I Fought and Fought (But The Army Got Me) – by Les Dawson

I joined the British Army for three reasons: One, I had a burning passion to serve my country; Two, I wanted ad­venture; Three, they came and took me away. My heel­marks are still etched in the pavement where they dragged me off.

Of course, I was ideally suited to the soldier’s life; my family has a long military tradition. You’ve heard of the thin red line? We were the fat yellow streak.

My grandfather fought in World War One. He was in France when the first shot was fired; he was in Rhyl when the seond one went off.

My father was the first off the landing craft for the Normandy Invasion. He got off at Southampton. Mind you, he had a great war record – of Flanagan and Allen singing Run, Rabbit, Run.

I duly arrived at Catterick for my training. It’s hard to describe what that camp was like in those days, but it made Alcatraz look like a home for retired nuns.

For more than three months, I polished, scrubbed, marched, drilled and ached. I was shouted at, abused, and manhandled. I was cuffed, bothered and bewil­dered.

Every non-commissioned officer was a bullet-headed moron with a mouth like a wind tunnel. Every officer was a vague, chinless shadow who looked at me as if I had stuffed a dead ferret up my vest.

Nobody seemed to love me, and it was the considered opinion that I had been planted by the Soviet Bloc to demoralise the men.

The War Office took one look at my photograph and wrote to me suggesting hara-kiri. I couldn’t really blame them. My uniform looked as if it had been rejected by Oxfam – my garters came up to my thighs, and my beret was so big that once, when I lost it, a family of gipsies moved into it.

I left Catterick a sadder, wiser man and found myself posted to Dale Barracks in Chester. I became trooper No. 22146757 in The Queen’s Bays, The 2nd Dragoon Guards, an old, illustrious regiment with a history of burnished glory.

They made me a gunner/wireless operator. At both of these appointments, I reached an extremely average standard of mediocrity.

As a gunner, I destroyed a latrine with a sergeant-major in it. As a wireless operator, I had the rare distinction of being told by a visiting general where to put my aerial; indeed, having witnessed my performance with the set, he seemed eager to do the job himself and had to be forcibly restrained.

The remainder of my National Service, I served in Germany, near a little town called Fallingbostel. What a place! It was so far behind the times, they had a “do-it­-thyself” shop. I hated the place and I nearly deserted twice in the face of NAAFl prices. I only stayed because my mates bought the beer.

The times I enjoyed best were, without question, the weeks we went lumbering off in tanks on what was referred to as  “manoeuvres”. On one such jaunt, I mis­read the map reference and the entire squadron of tanks finished up floundering in an acre of bog.

The language of the CO scorched the bark of a laburnum tree.

The comradeship was some­thing I will always cherish­ – young men from all levels of society finding a common ground for understanding: they all agreed that I was an idiot,

Finally, my demob date came, and the regiment did a jig of ecstasy. It was a short­lived delight. The government put on an extra six months owing to the outbreak of the Korean War.

I came home on leave, broken in spirit and con­vinced that I was doomed to be a sort of Flying Dutchman in khaki.

My father didn’t help. When he opened the door he took one look at me and shouted: “Bloody ‘ell lad, have you escaped?” My mother saw my turnip-style hairdo, screamed and set fire to my birth certificate.

I was glad to get back to the regiment, despite the bull and the parades. My biggest moan with the Army was the food; it was so bad the mice used to picket the kitchens and the dustbins had ulcers. Our cook was a big, hulking Scot who, I am convinced, was a descendant of the Borgias.

I remember he cooked a Christmas pudding and the only tender part of it was the 3d bits inside. His treatment of sausages was little short of criminal; he burned them to such a degree that we used them as ammunition against wildfowl.

Inspections were my private hell . . . socks squared off in cardboard; webbing brass gleaming; boots like mirrors and blankets in geometrical design. Mine always contrived to look like something out of a Whitechapel doss­house and the holes in my socks looked like a firsthouse audience in Clacton.

One vast sergeant took great pains to tell me that I was a ‘bag of manure” . . . or words to that effect. Gleefully he would inform the entire regi­ment that housemartins nested in my rifle, and that my neck was so dirty I suffered from soil erosion.

At last, I was demobbed at Bovington Camp in Dorset. Because of that fact, Dorset will always be my favourite county.

Mind, when I met the wife’s mother once more, I nearly re-enlisted in the Bur­mese infantry.

I hear that Mark Phillips, Princess Anne’s hubby-to-be, is serving with my old regi­ment which has now, re­grettably, been amalgamated with another to form The 1st Queen’s Dragoon Guards. I trust he will uphold the dignity of the Dragoons as did I.

The Army has left its mark on me. I cannot pass a scout car without bursting into tears, and a smear of blanco is sufficient to send me off looking for a hideout.

Some nights, as I listen to the wife snore, I am reminded of the roar of the mighty engines of the Cen­turion tanks; when she shuffles about in her sandals, I see again the caterpillar tracks churning up the mud, and when her mother yawns, I remember looking down the shiny barrel of a 20 pounder gun·

I recall jankers, the early mornings, the cold water shaves  . . . No, dear Army, I don’t miss you. But I will always salute you.

This article first appeared in TV Times, 28 July 1973.