An Officer and a Gentlewoman

by Heloise Goodley

  There are some advantages to this lost femininity. When I get up in the morning, I don’t fling open my wardrobe doors and sigh at the choice and decision to be made, because there is only one option. I don’t waste time each morning styling my hair or applying make-up and instead set my alarm clock for the last possible safe minute. If I’m having a ‘fat day’ it doesn’t matter, because underneath my combats no one can tell. And if I want my soldiers to take me seriously, it helps that they can’t check out my ass.

  And not all of the girls were interested in men anyway. In Eleven Platoon we had one unconfirmed lesbian. By unconfirmed, I mean she kept her sexual orientation to herself, but we all knew, and she now happily has a girlfriend. So despite the army’s stereotyped reputation, our ratio of one in thirty seems fairly average for gay and lesbian numbers in the society we serve. Lesbians and gays have been openly accepted in the British Armed Forces since the ban on serving homosexuals was uneventfully lifted in 2000.

  However, despite the firm establishment of women in the military, there continues a debate over their place and role. Many feminists see the continued exclusion of women from close-combat roles as one of the last bastions of sexual discrimination. At present women in the army are prohibited from serving in the forward echelons of the infantry and cavalry, where the job of close-up killing tends to be done. The officially stated reason for this surrounds the impact that a girl would have on the close-knit fighting units who do this task rather than any physical inability; the idea is that having a girl around in this small macho club would upset the balance and unfocus the mind. Although this debarring of women is not a globally held view as women currently serve in the infantry in countries like New Zealand, Denmark, Germany and Israel, but many civilized societies continue to find the concept of mothers, wives and daughters in the thick of battle unpalatable. Women are viewed as the more vulnerable sex and the idea of them thrusting a steely blade into another human being for a living doesn’t sit well. As givers of life, it is felt we don’t have the right to take it.

  But none of the girls in Eleven Platoon had aspirations to get close up and kill anyway. None of us felt a need to break down this barrier to equality and take up arms. The infantry boys could keep their miserable crawling, digging and hiding in holes; for us the infanteering was just a necessity to get through Sandhurst and not a lifestyle choice. We ran around on exercises with guns and honed our shooting on the range but it was not what we joined the army to do. Only one third of the army is infantry, leaving the rest available to the girls – engineering, teaching, policing, intelligence gathering, communications, helicopter flying, logistics, bomb disposal and much, much more. I didn’t join the army to go eyeball to eyeball with the Taliban (though it could happen), and the choice of alternatives was endless.

  But it was a choice we had to start thinking about, because while it felt like the end of Sandhurst would never come, it was at a very early stage that we had to start considering where we wanted to go when we did eventually commission and had to set our designs on a future army home. With a third of the army off-limits to the girls this narrowing of choice should have meant for an easier decision, but it wasn’t. While we’d all made the decision to join the army, what regiment or corps we actually wanted to join became a fluid, moving target as the year wore on.

  In the first five weeks of Juniors, between room inspections and drill square humiliation, we had received presentations from each of our options, but I was so tired at this stage that my attention was focused more on fighting with my nodding head and drooping eyelids than absorbing any of the information I should have been, and my only lasting memory of this was the presentation we received from the cavalry.

  For their presentation the cavalry had booked the most opulent of Old College’s function rooms, the Wellington Room, which was situated at the front of the college. It had huge, towering windows which overlooked the parade square, offering views of the Queen Victoria statue and ornamental rowing lake. Inside, the walls of the Wellington Room were covered in elegant damask wallpaper over which hung rare gold-framed oil paintings of battle scenes, while in one corner of the room sat an impressive carved marble bust of Wellington himself, presiding over the room’s events. It was in stark contrast to our Victorian schoolroom surroundings in New College and befitting of cavalry comfort and consuetude.

