All of One Section flanked right, through the glacial stream waters, each one of us crawling over stones and squelching along the muddy riverbank, while Captain Trunchbull continued her screaming tirade from the safety of the dry embankment, yelling out every filthy expletive she could lay her tongue on. She hopped up and down in anger, because it was in Brecon that Captain Trunchbull became her apoplectic best. As red as Lenin, she screamed uncontrolled blue murder at us, spinning into a fulminating rage like a caged Tasmanian devil. Her torrent of expletives provided us with little teaching guidance, serving more as an irritating distraction. And she didn’t know what she was instructing anyway because the last time she had conducted an advance to contact was more than ten years ago, when she herself had been in our position as an officer cadet.
We crawled for what felt like miles, through the muddy stream and spongy field to assault the enemy position. Until eventually, panting and wheezing, with lungs croaking like broken organ bellows, we got to within reach of the enemy. Next to me Officer Cadet Gill dug into one of her webbing pouches and fiddled with the safety clasp around a grenade, pulled the pin and launched it towards the Gurkha. We waited, crouching and tense for the explosive bang before leaping forwards, weapons to automatic, blazing into the enemy hide. The Gurkha let out a mournful wail, dramatizing his final death throes and jerked in comic spasms on the forest floor.
Then a silent pause.
Had we finished?
I was knackered.
In my ear I could hear a broken radio message, asking if there were any more enemy.
By now I was hungry and wondering about the state of the yoghurt pot in my crushed daysack, when another crackle of rounds came from deep inside the trees. This time it was Two Section’s turn to get their feet wet and bust a gut crawling. So as the shouting melee moved forwards, One Section could relax and recoup in reserve and conduct our own intelligence gathering operation, because in One Section we had the platoon’s best weapon, our own Gurkha spy, Officer Cadet Khadka. After each slogging assault, Khadka would chat away in Nepali to the Gurkha dead, getting handouts of vanilla fudge and finding out where the next enemy were, how many more positions we had to assault, what was in store for us that night and, most importantly, what time the coaches were coming back for us on Friday. These little snippets provided a much needed morale boost in an otherwise miserable week.
We spent three continuous days walking around Brecon in ‘arrowhead formation’ advancing to contact and patrolling towards the enemy on an ‘axis of advance’, waiting to be shot at. Assaulting up hills and streams, in woodblocks and farms, from Dixies Corner to Gardiner’s Track. Position after position. After each iteration, we would regroup and sit on our daysacks in an open square while Captain Trunchbull admonished us all for not trying hard enough, threatening that the reality would be far, far worse and that with real bullets we’d all have been dead. In reality, I’d be tucked up in a rear-echelon desk job, leaving the infantry madness to the insane. As we flogged ourselves at enemy positions again and again I couldn’t help thinking of Einstein’s maxim on insanity: ‘doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results’.
Perhaps we should have packed straitjackets in our bulging bergens too.
Each night we retreated into a dark, dense woodblock and set up a harbour area as we had done on Self-Abuse. Digging shell-scrape coffins, clearing a track plan, stringing out twine, boiling up horrendous corned-beef hash dinners and taking our turn to stay awake on sentry. This time I was sharing my basha with Cadet Gill; another university OTC veteran, she was joining the army to be a teacher and had a healthy laissez-faire approach to all the irrelevant crawling and digging she had to do to get there. We worked together as a team, me digging our shell-scrape while she fetched drinking water and cooked our dinner, kindly giving me her rice pudding, the only meal option that didn’t make me heave. On the first night, we unfurled our roll-mats and sleeping bags under our poncho and wriggled in for what very little sleep we could snatch before our turn on stag. The rain had continued intermittently all day and by now the ground was cold and squelchy beneath us. Pulling the sleeping bag cord tightly over my head, I curled up at the bottom searching for some warmth. I left my wet boots on, trying to dry them out, afraid that if I unlaced and took them off they might freeze solid as the temperature plunged. Forty minutes later, we were shaken awake to start our turn at night watch and I undid my sleeping bag to sit up. As I did so there was a sloshing sound as a bow-wave of water splashed along the bottom of the shell-scrape which had now become a shallow pond as the rainwater trickled in.
