An Officer and a Gentlewoman (9 page)

And then just when I thought it couldn’t get any worse, when I thought I’d hit my absolute rock bottom, someone handed me a spade.

Sandhurst isn't meant to be easy. A Queen's commission can no longer simply be bought if Daddy has enough money and knows the right people.
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At Sandhurst the training is tough and uncomfortable because the reality is even more unpleasant. The commissioning course is about physical and mental robustness; it's about toughening up floppy-haired students and pampered civilians for the realities of war. It's about learning how to live and function in discomfort, about overcoming how cold, tired, wet and hungry you feel and getting on with the job. Eventually, at some point it may even be about enjoying it.

But I was not tough, I was dysfunctional in adversity and I was not at any point enjoying it.

So far I thought life at Sandhurst had been pretty harsh and uncomfortable. Death o'clock starts in the morning followed by room inspections and parade square humiliation made my days fairly unpleasant. But then as CC071 deployed out into the field on our first ‘exercise', the comforts of fresh food, running water and sprung mattresses quickly came into perspective. For life in the
field was the real test of continuing to function in adversity and would take my misery to a whole new level.

Like so much of Sandhurst, I had no idea what to expect of a field exercise. Initially I thought some time away from my ironing board and broomstick was to be welcomed, a break in the countryside, taking in lungfuls of fresh air miles from Old College. I was wrong. As D-Day approached Exercise Self-Reliance was spoken of with sore foreboding, and fearful anticipation pervaded as preparations got underway. We were given maps of the training area to fablon,
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boxes of foil-wrapped boil-in-the-bag rations to pack and a long list of issued equipment and clothing we'd need. Keenly prepared, I packed the prescribed kit list into waterproof freezer bags and the freezer bags into watertight canoe bags and the canoe bag into my weather-treated rucksack, as reports of the week's weather forecast reached us. And then, having struggled to close the straps on my bulging rucksack lid (which in the military is called a ‘bergen' and I came to rename my ‘burden'), I tried to lift it off the ground and onto my back.

I couldn't.

It weighed almost as much as me.

I rolled it over, lay with my back on it and wiggled my arms through the straps, then tried to stand from there with it on, flailing instead like an upturned beetle.

I released myself and manoeuvred to try sitting on the floor and standing up with it on my back from that position.

I still couldn't.

In the end Officer Cadet Wheeler came to my rescue and lifted the bergen burden onto my back and I stumbled precariously top-heavy downstairs, fearful at the prospect of walking any great distance with it on.

Officer Cadet Wheeler was the platoon darling and my polar opposite: intelligent, highly capable and taking everything at Sandhurst in her unfazed stride, she was Eleven Platoon's poster girl. A Cambridge graduate and OTC veteran, she had far too much God-given compassion to be in the army, and watched out for each one of us like a guardian angel. She was strong, both mentally and physically, and always went out of her way to come to the aid of someone who needed it.  

Eventually with ‘burdens' packed, maps fabloned and rain forecast we were ready to deploy into the field.  

Much like my father, the organizers of the training programme at Sandhurst like to avoid the traffic and, with this planning parameter in mind, we were dragged from our beds at 3 a.m. to parade in the dark at the back of Old College, ready to board the coaches.  

It was already raining.  

Exercise Self-Reliance, or Self-Abuse as it soon became dubbed, was to take place amidst the quaint wealth of the Sussex green belt. And it is here, tucked away where expensive Range Rovers cruise leafy lanes, the idyllic beauty of Winnie-the-Pooh's Hundred Acre Wood can be found, whose childhood innocence was about to be shattered. As the coaches wound their way along the forest track from the main road, I caught glances of gentle rolling woodland, deer skipping through the trees and picnic clearings; how bad could this place be? This wasn't the wilds of Brecon or an inhospitable Scottish training area. Normal sane-minded members of the public came here to walk the dog, for Sunday strolls and to throw Poohsticks from the bridge. But then normal sane-minded members of the public wouldn't choose to spend five days here, sleeping in a woodblock exposed to the cutting midwinter weather.  

