Some of us needed to refresh our skills a bit swiftly with explosives, movement with vehicles, and map reading in desert conditions. We also dragged out the heavy weapons. Some, like the 50mm heavy machine gun, I hadn’t fired for two years. We had revision periods with whoever knew best about a particular subject-it could be the sergeant major or the newest member of the squadron. There were Scud alerts, so everybody was rather keen to relearn the NEC (nuclear, biological, chemical) drills they had not practiced since being in their old units. The only trouble was that Pete, the instructor from our Mountain Troop, had a Geordie accent as thick as Tyne fog and he spoke with his verbal safety catch on full automatic. He sounded like Gazza on speed.

We tried hard to understand what he was on about but after a quarter of an hour the strain was too much for us. Somebody asked him an utterly bone question, and he got so wound up that he started speaking even faster. More questions were asked, and a vicious circle was set in motion. In the end we decided among ourselves that if the kit had to go on, it would stay on. We wouldn’t bother carrying out the eating and drinking drills Pete was demonstrating, because then we wouldn’t have to carry out the shitting and pissing drills-and they were far too complicated for the likes of us. All in all, Pete said, as the session disintegrated into chaos, it was not his most constructive day-or words to that effect.

We were equipped with aviator sunglasses, and we enjoyed a few Foster Grant moments, waiting outside the hangar for anybody to pass, then slipping on the glasses as in the TV commercial.

We had to take pills as protection against nerve agents, but that soon stopped when the rumor went around that they made you impotent.

“It’s not true,” the sergeant major reassured us a couple of days later.

“I’ve just had a wank.”