Going Commando (7 page)

Whatever reason we were awoken for, I found the tone of our wake-up calls humorous, never feeling threatened or bullied by the DL’s antics. Looking back, it was to test our resolve as sleep deprivation is the catalyst for many a person to quit in any walk of life. There would be many more sleep-deprived weeks to come.

We were also deprived of time. Although induction was meant to prepare us for the rigours of training, it was a full-on, twenty-four-hour carousel of running around, cleaning, lectures and physical exertion. We were often late and the DL, after a generous allocation of very slow press-ups, explained we needed to ‘make time’. What a classic!

General relativity allows for the existence of ‘closed time-like
curves’ and, in theory, time travel into the past. The first equations that permitted closed time curves were proposed by Kurt Gödel in 1949 – a solution known as the ‘Gödel metric’. We had to solve the elusive ‘nod metric’ that would have allowed a Royal Marines recruit to deal with the seemingly insoluble issues posed by these curvatures in space-time. Unfortunately, I never did solve it and I never knew anyone who did. (I did know a few bootnecks with a GCSE in woodwork, though.) So we joined the most revered physicians in history in being unable to ‘make time’ within a stand easy. Einstein, however, was never thrashed for being adrift.

I was the only one still awake. Trying as best I could to fold down the ironing board without wrestling it to the ground, I looked at the clock. It was 02.05. It was the earliest I had yet managed to finish. The outer door opened and in strode a corporal with all the purpose of a man carrying a toilet roll to the loo. I stood to attention immediately, holding my ironing board reverently upright.

‘Stand by your beds!’ he yelled, switching on the lights in the darkened room. ‘Stand by your beds!’

I ran to my locker and stood again to attention. It was the first time since starting training that I’d been the first to do anything. I didn’t feel quite so tired now either, as the adrenalin pumped through my veins.

The rest of the troop, bleary-eyed and half-naked, did their best to stand to attention, some with a morning glory showing within their boxers. The strange corporal walked down the middle of the room with his hands behind his back. He looked a bit like a physics teacher, only more menacing and
without elbow patches. He regarded an indeterminate point somewhere in the far distance.

‘I have been hearing things about you lot,’ he said. His tone suggested otherwise. ‘And it has not impressed me.

I was right about some things
.

‘It seems you have difficulty grasping the concept of getting ready on time. You lot think you can turn up when you want and not give a fuck. Well, let me tell you fellas,
I
give a fuck. In the Falklands, we lost men ’cos people like you were adrift.’

I didn’t really know where he was going with this. I did suspect that, whatever the outcome, it wouldn’t be what I wanted at this unearthly hour.

‘Five minutes, outside Portsmouth Company HQ building in gash PT rig. Go.’

He walked out of the induction block, leaving a bevy of nods climbing into their lockers to take out their civilian PT kit. I only needed to don my trainers, so ran as fast as my legs would carry me to the meeting place where the corporal stood, hands on hips like a superhero, his body silhouetted against the light behind. He said nothing as we arrived in dribs and drabs, only occasionally looking at his watch. We stood in three ranks, hanging on his every word like dogs awaiting a Barbara Woodhouse command.

‘Five minutes, I said,’ he intoned, his voice calm and level. He sounded like he was going to read us a bedtime story. ‘It has taken you six. You lot are taking the piss. When I say “go” you lazy twats will run as fast as you can, up past the guardroom, back down the main drag and meet me by the water tank.’

Even though we were stood at ease we were as primed as anyone could be at such an unearthly hour, as if the corporal was Ron Pickering at the start of a
We Are the Champions
race.

‘Stand by, go.’

With only a survival instinct to guide us, we hurtled up towards the guardroom and back down the camp to the bottom field. The individual speed of nods differed and the troop was soon strung out, leaving the slower ones a couple of hundred metres behind the racing snakes. No one even thought of making use of the many short cuts we passed. We daren’t.

