An Officer and a Gentlewoman (24 page)

‘Blue, colour sergeant,’ I said, my head starting to feel light, as the gas lingering in my nostrils slowly built from a gentle korma into the agonizing fire of a phall.

‘And what is the square root of 206?’ he finally quizzed. A small triumphant twinkle in his eye.

What?
The square root of 206? How the heck was I supposed to know that? My brain had stopped working. My lungs were screaming out for air. I could feel the effects of the gas drowning every part of me. And then I lost it. My eyes and nose started streaming great swathes of snotty dribble. My ears burned. My skin inflamed. I needed to breathe. I desperately needed clean fresh air. Through streaked tears, I looked across the bare brick hut at the Platoon Donkey. I could see her chatting away nonchalantly, remaining remarkably composed. At the Rat’s request she was listing her top five Take That hits, and taking her considered time over it. I couldn’t believe it; she was completely unaffected. She was immune. Of all people. Of all the personal attributes. The Platoon Donkey had finally found something she was good at, and it was just such a shame that this would be the one and only time in her entire military career she’d be called upon to do it.

Then just as I thought my lungs were about to collapse, the Rat stepped aside and bundled me through the open door, coughing and choking uncontrollably into the summer’s air. I gasped at it, gulping in lungfuls between short snotty splutters. I wanted to curl up on the grass into a hugging ball and will the pain away, but outside CSgt Bicknell was shouting instructions for us to keep moving. Keep our arms outstretched to let the fresh air get in. So instead I stumbled blindly about, my eyes and nose streaming, waiting for the burning to subside, while those still left in the queue to go into the chamber watched in abject horror. And as the chilli sting finally mellowed, I prayed that God forbid we may never have to do this on exercise.

But of course we
were
going to have to do it on exercise; this was Sandhurst after all. Exercise was uncomfortable enough without
the faff and sting of NBC, but now, at the hottest time of the year, we were deploying into the field once more and this time we would be digging holes, fighting Gurkhas and advancing to contact, all in two layers of additional clothing. The extra warmth I had cried out for during those shivering nights in Brecon and the Hundred Acre Wood now just became more junk that I had to wear and carry around with me, as NBC meant more stuff to squeeze into my bulging bergen.

And we soon discovered that, whereas in FIBUA everyone dies of gunshot wounds, in NBC everyone chokes to death instead. We sat in NBC lectures in Churchill Hall, absorbing the horrors of what Saddam Hussein did to his own people, and realizing that there was nothing at all sporting about NBC. We were taught about each of the possible agents in an evil villain’s arsenal: nerve, blood, blister and choking agents, all of which were lethal. Gruesome pictures illustrated for us what would happen if we were exposed to them: first our pupils would contract then we’d experience profuse salivation and dizziness. This would be followed by convulsions, muscle twitching, involuntary urination, defecation. Then by asphyxiation and eventually death. None of which sounded like an agreeable event to have to deal with on the battlefield.

If we came under attack from any of these nasty agents we had just nine seconds to get our gas masks on. Nine frenzied seconds of hurriedly scrabbling at rubber, eyes screwed shut, breath held. In case of an attack our gas masks were carried around with us in a small bag strapped to our waists, like the bumbags that were popular in the eighties or with American tourists in London. Then when the chemical attack alarm sounded for us to put them on, we had to quickly remove our helmet and place it between our knees, rip open the Velcro fastenings on the gas-mask bumbag, pull out the gas mask, work out which way was up, grapple with the rubber straps, stretch them over our head and fix the mask into position. Then, when it was on and sealed to our cheeks we had to breathe
out and shout a muffled, ‘GAS, GAS, GAS,’ to warn others. And all of this had to be achieved wearing large, thick rubber gloves on our hands, which meant it was like trying to thread a needle whilst wearing boxing gloves.

Making this nine-second deadline took lots of practice and all of Eleven Platoon would stand outside in a fumbling frenzy as CSgt Bicknell counted us down: ‘GAS, GAS, GAS. Nine, eight, seven. Come on, ladies, you need to be quicker than this. Six, five, four. Come on, this needs to be faster, ladies. Three, two, one.’

At zero, half of us would still be grappling with the straps. The combat helmet that was supposed to be held between our knees would have dropped to the floor and rolled away, someone would invariably have their mask on upside down and those who had managed to get their mask on were slowly asphyxiating as it restricted their breathing.

