Survey's -- Do They Listen To Our Cries?

Did a survey today. It was the third in a series. Had one before deployment, and apparently one during our deployment, but I don't remember it, and one today. The usual rigmarole that you'd expect. A whole plethora of questions with numbers pertaining to "strongly disagreeing", "disagreeing", "neutrality", "agreeing" and "strongly agreeing." It seems you can sum up what a person really thinks with a series of standardized questions. No names affixed, run through a card reader, tally the results, calculate the mean (average) and that's what the troops are thinking. I almost think that nobody will listen. No, wait, I'm sure of it.

The questions asked were about what I thought of my job, about the Canadian Forces, the training leading up to deployment, about my fitness before, during and after deployment, and about leadership. In some cases, we were all given options to add a little extra, vent as it were. Now, much as I wanted to go into a detailed rant about the inanity of the military planning machine and how inadequate it really is, I couldn't. Time restrictions. Right. A survey they want done to completion, but in a specific time frame. It limits your thoughts, however good or bad. Much as I'd like to think positive these days, and I have been making strides to not be that way (although my writing probably doesn't reflect that), I found it impossible to even think well of any of it.

I remember a few of the answers I tossed down in relation to some of the questions. Probably my two favorite ones would be in regards to the pre-deployment exercises. Training in the cold Wainwright is not the same as being in hot Afghanistan. Two or three buildings in the middle of no where is not a built-up area full of people. In fact, often, there weren't any people, let alone civilian actors. The training wasn't good. It didn't address any of the problems we'd face overseas. I learned more one-on-one with my section commander and within my own platoon than I did at the company level. The end result was that I didn't have anything really positive to say about the process, both of work-up training, deployment, being deployed, or re-deploying back to Canada. No, wait, scratch that. I did have on positive thing to tick off. Decompression in Cyprus. It was nice to blow off steam before coming back to Canada to reintegrate, but none of that was in part from staff being there for me.

In the end, I said a lot of bad stuff about work-up training (junk), the realism factor on our training (more junk), certain aspects of my leadership (even more junk), and the entire process and how it was handled (just a shitload of junk).

Yeah, I bet a private could plan this better if he was given the chance.