NOTE: Before you read on, I have examined the blog thoroughly and have made sure that I have not accidentally revealed any information that is not already easily available on the internet. This is what is known as OPSEC and I have made efforts to ensure it has not been compromised. Seriously - I am not revealing military secrets. Am I taking things too seriously?
I'll let the masters speak for themselves. Today an unbuttoned pocket, tomorrow a safety catch.
Right. How am I now? I'm in an absolutely fantastic mood.
Seriously, I'm in the best mood I've been for weeks, everything is going my way, I've got beer, good food, and a good future ahead of me. You are reading the slightly tipsy (a guy's gotta celebrate) post of a lad who knows, with some luck, and some effort, he has the next twenty-two years of his life sorted out, squared away, bring them on! That's a hard feeling to express... Security like that can't be bought. You have to work for it, and when you work for it, god you're rewarded...
Let me explain.
Two days ago, I wrote that I was nervous over the course that I had scheduled for saturday. Which is fair enough. The Army was hard enough the first time around, maybe I really wasn't as fit as I thought I was. I chilled out until midnight and then decided it was bed time. of course, in true me fashion, the entire next hour was me running round like a headless chicken looking for things that I forgot.
It was therefore with some nervousness that I woke up in the morning. The alarm went off at 7am, just as I asked it to. Ungratefully, I slammed an angry fist down on it for its efforts, grunting half to myself half to the alarm clock that "it's not f*****g seven AM!"
. Oh, but it was, and it was time to get up. Time to grab my clothes and my hurriedly packed bag, time to get in the car and make like the sheperd - get the flock out of here.
I rush downstairs to a beautifully warm toasty living room (the heating failed, see previous post) to see my mum laid on the sofa watching, erm, Dallas! I think it was. Yep, I sat through fifteen minutes of JR seducing that woman that wasn't his wife and didn't wake up and eat breakfast with him each morning.
Time came to go, and I figured I'd grab a cup of tea to warm me up and a banana for some energy. Well the cup of tea came off okay, that was good. The bananas on the other hand were a different story. In the manner of Eddie Izzard's
"bowl of fruit" (buy a bowl of fruit and watch it rot!, the bananas were so "ripe" that they bent - the OPPOSITE direction - in the middle.
F**k it, I thought, and grabbed an apple from the fridge. I hate eating apples, the skin is like the slicey tissue of death that slices between my teeth and lacerates my gums. Nevertheless, out to the car we go, into the dark (7am in january is dark, I know it's not FINLAND!!!! but it is northern) and after only five minutes of swearing, shivering and scraping ice off with the "scrapey-ice-scraper-that-has-the-guard-to-keep-your-hand-warm-but-doesn't-work-
because-it's-been-in-the-car-all-night-and-is-therefore-frozen-solid-scraper-of-doom", the windscreen and windows are clear and we can go.
so we do, we slippety-slide our way up to the nearest main road and have an unevenful journey into town. I nervously watch the clock tick down the minutes until 8am (ok ok, it ticked UP the minutes, but this is technically "historical narrative" so I'm allowed to say things like that).
Finally, we got round the corner, me staring out of the windscreen expecting to see an impatient sergeant checking his watch and waiting for me.
My mum, as she always does, drives right PAST where I'm supposed to be, and further and further and further down the road, looking for "somewhere to park". F**k somewhere to park, drop me here, you're not exactly fleeing a lava flow or whatever.
So I grabbed my stuff, my mum wished me well and off I walked to the courtyard of the meeting place, the same place my brother picked us up from when we came back from London.
I walked up the road, into the courtyard seeing more recruits than I'd expected. Mostly lads, most younger, some older. I kept my gaze ahead, endeavouring not to make eye contact with these lads, each of whom had deemed themselves to be tough enough for the British Army. And it seems, in retrospect that the same thoughts were going through every single trainee's head.
We stood there in deathly silence, taking in the cold morning air. I'm looking around, at myself, and the passers by giving us odd looks. Obviously we're members of some sporting club or something. I look round seeing the faces of the lads and the las that are there with me. I must be maybe one of the oldest there, if not the oldest (I was the second oldest, the guy older than me was 3 years older, he was nearly 26). Were we, these young fresh faced wide eyed youths, the future of our nation? Were we, this group of kids and young men, the latest fodder for the army's recruiting machine? Were we willing to submit ourselves to that?
Evidently we were.
We kept ourselves to ourselves until the sergeant came along about 5 minutes later and called us forward. We answered our names, like in school, and we loaded ourselves onto the minibus. I did so, noting most of the recruits to be had to have parental consent forms, meaning that at least half of us were under 18. Damn I felt old.
