An Officer and a Gentlewoman (15 page)

Any activity inside the gym was a bonus; at least sheltered inside it wasn't wet, cold or muddy. But draconian Sandhurst rules extended within the gym too. There was to be no walking, only running; no standing still, just jogging on the spot; no talking and no fun. All infringements of these rules were punishable with yet more press-ups or, worse, the maintenance of some ridiculous
stress position. A tiny little natter would see the whole platoon down on the floor hovering and quivering in a down press-up stance, muscles crying out to be released, beads of sweat dripping onto the varnished parquet floor. And pity the fool who forgot to remove their watch.

Our dedicated platoon PTI was a small chippy female sergeant, called Sgt Walker, who was a freak of female nature. Superhumanly fit, she unfortunately expected the same of each one of us and used physical training sessions to thrash us to within an inch of our lives. She would scream red-faced at us as we clambered over one another trying to find a way over the assault course twelve-foot wall or wriggled hopelessly at the bottom of a rope climb. And as the only female instructor, she felt she had a point to prove too and would insist we matched the male platoons at everything. In the machismo army world there is some value in her dictum, but a great deal of pain was suffered in its delivery. The physical ability of females in the army is a much-mooted issue. There are many who strongly believe that because women are not as physically able as men, they should not serve alongside them, and in the infantry this is the case. In this instance, I agree, but in planning roles, desk jobs, chefs, even pilots, I don't believe this distinction is necessary. I recognize that women are not physiologically comparable to their male counterparts – we can't throw, catch or bench-press twice our body weight – but most of the roles in today's army don't require this level of physical prowess either. I would rather a bright enthusiastic female soldier than a lazy witless male one who can run fast. I accept that in the Army it is important to be physically fit, but matching the men I feel is narcissistic vanity. Although this didn't stop Sgt Walker from flogging us, and her favourite method of achieving this was on a loaded march.

These unfortunately regular sessions involved a high-speed endurance march with a packed bergen on our backs and rifle cradled in our arms. For hours we would speed-walk around the sandy tracks and one-sided Escher-like hills of Barossa, the wooded
training area behind the Academy, notching up miles and blisters. We panted up never-ending hills, in neatly organized rank and file, our hearts pounding inside our chests as we tried to keep to the punchy pace. A rehearsal of soldiers getting to the battlefield, this ‘tactical advance to battle' (TAB) was to become a staple of our training along with room inspections and drill. Starting by carrying no greater weight than a small bag of sugar, they ramped up progressively over the year until we could comfortably spend hours covering long distances with over half our body weight strapped to our backs, battling more with the boredom than discomfort. Wheeler and Merv were awesome at this. Both strong and mentally stubborn, they would simply put their heads down and slog forwards. But I found it more of a challenge. None of my pre-Sandhurst physical training had prepared me for these marches and at first I struggled to adjust to carrying the additional weight. My back ached terribly and my legs quickly grew weary as I suffered under the extra load. But at Sandhurst the initial training built up in a slow progression, giving me time to adapt and catch up, and before long I was comfortably slogging along with the rest of the platoon, bored and waiting for it to finish.

And I was motivated further when I discovered the benefits of all these endurance marches as my legs and bum began to tone up. Years of sitting static at a desk all day long in the City had brought on a premature sagging, soggy peach effect, but within weeks of being at Sandhurst this had firmed up nicely. The daily gym sessions and hours of standing to attention also honed my core stomach muscles and the endless press-ups had finally obliterated my bingo wings; for all the pain and suffering, Sandhurst proved to be the most effective ‘bikini diet' I've ever been on.

PT was also unfortunately one of few occasions on which we had to endure Captain Trunchbull. She would turn up at the gym with her bergen already on her back. Then as we set off she would stay at the back of the platoon, trotting along with SSgt Cox shouting ‘encouraging' abuse at us, as if we cared for her truculent
criticism. She picked off those suffering at the back and demoralized them further, like a nasty school prefect picking on hapless
fourth-formers
. Her words might have had meaning if only we'd thought she could do the same herself, but one grey morning as we hauled ourselves up a hill through the rain we found out she couldn't. As our boots were sinking deep into the mud, Officer Cadet Thomas stumbled over a protruding tree root and the weight of her bergen forced her off balance. She grappled forward for something to steady herself and, reaching out to Captain Trunchbull's bergen, she discovered it provided little resistance, proving squishy, yielding and feather light, compared with the heavy ones we were carrying. She had stuffed it with a pillow and with its discovery any residual respect we may have had for her instantly evaporated in the sweaty mist.

