Page 80 - The Light Dragoon 2024

Biggest slope we could find. Eight seconds of pure adrenaline.
Ex Ausbau Dragoon
Boys boys boys.
The debate. “This house believes that men look better in tweed.”
Seriously slushy snow day.
The Regimental Journal of The Light Dragoons
After grinding through six months of INTERFLEX in wet and windy Wathgill, RHQ was ready for some African sun in February 2023. The US Army was hosting a Corps-size exercise in Kenya, and LD RHQ was trawled to spend two weeks in a Nairobi hotel doing some notional planning and hanging out around the pool. A mate in the QRH, who had done it before, described it as “the biggest proff of his career”.
Imagine our disappointment when the Yanks cancelled the Kenyan exercise – something boring about ‘redistributing US resources from sub-priority theatres to rebalance focus onto the European JOA’. Yawn. Kenya was off. RHQ was at a loose end, and our holiday (sorry, work) bags were already packed. We needed a trip.
But where to go? Some cool options were floated: Cyprus, Canada, maybe Belize. In the end we settled on the least sunny place we could think of – Sennelager, Germany. There were a few good reasons to head there. The Regiment was going to Sennelager later in the year, and we could recce the facilities. We were also due to host a 4 Brigade battlefield study
day in Germany, and we could walk the ground ahead of time. But, mainly, the Commanding Officer had spent a couple of years in Sennelager before, and he wanted to revisit his favourite bratwurst and beer halls.
With great sadness, we swapped our sunglasses and flip-flops for thermal leggings and coats and got ready to depart on Ex Ausbau Dragoon.
The teamsheet was: Lt Col Jon Harris, Maj Luke Dodington, Maj Alex Thirlaway, Capt Lee Simpson, Capt Chris Godfrey, Capt Ed Elston, Capt Will Addison, Capt James Montgomery-Stuart, Capt James Digby, WO1 Anthony Richardson, WO1 Sean Tran, WO2 Anthony Pennicott, WO2 Andy Cawthorne, SSgt Ben Brewer and LCpl Callum Dean.
On 19 February 2023, we jumped into a couple of combis in Gaza and headed for glamourous Hull. The overnight ferry to Rotterdam was bouncing, and we sent many beers downrange, winning the onboard quiz and even throwing some shapes on the sticky dancefloor. From Rotterdam we drove through the Netherlands and had
barely entered Germany when a tyre blew on the Autobahn, leading to a nervous tyre-change with 40-tonne lorries racing past and a German police escort.
Despite Sennelager Camp – once home to 20,000 soldiers – being almost empty, we had been denied permission to stay there. Fine. CO’s TAC set up in a local Anglophile Baron’s mansion (the Baron greeted us warmly and told us about his favourite grouse shooting spots in Scotland), whilst everyone else stayed in a local castle (the rooms seemed suspiciously cheap until we learnt that it had been a concen- tration camp in WWII). We RV’d in town: schnitzels, sauerkraut and beers all round.
On Tuesday morning, we gathered at the castle. Wewelsburg Castle is a 13th Century pile that was the wartime HQ of the SS with some unfortunate Jewish and political prisoners held in a camp below. Besides being a cheap hostel, there is now a museum attached. The exhibits were sobering.
We retired to the Baron’s house after- wards and divided the SNCOs and junior Captains into teams for a formal debate:
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