assign punishments accordingly and the Africans would complain. This would start the ‘race card’ debate. This saw strenuous denials from the racists and they would fall back pathetically on a standard excuse: length of service. ‘I’ve been in the army ten, fifteen, eighteen years. I’m not a racist!’
Bizarrely, this fallacy often worked. Length of service seemed to impart a special voodoo-like force field against all accusations in the military. I saw this time and time again. These characters would then switch back to their racist rants when the Africans were out of earshot: ‘Shouldn’t be in the army, lazy fucking niggers, fucking skiving again.’ The spiel we were given in basic training about there being ‘no black, yellow, brown or white’ in the army, ‘only green’, didn’t seem to exist outside basic training, though occasionally the term ‘fucking non-swimmers’ was substituted for ‘fucking niggers’; most of the Africans and Caribbeans could not swim and on their personnel documents non-swimmers was the term used. I wasn’t going to join in, so I kept my head down and learned quite quickly that when anyone starts a sentence with ‘I’m not a racist, but… ’, they are a racist.
Likewise, women were a sore point, routinely treated as what the army terms ‘ginger cousins’ rather like the Royal Air Force. They generally couldn’t carry as much, had periods, cried, and didn’t put out when required. They also smelled far too nice – which was distracting – and they made the camp look untidy. They nonetheless were expected to adapt to the maleness of the culture: spitting, swearing and fighting were the criteria and many contributed admirably.
The physical culture was punishing but I embraced it. We did at least three training sessions a week and were encouraged to do more – these were beastings designed to push people physically and break them if possible. Every Friday we assembled for commanding officers’ physical training. This was normally a run in boots or a speed march with weight on our backs.
Physical training instructors (PTIs) are the prima donnas of any regiment and a gathering of them looks like a second-tier boy band. These mythical creatures can normally be found in the gym doing lunges, wearing crisp white short-shorts and permanent tans and their hair was often worn longer than regulation and crafted delicately and carefully. I often wondered if they got up especially early and styled each other. That summer we regularly ran a circuit through the woods in blazing heat, often in boots, sometimes carrying weight or even each other up hills, through rivers and so on. Once, during a fireman’s carry that seemed to go for miles, a corporal shat himself. The PTI applauded him and told the rest of us that this was exactly the kind of effort he wanted to see. We should count ourselves lucky to be going to war with men committed enough to shit themselves with effort before giving up. During another beasting, when the regiment gathered for a water break, the ‘elite’ 63 Squadron was missing. They were hiding in the woods. ‘Skive to survive’ was our adage on commanding officers’ physical training, which was fine unless you got caught taking it easy at the back. We were all thrashed in the heat for the sins of these few with many press-ups and sprints and fireman’s carries.
I loved the soldiering life. That system is designed to create a robust character and it made me robust physically and mentally. The military also teaches you that it’s socially acceptable to explode. Colchester has been a military town since the Romans and perhaps for this reason the inhabitants were adept at spotting soldiers and all but the least scrupulous of its womenfolk avoided us. We would regularly go to one of the two clubs or the various bars and pubs, and then batter each other or some unfortunate before devouring a kebab. Midweek, if we’d failed to ‘trap’ a woman – which was often, given we were a charmless herd of drunk soldiers – we would stumble back across camp to our rooms giving each other drunken abuse every step of the way. Sometimes we had grazed knuckles, split lips or aching mandibles and we stunk of kebabs and beer.
Such was the lifestyle of a junior private or crow. We had no rank to lose. We were closeted in the army and we were fit, strong and aggressive young soldiers. We would drink all night and sweat it out on a morning run. Violence was fine, even encouraged, and certainly expected. However, if you got caught or arrested then you discovered how much the sergeant major hated the paperwork and you would suffer doubly from the punishment and his attentions.
Getting on a sporting team was the way forward, we were told. Some people get into a sport and never go on tour but still fly up the ranks. I joined the boxing team and we trained all day long for weeks. It was immense. We were permanently in sports kit and went running at dawn and hit bags and pads and each other for three hours a day. The squadron boxing event was approaching and we threw ourselves into it. The medicals came around and I was barred from entering. I couldn’t believe it. I had been kickboxing for years by then and never even had a medical. I’d been punched and kicked in the grid (face) more times than I could recall, with no ill effect. Apparently my eyes were sub-standard. I was told to get into uniform and report back to my troop.
I went with the regiment to a training area in Norfolk, down on the whole thing until I realized what we were doing. We were to ‘play the enemy’ for a battalion of paratroopers who were going to Iraq. We were given vehicles and drove around wearing Middle Eastern scarves for a week, playing cowboys and Indians – or rather, soldiers and insurgents. We finished the week off by rioting in a village built specifically for training FIBUA (fighting in built up areas). We came in our hoodies and boots, some of us with newspapers stuffed in our clothes knowing we’d be getting a beating. We fought with the lines of paratroopers all day. They were fortified like ancient warriors behind their wall of shields, visors down, and armed with lengths of piping instead of heavy wooden batons. We threw spent baton rounds instead of bricks and got repeatedly beaten up and mock-arrested. It was even better than boxing.
One of our lance corporals managed to take down the CO of 2 Para (the 2nd Batallion, the Parachute Regiment) with a baton round. The man was prancing behind the line of his men when our boy saw him and chucked the round. It was a good shot. It split his eyebrow open beautifully and all us proxy rioters cheered as he folded and the 2 Para sergeant major dragged him away for treatment. During a break in the rioting he approached us as we sat around. We gawped at his patched-up face and the bloody dressing and he thanked us for our viciousness and told us that we needed to be as cruel as possible as these men were going to Iraq soon, where some of them would likely kill and perhaps die, and they would need to be tough and vicious to survive.
Between bouts we would sit in a barn with a group of Iraqi interpreters who stoked up a huge shisha. These Iraqi expats hired by the army for realism were great. They called everyone sarge and when we were rioting they would bang drums, dance and start chants, which we would mimic: ‘Down, down Bush,’ we sang to their cues, ‘Down, down Blair, down, down Ah-mer-ica!’ We fought with the paras all day until we were mottled with bruises and cuts and we could hardly lift our arms to block their blows.
I, along with two other privates, managed to make a baby paratrooper cry as we played at rioting. The paras were strung out in a line between buildings and this lone crow was between a building and a fence. The others couldn’t reach us with the plastic pipes they swung in lieu of batons. Some of these weapons rattled because the paratroopers filled them with stones and sealed the ends with tape to bite us harder and bloody us better. The kid had a bigger shield than the others. We asked him why – was he fucking new or something? We bullied him until he blubbered and started lashing out with his baton. One of the exercise marshals in his high-visibility vest eventually pulled him out of the game.
The final exercise had us huddling in buildings all night, loading hundreds of magazines with blanks. As dawn broke we squatted in the streets like guerrillas, faces covered with bandannas and keffiyehs. Through the mist the paras came in vehicles and on foot. We blasted off hundreds of blanks on automatic, and threw dozens of smoke grenades. The paras screamed as they followed us into the buildings and through the rat-holes which connected them. Anyone they caught was beaten for good measure. The rest escaped. Then suddenly the exercise was stopped by the marshals. One of the top-heavy Land Rovers had rolled on a corner. One paratrooper had
