by alex seymour
Finally I felt compelled to leave the suffocating conformity of suburbia. Bulldozers had moved in and razed my school. In its place rose mock Tudor-style “executive” homes. This was the last straw. I had to escape—it felt like my life depended on it.
I enlisted a week or so after my seventeenth birthday, fared well in the nine months of basic training, was promoted to section commander, then had bestowed upon me a Diamond Award—for recruits who achieve a standard of excellence. The commando training was grueling, exactly the right thing for me at the time. The commando’s official recruitment tag line was “99.99% need not apply.” In the first few weeks of training, we were literally shocked into a new awareness. You either wanted this gig really badly, or you didn’t. Most people, quite wisely, didn’t.
Each day in training followed a similar format. Up at 5 a.m. Thrashed all day and then crash into bed at 11 p.m. At the outset, during each physical training session in the gym, we would go balls to the wall, maximum effort, then seek permission to puke, and then get back in the gym and carry on. Log runs, mud runs, punishing swims—the pace was unrelenting, and the physical and mental challenges were extreme in comparison to my former cosseted life. The sessions we endured on the bottom field where the assault course was located were called beastings—for good reason. They consisted of sprinting, climbing, leaping, and crawling over, through, and under obstacles designed to stop all progress. The mood in the barracks fifteen minutes prior to a beasting was woeful. No eye contact, no banter, the air filled with wretched dread. Whatever the task that day, the imperative was endurance, and the training team kept us gasping, faces contorted with exertion.
Things got tougher, intensifying week by week. You go through training to become a regular soldier, and then there’s the commando phase—a step beyond, which included the endurance course—a very different beast from the assault course. Unlike the foreboding doom we experienced before beastings, prior to the endurance course it was a belly full of butterflies. We smashed through ice to swim through water-filled tunnels, with assault rifles and full gear, only to emerge onto land for more than an hour of wading, crawling, and running. Soaked through and freezing cold, we hobbled back to camp. Some recruits pissed or shit themselves during the five-mile run back. I wasn’t exempt. Knuckles would be bleeding from the tunnels crawled through, kit covered with a layer of frost by the time we staggered into camp with clouds of steam rising off our backs.
A school friend who’d successfully completed the course the year before had given me some good advice: “When you need to get a grip,” he said, “lock yourself in a toilet cubicle, cry as briefly as you can, dry your eyes, get back out there, crack on.”
One in three pass the three-day potential recruits course. Following that, a typical junior-troop-sized intake (composed mainly of seventeen-year-olds) was fifty-five recruits. By the end of training there were usually only twelve left. The contract between the marines and recruits was becoming clear: we will pay you each month, but you need to deliver in blood, sweat, and tears. I was obsessed with completing the course, driven by my covetousness of the prize, the Green Beret.
Our trainers had fought during the Falklands War—including our drill instructor, a keen boxer who took every opportunity to integrate “milling” into our unarmed-combat sessions. He took care to explain the rules.
“Gentlemen, milling is toe-to-toe pure aggression. In a few minutes you will be paired off with an opponent roughly the same size and weight as you. You will have two minutes alone to beat as much blood and snot out of him as possible. If you go down you must get up, otherwise we will make you do it again. During the fight you’re not allowed to dodge or duck—just take the punches to your face and head and give ’em back even harder!” He concluded by explaining that what they were looking for in each of us was a spirit that was incapable of admitting defeat, the kind that takes a beating and keeps on fighting.
I witnessed several brutal bouts before it was my turn. My opponent stepped into the ring, the bell rang, and the fight began. Defensive tactics were not an option—it was all attack, attack, attack. A massive wake-up call: this was the first time I’d ever been repeatedly punched hard in the face— bam, bam, bam—in the space of a few seconds. Forget technique, forget deftness. In a fury I countered, pummeling my opponent’s face with a newly acquired savagery. I can still see the surprise in his eyes. The bell rang, the bout finished. Although neither of us was declared the winner, the drill instructor said approvingly, “Now this is more like it.” My chest was heaving and my face was stinging, and inside my heart was beginning to swell with what must have been pride. This was my new reality, and I was encouraged. I could do this. This was something I could be good at.
Our training sergeant was called Dinger *1—our beast-master—and the closest I had ever come to meeting a racist psychopath. One black recruit took heaps of his abuse. This recruit was built like a gladiator, but Dinger wasn’t impressed and rode the guy unmercifully. On a troop march in which we were already cracking at breakneck speed, Dinger ordered him to run loops around the entire troop as we ran together as a unit, while carrying a general-purpose machine gun that weighed thirty-six pounds. “Get up here, you fucking black bastard,” Dinger roared. “Get that gun and loop around us as we’re running. And I want to see your white teeth in your black face, so fucking smile when you do it. Now run!”
Dinger would cackle maniacally as he ordered us to lie on our stomachs with our heels raised and exposed. Armed with a scalpel and bottle of surgical spirit, he relished his task as chief blister lancer. By now, of course, we all had blisters the size of fifty-pence coins, our heels rubbed into raw meat. We squirmed, writhed, and bucked from pain as he applied his grisly “first aid” treatment, and when he was done, he’d insist we’d respond, “Thank you, Sergeant.”
