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 that the African soldiers were not only lazy and disrespectful but also – and worst of all – black. The NCOs would 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