Going Commando

by Mark Time

  The new MK6 helmet also came with a camouflaged DPM cover. Logistical problems also meant the first shipments only came in one size: Extra Fucking Small. To get it over the helmet was like trying to put a baby cap over an Atlas stone and our initial attempts were failures, raising the ire of the DL who didn’t want his troops to wear helmets that seemed to turn them into the Hulk.

  The DL attempted to fit the cover over the helmet as proof it could be done. With the laws of physics not assisting his argument, he advised us to soak the covers in cold water then give them a good stretch. As always, we did what he said, which in retrospect may have been a mistake.

  When I was a child there were toys that you could put in water and they would grow exponentially. I think they were eventually banned as a child swallowed one and it expanded in his stomach until he died. The MK6 helmet cover was the exact opposite of that banned toy: once it was placed in water it shrunk as if it was in a film called Honey, I Shrunk My Helmet Cover.

  In no part could we be blamed for the logistical fuck-ups, yet all this ill-sized equipment only led to more beastings. As we were now issued weapons, the beastings could take on a different shade of agony. Stress positions, although deemed ill-treatment by the UN, were an active participation sport at CTC and combined with shoot-to-kill exercises that sounded very Ramboesque, but in reality were painful isometrics where we’d hold the weapon at various degrees of discomfort for a long time, until our bodies could take little more.

  The SLR only weighed just over 4kg, but its length meant holding it horizontal with one arm for the duration of an episode of Coronation Street was as painful as listening to Deidre Barlow. Shoot-to-kill exercises could be undertaken anywhere due to their static nature, so you didn’t even need space. I even got roped into one after having a piss with my weapon slung over my shoulder, as I’d earlier been seen taking my milk outside the training team office. According to Corporal Stevens, consuming the milk would make holding the weapon out to the side far easier. It didn’t.

  * * *

  Week five morphed into week six that seamlessly turned into week seven. Characters came and went, as new guys joined from troops ahead of us. These ‘back troopers’ could have been injured, therefore undergoing a rehabilitative period, or failed a criteria test, meaning they would have to be sent back to the appropriate week of training. Being back trooped was a humiliation whatever the reason, and it was the sword of Damocles that hung over the head of every recruit that passed through training. With the ever-changing faces, closeness towards back troopers was sometimes a little strained, as if a family member had been replaced by a strange interloper, accepted warily until proving his worth.

  This unease wasn’t helped by the spate of thefts that occurred within the troop. This was an immensely destructive element in such a tight-knit group, creeping into everyone’s psyche as well as their belongings to pilfer not only money but trust.

  Indeed, I was accused at one point. I had walked into a room to look for Hopkins, only to be surprised by another recruit lying on his bed, hidden behind his locker. He jumped to the conclusion that I was there to steal. Other than being accused of paedophilia, or of supporting Manchester United, I can’t think of any worse accusation, and I was happy to tell him so in such a manner that we had to be pulled apart by other recruits.

  The thief was winning. Despite my protestations of innocence, I knew that fingers would be secretly pointed. The Special Investigations Branch (SIB) was called in to take fingerprints of everyone in the troop. While this was humiliating, I knew it would exonerate me when the real culprit was unearthed.

  * * *

  Most of our outdoor training was conducted on the coarse heaths of Woodbury Common. A dog walker’s paradise, the scrub of the heath was crisscrossed by the many rough firebreaks that turned ankles and shredded skin if we fell. We tended not to use these firebreaks all that often, preferring the small tracks that were the capillary routes between the different areas of training. Mostly though, we were either on our backs, fronts or knees within the heath itself, a thick web of gorse and thickets that pulled, nipped and slapped us like a public-school flogging every time we tried stalking – in layperson’s parlance ‘creeping up on the enemy’, one of the core skills of a sniper.

  I thought I’d be good at stalking. As a small child I often went strawberry nicking after the fields were closed to the public. I would, in military terms, ‘leopard crawl’, using the strawberry mounds as cover and secretively eating as many as I could until the nausea of overindulgence took over. Only once did I ever get caught. Trying to flee from a farmer’s salt pellet-filled shotgun with the weight of a hundred strawberries swilling around my stomach led to me vomiting red sick down my front. My gran thought I’d been shot in the face.