These bergen PT thrashings were a painful necessity in the training. Without them we would never have been able to carry the heavy load of all our equipment around on exercise with us. So gradually, with sadistic joy, Sgt Walker was actually building up our strength, so that by the end of Juniors we were ready for our first significant military exercise, and this time my map-reading skills alone were not going to be enough to get me through.

As the end of Junior Term neared, one substantial hurdle still loomed large on the murky horizon; one remaining encumbrance separated us from the reward of three blissful weeks of freedom on Academy leave before we came back for the Intermediate Term. It was our big final end-of-term exam. Another back-breaking, whimpering week in South Wales. Five long days and four sleepless nights on exercise again. I had survived twice. Barely. But this time things were going to be very different, as Exercise Crychan’s Challenge would offer none of the cosy Home Counties security of Winnie-the-Pooh’s Self-Abuse, because Crychan’s was taking us to Brecon. An altogether different place. And for good reason, there are fewer words in the military lexicon that strike with greater dread than Brecon.

Far from the gentle leafy lanes and rolling hills of the South Downs, Brecon is raw, gritty and non-commissioned. Brecon is about infantry tactics and bloody combat; about ‘FIND’, ‘FIX’ and ‘STRIKE’. Brecon is about serious professional soldiering on the doorstep of the Infantry Battle School and selection ground for the Special Forces. Brecon is Wales at its most inhospitable and promised to be cold, wet, miserable and thoroughly shit.

Of course we had already been exposed to the foul climate and hostile Welsh hills on Exercise Long Reach, but on Long Reach there was no enemy. On Long Reach we didn’t worry about tactics and doctrine, or principles of war. And on Long Reach we left our weapons behind in the Academy armoury.
Long Reach had been an amble in the comforting security of a National Park, with its well-marked footpaths and glimmers of civilian inhabitancy. Crychan’s was on Sennybridge training area, on the other, darker side of the Black Mountains, trapped beneath its rain shadow.

Our Crychan’s ordeal started early – at half past four on a Monday morning. The platoon gathered outside in the pitched blackness of Chapel Square, busying around by the lights of the waiting coaches, packing food, ammunition and radios into already bulging bergens. Two days of rations, 200 rounds of ammunition, the latest Bowman radios, binoculars, medical kit, right-angle torches, weapon night-sights and absurdly a brown paper bag containing lunch, which included, with no forethought, a pot of yoghurt. All this was squeezed into pouches and pockets until zips and straps would no longer close. Our weapons had been drawn from the armoury and helmets and body armour were coming too.

Ahead lay a week of serious austere infanteering.

Packed and war-ready, we clambered onto the coaches for the depressing drive to Wales, settling down to sleep as we sped west along the M4, the last unmitigated rest we’d get until Friday. I quickly nodded off, my lolling head intermittently banging against the windowpane, awakening me at Reading, Bristol, the Severn Bridge and eventually Crickhowell where spots of rain started to fall. The clouds thickened and the sky greyed with brewing showers. As the coach wound its way around the mountain road, I caught a glimpse of Checkpoint X-ray, its peak lost ominously in the mist. At Sennybridge, we left the main road behind and crept up a steep track to the training area, the coaches’ low gears growling in protest as each hillcrest disguised another. Finally at the top, we rattled over a cattle grid that announced our arrival and the heavens promptly opened. Heavy raindrops started to splatter against the windscreen while, outside, sheep huddled in hollows for shelter. It was stark and bleak. The patchwork of bare open grazing was
windswept and exposed, broken only by tight forest blocks and icy cold streams. As we disembarked the coaches at Dixies Corner, my boots squelched into the sodden ground, water pooling around them like a squeezing sponge.

I knew then the week was going to be insufferable.

The point of Crychan’s was to test us. To test our understanding of the basic soldiering fundamentals we had been taught so far in the Junior Term. Those that failed would stay behind in Old College to repeat the term, while the rest progressed from shorts to trousers, entering New College and Inters.

