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