• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

Those of us who made it through basic training became commissioned officers. Then, for those planning on a career in the military, another five or six months of officer training followed, covering leadership, British military doctrine, and international relations. After receiving my commission as an officer in the British army from Queen Elizabeth, I would have to choose a regiment. I was encouraged to join the Coldstream Guards, a historic infantry regiment, one of the oldest in the British army and part of the queen’s personal guard. It was thought a fitting regiment for a prince—and, more important, my color sergeant was a Coldstreamer. So I began making preparations to sign up.

The problem was, the day-to-day life of an infantryman was proving less than glamorous. On a rare weekend break from Sandhurst, I met up with the crown prince of Bahrain at the Dorchester Hotel in London. Hamad Bin Isa Al Khalifa was a close friend of my father, and I looked on him as an uncle. A fellow Sandhurst graduate, he smiled in recognition when I told him about the punishing training we were being put through. As I said my goodbyes, he provided me with a welcome surprise: a hamper of sandwiches from the Dorchester kitchens. I was the most popular cadet in my platoon that evening, although I am not sure the other cadets believed me when I told them the sandwiches were a gift from the crown prince of Bahrain.

Years later, on a trip to London, I too bought a hamper of sandwiches from the Dorchester. I knew that the grandson of Sheikh Hamad, who had by then become the king of Bahrain, would welcome the gift. He was attending Sandhurst and I had all too vivid recollections of what he was going through.

In the spring of 1981, a week before I had to make my final choice of regiment, I was on an exercise with my platoon at a training area near the Welsh border. We had been dug in for four days and the weather was foul—snow, sleet, and freezing fog. I had trench foot, and we were all miserable. The nights were so cold and awful that some of the cadets actually wept.

At dawn, after we had put in a counterattack against one of our positions taken by the Gurkhas, a Scorpion light tank pulled up next to our trench, part of a reconnaissance party for another regiment’s exercise. Rumors circulated among the infantry that inside tanks were anything from TV sets to washing machines, even kettles so that tank commanders could serve up their own hot drinks. A cavalry officer popped his head out of the turret of the Scorpion, holding a steaming cup of tea. He took one look at us, disappeared back into the turret, and reappeared a few seconds later holding a small glass of port. He raised his glass to us in a silent toast, then slammed the top shut and drove off.

“That’s it, to hell with the infantry,” I thought. “I’m joining the cavalry!” The next day I transferred to reconnaissance and signed up for the 13th/18th Royal Hussars, which later merged with another regiment, the 15th/19th, the King’s Royal Hussars, to form the Light Dragoons. (A few years ago Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth honored me by making me the Light Dragoons’ colonel-inchief.)

I joined as a second lieutenant, and after two months went for a young officer’s basic course before returning to my regiment. I completed my armor training at Bovington Camp in Dorset, and served a year as an officer in the British army, in the UK and West Germany. At that time, in the early 1980s, the cold war was still at its height, and as an armored regiment one of our missions would have been to repel a Russian advance through the Fulda Gap into the heart of West Germany.

One afternoon I was traveling with my regiment on the M4 highway, the main motorway from London to the west, in Fox armored cars, which, although they have turrets equipped with 30mm cannons, move on wheels, not tracks. To a civilian, however, they look like tanks. These armored cars had a reputation for being fast, so I thought I would test them out. We were