The exercise would be fully tactical, deploying under a realistic scenario, with an actual enemy to fight and objectives to take during four days of conventional war fighting. Our mission: to seek out the baddies and kill them. Simple. And this would be done using our most recently rehearsed tactic, the ‘advance to contact’. On Exercise Self-Abuse we had already learned what to do when shot at – the agonizing dash-down-crawl routine of fire and manoeuvre – and advance to contact took this further, in looking for the enemy in the first place, then killing him. But to my civilian brain the whole concept of this high-risk game of hide and seek seemed utterly absurd.

As we went through the motions my internal monologue was baffled:

‘So let me get this straight: you think there’s a baddy hiding somewhere in the bushes on that hillside?’

‘Yes, that’s right. He’s camouflaged so you can’t see him and he’s got a gun.’

‘Erm, OK. And what you want me to do is walk slowly towards him?’

‘Yes, that’s it.’

‘But he’ll shoot me.’

‘Yes, that’s what we want. Then you’ll know where he is.’

‘You’re fucking right I will.’

The concept was bananas. Walk blindly up to the enemy and wait for the bang as he takes a potshot at you. Then if I survived the initial attempt on my life, I had to hurl myself on the ground and do the whole fire and manoeuvre routine to get to him and kill him. And to add insult to gunshot wound, I had been appointed the platoon ‘point man’, out at the front like a sacrificial lamb, because I could read the sodding map. I had not chosen my specialist skill wisely.

As soon as we got off the bus and gathered our belongings, the war started. We strapped our helmets and body armour on, oiled weapons, smeared on waxy warpaint and camouflaged with grass and moss. We’d been given a grid reference to get to and set off across the boggy ground following a compass bearing, Captain Trunchbull and SSgt Cox trailing at the back observing. Feeling exposed and alone at the front, I scanned the horizon through the rain, scrutinizing every bush and clump of grass, waiting in anticipation for the inevitable. After a mile, we neared a babbling stream when the crackling sound of gunfire rang out from a tree line to the left. I dived onto the ground, desperately looking through my weapon sights for the enemy.

Nothing.

I wriggled forwards a bit to get a better look.

Still nothing.

A further crackle and pop rattled out from the trees and then from behind a scrubby bush I saw him. A Gurkha dressed in brown desert uniform stepped forwards and gave me a little wave (the Gurkhas play enemy for all Sandhurst exercises, usually dying in highly dramatized Oscar-winning death displays). I started to fire at him. The weapon recoiled into my shoulder, as the rounds were released, sending hot empty brass steaming out onto the wet grass beside me. Behind me, Captain Trunchbull came charging up to the front to oversee the action screaming at us to ‘get into cover’. I looked around me – One Section had flattened forwards into a
defensive line, Allinson, Lea, Gill, Khadka, Rhodes, Thomas and me, all of us lying on our stomachs pinging off rounds at the waving Gurkha.

‘Get into fucking cover!’ Captain Trunchbull screeched at us.

Looking up and down I didn’t understand what she meant. We were already lying on the ground and there was nothing more for us to shelter behind. Then I looked across to my right, at our far flank.

No, no, no, no. She wouldn’t. Not on the morning of the first day.

Thirty metres or so to my right was a narrow ditch along which flowed the frozen waters of a whispering stream. Captain Trunchbull wanted us to get in it. The cow. We had no choice. So, while back in London my friends and former colleagues were probably standing on station platforms battling Monday morning Tube delays, I found myself crawling along a freezing muddy riverbed. The chilling waters seeped into my boots, soaking through my woolly socks and quickly numbing my toes. As I clambered forwards through the sludge, I was forced lower in the waters, until my trousers and jacket were sodden too. The icy water trickled through fabric and stitch, stinging my skin as it reached my body. The cold shock made me gasp and knocked the breath from my lungs.

All of One Section flanked right, through the glacial stream waters, each one of us crawling over stones and squelching along the muddy riverbank, while Captain Trunchbull continued her screaming tirade from the safety of the dry embankment, yelling out every filthy expletive she could lay her tongue on. She hopped up and down in anger, because it was in Brecon that Captain Trunchbull became her apoplectic best. As red as Lenin, she screamed uncontrolled blue murder at us, spinning into a fulminating rage like a caged Tasmanian devil. Her torrent of expletives provided us with little teaching guidance, serving more as an irritating distraction. And she didn’t know what she
was instructing anyway because the last time she had conducted an advance to contact was more than ten years ago, when she herself had been in our position as an officer cadet.

