by The Junior Officers' Reading Club: Killing Time;Fighting Wars
occasionally, and almost always without warning, we will have done something right. When our shoes are nice, our mobile phones are unlocked early (they are kept with unnecessary precaution in a locked box in the Colour Sergeant’s office) and the guilty pleasure of an extra hour’s texting is indescribable. The crap here is so extreme and unrelenting that the pauses in it seem like paradise which is one, albeit slightly backward, way of getting kicks.
it goes in waves.
the famed gallows humour of the British Army is clearly forged in basic training when there’s nothing to do other than laugh (or cry—which more than a couple do). Sometimes the banter is strong and the complete strangers you have been thrown in with seem like the best and oldest friends. Across the corridor my ‘oppo’ (opposite number, basically a buddy—another massive challenge here is effectively having to learn another language) hates ironing but excels at the precision bed-making which is required of us. I have no problem with the ironing so I do his trousers in the morning while he makes the bed, an absurd parody of a married couple which reduced us both to hysterics every morning until we were found out and punished for our unwarranted display of initiative and cooperation.
A typical day during those first five weeks went like this.
Up at 0430, having slept on the top of my bed because I am so bad at making ‘bed-blocks’ that I don’t want to ruin the hospital corners I did the night before and frantically try and iron down the rumpled creases of my own sheets while they’re still on the bed. Our rooms are freakishly nothing. A bare desk, a bookshelf with only a bible on it. A noticeboard with the misleading plan of the prescribed layout of a room. Cupboard doors are open to display everything hanging in correct order from left to right. Drawers are pulled out each one an inch further than the other in descending order to reveal the perfect formations of underwear (socks correctly bundled into a ‘smile’ and not a ‘frown’) and random military equipment. A quick shower to wake us up and a thorough shave—then as much time again drying out the sink in which a residual drop of water counts as dirt. By 0525 we are all seated in coveralls in the main corridor of our platoon lines awaiting the arrival of Colour Sergeant White. On the first morning we made the mistake of being there at 0525 when we had been told to be there at 0525, which is to say we were five minutes late because 0525 means we should have been there at 0520. Press-ups first thing in the morning prove an effective way of teaching this lesson in timekeeping, and at ensuring no one has been tempted not to fill to the brim their litre water bottles which, having been inspected, we drain in a painful, gag-inducing struggle, demonstrating we have finished like toddlers or rugby idiots by holding the empty bottles over our heads until we are waved off to dress and stampede towards breakfast to minimize the fifteen minutes’ allotted eating time which will be spent in the 270-man queue.
We learn little tricks. To remove our shirts before brushing our teeth after breakfast to avoid tiny white flecks of toothpaste. To cover all the surfaces in our rooms with cloths to be whisked off last thing before an inspection, revealing a perfectly dust-free environment. To change boots having come back from breakfast in case the boots you wore on the way there got scuffed and have to be freshly polished. Most mornings are room-inspection mornings, so we stand at ease outside our doors until the appearance of the CSgt, at which point we brace up and then spring to attention and state our names as he enters our rooms. The longer the silence the more the tension builds as you hear him pacing around, picking things up, pulling open drawers. An established tactic, damage limitation, is to leave something obviously wrong—a speck of water on the mirror, a ruffle in the counterpane, the sash window not left open at the regulation height—which will immediately be noted and can then be rectified, satisfying the true purpose of the inspections, which is to find fault no matter what. The alternatives are worse, either Kafkaesque retreat into bamboozling complexity (forget left and right, my toothbrush bristles weren’t pointing north) or the discovery of something really serious.
