The Man in the White Suit: The Stig, Le Mans, the Fast Lane and Me (19 page)

Back at barracks news broke that the final lengthy march of the week was being brought forward, reducing our recovery time from the previous run. A little extra test of character was needed to thin out the recruits to a more manageable number.

Where previous ‘walks’ had taken five or six hours, the final march took over eighteen. And we carried nearly 80 pounds, al in. Heavier, harder, longer.

Everyone was mental y and physical y shattered. Just walking to the shower block made your thighs burn.

As darkness fel , the orange street lighting crept through Seventies curtains into the partly vacated dormitory. I lay on top of my sleeping bag pretending to sleep, but running a checklist of al my equipment, worrying about spare shoelaces, food and the little I remembered of the route. A blue flash signal ed a text message from a mate in London. ‘Happy birthday big boy.’ I’d forgotten about that. I was twenty-nine.

Zinc oxide tape was al that was holding the welts across my back together, so I left it on and strapped a new batch around my ankles and feet. We formed up to receive our final marching brief in an atmosphere of apprehension. People stumbled around using head torches and smal pocket lights to seat themselves on their bergens in front of the four-tonners.

The DS opened proceedings with a total ban on head torches and walking in pairs or groups. ‘If we catch any of you walking hand in hand like Mary fucking Poppins, you’re binned.’

There was limited gossip en route to the start point except for Cartman, who was buzzing on a powerful cocktail of brufen, codeine and cough medicine. There was no stopping him now.

We arrived in the dark and scaled our equipment. I knelt by the headlights of the four-tonner, pounded some painkil ers and tightened my shoelaces for the big off, with the barrel of my weapon on my foot and the butt on the ground.

‘Whose
fucking
gat is that on the floor? Who is that with their fucking weapon on the floor?!’

My heart sank. It was no time to argue the toss. ‘Col ins, sir.’

‘Go and get a Fucking Big Rock and bring it here.’

I grabbed an FBR, had it authenticated with a number so that it could be checked at any one of the checkpoints along the entire march, and added this vital piece of equipment to my bergen.

Within minutes of starting I was scaling a slippery, muddy slope in total darkness. I drank al my water within the first half-hour. I had nothing left – pathetic. The enormity of the task suddenly overwhelmed me. It seemed I had found my breaking point. I stopped.

Breathe. I imagined hearing Cartman and Flash talking rubbish, singing the stupid chart-topping milkshake song, tel ing me to get the fuck up. I made out a tiny patch of light on my immediate horizon: the peak of the first hil . I broke the crest and felt a little better.

The first checkpoint lay at the bottom of a smal val ey next to a reservoir. It was littered with guys sitting on their bergens. I realised the group had jacked it in.

Next came a goat track that snaked its way up and around two giant mountains. There was plenty of tripping over loose stones in the blackness of the night, but at least each trip was a step in the right direction.

At the highest point the track was bordered by a sheer drop. A few guys ahead pinged on their head torches to speed their progress and I fol owed suit.

After a few minutes I looked behind me. For over a kilometre, sixty or so head torches bobbed the length of the path. It was a magnificent sight, like the fiery beacons along Hadrian’s Wal .

The guilty pleasure of the head torch was short-lived. On the way back down the hil I made up some good time by running, but the further down the mountain we went, the more open the ground became. It felt exposed.

I cashed in my chips, switched off my light and slowed to a fast walk, once again at the mercy of the broken ground and babies’ heads. Some guys ahead cracked on, lights ablaze.

I became aware of something moving from cover to my left. There was a rustling sound as black shapes sped across the long dry grass, fol owed by several thuds and the familiar sound of bergens slamming into the deck. The lights went out. I never knew what happened to the guys wearing them.

Dawn came and went. Legs pumped endlessly through the day. The peaks of the Beacons National Park were withering. Daylight brought a fresh perspective and extra energy. I ran along the flats and caught up with Ninja at a queue for an RV point. Some boys lay poleaxed on one side whilst fluids were pumped intravenously into their arms. A more hopeful lad squeezed the saline bag and jogged on the spot to speed the process.

Ninja was hol ow-eyed, shaking and confused, bordering on hypothermic. He was trying to get his Gore-Tex on but couldn’t even pul the zip, so I squared him away and we plodded on.

Legs pumped endlessly through the day. Pen Y Fan, again, was withering. As dusk approached once more we walked down a tractor track across an open field. I was a zombie, rifle flailing at waist height, legs on autopilot. There was a gap in the hedgerow ahead. As my right foot made contact with the solid incline of a tarmac road my face turned left towards the hil , then I heard a sharp metal ic thwack.

My bergen picked me up and spun me through 180 degrees into the hedge. I looked up to see the back of a square-framed steel trailer, laden with canoes, winging past at a rate of knots. The front of the trailer must have caught the outer pouch of my bergen.

I kept monging along, remembering Plissken’s final words: ‘You don’t need to be superhuman, lads.

You’l al make mistakes, but you push it to the end.’

