by The Junior Officers' Reading Club: Killing Time;Fighting Wars
On our guard duties, one of us would sit behind a desk all night at the entrance to the College, which was never used, and preside over The Occurrence Book, into which everything had to be written in CAPITALS in black ink and onto a ruler; certain things had to be double-underlined in red, and what was best of all was that one of the most senior men in the Academy actually checked the thing each morning, ripping cadets in half for inky smudges on the pristine pages let alone an actual mistake.
As we prepared for the drill competition we were busily polishing the actual soles of our boots, being instructed by the colour sergeant which brand of shower gel was best for cleaning the smooth sylvet cloths we used for the hallowed task of bulling our boots in the hope of one day attaining toe-caps so magnificently shiny that—what? The inspecting officer would see his very soul reflected in them?
It was a relief, albeit a painful one, to switch to preparation for the log-race. We didn’t know where running around the Academy grounds with a tree on a rope came into the preparation of the cream of future Commonwealth leaders to meet the demands of the volatile international climate, but at least we weren’t cleaning shit.
Our feelings towards CSgt Coates by this time were so mixed that Batty invented the tactical hand-gesture for him, the yo-yo. Coates should have loved us. His eccentricity was a watchword throughout the Academy, his thinking defiantly unconventional, the horrible Infanteer who had come top on his platoon sergeants battle course, who liked to let the rumours linger that he had escaped from Dartmoor prison to join the Army but who sat in his office strumming Coldplay on his guitar. Rumour had it that he had once overtaken the Academy sergeant major, himself no slouch on a bike, screaming down the M3 at well over 100 mph standing on his saddle. I could never work out whether it amused him or infuriated him that we religiously polished to The OC on a Sunday evening, working away the Marissa/Summer fantasies in concentric circles which made the drill boots glisten with an extra shine of sexual frustration. He shouldn’t have minded as long as we did what was asked of us.
And mostly we did. By that stage those of us who weren’t incompetent were making up the ground, and some of the stuff we were starting to do had barely been covered by those who had arrived six months before thinking they knew it all. Sandhurst was still Hogwarts with guns, but we weren’t in the first book any more. In fact, XV Platoon was beginning to find itself, to show a character which both explained and belied the fact that in the Sovereign’s Banner competition, a buzz which had been only mildly distracting in the junior term but which was starting to bite annoyingly, we were placed firmly last.
Over the three terms and based on points allocations for certain key events—the log-race, the drill competition, military skills test scores, etc.—the Sovereign’s Banner competition ‘rewarded’ the best platoon of the nine at Sandhurst with a multi-coloured lanyard for their last few weeks. The honour was purely theoretical, while everyone else spent the run-in to commissioning relaxing, the winners were frantically rehearsing the extra drill they would have to perform in the final parade.
But XV Platoon had taken Norman Dixon’s work on military incompetence to heart. Loved his idea that good generals differed from bad only in the degree to which they resisted the psychopathy of the very organization they served. We weren’t competitive. In fact, as we took more pride in being ‘good in the field’ we got less competitive. To foster the required sort of spirit, the pride in your turnout and drill to be a Sovereign’s platoon front runner, you needed to care about the trivia. We didn’t. We dealt with the extra weight and hassle of combat body armour when it was introduced because we knew it was not something we were going to turn down if we ever did have to assault an East German town (though we prayed that we never would have to assault an East German town and, in our smart-alec moments, wondered aloud if the Army might not be better served if it conducted less of its urban training on mock-ups of East German towns—there’s only so much realism injected by taking the cross off the top of a church and replacing it with a crescent moon). Our problem was that when we didn’t care, we didn’t play.
Perhaps that’s why we got rough treatment when it came to dreaded NBC—Nuclear, Biological and Chemical training.
We weren’t allowed to call it the ‘gas chamber’, of course, but we weren’t concerned about the sensitivities by the time we arrived panting and sweating buckets in the charcoal suits that we had been thrashed around the Academy in for half an hour, scarcely believing that the rumours were true and that the sweat actually does begin to accumulate in your rubber-clad boots.
NBC should have been a nightmare because, well, it was a nightmare. We’d already been fairly darked out by some pretty horrific footage of the town of Hallabjah after Saddam Hussein somewhat unsportingly decided to test his new nerve agent on it. War, we were learning, was nasty enough without having to contend with nerve agents that killed you in nine seconds: three seconds, dizziness; four seconds, cramp in all muscles; five to six seconds, involuntary shitting and vomiting; eight to nine seconds, collapse, seizure, death. We thought the worst of it might have been the extra hassle of more kit to carry and clean and lose, or at the very least the exhausting games of midsummer NBC-suit rugby, but nothing compared to ‘the confidence test’ when they made us take the masks off and get a taste of it just to see what we were missing out on.
Tear gas is a whole world of pain.
