Going Commando (13 page)

‘Can we fill him in, Corporal?’ asked one lad like a character out of
Lord of the Flies
.

Whether they could have was open to debate, but I couldn’t be arsed to argue with these fuckers. ‘Do your best then,’ I said quite benignly.

As I had eight years before, when visiting my parents on their scummy estate, I laid down to await a kicking. Everyone stood around, not really sure what to do. One word from the corporal and they would have set upon me like wolves.

‘Get up, you fucking lunatic,’ ordered Corporal Nash.

I brushed myself down in a show of ambivalence, red with anger at my own uselessness.

‘Right, fuck off to the troop sergeant. You’re wasting my time. He can get fucking rid of you.’

I stormed away quickly, my boots crashing loudly into the gravel, glad I’d never have to see those twats again. It then occurred to me that I’d left my webbing in the weapon stance. I walked back, red with embarrassment.

‘What the fuck do you want now?’ asked Corporal Nash welcomingly.

‘I’ve forgot my webbing, Corporal.’

‘Fuck me, you’d forget your balls if they weren’t in a bag. Go on, hurry up, you’ve taken up enough of my time.’

I rushed back into the weapon stance, ensuring I made no eye contact with any occupant.
Now
I wouldn’t have to see them again.

I heard Corporal Nash start to talk again, masochistically hoping he was talking about me. However, he switched tone immediately as if distracted by swatting a fly. ‘Right then, fellas, let’s get this lesson started.’

By chance, my new troop sergeant was the Unsmiling Assassin from my previous troop. He had just been promoted and I was his first ‘opt out’ as a sergeant.

‘You want to opt out? Why?’

‘’Cos I think I’m too young, Sergeant.’

‘You got a job to go to?’

‘Yes,’ I lied.

He simply said, ‘Okay, we will get you in front of the company commander this afternoon.’

That was it, as easy as that? Were they not going to try to keep me in? Was I so shit that they were completely happy to get rid of me?

Maybe they were right. Maybe I
was
really shit. I was too young to do this anyway. I should be out enjoying myself; not cleaning shitty toilets and parading around a drill square like some lobotomised monkey.

In front of the company commander, I saluted and requested to opt out due to not being mature enough to complete commando training.

‘That may be true, Time,’ replied the company commander.
‘But many before you of the same age have had these same concerns and worries, yet have grown into men with extremely successful careers within the Corps. It would be a shame to see potential wasted by current immaturity.’

‘I agree, Sir. But I still want to leave.’ With stubbornness concreted into my soul, I was adamant.

As I was aged sixteen and still classed as a child, the company commander was obligated to my duty of care. Using his powers of discretion, he allowed me to opt out. I would be on a train home within forty-eight hours.

What the fuck had just happened? At 07.30 that morning, I admittedly didn’t want to be scrubbing a black toilet floor with a toothbrush and boot polish; but I hadn’t ever thought of opting out before. I had just stated it in a spite of anger.

Sure, I was totally pissed off and hadn’t handled my failure well. But opting out after all the effort I had put in? Here I was six hours later, booked onto a train to take me home. My career in the Royal Marines had lasted a whole fourteen weeks.

What was I going to do when I got home? I didn’t even feel as if I had a home. Further education wasn’t an option in October, and I was sure as hell not working in my mum and stepdad’s fish and chip shop. I didn’t want to end up smelling like a ginger girl’s crotch.

I phoned my mum to tell of recent events and her response was one of mild indifference. My stepdad’s was just as short.
It was up to me, but I had to get out and get a job when I returned.

My mind swirled, not accepting the events of the day. I once again cleared out my belongings to retreat to a sparse room for those who opted out, my own personal growlery. As the only occupant of a six-man room, I felt like the loneliest person in the world.

And for the first time since I could remember, I cried. I didn’t cry when my gran died, but here I sobbed uncontrollably like the failure I’d become.

The last full day of life in the Royal Marines was pretty easy. All I had to do was go through a leaving routine and hand back my kit and equipment.

Corporal Nash, the leader of the section I had gladly left, spotted me leaving my room.

‘Oi, Time, get here.’

