Going Commando (18 page)

The march takes in some of the most breathtakingly beautiful parts of the moor, as well as the wettest. Already raw feet soon become wet crossing streams early in the route. Marching speedily from checkpoint to checkpoint, never settling for more than a couple of minutes to prevent bodies stiffening, recruits take in sweet, stewed tea and sandwiches, whilst cajoling and encouraging each other.

At mile twenty-six, the recruits steam over the highest point on southern Dartmoor, Ryder’s Hill. Due to its convex shape, no matter how many times the recruits think they have reached the top, there is yet another summit to conquer; however, with the finish in my day at Cross Furzes, just over the other side of the hill, they would willingly drag their bollocks over broken glass to get there.

Marching over the soft moor takes its toll on thighs, the hard metal roads take their revenge on feet, but the last few steps to the finish are taken on a cushion of euphoria. Crossing the thirty miles of rough Dartmoor terrain in less than eight hours would see a recruit pass the final commando test.

Taken individually, each test is eminently achievable. Anyone with a high standard of fitness, no injuries and a good period of balanced preparation could successfully complete each challenge. The difference for us as Royal Marine recruits is that we were twenty-five weeks into a highly demanding training course. Although our fitness has been equated with that of an Olympic athlete, our bodies were stock cars, getting battered
from one heavy crash to another. With little time for rest and recuperation, injuries were common and recurrent. The options were limited – push through the pain barrier, or be back trooped. The latter would only mean prolonging the torture.

The commando phase meant we wouldn’t do each test just the once. We would practise them repeatedly, thus degrading our bodies even further.

Test week, where each test would follow on consecutive days, would commence the day after we returned from the final exercise – a twelve-day consolidation of everything we had learned in military training.

Our fitness was now only part of what was necessary to complete the commando phase. Mental fortitude and the will to push beyond our pain and fatigue thresholds were equally, if not more, important.

The final exercise was now upon us. We saw it closing in as we counted down the days. It stared at us from the schedule pinned to the wall in pink paper, which I can only assume was to soften the blow. I hated looking at it. I hoped if I closed my eyes it would go away and become something far more pleasurable when I opened them. But there it still was. They could have named it something like Exercise Final Hurdle or Exercise Well Done Lads You’re Nearly There, but no. They called it Exercise Nightmare – and with good reason.

It started out as a bit of a dream. We were taken in a plush coach down to Portsmouth to spend a day out learning about
naval and Royal Marines history. We walked around HMS Victory and the Royal Marines Museum at Eastney Barracks feeling like tourists, although I was a little despondent I couldn’t buy an ice cream.

We moved to RM Poole to meet blokes from our very own Special Forces, the SBS. We looked in awe at these guys who, in our commando-tastic fantasies, all had webbed feet, gills and black masking tape covering their eyes.

Disappointingly, they looked like normal blokes, although it has to be said it seemed their selection into SB was dependent on them being suave dreamboats. I made a note to check up on cosmetic surgery services should I ever want to go SF.

We moved on to watch a demo by the less revered driver’s branch, who took us on combat log flumes when driving through deep water in Land Rovers. We were mightily impressed and choked by one marine burning rubber as he screeched around the skid pan circuit completing J and S turns, evasive driving techniques we’d only seen on
Starsky and Hutch
. It was all extremely impressive and rather distinct from the drivers we had so far met at CTC, who looked as bored as bat shit dropping off nods on Woodbury Common.

The one part of commando operations we had yet to be exposed to was the amphibious capability the Corps uniquely holds. We zoomed about on rigid raiders and sat bobbing in landing craft, jumping into the icy waters of Hamworthy harbour to make beach landings. Like the day spent climbing cliffs, all this rugsy-tugsy, commando-type stuff I had seen in the recruitment brochures was even more brilliant in real life.

But all this frivolity had to come to an end.

The troop sergeant called us together for a snap parade instead of the planned visit to the NAAFI. We stood nervously as he paced up and down like a father outside a labour ward, only with anger not nerves. I don’t think I was the only one expecting to hear the words ‘stand by’.

