"Энди Макнаб. Немедленная операция (engl) " - читать интересную книгу автораwho probably owed the bank half his annual salary.
I asked Debbie to move to Winchester and rent a flat with me, but I had to get permission from the O.C for that as well. I pondered a bit more about Selection and the life of a Special Forces soldier. From the limited amount I had seen, these people in Hereford seemed to have a much freer existence; I doubted very much that in the Special Air Service a platoon commander aged about twenty-one or twenty-two had to say whether a thirty-year-old sergeant should be allowed to take a credit application form to his commanding officer. I started to do a bit of bergen work just to see and found I could move over the ground pretty fast. Debbie and I lived together for about six or seven months. I had a great relationship with her and her family. Then came crunch time, my posting back to the battalion. She now had a problem: Was she going to stay in the UK or come over to Germany for three years? Exactly the same as last time, I thought: What the heck, we'll get married-and we did, in August 1982. This time, being a corporal, I got a quarter straightaway. s soon as I got to Germany I started to dream about a return ticket. Now 2RGJ were a mechanized battalion, which didn't grip my shit at all. I was supposed to be a section commander, but I didn't even know how to get into an A.P.C (armored personnel carrier), let alone command one. I had about a week to sort myself out, and then the battalion was off to Canada for two months of battle group training. All the tanks and infantry came together to form the battle group, screaming over the vast Canadian prairies in live-firing attacks. It was probably good training, but I hated bumming of the time was spent drinking tea while half the REME (Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers) were underneath them with spanners. Out of four vehicles in my platoon it was a safe bet that at least one of them would not even make it to the start line. The crew would spend days on the-roadside waiting for recovery. After three or four weeks back in Germany the quarter was ready, and Debbie flew out. Almost immediately we started having to do two or three-week exercises. We'd drive to a location, dig in, stay there for a couple of days, jump in our A.P.C again, go somewhere else, and dig in again. It was incredibly boring, and as far as I was concerned, we weren't really achieving that much. Certainly none of us at the coal face was ever told what the big plan was. As in Canada, most of these exercises were spent at the roadside -either broken down or grounded for two days because the Germans wouldn't allow armored vehicles to move at weekends. A fair one if you were the indigenous population, I supposed, but if you were the squaddy parked up just ten kilometers from the comforts of home, it was a downright drag. The general level of bullshit was outrageous, and it started to wear me down. Any time we weren't trundling around in geriatric A.P.C.S we were doing battalion duties. At least five times a month I'd be on guard. Then we'd have all the other regimental duties, which were twenty-four-hour duties. Then we had brigade duties. Because it was the British Army on the Rhine, we had to look good at |
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