Eye of the Storm (6 page)

In a sense, that is exactly what we were doing – beginning a sentence. There must have been some one hundred and ten hopefuls on that first day, but after six weeks there was barely a handful of us left. The reason was simple – the NCOs and instructors very quickly and very ruthlessly weeded us out. One screw-up and you were out, told that there was no place for you in the Parachute Regiment, invited to try again with another unit, and sent on your way.

In those first days we were shown how to put on our new kit and how to wind on our puttees – long khaki bandages that were wound round the legs from boot-top to knee. It didn’t take long to learn the shortcuts, however. If you were going to pass the course you had to learn fast, which was what survival in the Paras was all about. Slower-thinking recruits had no chance, and a steady drip of departures began almost from day one.

Every day there was a barrack-room inspection. Apart from everything else – ‘everything’ meaning having all your kit immaculate and neatly squared away in the prescribed manner – this meant ‘boxing’ your bedding, creating from unruly bedclothes a pack like a square biscuit, with every edge razor sharp and perfectly aligned. The order was first a blanket, then a sheet, then another blanket and then another sheet. Then a final blanket went over everything to form an outer cover. All the edges had to be even, and you then laid this ‘biscuit’ of wool and cotton at the proper place on top of the mattress each morning. Without fail you had to strip your bed and put two pillows and two folded pillow cases next to your boxed bedgear.

After three days, I learned the trick of laying out my biscuit of folded bedclothes for inspection and then, after the inspection, very carefully stowing it away on top of my locker. It stayed there, unused, for six months, except for the few minutes every day when it was laid out on my bed. I slept between the mattress and the mattress cover, thereby saving myself half an hour of effort in the mornings. I also had a brand-new, spotlessly clean washing and shaving kit which was never used apart from laying out for inspection – I actually used a second set which I kept well concealed. All our kit, and the room itself, had to be perfect or trouble followed, which meant, among much else, that we had to polish our boots until we could see our reflections in the toecaps, and shine the floor till it gleamed like a plate-glass window.

Our platoon officer was Lieutenant Rupert Smith, now Lieutenant-General Sir Rupert Smith. He was a very fair man, as were his two sergeants. In this I was lucky, although I didn’t know that for some time. If I had joined a month earlier – the first date given to me by the recruiting office in Preston – life would have been hell. That intake, it turned out, had been supervised by a group of NCOs who were little short of monsters. These regularly tossed their recruits’ blankets and other gear out of the barrack-room windows, leaving the bewildered young soldiers to scramble frantically around outside, often in rain and snow, trying to gather it up and put it all back together again for yet another inspection by the bullies who had roughed up their gear in the first place.

The truth is that there are a lot of NCOs of that type in the British Army. They are very tough on their subordinates, but crawl to everybody above them – or to anyone bigger and stronger who holds the same rank as they do. Give them some poor ignorant squaddie who can’t answer back, however, and they are in their element. I have never had time for men like that, and I was fortunate that, in Lieutenant Smith and his NCOs, I had decent superiors.

I underwent six months’ basic training, which was mainly made up of drill, running and hard slogs on route marches. Bit by bit we turned into soldiers. When a man joins the Parachute Regiment he is issued with a series of coloured shoulder tags to mark his progression through the training course. The first badge is green (it doesn’t take a genius to work out why); then, after six weeks, you move on to wearing a blue tag. By that time, so many of your intake have been kicked out as unsuitable for the Parachute Regiment that you feel like an old hand when you see that month’s new recruits arrive.

The NCOs never stopped reminding us that selection for the Paras was a very greasy pole. Because of the pace and the brutality of the training course, the rate of attrition is enormous, and fewer than one in five of those who start out are allowed to finish the course. Some men simply decide to quit, because they know they will never make it. The training is undoubtedly effective, however, for what comes out at the end of it puts the fear of God into other countries’ armies.