Brecon had become unadulterated misery.
On sentry, Gill and I lay shuddering with cold staring into black nothingness, stagnant at the cusp of hell. The temperature dropped further until my numb fingers lacked the dexterity to even unwrap a boiled sweet let alone pull the trigger. I looked at the time on my watch – twenty minutes past midnight. I had been awake for twenty of the last twenty-four hours, which on our £67 a day Officer Cadet wage equated to nearly half the statutory hourly minimum wage. I could be flipping burgers in McDonald’s for more, and at least in McDonald’s I’d have dry boots on. For the non-graduates like Prince Harry, it was even worse: they earned only £39 a day, which was a paltry £2 an hour to crawl through a river and sleep in a muddy puddle. I thought of all the times I’d battled across a Tube-less London because the greedy Underground train drivers were striking again, demanding more pay and better working conditions. The most basic infantry soldier risking his life in Afghanistan earns just a third of what a Tube driver does for driving a train through a tunnel.1
On our second stag of the night we once again lay with our heads propped against our rifles, staring into the inky void waiting for something to happen, but rather hoping it wouldn’t.
‘God, I’m so cold I can’t even move my fingers,’ Gill moaned. ‘If the enemy suddenly appear in front of us I don’t think I would actually have the movement to grip the trigger and fire at them.’
‘I’m so tired I think I’d offer myself up as a hostage,’ I said.
‘Only so long as they didn’t feed me any more corned-beef hash.’
‘Urgh.’ I made a gagging noise. ‘Where have you put that CWS thing we’re supposed to be using?’
We’d been given a ‘night-sight’ to use and, after fiddling with batteries, knobs and eventually removing the lens cover, we managed to turn the darkness around us into a view of soupy neon green. In the distance I could make out the outline of a ridgeline and forest block on the horizon. I played with the new toy for a while, scanning around the field in front of us, picking out sheep and turning around to investigate the harbour area behind me. Among the lines of thin pine trees the platoon slept, cocooned as little sleeping bag mounds at the bottom of their coffin holes. I switched it off and decided I needed to go for a wee, so, leaving Gill behind on her own to keep sentry, I nipped off into the wood with my rifle in search of a suitable spot.
Away from the platoon harbour the forest floor was marked with shallow ditches where previous exercises had dug their shell-scrapes and I stumbled about in the dark until I selected one, carefully putting my weapon down on the ground beside it. The ditch was only about a foot deep, and I stepped in, unzipped, lowered my trousers and squatted. I was mid-relief when a terrible thought crossed my mind: we were not the only people in this woodblock. The two boys’ platoons of Imjin Company were also harboured up in here. I wasn’t sure where, but I was sure that they too had night-sights. Suddenly, I was gripped by stage fright. I pulled myself together, zipped up, gathered my rifle and hurriedly made my way back to the sentry spot, hoping the super-keen infantry boys were not keeping a vigilant watch in my direction.
By the third day we were completely exhausted and utterly fed up with flogging ourselves up hills after the enemy. As the day came to a close, we anticipated another night shivering in a woodblock harbour area somewhere, feet frozen to a crust at the botto
m of our soggy sleeping bags. But as we plotted and followed the given grid, instead of leading us to another dense forest, we arrived at a farm. A delightfully dry farm. No digging shell-scrapes and lying contorted on the wet forest floor, tonight we would be sleeping in the sheltered warmth of a barn, with the comfort of a roof over our heads and solid floor beneath us. It was basic but total luxury.
