The fourteen medical specialists in total became basic military personnel in eight weeks. Learning to march, orientate, but also how to use a gas mask and shooting are part of the training. These and other skills were also practiced outside Breda. For example, the participants in the Netherlands and Aruba had a field week. “Those are very long days that you make and it is very hard physically,” says Matthijs. “At those moments it’s very nice to be a team as reservists, so that you can help each other through it.”
IC nurse Matthijs was retrained as a reservist: ‘Really a different world’