  I also thought being a short-arse would be an advantage, but never realised that, once laid down, we’re all pretty much the same height. I usually did well on the stalking stances, although with my inclination to chance things a little further I’d often be caught trying to get too close, which would result in a bollocking as bad as for those seen from a huge distance. There was no need for me to get so close and blow my cover. Carrying a weapon with a battle range of 300m, there was little point in getting to 60m and being shot. In any case, it meant less time spent crawling amongst the painful undergrowth.

  This permanent contact with the gorse often resulted in many recruits developing the infamous ‘Woodbury rash’. With bodies worn down by perpetual activity, it thrived on our lowered immune systems, leaving skin looking like bubble wrap and each pore a yellow pustule. Like many, my spare time was often taken up by squeezing, repeatedly amazed at what the zits would offer. It was like opening up a Kinder Surprise egg, only I wouldn’t be rewarded with a dodgy toy, but with pus, blood and, if especially lucky, a gorse needle.

  The thighs and knees took the brunt, but some recruits found the rash on their arse, which left a nice dot-to-dot puzzle for anyone brave enough to complete. Some even suffered symptoms on their genitalia, although this could have been a questionable excuse. A few would suffer huge black boils akin to the bubonic plague, and would be immobilised or back trooped due to severe infection.

  Years later, a Royal Marine recruit would die from the rash and was soon followed by an elderly woman who passed away from a single scratch. Studies showed that the gorse itself can cause a Group A streptococcal infection, which can lead to all manner of nasty diseases. So, although the most dangerous thing we had knowingly faced was a pusser’s pasty, we were unknowingly being attacked by deadly flora that should have made a guest appearance as a Doctor Who baddie.

  While up on Woodbury Common, we would often be handed a bag ration. Probably not named after the 18th century Georgian Prince Pyotr Ivanovich Bagration, a ‘bagrat’, as it was commonly known, was the lunchtime meal issued when troops were not on camp, usually in a non-tactical environment. Just as well really, as the bagrat consisted of the noisiest snacks known to humanity.

  The brown bag itself was made of a paper so thin that, even if the air turned a little humid, or condensation built up on a nearby water bottle, the bottom would rot to pulp and allow all its contents to fall out. Eating a packet of crisps is about as quiet as the Hiroshima bomb and the rustle or crunch seemed to amplify in quieter surroundings. If we were lucky the crisps would be soft due to celebrating the second birthday past their best-before date.

  A juice box was our refreshment, with a straw that could never pierce the silver circle and necessitated the use of a knife, resulting in clothes dowsed with sticky juice to become a target for any flying insect within a mile radius. Should you actually manage to get the straw in, the echoing slurps of reaching the bottom of the box would make the crisp packet rustling seem like a lullaby in comparison. The chocolate bar always was the ying to a ratpack ‘Rolos’ yang. Always melted, amazingly even in the winter, I can only assume they must have been kept in the oven prior to being bagged up, leaving the consumption making for a mess
y tongue wrestle with the wrapper.

  The fruit would usually be an orange or apple that looked as though it had just it’d returned from fighting at a football match: battered, bruised and with chunks often missing. The sandwich would be even worse. Only eaten to stave off starvation, the selection was immense: cheese and pickle, or polony and pickle. The cheese would be wafer thin or as thick as a brick, depending of on the boredom level of the sandwich maker, or the cheapest of polonies where visible pieces of a pig’s mutilated cock or eyelid, complete with lashes, were as prevalent as the bits of bone. On occasion we could hit the jackpot and even find a small amount of meat. For whatever reason, possibly in the name of being ‘continental’, the polony would often have a circle of stuffing in the middle. The contents of that stuffing were something known to only the guardians of Area 51 but at a guess it was a mix of cigarette ash, bum fluff and sage. In the meat processing factory, I can only suggest that there are three conveyors graded ‘Fit for Human Consumption’, ‘Unfit for Human Consumption’ and ‘Food for Royal Marines’. In normal circumstances, guys on restricted privileges usually made the bagrats, so their culinary pride was hardly on a par with Fanny Craddock, making eating any sandwich a cautious lucky dip.