I can only really describe it as drowning in Tabasco. As soon as you remove your mask, eyes firmly screwed shut and having taken a big enough breath to hope that you get through your NameRankNumber without taking another, it begins to burn the skin, around the eyes and the lips, as you’re garbling out as fast as you can 25181380OfficerCadetHennessey, except that the sadistic bastard colour sergeant had other ideas and, still barring the way to the door and sweet lungfuls of leafy Surrey air, threw in his curve-ball: ‘Name two of your top ten hits.’
And I’m stumped.
Stood there, blind and immobile, feeling the burning, creeping in at my neck and nostrils and a simultaneous fire as my lungs start to scream for air that I can’t inhale, I hadn’t a fucking clue what he was talking about until Chad leaned forward behind me and muffled ‘Travis’ through his respirator and I remembered that for some inexplicable reason the CSgt thinks I look like the lead singer of Travis, and, even though I can’t think of anything other than the pain at my chest, I blurt out ‘Why Does It Always Rain on Me?’, which seemed pretty apt at that juncture, and if I could have opened my eyes I’m pretty sure I’d have seen the colour sergeant laughing behind his mask, but I couldn’t hold it any longer and exhaled, gasping for breath …
Even though at that exact moment he stood aside and bundled me out of the door, my gag reflex was triggered, and it felt like pepper avalanching down my throat, and with the choking came more inhaling, which only exacerbated the whole cycle until all my skin and throat and lungs were on fire, and there was no air, only sting.
The temptation is to curl into an agonized ball on the grass, but it must be resisted as the only way to calm things down is to walk around like a vomiting idiot with your arms out, allowing the air to get to you. The small consolation is looking wonderfully stupid on someone’s digital camera, foaming at the mouth and trying to pull ‘Blue Steel’ through the tears as you exit the chamber.
In retrospect I should have gone for ‘Le Tigre’: it’s softer, more of a catalogue look.
But we emerged from the chamber, coughing and spluttering into more than clear air; through loss and digging and essays about what we should have been learning but weren’t while we attacked houses with ladders and sharpened boots and polished bayonets and smacked rifles through a sea of bullshit, suddenly, finally,
With fond memories of the expeditions which had passed into Sandhurst legend—the Middle Eastern cadet whose group had done a sailing trip on his father’s fully crewed yacht, the group who had been on a ‘cycling’ expedition and had taken only handlebars, posing for photos c
ut torso high, the exped that had been planned and submitted on physical relief maps only, a challenging trek through California which, if someone had bothered to check the grid references with a more conventional map, they would have realized was actually a bunch of guys walking up and down the streets of LA—we set off dutifully at the end of term for our own adventure training expedition. A hastily planned ‘challenging trek’ through the High Tatra Mountains which we had no desire whatsoever to complete.
But we did all want to go to Prague.
And of course we had forgotten to mention to the instructors at Sandhurst that the mountain range was equipped with a newly installed cable-car system, so of course we didn’t bother to mention that instead of climb the vicious beasts we just took the leisurely chairlifts and enjoyed posing for photos at the top. And of course we were too drunk to remember whether or not Hancox had actually been sick out of the window of the sleeper after we found that all they served in the buffet car was vodka, gherkins and dodgy sausages. Out of Sandhurst and out of green kit and let loose without a pause after three months of digging exercises and house-to-house exercises and NBC exercises and bayonets and grenades and of course we were too drunk.
And after day one of the planned five, when we realized that all the photos looked the same, of course we got bored, so it may or may not have been an integrity issue, but why not just head back to Prague and find the absinthe bar with the piano on the ceiling and the American ballerinas. Of course we did.
I’d like to think we enjoyed the senior term because, a mere eight months into our training, we began to learn things that were relevant. With a sleight of hand that couldn’t but shock us, the CSgt dismissed everything we had learned for the last two terms and began our training in counter-insurgency and peace support operations with, in his own words, ‘what the Army actually does’. Finally our lessons were not backed up by what had been done in the Falklands, but by what our instructors had done themselves in Ulster and Bosnia and some of them recently Iraq. Finally the enemy was not the Russian Shock Army but the real guy in the balaclava and the keffiyeh, and the game wasn’t to hold the tanks up for at least twenty minutes till we all die but we’ll have bought enough time for Washington to nuke Moscow, it was winning hearts and minds and working out how the hell we were going to get out of the provincial governor’s residence, as Y Company of the Princess of Wales’s Royal Regiment had in Al-Amarah, repulsing more than eighty attacks by the Mahdi army.
We deployed on Exercise Broadsword for ten days of rioting in Hampshire and marvelled at the satisfaction of whacking people with batons, suddenly understanding police brutality and sympathizing entirely. Broadsword was a revelation. The exercise didn’t involve hours of running around and living in little triangles in the woods but was written by the academic department at Sandhurst and based on real incidents. As one of the exercise supervisors said, it was all the worst bits of thirty years in Ireland, ten years in the Balkans and the last two years in the Middle East played out over ten days in one village—and you thought you had a bad day at the office.