Exercise Self-Abuse was all about introducing us to the baby basics of field survival and infantry tactics: Boy Scout survival lessons followed by running around with guns playing soldiers. The boys beamed with excitement; this is what they were here for.
I was never enough of a tomboy to have tried either, but I had once enjoyed a camping trip to Devon so while my ironing board and parade shoes were a safe distance back at Sandhurst, life looked good.

SSgt Cox started by giving us an introduction to field hygiene: how to keep clean by washing with water boiled in a mess tin and using a scrap of soap; avoiding trench rot and, for the girls, what to do with the indignity of having your period while living rough in the field (frequent trips to the Portaloos or an injection from the Medical Centre nurse). Colour Sergeant Rattray then gathered us in for a cooking lesson and introduction to army twenty-four-hour ration packs.

CSgt Rattray, or ‘the Rat' as he was known out of earshot, was Ten Platoon's CSgt. A broad Scot, originally from somewhere near Glasgow, he was thickly accented and proud to hail from north of the border. Through his ‘achs' and ‘ayes' I rarely understood what he was saying but that didn't matter because he was devilishly good-looking and knew it. A flashy playboy, he would show off in his red convertible sports car, screeching through the Academy, slowing to wink at the girls' platoon with handsome charm.

On Exercise Self-Abuse we all sat on our day-sacks in the wet field adoringly around him, as he produced champagne, caviar, Gentleman's Relish and a copy of the
Telegraph
from the small cardboard box on the ground, like Mary Poppins, chuckling that this was a wondrous ‘officer's ration pack'. If only that were reality, because no amount of mesmeric swooning over the Rat could excite us about the contents of our real ration packed meals. That night, huddled over a small hexamine stove tired and hungry, I found the sight and consistency of chicken stew and fruit dumplings in custard gag-inducing. I prodded the brown congealed gloop with my spork
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and realized the boil-in-the-bag
horrors would have to be eaten in the dark when too tired and ravenous to care. The alternative Lancashire hotpot, corned beef hash and treacle pudding may have been appetizing recipes for eating in Cold War trenches, but in the heat of Iraq and Afghanistan they are less palatable. What we really wanted in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Rat told us, was to get our hands on American MREs (Meals Ready-to-Eat). With fajitas and buffalo chicken on the menu, complete with squeezy cheese, peanut butter cookies, M&Ms and HOOAH! bars, they provide a whopping 4,000 calories a day so camp-bound Americans can continue to conform to international stereotypes.
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It wasn't all inedible. Having lived under SSgt Cox's chocolate ban for three weeks, the ration-pack chocolate bar was most welcome. I peeled back the silver-blue wrapper from the Nestlé Yorkie bar, rebranded for the military as NOT FOR CIVIS with disproportionate excitement and savoured the short-lived sugar rush. An even bigger sugar fix could be found in the small foil packet of boiled sweets, which proved a useful distraction when struggling to stay awake through the night. British rations would also be incomplete without tea bags; an army might march on its stomach but the British Army would come to a grinding halt without tea. After field cookery, we gathered in the forest for a Ray Mears-style shelter-building lesson.

I'm not really sure what I expected the sleeping arrangements on exercise to be – a tent maybe, or perhaps some sort of wooden shed or tin hut – but somehow through abject naivety I never actually expected to be sleeping in the field, in the open, on the cold hard ground, exposed to the unforgiving English climate. And as the reality sank in, I suddenly realized this was going to be nothing like my week of camping in Devon.

Using a large plastic-coated camouflage sheet called a poncho (not the sort tequila-slamming Mexicans wear) we erected a primitive
shelter by tying the corners to nearby trees with elastic bungee chords and propping a stick up in the middle. The shelter had to be as low to the ground as possible, preventing the enemy from discovering it, leaving just enough room to lie down and watch the rain pool in sumps above my nose and think how pitiful a night's sleep under there was going to be. I did wonder what you would do if there were no trees to tie the poncho to, say in the desert perhaps, somewhere maybe like Iraq or Afghanistan, but then I wasn't being paid to think and piping up with stupid questions like that was baiting fate. The poncho shelter promised no protection from the piercing wintry weather whatsoever; its purpose more about hiding us from the enemy than affording a comfortable night's rest. Not that there was going to be any rest anyway.

