Free Going Commando by Mark Time Page B

mandatory member of his school’s cadet force, Exercise First Step was just another weekend for him, unlike me who’d only spent nights out under canvas in holiday parks with drunken aunts and uncles. It was like having a personal tutor, and the ease with which he took to all the field tasks made me think he’d be promoted not long after training. It was he, not the training team, who really showed me how to put up a bivvy, and it was he who showed me the delights of a twenty-four-hour ration pack.
    Single-man ‘ratpacks’ were issued to troops with little logistical back-up, and as commandos we came under this definition. They came in four menus, mouthwateringly named A, B, C and D, and as an eight-man group we were given two of each to try.
    Menu C was steak and kidney pudding, which contained mostly lumps of fat and gristle, and kidneys that tasted like they’d been on dialysis for a few months. Menu A – chicken curry – was my favourite. However, it was best eaten duringthe day: when the tin was opened our bodies would light up in the reflection of the day-glo orange gloop. If opened under the cover of darkness it would instantly give away our position.
    Other tins contained either a bacon burger or a bacon grill. Giving them different names was an obvious ploy to make us think we were getting variety. None of it mattered much, anyway. After Exercise First Step we were only ever issued menu B but given two choices – eat it or starve.
    The ubiquitous confectionary pack consisted of Arabic ‘Rolos’ that even in the heat of the summer broke teeth, or even worse, a packet of out-of-date Spangles. In the civilian world these actually tickled the palate; when given the military makeover, the wrapper was fused to the sweets and it was physically impossible to unwrap them. During any given night in the field, you’d hear the constant spitting of plastic from guys sucking wrapped Spangles on sentry.
    As a biscuit connoisseur, ‘Biscuits Brown’ and ‘Biscuits Fruit AB’ were a great disappointment. Both retained the consistency of low-grade cardboard; the fruit AB was just a poor imitation of the world-famous garibaldi. If the Italian revolutionary had offered the military version to his republican troops they’d have hung him in mutiny.
    Finally, there was a sundries pack containing bitter coffee granules that would stick to Teflon, teabags so bad they were only used as the filling for homemade cigarettes, and a book of matches that struggled to light oxygen on a still day. If the wind rose above 0.5 on the Beaufort scale, we’d have to resort to windproof matches that were great if you could light things within a micro-second. To complete this plastic bag of usefulitems there was John Wayne toilet paper – so called because it took shit from no one.
    To add finesse to this delectable culinary experience, we always cooked on the woodland floor which was covered in a carpet of pine needles. These would stick to any moist surface, and made it almost impossible to eat or drink anything without a side serving of the spiky little bastards. Everything we ate became infused with the taste of pine needles and like anything sharp, they weren’t particularly pleasant to swallow.
    Watching guys cook was probably akin to commando Masterchef . I say ‘probably’ because I never watched anyone – I was too busy cooking in my own personal hell to bother about anyone else. It wouldn’t have been so bad if we’d had all day to cook everything up on a four-ring gas hob. Unfortunately, even on a leisurely day, we had about fifteen minutes with a small, bear trap-like stove that used hexamine blocks as fuel. These blocks gave off fumes that could kill a horse, though luckily they didn’t burn for very long – certainly not long enough to properly cook food, but enough to heat the metal stove to a temperature that took the skin from your hands in the mad rush to clear up after eating.
    Invariably, I would end up stuffing