"Энди Макнаб. Немедленная операция (engl) " - читать интересную книгу автора

going back to wherever they live.
But there again, I thought, there was no chance whatsoever of a lowly
rifleman like me making the grade, and that was that.
There were eight infantry battalions at Tidworth, our new base in
Wiltshire. The entertainment facilities in the town consisted of three pubs
(one of which was out of bounds), two chip shops, a launderette, and a bank.
The army spent all day teaching us to be aggressive, and then we'd go
down to the town, get bored and drunk, and use our aggression against each
other. We'd then get prosecuted severely as if we'd done something wrong.
We did all the garrison sort of stuff like field firing exercises; then
we started training again for Northern Ireland. The battalions wouldrotate,
on average, one tour a year. I saw it as a great opportunity to save money.
As a rifleman I could save a grand a tour because there was even less to do
over the water than in Tidworth.
There were three other bonuses. One, we got fifty pence extra pay per
day, and two, we got soft toilet paper instead of the hard stuff in UK
garrisons. It was actually dangled as a carrot during training: "Remember,
it's soft toilet rolls over the water." And three, it was a pleasure to get
away from Tidworth again. For the next three years the routine was going on
exercises, get stinking drunk in Tidworth and Andover, and going over the
water.
People were coming back with their grand and getting ripped off buying
cars that promptly fell apart. One bloke bought a hand-painted cream and
chocolate brown Ford Capri for nine hundred pounds, and within two days
things were falling off it. I looked at buying a Capri myself, but the
insurance was more than the car was worth.
I was still going out with Christine. She was living in Ashford, so I
got down there weekends and whenever else I could. There was certainly no
way she wanted to come and live in Tidworth. She had a job and still lived
at home. We were in love-"we think"-and everything was coming up roses.
There began to be talk of the battalion going to Germany for five
years, and I knew this would present a problem for our relationship.
If you were "wife of", accommodation was provided; if you were just
"girlfriend of," then it was up to you to go rent a place downtown.
We'd never be able to afford the German rents, so I thought, what the
hell, let's do it, and that was us married. It was a white wedding; the plan
was that she would stay in Ashford, and after the next Northern Ireland tour
we could get a quarter in Tidworth.
I got made up to lance corporal in time for the next tour. Still based
in South Armagh, I was now a "brick" commander, in charge of a four-man
patrol. As such, I had to write a short patrol report after each patrol:
what we had seen, what we had done, what we would like to have done. While I
was on my way to the operations room one night, three or four blokes turned
up in a car with all their equipment. I saw on the map that certain areas
had been put out of bounds; I knew these boys were going to go do some
stuff. It made me think that as the infantry battalion we were working our
arses off here, but these guys were working to a very different agenda. We
used to come back from a patrol and think, We've done this and we've done
that, tis really good stuff, but at the end of the day we were just walking
Figures (standard target, depicting a charging enemy soldier). We were so