  We attended these presentations as a platoon and although no one in Eleven Platoon was eligible to join the Royal Armoured Corps or Household Cavalry we still had to attend. On the day, we arrived early from the infantry presentation, another which the girls’ platoon had pointlessly attended, gathering quietly in the corridor outside to wait for our time to go in. Waiting patiently we could hear cavorting laughter and guffawing coming from the other side of the double oak doors, like listening to the inner sounds of a gentlemen’s club. The cavalry are an odd bunch. This collective of Flashman Army units are old and very traditional, still clinging to their glory days in Victorian battle with names like Hussar, Dragoon and Lancer. The typical officer has been bred from very good stock, with a top class private education, inherited wealth, a personal income and often land and a title too (both Princes William and Harry joined the Household Cavalry). Traditionally these swashbuckling types rode horses, but today they caper around in tanks, on Salisbury Plain or the Canadian prairie. Unfettered by financial constraints, cavalry officers are notorious for quaffing vintage champagne like water and wearing full black tie to dinner every night of the week in the Officers’ Mess.

  Waiting in the corridor outside the Wellington Room we heard the laughter eventually stop, and a latch clicked as the doors were flung open, revealing a floppy-haired gentleman, clad in burgundy cords and glossy leather riding boots. On his top half he wore a mustard-coloured heavy knit woollen jumper complete with elbow patches and tugged threads.

  ‘Ladies!’ he boomed at us. ‘Come on in.’

  And with a bowed flurry, Captain Flashman outstretched his arms and welcomed us inside. We filed past him through the doors for what we knew would be another pointless forty-five minutes of boyish bravado and a DVD of tanks to a Vangelis soundtrack, wishing we could just be allowed the sleep we so desperately needed instead. Inside the Wellington Room two further swashbuckling cads waited to greet us in equally vulgar cords and knitwear combo, their backs to a video projection of Challenger II tanks blowing smoke and dust across a German plain.

  ‘So, ladies,’ said number two Harry Flashman, clasping his hands together with a clap. ‘Well, I guess none of you are actually allowed to join the cavalry, are you? So you won’t get to know us by day, but by God I can tell you, you’ll want to know us by night.’ And at this he put his hands on his hips and thrust his pelvis towards us with a ‘Woof!’ (OK, all right, the ‘woof’ bit isn’t strictly accurate, but the rest of his toady smugness genuinely occurred.)

  One of the best examples of the differences between girls and boys in war at Sandhurst occurred on Exercise Dragon’s Challenge, the next of the middle term’s exercise thrashings.

  Dragon’s took us back on the coaches to Wales, but this time, with restrained relief, we weren’t going to be staggering up the howling Black Mountains of Long Reach, or advancing to certain death across the ridgelines of Brecon, because Dragon’s was to be our first foray into urban warfare (FIBUA) (Fighting In Built-up Areas) and would bring us out of the country and into the town. Into a mock West German town to be precise.

  Cilieni village was a purpose-built, pretend hamlet of concrete buildings clustered around a church with a tall watchtower, from where the instructors could watch us breaking and entering in house-to-house combat. These bleak grey concrete chalets were constructed in the style of West German architecture and grouped together they smacked of the ugly communist dourness of a charmless ski resort. Steel shutters firmly covered up glass-less windows and, at the village’s far eastern edge, the carcass of a burnt-out tank sat rusting under a cherry tree. This was to be our playground for the ne
xt five days, and play we would, because FIBUA turned out to be awesome fun. Like Quasar or paint-balling, it was the stuff of boy soldier dreams. The rough and tumble shoot-’em-up of boyhood war games played out at the bottom of the garden. We ran around with guns, leaping over walls and diving through windows in search of the enemy lurking around each corner and firing off loads of ammunition. We stormed houses with an SAS thrill, kicking down doors and lobbing in grenades, covering our ears and waiting for the smoky bang before charging in shouting and screaming with rifles to automatic, blazing the room with hot brass like a Sylvester Stallone character – our coolness marred only by the plastic safety glasses we had to wear.

