We Were Warriors

by Johnny Mercer

  Rather than the frontline, the Army decided to task me instead with completing Young Officer Training for the Royal Artillery at Larkhill in Wiltshire. If Sandhurst was relatively relaxed after Rowallan Company, this was a barely disguised student’s union. While the finer points of gunnery were lost on a lot of us, the opportunity to let off some steam after the confines of Sandhurst was not.

  I loathed much of the Commissioning Course and Young Officer Training, but I regret this now. I was a machine after Rowallan Company and I wanted to kick on again with another tough course. And, if I’m honest, I did find the ‘officer thing’ rather uncomfortable. I was terribly self-conscious and I’m embarrassed about it now. I should have just enjoyed myself a bit more, and made the most of the privilege.

  I did make good use of my time at Larkhill in some ways; I made friends with my fellow officers, got fitter and earned some money to buy a car, which would allow me to expand my hunting ground for girlfriends beyond the public transport network of southern England.

  During this training cycle, I became close friends with someone who I could tell was also a bit uncomfortable with the whole ‘officer thing’. A tall, gangly, badly coordinated but very funny man called James Goddard. Jimmy and I were to become close friends for life, and my friendship with him has had a deep and lasting impact on me.

  I was asked to put down three choices of regiment I wanted to be posted to in the Royal Artillery, and filled out all three spaces with ‘29 Commando’. There were two slots available at 29 Commando that year and Jimmy and I both wanted one. Plenty of others did as well, but we were determined to stick together, and when the forms came round he did the same as me.

  ‘You’re a bit silly aren’t you?’ said the ever-so-condescending chief instructor. ‘You can’t even complete a form properly.’

  ‘I just want to go to 29, sir. I’m not sure what I’ll do if I don’t. Sorry to be so firm,’ I replied.

  ‘For not filling out the form correctly you can polish the gun outside the office for half an hour every day before parade. But you can go to 29.’

  He never got in early; I wasn’t going to polish the gun. But I was off to 29, as was Jimmy.

  I had spent a lot of time at Sandhurst and Larkhill trying to recover from Rowallan Company, so I had my work cut out if I was to pass the Commando Course. First time passes were a requirement for officers in those days.

  5

  On a warm, late summer’s evening in September 2003, I arrived in Plymouth and walked through the imposing gates of the Royal Citadel on the Hoe – home to 29 Commando Regiment Royal Artillery. I remember very clearly the first time I ascended the ramparts of this famous sixteenth-century fort, which dominates the Plymouth foreshore, and looked out across the iconic natural harbour that is Plymouth Sound. The Royal Citadel is the longest continuously military-occupied fort in Europe. The guns predominantly point out not towards the sea, but the City itself.

  29 Commando Regiment remains a unique unit in the ORBAT of the British Army. Formed to provide close all-weather fire support to the Royal Marines, each man was expected to pass the All Arms Commando Course in order to stay in the regiment. With operations from Aden to Northern Ireland and prominent roles in the Falklands, Sierra Leone and Iraq, the tales emanating from this place were the stuff of legend. The evening I arrived I was fully aware of the personal challenge that lay ahead, but I also felt that I had arrived somewhere that I just might belong. I didn’t know, then, that this place would one day become my spiritual home, and that these soldiers and officers would become my family.

  First, I had to go and earn my Green Beret and become a qualified commando. I was instructed to turn up to a place called Okehampton Battle Camp on the very northern edge of Dartmoor in Devon. Okehampton is an isolated Army outpost built largely during the Second World War, which looked as if it had received precisely zero development since. The camp itself is perched on a small area of flat ground on the northern side of Yes Tor. Instructors on any course there would happily dispatch you for a quick run for any infraction, deserved or not, with the bonus (for them) of the site being on a steep slope and close to a prominent tor that disappeared into the clouds.

  Jimmy and I turned up two weeks into the six week pre-commando course run by the regiment. This wasn’t our fault. At our stage in a military career, you simply do what you are told by the individual who is most likely to cause you harm – it could be the commanding officer, but more often than not it was the senior non-commissioned officer (NCO) who was shouting at you.