I reached the water tank with my breath rasping. The corporal stood there as before: silently, menacingly, and, as it turned out, impatiently.

‘Everyone here?’ Again his voice was cool and quiet. ‘Good. Front support position place.’

We automatically spread out and adopted the press-up position. We held the position, until our stomachs started to cramp.

‘Arms bend.’

We bent our arms and they remained in place, shaking under tension.

‘Six minutes to get ready.’ He walked around slowly. ‘Six long minutes.’

The gurgling of those struggling to hold the press-up position punctured the cool night air.

‘Why it took so long I don’t know. Arms stretch.’

We straightened our arms, relieving the tension in our
triceps and shoulders only for the pain to transfer to our stomachs and groin. His silence was deafening.

‘Even after that warning, it seems only a few of you put the effort in to get here in good time. It has taken you lot another four-and-a-half minutes to get here. Not good enough, men. Arms bend.’

His soothing tones didn’t make the deathly slow press-ups any easier.

‘It shows me some of you are loafing…’

One nod’s body weight collapsed, as he could hold the position no longer.

The corporal didn’t shout, just made a quiet threat that reminded me of an evil Bond villain. ‘Get your chest off the fucking ground.’

He carried on after the rude interruption.

‘…Yes, loafing. And you’re not even out of induction yet. Stretch.’

The gasps of relief rolled around the prostrate group as we locked our arms straight again.

‘You have wasted ten-and-a-half minutes of my life, so I am wasting ten-and-a-half minutes of yours. Arms bend.’

The agonised groans told me many were struggling to hold the position. I was one of them. Twisting the arms against the body relieved the shoulders, only to isolate the triceps, a different yet equally substantial pain that made the teeth grit rather than the face gurn. When held in this position for such a long time it becomes rather undignified. Dribbling is the norm, snot bubbles burst from the nose as breathing becomes difficult and eyes are squeezed so tightly that stars appear
(with no Mathew Kelly in sight). It was a long ten-and-a-half minutes of agonising press-ups; it was a good job we’d only done about 200 in our earlier PT session.

‘Stretch. Right, stand up.’

We struggled to our feet, the lactic acid burning our quivering arms. I looked around the darkened faces; few seemed particularly overjoyed.

‘When I say go, you are to run, jump in the tank and be back here within thirty seconds. Go.’

It wasn’t too difficult to meet his strict deadline. The silent, shimmering water tank was only ten metres away, and the piercing cold water only encouraged the most fleeting of dunkings. We returned to our press-up area, the sound of dripping clothing drumming the hard-mudded area beneath our feet.

‘You lot have not impressed me one bit. I don’t know who I’ve upset, but I am going to be with you for the next twenty-eight weeks. You better start switching on, or I will start switching some of you fuckers off.’

I hoped that was it. My body was starting to cool and the cold, wet clothing was causing goose bumps to ripple my skin. At least we could go back to the accommodation now.

‘Front support position place. Arms bend.’

I was wrong. Apparently, we had only completed six minutes of press-ups. We carried on again for an extra four-and-a-half minutes, completing two extremely slow and difficult press-ups in our soaking wet clothes.

The novelty of staying up late was beginning to wear off. We tramped back to the induction block, and the general
consensus amongst the drenched group was that this corporal was there just to fuck us about and welcome us as induction recruits. Never mind, induction would finish in a few days and we could maybe get a bit more sleep after this.

How ridiculously naïve were we?

The two-week induction phase completed, our DL introduced us to the rest of the training team who would now become the most important men in our lives. One of them was the corporal who had beasted us on the bottom field at silly o’clock the week before. He said little and smiled even less, so we named him ‘the Unsmiling Assassin’.

We were evenly split into sections of ten men, which was easy as only forty of us remained, and were now to be led by a section corporal. Just below God in importance, the section corporal would assess the amount of punishment we would receive, while giving the appropriate amount of instruction to facilitate our progress. Above him was the troop sergeant who, in our case, was an aged alcoholic. Supposedly above them all was the troop officer who, in reality, was just there to do administration and talk posh.

