Page 77 - Wish Stream Year of 2018

The Famous First Five
OCdt Nichol
Ithink in terms of creases. Creases in my shirt, creases in my trousers, in my shorts, my sleeves, my smock; creases in my jumper, in
the shoulder pads on my jumper, on the badges of my smock. Creases in my curtains and my map. I dream about creases. And when I’m not ironing creases, I’m worrying about the creases I may have forgotten. Every time I sit down I panic at the thought of my creases becoming uncreased.
In one of our very first company briefings, they described to us in a single but highly apt phrase how we were feeling. “Shock of capture”. It’s one of their better clichés, I must admit. I don’t really recall anything from those first few days, apart from being consistently worried about every- thing I did and said. In my first interview with my platoon commander, I described the sensation of being “on a movie set where no one but me knows he’s acting”. In less pretentious language, that meant I felt totally alone and rather out of my depth – I seemed to have forgotten all my lines, so to speak. Luckily, one is so tired that they don’t even have a moment to consider how much they may or may not be enjoying themselves. It’s all about acclimatisation really. Getting up at 4:45 am, singing the national anthem as loud and as out of tune as possible, scrubbing the lines, making your bed to a set standard, ordering your
my legs was longer than the other. I moved with the elegance of a polio-ridden sloth, and was constantly reminded of this defect by the Colour Sergeant, who quickly grew fond of shouting my name with an added demeaning epithet. By the end of week five we were supposed to be pass- ing off the square. An ancient ritual it seems, and one that allows those who ‘pass off’ to march more freely around the camp and cease from calling out the regula-
tion drill commands.
When the day finally
arrived, it was a beauti-
ful winter morning, and
although nervous I felt
slightly more confident
than normal, having had
the secret of marching
revealed to me a few
days previously. It turns out that, if you bend your knees when marching, it all becomes a lot easier. I, in a state of perpetual nervousness, had forgotten how to bend my knees when walking and, therefore, failed to ever keep in step with the others. The resulting motion had been a hybrid of the very best Germanic goose step and the very worst Milano catwalk. Anyway, on that fine winter morning I was feeling quietly assured.
Confidence was my first mistake. After botching almost all of the drill movements, I sputtered out answers to a series of questions which seemed more and more tenuous with each passing moment:
“Who is the Commandant? Who is the acad- emy RSM? Who is the senior major? Who is the Adjutant’s wife? What is the name of the Col- lege Commander’s dog? Where does the Adju- tant’s wife play bridge on a Friday with the Col- lege Commander’s wife? How does she take her tea? If I am travelling at 86 miles an hour for 547 miles along a dusty Iraqi road in a south-westerly direction, with the wind to my rear, how long will it take for me to get to HQ?”
I exaggerate, of course, but when your mouth feels like sandpaper, your nerves are shred- ded, and you only have a couple of hours sleep under your belt, the simplest question sud-
By the end of week five we were supposed to be passing off the square.
It’s all about
acclimatisation
shelves to a prescribed lay out (toothbrush to the left, razor up), hanging your shirts in the correct order – sleeves overlap-
really. ping, trouser legs to the right etc. Dusting, clean- ing, polishing, ironing...it goes on. That’s what I found hardest in those opening weeks. The constant routine, with peo- ple you don’t know, and every minute being accounted for. The infamous night of long irons, saw us awake until the early hours, ironing eve- rything we owned. And despite the looming dan- ger of our first inspection, all I could really think
about was creases, my precious creases.
The company spent a huge proportion of the first five weeks doing drill. I, on the other hand, spent the first five weeks trying to work out which of
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