After six weeks, although we recruits – those of us still left, that is – had got as far as the blue-patch stage, we were still a long way short of winning the right to wear that maroon beret with its chromium-plated badge of a winged parachute. There were endless drills and classes, and miles of tracks to be run and tons of logs to be carried on bleeding shoulders through mud and slime, until we felt that our arms were being pulled from their sockets, that our legs were turning to jelly, and that our hearts would burst.

Log-running is the nearest thing the British Army has to a medieval torture rack. But it is all part of the very deliberate hardening process, like plunging white-hot steel into cold water to temper the metal – except that, instead of steel, it was muscle and willpower the DS were toughening and testing. They were constantly pushing us further than we thought we could go, until we were covering distances that only weeks earlier would have had us on our backs in the nearest emergency ward.

The emphasis was always on aggression. So whenever we looked like slackening, we were ordered into the gymnasium for a ‘milling’ bout. Milling is peculiar to the Parachute Regiment, and consists of two men, often mates, standing toe-to-toe on a mat and beating hell out of each other. And if they don’t go at it hammer and tongs, there is always a pug-nosed physical training instructor ready to take the place of the guy getting a soft ride. The PTI will then belt the chap who had been pulling his punches, knocking him all over the place.

Training NCOs encouraged their squads to attack other passing squaddies. They wanted to see men knock each other out of the way as they ran, disputing the other side’s right of way on the pavements beneath the horse-chestnut trees that flank Aldershot’s barrack roadways. After brief but frequently bloody skirmishes, the NCOs would call off their squads, for all the world like whippers-in at a hunt bringing their hounds back into line.

Several times I saw training corporals grab the helmet chinstraps of fast-fading recruits and run them across the assault-course finishing line. Then, when the exhausted man collapsed in a heap, the NCO would plant a well-aimed boot up his backside. Other slowcoaches often spent their NAAFI breaks doing a hundred press-ups, while their mates slurped mugs of thick, sweet, rather gritty tea and bit into rock buns baked by cooks who would never be in any danger of being prosecuted for misrepresentation under the Trade Descriptions Act.

So the laggards and the weak were thinned from our ranks. Dispirited and demoralized, they often simply bought themselves out of the army for £20 before the inevitable axe could fall. Indeed, I got myself into trouble with the brass for encouraging several of the fading recruits to buy themselves out long before they had been warned that they would not make the grade. There is little point in watching a man punish himself when you – and he – know there is going to be no reward for him at the end. It seemed ludicrous to me, even though all of us considered quitting at some time or another during those hardening months. So I tried to convince a number of our intake to leave while they were still ahead, something which the authorities soon came to hear of. As a result, one day I was summoned before an officer, who told me that I was a troublemaker and asked why I had encouraged other recruits to buy themselves out of the army but had not done so myself.

‘Because I never had twenty quid, sir,’ I answered, although it wasn’t the truth. I never for a moment doubted that I would not get through – not that I dared tell him that. The outcome was that he told me he was watching my performance, the clear implication being that the slightest failure or transgression would see me kicked out. It was scarcely news, however, for we were watched from dawn to dusk – and even beyond that during night exercises.

There was another cloud on my horizon, however, for while I enjoyed my basic training in the Parachute Regiment, I dreaded the thought of actually parachuting. In fact, the closer we got to going to RAF Abingdon in Oxfordshire for jump training, the more scared I became. Nor could I understand the guys who were looking forward to it, who struck me as being quite mad.

The Royal Air Force does not waste money sending trainee paratroopers up in an aircraft until the instructors know that the recruits can do the business. As a result, on our arrival at Abingdon, and after the usual lectures and practices and a certain amount of jump training in a vast hangar, we were first of all winched up in a cage suspended beneath a helium-filled balloon. The large silver-grey blimp is tethered by a steel cable, three-quarters of an inch thick, which winds around the drum of a large winch mounted on the back of a truck. The winch-men and their gear are protected from the vicious lash-back of a broken cable by a lattice canopy of heavy-gauge steel mesh. Trainee paratroopers stand in the cage while the balloon to which it is attached is allowed to rise on its cable to 800 feet. Then the jumping begins.

