Food menu options, set separate timers for each numbered rack. The computer will buzz and remind you when rack two, party pies are ready to roll, then once you have taken out that tray of tasty pastry, the internal thermostat will ensure the oven returns to its specified temperature before counting down the timers on the rest of the items inside.

Or perhaps you'd like to slow-cook a roast for the next day's lunch. Choose the type of meat from the menu, how quickly you'd like to roast (there is actually an overnight option), and the level of doneness for the meat. Stick the internal temperature probe into the meat once you've put the tray into the preheated oven (the computer will say when it's ready for the meat to go in), and the oven will take care of the rest. You can even choose to do roast with crackling, and once the core temperature reaches a certain point, the computer will crank up the temperature of the oven so that the crackling gets super crisp by the time the whole roast is ready.

Maybe you've got a couple trays of Cauliflower Mornay or Potato Au Gratin that you'd like to cook off. Back in the day, you'd have to blanch or steam your cauliflower or potato to partially cook it, then tray it up with the white sauce, cheese and/or breadcrumbs, then hope to bake it enough to get the cheese golden and melty without turning it brown or black. Now you can just choose from the Gratin menu, stick a probe in your cauliflower or potato, and the computer will know how long to steam/bake for, whilst also pumping up the dry heat in the last moments of cooking so that cheesy crust will be just right.

If you have a pasta choice coming up, you can actually put measured amounts of dry pasta, prepared sauce, and water into a gastronorm tray, immerse the internal temperature probe, and the combi will buzz you when it's ready to go. Ready to go onto the servery that is! Straight from oven to bain marie, without having to deal with the hassle of sticking a pot of water on the stove to heat up water and then cook pasta, then drain it off so it's ready for use. It's 2009, after all... why don't all commercial kitchens do away with such prehistoric means of cooking pasta!?

Say you're a bit of a control freak, and you're not 100% willing to relinquish control of your meal to software that has been developed by Germans (who no doubt wish to take over all of the world's cooking facilities, one combi oven at a time). You can still work in manual mode, and go into all sorts of menus to program your own cooking styles and save them on the oven's computer. Want to start off by steaming something at 75% humidity and 50 degrees, but finish off with a searing dry heat at 250 degrees? You can do it. It's like going into the source code of the cooking programs, and if something works well, you can even download it to a USB drive and transport your winning programs to another combi elsewhere. If you don't trust the autopilot, you can tool around with as many settings as you like. If you want to change messes and still insist on cooking quiches your way and no one else's, jam your masterpiece onto a USB key and show everyone else who's boss.

Maybe you have to be a bit of a geek as well as a not-too-precious chef to appreciate this sort of technology. The guy who was sent out to train us (madlove an oven that requires basic training, manuals, and a dvd included!) said that he used to work functions where he could get his produce in on a Tuesday. Then he'd prep it all on a Wednesday. Cook it and plate it up on a Thursday. Then blast chill it whilst the plates were loaded onto special trolleys. Pull it out of the freezer on the Friday, load it straight into the oven and stick it on the special reheat setting (the trolley is designed to fit into the oven whilst it is full of plates). Wait for the oven to bing, pull out the trolley and put a special thermal cover over it that can keep it at temperature for twenty minutes or so... which is the time it takes to heat up another trolley load. Work smarter, not harder! Pity you still have to rely on humans to actually take out the plates to customers at the function.

Luckily for us, there is still a need for human cooks, so that the right decisions can be made with the oven, and the right things are put on for meals. Some could argue that this takes the fun out of cooking, because so much of it is done automatically, but to be honest, I don't think anyone really sees checking temperatures and moisture content of food as the most enjoyable part of cooking. The other great thing is that the oven tracks temperatures and times for food that has been probed within it, so if someone decides that they've got food poisoning, we can actually pull up a record that says everything we've served has complied with HACCP standards.

I probably shouldn't be saying all this, because word might get out that the mysteries of cooking and getting things right with food have now been taken care of by a computer. The same ten year old that once knew how to program a VCR whilst their parents scratched their heads about how to get it to stop flashing 12:00? They're going to be smart enough to know how to cook a succulent steak, or a tray of perfect soft-poached eggs. You probably won't need Year Nine maths to be a cook any more, you'll just have to watch a DVD and be tall enough to shut the door.

I'm more awed than scared at the moment. Still, it's a good thing I'm looking into remustering in a couple of years. :)

muffins, meringues, and meat-based mayhem

2009-06-05T22:49:00.000+10:00

The day didn't start off too well. I dumped my bag with PT gear in it (hopeless optimism that I'd get time to duck out for a quick game of something with some of the other cooks), hung up my squadron cap, and realised that I forgot to bring a skull cap with me. A quick look in a couple other lockers saved me from scurrying back to my room, as I discovered Kina's secret stash of hats. Now things were looking up. A quick stop to check work emails, and look up a basic muffin recipe, and I was on my way.

Usually when I'm working, I've got to write out a full plan of what I've got to get through that day. It'll have a list of the tasks I'm assigned to, as well as timings so I can actually get everything done on time. It's one of the perils of being a bottom rung Aircraftwoman (ACW), but I don't mind it. I'm not that much of an organisation nut or list junkie, but I like looking at a timeline to get an idea of whether I'm ahead or behind schedule, so I can sing out for help or give someone else a hand as necessary. It really helps in sweets to have stuff nutted out before the shift as well, because I often struggle trying to get things baking, mixing, setting, and garnished simultaneously, and there's not enough time in the day to do everything as separate tasks.

Fridays mean a bit of a reprieve from all the planning - if the week's gone well, I know what ingredients there are in the fridge that are leftover and to be used up, and I know what we've run out of in the freezer or the dry stores so I'll come prepared with ideas that I'll be able to do without having to beg other messes for the right ingredients. There's a lot of flexibility with the sweets we can offer with meals - there used to be a set menu, but now it's pretty much an open choice as long as there's a hot sweet for lunch, and fruit salad with lunch and dinner.

I started off with a mega muffin mix, seeing as it's good to get the baking requirement of the day done first. It also helps warm up the kitchen and fill it with that awesome baked goods smell, which always gets the other cooks wondering what's cooking... and later swooping like seagulls for whatever scraps they can steal. The other thing about Friday sweets is that as well as preparing assorted platters of sweets for the upcoming weekend, the sweets cook has to offer something to the 58 Gap Year Cadets that have a weekly barbecue up at the Officers' Mess for lunch. I figured that I didn't have enough leftovers kicking around to sacrifice to the cause, so a giant batch of banana, mixed berry and white chocolate muffins would just have to do!

Doing something well whilst in sweets bay elicits a variety of responses:
'Ooh, yummy! What a shame you don't have a penis.'
-- from a seemingly easily impressed female

[Walking past the oven and looking in] 'Oh my God! Those muffins look like shit!'
-- the most backhanded of compliments from one of the guys

'Why are you wasting perfectly good muffins on the Gappies?'
-- from the new kid who was probably too scared to ask for one directly

My favourite response of all - busting a couple of the cooks stealing muffins from the bowl I was filling up for the Gappies, while they didn't think I was paying attention. :)

Due to the lack of equipment on hand, I only had a 24-cup tray, so I did two and a bit rounds of spooning the mix in and baking, giving the tray a quick wash in between. I ended up having enough mixture for 58 exactly, but with some muffins going AWOL earlier on in the piece (gotta love how blatant some of the guys are, not even putting the glad wrap back over the top of the bowl properly after yoinking a muffin), if each Gappie wanted a muffin, they might have to duke it out for the last couple. Well, they're going to have to learn sooner or later that life isn't fair and rations aren't always what you expect them to be. They looked so happy to receive a giant bowl of muffins for their dessert too! I can just imagine how crushed the last couple of Gappies would've been, discovering that they're too late for pudding. Survival of the fattest, ey?

