by Mark Time
Known for their character-building properties, beastings were a form of tough love. The punishments involved strange yet resourceful exercises, with varying pain settings repeated until the recruits were totally exhausted. Often, the troop sergeant would end a bollocking with a phrase that forever struck terror into our hearts: ‘You lot can stand by.’
The phrase still haunts me to this day. Even Tammy Wynette’s ‘Stand By Your Man’ gives me the chills.
It was like being given the death sentence. We knew pain would come, the only variables being when and how much. The thought of impending doom would gnaw at the back of my mind until the event happened. From an outsider’s perspective beastings may seem a form of abuse, but as a sixteen-year-old commando-in-waiting, while not overly excited about it, I was willing to get beasted every day if it meant getting a green beret.
This was life at Commando Training Centre: a consuming whirlwind of excess, shouting and running; a mind-boggling mechanical bucking bull that wanted to throw me off. All I could do was hold on just a little tighter in an ever more difficult attempt to keep on.
* * *
Our first real venture as wannabe commandos was on Exercise Twosome, or ‘Gruesome Twosome’ as it was affectionately known. This was something so completely different from anything I’d ever experienced in my short life that, for the first time, I wondered whether joining the Royal Marines had been a wise move.
The previous troop that returned from Gruesome Twosome had recently made the newspapers after it was revealed one of their recruits had been fed a shit sandwich. We couldn’t understand the problem: I certainly hadn’t had a good one yet. Then we realised that it was literally a shit sandwich, and we understood why his mother had contacted the press.
Although the training teams were warned similar actions would not be tolerated by the anti-shit-eating mandarins of Whitehall, it little changed our team’s intentions of making Gruesome Twosome live up to its reputation.
The exercise was an introduction into basic fieldwork, our bread and butter as potential commandos. One of our first lectures was on how to properly apply camouflage cream (cam cream). Split into pairs, I was hoping to partner up with Hopkins, but I was like the bespectacled kid with the wonky legs when being picked for a game of football. Everyone partnered off with someone they could trust, leaving me searching for a partner of equal incompetence.
The other guy standing alone was Jackie; I forget his real name, but he was so-called after his ‘cleaning Jackie’ faux-pas. He had struggled with every element of training so far. The only thing he seemed competent in was grumbling and he ‘dripped’ at every incidence of hardship, which, with the regime we were under, was quite often. We were all in it together so his constant whining had not made him at all popular. Neither, it seemed, was I. With no other options available, we begrudgingly paired up.
The first thing he said was, ‘You know I’m leaving at the end of the week? This is all bollocks.’
Oh, great. Not only was my partner shit at fieldcraft, he had no interest in improving.
The lessons were based on the ‘buddy buddy’ system, where each recruit checks the other to ensure both are ‘squared away’ and suitably prepared for whatever lies ahead. We had to cam up our partners, the idea being that we would both practice the application but also learn to entrust ourselves to our buddy.
My buddy was about as friendly as Adolf Eichmann, and his coverage of my face was poor, to say the least. Of course, he got picked up when I was inspected; I blended into the background like a cow in a pigsty. To be fair, Jackie was given twice the amount of press-ups I was, which wasn’t ideal for him as he could only do half the press-ups I could. These were made all the harder by Corporal Stevens shoving the cam cream bag nozzle up each nostril and filling them with the thick, brown gunk.
‘Time?’
‘Yes, Corporal?’ I answered from the floor, sounding like Malcolm from the Vicks Sinex advert.
‘Now you look like you’ve sneezed your own impacted bowel, you’d better scrub yourself clean and start again.’
I glared at Jackie. He was the twat that had got me into this predicament. It didn’t have much of an effect though, he was too busy scooping acrid cam cream from his mouth whilst enduring some rather vulgar language from Corporal Stevens.
‘When I come back you’d both better be as clean as Princess Diana’s knickers or you can stand by.’