We chilled on the minibus which finally set off, and down out of the town center we went. Onto the parkway, then onto the motorway, going up towards my home, at my home, past my home. We carried on, north, past the scenery, the flooded fields, the rivers with burst banks, past the pylons and radio towers, north...
The sergeant was cool enough to turn on the radio - us "Civ*l*ans" have got to have some home comforts.
Now let me pause here and mention an odd fact. It seems to me that music seems to bypass all thought processes, all reasoning and intelligence, and pass straight into memory. I remember
this tune vividly, being played over the speakers of the coach I travelled on during my combat infantryman's course, at six AM, a few years ago, and so I remember these, and
will remember these, I suspect, for a long time.
1. 2. 3.There were others as well, I forget. Good old
Radio 1.
so north we went, past leeds, which had a lot more skyscrapers than I remember it having (shows how long it has been since last I went - seriously, last time I went there was when Apache Longbow Gold came out, must have been 1998?), towards york. Up we went, up the motorway, while army vehicles went past the other way, dozens at a time. Light guns, heavy goods vehicles, the Army never sleeps, it seems.
We finally got to york, and the scenery got more and more familiar. We took our way through roads that I recognised, to an obscure turning to a base that I'd been to before. Strensall barracks.
Yes, I recognised the old buildings, the fencing, the red brick framework, the prefab classrooms, the old water tank. I noticed they'd built a totally new building though, I'd never seen it before. I'd been here many times as a reservist and to me, it was like coming back home.
We signed in, and the minibus seemed to take us off onto a brief tour (the camp is just laid out that way) and we came to a parking place. The sergeant gets out and runs about a bit, having instructed us to stay on the bus.
And so it begins - that's what I thought anyway. Half of us are there sitting on the minibus, some of us having drunk
Red Bulls, sitting around holding it in for an hour, not to put too fine a point on it, we needed to go to the
gents!!! Paticularly me - I hadn't been drinking Red Bull, but that route from Sheffield to Strensall seemed to be cursed, for I never one made the trip without sitting cross-legged in agony.
So we're there anyway. "Off the bus" we get. Over to the training group we get, where we shiver ourselves to death in what has turned out, at least up in york, to be a freezing morning.
After a brief chat, during which even the stupidest of us can't have failed to hear the words "lunch's been cancelled? so we can leave early?" at which point the sergeant orders us back on to the bus.
"This is it lads" says one recruit, "the f*ckaround factor". I grinned hugely, despite not even being initiated into the Army yet, we were already being subjected to the MOD's famous fcukaround factor - any trip from A to B has to go via C1 and C2, even if no one knows C existed at the start of the trip, and C2 is in the opposite direction to C1. Welcome to the Army, folks. On the bus, off the bus, on the bus.
We got off and into the gym we went. Those who needed to go,
went, and we got changed, saying a couple of words to each other. We went into the gym - a gym I remembered from when I was younger, where we met a rather fearsome looking
PTI .
And off we went.
"Form two lines, hands out of pockets" and so it began.
"You all know how to warm up" he says, before asking us all to warm up in the six minutes he'd given us. Of course, the die hards began to warm up expertly (expertly remembering the warmups on the posters the AFCO had given us - myself included)
The other half ran about like muppets, gave halfhearted stretching efforts, some of them - yes, I said "them" not "us", even began looking nervous.
"For Christ's sake" I thought, "this is the Army, THE ARMY!!! And no one has done an ounce of preperation for it!!!"
So we had our first exercise - heaves - climb onto a bar about 3m above the floor and pull yourself up until your stomach was touching the bar, and then down again.
The scary PTI showed us. "Do this, do this, then this, then this.
Any questions"?
Like good little recruits we all murmured "no, staff".
We formed two ranks, and the first pair went. maybe 6 on one and 4 on the other. Fine, nothing special.
The second pair went including the girl. One strong lad managed 15, amazing all of us there. the lass on the other hand, I watched with a mixture of incredulous amusement and horrified pity as she dangled from the bar as a fish would from a hook, thrashing around but never lifting herself not even her chin, hell, not even her wrists, above the bar from which she hung. She landed on a grand total of 0. I managed with five, the kid next to me with 3, the lad before me with 6. Seems we were on a semi equal footing.
After we'd done, "Back to the changing rooms, five minutes, then outside ready for the run".
"That ice better have f*cking cleared" I said to the room at large, "that Ice will add an extra minute to our run time". surprisingly I got a few nods of agreement. "They can't ask us to run in that" said one kid.
Nevertheless, out we were, and out was PTI Bastard - I'll call him PTI bastard from now on, completely against his credit because admittedly, all Physical training instructors are bastards, but this one seemed a fairly reasonable lad. If your idea of a reasonable lad was
temeura morrison after a few tequilas and a 4 hour long argument.