Luckily, I wasn’t thrown into the Unsmiling Assassin’s section; our section was headed by Corporal Stevens. A good-looking, chisel-jawed Adonis, he wore the ‘King’s Badge’, meaning he had been the best recruit when in training. He was also a sniper. All in all, I was in total awe of him. Here was a man who had been chosen to shape us into future
commandos, our mentor, guide and disciplinarian; a man of integrity and honour who would instill these commendable traits through careful guidance, education, and prolonged bouts of intense pain.

Leaving the induction block as immaculate as we’d found it for the next troop of new joiners, our new accommodation was in one of the ghastly white behemoths that towered over the rest of the camp. The view across the River Exe from my room was worth a million dollars. The estuary flow had receded, leaving a dark-brown mud flat. Adjacent to the train platform, the mud had been temporarily tattooed with footmarks spelling ‘519 Troop’. With a recruit troop every two weeks, it seemed that these guys in week ten had severely fucked up and been offered a mud run in lieu of death by firing squad.

Although the view was splendid, I never had much time to relax and appreciate it. I was endlessly running from one lecture to another, repeatedly changing uniform like a catwalk model, just without the long legs. It was information overload into a brain buzzing twenty hours a day.

My mates in the sixth form at school would be getting up at 8am to dress slovenly, in an un-pressed school uniform. I was now up at 05.30 to undertake industrial-standard cleaning, before ramming down my full-fat breakfast ahead of a 07.30 morning accommodation and uniform inspection, or a run, or whatever surprise the training team had up their smartly-rolled sleeves. This ranged from a locker inspection to snap shower inspection – only to find one of the training team having a shower, which would lead to us being punished for not having the showers ready for inspection.

Making my bed now took longer than the whole of my pre-school routine. In these times of duvets it seems hard to fathom that making a bed could take ten minutes or more, but the carefully-ironed bed sheets and blankets had to be folded down neatly and tightly at the top. On Wednesdays, it all had to be folded at both top and bottom, presumably to show we hadn’t slept in our boots. On other days we would have to make a bed pack, a specially-designed wrapping where sheets, blankets and pillow had to be measured, folded and wrapped inside the cover sheet to look like a giant Mr Kipling cake. This was for no other reason than to ensure we had to strip and remake our beds – and to remind us of Mr Kipling cakes.

Whichever bed design we had to create, once made it was treated like a house of cards – impossible to go near for fear of wrecking. So immaculate did we make them, all that was missing was a ribbon with a ‘Happy Mother’s Day’ card attached. It was not at all unknown, prior to more formal room inspections, for lads to make their beds to perfection the night before and then sleep on the cold linoleum floor. Six hours of discomfort was far more appealing than another series of punishment exercises for having a slightly creased sheet. It was easy to work out whether the bed was made to an acceptable standard. If it was, it would remain intact. If it was not, it would be thrown around the room, and sometimes out of the window, to the accompaniment of loud expletives, before being trodden on by the corporal’s polished boot – necessitating yet more washing, drying and ironing.

WHEN EVENTUALLY ISSUED a weapon, I found I wasn’t very good with it. Being a nervous recruit with a vast two weeks of experience, the drills barked by Corporal Stevens, although clear and succinct, just went in one ear and out the other. It didn’t help that most of the guys in my section had been in the cadets, or were mechanics or safebreakers in their previous lives. They all had far more practical ability than me, my childlike dexterity accentuating my slowness.

Hopkins soon became Corporal Stevens’ favourite. Not only because he allowed the corporal’s sheepdog to shag his leg when ordered to ‘act like a Wren’ (a female sailor), but
because he was good at everything. While I fumbled nervously with my gas plug, forgot to tap my pouches or panicked over some complex instruction such as ‘load’, Hopkins would understand first time, every time, and then demonstrate his competency with seemingly consummate ease. To boot, his suave looks complemented his friendly persona, making him an all-round ‘double yolker’ of a man. It was sickening really.

