Читать книгу Under Pressure. Living Life and Avoiding Death on a Nuclear Submarine онлайн

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Basic military training is pretty consistent across the armed forces: 11 weeks of ‘militarisation’ to instil a sense of discipline, teamwork and organisation, with a focus on weapons training, firefighting, swimming and damage control. You’ve got to be fit, as there are obstacle courses, long runs and gym sessions, including gymnastics and rope-climbing. Although I absolutely hated gymnastics, the one sport I’d been hopeless at while at school, being quite unable to reverse-somersault over the pommel-horse, I was brilliant at rope-climbing; I could get up a rope in around six to seven seconds, which took some doing.

Part of our training involved a trip to Dartmoor, a long weekend in the middle of nowhere with a compass, food and tent, trying to get to various rendezvous points within a certain amount of time. As ever when I ventured outdoors, the heavens opened with monsoonal fury, and we spent most of the weekend soaking wet, cold and hungry. One guy got pneumonia and ended up in hospital for a month. Most of the weekend, John – probably my closest mate in the squad – and I kept seeing what we believed were shadowy figures, which flicked in and out of our peripheral vision. Everyone thought we were going loopy through lack of sleep and hunger, hallucinating even. We were later told that members of the SAS had been shadowing our movements all weekend for training purposes.