He walked us round the run route, jogged us around a bit, even went so far as to express humour (the guard dogs started barking, to which his response was "we feed all the recruits that stop running and start walking to the dogs").
We walked round, he says "this IS a shortcut, but if you take it, you are a cheat, you will be failed and probably asked not to come back". Fair. No fcuking cheats here, not after we all worked hard to be here. Hang on, did I say worked hard? see my last few paragraphs. He showed us the sheets of ice we had seen on our way in. "Er, avoid this ice, if you can". I paraphrase a little bit.
So we walked round, until we got to the end of the second lap. Having taken a final few seconds to ensure out trainers were securely tied, he stood back and checked his stopwatch. Never a good sign.
"go"
he said.
"Go"
"GO"
"GO"Such an innocent little word, but out of the mouth of PTI Bastard, it took on a whole new meaning. Far worse than if he'd asked the demons of hell to torture us, he had asked us to torture ourselves". This was a British Army PTI. When he says "go" he fcuking means it!
And Go we did. Wisely, having played many many many racing games, I had taken a starting position as close to the inside of the
racing line - not that difficult to do, it was a 90 degree angle! - as possible, and off I sprinted.
Run, Run, Run, footstep, footstep, left, right, left right, left right.
...left...breath...right...left...breath...right...
...left...right...left...right...breath...left...right...left...right
I started strong and sprinted maybe 40% of a mile before I started slowing down. My legs were screaming, my chest was burning, I dared a look behind me and realised in amazement that not one, not a single one of the seventeen recruits that I had come to Strensall with, was within fifty metres of me. I am a bad runner, a very poor runner, but when I saw that not a single recruit was within 50 meters of me, I got a surge of pride. I ran and I ran, I felt bad, I felt worse. A couple of the stronger runners overtook me. They were faster and I was in no state to compete.
When I reached the halfway point, making sure to avoid the ice as PTI bastard said to, I ran round the corner, taking the racing line, my lungs on fire I'd just ran what, 750 fcuking meters without a break, AFTER doing TWO warmups. The faster runners ran past, I ran past in about 5th. "Well done, good lad" muttered the PTI and his colleagues.
"Fcuk you, bastard" I muttered under my breath as I ran past them and back along the same way.
Left
Right
Left
Right
Breath
Left
Right
Left
Right
Breath
Laborious?
It was for me, and I did it for well over a mile.
Sweat running down my face, my legs screaming for me to stop, my stomach cramping as my gasps turned to groans, each foot I put down ended in a different swearword out of my fizog.
I ran round the corner concious that someone was trailing me. Simon, the spikey haired wide eyed gobby yet lovable yoof was trailing me.
I ran and ran, I ran over to the right hand side, thinking to myself "If you're going to pass me now Simon, then pass me and get the fcuk out of my way because I'm not tripping over you!!!"
Past he goes, I swear I saw his eyes bulging while I was behind him, heard his grunting, saw the sweat pouring down the back of his man united football shirt. Past the PTI's he goes. "11:22, well done" son they say, I get past a fraction later, "11:27, well done, go and line up". So I do.
Behind Simon I go, we queue up, winners first, losers last, I'm about 5th or 6th out of the group of 18ish so I can't complain.
The sergeant comes back to call our times. It's confirmed. Pass time is 11:30. Simon got 11:22, I got 11:27. Both of us were cutting it incredibly close.
We're all done, our times are all called out.
So we queue up by the side of the nearest prefab building. Me, sweating and panting in agony takes my sweater (yes I was dumb enough to run with a sweater) off, PTI bastard says I should put it back on again. Fair.
Our times are called out, Simon's come close, I've come closer.
11:22 and 11:27 respectively.
We're all stood there, groaning, covered in sweat, panting, barely able to talk as we try to get our breath back.
We calm down for a few minutes while we chatt with the lassess there. Neither of them finished the run, both gave up before the run was done, rather than finishing with a bad time, they gave up altogether.
I spose I'm stronger than I thought I was.
We go into the gym, five minutes to change, which we do.
"Anyone enjoy that?" I ask. A few people say "Yes", to which I reply "liars!" to general laughter.
But next comes the icebreaker, a two minute presentation which you give to the other recruits, to assess your self confidence, your strength of mind and confidence in speaking to groups.
I wasn't the first selected, no. I watched all the lads in my group get up there, some were great, most were good, one or two were awful.
I gave my presentation, I got up with a grin and made my way to the front of the class. "Okay so" and my confidence began to waver. Nevertheless, I spoke, for over three minutes, about my life my family, how crap my job was, one I particularly remember, "I've always been a private person, which is a fancy way of saying I don't get out much" - that raised a few laughs. Which was about it. One thing about army criticism is that if you don't get any, that's a good thing.