Old hands at Abingdon took a sadistic pleasure in telling us of one trainee who had ‘Roman candled’ – that is, his parachute had failed to open – and how he’d fallen 800 feet to smash through the winch cage like pickled red cabbage. I thought I was going to be sick, but kept an expressionless face. The instructors are watching for reaction, and I was not going to let anyone know how scared I really was.

In the back of the 4-ton truck that took us to the DZ – dropping zone – that first morning, some of the more gung-ho trainees were singing a famous song about a parachutist whose canopy had not opened. Set to the tune of the Battle Hymn of the Republic, one of the verses ran, ‘Oh, they scraped him off the tarmac like a pound of strawberry jam.’ I just sat there by the tailboard, saying nothing, but fervently wishing they’d shut up.

When our time came, we shuffled into the balloon cage and stood there anxiously with our instructor as the winch cable paid out until we were at 800 feet. There was very little wind – which was a pity, for if there had been more than a strong breeze the jump would have been cancelled. And I would have been allowed to live for one more day …

The first men jumped, and presumably landed safely – I didn’t look. Then my name was called and I stepped forward to stand at the door of the cage. The instructor advised the NCOs on the ground, ‘One to come.’ I stepped towards the edge and crossed my arms, as we’d been taught in the hangars hundreds of feet below. Only this wasn’t a hangar. It was a cage under a balloon, swaying about high above the green drop zone. Beyond were fields of ripening wheat edging to the horizon and a pale blue sky dotted with cottonwool clouds.

We had been told not to look down but to look up and concentrate on the fringe of the balloon. I did so, until the instructor shouted, ‘Red on. Green on. Go.’ Oh fucking hell! I thought as I jumped off the edge. It was terrifying.

Suddenly I felt the parachute open. It tugged at my harness and I looked up and saw the canopy floating above me like a silken airborne jellyfish. And I knew that I wasn’t going to die – or not then, anyway.

The canopy opened, and then it shut again, and then reopened. We had been warned about that, however, so I managed not to panic. Moments later I heard shouts from the ground, the parachute-jump instructors yelling at me to pull down on my left or right lift web or steering cord, to hold on and get my feet and knees together. I was totally confused. I had shut my eyes again and only opened them moments before I hit the ground, landing, as I was always to do after that, like a sack of spuds. I was never to get a parachute landing quite right.

The second balloon jump should have been easier but because I now knew what was happening, it wasn’t. What made it worse, however, was the fact that the man before me refused to jump. Three times the instructor went through the routine. But the soldier would not step off the platform. No matter how much he was screamed at, he just kept shouting ‘No, no, no!’ The balloon was hauled down and he was taken away. We never saw him again.

While this may seem harsh, the fact that a man gets no second chance makes sense. A man suddenly refusing to jump when the Paras are going into battle might be the guy carrying spare ammunition or the radio. His refusal would immediately jeopardize the lives of the rest of the team, as well as their mission. Seen in that context, it becomes clear why the Parachute Regiment cannot take the chance of a man losing his nerve at a crucial moment in an operation.

A few weeks after those first jumps and I’d made it: I had successfully completed the Parachute Regiment entry course. With flying colours, as it turned out. At the passing-out parade on the barracks square in Aldershot, I received my red beret from a general, who then also presented me with a plaque for being Champion Recruit of my intake.

It was a beautiful July day. The regimental band played and, puffed up with pride, I felt ten feet tall as I marched across crunchy gravel and snapped to attention in front of the general.

Almost everyone else had their families and girlfriends there to watch them parade, but I had deliberately not invited my mother, because before the event I had thought that it was all a bit naff. So, instead of my family, I had invited my two former housemates from the Preston Labour Exchange to come and watch the parade. They loyally turned up, and I was glad they did, but suddenly, when it came to my turn to march out and collect the red beret and those blue, embroidered wings, I knew it wasn’t naff and it wasn’t showing off. Above all, I realized, albeit too late, that I should have had my mother there. Even so, I felt so proud of that red beret that for days afterwards I wore it day and night. It affected all of us like that – my friend Taff, the chap in our intake who won the big award for Champion Shot, was every bit as pleased and proud as I was.