Going Commando

by Mark Time

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I’m too young, Corporal.’ It was the truth. It was clear I was too immature for this commando life.

  ‘Maybe so, but you will grow up. I was sixteen when I joined. Fucking tough, innit? I felt like opting out too. But you know what? If I had I wouldn’t have had a clue what to do. Whatever it was it wouldn’t have been half as much fun as being in the Corps. Stay in, son, and you’ll get your rewards. But then again, if you think you can’t hack it then leaving’s probably the best thing, innit?’

  He walked away, throwing the gleaming metaphorical gauntlet down at my feet.

  I sat on my bed with a couple of other guys, opt-outs from different troops who had just arrived.

  At this point, I would like to say that I vanquished the inner demons that strangled my will to continue by reading Sun Tzu’s The Art of War, and the passage, ‘He who knows when he can fight and when he cannot, will be victorious.’ But I can’t.

  It was Peter Gabriel and Kate Bush, who were playing on Radio 1. Their song, ‘Don’t Give Up’, had been played repeatedly over the last couple of weeks and now its words were all the more appropriate.

  Music had always been a hugely important part of my life. If I hadn’t let peer pressure affect me, I could have made it as a professional musician – although the career path of a flugelhorn and descant recorder prodigy is somewhat limited.

  But songs had always stirred my soul, a motivational spur, a jab of remembrance, an emotional crutch. I listened intently, and realised that Peter and Kate were right. He hadn’t been a regular feature in my music cassette collection, and her freaky-shrieky persona I wouldn’t find arousing until a few years later; but together their words on this track smashed me into the realisation that I didn’t want to leave.

  I didn’t really want to opt out, and my dark mood had been an uncontrolled vehemence lashing out at my failure. I wasn’t yet ready to handle my emotions properly, and now I realised this I was better prepared to carry on.

  The remedial training that I’d done in Gibraltar Troop had been of a high standard and the corporal teaching us had asked why I’d failed Baptist Run in the first place. It was because I had let my suffering feet overrule the rest of my mind and body. Now rested and healed, the break in training had allowed my battered and bruised body to recover enough to complete physical activity without feeling as though my feet were stripped down by forty-grit sand paper.

  I requested to see the CSM, who passed on my request to carry on to the company commander. Twenty-four hours after being told I could leave, I stood again in his office.

  ‘Back again, Time? You are taking up a lot of my busy schedule.’

  ‘Sir, I would like to un-opt out.’

  ‘I don’t even think that is a word, Time, but carry on.’

  ‘I have been thinking, Sir. I opted out because I was angry and didn’t want to fail. I want to give it another go.’

  ‘Okay, fair enough. Maybe you’ve grown up a little in this last twenty-four hours.’

  Maybe he was correct.

  ‘I will approve your request. However, you will have to give me an undertaking. From here on in you are to give it your best shot. Do you understand?’

  It wasn’t as though I’d regarded the experience like a Butlin’s holiday up to now.

  ‘Yes, Sir.’

  ‘Unless you are not deemed suitable to carry on, or you break your spine, you will not be allowed to opt out again. Is that clear?’

  This seemed a fair deal to me, even if I preferred not to break my back. So with my well-practised gear-packing routine slick as a newly wet road, I was transferred to yet another troop.

  * * *

  It’s amazing what confidence can do for your wellbeing. My new troop seemed more accepting of me, and I shared my room with Charlie and Fred – a couple of fellow Yorkshiremen, and our homes were all within ten miles of each other. Fred was the original morale-in-a box on account of his strange usage of the English language, making us laugh with his absurdities that weren’t even intentionally funny. I loved his ridiculous descriptive similes: ‘as ugly as a carrot’, ‘as daft as a saucepan’ and my all-time favourite, ‘as gay as a bummer’.

  Charlie too, was a star. He at once made me feel welcome even as a disgusting back trooper. A man of integrity, and immense generosity, he possessed a charm and smile that could turn the straightest man to consider the love that dare not speak its name…

  Actually, no, that is going a little too far, but he was and still is a man who I look upon with genuine fondness. He would go on to have a hugely successful career, surpassing even my high expectations of him. We shared the same humour, same taste in beer, and we had both witnessed the legendary council-estate crumbly white dog shit.