  The boys beamed as all their war fantasies came true and once we girls had got used to the concept of hurling ourselves through open windows and scrambling over corrugated-iron roofs, the inner tomboy burst free giggling. FIBUA was new and novel. It involved none of the slogging advances to contact, no death marches, or round-the-clock trench-digging, and it felt like playing a game, almost a sport. We snuck up to doorways, scurried down back alleys, crept through trap doors and loft hatches, armed with an ‘urban assault kit’ (ladder) and grappling irons, breaking and entering, clearing from room to room, house to house, seeking out surrendering Gurkhas. If it wasn’t played out in a mock-up German village it would even have been relevant. And, unlike all our previous exercise experiences, FIBUA brought us indoors, so there was no lying in a muddy wet hole on stag trembling as the snow fell, or shivering in our sleeping bags as the wind whipped over us, because on Dragon’s we were sheltered inside buildings, away from the harshness of Wales, in relative comfort and with dry pants on.

  The exercise started with us capturing Cilieni village from the Gurkha enemy, chasing them out and then securing defensive positions in the buildings to wait for the inevitable enemy counterattack. Eleven Platoon were assigned a three-storey house near the church to occupy and defend, and 4 Montgomery Drive was what an estate agent would probably have described as ‘a well-appointed family home in need of some cosmetic improvement’. We set to work at it straight away with barbed wire, scaffolding poles, sandbags and sheets of corrugated iron, barricading doorways, blocking windows and constructing obstacles in the ‘bijou’ garden, building up a den and fortifying our new home. We became quite house proud of and even attached to the combat shabby chic decor, insisting on maintaining the integrity of a family home with a welcoming front door and even a dining room table. And this is where Eleven Platoon’s home at 4 Montgomery Drive differed from the rest of the houses in Cilieni, because while the girls continued to keep a tidy organized home, even in war, the boys had ripped out all their furniture, barricaded their front door and were climbing in and out through a ladder propped against a first-floor window. It just didn’t occur to us to be so destructive (and tactically astute). We still saw this pile of bricks and mortar as a house, something to covet and inhabit, whereas the boys were in role; they had made their house a fortress. So while at Number 4 we were measuring up for soft furnishings and arranging flowers, the boys were splintering tables and chairs into timber to block the stairs.

  A girls’ and a boys’ castle are clearly very different creations.

  As we were finishing off the final touches on the second morning, CSgt Bicknell came in to have a look around.

  ‘Very nice, ladies. Very nice. I like what you’ve done here,’ he said, taking a step back to admire our barbed wiring. ‘Miss Wheeler, are you watching your arcs in there?’ he hollered through to Wheeler who was sitting on some empty ammunition boxes at the window on stag, peering between a gap in the hessian curtain we had made to cover the window.

  ‘Yes, colour sergeant,’ Wheeler shouted back.

  He continued on his tour upstairs, noseying around, checking sandbags and the steel picks we had used to block a window with. As he poked his head around a doorway on the top floor, a couple of us were sitting around a burning hexi stove making breakfast.

  ‘Morning, ladies,’ he said, coming into the room. ‘So, who’s going to make me a lovely cup of Rosie Lee this morning then?’

  CSgt Bicknell had the endearing habit of sprinkling his speech with Cockney rhyming slang that often left us baffled as to his meaning. On the drill square, he’d chastise you for shuffling your ‘plates of meat’ or during a morning inspection he’d pick you up for mud on your ‘daisy roots’. He’d learned his lesson about the peculiarities of dealing with girls and now understood our ways. As Merv leaned forwards and offered him a black plastic mug of hot tea he knew he had been welcomed back into the Eleven Platoon fold.

  Unfortunately, the problem with FIBUA is that when war comes to town everyone dies, as the stakes go up at close quarters. History can testify to this overwhelming bloodshed with case samples from battles for Stalingrad, Budapest, Berlin and even Fallujah. And when the Gurkha enemy eventually returned for their counterattack we got hammered. They stormed our stockaded buildings and flushed us out, crashing through our front door, storming the stairs and overrunning the village. Bodies lay everywhere – killed off by the directing staff – among the empty brass ammunition casings that carpeted each room of Cilienigrad. And when Captain Trunchbull started screaming at us to retreat to the hills, we had to take the wounded with us, and the resultant drudging withdrawal ranks as one of my top five worst moments at Sandhurst.