‘You fucking lot are in the deepest fucking shit I think I have ever fucking seen. I assure you, you are going to be thrashed until your eyes bleed.’

It wasn’t the most pleasant of openings. We sort of guessed why we had been called together.

Many of us had gone to Exeter to buy lots of green string. As an extra special treat, we purchased civilian boots to wear on the exercise. We knew that as soon as we went to commando units we would buy our own.

In fact, very little clothing worn in a commando unit, when in the field, is military issue. We just thought we were exceedingly switched on in pre-empting this by purchasing boots while still recruits. Having only taken our new civilian boots to Poole, the training team couldn’t make us wear our issue pair. Not having control over this made them very angry. Very angry indeed.

The troop sergeant’s head had turned the colour of an overripe aubergine. We had often seen him angry, it was far more common than him being happy, but the spittle from his crooked mouth told us this was a new level of fury.

‘You think you are fucking clever buying these fucking Carlos Fandango boots. When your feet are being cut to fucking shreds by wearing these new fucking Gucci boots, don’t even fucking think about coming to fucking whinge. I
cannot describe my loathing for you fuckers. You literally are a bunch of cunts. You fucking fuckers can fucking stand by to stand by. If I had my fucking way the lot of you would be fucking back trooped. Now fuck off and prepare for severe unpleasantness.’

There was a swear jar somewhere that was willing to be filled.

His threats were not idle. Instead of starting the exercise with a morning twelve-mile insertion yomp, we set out the night before and were taken by landing craft to an unknown point. It was like one of those mystery tours at the seaside, only we were fairly sure it wouldn’t end with a nice meal at a pub.

When we reached our destination, the coxswain pointed in the direction we needed to head as the ramp lowered. The wind swirled inside and the temperature plummeted. Sea spray welcomed us to the gates of a freezing Hades.

‘Out troops,’ he shouted.

As good recruits do, we obeyed the order to disembark – into rather deep water. It was far deeper than I expected. In fact I was up to my neck in cold seawater, full kit and all. I had to bounce to ensure I didn’t go under and the pull of the current sent me slightly off track. It was rather unnerving until I finally managed to breathlessly struggle ashore.

We rendezvoused in a slightly submerged area covered by reeds. The training team then informed us we would be picked up tomorrow. They were leaving us to freeze our tits off.

‘Your new boots should keep you warm,’ was the last dose of sarcasm we received as they disappeared towards the teasing urban warmth.

We had dry kit in our waterproofed bergans. But was it wise to change into them? We were in cold seawater surrounded by the warmth of sodden, marshy reeds, the cold wind as welcome as a matador at a vegan conference. Putting on dry kit would only mean drenching both sets of clothing, going against all the rules of the wet/dry routine we had been taught.

We had to tough it out in wet gear, so we lay shivering in the reeds all night. It was a long, cold, sleepless night, and despondency kicked me up the arse yet again when I realised the gloves in my pocket were drenched – a prophetic start to Exercise Nightmare.

The training team arrived at first light. I had never been so happy to see those bastards. We dragged ourselves back out to the landing craft and were taken to our original point to embark on our aptly-named exercise.

The twelve-mile insertion yomp was counted as the first actual commando test, even if it was just a warm-up to the final exercise. Normally yomping such a distance wouldn’t have been an issue, but we’d now forsaken large packs and were issued proper 120-litre bergans. Three times as much space to put three times as much kit in to make it three times as heavy and, as I’d experienced the previous night, three times as difficult to drag through reeds. But it felt far more comfortable than the crippling packs we had used up to now, even if we were saturated.

Crotch rot soon followed, with saggy, wet combats rubbing my inner thighs, each step shaving off just a little more skin – just what I needed on the first day of an exercise. I can’t
remember hoping for unseasonably cold weather either, but I got it all the same. Laying up in preparation for a night raid on HMS Osprey, I contemplated whether I’d come close to hypothermia.

Charlie woke me for the assault but I couldn’t find my balance, inertia stupefying me. He held me up and asked if I was okay. Of course I said yes, but I couldn’t feel my feet and hands and had a strange unease I’d never encountered before.

