Out in the Army: My Life as a Gay Soldier (4 page)

Inside one of the boys, it appeared, had had a full breakdown
and was crying and shouting uncontrollably. He was beyond the point of calming and I shouted at some of the other boys to get help.

Written on the wall behind the boy in thick black ink were the words ‘RYAN IS A FAG!’ and it was obvious to us all that the graffiti was the cause of his current state.

Soon enough, the training staff arrived and told us all to return to our bed spaces. We weren’t told politely either. I will always remember the enraged look on Corporal Campbell’s face, the corporal in charge of 3 Section, as he looked down at Ryan and back at us all.

Within thirty minutes, the remainder of the platoon staff had been called back in and were having, from what we could hear, a one-way conversation with the platoon commander, Captain Kilpatrick.

We heard the office door fling open and one of the corporals screamed, ‘Corridor!’ The entire platoon quickly scrambled out of various bed spaces and mustered in the long hallway ready for news.

Captain Kilpatrick exited the office and stood before us.

‘You pin your ears back, fuckers, and you pin them back good!’ His voice reverberated through the corridor.

‘In 6 Platoon, I do not stand for bullying. In the army, we DO NOT stand for bullying. You little fuckers think you’re going to pass out and become soldiers, well, I’m telling you now: YOU ARE FUCKING NOT!’

It was really bad; the worst to date. We’d been bawled at plenty over the course of the year, but this was different. This was the platoon commander being called in to deal with something late at night, hours after he’d finished for the day. He wanted blood and he promised those who were responsible that they would pay for it massively.

We were ordered back to our rooms and told to sit in silence until instructed otherwise. I returned to my room, where the boys began whispering rumours about what was going on.

‘WHARTON!’ The platoon sergeant’s voice screamed from the office.

What the fuck? What on earth did they want to speak to me about? I had absolutely nothing to do with whatever 3 Section had been getting up to in that room of theirs.

All the boys in my room looked at me. It was written all over their faces; they thought I’d written that horrible sentence on Ryan’s wall. Furthermore, I knew everyone else in the platoon would all be thinking exactly the same thing. I hurried myself to the office door and stood there like a rabbit in the headlights.

‘Get in here, Wharton. And close the door!’

I was alone in the office with the platoon sergeant. The other platoon staff were elsewhere, probably making sure Ryan wasn’t doing anything silly. I was invited to pull up a chair, something that had never happened before to anyone. Platoon offices were no place for recruits. I eyed up the personal effects and pictures the sergeant had on his desk: pictures of a wife, two young
children
. It was the first time I’d considered this man, who we each feared and admired in equal breath, as someone other than the army action man he’d portrayed himself to be.

‘What’s going on with Junior Soldier Ryan?’

‘I don’t know, Corporal O’Horse. It wasn’t me!’ I was terrified I was about to be booted out of the army for bullying somebody I’d rarely spoken with.

‘I know it wasn’t you, you idiot. Ryan says you’re his only friend. He says you’re the only person who doesn’t bully him.’

I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. Ryan had told the platoon staff that everyone hated him and that I was his only friend. Ryan had made me out to be a godsend that stuck up for
him daily and took an active interest in his welfare. The truth was, however, I’d barely spoken with him; I didn’t particularly like him very much and I certainly didn’t consider him a friend. Why would he say those things to the platoon sergeant?

‘Is he gay?’ the sergeant asked. The memory of his first address to us all flashed across my mind. He’d made it very clear that he didn’t like gay people. But how on earth would I know the answer to his question?

‘I have no idea, Corporal O’Horse. He’s never spoken about anything like that to me.’

As self-centred as it now sounds, I realised at that very moment that for the previous ten or so months none of us had held a grown-up conversation with the man I was in the middle of talking with. I felt good that I’d managed to break down some institutional barrier that prevented platoon sergeants and recruits from having grown-up discussions. I was helping with the enquiry as to what had occurred earlier in the evening. For a few minutes, I was a little more important than I’d possibly ever been.

