by The Junior Officers' Reading Club: Killing Time;Fighting Wars
it seems that our blissful first leave weekend was a ruse designed to lull us into a false sense of security, that just when we thought we were getting the hang of things, something of an obstacle was placed in our way.
more specifically fifteen extremely high mountainous obstacles to be raced over in a non-stop, 36 hour, 80 km marathon. Shit.
i have just returned from the Black Mountains having heaved my sorry arse, along with 6 other wrecks all faintly resembling the human beings they had been two days previously, further over hill and dale than I would ever have thought possible. Exercise LONG REACH, we were briefed, is one of the most difficult endurance tests the army does. Period.
as it happened I could deal with the constant weight and aching shoulders, the dull pain in the feet that sharpened with every stage until by the end every blister was a dagger, I could even deal with the draining fatigue and strange hallucinations, looming farm buildings twisting like funfair rides, idle tractors becoming menacing elephants—what was by far the most exhausting thing was having to haul the other bastards along with us.
should any of you ever find yourself in a similar situation—a simpering weed crying over his blisters and refusing to go on, a grossly overweight clown of a man having to be pushed up each slope, a shell-shocked looking thirty year old or young kid who have withdrawn into themselves with the remainder of you losing energy fast with all the others’ kit you’re carrying and share of the work you’re doing just to keep your team together—let me give you an excellent tip. Once every six hours, 400mg of Ibuprofen, 2 x Proplus and 2 x Dextrose.
i dread to think what state our livers are in but we damn well got up those mountains.
only to find at the top some infuriating get-the-red-barrel-across-the-river-without-touching-the-green-stick krypton factor bollocks. Your mind becomes so degraded that by the time you’re hitting the last few checkpoints all rational thought has flown out of the window—got to change the tyre on the Land Rover, don’t bother with a jack we’ll just hold the thing up even though half of us are too weak to even carry our kit much further. Had it not all been so painful there might have been an excitement in the breathless anticipation of the track junction or phone box that you hope more than anything else you’ve ever hoped for in your life is 200m round the corner of the wood because if it’s not then you’ve got lost and are going to have to do even more walking. Pathetically, laughably, reduced to keeping up the spirits by singing ‘Bat Out of Hell’ to yourself in the vague knowledge that it’s ten minutes long and so singing it six times will pass an hour which is really measured in three or four if you’re lucky slow, hard kilometres. As it was it mostly just hurt.
but would you fucking believe it, we all finished. Long Reach is what they call here a ‘benchmark’ exercise and though I hate to admit it, having finished you do feel like you could take anything anyone could now throw at you.
hilariously, hundreds of cadets are now back in Sandhurst hobbling up and down from the medical centre, ridiculous in trainers with combats and sick-notes for blisters and ankles and everything else imaginable. In the lines a pile of bloodied socks (what sicko chose white as the colour for an inner sock) sits at the end of the corridor waiting to be thrown out and, we hope, ceremoniously burned. The problem is that you can’t really remember
pain and so that now the trepidation of stepping off up that first huge climb to checkpoint x-ray—the light of the Welsh pub in the village below getting depressingly smaller with every step—has been forgotten in the euphoria of completion and the anticipation of our next leave weekend, we probably think we all enjoyed that.
we didn’t really.
It’s funny how history writes itself. Having lost my journal I can’t recall much of the rest of the first term, nothing to tie it down in my memory; it is a vague blur of annoying discomfort and camaraderie in the midst of the strangeness. We might have suddenly been allowed to lie-in till 0630 and we might have been allowed our mobile phones in our rooms, but we still had midnight curfews and were being worked sufficiently hard that we didn’t want to escape that much anyway.
Petty bullshit was still the watchword. A moment of realization came when our section failed a pre-deployment inspection because, instead of taping five ten-pence coins to the back of our notebooks, we had all taped five fifty-pence coins. Instead of being congratulated for recognizing that the packing list was ten years out of date, and you couldn’t have found a phone box which would have taken ten pence if you’d been a general, we were thrashed up and down the hill to Barossa for our impertinence in ignoring the strict instructions.