Theoretical instruction was easier to ‘inwardly digest’. I could remember the parts of the weapon perfectly, and so too the contents of the cleaning wallet: combination tool, oil container, wire brush, cleaning brush, cleaning rod, pull through and flannelette. Not everyone was blessed with so retentive a memory. During one such session, Corporal Stevens asked a recruit the contents of the wallet. He held up a cleaning rod. ‘What’s this then, Lofty?’

‘Uh, I don’t know, Corporal,’ the recruit replied. You could almost smell the terror.

Corporal Stevens looked exasperated. ‘Right,’ he said. ‘I’ll give you a clue. It is a cleaning
blank
.’

The recruit still looked confused, as Corporal Stevens tried to extract the word ‘rod’ from his sponge-like brain.

‘Uh…’ This was going to be a long lesson.

‘Okay…’ said Corporal Stevens. ‘Think of the first name of a famous person whose surname is “Stewart”, and then add it to the end of “cleaning”.’

A forty-watt bulb dimly lit up above the recruit’s head, and a look of excitement crossed his face. ‘I’ve got it, Corporal!’

‘Excellent, so what is it? Cleaning…?’

‘Jackie!’ said the recruit.

My own imbecilic struggle with weapons drills meant I got fitter quicker, as my fuck-ups always resulted in a form of physical punishment commonly known as a beasting. Beastings were commonplace during recruit training. Indeed, rumour had it they were part of the syllabus, just never advertised. They were the equivalent of pensioner sex, or stepping in dog shit: you knew it was going to happen at some point, but you felt sick at the thought of it.

Known for their character-building properties, beastings were a form of tough love. The punishments involved strange yet resourceful exercises, with varying pain settings repeated until the recruits were totally exhausted. Often, the troop sergeant would end a bollocking with a phrase that forever struck terror into our hearts: ‘You lot can stand by.’

The phrase still haunts me to this day. Even Tammy Wynette’s ‘Stand By Your Man’ gives me the chills.

It was like being given the death sentence. We knew pain would come, the only variables being when and how much. The thought of impending doom would gnaw at the back of my mind until the event happened. From an outsider’s perspective beastings may seem a form of abuse, but as a sixteen-year-old commando-in-waiting, while not overly excited about it, I was willing to get beasted every day if it meant getting a green beret.

This was life at Commando Training Centre: a consuming whirlwind of excess, shouting and running; a mind-boggling mechanical bucking bull that wanted to throw me off. All I could do was hold on just a little tighter in an ever more difficult attempt to keep on.

Our first real venture as wannabe commandos was on Exercise Twosome, or ‘Gruesome Twosome’ as it was affectionately known. This was something so completely different from anything I’d ever experienced in my short life that, for the first time, I wondered whether joining the Royal Marines had been a wise move.

The previous troop that returned from Gruesome Twosome had recently made the newspapers after it was revealed one of their recruits had been fed a shit sandwich. We couldn’t understand the problem: I certainly hadn’t had a good one yet. Then we realised that it was literally a
shit
sandwich, and we understood why his mother had contacted the press.

Although the training teams were warned similar actions would not be tolerated by the anti-shit-eating mandarins of Whitehall, it little changed our team’s intentions of making Gruesome Twosome live up to its reputation.

The exercise was an introduction into basic fieldwork, our bread and butter as potential commandos. One of our first lectures was on how to properly apply camouflage cream (cam cream). Split into pairs, I was hoping to partner up with Hopkins, but I was like the bespectacled kid with the wonky legs when being picked for a game of football. Everyone partnered off with someone they could trust, leaving me searching for a partner of equal incompetence.