On the occasion of a stone having become lodged in the tread of my ‘breakfast boots’, which I hadn’t noticed as I had changed into my ‘inspection boots’, I was almost too awed to be scared by the perfect pitch of the CSgt’s screaming rage, the very capillaries in his eyeballs popping apoplectic red as he spat sheer Glaswegian terror, wielding the offending boot like a cudgel so close to my face that he was either a practised genius of intimidation or lucky not to break my nose. During such bollockings there was nowhere to hide, not even in the face of the man standing impassively opposite you, trying under normal circumstances to hint with a twitch of the eyes or inflection of the head how the inspection might be progressing while you strain every muscle in your neck not to turn around and check yourself.
Only one cadet took it all in his stride. Donaldson was so at ease with the whole thing he used to play the fool and entertain us by seeing how far he could pad up and down the corridors while the CSgt was tossing drawers out of windows and screaming at someone round the corner. We were amazed by how unfazed he was by it all. Donaldson had been a field marshal or something in the Officer Training Corps at university and knew all the tricks. Earlier than any of us he realized it was one big game and he played it as well as anyone. But the rules of the game were stacked against us, and when you thought it couldn’t get any worse, there was always drill.
Drill was when we put on our most uncomfortable clothes and our heaviest and shiniest boots and marched up and down the square. It’s not something one can actually be very good at—good, yes, but to be very good would be to stand out, which would be bad. Being bad, however, was pretty easy, and with drill lessons lasting anything up to two hours we had plenty of time to practise.
It never ceased to amaze me how people were incapable of doing the very simple things they were asked to do on the drill square. Sandhurst crams into five weeks for its officers what soldiers endure in basic training for fourteen: a course so hard and fast that our ears were full of left, right, left, right (which became, appropriately, a hoarse approximation of love, hate, love, hate in CSgt White’s throaty Glaswegian), left turn, right turn, about turn, saluting on the march—salute to the left … SALUTE! (in your heads up, two, three, four, five, down, swing … ) and so on it went until the blissful release of HALT!
And people were shit at it. People who must have known MILAN was not a city because they had passed RCB, these people couldn’t tell left from right, couldn’t count to four, couldn’t even stop at the right time in the right place.
On good days the hysterical, colourful insults and withering mockery were impressive. In our relief that we weren’t going to get thrashed, we would have gladly laughed at the more tried and tested lines (‘Mr shagging X, don’t tell me you don’t know left from fucking right, you’re fucking mental, you’re supposed to have been to fucking university, you’re supposed to have a brain the size of a planet, what a shame it’s only shagging PLUTO!’), but the colour sergeants prided themselves on élan and would often put on a bravura performance. Notable for its surrealism was the ten-minute bollocking of one particularly inept cadet in 14 Platoon whose CSgt (an equally ferocious Scot known as the ‘Badger’) performed an elaborate pantomime in which he phoned the cadet’s mother to sympathize with her for having a son who had been born with an acorn instead of a normal human head. Running with the theme, he offered to use a bayonet to carve eyes and ears into it so he could see where he was going and hear the words of command, or as an alternative, to put ‘acorn-head’ out of his misery, to get a blowtorch and roast his head off there and then on the square.
What was really terrifying was a ‘warm-up’. The warp-speed over-reaction to a mistake that involved the whole platoon trotting across the square in a vain and comic attempt to keep up with an impossible time being called out. Fifteen change steps! in a row and then a hard about-turn! with another run in the opposite direction. By far the most powerful tool for punishment was the mark-time!, a drill move which seems to
have been designed only for the purpose of punishment as entire formations march on the spot, straining to keep the knees up, thighs parallel to the ground, chins up and eyes straight forward. With the steam rising from our heavy wool blues uniforms, the heat from our aching bodies evaporating the sweat in the cold January air, we would stand there in a painful frenzy of activity, nostrils flaring for breath, mouths correctly clamped shut, eloquently going nowhere.
I hated marking time. I hated whichever idiot had caused us to be marking time. I hated CSgt White for making us mark time. I hated myself for having undertaken this nonsense course which had thirty young men marching on the spot. I hated how demeaning it was, I hated how brainless it was and I hated how symbolic it was, going nowhere.
