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 broken his arm, another got his helmeted head wedged between the roll cage and the concrete and an unfortunate Iraqi interpreter was taken away in an ambulance. The need for realism in training often led to casualties before anyone ever got to a war zone.
We played the enemy in a lot of exercises. It seemed to be our role and was much better than sitting in camp. We were dressed as Chechen-type rebels and given old Kalashnikovs brought back from war and deactivated for training. We wandered around the Brecon Beacons in Wales so the Pathfinder selection (reconnaissance) course could observe us from the hills and log our activities. These guys were some of the toughest in the brigade and had a fearsome reputation. Some of our lads got bored as we hid in an old farm. One of them had brought a football which they covered in fluid from a Cyalume (glow stick) and kicked it around the fields all night. The glow-in-the-dark football crowd later left our machine-gun out on a guard post. The Pathfinders crept in that night and nicked it. The course instructor had gotten sick of our antics and disassembled the gun into its three main parts. He handed each of the troublemakers a piece and pointed to a stone pillar on a hillside a mile or so away. They were made to run over fences, through ditches and bogs to the distant pillar and back until they could go no further. The rest of us held in our laughter. Being an insurgent is all about discipline, the Pathfinders assured us.
We eventually ambushed the would-be Pathfinders in the closing stages and beat them to the ground as ordered, piling on top of them while two of our number – a German speaker and a Ghanaian – ranted at them in foreign languages. We put bags over their heads, plastic-cuffed them and marched them up a hill to a little sheep shed, in which a fizzing radio provided disorienting white noise for our captives.
Back in camp there were whispers of an operational tour coming up and the old hands told us about invading Iraq – the oldest of them had been in both Gulf wars. They told us about machete wounds in Sierra Leone and Kenyan or Belizean or German or Russian and Balkan whores and fly-covered bodies on Rwandan roadsides under a toothless UN mandate and the heat in Iraq and the cold in Bosnia. These veterans told us about waiting near the border to invade Iraq and how the WMD sirens would wail several times per day so they’d have to get into their awful, sweltering chemical warfare suits and respirators and sit in the heat waiting to die, and how the WMD never came because there were no WMD and it had been known that there were none. All those awful, sweating, panting hours had been for nothing and that had