We had two Special Forces Falklands War vets in the training team—an officer and a corporal: gruff twins, inscrutable hard-as-nails Scotsmen, both with massive growler mustaches, who were, as Dinger liked to point out, “the cream of British military capability.”
One of the commando tests is the thirty-miler—a yomp, or long-distance march, across moorland carrying thirty-five pounds of gear, including a rifle and a shared large rucksack. We had to complete it in less than eight hours. A few days before this test, I woke up in the middle of the night with sharp pains in my back. I got up to look in the mirror and saw that my back was covered with boils, most about half the size of a golf ball. They hadn’t been there when I’d gone to bed. I couldn’t figure out what they were, but they hurt like hellfire. I went to sick bay the next morning, and the nurse took one look before exclaiming, “My God, what are they doing to you boys?” She shook her head, part in disgust, part in disbelief. She was young and new to the unit. Minutes later I was lying on my stomach biting down on a piece of wood that the medics had given me to stop me biting my tongue as they lanced the boils with a scalpel. Triumphantly, one of the nurses pulled from one of the boils a root of white pus that was shaped like a tiny parsnip. Two days later I was back out in the field on the thirty-mile yomp, trudging as fast as I could in nearly a foot of snow across the Dartmoor moorlands.
The entire process of basic training was formulaic textbook military indoctrination. When you begin, you are utterly incompetent. The training team reminds you of this unceasingly because it is true. As a team of men we had minimal value. Small achievement by small achievement, we gained competency working together, learning to function as a unit, eventually almost as a single organism. By the time we finished the training, those of us who’d survived felt like titans, omnipotent. This is an institution that knows what it is doing. It has an illustrious 350-year history, during which it has fine-tuned the training strategy with devastating effectiveness. Its methods are potent, so potent that many men contribute more than twenty-five years of service.
Punishing as it is, the training succeeds in turning clueless young men with aggressive potential into some of th
e most skilled fighting soldiers in the world. Though still teenagers, they now, at last, are cutting around wearing green berets, and on the shoulders of their uniforms are patches with red stitching that read Royal Marine Commando. Back when I was seventeen, I had been drafted to serve in 42 Commando, and I had found there a feeling of family that I had never experienced in my personal life. I had served with men twice my age, most veterans of war, and I looked up to them. Those sergeants and sergeant majors became surrogate father figures. They were strong, dependable, fair, funny, and brave. They demanded excellence in everything they did and set a stellar example to impressionable kids like me. I wanted them to coach me into manhood, and they inspired me to spend time pondering the qualities of masculinity.
By the time I was twenty, while in the marines in that first enlistment, I had taken the time to finish my A levels, and during my six years in service, I had traveled the world: seeing active service to Northern Ireland and serving in more than twenty countries in Africa, Europe, and the Middle East. After six years I left them to “go outside,” as they called it, returning to civilian life. I was twenty-three.
I worked for Guinness for five years and transitioned into a career in IT once the phenomenon of the Internet began to explode into every industry. During these years as a civilian, I felt like I was being infantilized and patronized, especially by aspects of the media. I felt British men were becoming increasingly feminized, emasculated by a culture and lifestyle that was geared toward the needs of women, and we were embracing it. I could hardly stomach the cultural and social scam that I saw all around me: I mean, men were being pitched male fragrances, sold the lie that they’d become more sexually successful if they smelled nice! I was not averse to change, especially that of gender roles. Men had ruled society since forever, and now women were having their rightful day in the sun—and who could blame them for wanting that. But men seemed to be losing something intangible in the exchange. Our physical makeup was still the same as it had been one hundred thousand years ago, and while a portion of me yearned for the “caveman mentality,” I was aware that in my part of middle England in the late twentieth century, the most dangerous threat a man encountered was scalding his tongue on the firm’s cappuccino. That caveman DNA left me with the sense that all was not right in the land of modern manhood. Where was the adventure?
Once on a tour of duty in the Persian Gulf, when I was only twenty, we were between patrols and were sailing through the Indian Ocean, the ship’s bow scything through a morass of half a million deadly mating sea snakes. We “parked up,” and the captain announced, “Hands to bathe!” He was granting us permission to jump off the highest point of the ship, plunge into the abyss twenty thousand fathoms below, and swim for as long as we dared. Some sailors also steered the RIB (rigid inflatable boat) nearby, using the noise of its motor to scare off inquisitive hammerhead sharks from the pool of shouting crew thrashing in the seawater. Back on board and dry, we sailed off to a desert island for a BBQ on the beach, where we also explored the island or sunbathed before jumping back on the ship and sailing back into the gulf. Within a few hours, under the command of the officer of the watch, I was back on the bridge at the helm, steering the 450-foot-long warship on another counterpiracy patrol.
Now all I had was a cubicle in the city.
In my family men had put their lives on the line, surviving sinking battleships and attacking enemy positions in RAF warplanes. Medals had been won. On my father’s side six brothers had fought in the First World War, and only three had returned alive from the trenches. Now I was outside—a civilian in my twenties, running the risk of winning “employee of the month.” Surely this was a sign that one man had become another man’s bitch.