Just when we thought life could get no worse, we deployed on our first field exercise.
Exercise Self-reliance (universally known by the cadets as Exercise Self-abuse) was five hellish days of dribbling through three hours of sleep a night in a muddy trench. By the third day I think I had shell-shock, and we weren’t even being fired upon. There is something uniquely minging about being so caked in dirt that four baths later you still feel filthy, being able to feel the squelch of inches of mud beneath your sleeping bag and the stabbing pain of cold-numbed hands grappling on the floor to try and pack up all your kit in the pitch black at four in the morning for a forced march through the rain to breakfast.
The exercise had promised glorious release from the oppressive routine of our training. Supposedly (laughably) we would get more sleep. We would be out running around the green fields with guns, playing soldiers, which was surely why we were all here. (Why are we all here?) Those who had gone before had painted an appealing picture of a happy week of no ironing, no room inspections, no woman, no cry.
It wasn’t until the mild drizzle which had come down all morning turned to rain on Monday afternoon that I began to worry. The 0300 wake-up was insufficient variation from our routine to ruffle us. D-day was to be an instruction day, our introduction to living ‘in the field’ a challenge, surviving against the elements, using nature as an ally not an enemy. Even the colour sergeants had smiles on their faces, cracking jokes in our introduction to the twenty-four-hour ration pack (when we commission we will get special officer-type rations with Ferrero Rocher and a copy of the Telegraph, tee hee hee).
For more than a split second, for a couple of hours, it was going to be fine. Then we started crawling.
And crawling and crawling and crawling. And maybe a bit of ‘fire and manoeuvre’, where you dash a few yards forward, throw yourself to the ground, fire off an imaginary shot, get back up to your feet and start again from the beginning. On and on and on. Across fields, down tracks, up knee-ripping elbow-bashing lung-bursting hills every time wetter and colder and more and more knackered.
And then we set up our platoon harbour, the area of wood in which we would spend the night, put up ponchos and cook up our boil-in-the-bag meals and roll out our sleeping bags and finally rest. Or more accurately the area of wood in which we would dig shell-scrapes, coffin holes filling with mud and rain as quickly as we could dig them around the painstakingly scraped triangular track plan imposing military straight lines on our little copse. If we had thought room inspections were bad we hadn’t a fucking clue. At least wardrobes and shelves incline themselves to order; trees have to have it imposed.
Impossibly complicated stag-rotas contrived to ensure the minimum of sleep; any lapse from the disciplined order brought collective punishment. Shivering miserably on the stag position until somewhere someone is caught.
And then it’s more screaming and shouting and bloodcurdling threats and everyone up in the dark hauling stiff frozen bodies out of damp sleeping bags and crawling, crawling, crawling round the track plan.
With only twenty-four hours to go the upside to neither having the time nor the inclination to eat all the meals in the provided rations was demonstrated when I dropped the bag of hash-browns and beans (the worst of the universally vomit-inducing breakfasts) into my lap, where it promptly started steaming off my soaked trousers. Friendships were forged like lightning in that adversity. Donaldson was everyone’s saviour, helping clean weapons, carrying extra kit. With nothing but the guy next to you to share your misery, we became intimately close to guys we’d never met. My basher-buddy Bowmont and I had been engaged in a miserable discussion which had moved depressingly from what we were doing one month before (he—beach in Brazil, I—lounging in Paris) to what would induce us to come out from under our poncho (apparently not even Elle Macpherson offering a blozzer 20 metres away), but now, cracked by the fatigue and the absurdity of it all, we just broke down in hysterics and boiled up more and more of the leftover meals, rubbing them all over our trousers to dry them out, stuffing them into our pockets for the warmth and finally, if only briefly, finding something to laugh about.
On a navigation patrol we came to a clearing in the woods, and Winnie the Pooh’s playground was laid out below us. Acres of gentle rolling woods so impossibly peaceful and redolent of childhood innocence that we couldn’t equate them with our muddy platoon harbours and the nightmare camping trip in which we were trapped.