We had an epiphany on that run. The platoon commander was, as ever, running on the shoulder of the guy at the back, screaming obscenities in his ear as if the opinion of a deeply mediocre Engineer captain was somehow going to bother the cadet from Dubai who just tried to close his eyes and picture the Brabus Mercedes waiting for him at home. CSgt White was keeping his head up at the front, growling low encouragement and keeping watch over the rest of the platoon as we started to really feel the unexpected climb, and I looked across at the boys and felt a surge of warmth, a previously unknown kinship with these men, these strangers; the aristocratic Charlies, Bowmont and Church, tall and languid even in the run and even in the ranks cousins, side by side. I could feel Oscar beside me starting to giggle. Oscar of the gargantuan lungs, the fittest man I’d ever met, and the bastard had the surname next to mine, which meant I was partnered with him and his gazelle legs for every fucking event. Donaldson the other side, rolling his eyes as he caught mine, and they must have been feeling it too, because the snicker started to spread, and the Charlies were joining in and then lazy, handsome, only-joined-the-Army-for-a-bet Jonty behind and even little C-T, the pantomime dame of the platoon, feeling it more than anyone on his little legs, spluttering with suppressed laughter even through the burning lungs.
It was all just a game.
We muttered ‘Leadership, Character and Intellect’ under our breath as we scored our own little victories; diverting the energy and effort we should have been putting in on the drill square and in the classroom by planning and executing the perfect covert operation—streaking the long Old College corridor. The beauty of Op Naked Parade was that, though they’d have kicked us out if they’d caught us, stood perfectly to attention, chests thrust out—look large, be massive—like the Academy Sergeant Major himself, they’d have had to admire the attention to detail in the planning, the precision of the O-group and the level of control in the execution of the op; it was what we were being taught every day.
For actual military instruction, we watched videos. Sandhurst relies on scenes from war movies for roughly 57 per cent of the course teaching material, and there was barely a lecture we attended that didn’t make use of one of the stock Sandhurst war films for an element of instruction. For this reason there is almost no one in the Army with less than five years’ service who has not seen all of Band of Brothers (Damien Lewis is, basically, the ‘perfect’ officer; our own platoon commander had got confused and thought he was supposed to emulate David Schwimmer’s odious character), most of Gladiator (Maximus’ exemplary employment of both fire support—catapults—and surprise in the battle with the Goths) and Saving Private Ryan (Tom Hanks probably a bit too thoughtful, but the fight up the beach sufficiently horrific to make up for it), not to mention significant sections of Full Metal Jacket (the opening half-hour), A Bridge Too Far (General Horrocks’ definitive ‘summary of execution’ paragraph) and, for reasons which escape me, Heat.
In the evenings we would put on our convict pyjama coveralls and sit together in the corridor, polishing our boots on our knees. If we’d been good that day maybe some doughnuts would appear and, on someone’s laptop, the CSgt would play his own favourites: Tumbledown obviously (but none of the scenes of Colin Firth fopping it up in Chelsea, from which we might have drawn officer comfort) and Mel Gibson’s porno-violent We Were Soldiers. I assumed my own favourites—Apocalypse Now, Black Hawk Do
wn, Platoon, The Life and Death of Colonel Blim—contained some hitherto unseen subversive elements and were on the Sandhurst junior term blacklist. We didn’t even dare consider a little Zoolander for light relief.
By the end of the first term, even when some transgression or other so petty I can’t even remember it brought the dreaded ‘return to weeks one to five’ that had been the threatened punishment ever since we had been allowed our duvets and half-hour extra in bed, it had the pre-planned air of going through the motions. All the platoons in the intake had been ‘put back’ for more or less minor infringements, the volume and pitch of the colour sergeants’ screams had been steadily increasing as weeks eleven and twelve of the fourteen-week-long term passed, and the Old College staff realized they wouldn’t have us as their playthings for much longer. The final exercise of term was round the corner, and the final intensification of the bullshit had been another of the things we had all been warned about before arriving, the final overreaction of protective parents about to lose their kids to college and the power of veto in their lives.