We crawled for what felt like miles, through the muddy stream and spongy field to assault the enemy position. Until eventually, panting and wheezing, with lungs croaking like broken organ bellows, we got to within reach of the enemy. Next to me Officer Cadet Gill dug into one of her webbing pouches and fiddled with the safety clasp around a grenade, pulled the pin and launched it towards the Gurkha. We waited, crouching and tense for the explosive bang before leaping forwards, weapons to automatic, blazing into the enemy hide. The Gurkha let out a mournful wail, dramatizing his final death throes and jerked in comic spasms on the forest floor.

Then a silent pause.

Had we finished?

I was knackered.

In my ear I could hear a broken radio message, asking if there were any more enemy.

By now I was hungry and wondering about the state of the yoghurt pot in my crushed daysack, when another crackle of rounds came from deep inside the trees. This time it was Two Section’s turn to get their feet wet and bust a gut crawling. So as the shouting melee moved forwards, One Section could relax and recoup in reserve and conduct our own intelligence gathering operation, because in One Section we had the platoon’s best weapon, our own Gurkha spy, Officer Cadet Khadka. After each slogging assault, Khadka would chat away in Nepali to the Gurkha dead, getting handouts of vanilla fudge and finding out where the next enemy were, how many more positions we had to assault, what was in store for us that night and, most importantly, what time the coaches were coming back for us on Friday. These little snippets provided a much needed morale boost in an otherwise miserable week.

We spent three continuous days walking around Brecon in ‘arrowhead formation’ advancing to contact and patrolling towards the enemy on an ‘axis of advance’, waiting to be shot at. Assaulting up hills and streams, in woodblocks and farms, from Dixies Corner to Gardiner’s Track. Position after position. After each iteration, we would regroup and sit on our daysacks in an open square while Captain Trunchbull admonished us all for not trying hard enough, threatening that the reality would be far, far worse and that with real bullets we’d all have been dead. In reality, I’d be tucked up in a rear-echelon desk job, leaving the infantry madness to the insane. As we flogged ourselves at enemy positions again and again I couldn’t help thinking of Einstein’s maxim on insanity: ‘doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results’.

Perhaps we should have packed straitjackets in our bulging bergens too.

Each night we retreated into a dark, dense woodblock and set up a harbour area as we had done on Self-Abuse. Digging
shell-scrape
coffins, clearing a track plan, stringing out twine, boiling up horrendous corned-beef hash dinners and taking our turn to stay awake on sentry. This time I was sharing my basha with Cadet Gill; another university OTC veteran, she was joining the army to be a teacher and had a healthy laissez-faire approach to all the irrelevant crawling and digging she had to do to get there. We worked together as a team, me digging our shell-scrape while she fetched drinking water and cooked our dinner, kindly giving me her rice pudding, the only meal option that didn’t make me heave. On the first night, we unfurled our roll-mats and sleeping bags under our poncho and wriggled in for what very little sleep we could snatch before our turn on stag. The rain had continued intermittently all day and by now the ground was cold and squelchy beneath us. Pulling the sleeping bag cord tightly over my head, I curled up at the bottom searching for some warmth. I left my wet boots on, trying to dry them out, afraid that if I
unlaced and took them off they might freeze solid as the temperature plunged. Forty minutes later, we were shaken awake to start our turn at night watch and I undid my sleeping bag to sit up. As I did so there was a sloshing sound as a bow-wave of water splashed along the bottom of the shell-scrape which had now become a shallow pond as the rainwater trickled in.

Brecon had become unadulterated misery.

On sentry, Gill and I lay shuddering with cold staring into black nothingness, stagnant at the cusp of hell. The temperature dropped further until my numb fingers lacked the dexterity to even unwrap a boiled sweet let alone pull the trigger. I looked at the time on my watch – twenty minutes past midnight. I had been awake for twenty of the last twenty-four hours, which on our £67 a day Officer Cadet wage equated to nearly half the statutory hourly minimum wage. I could be flipping burgers in McDonald’s for more, and at least in McDonald’s I’d have dry boots on. For the non-graduates like Prince Harry, it was even worse: they earned only £39 a day, which was a paltry £2 an hour to crawl through a river and sleep in a muddy puddle. I thought of all the times I’d battled across a Tube-less London because the greedy Underground train drivers were striking again, demanding more pay and better working conditions. The most basic infantry soldier risking his life in Afghanistan earns just a third of what a Tube driver does for driving a train through a tunnel.
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