I suppose what is clever is that, when we finally got back, pale and broken imitations of what we had been four days previously, the halls and corridors which we had loathed for the last two weeks suddenly felt like nirvana.
I overcame the trauma of my first week in the field—a week which, had I been one of the admirable Afghans, I would have scoffed at and, at the first hint of rain, wandered off the training area to find the nearest village—not only by writing self-pitying e-mails but by driving my little red car in circles round the Academy car park. It was another of those lovely Sandhurst customs, customs we would have found quaint were we not being throttled by them, which rounded off the relative luxury of a Sunday.
Sundays would begin with a church parade which had very little to do with religion and far more to do with putting on uncomfortable clothes, shouting loudly to military hymns and falling asleep somewhere no one could really see you or could shout at you if they did. Gambling men played the numbers and weighed up the brevity of the Catholic service against the anonymity of the larger Anglican congregation. Floppies—overseas cadets so called because they could never shape their berets correctly—were excused to sit in their rooms and order up deliveries from the Edgware Road to be smuggled in by the servants they all had staying down the road at Pennyhill Park Hotel.
My only experience of Sandhurst, before arriving clueless with naive enthusiasm, big hair and ironing board on the first Sunday of 2004, had been my grandfather’s funeral, and I drew unexpected strength from the proximity of the chapel to our daily comings and goings. The names carved on every spare inch of wall and pillar and pew may have suggested to more thoughtful souls the futility, not the glory, of war, and I was pretty sure that whatever God was being sung to had better things to do than check we were standing to attention during the national anthem, but I liked the idea that Grandpa was keeping an eye on things, and Sundays were good days because of this.
They were also good because in the afternoons those of us who had brought our cars were permitted to go and run the engines for an hour to stop the batteries dying. The sight of a slow, grateful traffic jam trundling round the grounds would have been farcical if it hadn’t meant so much. In the seats in which we had driven so many miles we recalled our outside selves as if everything we were missing was channelled through the steering wheel.
The mantra at Sandhurst, particularly in the first term, was ‘progressive training’. The assumption, on which I had depended, was that everyone would be treated as complete military virgins. The physical endurance events could only get progressively harder, slowly building up to competitions like the dreaded ‘logrun’, otherwise the course would end up breaking more than the roughly one in twenty cadets it did. By the end of our year we’d all be tabbing bored as hell over long combat marches, barely
noticing the bergens the size of small children digging into our backs, dreaming of Friday.
Most of the PT stuff was psychological anyway. Red-faced little instructors in tight vests and immaculate white Hi-Tecs screaming falsetto because someone had forgotten to remove their watch before starting a run, or had been caught walking in the gymnasium where only running was allowed, no standing still, only jogging on the spot. My platoon were lucky, our dedicated instructor a giant of a man and transferee from the Infantry who towered above his chippy colleagues and had nothing to prove to himself or us. Nonetheless there were the odd undeniably painful sessions; half-drowning trying to do sit-ups on the side of the pool, while your partner completed a length, willing him to finish so you could swap over and enjoy the release of the swim, but knowing you’d have to thrash yourself anyway so he wasn’t stuck on the side for too long like you were now. Long shuttle runs up and down the steep hills in the training area, someone too fit or too stupid risking a smart-alec comment from the back, and then it was everyone back to the gym for an agonizing ten-minute introduction to ‘stress positions’.
And then, six weeks in, there was Exercise Long Reach.
14.ii.04—‘Climb every mountain’
on return to boot camp, life improves. After 5 weeks I am considered to have completed the ‘basic training’ that everyone in the army must complete and now embark on specific ‘officer training’ with some of the perks that entails—our 0630 lie-ins had been keenly anticipated, the hard part of this 44 week extravaganza had been done, bring on the war studies lectures.
or so I thought.