Another week down, and one i feel i may look back on as being rather pivotal. It was a week more about actual soldiering than we have had before, full of rifles and running and toil, but brilliant because of it. A number of occassions are worthy of further report, starting with our journey down the Wishing Stream.
This may sound like a Lewis Carroll esq adventure, but was more Saving Private Ryan than Tweedle Dum and Tweedle Dee. After an afternoon of 'Tactical Command Tasks' (rescuing injured Gurkhas from landrovers stuck in minefileds while keeping watch for impending doom from the forest), we were tasked with returning via a series of tunnells, rivers, ditches etc while carrying a stretcher with a very war weary manaquin attatched, and a number of ammo boxes; all the while weighed down by our webbing, helmets, daysacs and rifles. This soon deteriorated into a full blown charge through the mud, quite literally chest deep in water and at one point fully submerged as the Directing Staff kindly aided us on our way under a bridge with the bottoms of their boots. Despite our best efforts to waterproof everything, there's only so much a tescos freezer bag can do against a putrid river, and cleaning out our rilfes was a rather labourious task. I'm sure there are many of you out there thinking this sounds horrible, but i'm equally sure there are few of us in here who didn't have more fun and sport wider grins than we so far have at Sandhurst as we ruined our kit through that river. That was more like the inspirational promo videos that had lured us in in the first place had promised and we loved it!
Things then continued along that line; we ventured onto our first day of live firing with real bullets, and equally real carbon covering every possible inch of our weapons afterwards. This was shortly followed by the imaginatively titled Excersise Second Attack, following neatly on from Exercise First Attack. This time though it was an overnighter, with all the misery that usually brings, and we were doing Platoon scale attacks. Again though it was fun; sweaty, exhausting, aching, hideous fun, but fun nonetheless. We battled increasing numbers of Gurkhas for a whole day, as attack blended into attack, untill ammo got so low that my unfortunate section ended up assualting three depth positions in one bound, and we all gave up in an exhausted huddle. As we have now progressed to proper radios and actual attacks it is a real thrill to look around at your mates and think shit, if i knew literally nothing about the Army i might think this lot were proper soldiers. It's also a surreal buzz to lay 20m away from a Gurkha in a hole as he fires automatic fire at you and you return your discipled rapid rate of fire of 30 rounds per minute, and you both wonder who is going to pretend to be dead first, despite the fact that i would have been dead hours ago if these were real bullets.
We are however told at the end, in a brilliantly Sandhurst esq way that we are 'achieving the required standard for this stage of the course, which i think is a compliment, but might also indicate that we're still bloody useless. Morale is boosted though by a perfect speech from our small, angry, Scottish Company Sergant Major with whose words i shall finish; i paraphrase but i don't believe exageratte, and i apologise for the swearing! " You men when you go home this weekend; and you're out in your f***ing bars and f***ing night clubs, i want you to look at that f***ing f***er next to you with his spiked up f***ing hair and f***ing stupid clothes and think what the f*** have you done today; because i've been learning to f***ing kill people!" It may not be quite out of the MOD book of Political Correctness but it certainly sent us on our long weekend with a smile.
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