CONFESSIONS OF A ROYAL MARINE COMMANDO (part one)

by David Stanley

  It was a saying I was to hear often; and each time became even more determined failure was not an option.

  The ones they cannot break are the ones they want.

  As the Commando advertisements run on television and billboards across the country declare “99.99 percent need not apply.”

  To this day I cannot tell you why I knew with such conviction I was amongst that unique 0.01 percent.

  Back home again and life was exactly the same as before I left.

  Except now I no longer had a job.

  I had been fired from the company building children’s playgrounds after taking the week off for the recruitment course without bothering to tell them where I was going.

  I just didn’t turn up for work that week and that was the end of my building career.

  During those weeks after the assessment course I spent much of the day lying listlessly on the old settee in the cramped lounge room of my mother’s bungalow staring mindlessly at the pointless game shows on her small black and white television.

  As each day passed mum looked increasingly bemused.

  She was still as hard as nails, but for once I could say she looked almost concerned, hovering over the stove each evening cooking our daily beans and chattering to herself.

  Concerned at my now apparent state of unemployment, mum kept saying, almost under her breath: “Don’t get your hopes too high, boy, you’re not exactly John Wayne. You tried your best now go find yourself a proper job.”

  She was still stern, dishing out tough love.

  She could not even imagine that I might have passed.

  There were two posts a day, morning and afternoon; and as each day passed I grew more and more restless.

  Twice a day the tension became unbearable as the time for the postman to arrive approached.

  The days turned into weeks without reprieve.

  It was as if I was holding my breath, waiting, waiting, occasionally to the amusement of my mother.

  One day she said: “Boy, you’ll be as much use to the marines as a violin is for a one armed musician, the way you’re carrying on.”

  But the day finally arrived.

  There on the floor of our cold, damp home lay the letter.

  It was near the end of August and summer was drawing to a close.

  But it didn’t matter how miserable the weather.

  With my mother hovering in the background like a comedy character from the famous British television series Faulty Towers, I opened the envelope.

  I had my start date.

  The letter had been a long time coming, but there I was, a scrawny but stubborn lad who had been selected to commence training at the Royal Marines Commando Training Center.

  I could not have been prouder.

  I might never have had any doubts, but upon telling my mother I witnessed a rare sight: she was completely speechless.

  Eventually she found the words to say: “Congratulations. Well done.”

  That was all she said, but I could see despite her still tough exterior she was quite emotional, visibly proud of me for the first time I could remember.

  CHAPTER THREE

  INDUCTION AS A NOD

  The following month, with the weather turning sour as winter approached, I arrived back at the Lympstone Commando Railway Station in the company of a group of other recruits.

  This time around there were no pleasantries as we arrived.

  Disembarking from the train, we were met by the members of the training team we quickly dubbed “the bastards”.

  They already had grim expressions on their faces and a bark in their voices.

  It suddenly dawned on me I would be looking across the Exe River mudflats for almost a year.

  And it wasn’t going to be an easy ride.

  Along the side of the river below us we could see a group of recruits being “beasted”.

  They were covered with mud and being screamed at to complete press-ups, sit-ups and running sprints.

  They looked utterly exhausted, as if about to drop.

  We might have been greenhorns that day, but we would be down there amongst them soon enough.

  Recruits were called “Nods” because we were so deprived of sleep we often looked like the nodding toy dogs that were fashionable at the time as car decorations.

  Given any chance, a few minutes or even a few seconds, we slipped into unconsciousness for some much needed sleep.

  An ordinary army recruit can do as little as 14 weeks training.

  Commandos do 32 weeks of basic training before moving into specialist training for their chosen field of interest.

  I was wondering if I had made the right decision.

  But one of my strengths, also a weakness, is that I never know when to give up.

  There was no room for second thoughts now.

  I was embarked on a course which would turn into the greatest roller coaster of my life up to that point.

  Within minutes of clambering off the train the suffering began.

  As we stood on the concrete platform watching the train depart, we were lined up with our backs to the high-wired wall topped by razor wire. The view overlooking the Exe River estuary had already lost any semblance of the romance it held on that very first day I had admired the view.

  The training regime started immediately.

  With no previous experience, we found ourselves having to march everywhere we went.

  We had not been taught how to march, and yet every mistake we made stirred another storm of verbal abuse and stops to “beast us”.

  “Beasting” was the term used for the most brutal physical exercises the training team could concoct.

  As we were forced to do countless pushups at each beasting stop, they continued to scream the most horrific verbal abuse imaginable at us.

  Beasting, as we were soon to learn, could be administered in many dark and evil ways.

  I was known as a “smiler”. Sometimes, even during the punishment itself, I would be ordered to go and ask the sergeant for another beasting I had let a smirk cross my face.