By age forty life became increasingly comfortable. I was married, with a decent house on a private road, good income, a beautiful daughter, aged eleven, and a fine, headstrong son, aged nine. We had a large shaggy brown dog, chickens laying eggs in the garden cared for by Portuguese gardeners, a Polish cleaner, and a Spanish au pair. But a piece of the jigsaw was missing. Just like the deadening sense of suburban sameness that compelled me to jump ship as soon as I was legally allowed, something drastic was called for to startle me into a fresh, sustainable way of thinking. There was an emerging realization that I needed to embark on a quest.
So after an absence of nearly twenty years, I rejoined the marines as a reservist, a fully trained civilian deployed in times of war. A return to service after an absence that long was unprecedented. Friends and relatives were not happy. Their judgments about my giving up a comfortable civilian life to go back to military service varied from “stupid” to “insane.” After all, they said, you have a loving wife, great kids, a chicken called Motherclucker. Isn’t that enough? No one supported me. Did I really want to risk my children growing up without a father if I “caught it up” (was killed in action)?
The questions were incontestably justified. Putting things in perspective in the most pragmatic way, I had two main considerations. The first was that in the event of my death, my family would have enough money to support themselves without struggle and to ensure a bright future for the children. I had that covered—there was plenty of insurance to meet their needs. The second concern was how, if I died, the children, following grief, would thrive and stay emotionally healthy. That’s a nice way of saying, what would they do without a father? But I realized I also was sure of that, once I stripped out my ego. I trusted my wife—she would find another man who was not an idiot.
My wife didn’t find my certainties compelling. She strongly resisted my desire to reenlist, especially with the specter of war looming. We had been married for fifteen years, and she was happy. Why couldn’t I be? We argued, but I had never been surer of my decision. We debated the issue for several months, and I’ll never forget the night the matter reached resolution. We were sitting up in bed, in heated discussion, and I looked at her and spoke from my heart, with complete honesty: “Baby, I’m deadly serious about this. I love you desperately, and if I come back—and I will come back—I promise to dedicate the rest of my life to you and the children. But please, please give me this one year to do this.”
After that she never uttered another word of complaint. I now had her support, and I could never have had this adventure without it.
I had met my wife at a friend’s party at the Paradise bar near Notting Hill. She’d recently moved up to London from Brighton. Her long blonde hair and get-here-now figure lured me. She was twenty-six and I was twenty-seven, and we spent the next two years together in a flat we bought in central London, then got married and moved out of inner London to a village near its leafier outskirts. Her career took off. She worked at an ad agency in the West End, then gravitated to the city. Before long she became a director within one of the old-guard financial institutions. She knew how to take care of herself, and I could leave knowing she would be OK.
2
The Helmand Candidate
B ack in the marines! I spent the first weekend in training abseiling (rappelling) in the dark down a two-hundred-foot office block in a snowstorm in east London. The training team and instructors had all returned from fighting in Afghanistan. Most had also served in Iraq and were ex-regulars. Facing the void, snowflakes swirling in the dark, perched on the precipice and straining forward with only the brake line to stop me smashing into the deck two hundred feet below, Bill, the six-foot, five-inch veteran running the session, asked, “So how long did you spend outside the corps before you came back to us?”
“Twenty years.”
“Fair play,” he said, then laughed.
I stepped over the edge face first and jumped into the void. The juices were flowing again.
Within a few weeks we were posted to the US Marine Corps Mountain Warfare Training Center in the Sierra Nevada mountains of California. Training was all about navigating, shooting, communicating, and operating effectively at nine thousand feet and above in the snowcapped mountains. We became
reacquainted with mountaineering, learned how to ford rivers, and were taught how to pack a mule and three different ways to kill it if we had to. We learned the principles and techniques of close-quarter urban combat, which took place in a town built specifically for the training. The days were long, starting at 5:30 a.m. and finishing at 11 p.m. I was immersed in an epic wilderness and surrounded by men I trusted and admired, who were all equally pleased to be there. Life felt good.
It was a pleasure to be surrounded by real characters, especially old-school funny blokes who didn’t give a toss about political correctness. Jenners was a veteran with a West Country burr so broad and deep it felt good down to my bones. He could read out a fire drill and still make it sound as cozy as a hobbit at home in the Shire. For laughs he’d reveal his arse cheeks, exposing the one-inch-deep, two-inch-wide hole in his buttock—courtesy of an RPG (rocket-propelled grenade) attack on his last tour of duty. His post-Afghanistan USA road-trip party trick was to drop his pants in a bar and insert several fifty-pence coins in a neat two-inch cylindrical stack inside the healed hole in his backside in exchange for free beers. He was like a pirate that pops out his glass eye for free tots of rum in an ancient tavern, and it was a privilege just to be around him. When we got some R&R in Reno, he led the drunken cry at 2 a.m. for twenty other marines to go “naked dancing” as the bar was closing. Not a single American in that bar complained. They let the British boys go for it, buck naked on the dance floor until they got it all out of their Afghan-bound systems. No punches thrown or bottles broken. It was good to cut loose. Important. We knew what was coming and that in a few months we’d all be out there.