from Armoured Farmer by Malcolm Cleverley
The author's lighthearted reminiscences of his years in the Royal Tank Regiment during the latter years of the Cold War era offer an amusing insight into the activities of British battle tanks and their crews...
Well then, here I was in May 1975, on a train into the unknown...
This journey had begun some time prior to my boarding the train. I had been through the recruitment process, having stepped through the Army Careers Office door in Plymouth earlier that year.
My most vivid memory of that visit was that due to the large queue of Army volunteers I had to sit in the waiting area belonging to the RAF, who shared the office with the Army recruiters. A chap with an immense moustache kept peering out of an office door. When his question of "Anyone for the RAF?" was answered with "No" he quickly returned to whatever else occupied him in his office.
Having completed the various selection processes I had to undergo, I was given a list of options from which I could choose the unit I would join. I immediately opted for the Royal Armoured Corps. Let’s face it, belting around the countryside at the helm of an awesome metal monster looked like pure joy to a sixteen-year-old whose only prior experience of large machinery was a tractor. Well, I had seen combine harvesters, but my uncle wouldn’t allow me behind the wheel of one of those!
To join at my age I would have to become a Junior Leader. From these hallowed ranks, I was informed, would come the regular Army’s future Non Commissioned Officers or NCOs. Quite frankly, by this stage I couldn’t care less if I had to have extensions sewed onto my ears to make me a better listener.
"When do I get to drive a tank?" Came my eager question.
"It’ll take about a year before that happens," came the reply from Graham Pearson, the 3rd Royal Tank Regiment’s Recruiting Sergeant.
"Bugger!" exclaimed I, little realising that in a very short while my Anglo Saxon swearing vocabulary would expand beyond all known boundaries.
So I ‘signed on’ as a junior soldier and gave my oath of allegiance to Queen and Country with my hand on a small black book. This book was to become my personal copy of The Soldier’s Bible and I still have it today.
All these thoughts filled my head as I rattled my way up the railway lines towards Bovington Camp in Dorset, the Royal Armoured Corps training centre and my home-to-be for the next fifteen years... The Army.
Later that day, at the end of a long and at times mentally harrowing journey, I arrived at Wool station in Dorset. As I battled my way off the train along with a crowd of other new recruits, all of us dragging our baggage behind us, I became aware of someone shouting. My days as an Army cadet told me to head towards the verbal onslaught echoing along the platform, which I duly did.
Stood at the platform exit was a towering example of British military might. He looked as if he had jumped straight from the pages of an issue of The Eagle, where he had been involved in some heroic action. His eyes were dark, pitiless holes, emphasised by the shadow cast from the peak of his parade hat.
The effect of his shouting was amazing. The throng heading towards him parted before him like some biblical sea before Moses. Having passed him by, the human mass closed again in its hurry to get through the gate leading to the buses waiting to transport us to the barracks.
"Come on you miserable little buggers, move out to the buses! Next stop Bovington Camp! You are now ALL at ’er Majesty’s pleasure. You there! Yes you... Spotty! Are you a Junior Bleeder? Yes? Well GET ON THE BLOODY BUS THEN!"
Was this it then? A Junior Bleeder? Someone who strange men in large hats hurled verbal abuse at for no apparent reason? Yup, that seemed to sum it up perfectly!
The rest of the day passed in a rush of military precision as we were herded, cajoled and generally pushed into ‘the Army way’, firstly at the Quartermasters stores…
"You, name? Right bloody stand there. you’re in C Squadron."
"You, name? Stand in bloody line for measuring."
"You, name? That’s right lad, YOU were made to fit THIS uniform".
At this point my arms were pulled out in front of me and articles of uniform and equipment, including the biggest damned china mug I’d ever seen, were piled indiscriminately onto my now painfully outstretched arms, like a contestant on the popular BBCtv show Crackerjack. A belt adorned with various objects mysteriously attached itself around my waist. A storeman’s face appeared before me, he winked, smiled and then, having lulled me into a false sense of security, piled even more gear onto my arms, the strain of which made me feel as though I had sustained some incurable injury in my already bursting shoulder sockets.