Shooting at Gurkhas behind sandbags had been one thing; dealing with actresses playing women claiming to have been raped, starving people looting aid drop-offs, religious leaders with bombs in their mosques, suicide bombers, Mafia bosses, dodgy rebel generals, not to mention press conferences and daily newspaper reports about how bad/good you are almost made us yearn for the bad old times. After relentless days we were exhausted and felt nothing but admiration for the guys out in Iraq. The odds might have been worse back in the day, but at least you wouldn’t get misquoted or indicted taking a trench.
The most important thing about being in the senior term is that you knew where you were going. All through the junior and intermediate terms you were a hopeful nobody, visiting various regiments with high hopes, on best behaviour and nervously wondering how your report card compared to the other guys who also wanted to join. The regimental selection process was like Sandhurst’s version of applying to university, and competition for certain places was fierce.
The Combat Arms, the so-called ‘teeth arms’, were top of most people’s lists. The Cavalry and Infantry regiments who’d be punching and scrapping through enemy positions were surely what the Army was all about. The Army Air Corps were in the club but they didn’t really count because, well, you could either fly a chopper or you couldn’t. Equally popular were the Combat Support Arms: the Gunners of the Royal Artillery and the Sappers of the Royal Engineers, the Royal Signals and the sneaky Intelligence Corps, specialist and pretty important jobs and big organizations who would take thirty to forty cadets from each intake compared to the one or two the smaller Cavalry and Infantry regiments would take. In the rear, literally and figuratively, were the Combat Service Support Arms, the logisticians and educators and administrators and mechanics who we all knew deep down were a far more valuable commodity on the battlefield than the grunts we wanted to be but weren’t exactly who we’d dreamed of being when playing soldiers in the back garden when we were seven.
The first two weeks of senior term were a whirl of final board interviews, some nightmare sweaty-palm jobs with six guys sat in the corridor interviewing for three places, others mere formalities and shaking hands with the regimental lieutenant colonels we’d met many times before as potential officers and well-looked-after sponsorees.
The whole thing should have been done long before, but Sandhurst itself was resistant, worried that once we knew where we were headed and started flitting off to London to be measured up for our smart new uniforms we would lose motivation. The Academy preferred to keep the uncertainty and threat of a dreaded ‘bottom-third’ report hanging over its cadets for as long as possible. The whole thing was a bit of a joke because in many cases the regiments already knew who they wanted and had subtly communicated it to the grateful cadets. The recruiting officers knew that being good at Sandhurst and being good in the ‘real’ Army weren’t necessarily the same thing. It was far more important to make a good impression on visits to the regiment you wished to join, to bond with the other young officers who’d become your family and for whom the opinions of the idiot captain that had taken a dislike to you in the first term would have little impact.
So those who were fucking good, those who had done their homework and chosen wisely and the small handful who were following Grandpa enjoyed finally being able to shape regimental berets in the mirror with the door locked and whooped joyfully on ‘uniform-fitting’ trips down to London while the unfortunates waited hopefully as the Academy staff called in favours to try and get them squeezed into the Adjutant General’s Corps so at least they’d have a uniform to wear at the commissioning ball.
The Grenadier Guards offered three places on CC041, one to me, one to Mark and one to Fergus. My contemporaries were the super-fit, super-fast son of a general from the platoon on the verge of winning the Sovereign’s Banner competition and a suave, trumpet-playing lady-killer with a laid-back style we loved (and his instructors hated). Those in the know on Army courses extolled the virtues of being ‘the grey man’—finishing a race in the middle of the pack to avoid expectation at the top and pressure at the bottom—so I reckoned I was perfectly placed for when we would finally all arrive at our new battalion.
Not that there wasn’t still hard work to be done, not least on Exercise Bayonet Point, our introduction to live firing. Scenario realism might make way for safety as the coastal ranges down on the tip of the Pembrokeshire coast were patrolled by safety staff in highvis vests, but there was something a little different from field firing, a metallic taste in the mouth from the live rounds and the adrenaline buzz that the overhead fire gun was spitting real 7.62 just above, that the grenades in our pockets were primed.
Live Fire Tactical Training (LFTT) is something the British Army does better than anyone else. No nation is so thorough in its planning and safety regulations, nor able as a result to exercise so realistically and so dangerously. While the Americans with a
ll their billions of dollars and real estate and resources develop paintball games and crawl underneath machine-guns, our LFTT is the envy of the world.
The hard work came in short, sharp bursts, and when it did, those bursts were exhausting. Sitting behind the bun-line waiting to go down the individual lane, 800 metres of loose gorse, patrol forward, targets up, down to the prone, leopard crawling into a fire position and then returning live fire till the target’s down and on again and again until your legs feel like empty shells.
Called forward, I didn’t look left or right as I made my way to the start-line, blocked out the banter from whoever it was coming, panting back up the range with words of warning and encouragement, and stared the horizon down. Determined that even the first slide down into the mud would be immediate, that from the start there would be no crawling pain in knees and elbows, that my hands were unfeeling solids against the hot magazine changes and cold metal of the rifle, I crossed the line and, as the first target popped up, went mad.