Going Commando (6 page)

We were under the command of ‘Pusser’, the slang word for ‘the service’. Everything would have the prefix ‘Pusser’, so a service-issue suitcase would become a ‘Pusser’s grip’. Anyone who was 100 per cent service through and through would be known as ‘Pusser’s’.

I never did find out who Harry was, but he was talked about often. Any adjective could have the prefix ‘Harry’ added to it, and be suffixed with ‘-ers’, ‘-bats’, or ‘-pigs’. For example: to expand on the word ‘wazz’ being slang for ‘good’, we could say ‘Harry Wazzbats’. To be cold: ‘Harry Icepigs’. Without money: ‘Harry Skinters’. Ronnie was Harry’s brother, so if Harry was being overworked we could use him instead, e.g. hot: ‘Ronnie Redpigs’.

The toilets were now ‘heads’, and steak and kidney puddings ‘babies’ heads’. Conversely, our actual heads became ‘grids’, ‘nappers’ or ‘fat ones’.

Jackspeak convention decrees that anyone with the surname ‘Smith’ will be rechristened ‘Smudge’, a ‘Brown’ will become ‘Buster’, a ‘Bell’ will be ‘Dinger’. Anyone who shared a famous surname would have their real first name destroyed forever and replaced with their famous counterpart’s. Dave Forsyth, for instance, would be known forevermore as ‘Bruce’. There are men who I was extremely close to, yet I never knew their real first names. Some surnames, such as ‘Driver’, could have a myriad of new first names attached such as ‘Screwy’, or even, ‘This par-four is short enough for me to use a two-iron rather than my’, although, in truth, I rarely heard the last one.

We also learnt how to talk in abbreviations and acronyms:

SLR – Self-Loading Rifle.

GPMG – General Purpose Machine Gun.

CEMO – Combat Equipment Marching Order.

LCU – Landing Craft Utility.

MUPPET – Most Useless Person Pusser Ever Trained.

So, despite not even being in a dogwatch, within two shakes of a donkey’s flip-flop we gobbed off in new tongues trying not to grip the shit of the pit monsters attempting to get their nappers down and bash out the zeds while we glopped goffers or NATO standard wets and scranning nutty while spinning hoofing dits about mega essence or rats’ gronks and pashes we had trapped while Harry Mingbats as strawberry mivvies - gen.

Every waking minute was taken up with the militaristic ethos and incessant subliminal messages to condition us. It was like a religious experience, and we were rapidly being converted. Our DL was the military equivalent of the Rev Jim Jones. While I don’t think he wanted to give us poisoned Kool-Aid, the Pusser’s orange cordial came close.

I actually looked forward to our PT lessons, even though pre-workout nerves always forced me to evacuate my bowels first. On the PRC, we’d been put through the USMC physical test to gauge our fitness, and now we attempted as many press-ups and sit-ups we could muster in two minutes, and how many pull-ups we could max out on. Having the body weight of a malnourished puppy, my achievements were better than average – although on the 200m shuttle sprint, my short legs left me some way behind the quicker lads.

Finishing off, we trotted out of the camp to do a basic fitness test run: a one-and-a-half mile troop run/walk to be
completed in fifteen minutes, which to all intents and purposes was a warm-up to the return run, where we would race the same distance back to camp as individuals. Although we had eleven-and-a-half minutes to complete it, if we’d taken that long on our PRC we wouldn’t have made it there.

I was near the back, completing it in eight minutes thirty seconds, over two minutes behind the racing snakes at the front. My time was similar to that on my PRC, but then I’d completed it in comfortable footwear. Here I ran in those cardboard-thin daps, over tarmac and asphalt, where treading on anything resembling a pebble would throw you off balance in pain. Just to check we weren’t loafing, we then did it all again for good measure. No wonder many recruits suffered shin splints and stress fractures from running in those things. It was the only time as a Royal Marine we would ever do a BFT (battle fitness training) in trainers; thereafter, it would always be in those RMHCB boots designed by the Italian Mafia.

Physical training at this stage was known as IMF – initial military fitness. We dressed smartly in our pusser’s daps, stretchy socks that I’d only previously seen on schoolgirls, and thick linen shorts that could only be sufficiently ironed at the same temperature as the earth’s core. To complete our IMF kit, we had a choice of either green or white rugby-type shirt. When I first looked at myself in the mirror in this get-up, it made me look less like a commando than an extra in some Ealing comedy about a public-school sports day.

IMF was about as far removed from expected physical training as one could imagine. The gym floor, I only now
noticed, was a huge game of dot to dot where each of us would stand over our designated spot then, upon command, walk around the gym, first in a sort of stiff marching motion then with one leg tensed to slam into the floor, making us all look like we wore calipers.