The other guy standing alone was Jackie; I forget his real name, but he was so-called after his ‘cleaning Jackie’ faux-pas.
He had struggled with every element of training so far. The only thing he seemed competent in was grumbling and he ‘dripped’ at every incidence of hardship, which, with the regime we were under, was quite often. We were all in it together so his constant whining had not made him at all popular. Neither, it seemed, was I. With no other options available, we begrudgingly paired up.

The first thing he said was, ‘You know I’m leaving at the end of the week? This is all bollocks.’

Oh, great
. Not only was my partner shit at fieldcraft, he had no interest in improving.

The lessons were based on the ‘buddy buddy’ system, where each recruit checks the other to ensure both are ‘squared away’ and suitably prepared for whatever lies ahead. We had to cam up our partners, the idea being that we would both practice the application but also learn to entrust ourselves to our buddy.

My buddy was about as friendly as Adolf Eichmann, and his coverage of my face was poor, to say the least. Of course, he got picked up when I was inspected; I blended into the background like a cow in a pigsty. To be fair, Jackie was given twice the amount of press-ups I was, which wasn’t ideal for him as he could only do half the press-ups I could. These were made all the harder by Corporal Stevens shoving the cam cream bag nozzle up each nostril and filling them with the thick, brown gunk.

‘Time?’

‘Yes, Corporal?’ I answered from the floor, sounding like Malcolm from the Vicks Sinex advert.

‘Now you look like you’ve sneezed your own impacted bowel, you’d better scrub yourself clean and start again.’

I glared at Jackie. He was the twat that had got me into this predicament. It didn’t have much of an effect though, he was too busy scooping acrid cam cream from his mouth whilst enduring some rather vulgar language from Corporal Stevens.

‘When I come back you’d both better be as clean as Princess Diana’s knickers or you can stand by.’

Without the aid of plentiful, hot, running water – or indeed, any water at all – this was going to be a hard task. We had been issued with the one water bottle per day with which we were also supposed to cook, wash ourselves and our cooking implements, and fight off dehydration. Luckily, the exercise was held in the hottest August since 1976 so drinking was clearly optional

It was around now when I reflected that getting camouflaged seemed somehow less appealing than it appeared in the recruitment brochures. They certainly hadn’t shown the discomfort of sweating like a cheap beef salad while lying awkwardly in spiky gorse bushes, with twigs, leaves and broken branches scraping, cutting and scoring the skin leaving me feeling like I had been buggered by a sexually frustrated Laburnum.

In between being jabbed, poked, kicked and thrashed around the local vicinity, we had further theoretical instruction in the large marquee that doubled as the training team’s accommodation and lecture room. Any notification was usually in the form of, ‘Right, you fuckers, you were told to be ready for your next session, and by the look of it you have been swanning/arsing about/loafing/ignoring us/taking the
piss [delete as required]. You have got five minutes to get your shit together and be in the marquee for a lecture on…’

On this occasion it was ‘sentry duty’. I consoled myself with the thought that at least the lesson on the duties of a sentry
had
to be easy. I based this forlorn hope on my extensive research of sentry duty that mainly involved watching lots of old war films. It seemed to entail a lot of walking up and down a designated path, usually in the opposite direction to any silent enemy, while sharing cigarettes, and talking German.

Unfortunately the reality of a sentry duty lecture was a lot different.

‘When you are a sentry, fellas, you are the eyes and ears of the troop,’ said the Unsmiling Assassin looking rather sinister behind his lectern. ‘So it is vitally important you are awake, alert and aware of your surroundings. Falling asleep is the biggest no-no of all when on sentry and you not only show a lack of discipline, you show true selfishness putting your own needs before your oppos. This scant regard for the team ethic lets not only your mates down, but also puts them in grave danger. You are the early warning system and it is up to you to alert your troop of any possible enemy approach.’