We polished random brass plaques and resumed evening shining parades under the CSgt’s watchful glare and sometimes, for a treat, the more terrifying scrutiny of his ten-year-old son, who would walk up and down the corridor brandishing a small broom handle while his father eulogized about the Jocks tabbing across the Falklands, and we all just sat there, giggling and bulling and bulling and bulling.
And when we had been good we were allowed to sit in the canoe—because it was all just a game.
Unfortunately Exercise Crychens Challenge was not just a game.
Crychens Challenge was our first proper test exercise. Fully tactical, we would be deploying with a ‘realistic’ scenario and enemy forces to live and fight four bitter days of conventional warfare. Beyond lay the prospect of four glorious weeks of leave and escape from Old College for ever, if only we could survive.
We were going to Brecon.
Even clueless Old College cadets understood the symbolism of the Brecon Beacons. We had been given a passing introduction to inhospitable Wales on Long Reach, but that had been the Black Mountains, with the faint whiff of a national park that they carried, distant memories of Duke of Edinburgh’s expeditions and regular glimpses of a red fleece which reminded you that misguided people did this sort of thing for fun.
Sennybridge Camp and Army Field Training Centre was not about the fun. It was about the Infantry. It was about the pitch-black woodblocks and the freezing streams that weren’t obstacles to be crossed but covered approaches to be crawled along. It was about the cattle grid on the track up from the main road which always signalled an ascent into freezing fog and about the cloud and sense of despair that always seemed to linger over Dixie’s Corner. Even to those of us who wanted to join the Infantry, the dread promise of Brecon had been enough to make the ridiculous recruiting videos of the otherwise untouchable rear-echelon corps and services—the lingering zoom-out shots of the four-tonners making their way across the desert before an enormous bloodred sunset to the power ballad strains of Maria McKee’s ‘Show Me Heaven’—seem quite appealing.
Sandhurst had an air of grandeur about it, a certain elegance and even, beyond the shouting and marching, a certain gentility to its stables and polo pitches and black-and-white photographs of back in the day when cadets sporting preposterous moustaches practised bicycle drill. Brecon was raw and non-commissioned, and we were definitely in someone else’s back garden. After fourteen weeks of basic training recruits pass out and become soldiers. When we qualified as platoon commanders, we would be instructing guardsmen, troopers, riflemen or privates, who had done only twenty-odd weeks of training. Out in Iraq and Afghanistan kids who had done four months of training and just turned eighteen were on patrol with loaded weapons. The first five weeks of Sandhurst had been breaking us in, a short, sharp military inoculation. The first term was the groundwork, everything beyond it was extra. Crychens Challenge was about making sure we could, at the very least, soldier.
We couldn’t soldier.
Once your feet froze in your sleeping bag, you couldn’t sleep let alone soldier. With crumbling fingers and Neutrogena at a premium (hard-working hand cream for hardworking hands) we stumbled in and out of impenetrable woodblocks as we tried to get to grips with the agonizing slog of advancing to contact—patrolling towards the likely enemy positions until engaged, defeating him, regrouping and then doing it all again—that was the bread and butter of the Infantry. Mile after mile, each rotation more stupid than the last, what sort of idiot plan was it anyway—to just walk at the enemy until he shot you? Effective enemy fire, we were instructed, was when the incoming rounds start landing at your feet; keep going till then. As if! After each attack we’d get a welcome five-minute break for a debrief. Sat perched on our sodden day sacks, sulkily eyeing-up the grinning Gurkhas who were playing enemy and who didn’t mind because they’d be in warm beds in Sennybridge Camp that night, we’d be told what we’d done wrong and how much worse it would all have been if it had been for real. Worse?
We couldn’t soldier.