While the muffins baked, I got platters ready for the weekend, as well as plating and garnishing up some desserts for lunch. I had a big tray of chocolate cheesecake brownie slice to cut up, something I prepared yesterday because the recipe said that brownies taste better the day after they're made. They weren't wrong! The beauty about cutting up good sweets is that anything you trim off the edges, or happen to cut unevenly, just gets eaten without you even realising it. Limited wastage all round! The guys thought that the hybrid of cheesecake and brownie was a bit unusual, but still dug it once they gave it a shot. I've made this recipe a couple of times, but I still can't match how one of my favourite cafes back at home does it.

The second round of muffins went in, as I decorated some mini-pavlovas for the weekend. I later discovered that I shouldn't have spread the pavlovas around all the platters, because they won't be any good beyond about 24 hours. Yes, sweets can indeed self-destruct. Something about the moisture making meringue go all spoogy after it's been sitting in the fridge for too long. A few bits of strawberry and some mixed berry coulis to finish off the pavlovas, and there's only a few gaps left on the platters to fill.

That's where my totally ghetto recipe for the day came into play... I made an orange polenta syrup cake yesterday, but buggered it up somewhat when flipping it out of the tray too soon after taking it out of the oven, so I ended up with a heap of scrappy bits where the cake cracked apart and I couldn't salvage a square-sized serving out of it. However, with a waste-not-want-not mentality, and spaces in the weekend sweets platters to fill, I thought I could turn these cake bits into Jaffa Truffle Balls. Feel the fear and do it anyway, right? :) A couple of cans of condensed milk, a smattering of cocoa powder, rolled into disturbing poo-balls and finished off with desiccated coconut. Everybody wins. I totally kick food wastage butt!

All that was left to do for the day is the hot sweet. Today's masterpiece was butterscotch self-saucing pudding, served with hot vanilla custard. I thought I should face my nemesis from Monday once more, after the pudding I tried to cook was nowhere near ready for the whole of lunchtime, whether it was due to too much liquid in the recipe, or the oven was turned down too low for most of its cooking, I still don't know. This time around though, I got the pudding in early, held back on the amount of liquid it recommended to pour in for the sauce, and it was ready ahead of schedule. I wasn't even using a recipe that I had tried before, but it all turned out like it was meant to. What a relief! After cleaning up the sweets bay area and putting out my hot sweet for lunch, it was time to... cook burgers.

I'm not kidding. Yes, I get paid way too much per hour to flip burgers, but this was my lunch job. One could argue that I also get paid too much to make sandwiches to order, but I might save that rant for another time. The new kid Harry was torn between the torment of sandwich bar, and the pressure of cooking burgers to order back in the kitchen... he first requested to swap jobs with me for lunch, but then went back on his wish and opted to go out to sandwich bar anyway.

This left me to find out all the wild and wonderful ways to not assemble a burger, according to Adam's Rules of Burger Assemblage:

Do not melt the cheese onto the base of the bun.

Do not start with any salad item other than lettuce.

Do not melt the cheese onto the top of the burger patty.

Do not put unmelted cheese underneath the burger patty.

Do not attempt to close the burger with salsa on the underside of the bun lid.

I have a feeling they're going to make me do remedial burger cooking at Ron's barbecue on Monday... I think I might have to plead strategic incompetence to get out of it. Who knew that there were even five ways to mess up a burger? Apparently it was painfully obvious that I never worked a job at Macca's or Hungry Jack's. I'm kind of glad that it shows, though. :)

Too bad I can't give up my day job until 2011!

and now for the weather...

2009-04-24T22:14:00.004+10:00

It's going to be windier than a baked beans convention... depending of course on how many delegates there are. All joking aside, if you're going to be marching tomorrow, you'd better hang on to your hats.

No kidding, that was the latest weather update on our local substitute for Channel Seven!

I don't think I've ever used the chinstrap on my service dress hat. I don't think there's any other way (short of wedging the hat right onto my head) of keeping it from blowing away in the wind, either.

At least it's not going to rain?

how can you have any pudding?

2009-04-16T22:46:00.004+10:00

Part of my competency log training is a checksheet on identifying different cuts of meat. Presumably so I can do an accurate stocktake of meat we've got in the freezers and fridges, as well as sign for deliveries and check them off properly. Although I've been doing this for almost two years, and I've even got posters of Australian Beef/Sheep/Pork primal cuts on the walls of my room, it's still my kryptonite.

I don't remember being explicitly told that meat came from dead animals. I think I've been fed meat for as long as I can recall any memories of eating. I can't really remember a time where I've not eaten meat, apart from when I've been too poor to afford any, or phases of inspired vegetarianism like when we did the butchering unit at TAFE and I couldn't shake the feeling that I was dissecting, cooking, then eating corpses for a living.

One strange thing about the Chinese language (or at least, in Mandarin) is that there is no word for pork. The word for pork is actually 'meat'. I guess a rough translation of beef would be 'cow meat', and fish/chicken have their own separate words, but perhaps when you eat so much pig meat, it's just a matter of efficiency to just call it meat and let everyone assume that it's pork unless otherwise specified.

It wasn't until I moved out of home, and started exploring various Chinese restaurants, as well as eating all manner of other foods, that I realised how much of what my parents cooked for me as a kid truly revolved around pork. I found it odd that a friend of mine at my 16th birthday would mention how she didn't eat pork, and disliked it so much that if she did eat any, she'd throw up... what's to fear? It's not like there's pork everything on the menu! Wasn't as tricky a situation as for vegetarian friends of mine, anyway...

So there's all these dishes that I don't know the proper Chinese or English names for, that I sometimes wish I could order at a restaurant. Pork dumplings and pork spring rolls are easy enough to find, as are barbecue pork buns. You know how you can get barbecue pork just cut up in special fried rice, or even chopped up for a take-home pack from some restaurants, you know, the ones with the ducks hanging in the window? It has that bright red tomatoey looking coating on the outside... as kids we called that 'red meat'. My Dad used to make us this marinated braised pork belly dish that I used to love with congee... because of the soy and whatever else was in the marinade, the pork belly was dubbed 'brown meat'. I didn't even know what congee was until just a few years ago, it was called something that I think translates to 'wet rice'.

Then there was this meatloaf kind of thing Dad made, which I think was just leftover dumpling filling moulded into the base of a bowl, with an egg cracked into a dent in the top of it, then it was steamed until it was cooked. You could break off bits of it with chopsticks or a fork and eat it with rice. This classic was simply called 'meatball'. I had all sorts of favourites - meat with bamboo shoots (which I didn't connect with pandas, as a kid!), meat with celery, meat with tofu, meat with Chinese spinach, meat with minced mushrooms. I don't know how they managed to do it, but my parents managed to feed me a million variations of pork without me being conscious or even annoyed with the constant source of meat. It was like a ghetto version of Iron Chef, but the secret ingredient is always pork. Just don't tell the kids!

Which brings me back to a year of vague attempts at discerning veal from beef, topside from rump, knuckle from collar, and meat from... meat. I totally blitzed my theory tests during the meat unit at TAFE, because I studied the primal cuts like a doctor would cram anatomy, but when it's not me that's done the breakdown from animal to chunk of something wrapped in plastic, I struggle.

