CONFESSIONS OF A ROYAL MARINE COMMANDO (part one)

by David Stanley

  Those who failed to clean their equipment properly were responsible for forcing all of us into a “beasting”.

  This usually consisted of a mud run on return to the Commando Training Centre.

  The mud run was one of the worst forms of beasting because of the peculiar nature of the estuary mud.

  The Exe River estuary is a quagmire of a bog stretching for hundreds of meters and is like no other on earth. “The bastards” loved it because it was the perfect place to make us suffer. Your legs would sink up to your shins at every step.

  Happy days!

  In retrospect I came to regard this process as both funny and character building. At the time it was little more than pure suffering; another obstacle to overcome in the pursuit of the coveted Green Beret.

  My views have changed with the passing of time.

  Now I hope to God “the bastards” serving at the Commando Training Center today are still dishing out as much grief and bodily pain as the recruits of my era went through.

  The grueling process did me good because it made me stronger minded for the rigors to come; and it would do the recruits of today an equal service, making them tougher in an increasingly dangerous world.

  Many young men of today are growing up in far more coddled environments than we ever knew.

  There weren’t the panoply of “do gooders” and social workers who have become over the decades part of such a massive government funded industry.

  Their intentions and the programs in which they are involved may be noble in intent, designed to help the poor and the under-classes and care for the disadvantaged, but many of them do more harm than good.

  It might sound a tad right wing, but I doubt you will find many former commandos who don’t think exactly as I do.

  The insulated lifestyle the kids of today now lead, fermented by the stifling political correctness of recent times, has made them soft of heart and mind. Brats.

  It has become increasingly difficult for military recruiters to find young men with the mental attributes and the character required to make a good soldier, much less a commando.

  Given the choice I would choose the punishment and tough regime I endured, rather than the modern “softly softly” can’t correct the children with a smack in case of causing psychological damage nonsense which now infests not just the education system but even the family home.

  No day ever started the same.

  In the pre-dawn dark, standing in the courtyard complex only partially lit by street lamps, we lined up in two parade rows awaiting “the bastards”.

  Each day the torture was different, having been pre-warned the evening before whether to dress for lectures, physical exercise or the assault course.

  Sometimes we would begin with gymnasium physical training, which could include an intense aerobics style exercise program lasting up to two hours, climbing up 20-meter ropes, as well as pushups and sit-ups numbering up to the thousands.

  The one I hated the most was the swimming pool; where we were dressed in our full military kits, with bricks in our military pouches. We were required to complete tasks such as treading water for what seemed like hours, barely able to keep our heads above water thanks to the enormous weight of the kits.

  Anyone trying to reach for the side of the Olympic sized pool would be hit in the stomach with an aluminum prod and pushed under water.

  No one came out unless you were dragged out or you put up your hand and declared you were quitting the course.

  One of the particularly difficult exercises was jumping off the high platform above the spring boards, with your military and ammunition pouches filled with bricks.

  Once or twice, to “the bastards” great amusement, they would “test your bottle” by forcing you to climb to the highest fixed diving platform with a canoe.

  You were then instructed to sit in the canoe feet first and push yourself forward until overhanging the ledge.

  If you suffered from any degree of vertigo this was the point at which to panic.

  Sitting perched precariously up there on the ledge and unable to control the situation because of being inside a canoe, it looked a very, very long way down to the pool beneath.

  You were then ordered to push yourself off the ledge while leaning back so that the canoe would enter the water smoothly, point first.

  This was an exercise far easier said than done.

  I found it a genuinely frightening experience, but it was one of those moments in life when there was no way out but through.

  The only other alternative was to “go home to mummy”, that is to quit the training course and abandon any hope of becoming a Green Beret.

  I managed to hit the water like the whale in the movie Free Willy. I made a giant splash and was left with red welt marks across my stomach.

  Whatever the morning exercises, we were given only a very small time frame to get changed out of our now filthy uniforms, shower and change for the next training exercise, before hitting the galley for the single best part of the day – breakfast.

  While commando training is renowned throughout the world as the toughest military training on earth there was one moment of bliss.

  The Royal Marine chefs are without peer. To the best of my knowledge, they are the best chefs of any military unit in the United Kingdom, probably in the world.

  Barely 18-years-old, and undergoing grueling courses on a daily basis, we were expending five times the normal energy output of an average working man and were therefore consuming five times the calorie intake of any normal citizen.

  The three meals a day were essential not just for our health but for our morale.

  Breakfast, after hours of physical activity since we had been woken at five, was the best of all the meals.

  Eggs, bacon, beans, fried bread, mushrooms, cereal, almost anything you could think of or desire, it was just phenomenal.

  Royal Marine food is nicknamed “Scran”, a term dating back to the 1800s and denoting food for working people. But this food was fabulous and there was no limit put on how much you could eat.