When we got there, the Company Quartermaster appeared with big green thermos containers full of steaming stew and we queued eagerly to fill paper bowls with as much as they could hold. I dipped slices of bread into the thick brown gravy and scooped chunks of potato with a clean plastic spoon rather than the dirty one that I had licked, wiped on my trousers and stored in my pocket for the last three days. That night, sheltered in our new sanctuary, we would be rewarded with some sleep too. I stripped off my boots, wriggled my damp toes in the fresh air, changed my clothes and boiled a mess tin of water for a soapy wash. After three horrendous days these were all the luxuries we needed: warm food, a roof over our heads, sleep and clean clothes. Brecon had reduced us to these bare essentials, to the primal needs of man.
The reason for this relative luxury was to give us a well-earned break, to allow us to recoup, recharge our batteries and energize ready for one final big push, our first Company attack. Because the next day, relatively refreshed from the gift of four uninterrupted hours of sleep we began the preparations, plotting, planning, scheming, rehearsing, thinking of every eventuality. Coordinating 100 wannabe officers in the dark with tactical aplomb soon translated into a complex feat of organization. The enemy were holed up in a farm and, with the first light of dawn the next morning, we would be there to bring them the good news. Storming their hide and winning our five-day war.
As Imjin Company consisted of one girls’ platoon and two boys’ platoons the boys were going to be doing the hard work, while we lay along a ridgeline in fire support. After all, this is what the boys had joined the army for and they didn’t want us coming along and ruining their fun.
That night we set off in the dead hours on a torturous long walk across the training area, sneaking along a roundabout route to avoid detection. One long silent line of troops marching quickly through the night. As we trudged along the darkened track, it continued to rain, driving harder as the wind whipped droplets towards us. The drops prickled on exposed skin, making me screw up my eyes and draw the hood of my jacket in closer. I hummed along quietly to myself, needing a distraction to keep me from falling asleep on the march, and after a while the chorus of a James Blunt ballad became stuck on an irritating loop inside my head. James Blunt had been an army officer, he had been through Sandhurst and Brecon, and probably attacked this very barn, probably even trudged along this very track in the rain. And now, amid the misery of exercise, I completely understood his capacity for such self-pitying song writing.
After two hours of head down, sleepy walking, we got to the form-up point and Eleven Platoon separated off into the woods to shuffle into position on the ridgeline overlooking the enemy farm. Below in the farm’s yard I could see a group of Gurkhas sitting comfortably around a bonfire, snug and warm, their faces glowing in the firelight. They knew we were coming. Lying in position, we waited, checking watches, waiting for H-hour. Minutes passed, the big hand moving slowing around the clock face. I rested my head against my rifle, watching the view in front of me move up and down with each breath. I was tired and it was a strong battle of wills with my eyelids, as they drooped heavier and heavier. Eventually the inevitable happened, as from the far end of the platoon row came a loud truffling snort as someone drifted into sleep.
At H-hour, flares lit up the purple sky and the air filled with the volley and thunder of gunfire as we started firing, jolting those snoozing awake with a shot of adrenaline. To the left flank the boys’ platoons came racing in, charging through the morning mist, across the field and fences, into the farm and clearing through the buildings, killing the enemy as they found them. Moments later, we ran hurriedly down the bank to join them in the farm complex, securing the area and checking the enemy dead. The whole operation was all over rather quickly. Everything had gone smoothly and exactly according to the well-rehearsed plan. Now all we had to do was walk back to Dixies Corner and catch the buses back to Sandhurst. I was almost excited; the sun was coming up, another hellish week on exercise was over and in one week I’d be on Easter leave. Life was good.
Then a loud explosion boomed into my ears and reverberated through my guts.
What the hell was that?
We were being mortared.
Suddenly the perfectly planned, slick operation descended into chaos and mayhem as more explosions bounced around us knocking the wind out of my chest.
And as we started to run, fleeing the farm, the first casualty fell, Captain Trunchbull picking them off, telling them to lie down immobile. Fortunately, Lea was the smallest, lightest member of Eleven Platoon and Wheeler quickly scooped her up and staggered forwards with her slung in a fireman’s lift over her shoulders. But a fireman’s lift was not going to get her all the way back to safety and more explosive bangs detonated along our escape route. We quickly created a makeshift stretcher using a poncho and took it in turns to haul Lea back up onto the ridge. Halfway up another casualty fell. Picked off in the midst of the melee by Captain Trunchbull. And then just as we tried to establish a method for moving two casualties we were struck with another. And with three the platoon were crippled.