Without the aid of plentiful, hot, running water – or indeed, any water at all – this was going to be a hard task. We had been issued with the one water bottle per day with which we were also supposed to cook, wash ourselves and our cooking implements, and fight off dehydration. Luckily, the exercise was held in the hottest August since 1976 so drinking was clearly optional
It was around now when I reflected that getting camouflaged seemed somehow less appealing than it appeared in the recruitment brochures. They certainly hadn’t shown the discomfort of sweating like a cheap beef salad while lying awkwardly in spiky gorse bushes, with twigs, leaves and broken branches scraping, cutting and scoring the skin leaving me feeling like I had been buggered by a sexually frustrated Laburnum.
In between being jabbed, poked, kicked and thrashed around the local vicinity, we had further theoretical instruction in the large marquee that doubled as the training team’s accommodation and lecture room. Any notification was usually in the form of, ‘Right, you fuckers, you were told to be ready for your next session, and by the look of it you have been swanning/arsing about/loafing/ignoring us/taking the piss [delete as required]. You have got five minutes to get your shit together and be in the marquee for a lecture on…’
On this occasion it was ‘sentry duty’. I consoled myself with the thought that at least the lesson on the duties of a sentry had to be easy. I based this forlorn hope on my extensive research of sentry duty that mainly involved watching lots of old war films. It seemed to entail a lot of walking up and down a designated path, usually in the opposite direction to any silent enemy, while sharing cigarettes, and talking German.
Unfortunately the reality of a sentry duty lecture was a lot different.
‘When you are a sentry, fellas, you are the eyes and ears of the troop,’ said the Unsmiling Assassin looking rather sinister behind his lectern. ‘So it is vitally important you are awake, alert and aware of your surroundings. Falling asleep is the biggest no-no of all when on sentry and you not only show a lack of discipline, you show true selfishness putting your own needs before your oppos. This scant regard for the team ethic lets not only your mates down, but also puts them in grave danger. You are the early warning system and it is up to you to alert your troop of any possible enemy approach.’
In the steam of a humid tent, in the early afternoon heat, immediately after lunch, trying to stay awake and alert while learning how to stay awake and alert was clearly a lesson in irony. However, I found it interesting. More interesting than some, it seemed. As usual, questions were asked to reinforce our learning, and more often than not the Unsmiling Assassin would question, pause, nominate one of the eager-eyed students keen to impress.
‘So to recap then, why do we stay awake?’ The Unsmiling Assassin’s eyes scanned the room, searching for a willing, or unwilling, volunteer to answer.
I tried to look alert by perking up my head in an attempt to garner his attention.
‘Right, just a minute fellas.’ He walked from behind his lectern. ‘Am I boring you, Lofty?’ he asked.
I looked to where his steely glare fell. One of the nods, Brum, (no one knew his first name, but he was from Birmingham), didn’t have his head raised and certainly didn’t look alert. In fact, he couldn’t have done a better impression of inattentiveness if he’d tried. His chin sat on his chest, his eyes firmly closed. He seemed content enough; anyone would, emitting the sort of wheeze that suggests a sleep so deep that it’s bordering clinical death.
‘Don’t any of you wake him up,’ warned the Unsmiling Assassin as he approach
ed Sleeping Beauty, who now had the temerity to snore.
‘Oi, fuckdust, wake up.’ No answer. To be fair, the corporal hadn’t shouted. He never did.
‘What’s his name?’ the Unsmiling Assassin asked the group.
‘Davies, Corporal,’ answered a voice from the crowd.
‘Oi, Davies, you knob jockey, wake up.’
Davies still didn’t move.
‘Is he dead?’
Now, if you were asked how to wake somebody up in such a circumstance, or indeed check if someone was still alive, would you:
A. Give them a shake?
B. Shout at them a little louder?
C. Hit them on the head with a wooden mallet?
The Unsmiling Assassin chose the third option, picking up a large-headed mallet designed to hammer in very big tent pegs. In his defence, he didn’t actually hit Davies on the head with it. He just let the natural weight of the mallet fall with a thud that drew a collective ‘oof’ from the rest of us.
