Going Commando (20 page)

He worked on the doors of a ‘fun pub’ in Scarborough, so I stuck with him. He would let me in without needing any ID, as I was his mate. I listened to his tales of derring-do, Falklands War heroics, and how he was generally the hardest man in NATO.

His dad apparently owned a large army surplus store in hometown Newcastle, so he could get me lots of ‘Gucci’ military kit really cheap, as I was his mate. I had no hesitation
in handing him £100 – a fortnight’s wages to me – so he could make me look like RoboMarine when I passed out and got drafted to a commando unit.

He even invited me to a big party he had organised where loads of hot, military-loving chicks were going to be, as I was his mate. Great! A proper party with grownups!

The party consisted of Kim, me, two girls from the fun pub and a cassette of Michael Jackson’s
Bad
album. I felt as uncomfortable as the two girls who were reluctant to dance with Kim, a very poor substitute for Jacko. He was more Peter Sutcliffe.

The girls left quite quickly, and I began to wonder what sort of bloke Kim really was. A few days later I called in to see him. I’d tried to distance myself but had left my expensive watch there after the crap party.

There was no answer at his apartment. I knocked on the next door; it belonged to a girl I’d met on occasion, so I expected a smiling welcome.

‘You fucking bastard!’ she screamed, at a volume you know others can hear. ‘If you don’t tell me where he is I swear I’ll call the coppers and get you done as well.’

My conflict management skills not yet polished, I struggled to fathom her ire. Not the most eloquent of communicators, all I could come back with was, ‘What the fuck are you on about?’

‘Don’t protect him. You’re his brother. You know where he is, the fucking thieving bastard.’

‘Firstly, I’m not his brother. Secondly…’

I didn’t have a ‘secondly’. My mouth was well and truly in
front of my brain and didn’t really comprehend the situation. I calmed slightly.

‘I’ve just come to get my watch from him. I left it here the other day.’

As I was believable, her anger subsided. Kim and I did have different accents and, unless I was the crappiest burglar ever, I’d hardly return to the scene of the crime within a few days.

‘So what’s happened?’

‘We must have all been at work when he came, ’cos when we all returned our flats had been broken into, including mine. He’s robbed everyone, turned over all our private stuff, went through me knicker drawer and he even broke open the gas and leccy meters.’

‘Frigging hell, that’s awful. But how do you know it was him?’

‘When the coppers came, they checked his flat. He’d cleared out all of his stuff and done a runner, so it was obviously him. That’s not the worst of it, though. The only thing left was his bed. Guess what they found underneath it?’

‘A watch and some military clothing?’ I asked hopefully.

‘No, a claw hammer and a crow bar.’

‘Ah, the toolkit of any self-respecting serial killer,’ I replied, an attempt at levity.

‘It’s not fucking funny, he’s nicked all me vibrators.’

Now that was funny.

In the vain hope he may have left some stuff other than sex toys, I tracked down the two girls from the fun pub. Unsurprisingly, he’d left nothing for me but left them with tall tales of going on a secret mission in Angola.

If Kim was ever in the military, it seemed he was the sort that the establishment probably wish they had never trained. He was a walking argument for the introduction of psychological profiling.

Years later, a programme was screened documenting a group of ragtag mercenaries fighting in the Balkans, doing their utmost to become a laughing stock to anyone with even a week’s worth of military training. My jaw literally dropped when the main character turned out to be a big, fat Geordie called Kim. He even got a book deal out of it, so I hope a hundred quid from the royalties he earned is winging its way in the post to me. I’ve been waiting a while, so I’ll blame the Royal Mail.

Despite getting matey with a maniac, being laid up at home was becoming a bore. So I did what any seventeen-year-old Royal Marines recruit would do to aid the recovery of his sore ankle: I ran eighteen miles with a bergan on my back.

Initially, I only planned to run to Filey, some eight miles away. Yet as I passed the lines of caravan parks with impressionable teenage girls looking from afar, thinking I was some sort of super-marine or sweat-drenched imbecile, I felt good. So good, in fact, I carried on to the small coastal town of Flamborough.

While I did see myself as a bit of a wimp on account of doing the route in trainers and not boots, finishing it with only a little ankle soreness was a fillip for my confidence. Of course, I still had the small matter of the forthcoming commando tests, but I’d be fit and refreshed. I was eager to return.