  The CO of 29 Commando had insisted Jimmy and I be allowed to buck the system, as there was an urgent need for two commando-trained officers in the regiment after some successive failures.

  ‘Jimmy, you’ve got to understand that the course staff aren’t going to be at all happy that you don’t have to spend as long at Okehampton as the rest of the course do,’ he had said to me in my initial interview.

  ‘It’s Johnny, sir,’ I replied.

  ‘I thought it was Jimmy?’

  ‘No, that’s the other one,’ I said. Jimmy was waiting outside for his initial chat with the CO too. I wouldn’t have minded, but his letter welcoming me to the regiment had also been addressed to ‘Jimmy Mercer’ and I was beginning to worry that he might be a bit ‘off the pace’, so to speak.

  He definitely wasn’t wrong about the Okehampton staff, though. My simply being there was apparently ‘a crime’. The sergeant running the course personified the staff’s collective anger that a couple of ‘fucking officers’ could bypass the first two weeks of ‘his course’ and still expect to pass-out from it.

  His name was Pete Simmons. With a body ravaged by twenty years of operations, and no hair whatsoever, Pete was an iconic figure in the regiment and would become one of my closest friends. He was, however, clearly determined that friendship wasn’t going to start now.

  Pete told us that there was no room in the officer accommodation block (there were six free beds), so Jimmy and I were sent to the ranks block with a wink and a nod, and some sniggering from the other instructors. Given the choice I would have gone into the lads’ accommodation block anyway. I enjoyed helping the others with their kit (on the rare occasion that theirs was worse than mine) and I enjoyed the banter. I was young for an officer – I had just turned twenty-two – so was a curiosity for the lads if nothing else. The physical training was hard, but nothing I hadn’t seen before.

  Officers stayed at the back of the groups on the early morning squadded runs around the granite tors and misty valleys of Dartmoor. Apparently it was tougher at the back, but I quite enjoyed it there because you could pretend to help the slow ones while catching your own breath. I can’t have been the first, or the last, to figure this out.

  There are four commando tests that a soldier must complete to earn his Green Beret, which have all remained unchanged since the war. The infamous Thirty-Miler is the last and probably most famous one. The Tarzan Assault Course, the Nine-mile Speed March and the Endurance Course are the others. The Tarzan Assault Course is held on ‘bottom field’, where one is also required to climb a thirty-foot wall on a rope, with weapon and webbing.

  To ensure recruits are suitably prepared for the rigours of the Commando Training Centre, Royal Marines Lympstone, this rope-climbing serial is completed at Okehampton, where I struggled very much with it. I could not for the life of me get more than halfway up the rope using the instructors’ preferred technique. Eventually, Jimmy and I went down to the ropes one evening and he showed me an entirely different technique that would help me until my arms were strong enough to repeatedly climb to the top. The technique worked, and I used to practise it well into the night on my own on the vertical ropes on the assault course, while everyone else was in bed. I could not afford to fail.

  Come the final day of the course, I had to demonstrate that I could pass this test. I climbed using Jimmy’s method, not the one taught by the instructors. I would take a couple of shimmies up the rope, lo
ck on with my legs and shake off my weak but strengthening hands; a couple more shimmies and rest again. The instructors were like a sea of angry piranhas below as they hurled the most vitriolic abuse at me, a couple of them completely losing their tempers. I didn’t care; it wasn’t like they were going to come up the rope and get me. And I also knew there was no time limit. Eventually I passed, much to the mirth of the lads, who liked anyone who stuck up two fingers at the instructors.

  Jimmy and I drove to Commando Training Centre, Royal Marines Lympstone that weekend, to be greeted by the new course officer, who bore a striking resemblance to Bruce Willis. He knew it as well, and overplayed his hand.

