AFTER THOSE FIRST FIVE weeks, after the close of boot camp, the color sergeants eased up. Ever so slightly. They didn’t shout at us quite so much. They
treated us like soldiers.
As such, however, it was time to learn about war. How to make it, how to win it. Some of this involved stupefyingly boring classroom lessons. The better bits involved drills simulating different ways of being killed, or not, depending.
CBRN, they were called. Chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear. We practiced putting on protective gear, pulling it off, cleaning and wiping the poisons and other muck that might be thrown, dropped or sprayed on us. We dug countless trenches, donned masks, curled into the fetal position, rehearsed the Book of Revelation over and over.
One day the color sergeants assembled us outside a redbrick building, which had been turned into a CS gas chamber. They ordered us inside, activated the gas.
We took off our gas masks, put them on again, took them off. If you weren’t quick about it, you got a mouthful, a lungful. But you couldn’t always be quick, and that was the point, so eventually everyone sucked gas. The exercises were supposed to be about war; to me they were about death. The whole leitmotif of Army training was death. How to avoid it, but also how to face it, head-on.
It felt natural, therefore, almost inevitable, that they put us on buses and took us to Brookwood Military Cemetery, to stand on graves, to listen as someone read a poem.
“For the Fallen.”
The poem predated the ghastliest wars of the twentieth century, so it still had a trace of innocence.
They shall not grow old,
As we that are left grow old…
It was striking how much of our earliest training was intercut, leavened, with poetry. The glory of dying, the beauty of dying, the necessity of dying, these concepts were pounded into our heads along with the skills to avoid dying. Sometimes it was explicit, but sometimes it was right in our faces. Whenever we were herded into chapel we’d look up and see etched in stone: Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori.
Sweet and fitting it is to die for one’s country.
Words first written by an ancient Roman, an exile, then repurposed by a young British soldier who’d died for his country. Repurposed ironically, but no one told us that. They certainly weren’t etched ironically into that stone.
Poetry, for me, was slightly preferable to history. And psychology. And military strategy. I wince just remembering those long hours, those hard chairs in Faraday Hall and Churchill Hall, reading books and memorizing dates, analyzing famous battles, writing essays on the most esoteric concepts of military strategy. These, for me, were the ultimate trials of Sandhurst.
Given a choice, I’d have taken five more weeks of boot camp. I fell asleep in Churchill Hall, more than once.
You there, Mr. Wales! You’re sleeping!
We were advised, when feeling sleepy, to jump up, get the blood flowing. But that seemed overly confrontational. By standing you were informing the instructor
that he or she was a bore. What sort of mood would they be in when it came time to mark your next paper?
Weeks ran together. In week nine—or was it ten?—we learned bayoneting. Wintry morning. A field in Castlemartin, Wales. The color sergeants put on head-splitting punk rock music, full volume, to rouse our animal spirits, and then we began running at sandbag dummies, bayonets high, slashing and shouting: KILL! KILL! KILL!
When the whistles blew, when the drill was “over,” some guys couldn’t turn it off. They kept stabbing and stabbing their dummies. A quick glimpse into the dark side of human nature. Then we all laughed and pretended we hadn’t seen what we’d just seen.
Week twelve—or maybe thirteen?—was guns and grenades. I was a good shot.
I’d been shooting rabbits and pigeons and squirrels with a .22 since I was twelve.
But now I got better. So much better.