Upon returning to our spots, the PTI stood proud on his dais before demonstrating arm movements to improve our coordination in the style of a tic-tac man at the races. It was beyond me how this was going to make me a commando, but it seemed that this warm-up was just a distraction from the real exercise. Around the walls stood those wooden beams that in school we called ‘apparatus’. They would be the framework upon which we would conduct countless sit-ups, press-ups and pull-ups, both in time to the PTI’s numbered calls and in our own time, where we would push out the designated number in the quickest possible time: a quick fifty here, a slow fifty there, over and over again until every sinew of muscle had been stretched, pulled and tweaked until it screamed for mercy.

Finally, my favourite, the rope climbing, would see us scale the 30ft ropes using a highly-efficient climbing method where the legs did the majority of the work, thankfully making my weedy grip of only minimal importance. We would wrap ourselves around the ropes halfway back down to make safe and then invert ourselves so we descended upside down. As I hung like a bat from the rope I smiled, knowing this was the stuff I wanted to be doing, the first time I’d done anything I considered commando-like. One thing I didn’t want to do was follow the examples of some lads who found the rope
climbing overly difficult, one falling head first down to a sickening crash on the hard floor.

‘I said controlled descent, Lofty,’ shouted the primary PTI in the direction of the whimpering, snotty heap at the foot of the rope. ‘Once you’ve stopped making strange noises, we’ll think about getting you some help.’

‘Don’t bleed on my floor,’ added a secondary.

For some reason the nod, bleeding from a head wound, didn’t see the funny side; probably not least because the bloodstain was going to make washing his IMF top a whole lot harder.

MUCH TO MY disappointment, we did very little of anything that resembled soldiering while in induction.

We wouldn’t even get our hands on a weapon until week three. But in those first two weeks I learnt how to march quite smartly in pseudo-unison with fifty or so others, feeling proud that I could complete complex tasks such as putting one leg in front of the other, turning and stopping.

On a drill square, even walking properly is difficult. Military marching is a mental balancing act of walking at a 30” pace, crashing your heels firmly into the tarmac parade ground and swinging your arms level with the shoulders, elbows locked, thumbs pressed hard on top of fists, head immobile on your
shoulders – unless we were trying out the complex new move of saluting to the left/right, all in time to the howling sarcasm of the DL. According to him, when anyone marched slightly wrongly a village was deprived of its idiot, or Joey Deacon was missing his less able brother.

Prior to getting mobilised, the drill square was the scene of many a tense inspection. The DL would slowly make his way along the front rank. Due to my height I’d been positioned in the middle of the second rank, so I had plenty of time to gauge his mood. Even if the recruit was immaculate he would suffer.

DL to recruit (who returns his look): ‘Do you fancy me?’

‘No, Corporal.’

‘So you think I’m ugly then?’

‘No, Corporal.’

‘So you do fancy me then. Give me fifty for being a noshbag.’

So the previously immaculate recruit, was not only accused of lusting after the drill sergeant, but now irrevocably creased up by press-ups on the tarmac of the parade square.

Anything even slightly less than perfect was picked up on, especially if it was fluff on our ‘wee beret’. The kind of thing a normal human could only see with the aid of an electron microscope stood out like a sore thumb to the DL.

‘Do you know why it’s called a wee beret, Lofty?’ the DL would ask, the blue beret swinging on his finger.

‘Because I have a small head, Corporal?’

‘
Weeeee!
’ the DL would shriek, throwing it twenty metres over the adjacent hedge.

The guardian of the drill square was the ‘first drill’. The bastion of everything ceremonial in the Corps, he was a sternly
anhedonic warrant officer whose presence made everyone extra nervous, despite his head looking like a suet pudding. His voice had all the tenderness of an air-raid klaxon, and his beady eye was cast not only us but also the instruction of our DL. Only years later would we find out that the DL we looked up to as one step up from God wasn’t overly respected by his peers, and was actually known as the ‘last drill’.

At the time, some bright spark at the MOD (there’s a lot of them, apparently) decided to reintroduce puttees for a trial period. Puttees are hessian wraps designed to protect the ankle as a buffer between the bottom of battle fatigues and boots. They were so old fashioned that they were introduced around the time the Dead Sea first went sick, and taken from service not long after. We wore them with our denims, but only for drill in our initiation weeks. Our DL had somehow forgotten to tell us how to put them on correctly, possibly due to not really knowing; after all, they had been discontinued way before even his time.