"Twat," I thought, making use of a new addition to my vocabulary.
Having been fully ‘kitted’, the next few days consisted of C1 Troop (as we’d become known) being fully inducted into the ‘Army way’. One of the first things we were told was that the Army now owned our souls and that we were now a number. Mine was 24358180, definitely a number I shan’t forget!
We were informed that the Army was the only thing we needed, the first proof of this being the haircut.
Now the term ‘to have one’s hair cut’ can be viewed in many different ways for a civilian, especially back then in the seventies, when hair length varied between ‘slightly effeminate’ and ‘bloody ludicrous’. However in the Junior Leaders Regiment of The Royal Armoured Corps ‘haircut’ simply meant you were destined to end up looking like ‘the head from hell’.
I am sure you could have a skirmish against a hover mower, lose, have most of your hair removed from your head during the fight and still look better than the end result of a ‘Sweeny Todd special’.
I should, at this juncture, like to point out that J.L.R., as it was known, had a particularly vicious ‘Sweeny’, who’s instructions were quite clear as to how we should look. In a nutshell, bloody bald, or is that as bloody bald as a nutshell? Certainly, after my haircut I couldn’t work out which had more hair, my head or my nuts!
As time passed, the great military machine cajoled, manipulated and ground us into professional soldiers, albeit young ones. Our training was a routine, but one that could be changed at any time night or day. All this was (I realise now) carefully constructed to transform our self-motivation from ‘I have to do this’ to ‘I want to do this and give me some more’. Teamwork. A much vaunted but abused term in civilian life. In the Army it has always meant the achieving of a goal by a group of individuals working together to use each other’s skills quickly and effectively.
Our first lesson in teamwork was to be ‘drilled’. This had nothing to do with dentists, although the pain, at times, could be as intense. Drill is a term is familiar to everyone in the military. Marching; and plenty of it.
How do you march? In conceptual terms it’s quite simple; its an exaggerated form of walking. Let’s face it, as toddlers we learn how to put one foot in front of the other. Well… nobody actually teaches us to walk, we sort of pick it up as we go along. At this stage it is really quite simple. We place our feet down in a happy and timeless manner of coordination. So, why is it so bloody difficult to march? After our first drill lesson we all pondered this problem that evening. I lay on my bed, nursing a blister the size of my head that had manifested itself on my foot and thought that, somehow, walking would never be the same again.
Our ‘drill squad’ was useless. Our drill sergeant had left us in no doubt of this fact. His terminology was very graphic...
"You useless bunch of fucking scabs!" "You twats! My granny could do better with her fucking formation Zimmer frame team!" "You, that man! Yes you, Lawrence isn’t it? Yes I thought so, well you fat bastard, if you go much slower the sun’ll melt you like the tub of fucking lard that you are!"
As you can imagine, my vocabulary was expanding at a phenomenal rate. I thank the Lord for the miracle that is the English language. Of course we had plenty of time to digest and practise these expletives as we hobbled around each evening. Our bodies were aching and bruised, somebody had even drawn blood from a blister. My god, that interested us for a whole morbid evening. Also our heads hurt, as we all had to wear the dreaded red and yellow No.2 dress cap – dreadful to look at but a whole lot worse to wear, as the leather sweatband inside pinched your forehead and when you sweated, which was unavoidable, the band seemed to contract and hurt even more. This was, as we called it, a ‘twat hat’, because that it made you look and feel like a complete twaaaaat.
If at this stage we thought our Drill Sergeant was a shit, we were in for a surprise… Every Saturday morning was a drill morning. On our first Saturday we were introduced to Satan’s right hand man. We could hear him long before we could see him. His presence emanated through the entire barracks like a small tactical nuclear bomb. A loud scream echoed across the parade ground announcing his arrival, even though he was some two minutes away from our vicinity. The subject of his tirade was an injured soldier excused duties.
"Get those bloody arms up to your shoulder level! I don’t give a flying fuck if it’s in plaster you shirker! MOVE! LEFT, RIGHT, LEFT! Get on, move it, move it!"
