Page 53 - The Light Dragoon 2024

Some tooled-up geezers.
Half-marathon DOMS.
The tough mudder team after a tough loss.
experience’. As they hadn’t completed drop-down drills, we couldn’t actually drive them anywhere – so they flew us over the forests of Estonia in return for being sat in a stationary vehicle. Best trade ever.
Next the Paras dropped in, windswept and dusty. Then some French Foreign Legionnaires (in this author’s humble opinion, the second-best Legion in the world). Then the Royal Marines, and some Canadians driving armoured howitzers, and some Danes and more Brits and Estonians and Frenchies and Americans and Italians and Poles and so on until you literally couldn’t move for attack helicopters, quadbikes, tanks, trucks, IFVs, AFVs, etc. It turns out that 14,000 soldiers from 11 different nations had been pulled in for this exercise, and it was going to cover half the country. Fair play.
The second surprise was the exercise itself.
We thought it was going to be scripted. We were wrong. Once the columns of vehicles had rolled out of camp and the enemy forces (us, yay) and friendly forces (them, boo) had reached our start locations on opposite sides of the country, some anxious-looking Estonian Corporals came to brief our battlegroup on the ‘rules’.
“This”, they said, “is a map of Estonia. You see the red bits?”
We nodded. There were some tiny red rectangles on the map, shaded in.
“You cannot go there.” We looked at them in disbelief.
“Wait. You mean we can go anywhere else?” someone asked.
“Yes,” they said. “It has to be realistic, you see?”
Roger! As soon as the whistle went, we were off, smashing through thick Estonian forests, fighting local old-boy militias (60-year-olds with antique weapons who made booby traps for fun), before whacking out into villages and opening up fire with machine guns against Estonian conscripts whilst locals did their shopping around us. It was completely class.
We fought against dug-in infantry, anti-tank units, air assets and tanks. B Squadron got into such thick fighting that Maj Glover was yelling “Broken Arrow” over the net whilst throwing hastily-formed crews into a maelstrom of dug-in positions that seemed to keep magically regenerating. 4SCOTs were used to moving at infantry pace and were initially surprised by us fighting through 80km in four hours (their machine-gunners, on foot, couldn’t quite keep up), but they got into the spirit of it by the end and led the final assault. An enter- prising member of A Sqn, having snuck into an attack helicopter base, managed to