My parents' parents would probably laugh at my so-called misfortune and tell me to stop trying to label it, just be grateful and cook/eat it instead.

in defence of defence

2009-04-05T01:07:00.004+11:00

DEFENCE FORCE FATTIES screamed the headline of The Daily Telegraph on an ill-fated morning whilst I tried to enjoy my usual weekend breakfast of glee. The online article has the less sensational headline of 'Defence Force Obesity Epidemic', but you get the idea. Apart from the immediate guilt at scoffing down the breakfast of champions (I think it was the vegetarian big breakfast with scrambled eggs, but I can't quite remember), and having recently failed my Physical Fitness Test multiple times, I was taken aback by the image in the paper of 'Hot chicken heroes':

Fortunately, the surname patch on the left side of HCH#1 has been craftily edited out on the online version of the photograph, but nothing seemed to stop the newspaper from printing the unedited version in several hundred copies. The soldier's rank is obscured by the kebab, but due to the Australian flag on the arm of HCH#2, and noting that the caption mentions the photo was taken in Brisbane, it probably wouldn't be able to find out who HCH#1 probably is. Regardless of whether anyone can narrow down the true identify of HCH#1, I'm sure the two know who they are. How embarrassing. Since when was it a crime to grab a kebab? I'd like to think that this article says more about the quality of TDT's journalism than anything particularly conclusive about the state of our troops.

I should say at this point that even though I failed my PFT earlier on this year, I eventually passed on my third attempt, after a couple of weeks of solid training, sound advice and remedial PT classes led by the supportive and encouraging staff at the base gym. I guess that makes me a form of evidence that even though someone in the military can lack the discipline to maintain their fitness during the entirety of the year, it doesn't take that much in effort and resources to get that fitness back. Obviously the situation is different for other people who have more work to do, whether it's due to recovering from injuries, being deployed in areas where it's difficult to maintain physical fitness routines, or because they ate more ham over Christmas than I managed to during my leave. However, I'd like to think that any member of the ADF would also believe that it's possible to achieve the basic fitness level and maintain it without too much difficulty.

The big stink about this article is that is uses BMI as a metric to classify people as 'obese'. A multitude of people (military and civilian, from the looks of it) commented to various incarnations of the online and print articles, pointing out that BMI does not take into account muscle mass or body type/structure when labelling people as obese or otherwise. BMI is useful as a guide, but when you're talking about a subsection of the population that are more likely to contain muscular types, or at least people that have greater than average inclination to do regular weight training (whether it's incidental from pack marching, carrying a weapon/webbing, compulsory PT sessions involving weights work), it becomes less useful.

It's also worth pointing out that Australians in general are becoming bigger/heavier as a population, so the alarmist comment that our troops 'are becoming super-sized, averaging 16kg heavier than their World War I counterparts' is somewhat irrelevant. Never mind the fact that no other statistics are mentioned about how the average size of Australians has changed in the past 100 years, and that the size increase of today's troops compared to WWI could also have something to do with the average age upon enlistment (or even of members in the entire ADF, for that matter).

Some online commenters brought up the point about mess food quality and choices available, and I must admit that after eating at four different military locations (RAAF, Navy as well as Army), there are not always a wide variety of healthy options. However, some choices are always better than others, and policing the food that messes provide to ADF members would be a futile solution to the 'epidemic', considering that most members have the ability to eat food from elsewhere anyway. During recruits, when I was eating three square meals a day, going crazy on weekends with whatever I wanted, and scoffing vending machine snacks and contraband whenever possible, I still managed to lose weight and get fit in a way I never have before. I didn't give much thought to what I ate at the mess, because I was far more concerned about getting as much food into my mouth as possible during the limited time we had during meals. I realise this totally goes against anything that a nutritionist, doctor, dietitian or personal trainer would recommend, but I guess we worked hard enough to work off everything that was put on our plates.

When I had my first Annual Health Assessment, I informed the Medical Officer in a general questionnaire (which I guess is used by them to determine what kind of healthy habits or bad health indications there were to praise/beat out of us with a stick) that I had gained 10kg in approximately 6 months. Yes folks, this isn't a normal or healthy occurrence, and to be honest I didn't realise how drastic the numbers seemed until I compared my weight at the time to my all-time-record from rookies. I put down a little weight gain to having come out of the recruit lifestyle, and a little more to starting cooks' course, which meant a lot more eating than I was used to. What I didn't count on was the influence of Depo injections, which I'd started once I got to Cerberus, and decided to stop after struggling to shake off the weight that I'd gained since finishing recruits.

Despite not knowing for sure whether Depo was to blame for all that weight gain, the MedicO informed me of what resources were available to me to help me lose it once more. I could make specialist appointments with a dietitian in town, to see whether it was a matter of what I was eating that was the problem, or if it could be some weird hormonal thing (Depo, anyone?) or some other kind of body malfunction. I could weigh in weekly in a sort of Weight Watchers manner, so that during my weight loss journey I could be accountable for my progress and also get regular support and advice . I could participate in Physical Conditioning Program classes at the gym (also for people that had trouble passing PFTs), and speak to Physical Training Instructors on what sort of exercise I was doing. I even read some documentation on Defence sponsored diet products and even gastric surgery, which scared me a little. But this all goes to show that ADF does actually care about managing weight/fitness, as opposed to just kicking people out once they don't meet a certain standard/number/metric.

Perhaps it's not even worth my time saying that although 14% of the ADF appears to have a BMI over 30 (myself included, and even at my fittest during rookies I wasn't ever in the healthy weight range), the real concern should either be the ADF's capability to defend the nation despite the size of our respective girths, or the percentage of Australians that have a BMI over 30. I can't help but be biased in saying that the ADF made a wise choice in changing the entry requirements so that people with a BMI over 30 could still enlist, otherwise I never would have made it in when I did, but I am a firm believer that as long as you are physically fit enough to do your job, your BMI should not matter.

friends, civilians, military men... lend me your inboxes

2009-04-05T00:58:00.003+11:00

CIVILIAN FRIENDS - Disown you for running around their house naked in front of a bunch of people none of you have ever met before.
MILITARY FRIENDS - Take photos and then join you.

CIVILIAN FRIENDS- Think its disgusting that you got so drunk you pissed your pants and drowned the phone in your pocket - in their bed.
MILITARY FRIENDS-Upon hearing what happened say "That's fucked - that's why I don't sleep with my mobile in my pocket anymore" and help you turn their mattress over.

CIVILIAN FRIENDS: Get upset if you are too busy to talk to them for a week.
MILITARY FRIENDS: Are glad to see you after many years; and will happily carry on the same conversation you were having last time you met.

CIVILIAN FRIENDS: Never ask for food.
MILITARY FRIENDS: Are the reason you have no food.

CIVILIAN FRIENDS: Call your parents Mr and Mrs.
MILITARY FRIENDS: Call your parents Mum and Dad.

CIVILIAN FRIENDS: Bail you out of jail and then tell you what you did was wrong.
MILITARY FRIENDS: Would be sitting next to you saying, 'Mate...we fucked up ....but what a giggle?'

CIVILIAN FRIENDS: Have never seen you cry.
MILITARY FRIENDS: Cry with you.

CIVILIAN FRIENDS: Borrow your stuff for a few days then give it back.
MILITARY FRIENDS: Keep your stuff so long they forget it is yours.

CIVILIAN FRIENDS: Know a few things about you.
MILITARY FRIENDS: Could write a book with a shed full of direct quotes from you.