Our faces must have been a picture. Chins dropped like mechanical shovels, our throats suddenly dry and a general lack of any muscular control.
CRUNCH, CRUNCH, CRUNCH came the sound of hobnailed boots moving along the nearby road in a precise, crisp and strangely menacing manner. Even our Drill Sergeant looked a tad uncomfortable; beads of sweat ran down his neck and darkened his collar. So here it was… Armageddon.
A large guttural clearing of throat and a final crunch of boots and there he was… the personification of evil. The gargantuan creature snapped to a precision halt and flexed his muscular frame. He looked like Blackpool tower with a hat on. Seven feet of man with a head like an artillery shell perched on his shoulders. I can honestly say that I never did see his eyes because, welded to his head, was a Coldstream Guards peaked cap, with the peak slashed so severely that it formed a visor. Under the peak was the tip of his nose and under that a Boer War style moustache, truly magnificent in all its waxed glory.
Tucked into his armpit was a pace stick, and at the base of his immaculately pressed trousers was a pair of ‘ammo’ boots that had been ‘bulled’ so much that many a car manufacturer could have learned a great deal about paint finish.
This was Drill Sergeant Major ‘B’ of the Coldstream Guards. Yes, the Guards. Shit! Drill had really taken a turn for the worse. We never did figure out whether the ‘B’ was really his name or was to indicate that he was a right proper BASTARD!
Having informed us of his identity and that his sole aim in life was "to make you bastards suffer", he proceeded to watch us in our (suddenly more energetic) demonstrations of drill prowess. It would become second nature to keep our eyes and ears open for any sight or sound of his approach for the duration of our time at J.L.R.
However, it was later said that, when, in our 4th term, our troop became the first drill squad ever to win the drill competition in all four of our terms, that the Sergeant Major had bet a significant amount of cash on our winning. He was seen marching off to the Sergeants Mess bar with a large smirk under his moustache.
Alongside our drill training we were, of course, learning other soldiering skills, such as shooting, camouflage and concealment and other arts of foot soldiering, the emphasis being placed firmly on the fitness of the British soldier. The training was, to say the least, arduous, running for five miles carrying a telegraph pole between four of us was a particular favourite of the PT instructors. At the end of such an exercise our bodies felt as if aliens had snatched us and were just waiting for the opportunity to burst from our chests and leave us for dead.
Of course the real catch about the five miles was that this was only the outward leg and we could look forward to the pain of the return to barracks. Well, eventually … because the PTIs would ensure we saw plenty of sights en route by detouring a few times up and down the notorious ‘heartbreak hill’, which every British Garrison seems to have in its vicinity. After the first few weeks of this, our bodies and limbs started to swell alarmingly with strange new muscular growths where hitherto only flesh and bone had held sway.
The next favourite form of physical torture was the assault course. This was, to many of my chums and I, quite simply ‘something designed by that arsehole Satan and all his little twatting goblins!’ Many of us emerged time after time with various levels of injury. It is fair to say that none of us was seriously maimed, but we all had our share of near misses.
The worst days of assault course hammering were, without doubt, in mid-summer, as we launched ourselves across the obstacles fully kitted for action, including wearing full NBC protection and gas masks. NBC, or Nuclear, Biological and Chemical warfare protection, consisted of the ‘noddy suit’ (so named after our comical appearance when worn): rubber gloves and over-boots teamed with a gas mask (or ‘respirator’, to give it the technical term). All the articles seemed to be designed to inflict maximum discomfort, although I’m sure that, in the event of a chemical attack, we would have been grateful for its protective qualities.
One thing we never could understand was the inclusion of the word ‘nuclear’. Lets face it, if the big bang happened, our earthly remains wouldn’t have been substantial enough to fill an ashtray. Hence the saying, ‘in the event of a nuclear explosion, remove your respirator, place your head firmly between your knees … and kiss your arse goodbye!’
© copyright 2007 Malcolm Cleverley ~ all rights reserved