  The steaks were enormous and accompanied by thick cut home-made chips, any kind of mayonnaise you could think of, vegetables I had barely or never even seen before.

  While many people hate broccoli and hold resentful memories of their parents forcing them to eat it because it was good for them, I had not seen anything like it before and loved it.

  After the daily baked bean regime of my mother’s hopeless cooking, the food was the highlight of each day.

  I’ve never eaten so well in all my life as I did at the Commando Training Centre.

  In the early stages the “total bastards” would do their best to cause trouble between the recruits, even though at the same time they were teaching us about the importance of taking care of your “oppo”.

  The bastards loved to beast us.

  We were split into three sections.

  I was placed into number three section.

  Lucky me!

  In charge of our section (3IC) was a Corporal who was a biological and chemical warfare specialist.

  He had received numerous awards, including the Military Cross, given only to officers of the British Armed Forces since 1914. As part of a review to make awards more egalitarian it was later opened to all ranks serving in the British Armed Forces.

  The Military Cross is granted for acts of exemplary gallantry during active operations.

  Corporal D was a towering, thickset man with a black Saddam Hussein mustache. To me he looked like the American Charles Manson, best known as being the criminally insane founder of a commune known as The Family.

  Amongst other killings, Mason inspired the commune to murder American actress Sharon Tate, former wife of Roman Polanski and best known for her role in The Valley of the Dolls.

  Charles Manson orchestrated murders for the sake of apocalyptic war resulting from racial tensions between blacks and whites.

  The Manson image stuck in our young
minds.

  His sense of humor was at its peak when our suffering was at its worst. Whenever our physical and mental abuse reached extreme levels a beatific smile spread across his face. There was nothing he enjoyed more than to see us in pain, physical, mental, psychological and emotional.

  He would have made a great leader of the Manson Family.

  In contrast Corporal M, our drill instructor and the Section 2IC, although harsh, sometimes showed a good sense of humor.

  He was the same man who had given such an unforgettable demonstration of personal hygiene.

  He was a short, stocky Scotsman with a bellowing voice. He always carried a “pace stick” under his arm.

  The stick is like a cane which splits open and can be used to measure the exact length of each marching pace. Every step had to be of identical length.

  M, except on the odd occasion, was very decent to me, giving me a guiding hand while at the same time dishing it out to most of the other recruits.

  If you got on his bad side your life turned to hell. All it took to turn him into your worst nightmare was to make the same mistake twice.

  Part of his job was to make sure we looked parade ground immaculate at all times.

  He taught us how to iron and use starch, how to make a perfect crease.

  If you ironed a tram line, for example, even if it was only a barely noticeable few centimeters at the top of your trousers, M would go ballistic, ordering the recruit to run around the parade ground with his 9.9 pound self-loading rifle held above his head.

  At the point when their arms started to shake and bend, as is inevitable in such a stressful physical position, the verbal abuse intensified.

  When you are at the place where you cannot take anymore, that is the point where the bastards would jump in and verbally push you, trying to either break you or enhance your determination.

  Your mind was faced with two choices, to persist and collapse or give in and go home to Mommy.

  Known as doubling or a double march with your weapon held high was one of M’s favorite forms of beasting.

  He would always inspect us prior to an officer reviewing us on parade, as occurred several times a week, and if he saw the slightest flaw or imperfection, even a tiny speck of dust on our uniforms, the unfortunate recruit was beasted on the spot.

  M took any of his charges as having anything less than an immaculate appearance as a personal insult, both to his pride and teaching abilities.

  But there was one good thing about M.

  If you were faultless in your appearance he would genuinely praise you.

  For some reason I was able to get my uniform up to his impossibly high standards.

  Unlike most of the recruits, I was often commended by M and rarely beasted.

  Other recruits struggled with the ironing and starching of their uniforms, and as a result were pushed so hard they would eventually be forced to give in and leave the Commando Training Center at Lympstone.

  All because of their inability to iron their uniform the way M liked.

  The Section One Corporal P, was a different story altogether.

  He was a nightmare for me, a stocky ginger-haired northerner with one very big chip on his shoulder.

  I wasn’t even in his section but he stated very early on in my time at the centre that he didn’t like me and was going to make sure I failed and was booted out.

  Maybe it was because I was small.

  There was instant dislike between us which was visible in both our eyes and when P came anywhere near me the hatred was so intense to the air seemed to thicken between us.

  On several occasions he invited me to fight with him, stating he could see I did not like him. Nothing would give him more pleasure than to bash me up, he would say.

  Looking back the singularity of his hatred towards me was because he was a “wannabe”.

  He was tough, but he was nowhere as tough as I became and those he served amongst. The real does not like the fake. It’s why so many institutions are dysfunctional. Talentless fruitcakes in management are frightened of genuine ability, and much prefer to promote the mediocre who pose no threat.

  This proved himself time and time again to be a real bastard.

