Free Our Last Best Chance: The Pursuit of Peace in a Time of Peril by King Abdullah II, King Abdullah

Brown, and Columbia, where the toughest thing they had to contend with was another freezing winter. And here I was running around the Barossa training ground, mud on my face, carrying a rifle. It was surreal. Alongside the training ground was an old Roman road nicknamed Devil’s Highway. After a couple of hours out there in the cold I had a pretty good idea how it had gotten its name.
    In those days most incoming cadets were high school graduates, all about eighteen. I do not think most of us had any idea of what was in store. Half of the cadets dropped out of my platoon within the first five months. The training course was designed to be tough, and the military brass fully expected people to quit. They were weeding us out and wanted to keep only the ones who would not cave in. I remember training one afternoon under the watchful eye of Color Sergeant Lawley. He ran us down to the main gate, from where we could see the Staff College at Camberley, which provided postgraduate military education for senior officers. It looked like a little palace. He made us all do push-ups, and as we lay facedown in the mud, he said, “That is Staff College over there. And looking at the bunch of you, this is about as close as you are ever going to get!”
    Sergeant Lawley was a philosopher in a soldier’s sort of way. We were in the middle of a live-fire exercise in the countryside and things were going from bad to worse. My section of cadets was about to assault a hill, and we were waiting for the order. He and I were sitting slightly apart from the others, off to one side behind a few trees. He said, “Mr. Abdullah, there’s something I’ve been meaning to tell you.” He paused for effect. “You’re always going to be in the shit. It’s just the depth that’s going to vary.” I adopted that as my motto, and to this day still think of his words whenever I am facing a tough situation.
     
    Those of us who made it through basic training became commissioned officers. Then, for those planning on a career in the military, another five or six months of officer training followed, covering leadership, British military doctrine, and international relations. After receiving my commission as an officer in the British army from Queen Elizabeth, I would have to choose a regiment. I was encouraged to join the Coldstream Guards, a historic infantry regiment, one of the oldest in the British army and part of the queen’s personal guard. It was thought a fitting regiment for a prince—and, more important, my color sergeant was a Coldstreamer. So I began making preparations to sign up.
    The problem was, the day-to-day life of an infantryman was proving less than glamorous. On a rare weekend break from Sandhurst, I met up with the crown prince of Bahrain at the Dorchester Hotel in London. Hamad Bin Isa Al Khalifa was a close friend of my father, and I looked on him as an uncle. A fellow Sandhurst graduate, he smiled in recognition when I told him about the punishing training we were being put through. As I said my goodbyes, he provided me with a welcome surprise: a hamper of sandwiches from the Dorchester kitchens. I was the most popular cadet in my platoon that evening, although I am not sure the other cadets believed me when I told them the sandwiches were a gift from the crown prince of Bahrain.
    Years later, on a trip to London, I too bought a hamper of sandwiches from the Dorchester. I knew that the grandson of Sheikh Hamad, who had by then become the king of Bahrain, would welcome the gift. He was attending Sandhurst and I had all too vivid recollections of what he was going through.
    In the spring of 1981, a week before I had to make my final choice of regiment, I was on an exercise with my platoon at a training area near the Welsh border. We had been dug in for four days and the weather was foul—snow, sleet, and freezing fog. I had trench foot, and we were all miserable. The nights were so cold and awful that some of the cadets actually