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

from R Squadron was missing after a tab, and the standby squadron was called
out to search for him. They found him in his sleeping bag, half in, half
out, with biscuits in one hand and a hexy burner in the other. He must have
died in that position.
We had passed Selection, the only phase that we had a certain amount of
control over. Now, as we entered the lecture room on Monday morning, we were
going into the unknown.
The training sergeant major stood up and said, "You are starting
continuation training now. There's going to be a lot of work involved.
Just switch on, and listen to what's being said. Remember, you might
have passed the Selection phase, but you're not in yet."
From the original intake of 180, we were now down to just 24.
Sitting around me were people from many different organizations-blokes
from the signals and Royal Engineers, infantry, artillery, and a marine. It
was accepted that everybody would have different levels of expertise and
different levels of experience. In terms of training, it was back to the
drawing board.
The first step was to train us in the use of the Regiment's weapons.
"If you finally do get to the squadrons," the DS said, "you might find
yourself arriving, and going straight on jobs. They won't have time to train
you; you've got to go there with a working knowledge of all the weapons."
The standard expected of us would depend on our previous experience. I
was a sergeant in the infantry; weapons were my business. But the last time
a lance corporal in the Catering Corps had touched a weapon might have been
a year ago, and even then it would probably just have been a rifle; he'd
know nothing about the GPMG, sustained fire, or any of the technical stuff.
He'd find it more difficult than I would but wouldn't necessarily be
doing any worse. The DS said that to their way of thinking, if one person
hadn't got the same experience as another but was learning, and was getting
to a good standard compared with the more experienced bloke, then in essence
he was learning more.
It was very much like a Bible story I remembered, when the rich man
turned up at the church and dumped off six bags of gold and everybody was
thinking how wonderful he was. Then an old woman came in and she had two
coins, her whole wealth, and she gave one of them to the church. The fact
was, this woman gave more to the church than the rich man did because the
six bags of gold was jack shit to him. The instructors were looking at us in
the same light. They were looking at what we were, and what they expected us
to become. It was during this stage that we lost the marine corporal, who,
as far as they were concerned, had a standard of weapon handling that wasn't
as good as it should have been for a corporal in the Royal Marines.
I suspected that our personalities were also under the microscope.
From the way the DS looked at us I could almost hear the cogs turning:
Is the experienced soldier helping the less experienced corporal in the
Catering Corps to get on, or is he just saying, "Well, hey' I'm looking
good"? Was a bloke maybe such a dickhead that he spent his time joking away
with the DS? They'd joke back with him, but at the end of the day they'd
probably think, What a big-timer. It was their job to make sure that people
who were going to the squadrons were the best that they could provide. They
had to go back to the squadrons themselves; they might be in command of us.