We made two more poncho stretchers and loaded the fresh casualties in, then hauled the three of them up the steep ridge slopes, seeking safety at the top. Dragging the heavy loads was agonizing, back-breaking work. My lungs wailed in pain as I tried to hold up my corner of the poncho as we struggled to the top, bumping the casualty indelicately along the ground. My ears filled with screams of urgency and, with each explosive boom, the pit of my insides resonated. With each step the body hanging in the stretcher cradle got heavier and heavier. Rifles swung into the way and daysacks slipped from our backs. I felt as though I couldn’t carry on. We were never going to make it. I had to stop. This was too much. But there was no option to stop or slow down. Dragging those bodies back to Dixies Corner was worse than marking time on the parade square, worse than leopard crawling around Hundred Acre Wood, worse than loaded marches and worse than digging my own coffin hole. Red-faced and shattered, we finally got there, but I felt no elation at the finish line. It wasn’t real, nowhere near real, but it was horrendous. And casualty evacuation like this was to become a routine fixture on exercises for good reason.
At Dixies Corner I sat on my bergen awaiting the arrival of the coaches, my head cupped in my raw chapped hands, chest rising slowly to the rhythm of my lungs. Brecon had been as horrid as advertised. The rain had fallen, the ground squelched, the temperature plummeted and the winds stripped and squalled. I wiggled my frozen toes in the bottom of my soggy boots and wondered if they would ever thaw and regain feeling. My fingers were numb, limbs bruised and my eyes were tired from lack of sleep. On the distant horizon the coaches appeared like a mirage, coming to rescue us, and I looked out beyond them, across the mountains and hilltops, taking in the dramatic setting. Over on a far crest the grey clouds were parting, breaking for beams of sunlight to shine onto the fields of sheep below. It was beautiful, a picture-perfect scene, and one I should have felt privileged to witness, but it was ruined for me. Crychan’s Challenge had stripped Wales of its majesty and beauty. I would be going home with no desire to ever return to this stunning corner of Britain, plagued by the memories. Tired and silent, I boarded the coach, asleep before we rattled back over the cattle grid, fleeing to sanctuary in the fields of Elysian.
A few hours later the coaches came to a stop and we stepped off at a motorway service station, walking down the coach steps and entering the strange humdrum of civilization like submariners emerging from a submarine that has been roaming the seabed for months. Dazed, bleary and confused, it felt like being a tourist in a foreign land
, gawping at the pleasures of normal life: newspapers, magazines, hot food, fast food, chocolate, freshly ground coffee, people in everyday clothes from all walks of life. I wandered across the car park with Merv and Gill, staggering on weary legs through the throng of commuters and Friday traffic, searching for the relative luxury of a porcelain toilet. Eyes followed and stared as we made our progress, fascinated by what must have looked like 270 scraggy and unwashed tramps flooding the services, stinking of the slime on a sewer rat’s belly. Inside everything felt so clean and polished after our feral woodland existence. In the toilets I caught sight of my reflection in a mirror and balked at the hollow mud-smeared face blinking back at me; no wonder people were staring. In W. H. Smith, Gill and I queued for an ice cream and sat outside on the grass with them, soaking up the sunshine, letting the warmth return feeling and form to our broken bodies.
Looking around, I noticed that the service station seemed particularly busy, heaving with families and cars laden with luggage; bikes clung to roof racks and back windows were obscured by bags and bedding. Children ran up and down outside, skipping between benches and picnic tables with an excited holiday spirit. I sensed a feeling of careless freedom in the air.
‘It’s really busy, isn’t it?’ I wondered out loud. ‘What’s going on that we don’t know about?’ I poked the wooden stick of my now finished ice cream into the grass.
An Officer and a Gentlewoman Page 13
