Free End of the Road (The Rozzers) by Diem Burden Page A

way. Thankfully it never did and, like all good military relationships pre-computers, I was to lose contact with each and every one of them as soon as I left the army behind.
    We were bantering about women, life and sex, easy and relaxed in each other’s company. The man in charge was Sergeant ‘Smudge’ Smith, an overly short career man who had been with us for so long that he was like part of the furniture. For a sergeant he wasn’t all that bad, despite his size. He was the man handing out cans of beer we’d been given earlier, blatantly ignoring army regulations which forbade drinking in military vehicles.
    “But Dave, seriously,” said Smudge. “You’ve got your pre-release interview with the Old Man next week, for fuck’s sake! You need to decide!”
    He was right, of course. I had to have something to say to the boss. In twelve months I’d be out of the army and on Civvy Street , and the major expected to hear of my plans for the future.
    But what?
    As much as the dull routine of army life had bored me for the last five years, I couldn’t help but feel satisfied at that day’s work. We’d been assigned to ‘civil aid’, which roughly means the army helping the civilian population in some way. We’d arrived in a tiny village in the middle of Salisbury Plain in a huge tipper-truck, towing an enormous tilting-trailer with one of our camouflage-green, earth-moving machines on the back.
    The twelve-tonne digger had spent the day knocking out the crumbling wall of the local church yard and digging the earth out, as we prepared the foundations for the vicar to have a new wall built. We also carted off all of the leftover rubble. Cat won the kitty for guessing the exact quantity of skeletons we’d pull out of the ground – zero, if you didn’t count the small finger bone. I tapped my pocket. A keepsake.
    “It’ll come back to haunt you,” Smudge had said, laughing.
    As we were sweeping the soil off the road the vicar came out and thanked us all individually, whilst presenting Smudge with a case of bargain beer for our efforts. We were thrilled; British squaddies will drink absolutely anything.
    The vicar watched as we routinely and expertly loaded the digger onto the trailer, tethered it down and jumped up into the spacious cab. After some careful shunting back and forth by Cat, we ended up facing in the right direction and headed off out of the village and up onto the desolate, darkening roads of the plain, and back to the dull routine of camp life.
    It felt good, and I wanted this feeling to be a regular part of my new life. So what could I do? In my panic to escape my previous life at seventeen, I’d ended up here – a squaddy in the British Army, overjoyed at being let out to do a bit of useful work for the day. That was a mistake I was only too aware of.
    How I’d turned out to be a combat engineer is down to similar, well-thought-out planning. At the army recruiting office I had commented on the fact that I liked the look of the Royal Engineer cap in the poster. I was told that I could learn any trade I wanted to in the Engineers. Nice cap; good trade. So into the Engineer Corps I went. As for the trade, I had no idea. Other recruits said that being a POM was the easiest job available. I had no idea what a POM was, and I certainly wasn’t one to take the easy option but it seemed like the job everybody in the know was taking.
    “You’ll have to sign up for six years for those qualifications, son. Army’s gotta get its money’s worth from its investment, you know.” When you are eighteen years of age, six years doesn’t seem like a very long time at all, so I took the job of POM – which I later learnt stood for Plant Operator Mechanic . For the last five years I’d been learning how to operate and maintain dozens of huge earth-moving equipment, along with all the other jobs we sappers did.
    I briefly thought of going back to college, but soon laughed at the thought. Being a squaddy