I didn't get any. Others were told to speak about more or to speak longer, I got nothing.
Good, I spose.
And off to the jerrycan carry. Yes, that's right, off we were marched down to the side of one of the huts where four jerry cans waited for us.
"Form into two lines" said PTI Bastard, and we did. And off we marched.
And as we marched, two lines formed into three, into three and a half.
"Well those two lines lasted a long time" says I, after about 18 seconds, to general laughter.
Eventually though we got to where we were going, right next to a place I'd been before, which I'm not going to tell you because I'm mystical like that, and there, were two jerry cans per side.
"Two
jerry cans aren't that much, this will be a piece of piss" I thought to myself as I watched the first and second pairs o recruits pick them up, walk the 150 meters, and then a second PTI came alone "when they come back walk along with them, you start at the opposite end and walk your way back here". Only fair.
So we walked along, at the opposite end, I made sure to wipe the handles of the cans clean, made sure there was no water, no sweat, nothing that would make my grip slip.
So I pick them up, "Christ these are heavy" my brain notes without letting a miniscule wince of discomfort pass itself to my face.
I walk the first way along, then the way back, they get heavier and heavier as I feel the water sloshing around inside.
We turn tound again, pause, and then head back as I start grimacing, my teeth start showing and I start swearing.
"You look a bit shaky, you look a bit unsteady" says the sergeant, walking along.
"I'm not f**king doing this again" says I.
"EH?" says he, as if I've refused to carry out an order or been insubordonate, which I spose I could have been. I hastily explain;
"I'm not f*cking failing, I am not failing this" as I'm walking along, legs shaking, hands white from the weight.
"Good lad", says he as I carry on.
We get to the end, the lad next to me puts down the cans, I let mine go with a thump.
We both passed.
Thank god.
We get the cans back into the local "can storage hut" i spose, when I meet a blast from the past, a certain NCO who I trained with when I was a kid in the reserves, is still at the base, and I've bumped into him again. not only am I at the base, but I'm back with this NCO - MAN this place is where I was BORN to be!!!
Anyway, the icebreakers and the jerrycan's done, it's back onto the minibus. After a short period of fcuking around, we're on there and on our way home.
I notice that far from being the group of nervous individuals we were this morning, we're not a group of people who know and who like each other.
The army does that to people. It turns individuals into a group.
So I spent my entire journey back chatting to most of the lads who I'd trained with, reflecting on how hard they found the run (apparently, Simon, who finished ahead of me by five seconds had only done so because he "had a choice between sprinting the last bit, or by giving up and walking").
To my relief, I wasn't the lowest performer, not even close. I'd come in overall, 5th out of about 18, not a bad score at all. Now all I need to do is work harder.
We drove back to Sheffield, chatting laughing, getting on, like the group, like the team mates we now were.
Eventually we got back to town, eventually we all dispersed, a few of us stayed chatting, about how the day had gone, how we had passed, wishing luck to those who had to return, but generally basking in the glory of being good enough to pass a test set by the British Army.
After a while, we broke up and went home.
I bumped into a mate who I went to get something to eat with, then I met my family at the local hardware store. I stayed hidden behind my ickle nephew, he never noticed I was there until my mum told him not to bump into me.
From that point he was attached to me, literally. He would hold my hand all the time. We walked all the way round the store. He loved it. He'd go into the play houses, round all the garden center, it was great.
Then we went round Morrison's - christ what a queue - we shopped for an hour and it took another 25 minutes to get to the end of a queue.
We got out eventually though, and went to my brother's house, where HARRY POTTER was on. Christ, no one else can understand why I don't want to be on the receiving end of this badly filmed badly directed shite. No one seems to understand why I don't want to be on the receiving end of commercialism's latest answer to osama bin laden's (all small letters) propoganda tapes.
Public histeria is the sole succour of those with little to do and less to imagine, to marvel at. Is our own world not special? Is Earth, is nature, not miraculous enough that we have to invent fairy tales to justify our place in existance?
Still, my sister and my brother played a few games on the wii, which was pretty cool, it was cool just chilling out and watching them. It's nice to spend time at my brother's, it really is. I'd be the first to admit I don't do it enough, historically my brother and I were always close, now it seems that even though he's only local, given our mutual work committments, he may as well be a thousand miles away. Either way, spending time with him, let alone with him and the rest of my family, is not something I do enough.
In any case. I have now decided that I want to work with tanks. I want to be a tankie, I want to be tank crew and that is it, that's all there is to the matter.
If I've made the wrong decision then let me bitch and moan about it in 4 years time.
Until then, take care! :D
