So, as people left Recruit Company, through injury, or after deciding this wasn’t the life for them, or simply being unable to take the pace, those of us who remained grew closer. But we all knew we still had another hurdle to cross before the end of our training was in sight. This was Pegasus Company, or P Company—the pre-parachute selection course. If you pass P Company, you’ve qualified for your red beret. Then you can go on to do your parachute training and get your wings.
Nowadays P Company takes place at the Infantry Training Battalion in Catterick, North Yorkshire, but back then it was in Aldershot. It exists not only for the Paras, but for any soldier or officer who wishes to serve with the airborne forces. And although this is a pre-parachute selection course, it has nothing to do with parachuting. Nobody was interested in our head for heights or the strength of our ankles for landing. It wasn’t even much to do with military ability—the P Company team aren’t concerned with drill or fieldcraft. Instead, the course exists to assess the recruits’ endurance, persistence and courage under extreme stress, to see whether they are made of the right stuff to serve with the airborne forces. It was everything we’d been building up to.
P Company consists of eight tests taken over five consecutive days. For seven of these tests you are given a score, while one of them is a matter of a straight pass or fail. At the end of the week, if you’ve got enough points, you’re through. The trouble is, only the instructors know what the pass mark is. P Company one of the hardest recruitment tests in the British Army, and not for the faint-hearted.
Day one starts off with a steeplechase. For us this involved jumping off scaffolding poles into stinking water which we had to wade through before taking one of only two slippery, awkward exit points on the other side. If you don’t get to the water quickly enough, you have to wait your turn while the other recruits make their exit, before continuing the 1.3-kilometre obstacle course. And then, when you’ve finished, you have to do it again. The steeplechase is against the clock—you’re aiming to complete it in under nineteen minutes. For every thirty seconds you go over that, you lose a point. It’s a killer.
When you’ve finished the steeplechase, there’s barely any time to rest. Next up is the log race, for which we were divided into teams of eight. Each team had to carry a telegraph pole weighing 130 pounds over two miles of bumpy terrain, the idea being to simulate having to manoeuvre an anti-tank gun in battle. It might not sound much, but in fact this is one of the toughest challenges P Company can throw at you—the thirteen or so minutes that it takes are some of the longest of your life. The flat sections of the log race take place on loose sand, and if you’ve ever tried to run along a sandy beach you’ll know how difficult that can be.
The afternoon of the first day sees an event known as milling. Two recruits of approximately the same size and weight are given boxing gloves, put into a ring together, and expected to slog it out for sixty seconds. That may not sound like a long time, but trust me: a minute of milling passes very slowly indeed. This isn’t a test of your boxing skills, because you have points deducted for blocking or dodging a punch. It’s a test of your ability to demonstrate controlled aggression, and to endure the aggression of the other guy. There’s no winner or loser in a milling competition, and there’s no complaining or backing out either. You either perform or you don’t. And if you don’t perform, you have to go again. Today the recruits wear mouth guards and head protectors, but when I went through P Company all we had was our gloves.
After the milling, the Crows get a weekend of rest—a weekend during which we were advised to do nothing but eat and sleep, because we had a hell of a time ahead of us over the next few days.
Monday morning means the ten-mile tab, or march. We all had to carry a thirty-pound Bergen (not including water), ammunition and individual weapon, and to pass we had to complete the march in under an hour and three-quarters. It sounds tough—it is tough—but it’s important. When a soldier is parachuted in on an operation, his objective could easily be ten miles from the drop zone, or DZ. And it would be marching like this that would get 2 Para into Goose Green during the Falklands War just a few years later. When you’re in enemy territory and your only mode of transport is your boots, you need to have the endurance to keep going.
Again, no time to rest, because next up was the trainasium. This is a particularly challenging test—a mid-air assault course the purpose of which is to test the recruits’ confidence and ability to overcome fear. Narrow planks that you could easily walk along if they were a couple of feet off the ground become a different prospect when you’re twenty metres up in the air. And jumping wide gaps that look bigger than they really are because one side is slightly lower than the other takes a lot of psychological strength when you’re that high up. You’re being tested here on your ability to control fear, and on your swift reaction to an order. When an instructor shouts ‘Go!’, you have to jump that gap, even though every cell in your body is screaming at you not to. The trainasium presents you with challenges that anyone with any sense would just walk away from, and it’s this event which is a straight pass or fail. Pass and you move on to the next stage; fail and you’re packing up your kit and heading home. I had to tell myself that so many people had done it before me but I was going to do it better. That is the mindset that six months of Recruit Company gives you.
The next day came the stretcher race. We were divided into teams of sixteen and had to carry an 180-pound steel stretcher over a distance of five miles. No more than four people were allowed to carry the stretcher at any one time, while the others carried their rifles. The stretcher race is designed to test your capacity to evacuate a wounded colleague from the battlefield, but more than that it is a fearsome test of your team-working abilities. Swapping positions, swapping weapons—all this takes coordination, communication, and, above all, the ability to work together. Winning or losing the race made no difference to your final score—the instructors judged you according to how well you presented yourself within a group.
The two-mile march, like the ten-mile march, was performed with a full pack and rifle. Time limit: eighteen minutes. And finally, the twenty-mile endurance march: full pack and rifle, and four and a half hours to complete it.
Nobody wants to fail P Company, naturally. But none of the training NCOs who have been putting the hopefuls through Recruit Company wants any of their boys to fail because it reflects badly on them. We had a chap called Rooster Barber—six foot across the shoulders and built like a brick outhouse—and he was determined that not one of his lads was going to fail. He beasted us like never before. In the days leading up to P Company he had us up before breakfast running around and jumping over benches with our rifles above our heads. Then each evening he gave us no chance to rest but blasted us with more and more fitness exercises. By the time P Company came along, we were at the peak of physical fitness. Thanks to Rooster Barber and his regular beastings, we all gave a pretty good account of ourselves in P Company and came out the other end successfully. It was a gruelling week, but all in all an amazing experience for a 17-year-old kid. At the end of it I was awarded my red beret, and that made it all worthwhile.
With the hurdle of P Company successfully negotiated, I was able to move on to parachute training at RAF Brize Norton in Oxfordshire—an enormous, sprawling airfield the size of a fair-sized town, and with many of the facilities of one too. Living accommodation, messes, recreation facilities, all surrounded by the constant thunder of VC10