With no exercise to recover from, 523 Troop had a slight advantage over other troops. Their bodies, like mine, had recovered and we were upbeat for the test week ahead.

First up was the endurance course. I was over the moon when I was pushed into a team with Charlie, as he was my morale crutch and we knew we’d spur each other on.

I needed it. I always struggled on this test. My times were never spectacular. Seventy-one minutes was the time in which we had to complete the course, and I’d finished it in under seventy minutes just the once. I was never going to get a quick time, only a pass time.

But for someone who only wanted to see light at the end of this very long (and wet) tunnel, another chink appeared as I fired the last successful round down the range knowing I had vanquished my greatest adversary. Where I had broken down on the Tarzan assault course three weeks before, I now flew over as if my arse was on fire. As my strongest test, I completed the pass-out in less than ten minutes, one of the quickest in the troop.

On Saturday afternoon, I went ashore with Fred and Charlie a happy man. So happy, in fact, that I didn’t buy any green string. That morning, we had run the nine-miler and I’d even pulled someone along, encouraging them to keep up. All there was left to complete was the thirty-miler – again. Even though I’d already passed and didn’t need to repeat, finishing the march to be handed the green beret was the best way to receive it.

The big man upstairs must have looked over us with sympathy, as the moor lay resplendent in spring sunshine, flowers swaying to the whispers of the breeze. Light greys of granite stood out proudly from the vivid greens that occasionally darkened under the shadow of a cloud passing across an azure sky.

Navigation was simple, and many checkpoints could be seen from afar. Our syndicate was made up of some the biggest characters in the troop, and as the thirty-miler was, by definition, an endurance test, we made the time go quicker by joke-sharing, poor song choices and the odd comical fall.

Ryder’s Hill was still a bitch, but we ascended in cruise control, high on expectation. In just over six hours, we double marched to Cross Furzes. My heart pounded, not just from exertion, but from excitement and pride. There once again stood a line of welcoming commandos, applauding their future brothers.

This time I was to be one of their brethren. This time I had completed the tasks at hand. This time I stood to attention and saluted, before being handed my green beret.

I placed it on my head for the first time. I was no longer 5’6” (and a bit). I was ten feet tall.

King’s Squad is all about promenading around camp wearing a peak cap, drill uniform, white lanyard and contented smile.

We could march smartly around camp knowing recruits would look upon us with awe and wonderment. King’s
Squad seemed to be even more respected than the green-bereted commandos around camp. Now I was one of them, I marched smarter than ever before and had an inner lust for life, knowing I’d never have to crawl through those fucking endurance course tunnels again.

Another rite of passage in this last two weeks was to get that elusive tattoo. It wasn’t necessarily written in Corps lore that you had to be adorned with ink, but many thought it only right and proper to get something that would make them an obvious target, should they get naked on the streets of West Belfast. The most common, and admittedly the cheapest, option was to get a simple blood group tattoo on the shoulder. Fred had chosen this option.

‘I don’t want anything too bootneck,’ he explained.

‘So tell me Fred,’ Charlie asked. ‘What other groups outside of the military would need to know their blood groups and have them as a tattoo?’

Fred pondered for a while. ‘Haemophiliacs.’

This was a fair point, but Charlie was one of a few who thought ‘tats’ were a bit shit. ‘Okay, so why have a tattoo? You’ve got dog tags to wear around your neck for any medic needing to know your blood group. And what happens if you get your arm with the tattoo blown off?’

‘Well, what happens if your neck gets blown off?’ retorted Fred, a little quicker than he should have.

My favourite was the classic British bulldog wearing a green beret. Bulldogs have a bad reputation. Noted as the poster dog for right wing nationalism, I couldn’t think of a more ridiculous choice to represent our country. Bulldogs,
admittedly, are cute as puppies but the term ‘bulldog chewing a wasp’ wasn’t meant as a compliment.

Aesthetics aside, bulldogs often have hip and respiratory problems, can’t run particularly quickly over distances longer than a school ruler, and rank seventy-eighth out of eighty breeds when tested for intelligence. Hardly the attributes that a nation aspires to, but as long as it’s got the word ‘British’ in front of it then it’s imperialism all the way.

