First Man In

by Ant Middleton

  ‘Oi!’ came a shout. ‘Where you going, mate?’

  I stopped and turned. On my way I’d passed a smaller brick guard hut. It hadn’t looked occupied but a man in army fatigues was now hanging out of the door, barking at me.

  ‘You can’t go up there, mate.’

  I stopped and turned back.

  ‘This is a military area,’ he said. ‘What you doing here? Who are you?’

  ‘I’m afraid I’ve got my dates wrong,’ I told him with an embarrassed shrug. ‘I have to come back next week, so …’ I smiled, as if the whole thing was no bother at all.

  ‘New recruit?’ he said.

  ‘Yes.’

  He shook his head and pointed with his chin back towards the large guard house. ‘Get over there and knock on his window,’ he said. ‘He’s fucking with you.’

  Half an hour later I found myself standing in a large, spotless room in a line-up of new recruits. We’d come from across the length and breadth of the British Isles in all shapes and sizes, young, spotty, greasy and hairy, none of us comfortable in our own skin and yet all of us desperately acting like we were. A corporal was walking up and down the lines of bodies, silently examining us with an unimpressed eye. The sound of his clicking heels echoed around the shining walls and polished floors. He seemed to tower over us, his spine erect, his broad shoulders filling out his shirt so that the khaki material stretched tightly against his skin. I tried to stop my eyes following him around the room but it was impossible. As he approached closer and closer to me, I forced them forwards and raised my chin just a little bit higher and puffed out my skinny chest as far as I could. The corporal stopped. He stopped right in front of me. My eyes widened. My heart froze.

  ‘Name?’ he said.

  ‘Middleton, Corporal.’

  He turned and bent down so that his face was barely an inch from mine.

  ‘Middleton,’ he growled. ‘In the British Army we prefer our men to have two eyebrows.’

  ‘Yes, Corporal.’

  He walked on. My eyes didn’t follow. My cheeks burned. I was intimidated, I was disorientated and was wondering what the hell I’d got myself into.

  After some brief words from the corporal, we were sent to our accommodation block to settle in. We were shown into a big room with a gleaming parquet wooden floor. There were rows and rows of identical beds with itchy blankets, and wooden lockers with their doors hanging open. Everything in there was immaculate. Spotless. For the first time I felt almost at home: this was exactly how my stepfather had always forced us to keep house. I found myself a bed – a bottom bunk in a far corner of the block – and took the opportunity to have a scan of all the others. There must have been about thirty lads in there, some teenagers like me, others in their early twenties. I guessed it probably wasn’t a coincidence that I’d been highlighted, like that, by the corporal. I looked different from the others. I wasn’t like them. You could just tell.

  The truth is, most of the young men who’d turned up for Basic Training that day were tough working-class lads who’d grown up immersed in the British culture of drinking, bantering and bashing the shit out of each other.

  My childhood hadn’t been anything like that. After my dad had died completely unexpectedly on 31 December 1985, my mother and stepfather had suddenly come into a lot of money. There was some confusion over my dad’s true cause of death, but it was eventually ruled that he’d had a heart attack. This official verdict meant his life insurance could pay out. My mum and her new boyfriend Dean, who’d been around from almost the precise moment my dad passed away, were suddenly awash with money. The family moved from a three-bed house in Portsmouth to an eight-bed mansion outside Southampton.

  Suddenly, everything was different. Me and my brothers were decked out in designer clothes, driven about in expensive cars and educated in the better private schools. My mum really started spoiling us. One Christmas it took us about three days to open all our presents. Then, when I was nine, the whole family upped and moved to northern France. We had a large, rambling plot of land with a big house that was once a farm on the outskirts of a town called Saint-Lô, twenty miles from Bayeux. I attended a well-respected Catholic school and was always neatly presented, and extremely polite and respectful. Almost overly so. People would love it when I came to their house because they knew the dishes would get done. I was a product of that much more gentle and civilised French culture.

