Notes From a Small Military - I Commanded and Fought with 2 Para at the Battle of Goose Green. I was Head of Counter Terrorism for the M.O.D. This is my True Story. Major-General Chip Chapman
still have such an army: whether we will for much longer might lead you to the final chapter. My Sandhurst course was not to equip me with the above qualities – but the Parachute Regiment eventually, and by chance or design, would.
1 From ‘A Century of Change: Trends in UK Statistics Since 1900’, House of Commons research paper 99/11, dated 21 December 1999.
2 Jane’s International Defence Review, Volume 44, August 2011, page 6: ‘UK Seeks Coherence for Dismounted Close Combat’.
2a Equivalent to the weight of a light welterweight boxer for the WBO, super lightweight for the WBA and junior welterweight for the IBF and WBO. Boxing is more confusing than the army. I use light welterweight as it is the weight I boxed at every time an opponent broke my nose. No one has ever gone in to combat carrying a boxer on his back but we continue to want our infantrymen to do so.
JOINING ‘THE REG’: P COMPANY AND PARACHUTING
There is no point being a member of the Barbie Club if you are a fan of the fantasy game Warhammer. The Parachute Regiment is Warhammer on steroids. It also believes itself to be – and it is – an elite organisation. Every man in the regiment, officer or soldier, has a bond that is sealed in the privation and shared experience of having had to undergo the same rigorous selection to earn and wear the Red Beret. Part of that is inculcation into the ethos of this particular ‘band of brothers’. It is best described by Field Marshal Montgomery’s famous quotation, which almost all paratroopers know off by heart:
What manner of men are these who wear the red beret? They are firstly all volunteers and are then toughened by hard physical training. As a result, they have that infectious optimism and that offensive eagerness which comes from physical well-being. They have jumped from the air and by doing so have conquered fear.
Their duty lies in the van of battle; they are proud of that honour and have never failed in any task. They have the highest standards in all things, whether it is skill in battle or smartness in the execution of all peacetime duties.
They have shown themselves to be as tenacious and determined in defence as they are courageous in attack.
They are, in fact, men apart – every man an Emperor.
Before you can become an emperor, you have a period of apprenticeship: a rite of passage. For the Parachute Regiment this is formed by Pre-Parachute Selection (PPS), more commonly known as ‘P Company’.
Not all pass, and the denouement after the conclusion of all the selection events is brutal. Each person stands up as an individual and is told simply in one-word terms, ‘pass’ or ‘fail’. There is absolutely nothing in between, and no discussion of the why or wherefore of the decision. I’m not too sure if this ‘men apart’ band has now been broadened to include ‘men and women apart’. It should, so that all genders have the equal right to pass if they are good enough, and fail if they are not good enough. That is and should be the standard: without any social engineering to take account of physiological or other factors, because the last time I looked, the enemies on the battlefield do not place much credence in social engineering. They merely want to kill you.
It is probably bleeding obvious that the first requirement is to be fit. But there is more beyond that: mental determination to carry on when the going gets tough, and for officers to show leadership and not to shun the limelight, merely seeking to ‘get through it’.
Cleanliness – both of clothing and body – really was next to godliness. Godliness only involved two things: fitness and determination. We all knew that God was Airborne: it was drummed in to us. Bullets and shrapnel may not take fitness into account, but many soldiers’ lives have been saved after they have been wounded because they were fit, and had the mental attitude not to give in.
These were the final days for the young officers on the course when they would have no overt leadership or command responsibility. You only needed to know two mantras and one quotation to sustain you and to help you through:
A thoroughbred horse runs until its heart gives out.
We have it easy compared to the French foreign legion.
No one actually expected us to die because our hearts had given out, but they certainly did expect us not to give up. By the end of the first day, the 51 who started the course had been whittled down to 46. Five were already not godly enough. They had not driven through the ‘no pain, no gain’ expectation to win the prize of their red beret, or as G B Shaw put it: ‘The most intolerable pain is produced by prolonging the keenest pleasure.’3 We wanted that red beret.
P Company had a ritualistic feel to it. Each day of the two-week ‘beat-up’ prior to the selection week began the same way with the Army Basic Fitness Test (BFT) along Queens Avenue in Aldershot. The BFT was a squad run for one-and-a-half miles followed by a ‘best effort’ one-and-a-half miles back. The rule of thumb was that anyone who could not complete the BFT in less than nine minutes, in their Directly Moulded Sole boots and puttees tucked in to their green lightweight army trousers, would struggle to pass. It was cannily accurate.
Each candidate wore their army issue red or white PT vest with their name written across the front. In some cases, this would be the front and back to cope with officers with double-barrelled names such as Lt Stewart Larter-Whitcher or Lt Nick De Tscharner-Vischer. It was probably a good thing that the officer with probably the longest name in the army – Patrick Elrington O’Reilly-Blackwood Davidson-Houston – never attempted P Company, for there would have been a problem finding enough black ink to write it on any shirt. I once went to a meeting where a fellow officer (the current Chief of Defence Staff, General Sir Nick Houghton, when he was commanding 38 Brigade in Northern Ireland) briefed that his oral report would be of greater brevity than PEO’R-BD-H’s name. I could almost imagine Patrick Elrington O’Reilly-Blackwood Davidson-Houston having to ‘mill’ (a form of boxing but without the Queensberry Rules) against Christopher James Piers De Lukacs Lessner De Szeged. I imagined them trading blows, with each blow leading to a letter of their respective names falling from their PT vests until we were left with an exhausted winner and the pronouncement that they had fought a good fight and the winner was declared by the ‘last letter standing’.
We would change into our army issue blue shorts and black PT shoes for gym sessions. The equipment issued to the British army has historically come in for a lot of criticism, but I have to commend the cotton blue PT shorts for their ruggedness and longevity. I still wear those shorts 32 years later. They are still working well. They may not have a designer logo on them but they sure are tough wearing. I even wore them in a race in 2012 while in Tampa. The whole-life cost of those shorts is something to behold; they represent real value for money. The same could not be said for our PT shoes. In reality, they were black plimsolls; exactly the same as worn as a young child in junior school. Soldiers really did complete half marathons and suchlike in these plimmys, even into the 1980s. It was no wonder we had so many lower-leg and foot injuries.
The conclusion of each day of P Company led to a ritual: officers would head back to the officers’ mess to indulge in a soothing Radox bath in an attempt to get some of the stiffness and pain from their aching limbs. In those days, ice baths were unheard of. In the evenings we drank nothing more at the bar than an orange juice and lemonade. Alcohol was verboten. It was little wonder that an orange juice and lemonade was ordered at the bar by its own official name. You would merely ask for a ‘P Company’ and the fizzy yellow concoction would appear.
Our administrative requirements as officers were simple.