Day one had been wet, but not cold. The cold came sometime on day two, which was probably why everything froze, but at least it kept us awake with shivering on the long stags, not even bothering to look through the night sights, bulky CWS which had already been outdated in 1982, when the troops had gratefully swapped them for the superior ones they captured from the Argentinians.
At night it was a toss-up on the lesser of two evils. Staying behind in the harbour, freezing and blind on the stag positions, actually watching the frost form on your trousers, feeling the water sliding in to the shell-scrapes and trying not to anticipate the grimness of stuffing the mud-soaked sleeping bags back into our mud-caked bergens the next morning. Or, for a laugh, out on a recce patrol. Even less sleep than if we’d stayed behind, but the highlight of the exercise when the platoon commander, coming along to critique, fell straight into one of the chest-deep holes of freezing water that pockmarked the foul training area. A break in the cloud and a sliver of moonlight revealed the section trying to hold back grins for the deliberate split second too long it took anyone to offer to help him out. The double bonus was the patrol being cut short because the poor bastard was so cold.
We shouldn’t have been amused, but you had to find what humour you could. The CSgt was best, his stream-of-consciousness rants by now the stuff of legend among thirty of us who had as clear a case of Stockholm Syndrome as ever you’re likely to see. Hanging on every word of this man whom we had feared and hated in equal measure but now worshipped and envied, his professionalism, his experience, his implied hardness and the fact that he would come grinning in to work after a leave weekend with impressive bar-brawl scars, growling at us that we’d better not piss him off that day because he loved his wife and if we annoyed him he’d have to beat her because he wasn’t allowed to beat us. He was an awesome soldier, and the more we learned about soldiering and the more we found it nigh impossible, the more we revered him and the more we laughed nervously when he snarled down the suggestion that landmines were unethical things that we shouldn’t bother learning about because we’d signed the Ottawa Convention banning them.
And with a nod of satisfaction and half a smile he’d turn away to his steaming flask of whatever delicious brew he’d picked up before coming out to our pathetic harbour that morning, leaving us just enough aware he was joking to be laughing, but just enough unnerved by his grin to think that perhaps the Scots Guards Close Observation Platoon had assassinated the Princess of Wales in a stand against her position on landmines.
And then, at around GR 852, 346, we got to the Company Assembly Area for what would be the final night, except it wasn’t a harbour, it was a farm.
It was about four in the afternoon, and it was a farm, and the weather had finally broken, and spring was here, and we had the roof of a warm barn over our heads and were sat in straw, peeling off damp socks and just wriggling our toes.
Next came the norgies—giant thermos flasks for food—full of I don’t know what but it was hot and tasted good with lots of Worcester sauce and the white sliced bread that came with fresh apples for pudding and I went outside and sat on the step for a smoke.
And I was happy.
At four in the afternoon on a Thursday I was pissed wet through, shattered and filthy and having fun for the first time, and, although I knew I couldn’t soldier, I suddenly remembered why I wanted to.
The First Long Summer
On practically my first meeting with my platoon commander in Old College he had called me a cunt. On my first meeting with my new platoon commander he called me a goobah and smiled. We didn’t even know what a goobah was, but in a thick Aussie accent this seemed like the sort of progress we had hoped for and, although we pined for CSgt White like we pined for nanny, CSgt Coates promised to be a decent, if eccentric, au pair.
The whole point and promise of New College was that, au pairs not nannies. Terms two and three at Sandhurst were not about the mindless crap, they were about learning and improving as warriors and leaders of men.
I guess that’s why we spent the first weekend back polishing the skirting boards.
Straight out on exercise within days of having returned and without having caught our breath set the tone for the middle term, which was a busy thrashing. I lay on my back in the stag position, neglecting my arcs but staring enviously up at the planes coming and going low overhead out of Heathrow, flashes on the wing-tips so bright you felt you could climb the tall conifers and touch them, full of comfy, warm, pleased-to-be-coming-home, pleased-to-be-going-on-holiday smug bastards.