Frost had settled on the ground and my throat rasped when I inhaled. Just to move seemed an effort and as I rolled up my mat, leaving a dark patch on the frosted ground, I tried unsuccessfully to shelter myself from the icy winds that blew from the English Channel onto the exposed heights of Portland Bill.

Even now, I look back and consider this to be the point where I experienced the very coldest conditions. Yet pushing through this discomfort and pain is what makes a commando, someone who can take the extreme hardship and carry on. When the seeds of doubt are sown in the mind, it takes willpower and courage to press on regardless.

With the thoughts of coldness stowed away with the rest of my kit, I loved attacking the base – especially as we made a matelot shit himself when storming his sentry post full of chocolate wrappers and pornography. We moved further southwest by helicopter. For the duration of the exercise we would endure extreme Dartmoor weather.

‘It’s as cold as a bastard,’ commented Fred, as we looked through squinted eyes over the whitened bleakness. I couldn’t have put it better myself.

Heavy blizzards forced us to plough unceremoniously through knee high snow, trying to make good speed wherever we advanced to contact. The awaiting enemy, played by the specialist unit of marines, must have been freezing their tits off by the time we arrived. One actually went down with hypothermia.

The weather was relentless, pelting us with freezing hail one minute then shrouding us in snow the next. The cowardly sun didn’t have the balls to shine through the greyness. Our jokes were diminishing and the only smiles were grins of perseverance to get through this communal hell.

I had been sharing a bivvy with Fred, as I often did. At first we were like two naughty schoolboys who would giggle at the slightest oddity, should it be someone falling over or quite pitiful jokes taken straight from The Shit Joke Annual 1987.

As the days wore us down I could see Fred’s cheerfulness ebbing away, something noted by the training team, who themselves must have wondered who they’d upset to be present on the moor in such conditions. They pulled Fred away for a while and he returned as he had left, a shivering wreck. His behaviour had become a concern to the team and they were worried he had succumbed to the conditions, but Fred had convinced them he was fine to continue. After all, one of the symptoms of hypothermia is mental confusion, something that Fred could present even on a warm summer’s day.

However, his inability to rise from his sleeping bag for a later sentry meant I had to cover for him, something the beady eyes of the training team did not miss. In a role reversal of Captain Oates’ fateful last walk, I told Fred, as I trudged away
towards the sentry position, that I wouldn’t be long. On my return an hour later, the bivvy was empty. He was gone.

The training team saw his withdrawal as a final confirmation of hypothermia, the green light to take him from the moor and back to a warm bed in sickbay. It was exceedingly hard on Fred, and if I were to be honest, on me as well; my morale boost had gone. Missing even a few hours to reheat the body would see him fail the exercise.

A few of the other recruits also succumbed to the cold, taken back to the comfortable bosom of civilisation. Nods were dropping like flies from the harshest of climates. Even sadder still, a few hours later, despite my best efforts in trying to cheer him with my crap jokes about dogs and pants, Charlie had also been taken off the moor. I watched him leave, his shivering body working in slow motion, dizziness causing him to stumble like a drunk. My two best mates had been taken from me.

The bastion of mateship had already been breached, but I paired up with a new bivvy partner. As a Scotsman and Englishman together, we embraced our resilience, recognising that if we too were to succumb to the cold we’d only have to do it all again. Mind you, for him, being from Inverness, it must have been like a summer’s day.

The cold dissipated on the final evening, to be replaced by torrential rain. Dry cold then rain is dangerous enough, but if the cold snap returned after such a downpour then many more of us would be in danger of hypothermia. I think even the training team were looking forward to the exercise ending. We had it hard, but they too had also to endure the weather. While
they were seasoned veterans, slowly picking off hypothermic nods from the moor was not good for their morale.

It must have been due to this rush to get things over and done with when Corporal Hagar hurriedly pushed me from a wall we were traversing. With a GPMG in my arms and a fully loaded bergan on my back, I fell awkwardly. Immediately, I knew my ankle wasn’t in a good state.