He asked me again if I wanted to tell him who’d been bullying Ryan, but away from saying that pretty much everyone picked on him for one reason or another, I told him I wasn’t of any further use to him.

Junior Soldier Ryan was officially the smallest, weakest and youngest-looking recruit in the whole platoon. He would always finish last. If anybody was late in the morning it was likely to be him and if something went wrong, which it often did, he’d resort to crying straight away. Knowing what I know now, I’d say the army wasn’t suitable for him, but back then I guess I just thought he was a bit of a wuss, constantly letting the side down and causing us trouble.

The army, rightly or wrongly, puts its recruits in situations where ‘it pays to be a winner’. The number of times I’ve heard
that line shouted at soldiers over the past ten years is unreal. If somebody in a team, in this example 6 Platoon, is failing or letting the side down, the entire team is punished in the hope that it will make the individual responsible realise his actions have affected everybody. This usually makes that individual unpopular and often results in some other consequence later on, a beating or some other form of bullying from the boys in his section.

After I was unable to provide the platoon sergeant with answers, he decided that we would all be punished until someone owned up to writing on Ryan’s wall. What followed was hours of misery, beginning with a run down the six flights of stairs and outside into the rain. Once there, and the sergeant could see us out of his office window, we were made to run back up the stairs and stand to attention in the corridor. This was repeated for some time. He then kept us stood in the corridor in silence, soaked and out of breath, for what seemed like hours. Eventually he sent us back to our rooms to arrange our lockers, which held all the equipment we used and which had to be kept to an immaculate standard. He inspected us an hour later, by which time it was gone 1 a.m. We had to be up at six!

After the locker inspection, and just as I was sure it couldn’t get any worse, he made us all change into different orders of dress, thus destroying the locker lay-outs we’d just spent an hour arranging. We were experiencing what is affectionately known in the army as a beasting.

The clock ticked past 2 a.m. and while everyone was
changing
into chemical warfare outfits with respirators affixed for the second time, Ryan went to the platoon office and asked to speak with the sergeant privately. Five minutes later, it was all over. We were pulled into the corridor and told it was finished, the truth had emerged.

Robertshaw from 3 Section told me in the shower afterwards
that Ryan had admitted to writing on his wall himself. It was him all along. Crying out for attention, I suppose. The news filled everyone with anger, but everyone knew that, ultimately, we’d collectively pushed him to it. The following morning Ryan left the army and was never seen again.

I’d love to tell you that I pondered over the events of that night for days and weeks after, but, to be honest, twenty-four hours later we’d all moved on. Basic training was just so
time-consuming
. A long time after, I recalled the events over some beers while away on a course with other soldiers and it occurred to me that maybe Ryan was gay after all. He’d written those words on his own wall and blamed the rest of the platoon for his actions. He’d pretty much blamed everyone but me. He’d singled me out as his only ally. Why did he do that? Perhaps Ryan suspected I was gay. I wished he’d approached me directly and told me of his problems. I honestly had no idea at the time and, if he had come and spoken with me, perhaps we could have discussed our sexuality. It might have helped me to consider who I was and understand the feelings I was trying so hard to repress. I had no choice but to continue to keep my secret to myself.

Towards the end of our time in Harrogate a few of us
discovered
a staircase behind a boiler-room door leading up to the lofts. Once there, we had a huge space completely hidden away from the other 2,000 people in the college and, more importantly, from the staff who policed us with iron fists. Amusingly, we used to call the loft space ‘Heaven’, which is aptly the name of a
nightclub
I’d discover in the future. I wished we’d found it sooner, but for the last six weeks it was the place to be once ‘lights out’ was called at 10 p.m. every night – very annoying if you wanted to watch
Shameless
(which everybody did), with offenders punished severely for breaking the lights-out rule.