We had to cover 10km in four hours to make the cut-off. More than enough time to cover the distance in normal circumstances, but I knew I was losing the plot. Stomach cramps gripped me every 30

seconds. My head was pounding and my legs were so swol en that every step made my eyes water. I couldn’t eat anything except Jel y Babies, which were running out fast. One navigational error in the dark and we were done for.

‘Come on, Benny, we’ve
got
to do this,’ Ninja urged.

To be sure of reaching the end, it was time to start running. I closed my eyes, detached myself from reality and pounded up the incline. I heard a voice inside as every system in my body spoke with unanimous certainty: ‘You are going to die.’

Al the pain could go away in a mil isecond; al I had to do was stop, rap, throw away the bergen and sleep. I was bouncing off the limit of my physical endurance.

A lyric by The Kil ers popped into my head and offered twisted solace: ‘Smile like you mean it.’ I shouted the words like a lunatic with each breath. We final y crested a rise, contoured a wood and descended the ankle-smashing shingle of a dried riverbed. It was the hardest hour and a half of my life.

Moonlight bounced off the water of a reservoir ahead. The end was nigh and carried its own demons. Realising we would make it, my brain signal ed its helpful endorphins to switch off. As far as the grey matter was concerned, the serotonin and dopamine had done their job. My legs returned to pil ars of fire, the pit of my stomach tightened and gravity doubled.

I told Ninja to get lost. We couldn’t finish as a pair anyway, and I didn’t want to hold him up. I staggered the rest of the way, stopping for every third stomach cramp and dry retching the others on the move.

A golden head torch flickered in the distance. Voices … An unforgettable sense of euphoria grew inside me and made the pain irrelevant.

It was acutely personal. No car had carried me to this place, nor had luck. The training officer took my name and number at the final checkpoint. No one asked to check my Fucking Big Rock.

I slumped on my bergen in a shit state. One of the DSs handed me a brew with some ‘airborne smarties’ to kil the pain. It was the best tea I had ever tasted, fol owed later by the best shower in the world and the kind of sleep that money can’t buy. I never felt so alive.

We lost some strong guys during the final exercise. One had even fal en off a cliff, but managed to stagger into the next checkpoint, where he was withdrawn by the DS. Having passed one of the toughest military recruitment training courses in the world, the rest of us might have been forgiven for expecting some respite going into the continuation phase of our training, the skil s-at-arms for soldiering in smal tight-knit patrols.

Our new training staff introduced us to a Welsh cyborg by the name of Jones, a multiple Iron Man champion and uber-athlete. He had sunken eyes and the physique of a half-starved cage fighter. Alongside him was a stacked Geordie of an African persuasion on secondment from the Regular Army, there to impart the wisdom gained through his extensive and distinguished service. Geordie had encyclopaedic tattoos scrawled across his sizeable biceps and a penetrating glare that I tried hard to avoid.

Our new webbing, or fighting order, was far more advanced than the old belt kits, containing numerous pouches for carrying ammunition and survival equipment, but the trusty bergen lived on. When we were ordered to drop bergens and prepare to move I thought we’d arrived at Butlins.

‘You haven’t met Ken yet, have you?’ enquired a big Canadian bear who had joined our course.

‘No, who’s Ken?’

‘Can you hear that noise?’ asked Bear. ‘No.’

‘
Exactly
. He hasn’t arrived yet. You’l know it when he does.’

‘Right, stop yappin’,’ Jones mumbled. Then he ran off up a metal ic road.

Jones ran the legs off us, legs that stil remembered being reduced to jel y on that long final march across the hil s. Then the DS dined out on our lack of performance, our unworthiness and so on. A raft of new and unpleasant physical exercises would cure our il s. About twenty-five of us moved into a field and began doing fireman’s lifts, sit-ups, jumps, monkey crawls, endless press-ups, burpees, run, down, up, run, down, up.

A dangerous looking man appeared through a turnstile and strode towards us with clenched fists like he wanted to kick someone’s head in. He was hairless, in his mid forties, wearing the disco jungle pattern uniform popular with Paratroopers. At this point I was clinging on to Flash’s legs whilst he pedal ed his arms across the ground for the final leg of a wheelbarrow race. We col apsed in an undignified heap a few metres short, then crossed the line first and heaved in the oxygen.

‘Fackin’ listen in, fel as,’ the Para began.

Someone choked on their puke and Para’s neck stretched like a meerkat in search of the culprit.

‘Fackin’ pack it in when I’m talking, yeah? You lot better start
fackin’ sparking
, right. Some of you are treading water. Wel , your fackin’ faces don’t fit …’ and so forth.

This, I presumed, was Ken. We moved along to an innocent looking basin with a short sharp rise to a treelined hedgerow. At the foot was a pile of sandbags that needed shuttle sprinting to the top. After the third one, it was hard to look like you were trying when the grass was growing faster than you were moving.

By the sixth, you were utterly bol ocksed. Johnny fel out with chest pains. That made him a marked man in Ken’s book.

Eventual y our bodies could take no more. We were told we had a long way to go to be fit enough to handle the ranges; firing and manoeuvring at pace in tight formations, firing live rounds. You’ve guessed it: if we couldn’t handle it, we were out.