Even with my impending departure, I doubled toward him instinctively.

‘So you are opting out?’ he said.

‘Yes, Corporal.’ My heels were firmly together in attention.

‘Why?’

‘I’m too young, Corporal.’ It was the truth. It was clear I was too immature for this commando life.

‘Maybe so, but you will grow up. I was sixteen when I joined. Fucking tough, innit? I felt like opting out too. But you know what? If I had I wouldn’t have had a clue what to
do. Whatever it was it wouldn’t have been half as much fun as being in the Corps. Stay in, son, and you’ll get your rewards. But then again, if you think you can’t hack it then leaving’s probably the best thing, innit?’

He walked away, throwing the gleaming metaphorical gauntlet down at my feet.

I sat on my bed with a couple of other guys, opt-outs from different troops who had just arrived.

At this point, I would like to say that I vanquished the inner demons that strangled my will to continue by reading Sun Tzu’s
The Art of War
, and the passage, ‘He who knows when he can fight and when he cannot, will be victorious.’ But I can’t.

It was Peter Gabriel and Kate Bush, who were playing on Radio 1. Their song, ‘Don’t Give Up’, had been played repeatedly over the last couple of weeks and now its words were all the more appropriate.

Music had always been a hugely important part of my life. If I hadn’t let peer pressure affect me, I could have made it as a professional musician – although the career path of a flugelhorn and descant recorder prodigy is somewhat limited.

But songs had always stirred my soul, a motivational spur, a jab of remembrance, an emotional crutch. I listened intently, and realised that Peter and Kate were right. He hadn’t been a regular feature in my music cassette collection, and her freaky-shrieky persona I wouldn’t find arousing until a few years later; but together their words on this track smashed me into the realisation that I didn’t want to leave.

I didn’t really want to opt out, and my dark mood had been an uncontrolled vehemence lashing out at my failure. I wasn’t
yet ready to handle my emotions properly, and now I realised this I was better prepared to carry on.

The remedial training that I’d done in Gibraltar Troop had been of a high standard and the corporal teaching us had asked why I’d failed Baptist Run in the first place. It was because I had let my suffering feet overrule the rest of my mind and body. Now rested and healed, the break in training had allowed my battered and bruised body to recover enough to complete physical activity without feeling as though my feet were stripped down by forty-grit sand paper.

I requested to see the CSM, who passed on my request to carry on to the company commander. Twenty-four hours after being told I could leave, I stood again in his office.

‘Back again, Time? You are taking up a lot of my busy schedule.’

‘Sir, I would like to un-opt out.’

‘I don’t even think that is a word, Time, but carry on.’

‘I have been thinking, Sir. I opted out because I was angry and didn’t want to fail. I want to give it another go.’

‘Okay, fair enough. Maybe you’ve grown up a little in this last twenty-four hours.’

Maybe he was correct.

‘I will approve your request. However, you will have to give me an undertaking. From here on in you are to give it your best shot. Do you understand?’

It wasn’t as though I’d regarded the experience like a Butlin’s holiday up to now.

‘Yes, Sir.’

‘Unless you are not deemed suitable to carry on, or you
break your spine, you will not be allowed to opt out again. Is that clear?’

This seemed a fair deal to me, even if I preferred not to break my back. So with my well-practised gear-packing routine slick as a newly wet road, I was transferred to yet another troop.

It’s amazing what confidence can do for your wellbeing. My new troop seemed more accepting of me, and I shared my room with Charlie and Fred – a couple of fellow Yorkshiremen, and our homes were all within ten miles of each other. Fred was the original morale-in-a box on account of his strange usage of the English language, making us laugh with his absurdities that weren’t even intentionally funny. I loved his ridiculous descriptive similes: ‘as ugly as a carrot’, ‘as daft as a saucepan’ and my all-time favourite, ‘as gay as a bummer’.

Charlie too, was a star. He at once made me feel welcome even as a disgusting back trooper. A man of integrity, and immense generosity, he possessed a charm and smile that could turn the straightest man to consider the love that dare not speak its name…

Actually, no, that is going a little too far, but he was and still is a man who I look upon with genuine fondness. He would go on to have a hugely successful career, surpassing even my high expectations of him. We shared the same humour, same taste in beer, and we had both witnessed the legendary council-estate crumbly white dog shit.