CIVILIAN FRIENDS: Will leave you behind if that is what the crowd is doing.
MILITARY FRIENDS: Will kick the backsides of whole crowds that left you behind.

CIVILIAN FRIENDS: Would knock on your door.
MILITARY FRIENDS: Walk right in and say, 'I'm home, got any beer!

CIVILIAN FRIENDS: Share a few experiences.
MILITARY FRIENDS: Share a lifetime of experiences no civilian could ever dream of.

CIVILIAN FRIENDS: Will take your drink away when they think you've had enough.
MILITARY FRIENDS: Will look at you stumbling all over the place and say,'You had better drink the rest of that, don't waste it. Then they carry you home and put you safely to bed.

CIVILIAN FRIENDS: Will talk crap to the person who talks crap about you.
MILITARY FRIENDS: Will knock the crap out of people who use your name in vain.

CIVILIAN FRIENDS: Know where you buried the body.
MILITARY FRIENDS: Helped you bury the body.

CIVILIAN FRIENDS: Will call you 'mate' as a term of endearment.
MILITARY FRIENDS: Will call you 'Wanker ' C*&T or 'Tosser' as a term of endearment.

CIVILIAN FRIENDS: Are for a while.
MILITARY FRIENDS: Are for life.

CIVILIAN FRIENDS: Will ignore this.
MILITARY FRIENDS: Will forward this to their military mates.

the tyranny of fitness

2009-01-25T14:39:00.002+11:00

The first couple weeks back for a new year involves a lot of updating of compulsory annual training, such as firefighting, first aid, occupational health and safety, and for a lucky few, physical fitness tests. I wasn't due for another PFT until closer to June this year, thanks to a lucky(?) clerical error in my favour last year, which has meant I haven't actually done a PFT since passing one in week eight of rookies circa August 2007. However, I wasn't so fortunate this time around, by finding myself on the list for a PFT last Monday.

What I was worried most about, I passed with no troubles - the push-ups. I'm not a fan of push-ups at the best of times, and usually train up for a PFT by doing push-ups until fatigue point just before bed each night. I used to do the same with sit-ups back in boot camp, practicing with other girls that weren't otherwise occupied with cleaning weapons or ironing (such is life!). The alternative exercise to push-ups is the flexed arm hang, which I couldn't do at all back in the days when I was first seeing a personal trainer to get fit enough for enlistment. Weighing ten or so kilograms more than I do now also didn't help with relying on my puny arms to support my whole body weight. However, before I realised that push-ups were another metric used in the PFT, I worked on all manner of exercises to build my core, arm, and back muscles to the point where I could hang for long enough.

I was less concerned with sit-ups, considering in a circuit training session the previous week, I had been able to do the requisite amount. Whether it was because I hadn't slept or eaten enough to restore my energy reserves and rebuild the abdominals I'd worked in that session, or because I'd made the foolish choice of having my feet off the mat as opposed to on the mat (which even the PTI Sergeant admitted was a slight biophysical disadvantage I was giving myself), I don't know, but I missed the sit-ups target by two. I tried again with my feet on the mat about ten minutes later, but my feet kept coming up off the floor, my abs had nothing left to give, and I said I'd try the walk before coming back to attempt the sit-ups with feet held (which use slightly different muscles).

As for the walk, well it was definitely deceptive. I've never done the walk option before, as we didn't have a choice of it in recruits (that I knew of), because we were expected to do the run. I didn't trust my post-Christmas cardiovascular ability enough to get the right pace for the run though, so I thought choosing to walk would be easier. Boy, was I wrong. The cracking pace required to make the time target was more of a slow jog than a brisk walk, considering how short my legs are and how useless swinging arms and stepping out is for keeping the speed up. I used a guy that was pacing along listening to an iPod (another thing I didn't know we were allowed to have for PFTs!) to mark my time, but we ended up both missing out by four seconds.

Four seconds, and two sit-ups, what's the big deal, you may ask. Much like the military doesn't care if you beat the targets by seconds, minutes, fives, or tens - a pass is a pass and a fail is a fail. So I've now got 90 days to redeem myself, with the opportunity to retest any time between now and some time in April, in order to avoid further reproach (baby's first Record Of Conversation! Argh!) and regain my Individual Readiness aka deployability. I was slightly pissed off with myself for missing my targets so marginally (I probably deserved to miss them by heaps, considering how much I ate and how little I did over my summer holidays), but took it all as the kick in the butt I need to get cracking on my physical state in 2009.

I already had plans to start yoga, boxing, and Krav Maga this year. I'll tone down the running until it starts getting interesting again, but I am interested to see what these three different yet related disciplines can do for me with some serious practice. For those not in the know, Krav Maga is a military hand-to-hand combat system developed in Israel, which assumes no quarter will be given, and emphasizes threat neutralization (according to Wikipedia). I'm basically doing it for fitness and self-defence, and considering its military (and quite practical) roots, I didn't think I'd have a problem with being allowed to partake in it.

That's part of the joys of being government property, you see. Even though we ran around with webbing, rifles, and CBRND suits in 30 degree heat, threw ourselves over and under logs, ropes, chains on an obstacle course, and did numerous battle PT sessions hauling around logs, ropes, tyres, stretchers and trucks, if anyone wishes to participate in organised sport during their spare time, they need permission from the RAAF. I'm not too sure on the definition of organised sport, but considering a friend of mine struggled to be allowed to practice and teach Judo (despite being a State champion) because it wasn't recognised by the RAAF as a permissible sport, I was a little wary of admitting my potentially un-approvable extracurricular intentions.

I thought I'd do the right thing anyway (not entirely convinced by annual Fraud and Ethics training), and ask my Flight Sergeant for the 'permission to partake in outside sport' form to fill in. Just in case Krav Maga is not on the white list (even though there's another RAAFie practicing that does have permission to play!), or Iyengar yoga is seen as a national threat of some kind, or non-contact boxing is only allowed during RAAF supervised PT sessions. Part of filling in this form is seeking approval at the unit level (even though I'm sure the Commanding Officer has better things to do than sign off on everyone's voluntary sporting activities), but I thought I had a pretty good case seeing as working towards being fighting fit can only be an advantage.

Imagine my surprise when the reply from FSGT was that he could give me the form, and was happy to set the wheels in motion for me to get it signed off in the right manner, but not until I was IR current. In essence, this means I may not be medically covered if an injury occurs to me whilst I take part in 'unapproved sport', and following that sort of logic, I shouldn't be doing any extracurricular sporting activity until I am deemed 'medically fit' again. Time to play spot the Catch-22, perhaps? One would think that having failed a PFT, I should be encouraged to do anything (in my spare time or otherwise) that will increase my fitness, and therefore my prospects of passing a PFT in the near future, not discouraged.

I'm tempted to look up the relevant Defence Instructions on such rulings, to see if I have anything to wield against FSGT for doing this, but I've already been told by my immediate SGT that I should do whatever it takes to get fit again, and in the event of any injury, just say I fell down drunk or something similar. Like that's much more honourable/believable!

the year in preview

2009-01-17T22:23:00.003+11:00

I've only been back at work for a week, but I can already tell that it's going to be a pretty busy 2009. Christmas/New Year break was fun, spent mostly in Melbourne, but stopping at Canberra, Wangaratta, and Terrigal along the way there and back. Clocked up some much needed kilometres on the new/old car, caught up with friends and family, and thankfully didn't get called up to do any RAAFesque duties.