  “The bastards” had a number of favorite forms of beasting; including the infamous mud runs in the estuary stretching below the barracks.

  Other favorites included forcing the recruits to crawl on their bellies across graveled roads, sometimes for hours. This left their elbows and knees bleeding and was both incredibly painful and physically exhausting.

  Another of the training team’s favorite forms of beasting was to come up to a recruit unexpectedly and punch them in the stomach and on the chin, knocking them to the floor. Recruits were then ordered to run off to the troop sergeant and ask for another punching.

  The Sergeant responded courteously: “Certainly you can.”

  The ridicule towards me from the training team started almost from the moment I climbed down off the train.

  Because my hair was long in the Bay City Rollers style popular back in the seventies as a symbol of youthful revolt, I was likened to “Donny Osmond”, the wimpish teen pop star of the long running variety program The Andy Williams Show.

  Songs such as “Puppy Love” were syrupy enough to make any self respecting teenager want to puke.

  As I quickly realized, the more exhausted one became the more effective and distressing was the accompanying verbal tirades.

  On that first day, after being marched around the camp and “beasted” several times, we were assigned a long succession of tasks, including swearing allegiance to queen and country.

  We were then shown our quarters.

  Next came the mandatory haircuts we had all been waiting for.

  In some way the haircuts marked the symbolical removal of our last attachment to civilian life.

  Fortunately for me the haircut also marked the end of the two hours of ridicule I had endured over the length of my hair.

  The Donny Osmond comparisons disappeared as my carefully blow dried locks drifted to the barber-shop floor.

  Bein
g likened to the smarmy Donny Osmond, who I particularly hated, had already put an end to any teenage illusions that my hair style made me look “cool”.

  Even those who tried to beat the military barber shop system by having had their heads shaved prior to arrival got haircuts.

  During that first fortnight we were instructed in every minute detail of military life.

  Part of our induction into military life was being schooled in boot neck speech: the dinner hall was “the galley”, the rooms we slept in were “the grots”, a shower was “a Dobie”.

  The quirks of this new language were endlessly colorful.

  The detail of our induction into a new way of life went right down to being shown how to shower and maintain personal hygiene.

  Inside the barracks one morning we were ordered to gather around our drill instructor, a short, wide, powerful looking man who informed us that the next hour would involve a lecture on self-hygiene.

  I thought: “Come on man, a one hour lecture on personal hygiene, what can he possibly tell us we don’t already know.”

  Much to the jaw dropping astonishment of every last single recruit, the drill instructor, standing directly in front of us all, then proceeded to first remove his green beret, followed by the rest of his uniform, folding each item neatly on the end of one of the recruit’s beds.

  Within an all too short a time he was standing stark naked in front of the 50 or so recruits who had survived the horrors of the first few days.

  By this stage we had learnt not to laugh at anything, no matter what, for fear of punishment.

  But the expressions on our faces must have been priceless.

  The naked drill instructor grabbed his towel and wash bag and proceeded to the communal showers.

  We recruits dutifully followed his naked bum. The sight of that particular rear end is still drilled into my memory.

  Following behind us was another corporal with a stiff bristled broom. We were given no idea as to exactly why.

  Once inside those massive communal showers, shyness being something that had to be lost from day one, the drill instructor proceeded to demonstrate how to shower, lathering up much as one might expect, shampooing his hair and washing behind his ears. Dirt behind the ears was one thing our superiors always looked for as an excuse to beast us.

  If a single recruit had a single speck mud behind his ears during inspections every one of us would be “beasted” again, that is made to crawl through the mud of the River Exe estuary.

  A speck of mud could make one very unpopular with your fellow recruits.

  The drill instructor proceeded to demonstrate, in front of a by now thoroughly appalled group of recruits, how to clean under your foreskin.

  He demanded that everyone watch and learn. He pulled back his foreskin and was virtually masturbating with the soap.

  As if that was not a bad enough image to sear into our adolescent imaginations, then came the part of the lesson concerning the cleaning of the crack of your ass.

  The nicest possible thing I can say about that is: “It was not a pretty sight.”

  The lesson reached its pinnacle when we were warned that if our personal hygiene fell below their immaculate standards the training team aka “the bastards” would take matters into their own hands.

  They assured us the yard brush would be given an energetic workout.

  The corporal then stepped then forward with the hard bristled broom he had been carrying, making it clear that our privates would not be exempt.

  We all winced as if we were about to be kicked in the balls, shuddering at the thought of a soapy yard brush anywhere near us.

  What a sight we must have made.

  Let’s face it, all men relate to the pain that can be suffered in their vital parts; and with the picture of the broom being used to clean me I was cringing along with everyone else.

  While we were taken through other administrative functions and demonstrations during that first fortnight’s induction, there was no letup from the training team in their relentless effort to break us.