  As if training and stomaching a bagrat wasn’t hard enough, those recruits who didn’t come up to scratch in their personal administration were either charged or put on ‘crabby recruit routine’. To be put onto ‘crabby’ was a fate worse than death. Not only were you ordered to parade five extra times in every uniform that you held, you were tainted as being ‘dirty’. The fact that those on ‘crabby’ were godly clean compared to civilians was irrelevant. Even being found with a stone embedded into the sole of a polished boot in a clean locker could be sufficient reason to find oneself on crabby recruit routine. By Royal Marines standards they were lepers: dirty, filthy tramps who were pariahs to the mainstream recruits. Fortunately, my administration was of sufficient standard. However, on a week-eight exercise called Hunter’s Moon I was found out.

  Piss-wet through all week, the exercise was a continual trial of yomping from one harbour position to another, interspersed with practising our map-reading skills, camouflage and concealment for stalking activities, and observation stances where we would try to find a water bottle hiding in a bush or a torch sneakily tucked behind a tree. The October rain – ‘It’s not rain, it’s liquid sunshine,’ we were told – let up for around two hours on the Wednesday night, but that was irrelevant as we were being crash moved yet again, dragging all our saturated kit through the mud of Woodbury Common. On the Thursday morning, with little sleep, yet another field inspection was scheduled.

  I was extra tired, truly hanging out of my hoop. That night I had been on sentry and Hopkins was my relief. As per normal, ten minutes before the end of my watch I’d scramble through the bivvies, having noted previously where he’d be. The harbour position always looked different in the wooded blackness and any of us could trip over bivvies and bits of errant kit, or just fall into holes in the ground. I eventually found him.

  ‘Hopkins, your turn for sentry,’ I whispered.

  ‘Nah mate, wrong bivvy. I woke you up.’

  This was a usual ploy and one I’d tried before getting kicked for it. Some had even denied who they were, preferring instead to get a precious five more minutes sleep while the confused recruit bimbled around looking for them, then realised he’d been correct all along.

  ‘No, Elliott woke me up. It’s your turn.’

  He jumped from his bivvy still wrapped in his sleeping bag.

  ‘I’m not getting up. Fuck off.’

  I was taken aback, this lad was supposed to be my best mate – not that I had many others to choose from. He shrivelled back into the dampness of his bivvy. He obviously didn’t realise it was me.

  ‘It’s me, Timey. Mate, you okay? You can’t go back to sleep.’ It’s hard to be assertive when whispering.

  ‘Seriously, fuck off. Leave me alone.’

  Although he wasn’t the happiest of fellows, he seemed to take to training with far more ease than someone like me. But here he was blatantly refusing to do his job. What could I do? I wouldn’t grass him up to the training team. I certainly couldn’t wake anyone else up. They were hardly going to volunteer to get up an hour early in the pouring rain to do extra sentry duty.

  My only option was to return to position and do Hopkins’ sentry. That feeling of smugness when just about to go to sleep had ebbed away, and here I was again with cold rain falling down the back of my neck, trickling iced water down my spine like some Devonian water torture. Looking into the blackness of pine forests, I could only wonder what the fuck was wrong with Hopkins.

  I didn’t manage to speak to him once stand down had been called after first light. He was keeping himself to himself behind the screen of his bivvy, saying little while eating his breakfast bacon grill from the tin.

  On morning inspection being called, we hurriedly clustered together in our sections, laid out all our equipment as neatly as we could on our soaking wet ponchos, and stripped down our weapons for field conditions.

  As I stood at ease behind my poncho, I looked across to the other section where the Unsmiling Assassin was on his haunches inspecting the underneath of mess tins, the cleanliness of bayonets that were never used, and checking the amount of water in bottles. Anything less than full and it would be emptied, a rather strange punishment for not having a full complement of water. The guys in his section tended to be the better recruits and we put it down to them being shit-scared of their section commander.