In an NBC environment our chances would be slim.

Daily NBC life proved to be a complete faff too, as once the gas mask and gloves were on, everything became far more complicated. The mask narrowed your field of vision like a blinkered pony and with rubber boxing gloves over your hands the most basic of tasks became a muddled effort. I struggled with fiddly buttons and zips, while the logistics of eating, drinking and going to the toilet became an undignified and messy act. All required us to learn a complicated set drill; the defecation drill being of particular shameful indignity, and as I simulated trying to protect the toilet paper from contamination I hoped to God the constipating ration-pack biscuits never necessitated this become a reality.

My favourite NBC drill was the ‘nuclear immediate action drill’, which was quite possibly the most ridiculous thing I did during my entire time at Sandhurst, more bizarre even than looking for litter in the dark or singing the national anthem at dawn. The nuclear immediate action drill was to be carried out in the unfortunate event of being in the wrong place when a nuclear bomb is dropped. In this far from ideal situation, what we were to do was face the
direction of the blast and lie down on the ground on our stomachs, head face-down, with our arms tucked underneath our bodies (the boys’ hands invariably clutching their crown jewels). We were to lie there like this as the blast wave rushed over us, no doubt scorching and stripping the clothing from our backs, then we were supposed to continue lying there and wait for the returning second blast wave to come rushing back over us. Finally when both waves had passed, the drill was to stand up and brush the ‘nuclear fallout’ off our bodies with leaves and twigs plucked from nearby trees, like some sort of Pagan self-flagellation ritual. That was if the explosion of a nuclear bomb hadn’t turned you into crispy bacon and the surrounding trees still had any foliage left.

You don’t need to be in the military to realize that all this is a completely fanciful notion, probably dreamed up to convince soldiers that in a nuclear attack they stood a chance, when in reality Hiroshima and Nagasaki conclusively attest otherwise. In reality, if a nuclear bomb does go off, any sensible soldier would be putting his head between his legs and kissing his arse goodbye.

I don’t recall much of the NBC exercise; probably because my brain has elected to wipe most of the whole sorry experience from memory and possibly because with a gas mask on I didn’t really see very much of it either. The exercise was called Marathon’s Chase, named, I’m sure, because it was a long, miserable slog which would see us in considerable amounts of pain and, in my case, unable to walk by the end of it.

After the soggy suffering of Brecon, the third and final exercise of the Intermediate Term would be taking us back to the flat, featureless farmland of Thetford once more. To where our Worst Encounter trench demons lay and sadly I knew that this time there would be no swimming angels coming to rescue me. As the convoy of coaches pulled up on New College parade square for the pre-dawn start, the whole of CC071 piled onto them, bergens bulging with all the now well-worn exercise paraphernalia. This
time for our East Anglia excursion the picks and shovels had been swapped for NBC oversuits, gas masks and a ‘chemical warfare agent detector’, which was a large cumbersome metal box that weighed a handy compact twenty-five kilograms and would have to be carried everywhere with us.

Despite NBC being of relative contemporary bearing, the exercise was still played out according to the now hackneyed Cold War template. And as dusk approached on the first night, we moved into the familiar routine of setting up a triangular home among the dense trees of a woodblock. This time I was sharing a shell-scrape with the Platoon Donkey and that night as we cooked our dinner and sorted ourselves out, I discovered in her someone even less suited to military service than myself as she produced a manicure set from a bergen pocket. I offered to dig our shell-scrape while she prepared the boil-in-the-bag ration-pack meals that would be our dinner (Tesco trips were now strictly out of the question), and I handed her my corned-beef hash to heat up while I attacked the topsoil.

‘Can you stick that on for me, please?’ I asked, throwing the dense silver foil packet to the ground beside her. ‘There’s some hexi
3
in the pocket of my bergen lid if you need it,’ I said as I swept back a pile of leaves from the forest floor.

‘OK. Thanks. I’ll light it in a minute. Can I use some of your water too?’ she said, filing the jagged edge of a broken nail.

‘Yes, of course, it’s in one of my webbing pouches, but there isn’t much left, I need to fill up. Haven’t you got any left?’ I asked, as I shovelled the soil into a ridge around the outside of the
shell-scrape
hole, trying to create the illusion of a deeper excavation.