I'll start with some not-so-breaking family news. While talking to my Mum and Aunt about someone who ran into me last year while I was attending the International Women's Day Dinner at Telstra Dome, I found out that this woman's father worked in the Air Force with my Grandfather. I didn't even know my maternal Grandfather was in the Air Force! I'm guessing it was for Taiwan, seeing as that's where my Mum grew up, but who knows. I'm determined to learn Mandarin properly, and go back to Taiwan to research more of this untranslated side of my family's flying history. Maybe it's something in the blood, which could explain other relatives on my Mum's side working for Cathay Pacific, and my own brother's fascination with aviation.

I think I remember seeing photos of my Grandfather with medals, or at least ribbons/braids of some kind, but no one in my family told me there was any kind of Air Force connection when I first said I was enlisting. So much for being the first in the family to go the military route. Not only was my Grandfather in the Air Force, he was a fighter pilot! My Mum and Aunt continued bantering away about the odds of me coming across someone who was two degrees of separation from my Grandfather, while I was still gobsmacked about him being some kind of AFie! Funnily enough, the woman that spotted me at the Telstra Dome thought I was with the Victoria Police band (who were performing that night), because I was in my service dress blues, which look quite similar to the Police uniform. I could have also been two or three degrees of separation from this woman, because she worked for Metropolitan Fire Brigade, which isn't too far removed from the Paramedic I'm with...

News on the future career front is that my application for LEAP, which is a scheme that basically covers the cost of the Bachelor of Business (Logistics and Supply Chain Management) course I'm attempting by distance learning, has been successful. This means that I've really got to get my rear into gear and pass all the subjects that I'm pledging to get through this year (four of them, yikes!), and spend the next couple years doing the equivalent of first year university. Through the application process, I've had to inform my superiors (and their superiors) of my intentions, which is basically to get a head start on the Business degree in order to be competitive for the Undergraduate sponsor scheme (full time study at a civilian university campus) or entry to ADFA via the Airman/Airwoman Access to the Academy Scheme (full time study in Canberra) by 2011. Not entirely concidental is the end of my initial sentence (sorry, Return Of Service Obligation) of 2 July, 2011, although I'm not sure what the payback is meant to be for however much of my degree the RAAF ends up footing the bill for. :)

So what does this all mean, in a nutshell? Well, for one, it doesn't look like I'm going to be saving up money for that little bar or cafe in the near future. My initial impetus for going the logistics path was a mixture of wanting to open up my career options so that I could possibly move back to or closer to Melbourne and live with my partner (RAAF cooks can only be posted to NT/QLD/NSW below Corporal rank), and also coming to the realisation that I don't think I'm physically and mentally capable of spending years in catering without wondering why I didn't give in to the curiosity of what I could do and where I could go if I pushed myself that little bit further. Also, if I do want to leave the RAAF eventually, I think the idea of a civilian job in logistics is much more appealing than one in hospitality (if it's not for my own business). My bar and cafe dreams have somewhat dwindled to the mobile coffee or kebab cart for now; I think that owning/running a small business is its own battlefield of sorts, and the sum total of my hospitality (and life!) experience hasn't readied me for that at all.

To put another twist in this tale, it turns out that I might not be a couple years away from wrangling my way to a more Victorian location, as it seems quite possible that my Paramagic partner can share this lovely State with me a lot sooner than 2011. There are no guarantees of course, but considering for the best part of a year I've thought that I'm going to be up here keeping the bench warm by myself for a couple years, this is amazing news to me. I'm still going ahead with the degree studies, and pursuing that ever elusive commission (if only to have an ending of sorts for this story!), but there's less pressure to ride the career rodeo just to be in a more geographically favourable position. This year I'm hoping that I'll be sent away on an exercise within Australia, that I'll get my Leading Aircraftwoman rank, and that I'll move into a non-military dwelling of some kind.

That's right - with a little luck, and a bit of work, this little baseling is going to go places.

how to recruit the right person for the job…

2009-01-17T00:23:00.005+11:00

(A debrief of the first week back to work to follow; for now, here's the best of the jokes that were sent to me in the month or so that I had off. Translations in square brackets for the civilian impaired!)

Put about 100 Bricks in some particular order in a closed room with an open window. Send 2 - 3 candidates into the room and close the door. Leave them alone and come back in 6 hours to analyse the situation.

If they stack and count the bricks: Assign to RAAOC [Royal Australian Army Ordnance Corps]

If they recount the bricks: Assign to Pay Corps

If they've done nothing useful except make a huge mess with the bricks: Assign to RAE [Royal Australian Engineers]

If the arrange the bricks in strange order: Assign to Clerks

If the make the bricks into a wall and insist on knocking it over with their heads: Assign to Infantry (without delay)

If they insist on eating the bricks with the belief of hardening up: Assign to Armour

If any bricks are broken and one candidate dobs them in: Assign him to MP's and the others to Infantry [Military Police]

If the candidates are throwing bricks in no particular direction: Assign to Artillery

If they've already knocked off for the day: Assign to the RAAF

If they're staring out the window: Assign to Navy

Finally, if they are all sitting around talking to each other and no bricks have moved… congratulate them and send them to Duntroon. [Royal Military College, for officer training]

combat catering

2008-12-06T19:04:00.002+11:00

The mission: to establish and maintain law and order in the fictional country of Nesos Mikros, whose government has requested the help of the Australian Defence Force. Two local tribes (the Lenevians and Balmerians) are in conflict over the alleged poor treatment of Balmerians by the Lenevian-led national government. The RAAF is sending approximately 80 members of 381 Expeditionary Combat Support Squadron to set up an Aerial Port Of Debarkation (temporary air-strip) that is expected to operate for up to 30 days.

They say half the fun is getting there. In order to replicate the travel required to get to the Pacific nation of Nesos Mikros (which I soon discovered was merely the relabelled south island of Fiji), and for some members of the unit to get in some much-needed convoy practice, we drove from Williamtown to Tamworth (286km), and then swung back to Taree (333km). This is just over eight hours of ordinary driving, but you can pretty much forget about that timing when it comes to a military convoy’s pace. A particular highlight for me (apart from sneering at the Golden Guitar at Tamworth, for although 12m is quite large for a guitar, it’s not as big as I remember it to be) was stopping by the now defunct Leyland Brothers World.

It took about twelve hours for our packet to reach its destination, with minimal toilet stops, and wonderful opportunities to catch some fresh air and open the less bus-friendly bits of our ration packs to eat. Gotta love digging into a stone-cold pack of salmon mornay and pasta while there’s a McDonald’s and a Subway within smelling distance! Oh yeah, due to ‘not being able to ingest local food’, we had to get by on rat packs for the first few days. Fortunately, at Taree’s Army Reserve Squadron, where we were camped whilst doing force preparation, our rat packs were supplemented by cooked breakfasts and dinners thanks to The Salvation Army. Bless. Judging from the desperation that our troops dug into the fresh rations after only 12 hours on rat packs, there was no doubt going to be some pressure on Catering to set up our kitchen ASAP once we got out bush.

Luckily, I got as much sleep as I could during the convoy, because as soon as we landed at Taree, we got straight into force prep. This involved various ground defence lessons for most of the day, as well as two sets of piquets (guard duties) during the night – let the sleep deprivation begin! It seemed kind of pointless to sit and watch a bus with weapons locked in its hold, and then to rove the perimeter for a further hour, when we didn’t have weapons in our hands to actually guard the weapons with. Who said the military was bursting at the seams with logic, though? The real kicker about doing force prep was finding out that despite having to sleep on the ground in mozzie domes, we weren’t going to get field allowance for the privilege!