  I’d experienced my first hint of difference between the two nations on a visit back to the UK to see my maternal grandparents. There’d been a guy about the same age as me walking down the street, strutting along, and he just started staring at me. In French culture, you tip your hat, you’re polite and respectful. When you pass someone in the street you say ‘Bonjour’ and ‘Ça va?’ So I said, ‘All right?’ He just glared at me like he wanted to kill me. I didn’t realise he was doing that stupid young-lad thing of who can stare the other one out. I found it so strange. I just thought, ‘What a weirdo.’

  I couldn’t have been more different from these people. I’d grown up in a place where fourteen-year-olds visit bars to drink coffee, not to down jugs of vodka Red Bull until they beat each other senseless, then puke.

  I opened my bag, commandeered a locker and squared away all my kit, folding it neatly and piling it up. And then, as quickly as I could, I took my wash-bag and a disposable Bic razor to the toilet block. I popped the orange cap off the blade and held it under cold water, then, with a firm hand, I placed it on the base of my forehead and pulled it down over the black fuzz that connected my eyebrows. As I bent down to rinse the blade under the tap, I heard the voice of the corporal echoing out of the nearby dormitory. ‘Right, get your fucking PT kit on, you lot,’ he barked. ‘I want you lined up out on the parade ground in sixty seconds.’

  I glanced up at the mirror to examine my handiwork. I couldn’t believe it. I’d shaved off a wide rectangle of hair, the precise length of the razor, from above my eyes. The good news – I had two eyebrows. The bad news – I looked like I’d been run over by a tiny lawnmower. ‘Fuck,’ I muttered. I ran back into the dorm, dodging the squints and smirks, and got changed as quickly as possible into the physical training kit that had been left out for us, folded perfectly at the end of each narrow bed.

  Out in the parade square we lined up in three rows in our green T-shirts and blue shorts. All I could do was pray the corporal didn’t spot what I’d done to my face and decide to humiliate me all over again. He took his place in front of us on the tarmac and stood legs apart, his hands behind his back.

  ‘I’ve got bad news for you lot,’ he said, scanning the lines of faces, each of which was trying hard not to show the cold, jaws clamped, nostrils flaring. ‘There’s been a minor cock-up. We’ve got too many of you here. We don’t have enough places. Not enough beds. “What does that mean?” I hear you ask. What it means is that some of you are going to have to stand back for two weeks and join the next intake.’

  Was he being serious? Was this another wind-up? It was impossible to know.

  ‘So how are we going to choose between you?’ he continued. ‘How are we going to make this fair? We’re going to kick off this morning with a Basic Fitness test. We’ll begin with a mile-and-a-half run. You’ll have to complete that mile-and-a-half run in ten minutes or less, gentlemen. You’ll be competing. This will be a race. And the prize for the winner, and only the winner, is one guaranteed bed.’

  With that we were marched off the parade ground and through the maze of gloomy brick buildings until we reached an airfield on the edge of the base. As soon as we were shown the starting line we began jostling for position. I already had a good sense of where I stood in this pecking order. I didn’t have much chance of beating some of these older, bigger, fitter lads. But I told myself I had to at least get into the front half of the pack.

  Still jostling – elbows poking, shoulders barging, feet inching forwards – we watched the instructor take his stopwatch in one hand and a steel whis
tle in the other. The moment I heard that whistle scream, I pushed my way forwards in the pack as best as I could and launched into it with everything I had. I could feel the warmth of the bodies around me, hear the sound of pounding feet and the breathing, feel the muddy turf slip and yield beneath my boots. I pushed harder and harder, desperate to clear the mass, shoving this way and that, finding little routes through the bodies.