‘Awake now are we, Princess?’ asked the Unsmiling Assassin politely.
Davies, rather shell-shocked but awake, was speechless. Funnily enough, he didn’t fall asleep again, probably due to pain from the large haematoma that bulged from his bonce.
We practised sentry duty that night. As the youngest I was the least important, so I was detailed to the shittiest watch. Other than contracting Ebola, it was the last thing I wanted. In the summer, doing the 03.30-04.30 watch meant finishing just prior to being called for first light stand-to. Stand-to was a call for alertness; everyone had to lie in the harbour position, in a small circle of bivvies, for forty-five minutes before both first and last light, the logic being this was the most likely time for enemy attack. For a recruit, it was also the most likely time to get a kick up the arse from the training team should we not be positioned correctly. Once the light had sufficiently changed we would then be allowed to ‘stand down’, and rub the aforementioned kicked arse.
My first sentry duty was textbook: alert and awake, I scanned the trees and paths in my arcs of vision. Any time there was even a hint of a rustle I’d shout, ‘Halt! Who goes there?’ to nothing more than the breeze. On my second sentry duty, I listened to my quick brief, laid down, got comfy and… zzzzzzzzzzz.
Luckily, there is an inner panic button we develop when asleep, a primordial survival instinct, and mine kicked in. Admittedly, it did take twenty minutes – thankfully, a short enough time not to get caught and thrashed to within an inch of my life.
I wasn’t the only one to succumb to the heat of the day and general lack of sleep. One favourite trick of the trainers was to wake us from our slumber, and force us into a game of ‘It Pays to Be a Winner’.
The rules were simple. On the command ‘Go!’ we would race over rough ground like demented maniacs to a distant object, usually a solitary tree at the top of an incline, and back to the starting point. It would have taken an Olympic athlete about a minute to complete the race, but the training team expected us all to return within half the time as a mark of ‘putting effort in’. The first lad to return would be the winner and exempt from the repeat race, with the winner of each rested from the subsequent races until only the last few remained.
It certainly didn’t pay to be a loser. The slower lads would run more than ten times the distance of the faster lads, and despite what the corporals said, it didn’t make them any faster. It was pretty obvious who the fastest lads were, and it would have been easy not to put in 100 per cent effort for the first few races as we knew it’d be a waste of energy trying to keep up with Hopkins and the like. However, the training team was wise to the trickery of those who ‘loafed’, and happily dished out press-ups or star-jumps as an alternative. This slowed down the recipients even further.
Up to now, we had only worn badly-shaped blue berets and field caps. Now we were running around with helmets that seemed to be designed by that benevolent old soul Torquemada. Imagine a WWI German helmet with the point sticking out from the top: our helmets had the point protruding downwards inside the helmet. This sharp point was the male fixing for securing to the female fixing of the inner cap that looked like a Tour de France cyclist’s helmet. Should the inner cap and the spike not fit properly then the spike would bounce into your skull as you ran, the stabbing pain magnified by the bounce of the elastic chinstrap. Too scared to disclose that my male and female fixings didn’t fit, I winced every time I went over broken ground or had to run, which was pretty much all the time. The problem was finally noticed as we did some practice attacks, when the troop sergeant saw the blood dripping down my grid.
‘Time!’ he yelled. ‘Get over here. You’ve got red sweat rolling down your face.’
He took off my helmet, checked the inside and shook his head wearily at me. ‘Put some masking tape over the spike, you wanker,’ he said rather unsympathetically. ‘On your way.’
So off I went, being the wanker I was, continuing to bleed heavily from the incessant spearing of my helmet until late afternoon, when I could actually get hold of some mythical Harry Black Maskers which, as anyone who has ever served in the Corps will tell you, is as rare as hen’s teeth.