By the time we made it to the site of the APOD in Salt Ash (about 15 minutes away from Williamtown), we were wishing for an increase in field allowance. The land was once an orchard, with a north-south downwards slope that undulated with troughs of poorly cleared plant matter. Just perfect for building pits from sandbags, and setting up a nice level kitchen on! There was something about the location which must have appealed greatly to mosquitoes, ticks, and leeches, because they certainly didn’t clear out just because we arrived with our industrial insect repellent. Medical was kept busy with the steady stream of tick-victims, and progressively filled a jar with a still-twitching collection of the parasites. I joked that the person with the most ticks pulled out at the end of exercise should win the jar – either that, or they should start a guessing competition to see how many ticks would be in the jar by the end of ten days, but if the prize is the jar, no one would want to win that contest anyway…

I’d heard rumours that Catering always gets reamed out bush, no matter what the scenarios, but I wasn’t expecting to struggle before anything even started. Seems that we were a target for plague as well as pestilence – in the first couple days we lost our Sergeant to a mysterious illness, as well as an extra Corporal (a Physical Training Instructor that was tacked onto Catering) to indigestion or perhaps strategic dehydration. Our kit wasn’t even set up fully yet, and we were two men down, from a ten-man section! It was up to the remaining Corporal to step up to the plate, and a surprise 2IC to also jump into the mess headfirst. We also copped it on the first night of major contact, because one of the cooks had an unlawful discharge, so he didn’t have a weapon for about 12 hours.

Here’s how we got screwed by some of the scenarios:

I shot the Padre (but I did not shoot the deputy). This was an ‘authorised unlawful discharge’, where I was meant to pretend that I was cleaning my weapon and accidentally shoot the Padre. The scenario was meant to test the response of Medical, Security Police, and also the follow-up checking of my weapon functionality by Ground Defence/Warehouse. Oh, and the Padre was also meant to be relieved by another Padre, so this was just a more dramatic way of doing a changeover, I guess. I was taken out of the kitchen for a couple hours while the Padre got treated and medevaced by helicopter (your taxes at work!), and while I got questioned and counselled. Turns out my weapon was borderline unserviceable anyway, so it was a good thing I shot the Padre!

One of the fridges was taken out by a bullet. No major drama, just requiring a quick reshuffling of produce from one fridge to the other. The funnier thing was that for authenticity’s sake, someone drilled a hole in something that they probably shouldn’t have, because after the scenario was over the shot fridge actually was shot. It didn’t become serviceable again for another couple of days.

A fridge-worth of rations got delivered while we already had one full fridge. Another exercise in prioritisation. Some of us tried to argue that various items such as eggs, fruit, and certain vegetables didn’t require refrigeration, but our frazzled Corporal ignored the points we were making about what gets shelved versus fridged at Woolies, and insisted we cram as much as possible into the one remaining fridge. I would have laughed and said I told you so, if the sole fridge then decided to pack it in due to being overstuffed.

Intruders entered the Area of Operation ten minutes after dinner was ready to be served. Base camp could smell the steaks from anywhere, but someone higher up the hill must have forgot to keep track of the time. Even though we had dinner all ready to go and waiting to be served to the troops, it all had to be thrown out because the scenario went on for so long, it was no longer safe to eat because it was just sitting in hotboxes and not the actual servery.

Airplane crash during lunchtime, requiring 22 extra meals prepared for delivery to the personnel sent out to help at the crash site. Our own lunches were sacrificed for the cause, to make the delivery that little bit speedier. We ended up going hungry and raiding the fridges later for refreshment. Fortunately there were still enough rations to go round at that point. It got trickier to pull extra meals out of nowhere as the days went on, and sections grew, or other scenarios requiring emergency/unannounced hotboxes continued to crop up. Things got a little desperate when we ran out of coffee and biscuits, and we had to put on a morning tea for a realtime affair – local VIPs and media.

One of the Military Working Dogs got shot, and the body had to be stored in one of our fridges until it was picked up. Despite our Corporal arguing that once a dead body went into our now-working second fridge, we weren’t able to use it for food even after it was emptied once more, higher-ups decided that preserving a dead dog’s body was more important than maintaining the capacity to feed fresh rations to the remaining living troops. For some reason, shoving a dog’s body into a shipper with ice seems a little cruel. Not as cruel as letting the unit go back onto rat packs until we get another fridge sent to us, obviously!

A typical day in the life of Catering could include:
4 hours general ground defence duties (sandbagging, maintaining pits/camouflage, cleaning weapon, clearing patrols and stand-to periods)
2 hours Vehicle Check Point duty
2 hours day shift piquet in section Alert Pit
2-4 hours night shift piquet in section Alert Pit
8 hours preparing/serving/cleaning up after three meals per day

Sleep happens whenever and wherever possible. I don’t think I slept for more than three hours continuously for the entire time we were out there. The only things that managed to keep me awake and alert whilst on piquet were actual contacts – when there are people firing at you from the treeline 100m away, you suddenly forget you’ve had bugger all rest and your body finds its urge to survive.

I got cranky. I got dirty. I got delirious. I hallucinated. I swore like a trucker’s wife at anything and everything that frustrated me in the slightest. I probably managed to piss off each and every member of our crew at some time or other, but also turned around at other stages to motivate each and every one of them to harden up and push on. There’s something magical about going out bush – I imagine it’s something akin to childbirth – despite the pain and trauma of it all, what you get out of it by the time you come back home and the dust settles far outweighs all the crap that happens to you out there.

No one would believe me when I said it, but I’m glad I actually went. It was an eye-opening experience for sure, and it highlighted a lot of bullshit that I imagine goes with the territory of military exercise (or general practice, for that matter), but I’ve learnt a lot in ten days that I probably wouldn’t have found out any other way.

like being raped with the unpleasant end of a rake

2008-11-09T15:51:00.004+11:00

Hindsight is a marvellous thing. I should have printed a copy of this off and kept it in sight whilst I was applying to be a RAAFie cook. Things might have turned out quite differently! For better or for worse, I've still yet to decide. :) I figure I've been writing this blog long enough to have a flashback episode. I remembered the other day that I had once vowed never to work in a kitchen again, and then tried to dig out what I'd written from the archives of the internet...

From an old journal entry written on November 23, 2005:

Fuck me.

Actually, that's already happened. Up the butty and around the corner. This shit'd put Mary Magdalene to shame. Screwed over by the kitchen, by the customers, by the waiters in a hospitality bukkake. Grinning maniacally at the end of it, fighting the urge to sing.

From the first to the last docket, everything simmering, riding high on two lattes and a Red Bull. Nerves bundled up like cancer in my belly, shoulders tight and forearms already feeling the burn. Not enough spoons, too many bowls, what the fuck is that bacon doing there and not on the steak sandwich. What was the secret to Lin's perfect poachies at Pancakeland two years ago? Do I remember how my Mum cooked rockling, let alone how Marino did it yesterday?

My head spins and I keep having to remind myself to breathe. And reminding the larder kid what goes into a side salad. Yes, it's the same as the last one you made. Lettuce, no, not the cos lettuce, the mixed lettuce. Tomato... cucumber... yeah, and the onion. The spanish onion. The purple shit. I resist the urge to grab the plate off him and do it myself, because there's stuff on the stove I should be paying attention to. The fourth docket comes in and I'm still not sure whether to laugh or cry.

More water in the pots, spray some oil there on the grill. Shit, there's no bacon, of course, because Marino automatically preps it every day so it's never on the actual prep list. I want my brain back. I think I dissolved it with the second coffee of the day. No sugar. Got enough bacon for two pastas. Haven't you made a pizza before? Read me out the ingredients of the express pasta sauce. Fuck it, I'll make it up as I go.