  By the time I was halfway round the airfield I realised with a shock that there were only two men left in front of me. The sight of all the beautiful clear space in front of us spurred me on. I could feel myself surging with that angry competitive drive my stepfather had always instilled in me. I could practically see him there at the side of the field, with his big leather trench coat and his Rottweiler, shouting at me, telling me I wasn’t giving it enough, that I needed to push harder. I’d fucking show him. I picked the first man off and left him comfortably behind, as spots of cold mud flecked my legs and heat burned in my knees. Two hundred metres to go. I took the last bend, my legs pounding. The last man and I were neck and neck, sprinting with everything we had. From out of nowhere I was hit with a flash of the humiliation I’d felt earlier. I imagined my competitor laughing at me. A furious thought entered my head: these bastards think I’m nothing. They think I’m some skinny, monobrowed, nice middle-class boy. I found myself surging forward, faster and faster. By the time I got to the finish line I was a full twelve seconds in front of him. I couldn’t believe it. I’d won.

  Following that race, I charged with everything I had into this brutal, confusing and sometimes thrilling new world. Every day of Basic Training that followed was painful. We’d have press-ups, sit-ups, pull-ups, assault courses, cross-country running with heavy bergens on our back. With all that and the fieldcraft lessons, we’d hardly a minute to ourselves, and any minutes we did have were spent ironing our kit or making sure our lockers were immaculate. During our first proper inspection, I was waiting by mine and the corporal stopped in front of the lad next to me, a nineteen-year-old called Ivan.

  ‘You look like a bag of shit,’ he shouted at him. ‘Look at your fucking boots.’ As Ivan looked down to see what he was talking about, the corporal punched him in the chest and sent him crashing through his locker, right through the wood at the back, which snapped in half. Ivan lay there, gasping like a fish, in a nest of splinters and dust. One thing I knew for sure: I wasn’t in Saint-Lô anymore. I was going to have to toughen up.

  At that time I’d only ever thrown one punch in my life, and that was only because the situation had been forced upon me. It had all happened when I was living with my mum and stepdad in Southampton, shortly before my family had left for France. I’d been having some problems with a bully, a guy a couple of years older than me who’d taken it upon himself to make my life as miserable as possible, tripping me up, throwing me against walls and just generally being dumb and menacing. I tried to avoid him as much as possible, but it inevitably started getting me down, to the extent that I didn’t want to go into school anymore. When my stepfather noticed something was wrong, I made the mistake of telling him the details.

  ‘Well, what are you doing about it?’ he asked.

  ‘Nothing,’ I shrugged.

  ‘Do the teachers know? Have you told them?’

  ‘Of course not.’

  ‘Anthony,’ he said, ‘listen to me. I do not want you to come back to this house until you’ve punched that boy square in the face. If you don’t do that, do not come home tomorrow.’

  I couldn’t believe what he was saying. I didn’t even know how to throw a punch.

  ‘I can’t do that,’ I said, trying to reverse out of the living room and escape upstairs to my room. ‘It doesn’t matter.’

  ‘I’m not fucking about, Anthony,’ he said, barring my way. ‘Until you’ve properly hurt him, don’t even think about coming through this door again.’

  The next time I came across the bully he was waiting in the dinner queue. I saw him before he saw me. He was holding a tray with a bowl of chips covered in steaming hot beans and a carton of Ribena on it. He was with his mates, I was alone. Despite the fact that I had no backup, I decided it was then or never. I walked up to him.

  ‘I just want to put everything to bed,’ I said. ‘Is that all right? Do you want to shake hands?’

  The bully just stood there, looking at me, dumb as an ox. To be fair, he was probably trying to work out how he was supposed to shake my hand when he was holding his tray. But whatever it was that was going through his head, I decided that that was my moment. I punched him square in the bridge of the nose. He fell back, chips and beans flying everywhere, cutlery and tray clattering to the ground. I didn’t hang around to see what damage I’d done. I was gone.

  Later that afternoon my stepfather received a phone call from the headmaster.

  ‘I’m calling with unfortunate news,’ he said. ‘I’m afraid I’ve had to take the difficult decision to suspend Anthony from school for a period of one week.’

  ‘Suspend him?’ said my stepfather.

  ‘I’m very sorry to have to let you know that Anthony physically assaulted another pupil today. We can’t let something like that pass without taking appropriate steps.’

  ‘Good,’ he said. ‘I’m glad to hear it.’