* * *
Slowly, we were turning from a collection of selfish individuals into a team. It had been hammered into us from day one, and ‘I’ was finally becoming ‘we’. The buddy system became second nature: if I had to check that my buddy was properly dressed or feeling okay, he’d check on me too – as long as I wasn’t paired with Jackie. In modern street language, we ‘had each other’s backs’, and in the Royal Marines the bond did indeed become gang-like.
With this new-found bond, we inspected each other like chimps checking for fleas, and even when we were woken up by explosions simulating an attack and were forced to evacuate with our kit to another position, we managed to think for each other, ensuring our mates had collected their kit and were all following in the same direction.
These ‘crash moves’ were intended to simulate the emergency evacuation of a position. I was under the impression that, as trainee commandos, we were on the way to omnipotence and this constant crash moving was an irksome folly. Surely we’d just stand and fight, no matter how many Chinese were pouring over the hill? We only had seven hours of night routine: in crash moving three or four times a night, I dreaded the sort of conflict we could be engaged in where this would actually happen. It kept us in a constant state somewhere between somnolence and death during the heat of the day.
The lessons we were receiving, whether in the syllabus or otherwise, were harsh ones. If we didn’t learn from those lessons we knew the consequences would be painful, or tiresome. But they were valuable. We learnt quickly and we learnt well – though not well enough, according to the training team.
Being dehydrated wasn’t something we needed much tutelage in. If I’d been sitting in a stripy deckchair in my vest and pants, wearing a knotted hankie on my head, I’d have required at least four litres of water. We had one warm 1.5 litre-bottle a day, of which we could actually drink very little. Fully clothed, constantly running, carrying 30kg of equipment, stressed and tired, undertaking all manner of physical activity designed to test our endurance, we were all suffering. But in week four, no-one would dare question the training team’s methods.
On the final morning, all that was left to do was de-rig and pack up the training team’s area. They had the privilege of using a field kitchen. Nightly, it would waft out the aroma of bacon and eggs, while we hungry recruits lived on ration packs a stone’s throw away. The field kitchen’s pots and pans required a serious clean before returning to the stores back at Lympstone. I was one of five detailed to the washing up. With no hot water, the washing-up liquid was used with gay abandon, but did the trick sufficiently. With only hydration on my mind, I blew the excess bubbles from the top of the large bowl and drank a ladle full of greasy, fetid water, to the hilarity of the other four.
‘What’s it taste like?’ asked Brum Davies, still nursing a lump the
size of a crème caramel on his head.
‘It’s quite nice,’ I replied.
‘Really?’
‘Yeah, it’s a bit meaty, like Bovril.’
‘Give us a go then,’ Davies took a large swig and spurted it out all over himself. ‘It tastes like shit.’
‘Uh, yes,’ I replied, and realised it had taken me until the last day of week four to take the piss out of someone. My confidence had grown.
Although ghastly, it quenched my parched throat, so I took another ladle full. Noting my ability not to throw up, the others followed suit, even Davies reluctantly drank more with his nose pinched. It was a great opportunity to rehydrate, until one of the corporals noted our high-spirited drinking party. He ended proceedings by kicking me in the kidneys for being a stupid prick and poisoning myself. But by this time we’d all drank our fair share of greasy, dirty sullage.
Packing finished, we sat expectantly, under the shade of one of Woodbury Common’s many copses, for the four-tonne truck to bus us back to CTC.
‘Right fellas, listen in.’ said the Unsmiling Assassin. ‘The transport was due to be here by now, but one of the things you may not know about the road between CTC and Woodbury Common is that it is like the Bermuda Triangle. Looks like your truck has been swallowed up. What a bastard eh? So what alternatives do we have to get back then?’
We all knew, but really didn’t want to say.
‘Wait for another one?’ asked Jackie hopefully. It was going to be his last day so idiotic questions weren’t really an issue for him.
‘Unfortunately, we can’t afford to lose any more four-tonners. Only one way to go, and that’s by Shanks’s pony. We do know what that is, don’t we?’
With the other corporals lined up with all their kit on their backs, we had a good idea.
