Page 51 - The Light Dragoon 2024

The Regimental Journal of The Light Dragoons
The Light Dragoons Battlegroup.
We all thought Estonia was going to be crap. The Light Dragoons had orders to play enemy on Ex SPRING STORM in Estonia, May 2023. Nobody had heard of SPRING STORM, but it sounded a lot like WESSEX STORM, which everybody knows is pump.
As enemy, we reckoned the exercise would be completely scripted, and we would have to sit beneath some trees until the QRH came in tanks to roll us up. Some of us had been to Estonia before, and remembered it as cold, wet, marshy place, full of depressed Fusiliers and Riflemen wishing they were doing the fun CABRIT in Poland instead. This was going to be crap.
Expectations, already low, were lowered even further by the sheer pumpness of receiving a fleet of barely functioning
Ex Spring Storm
Jackals and driving them the length of England in the rain to put them on a boat in Dover. We had asked for low-loader trucks to move the Jackals for us; we were told no. Brilliant. Half of them broke on the way.
So when A, B, HQ Sqn and RHQ jumped on an RAF plane at Teeside airport (you know the drill – turn up a day early, wait, fall asleep, get moved, wait, listen to a brief, wait, get told the flight is delayed, wait...) and started removing our SIM cards, the mood was pretty low. 4SCOTS and 2ANGLIAN had kindly sent some troops to join us, who seemed just as depressed as we were. Finally, the RAF decided to get us airborne, and we flew over Paris and Berlin and the great cities of Europe on our way to some mashed- together British/Estonian/who-knows- what exercise in a small dismal country on the marshy freezing fringes of Russia.
The first surprise was the weather.
We landed into blazing sunshine. It was like Spain. Apparently Estonia was experi- encing a once-in-a-lifetime heatwave, unheard of for that time of year. Throughout our month away the weather was gorgeous, regularly hitting 30°C. Suntanning was considered a little too American, but working out topless was okay, and soon the outdoor gym was rammed with LDs practicing pull-ups and Top Gun flexes.
It turns out we weren’t the only ones pulled in for the exercise, either. Next to our accommodation were a charming bunch from the Army Air Corps, busy polishing their helicopters. After we had repaired our Jackal fleet with lots of gaffa tape and zip-ties, they offered us some rides in their Wildcats in exchange for a ‘Jackal
Racing home after ENDEX.
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