‘Yes, I’ve still got lots of water left, but it’s
Evian
and I don’t want to cook with it.’

‘It’s what?’ I asked, swinging around to look at her, unsure that I’d heard correctly.

‘
Evian
mineral water. I filled my water bottles with it back at Sandhurst before we deployed. If I only use it for drinking it’ll last me till Wednesday. So can I use your water for the cooking?’

Oh good God. How had she managed to get this far into the course? I quietly shook my head and carried on digging, aghast at her utter illogic. It wasn’t as though we had to go foraging for water on exercise, it was all provided readily for us in jerry cans to fill up from each time we stopped. But as I dug I thought about it more and in an odd sense I admired her; she had resolutely refused to give up her civilian girly ways, she was clinging on and dissenting, repelling the conversion to the army’s sensible soldier approach. Except we all knew that at some point you had to give in, you couldn’t fight the Sandhurst machine for ever and the earlier you relented the easier life became. Because once you understood that the Army has to operate within boundaries life made sense. To be an effective force there isn’t scope within the army for wild individualism. You can’t have ill-disciplined non-conformers. It would never work. It would be impossible to command an army of odd-bods and misfits and for this reason Sandhurst was pressing into us a method and way of doing things. Our personalities were not stifled (despite what I may have felt at times) but in uniform you can’t go violently against the grain, and filling water bottles with
Evian
while relying on someone else to provide water for you to cook and wash with was actually selfish. The Platoon Donkey’s fight couldn’t last for ever, and she’d have to break at some point because the system wouldn’t.

I dug away at our shell-scrape, finishing it off between spoonfuls of piping hot corned-beef hash, and as darkness finally fell I was looking forward to some brief snatched sleep at the bottom of it. In the army there is an exercise trade-off all soldiers face over the course of the year between warmth and sleep: during the cold
winter months plummeting temperatures mean nights spent shivering in a sleeping bag, curled up into a foetal ball desperately seeking warmth, whereas the summer months bring more comfortable temperatures, but shorter nights, which reduce sleeping hours as dusk rapidly rushes into dawn. And as exercise Marathon’s Chase fell over the summer solstice we had only a few hours of darkness each night, which meant there was little point in us having packed our sleeping bags at all, especially once the stag rota had been drawn up.

I was on stag with the Platoon Donkey and after just thirty minutes of shut-eye we were shaken awake by Merv to take our place at the sentry post, staring into the darkness. We were wearing our NBC chemical oversuits and I felt pleasantly warm in the extra clothing as I lay on the dirt, my head propped against my rifle. The unusual exercise warmth had a soporific effect and as we lay there battling the will to fall asleep I offered the Platoon Donkey a boiled sweet. We chatted in hushed whispers to keep ourselves awake, playing ‘Shoot, Shag or Marry’ to pass the time and give us something more exciting to think about than NBC.

‘Brad Pitt, Daniel Craig or Justin Timberlake?’ she said, sotto voce. ‘Shoot, shag or marry?’

‘Oh tough one,’ I said, crunching on the remains of a boiled sweet as I mulled over my decision. ‘I think I’d have to shoot Brad Pitt, to teach him a lesson for leaving Jennifer Aniston for Angelina Jolie. I’d snog Daniel Craig, definitely.’ I closed my eyes and thought of the shirt-off James Bond moments.

‘Good choice. Snog Daniel Craig, definitely,’ the Platoon Donkey agreed.

‘Oh, but hang on,’ I said, trying not to raise my voice in the excitement of the memory. ‘Do you remember that scene in
Thelma and Louise
with Brad Pitt, maybe I should snog him.’

‘No, no. You should strangle Brad Pitt, for being an adulterous sleaze,’ she said. ‘Plus he’s past his prime now anyway.’

‘I suppose then that leaves Justin Trousersnake for marriage. I’m not happy with that. I don’t like him. His music annoys me,’ I said, taking my decision very seriously. ‘OK, your turn to decide,’ I whispered, turning the tables. ‘How about Jeremy Clarkson, James May and Richard Hammond? Snog, marry, strangle?’ I said, just as CSgt Bicknell emerged through the trees and appeared in front of us.