In the steam of a humid tent, in the early afternoon heat, immediately after lunch, trying to stay awake and alert while learning
how to
stay awake and alert was clearly a lesson in irony. However, I found it interesting. More interesting than some, it seemed. As usual, questions were asked to reinforce our learning, and more often than not the Unsmiling Assassin would question, pause, nominate one of the eager-eyed students keen to impress.

‘So to recap then, why do we stay awake?’ The Unsmiling Assassin’s eyes scanned the room, searching for a willing, or unwilling, volunteer to answer.

I tried to look alert by perking up my head in an attempt to garner his attention.

‘Right, just a minute fellas.’ He walked from behind his lectern. ‘Am I boring you, Lofty?’ he asked.

I looked to where his steely glare fell. One of the nods, Brum, (no one knew his first name, but he was from Birmingham), didn’t have his head raised and certainly didn’t look alert. In fact, he couldn’t have done a better impression of inattentiveness if he’d tried. His chin sat on his chest, his eyes firmly closed. He seemed content enough; anyone would, emitting the sort of wheeze that suggests a sleep so deep that it’s bordering clinical death.

‘Don’t any of you wake him up,’ warned the Unsmiling Assassin as he approached Sleeping Beauty, who now had the temerity to snore.

‘Oi, fuckdust, wake up.’ No answer. To be fair, the corporal hadn’t shouted. He never did.

‘What’s his name?’ the Unsmiling Assassin asked the group.

‘Davies, Corporal,’ answered a voice from the crowd.

‘Oi, Davies, you knob jockey, wake up.’

Davies still didn’t move.

‘Is he dead?’

Now, if you were asked how to wake somebody up in such a circumstance, or indeed check if someone was still alive, would you:

The Unsmiling Assassin chose the third option, picking up a large-headed mallet designed to hammer in very big tent pegs. In his defence, he didn’t actually hit Davies on the head with it. He just let the natural weight of the mallet fall with a thud that drew a collective ‘
oof
’ from the rest of us.

‘Awake now are we, Princess?’ asked the Unsmiling Assassin politely.

Davies, rather shell-shocked but awake, was speechless. Funnily enough, he didn’t fall asleep again, probably due to pain from the large haematoma that bulged from his bonce.

We practised sentry duty that night. As the youngest I was the least important, so I was detailed to the shittiest watch. Other than contracting Ebola, it was the last thing I wanted. In the summer, doing the 03.30-04.30 watch meant finishing just prior to being called for first light stand-to. Stand-to was a call for alertness; everyone had to lie in the harbour position, in a small circle of bivvies, for forty-five minutes before both first and last light, the logic being this was the most likely time for enemy attack. For a recruit, it was also the most likely time to get a kick up the arse from the training team should we not be positioned correctly. Once the light had sufficiently changed we would then be allowed to ‘stand down’, and rub the aforementioned kicked arse.

My first sentry duty was textbook: alert and awake, I scanned the trees and paths in my arcs of vision. Any time
there was even a hint of a rustle I’d shout, ‘Halt! Who goes there?’ to nothing more than the breeze. On my second sentry duty, I listened to my quick brief, laid down, got comfy and… zzzzzzzzzzz.

Luckily, there is an inner panic button we develop when asleep, a primordial survival instinct, and mine kicked in. Admittedly, it did take twenty minutes – thankfully, a short enough time not to get caught and thrashed to within an inch of my life.

I wasn’t the only one to succumb to the heat of the day and general lack of sleep. One favourite trick of the trainers was to wake us from our slumber, and force us into a game of ‘It Pays to Be a Winner’.

The rules were simple. On the command ‘Go!’ we would race over rough ground like demented maniacs to a distant object, usually a solitary tree at the top of an incline, and back to the starting point. It would have taken an Olympic athlete about a minute to complete the race, but the training team expected us all to return within half the time as a mark of ‘putting effort in’. The first lad to return would be the winner and exempt from the repeat race, with the winner of each rested from the subsequent races until only the last few remained.