Page 70 - The KRH Year of 2023 (CREST Sharing)

70 The Regimental Journal of The King’s Royal Hussars
Ex CENTAURE CHALLENGE
Adifferent beast to CAMBRIAN PATROL, the French 7th Armoured Brigade’s CENTAURE CHALLENGE is a much more civilised patrols competition between the 7th Brigade Regiments and one to which the KRH, as part of the sister 12 (UK) Armoured Brigade, were honoured to once again send a team – and attempt to beat a few of the French on home turf.
The Challenge consisted of a two-day patrol across beautiful summer Alpine countryside, interspersed with abseiling, via ferrata, kayaking, BCD and weapons serials, and kicked off with a stretcher race/Glock pistol biathlon. A perfect occasion for the mainly B Sqn team, under Maj Williamson, to fly the Regimental flag. Thus followed a pre-deployment package consisting of assault courses, high ropes, weapons training, and Glock ranges with the indomitable Capt Brian Trainner SASC.
To meet us as we arrived at the Camp de Valdahon was WO1 (ADC) Delunsch, whose perfect English smoothed all difficulty. The first event for the team, consisting of Maj Williamson, Lt Campbell, Lt Brenninckmeijer, 2Lt Palmer, Sgt Duncan, Cpl Holliday, Cpl Parry, LCpl Taylor, Tpr Cheke and Tpr Roberts, was the biathlon: A team stretcher-carry over obstacles fol- lowed by three rounds fired on the Glock range. Each round
Maj Williamson leading the charge
The exact moment Lt Palmer acquired his black eye
missed was 30 seconds in the ring with French Army boxers. Sgt Duncan (the Scots not being famously gentle) gave as good as he got; the Officer Corps were left mostly bruised and feel- ing sorry for ourselves. Thus we started in 7th place of 9 teams.
Day 2, a 26km march with 1000m ascent, proved the chance to get ahead, with a rapid pace set by Maj Williamson to the first serial, the weapons salad – reassembling French weapons from a box of parts.
Spurred on, the next serial saw the team crawl through a cave system to then abseil from a cliff. A standard part of French military training, the team was relatively unprepared. This didn’t deter Cpl Holliday from conquering a fear of heights