  ‘Well, yes, you obviously understand then that even though this was very out of character for Anthony, we do have to …’

  ‘No, no, no,’ he interrupted. ‘I’m not saying I’m glad you suspended him. I’m saying I’m glad he hit that prick. I told him to do it. How long did you say he was suspended for?’

  ‘A week.’

  ‘You’ll see him in two.’

  I can’t deny there was a certain pleasure in seeing my tormentor caught under a scalding orange rainstorm of Heinz’s finest, though to be honest I wasn’t especially proud of myself for hitting back. It might have largely ended my problems with that particular bully, but it just didn’t feel like who I was. I did at least manage to take one crucial bit of positivity out of it. From then on I knew I had that capacity within me. When push came to shove, I learned that I could react with some level of violence and cause a bit of damage. But that wasn’t the only thing I learned. Over the two-week holiday from school that the punch had earned me, I played the scene over and over in my head. I’d obviously been scared before the moment I struck out, but what exactly had been the source of all that fear? What had been holding me back from sorting the problem out for so long?

  I realised it was a dread of the unknown. I was scared of punching the bully because I didn’t know what was going to happen next. He could have thrown hot food in my face. His mates could have piled on top of me and kicked me shitless. He could have barely flinched, calmly placed his tray to one side and then calmly broken my jaw. Anything could have happened. That, I realised, was the truth about most of the fear we’ll experience in our lives. Humans don’t like being in the dark about things. We hate not knowing what’s behind the door. We like to be able to see the future, to put one foot in front of the other and walk through life steadily, carefully and predictably.

  Learning to cope with deep states of doubt would be the journey of my life in the military. That’s one of the things it teaches you – and it’s a long, tough lesson, because it’s going completely against the grain of your human nature. It was only years later, going into war zones as an operator, that I truly learned to cope with the fear of stepping into unpredictable situations. By that stage I knew that if I got to my target, I could act. I could punch through an enemy position, I could cope with being shot at and, if I needed to, I could pull that trigger and end a life. I had that capacity in me. And the seed of that capacity was planted way back when I was a boy, at that moment in the dinner queue.

  When I was a new recruit at Pirbright, those lessons were still an extremely long way off. Three weeks after I’d seen that young lad being posted through a plywood wall, I found myself on the parade ground beside him. We were in forma
tion, waiting for the corporal to arrive for inspection. Next to us, looking confused and out of place, was a new recruit called Neil. He’d joined our troop after falling out of Basic Training, having suffered a broken ankle on week five of his intake. Now he was mostly better, he’d been inserted back into the programme. Neil was a big, leery lad and slightly chubby round the middle, probably out of shape after being out of action for a while.

  The problem was that Neil threw the numbers out. We were supposed to be arranged in rows of three, but now we had an odd number of bodies, so there was a gap at the front of our formation. I knew that in this eventuality you were supposed to arrange yourself in such a way that you still looked orderly from the front. The corporal was probably seconds away from rocking up and Neil was in the wrong place. He had to sort himself out, otherwise we’d all be in the shit. I flashed him a friendly smile.

  ‘Mate,’ I said to him. ‘Why don’t you jump up here, because the instructor’s going to come any second?’

  ‘Who the fuck are you?’ he said, taking a step towards me.

  Seeing what was about to happen, Ivan spoke up. ‘All right, mate, he’s only trying to help you out.’

  ‘And what’s your fucking problem?’ said Neil.

  ‘You’re the one with the fucking problem.’

  ‘Do you want to sort this out then?’

  ‘All right.’

  ‘Once we’ve knocked off tonight, I’ll see you behind building 2D.’

  I couldn’t understand it. Why was Neil being such a dick? Did he feel, coming into a new troop, that he had to dominate people to get respect? Maybe it was that he’d clocked up a few weeks’ more experience than us prior to his injury, and so when I told him where to stand he felt insulted. What was the point of reacting like that? I’d been polite and respectful to him. If I’d have said the same thing in France, I’d have been thanked. But the UK was a completely different culture and these kinds of situations would probably be solved with aggression or outright violence.