The training team seemed as tough as most, but for some
reason less vindictive than my previous corporals. My new section corporal was even shorter than me. There always seemed to be an undertone of humour when he spoke, leaving me unsure whether to smile or just stare blankly. If he was being funny and I didn’t smile, he’d suggest I didn’t find him funny and give me press-ups. If I smiled thinking he was intentionally being funny and he wasn’t, I’d get press-ups. In fact I did very well not to get press-ups whenever he spoke to me.

Exercise Baptist Run was repeated. Despite being a back trooper I was invited to share my bivvy with Fred.

‘I don’t want you to look like Barry No Mates,’ he said.

‘Don’t you mean Billy?’ I replied, appreciative of his skewed offer.

‘No, I say Barry. It reminds me of Barry Manilow. He’s not famous for having mates is he?’

And so this time, feeling like a confused audience member on a surreal TV show, I cavorted around Woodbury Common like a spring lamb, nailing the exercise, passing every test with flying colours. Finally, after much heartache, disappointment and cleaning, I had passed the first phase of training.

Our reward was a week’s adventure training in the beauty of Cornwall’s Penhale. Only a short drive from Newquay, it was where my first ever attempt at rock climbing took place.

When joining the Royal Marines on the first day, recruits receive a number of inoculations. One of those jabs is an anti-dancing serum. It doesn’t matter whether the recruit is Billy Elliot’s better dancing brother, the ability to combine commando operations with dance floor heroics becomes impossible, for it is written in the Royal Marines Commandments that thou
shalt dance like a twat and so deliberately perform buffoonery in a night club to:

I certainly couldn’t dance well. That is why at about 90ft, while climbing the cliff walls near Land’s End, I was surprised by my fantastic Shakin’ Stevens impression. Climbing can bring out the Shaky in all of us: limbs contorted at unnatural angles, strained muscles making alien movements, ensuring that when we’re perched on a small lip the width of a wafer mint, our toes send a domino effect throughout our struggling body.

Some climbers call it the Michael Jackson leg, but I’d never seen Jacko quiver like the 1980s’ Welsh rock ’n’ roll star. It starts with discomfort in a toe. It shakes slowly. You try to stop it, only making it shake with ever more vigour, then it moves to your foot, then your heel, then your calf. Within ten seconds of the first toe quake it has rippled to your knee and you look like a naked Eskimo, unable to stop trembling.

Should you be conversant with such a dodgy predicament you can divest even more sympathy when I simultaneously suffered an excruciating attack of piles. Not having a proctologist’s education, I don’t know the technical term for a piles attack, but when those haemorrhoids play up it feels as though the devil himself has shoved a red hot poker up my sphincter. So for my
Emma Freuds to have a quick peek at the outside world just as I was a trembling wreck, perched on a rock face, was bad timing.

My screams were at first received with concern, but as I explained my predicament to my belaying partner, my new PTI, and the rest of the lads from my new troop, laughter replaced compassion. With the pain subsiding to a level where I could move, I scaled the last few metres like a sweaty spider monkey and tried to adopt a position on the summit where my chalfonts would withdraw to the safety and warmth of my back passage.

Through this sort of misadventure, I got to know my new comrades in a far more relaxed and civilised environment. In this atmosphere I actually caught one of the training team smiling, and not because he was watching us suffer.

Reaching the fifteen-week mark allowed us to wallow in a job half-done. The Friday of week fifteen was Parents Day, an invitation to family members to come to CTC and see how their son/husband/boyfriend was coping and what he’d experienced in training so far. As we re-enacted physical training, weapon drills and fieldcraft skills to our highly impressed audience, for some reason we were no longer labelled ‘scrotes’, ‘fuckwits’ or ‘oxygen thieves’.

But my parents were too busy frying chips to attend. So, along with Jock, the only other parentless recruit, we sat alone like a pair of cast-offs in the NAAFI bar, watching parents socialising with each other, sharing conversations of obvious
hilarity with the recruits and the training team, who were wearing their civilised heads.