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
daily and weekly requirements were no more complex than:
| Wash kit |
| Buy Vaseline (for nipple rash) |
| Check kit in drying room |
| Clean boots and plimsolls |
| Press kit (lightweight trousers, PT shirts, puttees) |
| Adjust webbing and rucksack (to save on further applications of Vaseline elsewhere on the body) |
| Check alarm timing on clock radio |
| Buy Radox, foot pads, glucose drinks, energy tablets |
The set events in Test Week were designed to simulate various portions of an airborne battle. I’m not sure how ‘milling’ takes its place within the context of an airborne battle. Milling is like boxing, but one is not allowed to box. It is pure fighting. The object is to land as many blows on your opponent for as long as possible over a two-minute period in order to show tenacity, courage and determination. If one is knocked down, there is merely a brief pause while one gets up to start the battering (one way or another) again. I still recall the name of the opponent I fought – Baxter from 9 Parachute Squadron Royal Engineers. I was given as the victor for my bout. Fortunately, I was up against someone of comparable weight, so the bout was evenly matched. If the P Company staff did not like you, or wished you to be taught an early lesson, the weight differentials could be what one might term ‘unfair’. Acceptance of this unfairness was expected. After all, if we were to be clever in warfare we wanted and should expect an unfair fight. In most cases, and using the principles of war, this unfairness should be in our favour. As you will see throughout this book, it was often the other way around!
I believe that in the modern era of ‘health and safety’ and ‘duty of care’, the current P Company candidates are now allowed to wear head guards during the milling. We were protected only by our blue army shorts and white PT vests. The latter could be problematic, as it could quickly become bloodied. One was expected to turn out in pristine white PT vests sans blood for follow-on activities. Buying additional PT vests to lessen the load on the overworked washing machines was a sound policy in lessening the groundhog-day simplicity of the ‘things to do’ list.
Some people fell quickly by the wayside, not being able to complete the high bars confidence course successfully. The piéce de resistance of this event was the shuffle bars test 30ft above ground. This consisted of shuffling along a couple of parallel scaffolding bars, with the added bonus of being required to delicately raise your feet over the scaffold brace about half way along in order to proceed to the end, then bend over and touch your toes while screaming out your army number. The whole episode was a slight illusion; if you fell off there was a safety net somewhere below. But the illusion worked. There were people whose fear of heights paralysed them. There were people whose fear of heights was overcome by their determination to succeed. Those who were paralysed were instantly given the red card: there was to be no pass or fail for such soldiers or officers. They were, in the words no one ever wants to hear, Returned to Unit or RTU’d. If this was an officer who had been sponsored through Sandhurst by the Parachute Regiment he would now be instantly looking for another regiment to accept him. He was a casualty of peace.
Military marching with heavy weights is part of the Parachute Regiment ethos. They are good at it. Marching in the Paras is known as tabbing, which is supposed to be an elongated acronym for ‘tactical advance to battle’ (something I did not know for about 10 years). The Royal Marines’ equivalent is known as yomping. You will never get anyone from either organisation using the vernacular of the other; that would be akin to a criminal offence. Yomping is like tabbing but much, much slower. The Royal Marines will, in the competitive world of elite forces, tell you that it is the other way around.
Marching (tabbing) is therefore a core part of P Company. Two of the test events were the 10-miler, with a 10lb rifle and 35lb pack, to be completed in one hour and 45 minutes, and a 14-miler on the South Downs Way. Part of the start day ritual would be the weigh-in of all our backpacks (bergens) to ensure that no one could cheat on the weight. The only ones allowed to do that were the instructors: the clipboards they carried weighed more than their packs (but they did do the distances day in and day out, and so the toll on their knees over a two-year posting made this concession understandable). Although the location of P Company has changed over the years (it is now in Catterick, North Yorkshire, since Depot Para in Aldershot closed under earlier defence cuts), the style and pain remains the same. You, dear reader, now have your own chance to experience the 10-miler: there is now an annual ‘Paras 10’ charity event run in Catterick, Aldershot and Colchester. You can now pay to be put through the agony and hills of Catterick. The concession is that you can do this with or without a bergen – and you get a medal.
The key requirement in all the test marches was to stay with the main group. If you began to fall back, you would always be chasing the error in attempting to catch or keep up with the group. And it would begin to eat at you mentally as you crossed the features seared into our memories: Hungry Hill, Flagstaff Hill, Miles Hill, Seven Sisters (why are large sequences of hills always called sisters or, as in Australia and Cape Town, the 12 apostles?), Concrete Hill and finally, what sounded like the luxury of a valley but was in reality the energy-sucking glue of Long Valley. There were a lot of hills. If you had fallen behind, the worst thing would be to think you had caught up during one of the quick water stops, only for the group to set off again, once more beginning to leave you behind. Being ‘off-pace’ was weakness and therefore not tolerated.
Two other endurance events on the plat du jour of P Company were the Stretcher Race and the Log Race. Both of these are universally hated for the pain they inflict. The Log Race is designed to simulate bringing an artillery gun or large anti-tank weapon into action. This is a good idea, although I cannot think of too many battles – no, change that to ‘I cannot think of any battle’ – where a bunch of men have had to run seven miles to bring an artillery piece into action. The Naval Gun Race that used to be so popular at Earls Court in the days of the Royal Tournament was conducted over the length of two football fields and simulated a Boer War naval brigade engagement. Maybe our log race was designed to simulate trying to get the weapons in to Arnhem from the 1944 drop zones, for the distance involved was not dissimilar to this event.
In both the log race and the stretcher race, the most heinous crime was to come off the log or the stretcher. When it was your turn to be part of the carrying party, you were to be fixed to it no matter how painful or tired. To ‘jack’, the colloquial shortened version of to ‘jack something in’ (cease doing something), would once again lead to a fail. It showed a lack of determination and guts. The log was a spruce pine about 14ft long. The carrying handles were not designed by Conran, but by the Marquis de Sade. They were no more than thick ropes with a toggle on the end. They bit in to your hands, and with a number of log runners on the left and right, had the ergonomics of a dysfunctional attempt at sculling in an Oxford v Cambridge boat race – but one that you tried to row in once the boat had overturned.
The stretcher race was a similar distance and the stretcher too had been designed by the Marquis. With shortened scaffolding poles of tubular steel and a flat top, it resembled a stretcher but it was made of heavy metal. In the history of medicine there has been no example of a stretcher made of scaffolding poles – but our test was not designed to replicate medicine, more the pain of having teeth pulled without an aesthetic.
The assault course and steeplechase events (muddy deep water to wade through as routine and guaranteed to sap your energy) almost completed the P Company events. The most famous horse-racing steeplechase is the Grand National at Aintree. The average winning time is a touch over nine minutes (‘Mr Frisk’ holds the course record with 8:47.8 for those about to go to the pub quiz after reading this chapter). Our steeplechase was scored on points rather than position. You only got six points for 18 minutes and 30 seconds of two miles of soft-going agony, and like Aintree it was two circuits. The preview of running the steeplechase was rather like a jockey doing his own notation at Aintree:
Attack the