  Lympstone is an intimidating place to turn up to if you are not a natural fit for the military. There is an ever-present tension in the air; a sense of careers starting, or failing with a thump as another ‘sprog’ marine falls off the rope from thirty-foot up and gets transported away on a stretcher. There were no women on camp (none that I saw anyway); it was a school of ‘masculinity’ that simply awakened each day and produced commandos. The loud blokes were hammered; the arrogant ones snapped; the weak ones were trained up; the nervous ones were inspired with confidence. I loved it.

  As an officer, you were expected to lead. If you couldn’t they would tell you and you would soon be leaving the course. There was none of the tolerance of Sandhurst. The Royal Marines prided themselves on being ‘better’ than the Army (or pongos as they called us, because our ‘personal admin’ – hygiene – was so bad that we persistently stank). We countered these aspersions with an equally determined belief that these marines were land-loving sailors who spent far too long in the gym preening themselves, and could learn a thing or two about soldiering from us.

  This delicately balanced rivalry helped keep standards very high, from kit husbandry to marksmanship on the range; from speed over the ground with weight on your back to resilience in foul weather. Professional standards were the currency we traded in, and again I learnt a great deal.

  And, of course, there were the foggy mornings on the banks of the River Exe when the tide was out, when we took part in the infamously brutal ‘mud runs’; the staple of any commando’s diet. If you ever take the train from Exeter to Cornwall along the western side of the river Exe, squint through the fog and across the estuary towards the newer collection of industrial buildings on the far eastern side. If you are early enough, you will catch recruits still suffering it today.

  At Lympstone, Jimmy and I became firm friends with a chap called Goose. As with ‘pongos’, nicknames are not overly cerebral in the military; he did literally look like a Goose. Goose was part of the detachment of the Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers attached to 29 Commando Regiment. They kept our vehicles on the road, and generally fixed anything we broke. Goose was very much like Jimmy, except he was equipped with a significantly higher dose of common sense. But that was why I liked Jimmy in the first place, and why we were such firm friends.

  Goose was probably the toughest bloke I’ve met; annoyingly so. I recall one particular march on the Commando Course when I tried to take all of my team’s radio equipment in my Bergan to help ease their load on what was to be a difficult day for my section.

  Marching – known as ‘yomping’ or ‘tabbing’ – is a strange art. Sometimes done ‘in step’, the military uses marches to move a body of men from A to B at speed, with full equipment – usually in the region of 120lb in a rucksack, excluding weapons. With marches lasting anything from a few hours to a few days, they require determination and strength of character to push through the discomfort, blisters and fatigue.

  For some reason, on this occasion I was nowhere near strong enough to pull off carrying my men’s spare batteries. I had written a cheque my body was not going to cash. I tried. I pushed it bloody hard. The embarrassment was keeping me going, long after I would normally have asked for help. But about six miles in and drifting in and out of consciousness, I had to approach Goose.

  He teased me relentlessly about this for a long time afterwards, but the truth is he didn’t bat an eyelid at the time; he simply loaded some batteries into his already topped-up Bergan, before giving them back to me at the end without a word. I felt dwarfed, literally and metaphorically.

  Goose, Jimmy and I made a very odd threesome. They were both six feet four, and I most certainly wasn’t. But we became known as a unit, and eventually we all passed the notorious commando tests together, earning our Green Berets by Christmas 2003. We were inducted into 29 Commando in the usual manner – we were dropped off by helicopter – with nothing but what we were wearing – in the very middle of Dartmoor and given a series of embarrassing tasks to complete, before meeting the CO and the rest of the officers in Plymouth’s premier gay bar. What followed on Union Street is largely forgotten, which I am assured is a good thing.

  Christmas duties that year were neatly split between us. Goose and Jimmy and I were generously given a week each to get to know our way around the Citadel. It was better than searching for a dropped weapon in a freezing pool on Dartmoor, so I didn’t mind. My first duty was perhaps the most eventful, but for all the wrong reasons. One of the Junior NCOs had passed his leadership course and celebrated by drinking heavily in Plymouth. He died in his sleep in the lads’ accommodation that night. His girlfriend couldn’t rouse him, and ran across the square emitting the most howling scream to get the attention of the guardroom. Nothing could be done for him. I was largely shielded from the ensuing inquiries and Coroner’s Courts, but they were a horrendous ordeal for his family and the regiment.