  If he did not like a recruit, as he did not like me, they were almost always broken and forced to leave the Commando Training Centre, thereby abandoning the dreams they had held so dear.

  This seemed to regard this as a triumph.

  Then there was our Physical Training Instructor (PTI), another ginger-haired man only a little taller than myself, lean and fit.

  This instructor’s gas tank never seemed to run out.

  I liked him.

  He was hard but fair.

  Slackers got his back up but if you really put the effort in during his classes he was quite the verbal motivator. He even smiled at us on occasions when he thought we had done well.

  And would comment: “Fucking well done. Good effort.”

  You either achieved that or you achieved nothing.

  Praise at the Training Center was very rare indeed.

  And then to top off the Training Team which at this point in our lives had complete control over us, there was the Troop Sergeant.

  Sergeant K.

  Where do I begin?

  K was a six foot Scotsman who had been posted to the Training Center due to what could politely be called “mental issues”.

  He was a menacing looking man with eyes that

  pierced through you in a crazy sort of way. He would have been at home in that

  classic Jack Nicholson movie about a mental asylum, One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest.

  I remember the menacing sing-song line in the movie: “Its medicine time”.

  The line always reminds me of him. He was one very frightening man.

  He was under psychiatric help after having fought in the Falklands War of 1982.

  While it is quite normal to receive such assistance following the trauma of the battlefield he was out of the box.

  The Troop Sergeant had a disorder which meant he didn’t just like to kill, he enjoyed it.

  This pleasure in killing was way beyond any normal soldier’s reveling in the killing of their enemy or the normal bloodlust of the warrior.

  The Sergeant suffered from what psychiatrics call an “aggressive psychopathic personality”.

  If he couldn’t kill, which was a bit difficult in a training centre full of teenagers, he liked to hurt people.

  For him having us young recruits to play with was sheer sadistic pleasure. He truly was the bastard of all bastards, the Commando Training Centre’s number one loony tune.

  But he sure made us tough!

  We had just received beasting on Woodbury’s Common one day when he got right in my face eyeball to eyeball and said: “You have a fire in your eyes which I relate to. I think you really want to punch me right now.

  Go on.

  You can do it if you want.

  Let’s see who survives?”

  I said nothing. I didn’t back down. I just stared right back at him.

  A few moments passed and he quickly moved on, punching someone in the stomach two or three positions further down the lineup.

  Psycho that he was, the Troop Sergeant very slowly took a liking to me.

  He was proud of the fact that after only six months of completing basic Commando training I passed the selection course and achieved entry into 40 Commando Reconnaissance Troop – commonly known as the “Recce Troop”, a particularly difficult troop to get into.

  After training had finished and we met again and became friends. By this point I understood the training techniques and personalities required to turn a recruit into one of the world’s finest soldiers.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  THIS IS MY GUN, THIS IS MY RIFLE

  We had been issued our 7.62 self-loading rifles during induction and it finally came time to learn how to use them.

  The L1A1 Self-Loading Rifle, known to us re
cruits as an SLR, is a particularly fearsome weapon with the large 7.62 rounds of ammunition sure to kill the enemy. It is a very, very powerful bullet, providing a small entry point into the body of your opponent and a large exit wound, taking a large chunk of flesh with it. Your enemy is left in very poor shape.

  This classic weapon was used between 1954 and the early 1990s by the Royal Marines during the Suez Crisis, the troubles in Northern Ireland, the Falklands War and the Gulf War to name a few of the conflicts in which it has played a part.

  Our weapons training began in concrete bunkers overlooking the River Exe estuary.

  We weren’t allowed to call our guns rifles. The way it was explained to us was amusing.

  The first words I remember about the first lesson were the corporal grabbing his scrotum with one hand and holding up the rifle with his other. “This is my rifle,” he declared before grabbing his penis. “And this is your gun.

  “If anyone calls this weapon a gun you will be duly punished.”

  In these initial lessons we were taught how to strip, clean and reassemble our weapons under tight time constraints.

  Over the course of weapons training we were blind folded and then ordered to strip, clean and reassemble the weapons.

  Obviously many of us didn’t meet the standards required; none of us quickly in our early attempts, much to the delight of Corporal D, who happily pointed out a stagnant deep pit of stinking fowl green water 500 meters away.

  He ordered us, having failed the assignment, to run towards it and then jump in, run straight back and try again. There were many soakings.

  As previously recorded, I was “a smiler” and from the corner of his flaming eye Corporal D spotted me one day smiling as I ran back drenched and stinking.

  He told me to about turn and do it again, seeing as I had obviously enjoyed it so much. They weren’t known as “the bastards” for nothing.

  While I ran the additional 1,000 meters there and back he punished all the other members of my section by forcing them to do constant pushups until my return. Needless to say, I was popular that day!

  Later we learnt to use other weapons, such as the General Purpose Machine Gun (GPMG), in the same way with the same training techniques.