The heavy grey sky rained pathetically on us all morning and the dampness seeped through every seam of clothing and stitch of fabric straight to the bone. And on day one of five there was no early promise of drying out. The test of our resolve under adversity had begun and already I wished to be back at the Academy ironing and polishing with dry pants on.

And so, with this conditioning in place, it was time for us to play soldiers.

Daubing thick smears of waxy green and brown camouflage cream across our faces and sticking leaves and twigs to the helmets on our heads, we began to look more plausibly like soldiers, albeit more
Dad's Army
than gritty professional warriors. The pouches on our webbing
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contained magazines filled with ammunition for the first time and we were excited at the prospect of finally using it.

But then out came ‘Willy-the-whistle' and the crawling began.

On each blast from Willy we had to throw ourselves down in the mud and nettles and start to crawl. With rifle cradled and
webbing on, we crawled. And crawled and crawled. SSgt Cox and Captain Trunchbull screamed murderously at us to stay down and move faster. We crawled across woods, along tracks, over fields and through bracken until our lungs were bursting and limbs bleeding. This wasn't crawling like babies on hands and knees but lower, more stealthily, with belt buckles to the ground, like leopards stalking on the Serengeti. We dragged our tired defeated bodies through muddy puddles and undergrowth, over stones and to the summit of hills, until our limbs couldn't ache any more.

Elbow-ripping, kneecap-grinding, lung-busting crawling.

One blast from Willy and we jumped up and ran forwards, another and we threw ourselves down in the dirt and started to crawl. Up, down, crawl, up, down, crawl; because through pain and Willy we were learning the most fundamental of infantry tactics – ‘fire and manoeuvre'.

Partnered up, one of us fired blank rounds of ammunition at an imaginary enemy while the other scurried forwards, dived down and crawled forwards to start shooting, then the other half of the pair did the same. Each running dash covered and protected by shooting fire from the other. A so foolproof simple technique, fire and manoeuvre is at the crux of what the infantry do. A soldier's bread and butter, his gravy and potatoes, the daily grind of a section, platoon and company; two years later in Afghanistan I would watch images from a helicopter of Royal Marines doing exactly this when assaulting a Taliban compound. Their movements were no more complicated than ours were that afternoon as we dashed forth, dropped down, crawled forwards and fired. Dash-down-crawl-dash-down-crawl. Again and again, throwing ourselves down onto the soggy wet ground, panting, breathless and exhausted. Except we were in Sussex in January not Helmand in July and we weren't wearing 35 lb of body armour like the Marines, nor carrying radios, counter-IED equipment, ammunition and all the other gubbins an infantryman is loaded
up with. If I hadn't been suffering so much personal pain at this point I may have even been humbled with appreciation for what it is infantry soldiers do.

As darkness fell, battered, bruised and exhausted, we moved into the woods to set up a platoon harbour. Here, tucked away in the thick of the forest, we would be spending the night, cooking up our gag-inducing boil-in-the-bag meals, changing socks and pants, and notionally rolling out our sleeping bags. The harbour was to be triangular, each of the three sides facing outwards ready to spot and fight the enemy. A thread of twine marking each edge of the triangle was meticulously tied around the trees, forcing military straight lines onto the beech and birch of Hundred Acre Wood. Around our triangle home ran a track for us to move along in the dark which had to be delicately cleared of leaves and twigs that could crackle and snap when walked on, alerting the enemy to our location. Perversely this was contrived to involve yet more crawling through mud, as we swept away branches and foliage until we were all thoroughly pissed off with scraping our knees and elbows along the ground.

The flimsy poncho shelters we'd learned to construct earlier were erected between the trees over shallow trenches as we basha'd
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up. Hollow ‘shell-scrapes' were dug beneath these basha, each long enough for the tallest person to lie down and wide enough for two to lie side by side. With my limbs already fatigued from crawling, an entrenching tool (a spade: for some reason the army don't call a spade a spade) was thrust into my hands and I started to scratch away at the dense soil, digging my own coffin hole. By now I was dead on my feet. All I wanted to do was stop, curl up on the cold, hard forest floor and let sleep take me away. My stomach was empty, my legs were weary, and I couldn't care less if the enemy found us, if it brought an end to the agonizing crawling.