  The woodblock we sought refuge in couldn’t have been more than three miles away from Cilieni village, but getting there with bergens on, dragging the bodies of the wounded, was as emotional as childbirth, and the closest I ever came to public tears at Sandhurst. To get there we first slogged our way along a muddy flood plain, its river in full swell, schlepping in our heavy boots, drawing them deeper into the mire. With the weight of bergens and casualties dragging us down, we floundered dreadfully, stumbling and slipping like drunks on the greasy mud. We plugged onwards, as Captain Trunchbull hopped about with caged fury, screaming expletives and bawling senselessly at us to get a move on as the mud sucked us further in. The going was slow and demoralizing, each step getting harder and harder as cracks soon started to appear in the platoon.

  Eventually, after a mile we turned left, moving away from the river’s banks, heading upwards to join a narrow faded track that traced the steep slopes of a hill. The ascent to the top was utter agony. My bergen pressed down so heavily on my back I thought I might faint with fatigue and pain. I was by now completely exhausted from the mud plain march, my legs stung with an excruciating pain, which seared up through my spine and screamed at my brain to STOP. Which others did, only adding further to the suffering of those of us left on the march, since their bergens were handed to us to pick up and soldier on with. I was in astonishing amounts of discomfort, suffering under the weight of my bergen and struggling up the steep hill without the aid of crampons and a rope. Inside my head I was having a fierce mental battle to keep going, and using all my concentration to stop tears from welling in my eyes.

  CSM Mockridge strode up next to me. ‘Come on, Miss Goodley,’ he said in a hushed voice. ‘I know you can do this. You’re not going to let yourself down. Keep going. Head up. Focus, Miss Goodley. Focus.’

  I was on the verge of giving up. I couldn’t see the summit and, as each crest ahead proved to be another false one, our goal remained tantalizingly out of sight. I knew I couldn’t make it. At this Sandhurst had now pushed me too far. Here was going to be the point at which I finally broke and failed. As each step became more of a struggle and my legs trembled under the strain, failure looked more and more attractive. I could easily stop and give my bergen to someone else to struggle on with, and join the ranks of others who had already dropped out. I could shoulder the disappointment and shame of having let myself and everyone else down instead. While keeping my vertebrae intact.

  Listening to CSM Mockridge I lifted my head and looked up from my boots to see the Platoon Donkey ahead of me wavering too. Faltering more with every step, she was crying freely with tears of pain and f
rustration. ‘Come on,’ I willed her on. ‘We can do this.’ I knew that if she gave up, her bergen would fall to me to carry, and that would be the final straw breaking over my back. If she went I knew I would too. And sure enough, she soon broke, collapsing to the ground in front of me, her cheeks streaked with tears, refusing to take another step. I went to her, hovering over the desperate heap lying in the grass, trying hopelessly to encourage her to her feet once more. The thought of having to take on her bergen as well as mine enraged me and I swore at her for being so selfish.

  As she turned away from me, sobbing, Wheeler appeared and released the bergen from the Platoon Donkey’s back, rolling it free. She lifted up one of the straps in her hand and, motioning for me to take the other, we lifted it off the ground between us. We shared the bergen like this as we continued on up, leaving the Platoon Donkey to stagger unburdened behind us. We moved in silence, struggling too much with our own mental battle to keep going to be able to speak to one another, resorting to just sideways smiles of encouragement. But it spurred me on.

  From somewhere I found strength in pain, finding energy in not wanting to let the side down and a pride in being one of the few left. Somewhere inside my body a little box of reserve energy was found and opened, driving me to the summit, where finally I was overcome with relief, flopping down in the wet grass, as every muscle in my body flooded with elastic release. I had made it. I couldn’t believe it. On my own there was no way I would have achieved what I had just done. As a pampered City girl, it would have been completely out of the question. Sandhurst was teaching me a stubborn resolve, a pride and bitter grit to keep fighting on, to battle with the pain and ignore my demons.

  As I breathed in a light sigh of relief, CSM Mockridge appeared again and gave a gentle nod of his head in my direction, a rare smile spreading across his thin lips.