You've got chips down for a burger, right? And that steak sandwich? Do you know how to make a caesar salad? Bacon bits, croutons, cos. Yeah, you gotta chop that up. Well, if you run out then wash some more from the coolroom. Throw it into a silver bowl and mix it up with some of that dressing. Shit, dressing on the side for that one. Cut up enough for a normal salad bowl. One of those.

I've got chicken for that, now cut the egg in half. Shit, lengthways not sideways for the next one. No, I only need one. Hang on, I'll fix it. What docket is that for? Have you got fries down for that? Jesus. Fuck, the pollo's burning. Get some garlic bread and bruschetta going. On the ciabattas, yeah? You're going to need some garlic butter... butter's right there, grab the garlic, some parsley and go.

I feel like I'm about to induce a seizure, forcing my personality to split between being buddies with the larder and kitchen hand, to mortal enemies. Nothing seems to be going right and in the heat of the moment I realise that I can't do this right without them, even though it's excruciating trying to do anything with them. I need a robot and a third fucking microwave. I want Marino back. He said if I freak out about anything just call, but it's like calling an ambulance if you've already sliced your leg off. There's not much you can do about it by that point.

I'm going nuts trying to keep track of what's on the grill, what's in the oven, how long the pasta's been in the water, whether there's enough chips in the fryer, if I've got enough salad plates or any prepared at all, whether Gaz is going to shut up or keep continuously asking me if there's any dishes to be done. Han jumps in every now and then when tables outside are just waiting on their food... trying to be my second brain and organising the boys to help and not hinder. I lose count of how many times I say fuck.

Six hours after I step into the kitchen, I emerge, a battered soul. Coated in sweat, smoke, and a slight spattering of napoli, I feel sick to my stomach. Han gives me a hug, like I'm a wounded soldier in need of support. The egg on toast that I had for breakfast churns away in protest, and I'm not sure if it wants some company or it's complaining about the view. I don't feel like eating at all. After dishing up some pastas for the staff, I swallow a couple mouthfuls of lemon squash, tell Meke to finish up cleaning the floor and get on with the ordering so I can skip out of there.

I stare at the prep list for tomorrow, forcing my brain to process with what little power remains in it. Seano opens a Becks and offers it to me. I take a good, full swig of that cold liquid gold and feel it travel down my throat to greet the remains of the egg on toast. It's good. It's all I need, after more than a month without beer, it hits me sweetly. I make a couple phone calls and get the fuck out of dodge. I remind myself again to breathe. I tell Han I don't care what happens to Marino next time around, it's in Lou's best interest to get a real chef in, because even though we made it through the day, I'm not going to forget the experience for a while.

Someone point me to this entry the next time I get the urge to be a chef!

Strangely enough, reading this all over again, so many years later, it actually makes me miss working in civvie kitchens. About the only real pressure we get is whenever we do function work, and we have to pump out/plate up multiple plates within a short space of time, having each dish look the same and tasting great. Functions only happen every once in a while, with the day-to-day work being a-la-carte breakfast cookery and bulk cooking lunch for anywhere between 50-300 troops.

Being pushed out of my comfort zone by function work gives me greater respect for people that do this sort of stuff all the time. I don't think RAAFie cooks that haven't worked in civvie kitchens have any idea what it's really like on the outside. Even after a few years out of civvie kitchens, I did manage to forget what it was like, enough to sign up as a cook, anyway!

on women in combat corps

2008-09-06T21:16:00.002+10:00

From a discussion board I couldn't resist posting to on Facebook:

I think the point here isn't that women are more likely to be incapable of physically or mentally taking on a combat role, and therefore should be excluded by default. I figure that if it is a job that you are capable of doing, and you have the determination and desire to do it, then by all means, find a Force that will accept you in that position. I hope that by thinking about what is at the core of what you really want out of life, you'll be able to find somewhere in the ADF that can help provide it.

The argument regarding ADF is that being an equal opportunity employer, any female that has the correct attributes for a position should be allowed to apply for it. However, attributes cover more than just mental and physical. In general, I believe that women have more capacity for mental toughness than men, whilst men have more capacity for physical strength. I'm not being sexist here - this is just how the world is skewed!

It's hard for any male to bring up the point of menstruation without it seeming like a clumsy attempt at pointing out weaknesses. There are of course multiple ways to safely stop a woman from menstruating - but they probably cannot be legally forced upon a female as a workplace requirement. And might I point out here that safety doesn't equate to reliability when it comes to birth control, hormonal in particular - I knew a number of women in recruit school who had trouble with their menstrual cycle due to stress. I can just imagine what might happen if any of those women were in an actual combat zone!

James said:

hey um not trying to sound sexist or anything but women are not normaly as strong as men. they would probably want different places to got to the toilet. they would possibly be raped by someone. they might slow the squad down simply due to the differences in stamina and things.

Perhaps it wasn't well articulated, but James does have a point here about the different needs of women. When I was doing field training with my cooks' course, I was the only female out bush, and they asked if I wanted a tent to myself. I told the boys not to bother putting it up, and apparently most of the time the females on course will actually ask for their own separate tent. But just because I don't care whether I sleep, eat, shit, and shower amongst a bunch of guys doesn't mean all women are cool with it, nor are all guys cool with a female being 'one of the boys'.

Even though it seems like the government has a double standard regarding sending out men on the front line but keeping our women somewhere safer, can you imagine the shitstorm that would result if a female troop were to get captured by the enemy, raped, tortured, and possibly killed? We haven't got rid of enough of the patriarchy for even the possible image of that happening to be acceptable.

Keeley said:

Along with the fact that if a woman is introduced into such an already male dominated role, the dynamic of the group itself could change, possibly causing division within the group itself between those who take a liking(non romantic or otherwise) to the female/s within the group, and those that dont.

I've seen this happen in a non-combat situation, while I was the only female on my cooks' course. Kayla Williams wrote about the Queen For A Year syndrome in her book 'Love My Rifle More Than You', where the attractiveness of a female being a minority amongst testosterone-fuelled men on deployment increases, while the normal perception of how attractive women are in general decreases. Face it, we don't live in a utopian world where women are seen as being equal to men - that won't happen for as long as we are two different genders. There is no denying the undercurrent of basic instincts that come into play when there isn't a balance between the genders within a group. Our course was told repeatedly that if there were more females within the class, the dynamics would be quite different, and most likely find it easier to settle.

Jes said:

My degree was social sciences. This is a fact of life. Dynamics change. Combat soldiers need to be immune to this - it is an integral part of their life/work. This can happen with different men in the units also.

I don't have a degree in social sciences, but I would argue that despite dynamics changing (it's what they do best, I hear), the essential nature of humans will not. You can't expect any large group of men, highly-trained combat soldiers or not, to act the same way whether or not there is a female present among them. Much like you wouldn't expect a large group of women to act the same way when there's a minority of men present.

Basically, you can sit and wish you could be treated like one of the boys as much as you want (heck, there are some days when it comes close to forgetting you're not, that's the kind of mates you make in the military though), but for as long as you've got the requisite bits that make you female... you won't *be* one of them. You never will be, and that's no fault of the ADF or other Forces with similar lines of thought.

truck rolled over on the F3

2008-09-04T15:49:00.004+10:00

Well, it made me laugh. I'm glad I have other people who read and forward emails all day to sift through all the crap, in order to find me the really good stuff! Saves me having to do it, anyway.

