Our Last Best Chance_ The Pursuit of Peace in a Time of Peril - King Abdullah II [24]
My time at Deerfield passed quickly, and before I knew it I was coming to the end of my senior year. I was planning to attend Dartmouth with Gig, but my life was about to take a quite different turn. Shortly before graduation I sat down with my father, and he asked me how school was going and what I planned to do next. I told him about my plans for university, and how I wanted to study law and international relations. After listening quietly for some time, he said, “Have you ever considered the military?” Coming from my father, this was more of a command than a suggestion. So I began to look at options. I went to visit the Citadel, the military college in South Carolina, but was put off by the thought of four years of its strict, Prussian-style curriculum. When I walked through the dining hall, the cadets seemed very stiff and formal. It was a long way from what I had experienced at Deerfield.
Back in Amman one evening I was watching a movie with my father and Feisal. Sensing that I was not excited by the thought of an American military education, my father said, “What about Sandhurst? It’s where your grandfather and I went. Why don’t you go there?”
PART II
Chapter 5
Sandhurst
The gravel crunched beneath the car’s tires as I pulled up to the gate. I got out of the car, picked up my bag, and walked through with the academy adjunct, who was responsible for welcoming new students. Back in the United States in the fall of 1980 my Deerfield friends were discovering the delights of pop, dancing to Fleetwood Mac and the Blues Brothers. Some of my peers in the UK were engaging in body piercing and dyeing their hair purple. But I was about to undergo quite a different experience. Walking through the gates of the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst, I was in for the shock of my life.
The first five weeks were hell. We marched for hours on the parade ground, woke up before dawn to go running in the pouring rain, and shined our boots endlessly, with color sergeants shouting at us constantly. I thought, “What the hell have I got myself into?” All my classmates from Deerfield were freshmen at places like Dartmouth, Brown, and Columbia, where the toughest thing they had to contend with was another freezing winter. And here I was running around the Barossa training ground, mud on my face, carrying a rifle. It was surreal. Alongside the training ground was an old Roman road nicknamed Devil’s Highway. After a couple of hours out there in the cold I had a pretty good idea how it had gotten its name.
In those days most incoming cadets were high school graduates, all about eighteen. I do not think most of us had any idea of what was in store. Half of the cadets dropped out of my platoon within the first five months. The training course was designed to be tough, and the military brass fully expected people to quit. They were weeding us out and wanted to keep only the ones who would not cave in. I remember training one afternoon under the watchful eye of Color Sergeant Lawley. He ran us down to the main gate, from where we could see the Staff College at Camberley, which provided postgraduate military education for senior officers. It looked like a little palace. He made us all do push-ups, and as we lay facedown in the mud, he said, “That is Staff College over there. And looking at the bunch of you, this is about as close as you are ever going to get!”
Sergeant Lawley was a philosopher in a soldier’s sort of way. We were in the middle of a live-fire exercise in the countryside and things were going from bad to worse. My section of cadets was about to assault a hill, and we were waiting for the order. He and I were sitting slightly apart from the others, off to one side behind a few trees. He said, “Mr. Abdullah, there’s something I’ve been meaning to tell you.” He paused for effect. “You’re always going to be in the shit. It’s just the depth that’s going to vary.” I adopted that as my motto, and