Up until joining the army, I’d lived quite a sheltered life. Mum
and Phil had tried their best to give me a proper upbringing. During my time at the college I was exposed to just about every taboo there was. Smoking. Everybody smoked. I didn’t. Porn. Everybody had a DVD they guarded with their lives. Porn would be traded in the evenings and the boys would share reviews the next morning over breakfast. I became superficially involved in this black market, although I had no interest in the content of each film. I let peer pressure get the better of me where this was concerned. If the platoon staff discovered these DVDs they’d confiscate them – probably to their own rooms. I have to say, my sheltered upbringing was soon behind me and heavy drinking became the norm. After spending six weeks confined to camp, most of us were trusted to go out into the world on a Saturday afternoon. This, of course, led to the inevitable.

I joined a couple of the lads on an excursion to York one Saturday afternoon which turned into an extremely messy day out and ended with us all in a world of trouble.

We found a pub, one that was willing to serve us without ID, and settled there. Curfew was at 11 p.m. on a Saturday and that day we missed it.

The trouble we faced upon returning to the college was insane. We knew we’d messed up. It was so serious the four of us had to go and see the senior officer commanding Waterloo Company, which 6 Platoon was part of, on the Monday morning.

The platoon sergeant called us into the office. ‘So, you are my four bad lads.’ This was something I wasn’t used to being called. I was a good lad. ‘Thing is, gents,’ he continued, ‘the trick is not getting caught!’ He recounted another tale of behaving very badly while serving in Bosnia ten years earlier and, naturally, getting away with it. A lesson was learned very quickly that morning. We got slapped wrists and were put on three-month warnings. We had to behave – or at least not get caught.

Before we knew it we were counting down to the last few weeks and days until graduation and leave. We’d soon be joining our respective regiments around the world.

Having chosen the Household Cavalry, Warren, Dean and I were to report to London after leave to begin ceremonial training and riding school. The excitement was really starting to build up. I’d never been to London and had always considered it a place where dreams came true. I’d seen the city in movies and on TV and hoped to live there one day; that day was now fast approaching.

The final challenge of basic training was ‘Final Ex’, a
five-night
exercise in the Northumbria hills testing all the skills we’d learned throughout the year. This was supposed to be the peak of testing environments, but in due course we’d all be going on much harder exercises for much longer and much further away than Northumberland.

They tested us well, attacking us throughout the night and making us travel long distances in the day. Of course the weather was awful, which I’m sure the platoon sergeant had arranged especially. He’d scream his favourite slogan at us whenever it was wet: ‘If it ain’t raining, it ain’t training!’ It was a challenging time and, as the end of our test week as soldiers arrived, it dawned on me that I was going to make it. I was going to pass out, a trained professional soldier, in front of my family.

Out of the forty-nine that began our army adventures on 7 September, thirty-nine had reached the end. Over the course of the year we lost ten guys, for various reasons but mostly because they found the army just wasn’t for them. As testing a period as the whole thing was, there wasn’t a single moment when I considered packing it all in and quitting. I’d made my mind up almost four years earlier that a life in the military was what I really needed, and achieving that meant basic training. Basic training was now over.

The whole family came to see me graduate a year after they’d left me at the college and, at that point, it was the proudest moment of my life. I’d gone through the army’s basic training and reached the other side a tough young professional soldier. My school days felt so long ago. What were my schoolmates all doing now?

Two thousand soldiers passed out of training that day, some of whom would be fighting in Afghanistan or Iraq within six months. I didn’t have that worry on the horizon for some time, as I, along with Dean and Warren, was off to the safety of London to ride with the Queen for a couple of years. The thirty-nine members of 6 Platoon marched off the square proudly that
afternoon
, the future quite unknown to us. We had a massive party at a venue in the middle of Harrogate, which ended with us all getting very drunk. We said our goodbyes to each other and that was that.

A year of being together every day, joking, fighting, drinking, all as one close happy family, was over. We’ve not been in the same room since nor are we likely to be again. It’s not often in life one can say one has had a life-changing experience. I’m lucky enough to be able to say I’ve had a few. My first life-changing experience was over.