Free The Afghan by Frederick Forsyth

and first-viewing prototypes. For Mike the high point was the visit of the Red Devils, the stunt team from the Parachute Regiment, free-falling from tiny specks in the sky to swoop to earth in their harnesses right in the heart of the tiny landing zone. That was when he knew what it was he wanted to do.
    He wrote a personal letter to the Paras during his last summer term at Haileybury, in 1980, and was offered an interview at the Regimental Depot at Aldershot for the same September. He arrived and stared at the old Dakota out of which his predecessors had once dropped to try to capture the bridge at Arnhem, until the sergeant escorting the group of five ex-schoolboys led them to the interview room.
    He was regarded by his school (and the Paras always checked) as a moderate scholar but a superb athlete. That suited the Paras just fine. He was accepted, and began training at the end of October, a gruelling twenty-two weeks that would bring the survivors to April 1981.
    There were four weeks of square-bashing, basic weapons handling, fieldcraft and physical fitness; then two more of the same plus first aid, signals and study of precautions against NBC (nuclear, bacteriological and chemical warfare).
    The seventh week was for more fitness training, getting harder all the time; but not as bad as weeks eight and nine: endurance marches through the Brecon range in Wales in midwinter, where fit men have died of exposure, hypothermia and exhaustion. The numbers began to thin out.
    Week ten saw the course at Hythe, Kent, for shooting on the range where Martin, just turned nineteen, was rated a marksman. Eleven and twelve were ‘test’ weeks – just running up and down sandy hills carrying tree trunks in the mud, rain and freezing hail.
    ‘Test weeks?’ muttered Phillips. ‘What the hell has the rest been?’
    After test weeks the remaining young men got their coveted red beret before three more weeks in the Brecons for defence exercises, patrolling and ‘live firing’. By then, late January, the Brecons were utterly bleak and freezing. The men slept rough and wet, without fires.
    Sixteen to nineteen covered what Mike Martin had come for: the parachute course at RAF Abingdon, where a few more dropped out and not just from the aircraft. At the end came the ‘wings parade’ when the wings of a paratrooper were finally pinned on. That night the old 101 club at Aldershot saw another riotous party.
    There were two more weeks devoted to a field exercise called ‘last fence’ and some polishing-up of parade-ground skills; week twenty-two saw Pass-Out Parade, when proud parents could finally view their spotty youths amazingly transformed into soldiers.
    Private Mike Martin had long been earmarked as POM – potential officer material – and in April 1981 went to join the new short course at the Royal Military Academy, Sandhurst, passing out in December as a Second Lieutenant. If he thought glory awaited him, he was entirely mistaken.
    There are three battalions in the Parachute Regiment and Martin was assigned to Three Para, which happened to be Aldershot in penguin mode.
    For three years out of every nine, or one tour out of three, each battalion is off parachuting and used as ordinary lorry-born infantry. Paras hate penguin mode.
    Martin, as a platoon commander, was assigned to Recruit Platoon, putting newcomers through the same miseries he had endured. He might have remained there for the rest of Three Para’s tour as penguins but for a faraway gentleman called Leopoldo Galtieri. On 2 April 1982, the Argentine dictator invaded the Falkland Islands. Three Para was told to kit up and get ready to move out.
    Within a week, driven by the implacable Margaret Thatcher, a British task force was steaming south in a collection of vessels, bound for the far end of the Atlantic where a southern winter, with its roaring seas and driving rain, was waiting for them.
    The journey south was on the liner Canberra with a first stop at Ascension