  The training team seemed as tough as most, but for some reason less vindictive than my previous corporals. My new section corporal was even shorter than me. There always seemed to be an undertone of humour when he spoke, leaving me unsure whether to smile or just stare blankly. If he was being funny and I didn’t smile, he’d suggest I didn’t find him funny and give me press-ups. If I smiled thinking he was intentionally being funny and he wasn’t, I’d get press-ups. In fact I did very well not to get press-ups whenever he spoke to me.

  Exercise Baptist Run was repeated. Despite being a back trooper I was invited to share my bivvy with Fred.

  ‘I don’t want you to look like Barry No Mates,’ he said.

  ‘Don’t you mean Billy?’ I replied, appreciative of his skewed offer.

  ‘No, I say Barry. It reminds me of Barry Manilow. He’s not famous for having mates is he?’

  And so this time, feeling like a confused audience member on a surreal TV show, I cavorted around Woodbury Common like a spring lamb, nailing the exercise, passing every test with flying colours. Finally, after much heartache, disappointment and cleaning, I had passed the first phase of training.

  Our reward was a week’s adventure training in the beauty of Cornwall’s Penhale. Only a short drive from Newquay, it was where my first ever attempt at rock climbing took place.

  When joining the Royal Marines on the first day, recruits receive a number of inoculations. One of those jabs is an anti-dancing serum. It doesn’t matter whether the recruit is Billy Elliot’s better dancing brother, the ability to combine commando operations with dance floor heroics becomes impossible, for it is written in the Royal Marines Commandments that thou shalt dance like a twat and so deliberately perform buffoonery in a night club to:

  A. Prevent piss-taking by your mates;

  B. Wind up civvies by bumping into them with chicken wings and ostrich legs;

  C. Attract females who would otherwise just think you were trying to be smooth.

  I certainly couldn’t dance well. That is why at about 90ft, while climbing the cliff walls near Land’s End, I was surprised by my fantastic Shakin’ Stevens impression. Climbing can bring out the Shaky in all of us: limbs contorted at unnatural angles, strained muscles making alien movements, ensuring that when we’re perched on a small lip the width of a wafer mint, our toes send a domino effect throughout our struggling body.

  Some climbers call it the Michael Jackson leg, but I’d never seen Jacko quiver like the 1980s’ Welsh rock ’n’ roll star. It starts with discomfort in a toe. It shakes slowly. You try to stop it, only making it shake with ever more vigour, then it moves to your foot, then your heel, then your calf. Within ten seconds of the first toe quake it has rippled to your knee and you look like a naked Eskimo, unable to stop trembling.

  Should you be conversant with such a dodgy predicament you can divest even more sympathy when I simultaneously suffered an excruciating attack of piles. Not having a proctologist’s education, I don’t know the technical term for a piles attack, but when those haemorrhoids play up it feels as though the devil himself has shoved a red hot poker up my sphincter. So for my Emma Freuds to have a quick peek at the outside world just as I was a trembling wreck, perched on a rock face, was
bad timing.

  My screams were at first received with concern, but as I explained my predicament to my belaying partner, my new PTI, and the rest of the lads from my new troop, laughter replaced compassion. With the pain subsiding to a level where I could move, I scaled the last few metres like a sweaty spider monkey and tried to adopt a position on the summit where my chalfonts would withdraw to the safety and warmth of my back passage.

  Through this sort of misadventure, I got to know my new comrades in a far more relaxed and civilised environment. In this atmosphere I actually caught one of the training team smiling, and not because he was watching us suffer.

  * * *

  Reaching the fifteen-week mark allowed us to wallow in a job half-done. The Friday of week fifteen was Parents Day, an invitation to family members to come to CTC and see how their son/husband/boyfriend was coping and what he’d experienced in training so far. As we re-enacted physical training, weapon drills and fieldcraft skills to our highly impressed audience, for some reason we were no longer labelled ‘scrotes’, ‘fuckwits’ or ‘oxygen thieves’.