I ended up just wrapping them around in an ‘I’ve broken my leg’ sort of way, gaining a B grade in first-aid bandage. It left me looking like a cross between a Japanese sniper and a 1950s golfer. Take a few steps and they would unravel, leaving me looking like the Andrex puppy.

On parade, a marine turns up wearing only one.

Inspecting officer: ‘Why are you only wearing one puttee?’

Marine: ‘I could only find one, sir.’

Inspecting officer: ‘Well, don’t you think it would look better with no puttees?’

Marine: ‘Yes sir, I do.’

Inspecting officer: ‘Well, sort it out, then.’

The marine bends down to untie his puttee, unwrapping the yards of cloth. As the last of the puttee comes away he finds his other one underneath wrapped around the same ankle…

As a sixteen-year-old I was chuffed when I got picked up on a drill inspection for not shaving correctly. However, pride in my newfound manliness was slightly dampened when I had to run back to the accommodation to fetch shaving kit and a mess tin full of cold water to re-shave at the side of the drill square, while fellow recruits ran around the square for misdemeanours such as dull boots, dirty brasses or having uneven ears.

Still to this day I wonder at the relevance of those many hours on the drill square. Sure, we needed to know how to march and salute. Discipline, order and team building were integral, but the military ethos and fieldwork can facilitate those mechanics. The historical importance of drill cannot be ignored, but in today’s theatre of war it pales into total insignificance. Maybe we just like to do it for traditional purposes, Pavlov’s dogs performing to the crowds at Buckingham Palace. But as a teenager in my first few weeks of training, I continued unabated in my quest to complicate something as easy as walking.

Our first venture out of CTC was Exercise First Step. It could hardly be regarded as a commando operation; it was more like a camping trip to instill in us the basics of building a
low-lying tactical shelter known as a bivvy, and how to cook our rations.

Again, washing was an inherent part of these field lectures – this time conducted by two corporals to whom we’d been briefly introduced when taking our oath. A bivvy poncho separated the pair. The corporal at the front had his arms hidden, replaced by the arms of the corporal behind. Watching the rear man operating blind, undressing the corporal at the front, was hilarious, especially when shaving. The shaving brush swathed foam all over the face of the first corporal, and then his nose and cheeks. It was evident that not only did the corporals have a sense of self-effacing humour, there was trust between the two – especially when the rear guy cleaned under his mate’s foreskin and removed shavings of processed cheese, which he then placed in his mouth.

I was bivvied up with Hopkins. Our friendship blossomed after Elliott had been swallowed by his locker, and we’d built up a bit of a bond. Hopkins was the total opposite of me. He had lived in Germany, Hong Kong and Gibraltar; I’d been to Ibiza once on a package holiday. My real father was a mysterious Spaniard in the UK on a building project, who seemingly liked impregnating young waitresses but not the responsibility of sticking around. His father was a respected lieutenant colonel in the British Army, who had sent Hopkins to boarding school from the age of eight. He’d learned to look after himself from an early age and, while not academically outstanding, had passed his ‘A’ levels. He was a good-looking bastard as well, and his physical prowess was pretty impressive. He had the body of an Olympic gymnast,
and already seemed to find the gym sessions slightly less arduous than most of us.

There was one small problem. He didn’t want to be there. The youngest of four brothers, the others had all joined the army as officers and, as per family tradition, he was expected to follow suit. So he decided to join the Corps, not as an officer but as a ground-level marine, just to buck the trend. While his father was happy that he’d at least joined the military, Hopkins had only done it out of family duty. It was going to be a long thirty weeks for him.

But he had a coolness born from having done this sort of thing for the last ten years and, as a mandatory member of his school’s cadet force, Exercise First Step was just another weekend for him, unlike me who’d only spent nights out under canvas in holiday parks with drunken aunts and uncles. It was like having a personal tutor, and the ease with which he took to all the field tasks made me think he’d be promoted not long after training. It was he, not the training team, who really showed me how to put up a bivvy, and it was he who showed me the delights of a twenty-four-hour ration pack.

Single-man ‘ratpacks’ were issued to troops with little logistical back-up, and as commandos we came under this definition. They came in four menus, mouthwateringly named A, B, C and D, and as an eight-man group we were given two of each to try.

Menu C was steak and kidney pudding, which contained mostly lumps of fat and gristle, and kidneys that tasted like they’d been on dialysis for a few months. Menu A – chicken curry – was my favourite. However, it was best eaten during
the day: when the tin was opened our bodies would light up in the reflection of the day-glo orange gloop. If opened under the cover of darkness it would instantly give away our position.

Other tins contained either a bacon burger or a bacon grill. Giving them different names was an obvious ploy to make us think we were getting variety. None of it mattered much, anyway. After Exercise First Step we were only ever issued menu B but given two choices – eat it or starve.