  ‘Why are your boots muddy, Lofty?’ asked the Unsmiling Assassin politely, as he always did.

  The recruit answered with a shivering mouth, ‘’Cos it’s… it’s… muddy, Corporal.’

  Yet his logical gibbering wasn’t due to him being scared of the punishment that awaited – he was fucking frozen. Awaiting him were a number of ways to warm him up, none of which could be considered desirable.

  The cold gnawed at my bones too. My stinging ears took note of the activity to my right as Corporal Stevens inspected my fellow section members. As he approached, nervousness rose from my stomach as it always did. I would always get picked up for something and my press-ups were legendary.

  Corporal Stevens came into view with a mess tin swinging from his finger. He lobbed it into the undergrowth behind and turned to Davies who he had just inspected.

  ‘Off you go, Davies, crawl and get it back. You can start from that puddle.’

  Davies lay down next to the fetid puddle at his feet. But that was a slight understatement: it was, in fact, a large fuck-off pool of muddy water, seemingly made by the many trucks that had ploughed these soft tracks.

  ‘Stop!’ Corporal Stevens exclaimed. ‘The middle of the puddle is your starting point, lightweight. Get in there and then start.’

  Davies slipped onto his hands and knees into the brown water that mirrored his despondency.

  ‘Leopard crawl, fuckwit, not monkey crawl,’ added Corporal Stevens, just to make Davies’ burden a little moister.

  Corporal Stevens then benevolently turned his attention back to me. ‘Time…’

  ‘Good morning, Corporal.’

  ‘Is it a good morning, Time?’

  ‘Up to now, Corporal, yes.’ My eyes did not move as he bent down to pick up my weapon.

  ‘Hmm, well, looks like it’s going to go downhill from here, then.’

  The muzzle of my SLR came into my eye line as it was thrust towards my face.

  ‘What’s that there?’ He motioned towards the flash eliminator, which was now an inch from my bleary eye.

  I looked. Inside one of the eliminator grooves was a patch of brown.

  ‘Cake?’ I asked, more in hope than certitude.

  I didn’t know whether he wanted to laugh or punch my head in. ‘Cake? Fucking cake?’

  It was a fair response. I couldn’t actually recall eating any cake during the week, let alone while cleaning
my weapon. It did appear a foolhardy thing to do just in case crumbs did fall into the flash eliminator.

  ‘It’s fucking rust! Not fucking cake. Give me fifty.’

  So while I was doing fifty very wet and heavy press-ups, and listening to Davies getting his lanyard stuck in the gorse he was crawling through, Corporal Stevens was recounting my story to the other members of the training team, asking them whether it was indeed ginger or Dundee cake while levelling a variety of quite offensive names at me.

  ‘You realise a rusty weapon is a chargeable offence, numpty bollocks?’ said Corporal Stevens after I’d finished my press ups.

  I did now. On my return to camp, not only had I learnt a new phrase of abuse, but was marched into the company commander’s office to be lectured on the importance of my weapon being clean. I was to be charged £50 – a week’s wage – and seven days restricted privileges (RPs), which meant I could not go ashore at the weekend. I just hoped I’d stocked up on enough green string.

  As if I wasn’t busy enough, having RPs meant I now had to report to the guardroom at 06.00, 18.00, and 22.00 in my half-lovat uniform, to be inspected and lectured about weapons cleanliness by the bored guard commander who was probably pissed off that my presence took him away from him watching television.

  ‘Here you go, Lofty, just to confirm you have understood what I’ve said you can give me a confirmatory demonstration on how to clean,’ said the guard commander, throwing me some rags and a tin of Brasso. ‘For the next half an hour you can busy yourself by making those cannons glisten.’

  I looked at the cannons that flanked the guardroom door. How I was to make them glisten even more I didn’t know. But I gave it a good go.

  ‘Right, that’s half an hour, Lofty. Let’s see how we’ve got on, shall we?’ said the guard commander, probably during the TV advert breaks.