  But my parents were too busy frying chips to attend. So, along with Jock, the only other parentless recruit, we sat alone like a pair of cast-offs in the NAAFI bar, watching parents socialising with each other, sharing conversations of obvious hilarity with the recruits and the training team, who were wearing their civilised heads.

  It was a case of ‘what happens in Lympstone stays in Lympstone’, as they clearly didn’t want parents knowing that their little Johnny couldn’t make a bed pack and had to swim for half an hour naked in the regain tank because he couldn’t do a ‘make safe’ on his weapon quick enough.

  The troop sergeant noted we were sat alone. ‘Where’s your folks, fellas?’ he asked, downing a pint in the process.

  ‘It’s too far to come for mine, Sergeant,’ replied Jock, whose parents lived in the far north of Scotland.

  ‘What about you, Time?’ he asked, sucking the beer head from his moustache. Before I could reply he interjected, ‘They don’t like you either?’

  He could have had a point.

  ‘Uh, too busy, Sergeant, they own a business.’ I hoped I was making it sound as though they ran a multinational conglomerate and not a council-estate chippy.

  ‘Right, seeing as though you are a pair of sad fucks you can thin out early on long weekend leave. Go on, fuck off.’

  It was the most compassionate thing I had yet heard.

  If my parents couldn’t be bothered to come and see me, I took on the role of petulant teenager and decided I couldn’t be bothered with them either. Heading straight to Knottingley, I spent the duration of the three-day weekend with my mates, not even telling my parents I was back. With my newfound reliance on my fellow recruits, mates had become my new family, and while the mates I went back to see weren’t military they were still people I could rely on.

  NINE

  ‘If you think this is cold, wait ’til you get to Norway.’

  EVERY SINGLE BOOTNECK, WHETHER THEY HAVE BEEN TO NORWAY OR NOT

  WHEN NODS TALK about the second half of training, the general consensus is that as the intensity is cranked up the bullshit is lessened. What a load of bollocks…

  On our return to CTC after a wonderful three days without getting flogged, we were greeted with a notice stating formal rounds of the accommodation were scheduled for 07.30 the following morning. Therefore, in between tales of numerous rejections from girls back home despite being a week sixteen recruit, those of us who had returned early cracked on with the familiar routine of cleaning every visible item, putting in extra effort to cover recruits who were returning as late as they possibly could.

  No matter how much effort we put in, it was always going to be a waste of time. The training team, it seemed, was intent on making our return a difficult one. The standard of our accommodation was apparently way short of that nebulous mark of no tangible value.

  After the mandatory flinging from the second-floor window of our bedding, the contents of our lockers were swept onto the floor in a rather childlike tantrum, leaving our room looking as though a Tasmanian devil had just visited. Fred muttered that the inspecting corporal was a ‘cock muncher’ as he stared out of the window at his clothing two floors below; yet even humour couldn’t hide the fact we were being thrashed for no good reason. A lunchtime weapons inspection followed yet another room inspection. All these failed inspections apparently indicated we were still on leave and had to start switching on. These inspections would only get worse if they didn’t get better.

  Now, in Chatham Company phase two training, the training team needed to know we still had every bit of kit issued to us. The only way to do this was through us laying out a full kit muster, which was called after the evening meal.

  Think of a kit muster as the desktop of a computer user diagnosed with obsessive compulsive disorder. Each item of clothing a computer file meticulously displayed in its rightful place in a certain way, in a certain position on the bed. Not only was the purpose of a kit muster to check our equipment, it was an easy way for the training team to pick us up should we lose any bits of kit or place an insufficient gap between items.

  It was evident we were in the shit. The only variable was how deep. My kit muster now looked like the desktop of a deranged axe murderer. At 22.30 another kit muster ensued. I don’t know whether they realised, but any kit we were now deficient in had probably blown away during their earlier hurling tantrums. Again, all our kit had to be laid out neatly on our immaculately-made beds. Every piece of equipment was scrutinised yet again, as if found on some archaeological dig. Anything that wasn’t spankingly clean was thrown around the room. Nothing was good enough, unsurprisingly.