Speaking of sifting through crap... or perhaps thinking of wasting time on the internet, one of my many avenues of online escapism (such as looking at rental properties, used scooters, cheap cars, international flights, interstate hotels) is now poking through the Defence Force Recruiting website. I'm sort of toying with the idea of either remustering and being a bit of an ACW of all trades, or maybe switching to Reserves if it's actually possible to go there from here (a lot of people do it the other way around), or chasing a commission and going for an officer role in logistics, intelligence, or education.

The newest campaign on DFR's website is a flashy looking extreme questionnaire with the banner - COMPLETE THE TEST AND DISCOVER IF YOU'VE GOT WHAT IT TAKES TO BECOME AN OFFICER IN THE AIR FORCE. Of course there's the fine print that says that the online tests 'do not have a scientific basis and are in no way a literal representation of the actual Air Force or broader ADF officer aptitude tests. Therefore any results obtained cannot be used in, or referred to, as part of any applications to join the Air Force or broader ADF.' So basically, anyone who knows how to read grey print on a black background can figure out that it's going to take a little more than an online test to determine whether they're officer material, and by doing the test they are signaling to someone in a government department far, far away, that percentages and pie charts with a bit of glossy marketing can indeed pique the interest of the internet punter.

What's all this got to do with a truck rolled over on the F3? Well, the funny thing is, yes DFR, I have wondered if I have what it takes to become an officer in the Air Force. I'll believe for a moment (or two, if needed) that by taking the Air Force Skills test I'll gain a better idea of my own talents and abilities, as well the key qualities that contribute to becoming an officer in the Air Force.

So go on, find out if you’re accomplished.

I would, DFR, trust me, I would... if the 'Take The Test' button actually took me to somewhere other than a blank page! Or perhaps this is part of the test, and clearly anyone who's officer material would be laughing their way through the thing right now, as opposed to laughing at getting thwarted at first click? Not feeling so accomplished now.

things bulk cookery won't teach you

2008-08-22T21:34:00.004+10:00

A handful of LACs and AC/Ws got to spend the week at Hamilton TAFE, brushing up on skills that may potentially be shown off as part of a Salon Culinaire competition. Before we even make it that far though, we had some plates casually judged by a Flight Sergeant and a Sergeant, and we're going to have an on-base cookoff of sorts next month, presenting the same or similar dishes again.

On one hand, it was great to be back in a school environment, learning things in a dedicated education zone, as opposed to sucking all the knowledge that you can while you're on the job and treading water. On the other hand, it actually made me miss working in proper restaurants, where you get the thrill of the chase... that rush of service, and the simple pride from putting out plates of individually presented dishes. We get to do a bit of that when functions are on, and there's a little more freedom (and budget) to play with. I'm seriously considering getting an outside hospo job once I move off base, just to stay in touch with the real world. Even if it's only serving food, it's good to be in a slightly less homogenous working atmosphere.

Fortunately, unlike Chisholm where we couldn't take photos of our work because we weren't allowed to take valuables such as phones and cameras to TAFE, I had my camera along for the ride. Unfortunately, I was mostly busy cooking or helping to plate up dishes in our four-person team, so our tutor had to take photos for us, and I didn't go into much detail over how to use my camera properly. Some pictures are better than none at all, I figure!

Scallop and blue eyed cod boudin blanc served on baby spinach with a seafood reduction and balsamic dressing. I didn't realise that there was another way to have sausage on the menu without all the bad connotations that the mere word 'sausage' brings. I think we all got sick of the taste of this by the end of the week, it's basically white fishy mush with a bit of dill, cream and Pernod that's gone through enough steps to look like a sausage. About the only thing it's got going for it is that it's not your typical snag made with random intestine or questionable skin/contents! To me, a dish like this just doesn't scream anything amazing. Actually, it seems like the yuppie food equivalent of mutton dressed as lamb.

Roulade of Atlantic salmon with shiitake mushrooms and beurre rouge on a bed of rocket. This was actually quite tasty in the end, after a few modifications we made to the original idea. Version one involved rolling the salmon fillet around a farce, which was some of the boudin blanc mix from above. We thought that diners should get something more surprising (read: different to the first course) when they got to the centre of the roulade, so a bit of baby spinach was rolled into the middle for contrasting colour, texture, and flavour. The beurre rouge looked dramatic on the plate (you can't really tell from the photos), and tasted fantastic as well.

Duck breast filled with apple and raisins on buttered zucchini noodles and carrot confit. This was by far my favourite dish that we made. I'm guessing that the adjective 'stuffed' is another one of those clumsy menu words, even though we all know what it is and what it means. Duck is always something special in my culinary world, and this is probably just a result of me being psychologically tuned to know that duck doesn't come into one's life very often, so when it does, one must definitely take time to appreciate it. Even the zucchini and carrot were tasty, and they were just there to boost the duck!

Braised ox-tail wrapped in crepinette on soft polenta and petit legumes. I've been a fan of ox-tail ever since being brought up on my Dad's ox-tail soup, which seldom failed to make me feel better whenever I had it. Seeing how it all came together in the crepinette was interesting too, as I've only ever seen crepinette used on a Marco Pierre White video, if I recall correctly. So I thought it was crazy out-there fancy French stuff, and it probably is, but now that I've seen it done and tasted the results, it's actually simpler than it looks. I've never loved turning vegetables, and don't see the point in turning them, no matter how cute they look... just think of the wastage! This dish has to win the quiet achiever award... it seems quite unassuming, but is actually packed with flavour. Slow cooking does indeed have its merits.

The dessert plate was actually a trio of vanilla bean pannacotta, mini corella pear tart, and milk chocolate 'millefeuille' with honeycomb cream, but we were a bit rushed getting it out, and the camera was somewhat forgotten by then. I think the coolest thing about desserts was seeing honeycomb get made (Mister Hart, what a mess!). We spent most of a day playing with chocolate and made moulded chocolates, as well as filled chocolates. The above is a shot of my chocolate sculpture, made from simple shapes and the assistance of some rings and silicone/rubber 'noodles' used as moulds. I think it looks sort of like an obscure awards ceremony trophy. You can't really tell, but there's a heck of a lot of chocolate there - the base is about 2.5cm thick with a 15cm diameter, and the whole thing stands around 25cm high. Those curvy bits are around 2cm thick, but the balls are more like Easter egg thickness. Consider it an award for Most Amount Of Chocolate Eaten In A Single Week Without Being Physically Ill!

We'll see if it makes it through the weekend. :)

I love the smell of career limiting moves in the morning

2008-08-21T20:42:00.000+10:00

Say you're wanting to write a book about your experiences in the military.

You come across an award whose prize includes $10,000 cash, guaranteed publication, royalties on book sales and editorial support to develop the proposal into a finished manuscript.

All you need to do is submit a proposal comprising a one-page description of the work, a table of contents, an author bio, a comment on target readership and two sample chapters. An indication of proposed word length should be given (40K min and 90K max) - final word length is subject to negotiation with the publisher.

In the event that you win, do you:
a) conjure an untraceable pen name and cackle with glee each night after work whilst tapping away at a no-holds-barred account of aforementioned military experiences
b) write conservatively under your real name and hope that no one in the military that reads you will find you
c) write what you want under your real name, and if the military finds out, include the aftermath in an added chapter to the book
d) take the $10K, change your name, go AWOL overseas, and write whatever you damn well please

on patisserie

2008-08-17T20:58:00.002+10:00

too many sweets and
too many syllables to
know where to begin

(More news at eleven.)