  For a start, we were barely given three hours of sleep a night.

  After arriving back at the barracks, physically exhausted from the pressures we had been put under, there followed several hours cleaning our kits which by that time of the day were filthy from the estuary mud if nothing else.

  Your kit had to be immaculate every morning or there could be dire consequences.

  We were always kept on the move in one way or another until 2am.

  The tortures began again at 5am.

  From the very first moment of consciousness, everything had to be perfect, starting with showering and then getting dressed.

  After showering we would have to make sure the communal bathroom was immaculately clean and dry.

  The recruits would check each other to make sure we were shaved properly, our clothes regimentally starched and ironed and our boots gleaming.

  Our beds also had to be perfect, with the sheet corners turned down at precisely 90 degrees.

  I never had any trouble with this, perhaps as a result of being brought up by my rather strict mother, but many of the other recruits struggled to make their bedding perfect.

  As we left the building, we were obliged to walk backwards in our socks down the long red linoleum corridors we had only finished polishing on our hands and knees at midnight the night before. But we had to make sure there were no scuffmarks anywhere.

  At the front door of the barracks we put on our black leather commando boots, making sure the laces were in perfect parallel lines and we hadn’t scuffed our boots on the way out.

  For decades in the British military this process has been known as “the bullshit”.

  Often enough, when we thought our efforts to clean the accommodation barracks were at their best, nobody would even bother to inspect them.

  But “Sods law” – that bad fortune will be tailored to the individual - the day something was overlooked would be the day an officer, accompanied by the training team, would go through the building with microscopic precision.

  We were young adolescents, still relatively sensitive, still trying to find ourselves.

  These “monsters” had already survived the theatre of the Falklands War and years of military discipline.

  The levels of anger directed at us by over the slightest infraction, not just their bellowing voices but their physical intimidation, deliberately intended to instill fear, defied belief.

  As that month’s intake of fresh faced recruits, we had already received the order: “Stand by your beds.”

  We were all fearful of the barrage of abuse which could be directed at any one of us with whom our supervisors found fault.

  If they found the slightest imperfection with one of the recruits work everyone would be punished, making that person very unpopular.

  Each recruit had only one thought in their minds: “I hope it’s not me.

  “The bastards” always managed to find a flaw with someone’s presentation and then the shouting would begin. I cannot remember a single day in that first fortnight of induction when they did not find fault with at least one of us.

  We did not realize at the time it was the job of the training team to break us and we were more than happy to label them “bastards”.

  The team deliberately aimed to keep us all physically and psychologically exhausted, knowing only the strongest would survive the complex and difficult military operations to which only Commandos are assigned.

  Just one of their tools to wear us down psychologically was to find fault for no reason, to get into our faces and into our minds.

  Often one of them would wear a white glove to run their finger across the top of doors, window frames and the always highly polished water piping referred to as “the brass pipes” because of the amount of Brasso used on them.

  The training team’s response to even the slightest blemish was always extreme.

  As they hurled abuse at the po
or victim or victims they had selected “the bastards” would throw his or their clothes, boots and even mattresses out the window into the gardens below.

  This created hours of additional work. Whoever had been found at fault had to rewash, iron, press and pack their belongings.

  All the hard work put in by all of us since waking up at 5am could be ruined by a speck of dust or pinhead spot of Brasso remaining on a belt buckle.

  if fault was found, which during the induction period proved inevitable, we all had to prepare for re-inspection.

  Depending on the scheduled training regime for the day, the bastards could easily find another excuse for us all to fail the inspection and provide them with yet another excuse to “beast” us.

  Even the size of our folded shirts were checked to make sure they matched the exact dimensions of the Globe and Laurel magazine.

  The magazine was named after the famous Globe and Laurel emblem of the Royal Marines. Only 7,500 active marines are legitimately entitled to wear this proud

  symbol at any one time.

  The image of the globe embraced by laurels and

  topped by the reigning monarch’s crown was first granted for gallantry

  displayed in the capture of Belle Isle in 1761.

  Daily I watched my fellow recruits breaking under the stress.

  I would see them heading to the Sergeant’s office.

  Some of them were heart-broken.

  Some just couldn’t wait to get out of there, realizing the dream of being a Commando had been a terrible mistake.

  The two week induction concluded with the first exercise of many to come.

  We had to spend two nights on Woodbury Common demonstrating basic outdoor military skills such as learning to cook our ration packs, building shelters, lighting fires and dealing with the issues of field hygiene both for ourselves and our equipment.

  The metal mess tins had to be whistle clean. After we were finished washing up after a meal there would be spot inspections of our kits.

  Anyone who hadn’t bothered to clean their mess tins, not expecting to be checked on, suffered the inevitable consequence: hours of beasting.

  At this point in time there was considerable tension amongst the diminishing group at this stage.