Just do what you are told, that’s all you worry about. Thinking is out of your pay scale.’ Soldiers do not work with the padre. He is normally trying to get people to talk to him and stop hiding when they see him coming. Soldiers, however, are rarely out of sight of NCOs. We took our cues on ethics from the NCOs, who would beast us and occasionally threaten to shoot us, not the priests.
At the end of our training, when we had passed all of our basic tests in shooting, marching, obeying and being abused, we had a passing out parade – a ceremony where we marched around the parade square in front of our families before being inspected by a senior officer. We carried out some overly elaborate drill moves as a full troop of thirty or so soldiers. We managed to fluff most of it and after we’d finished a visiting colonel strutted our three ranks inspecting, fawning and talking rubbish to us. I was unmoved. I had no family there to see my shiny toecaps and no. 2 dress (formal dress). It was my own day. I was going to be a soldier now and felt like I was part of something good and wholesome.
The logistics soldiers were sent down the road from Pirbright to Deepcut in order to learn to steer ourselves and others towards or away from violence, depending on the situation we would be facing. We were still treated like children, but called private instead of recruit. Many of our families were more concerned about a son posted here than to Iraq. Deepcut was a grim old training camp – home of the School of Logistics – and had a sinister reputation. By this time pickaxe handles had been swapped back to rifles for the guard shift, as a number of recruits had managed to shoot themselves in the head multiple times. A huge legal battle had ensued with much squirming from the Ministry of Defence and Army. We never pressed the topic.
At Deepcut you stayed quiet and tried to get through your course as quickly as possible. After my trade training I was put into a driving course. This consisted of a week or so of intensive lessons and then test after test until we either passed or were made to be chefs – chefs did not need to have a vehicle licence. We were constantly threatened with being forced to become an army chef – no one there wanted to be an egg-flipper or a cabbage technician. I did six driving tests and barely managed to escape.
I was despatched with three other soldiers on an otherwise empty coach to the military driving school to do our truck licence. We sat in the hangars of the old airbase for days at a time waiting for someone to pass their test so we could take their position. When this was finally done I returned to Deepcut and did two weeks of guard, standing on the gate in all weathers as people came and went. We stopped and searched random cars to punctuate the boredom. I had asked to be posted to Colchester, which was approved. I was despatched for some pre-posting leave with papers telling me not to be late to my unit.
We were told to choose the three regiments we most wanted for our first posting and I got my first choice: 13 Air Assault Support Regiment. Based in Colchester, it had a good boxing team and looked more interesting than the standard logistics units in that we got maroon berets and bigger badges and it was said to be more warlike. Its soldiers were trained to move things – people, fuel, water, ammunition – wherever they needed to go. The regiment had a fleet of vehicles and the specialisms within the regiment ranged from drivers and logistics specialists to petroleum operators who specialized in the transport and storage of fuels.
We provided this logistical support to the airborne brigade and the paratroopers who hated us for being ‘crap-hats’ (non-paras). Nonetheless we got to wear maroon berets like them. The paras – while professionally aggressive – were unlikely to be parachuted en masse into anything ever again. The epoch of mass parachute assaults had ended but it still looked good to have paratroopers. I disliked heights but planned to take the course – it meant more money.
I walked through the gates one morning and was quickly processed and told I would be in 82 Squadron. I was put into a room with three others. A St Lucian, a Scottish kid named MacDougal, and Dobbin who was a shit-magnet (a soldier who attracts trouble) I knew from Deepcut. I never knew anyone who messed up so much, or got shouted at so often. We thought perhaps his mother had made him join. These kinds of kids go one of two ways: they are either abandoned as a liability or kept on as a kind of dopey mascot. We tried our best to look after him. MacDougal was the scruffiest soldier I had ever met. Once, when he turned up on parade in clip (a scruffy state) he was told he would have looked scruffy naked. Despite this he was a regular Casanova and very successful with women. I started drinking with him to pick up stragglers and it turned out he was also good company.
Dobbin was terribly unfit and always late. He constantly exasperated our administrative sergeant, Nasty Bob, who was a professionally unpleasant senior NCO. He was also commando and airborne trained, very fit and completely tapped. I suspect he saw in Dobbin a younger version of himself and he tried to shape him. He took him on runs and beasted him and tried to stop him chain-smoking, eating kebabs every night and drinking litres of Coke. These long, arduous runs were called Bobercise. I imagine every army in the world has a Bob and a Dobbin. The sound of Nasty Bob shouting in frustration at Dobbin as he messed up simple tasks was the elevator music of our working day.
The tension in a working unit was different to that in basic training. Any new private who believed that passing training would elevate them was soon crushed. You were a nig (new in green) or a crow (new bloke), and the last batch of nigs had been waiting for the next batch so as to assume the role of slightly-less new bloke in order to be able to avoid shit tasks and duties. I had picked up enough cant and bearing so that people assumed this was a second posting. At twenty-two I was geriatric by these standards and as soon as I arrived I came nose to nose with my sergeant major. He took exception to my not standing rigidly to attention as soon as he appeared – albeit unidentifiable in civilian clothing. From then on I realized that bullshit was maintained here and wheeled out on occasion. This was my first clash with the hierarchy and my only clash for years. After that I built a rapport with the seniors, mostly by just turning up on time and not moaning when I did get assigned a shit job.
One morning after I’d been in the field army a week or so – the camp was woken by the regimental sergeant major setting off all the fire alarms. It was around 0500 hours. He had gathered his senior NCOs from the sergeant’s mess and they screamed at us until we were all on parade. Some of us were in no. 2 dress, others in sheets and some in boxer shorts or half of a uniform. He paced the great square as we gathered and waited, tapping his stick on the tarmac. ‘Somebody,’ he roared in his Northern Irish accent, ‘was outside my regimental HQ early this morning, smashing up the garden furniture that my HQ staff sit on.’ There was silence and hundreds of sidelong glances. ‘You will all go from here, and reassemble in ten minutes in full no. 2 dress.’ He went on, still pacing, ‘After that you will parade again in combat order.’ He let it sink in. The RSM timed threats expertly. ‘This will continue until I have a confession.’ He faced us squarely, putting both hands on his stick and leaning on it. The sun was coming up by then. ‘Begin’.
We did about three changes before someone grassed up the guilty soldiers. The two offenders, a pair of Geordie lance-jacks (lance-corporals), were marched away for discipline. It turned out they had staggered into camp after a night on the beer and seen the plastic garden furniture on the grass by RHQ. They had been smashing it up in the balmy night when the RSM returned from a conference. He had driven back overnight and pulled up as they were throwing chairs at the building. They had run off before the RSM could identify them.
The level of prejudice surprised me and took some of the gleam off my shiny new world. At times it was worse in the army than outside, perhaps because prejudices were institutionalized. We had Fijians, Nepalese, black and white Africans, Scotsmen and Ulstermen and a gay chef. He was constantly sniped at for his orientation and he sniped back admirably. Contrary to recent PR exercises, gays are not generally appreciated in the British Army.
The white NCOs opined openly