Often surrounded by the words ‘Royal Marines Commando’ (or ‘Pooyal’, as displayed on a good friend’s arm) the green-bereted bulldog actually looked rather swish, despite the pooch not earning the right to wear it. The tattooist in nearby Exmouth, through locality, had plenty of practice doing this particular piece, unlike the lad who thought his local tattooist in Middlesbrough could conjure up something just as impressive. Unfortunately, the tattooist didn’t really understand the difference between a British bulldog and a ferret, which isn’t quite so patriotic unless you come from my county.

The problem with getting a tattoo done at the end of training is that many lads have lost weight through the commando phase and are skinnier than usual. Once they pass out and join a commando unit, many hit the weights and grow arms that look better proportioned on a rhinoceros. On such limbs the tattoo metamorphosises from a bulldog with a green lid to a Shetland pony wearing a green duvet on its stretched head.

I sauntered down with intent to see whether there was anything I could scar my underage body with, preferably that didn’t consist of military iconography. A black panther eating
a snake was rather alluring, unlike the hand swallows many of the miners back home displayed. My personal finances would also dictate my choice: with £10 and a tissue in my pocket, the chances were slim of getting an epic tattoo across the width of my back depicting the battle between David and Goliath, the metaphor for vanquishing my struggles throughout training. So I persuaded the confused tattooist to draw a ‘No entry’ road sign on my arse, using a paint pot to draw a circle, to warn off anyone at my future commando unit from trying to give me a welcome present I wasn’t keen on.

Having a sore arse for a couple of days didn’t pose any particular problems in King’s Squad. We spent most of our time on the drill square without anything that resembled a weapon, until it was deemed we were to be introduced to the new SA80 rifle brought into general service. But when I say ‘resembled a weapon’, the initial issue L85 SA80 didn’t appear to be a real one.

Based upon the EM2 weapon prototyped in the early 1950s, the SA80 IW (individual weapon) and LSW (light support weapon) were produced in 1975. One would have thought that after nearly a decade of academic research, detailed fine-tuning and stringent testing, they’d have come up with something more useful than tits on a fish.

It was if the R&D guys had gone down to the local MFI furniture store to get ideas on gunsmithing. It was a flat-pack version of a weapon, and came with instructions that needed to be read a hundred times before anyone could make head or tail of them. It had infinitely too many small parts for a general service weapon that could be painfully knelt on. Once
assembled, however, it did look good. Yet it was as robust as, well, a flat-pack wardrobe.

Since inception it has caused controversy, and initially its faults were many. Some of the more typical faults we found within the first two weeks of issue were:

The SUSAT optical sight: while exceedingly accurate on a range on a nice summer’s day, its glass would mist up as soon as the temperature changed by a degree or a slightly grey cloud came within a mile of the shooter.

The sling: seemingly based on the Rubik’s Cube and a spider’s web, was an overcomplicated series of straps designed to allow the weapon to be carried in a variety of ways. It was impressive for its aesthetics, but our initial ‘ooh’, ‘aah’ and ‘that’s good’ stopped once the novelty turned to realisation that, apart from the default mode of carriage, the other variants were not operationally sound. I can count on one stump how many times I split the sling straps and carried the SA80 down my back; it’s certainly not the quickest way to get the muzzle pointed for dispatching outgoing death. To assemble it was bad enough, but should you make a slight mistake and incorrectly thread the buckle the weapon would fall embarrassingly to the floor. It would also crash to the floor should the rubber buttplate at the stock end of the weapon not be secured properly by screws I wouldn’t trust on a toilet-roll holder.

The buttplate: made from something resembling green moulding clay, it was so malleable that the rear sling swivel would often be pulled out by the weight of the weapon.

The hand guard: made from a brittle plastic seemingly left
over from when Action Man manufacturers were trying to cut costs.

The magazine release catch: aptly named, every time it would catch on something the magazine would release – usually by accident. It stood out like a racing dog’s bollocks; every time the protrusion was knocked, rubbed or given a stern look, it would cause the magazine to fall out of its housing, usually unbeknown to the operator of the weapon. A weapon without a magazine full of ammunition is as much use as an ashtray on a motorbike. At least if you hit anyone around the head with an ashtray, it probably won’t break.