  At 02.00 the DL woke us all and ordered us all out onto the landing. No shouting, no threats, just a quietly spoken order: ‘Full kit muster, including beds, laid out on the bottom field, one hour. Go.’

  It would have been suicide to suggest that it was raining and a kit muster in such conditions would only render it less useable for the next day. So, in the spirit of being fucked about for the sake of it, we rushed panic-stricken to our rooms to get all our beds and equipment down to the bottom field. Would it be better to arrange our kit muster on the beds now and carefully carry our beds to the field? Or should we get the beds there quickly and make shuttle runs back to the accommodation with our kit and equipment?

  Fred and I took the former option. He was a good choice of partner as he’d been a removalist prior to joining up and so was expert at carrying large objects up and down stairs, a skill I doubt he’d ever thought would come in handy again.

  We hurriedly laid out the muster before carrying the fully-laden bed carefully down two flights of right-angled stairs, out of double doors that were so heavy if one swung back it felt like you’d been punched by Marvin Hagler, down the steep stairwell to the bottom field, past the regain tank to plonk down the bed as neatly as one could expect on a muddy field next to the 6ft wall and tank trap of the assault course, all the while feeling the rain slowly drench our kit.

  Watching others do the same, I could only wince as some got their angles wrong on the stairwell, their kit sliding from the bed onto the floor. This would cause a staircase bottleneck, with some cursing and those who saw the funny side of this whole exercise in bullshit giggling.

  The DL returned to the accommodation block after half an hour to apologise. He hadn’t realised it was raining so hard. He paused to gauge our expectant joy. The kit muster would now be under cover, in the drill shed. The bastard…

  As word passed around the troop to those already neatly organising their clothes in the muddiness of the bottom field, the giggles turned to disquiet. Even Charlie, who up until now wore a permanent smile and would thank you for setting his head on fire, cursed in anger as once more we crash moved our beds to yet another location not designed for displaying beds.

  At inspection time, the DL arrived. We all stood to attention. He, I am posit
ive, revelled in the loathing of the thirty pairs of eyes now upon him. By now, we had all been taught a number of ways to kill someone. At this moment in time he was a likely candidate to be my first. He slowly walked around our beds, a cursory check here and a casual glance there. He occasionally commented with a big dose of sarcasm that our kit looked wet.

  No shit, Sherlock.

  But in the main, he walked around looking at our tired, angry faces. Then, without any further ado, he just plainly said, ‘Good night, gentlemen.’

  On the scale of ‘good’, tonight was well down. In fact it was pretty near the bottom. Although the kit muster was over, the night (or more correctly the morning) had just begun. Wiping our beds clean of mud, drying and pressing our wet clothing and equipment again, we had only another day of tiresome inspections to look forward to.

  We were clearly under a ‘welcome to Chatham Company’ banner for the rest of the week, when constant beastings ended with the mantra that training would only get harder. We were certainly part of the teabag syndrome, which suggests the longer you are in hot water the stronger you become. We were on a rolling boil, under constant pressure from the moment we woke to the moment we crashed exhausted into our beds.

  I occasionally bumped into guys from my original troop, and retold my stories of the continual beastings of week sixteen.

  ‘Yeah, we did a full bed kit muster too, but in the River Exe, naked. You had it easy, geezer.’

  Of course I should have known better. One-upmanship was prevalent in training and everyone had it harder than anyone else in the weeks behind them. This sort of black catting followed people through their careers. I am sure that, in 1664, when the forefathers of the Royal Marines were formed under the auspices of the Duke of York and Albany’s Maritime Regiment of Foot, number two troop got shit from number one troop about how their training was harder.

  Yet the continual testing, including commando tests, is the benchmark. After beastings were discontinued in 2000, one could assume training had become easier, but as recent history has shown, in the last few years those guys have undertaken operations far more dangerous than I experienced, and performed with distinction whether they had to lay a kit muster in a field or not.