After we finished unloading the truck and whatever, we retrieved our rifles. Somehow, one of my tent-mates and I were left without a rifle. Now normally, especially outside of a military camp, losing one's rifle is one of the worst sins possible, maybe resulting in a court martial. But as this occurred within a camp and as we were (presumably) ordered to stack our rifles by a NCO, neither of us seemed particularly concerned. The serial numbers of the rifles were registered along with our personal army numbers, so the rifles could be identified when they turned up.
The night following our return to the base camp would have a company's commander inspection of our tents, a very big deal (or at least, so it seemed), so everyone spent their time making our area clean. All the rifles (bar the missing ones) were locked in the rifle rack, so the lack of rifles was not particularly important.
At some time in the late evening, my companion and I were given to permission to seek our rifles thoughout almost the entire base. We visited all kinds of places, mainly tents with other recruits, but not only. We returned to our tent at about midnight without having found the rifles.
We then had to stand at attention for a couple of hours as the company commander - whom we had barely ever seen - made his inspection of the tents. I could see that people were standing at attention despite the fact that they were fast asleep - instead of being perpendicular to the ground (90°), some were leaning dangerously forward at about a 75° angle. Nothing was said about the missing rifles when the commander came into our tent. Eventually we were allowed to go to sleep.
The next morning, at the company parade, I and my companion turned up without our rifles, and so our platoon commander could not go through the ritual of checking the rifles' barrel for dirt. "Where are your rifles", he asked. We replied that they had gone missing the previous day whilst we had been ordered to stack our rifles - in other words, we weren't responsible. Nothing much happened, meaning that the platoon commander probably knew full well where the rifles were.
I don't remember exactly how the situation was resolved. Someone mentioned - or maybe it was my companion and I saw - that the rifles were leaning against the wall in the company office (a place that we had been barred from checking during the night). One of the NCOs obviously wanted to play a joke on us, but instead of getting all worked up about losing our rifles, we were fairly apathetic (this happens when one's tired), and as I wrote earlier, we considered ourselves not to be responsible for the disappearance of the rifles as we had stacked them upon the direct order of an NCO.
This may have taken place on a Friday morning, meaning that there is a good chance that we went home for the weekend after this event, rifles in place.
It occurs to me now that this 'joke' didn't turn out the way it was intended, as it was perpertrated accidentally on two 24 year old university graduates. I imagine that things would have been different had it been two callow 18 year old recruits whose rifles had been 'stolen'.
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