  January 2004 arrived, and back in those days, 3 Commando Brigade, which was the higher formation of which 29 Commando was a part, went to Norway every winter. NATO expected the UK to help defend the ‘northern flank’ from Russia. It was a point of principle that this fell to the Royal Marines and 3 Commando Brigade – it was considered ‘too tough for non-specialist units’, according to my Commanding Officer. Precisely how much of the ‘too tough’ Norwegian winter he was personally going to see from his office was up for debate.

  He wasn’t wrong, though. The entire regiment headed off to Asegarden Camp in northern Norway, which was to become our regimental home for the next three months. Soldiering in the Arctic was tough. It’s bloody cold for a start. Depending on how far north you were, temperatures ranged from minus eight degrees centigrade to minus thirty. Your eyelids stick together and your piss freezes before you’ve finished. You have to have your wits about you if you want to survive in the field without long-term after-effects.

  Those of us on our first trip to Norway had to complete the infamous NIGS (New In Gunnery) course – a rather brutal three weeks in the Arctic wastes trying to keep all of your fingers and toes. The Arctic Winter Warfare course followed. Both were notorious in commando circles, and often considered the ‘proper Commando Course’, to the extent that some old-timers in wouldn’t consider you a full member of the regiment until you had completed the Norway training as well.

  I learnt how to ski for the first time. For those of us who had never skied before, the approach to teaching was robust. The regiment hired a ski slope for the day. Once we had figured out the button lifts, we were taken to the top and told to get on with it. The wimps like me spent most of the day learning to ‘snow plough’ our way down, before the more adventurous learnt some parallel turns and the show-offs learnt how to Telemark.

  Even at this stage, it was clear to me that one of the best things about my regiment was the characters you met. There was an officer in another battery to mine who had taken a bit of a shine to me, and me to him. His name was Jim Philippson.

  Jim’s approach to learning to ski was different to mine. He took the first lift of the day, got to the top, pointed his skis down the slope and let gravity take over. He careered faster and faster down the slope, entirely out of control. To the amazement of the rest of us, and himself, he remained upright. The mountain leader instructor, a Royal Marine who we despised for h
is undisguised pleasure in making us suffer, saw the impending accident before we did and started threatening Jim with some un-pleasantries as he hurled past. Jim ignored him.

  Just at the point of highest velocity, and without the strength to absorb the flattening of the slope signalling the end of the run, Jim simply disappeared into a huge cloud of snow. We all expected the worst, but he got to his feet, gave the Mountain Leader a quick ‘Cheers Royal’ under his breath, and joined the back of the queue for the button lifts.

  The courses culminated in the survival phases – above and below the snow line – including a brief dip through an ice hole, which I found a lot colder than I had hoped. As an officer, the Mountain Leader kept me in the water far longer than he should have, asking me to recite the Commando Qualities forwards and backwards, along with a number of other mantras. I was in a pretty bad way when I got out.

  Survival above the snow line was great fun – simply dig a snow hole and get in it. There would be four of you digging a deep trench, and then at a suitable depth you’d dig a shelf that you could all fit along like sardines, and then huddle up for some warmth.

  Survival training below the snow line was a little different. You had to build a structure resembling a wigwam from tree branches, pad out the holes with snow for insulation, and build a fire in the middle. You would then catch some fish and fry them on a shovel. After not eating for some time, they were delicious – bones, eyes and all.

  It was important to leave a small hole in the top of the wigwam so that the smoke and heat from the fire could escape without melting the snow insulation. This is something Goose forgot to do. After an emotional night, with melted snow soaking and then re-freezing the men in his shelter, his entire section – bar himself – reported sick the following morning with varying degrees of frostbite and frost-nip. They looked, to me, a broken bunch, and I felt sorry for them. Goose thought they were all a ‘little weak’.