Swedish Reserve Officers Basic Winter Training Course 24
The following article is taken from the latest issue of the Globe & Laurel magazine.
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Three officers from the RMR deployed to Sweden in March to attend the Swedish Reserve Officers Basic Winter Training Course 24 at Camp Ånn, Sweden. The invitation saw 30 commissioned representatives from Sweden, Denmark, Finland, Estonia, Germany, Netherlands and the UK join together to complete a week of cold weather training jointly hosted by the Swedish Reserve Officers Federation and the Swedish Armed Forces and funded on our part by the UK Reserve Forces Association.
The opportunity was first published by UKRFA in their annual programme of international events and Defence Engagement opportunities available to personnel from the Reserves. Once this filtered its way out to the Reserve Units, officers from RMR Leeds, Cardiff and Plymouth detachments put their names forward.
This was the fifth iteration of the package run by the Swedes but the first to be attended by the RMR. With the focus of activity for the wider Corps on cold weather training in Norway, sourcing a full issue of cold weather clothing to send three officers to Sweden for a week created the first hurdle.
Calling in favours and a few packets of biscuits later ML Coy offered their support which unlocked the equipment side, and a member of the Reserves ML community put on an evening Zoom lecture series to ensure we were refreshed on HAVERSACKS and COLDFEET. Now safe to deploy we coalesced at the airhead and began the several steps of the journey to get to rural Sweden and begin the course.
Arriving late on Sunday evening we were straight into introductory lectures and given a full issue of Swedish cold weather kit. More cold weather lectures the following morning, and we were onto ski prep in the afternoon.
Initially unsure why the instructors were warming a bucket of tar by the fire and thinking that 1-9-4-7 must be a serial number on these weather-worn planks of wood, I was surprised to find that my own set of pusser’s planks were into their 77th year of service in the Swedish military, and instead of choosing between red, blue, or Klister wax we were going to use tar to provide the grip on our skis.
Ski training ran much as I remembered from previous winters in Norway with a steep learning curve and plenty of flashing as ………..
To find out more about the RMR and RM activities across the globe, catch up regularly with all the news in the Globe & Laurel Magazine, the Journal of the Royal Marines.
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Globe & Laurel – RMA – The Royal Marines Charity (rma-trmc.org)