The ubiquitous confectionary pack consisted of Arabic ‘Rolos’ that even in the heat of the summer broke teeth, or even worse, a packet of out-of-date Spangles. In the civilian world these actually tickled the palate; when given the military makeover, the wrapper was fused to the sweets and it was physically impossible to unwrap them. During any given night in the field, you’d hear the constant spitting of plastic from guys sucking wrapped Spangles on sentry.

As a biscuit connoisseur, ‘Biscuits Brown’ and ‘Biscuits Fruit AB’ were a great disappointment. Both retained the consistency of low-grade cardboard; the fruit AB was just a poor imitation of the world-famous garibaldi. If the Italian revolutionary had offered the military version to his republican troops they’d have hung him in mutiny.

Finally, there was a sundries pack containing bitter coffee granules that would stick to Teflon, teabags so bad they were only used as the filling for homemade cigarettes, and a book of matches that struggled to light oxygen on a still day. If the wind rose above 0.5 on the Beaufort scale, we’d have to resort to windproof matches that were great if you could light things within a micro-second. To complete this plastic bag of useful
items there was John Wayne toilet paper – so called because it took shit from no one.

To add finesse to this delectable culinary experience, we always cooked on the woodland floor which was covered in a carpet of pine needles. These would stick to any moist surface, and made it almost impossible to eat or drink anything without a side serving of the spiky little bastards. Everything we ate became infused with the taste of pine needles and like anything sharp, they weren’t particularly pleasant to swallow.

Watching guys cook was probably akin to commando
Masterchef
. I say ‘probably’ because I never watched anyone – I was too busy cooking in my own personal hell to bother about anyone else. It wouldn’t have been so bad if we’d had all day to cook everything up on a four-ring gas hob. Unfortunately, even on a leisurely day, we had about fifteen minutes with a small, bear trap-like stove that used hexamine blocks as fuel. These blocks gave off fumes that could kill a horse, though luckily they didn’t burn for very long – certainly not long enough to properly cook food, but enough to heat the metal stove to a temperature that took the skin from your hands in the mad rush to clear up after eating.

Invariably, I would end up stuffing half my rations back into my large pack, leaving even less room for the next lot. Often, we ate our rations cold to save time. In the summer this wasn’t a problem, but as training progressed through the colder months, hot food would become an emotional, as well as physical, spur.

Of course, after the speed eating and drinking that left
indigestion burbling away within our sweaty bodies, every culinary accessory had to be spotlessly clean. If even a grain of salt was noted on the KFS fork on field inspection, then food poisoning would be a welcome alternative to the punishment we’d receive. If the merest speck of black should be found on a mess tin, pain followed. Unfortunately, whether by accident or perverse design, hexamine blocks leave a sticky black residue on the base of a mess tin slightly harder to remove than caramelised soot mixed with woodchip wallpaper. It wasn’t too bad if you got to it while still damp, but if you let it dry it was like removing week-old Weetabix from a bowl.

Despite all of this, eating rations and assembling a bivvy was quite exhilarating for me. I thought myself a tad nearer to being a commando as I’d used my webbing as a pillow and, although non-tactical, spent most of the night with one eye open, waiting to batter to death any approaching enemy with my new weapon: a mini-baton made from the packet of Arabic Rolos.

Other than the four-mile run back to camp wearing new boots that started to slice up my feet from the ninth pace, Exercise First Step was the easiest thing I’d yet done, mainly due to Hopkins. But for him, just being there must have been extremely difficult.

Back at CTC I did a lot more physical exercise: more walking in circles in various well-pressed, if ill-fitting, uniforms; saluting; trying to remember my new first name; cleaning everything from the cheese under my foreskin to the soles of my boots to the inside of a toilet. More than once, I reflected that if I failed Royal Marines training I’d be able to
start my own cleaning empire and call it something ridiculous like the Gleam Team.

What I didn’t do much of was sleep. On nights when I did manage to get to bed before 03.00, the DL would invariably come in and wake us with some important task like reciting Royal Marines Victorian Cross winners, or chanting the weight of a 7.62mm self-loading rifle.

One night, he came in offering a nighttime snack. ‘Anyone like a teacake?’ he said, cheerfully.

Elliott, keen to redeem himself after the locker incident, bravely accepted his offer. Depending on where you come from in the UK, a teacake is a current bun, a bread roll or a scone-like pastry. I don’t know anywhere other than CTC where a teacake would be a large lump of butter atop a dry teabag. Elliott ate it. It was better than many of the disgusting items that would pass my lips in the years to come.