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We lost some strong guys during the final exercise. One had even fallen off a cliff, but managed to stagger into the next checkpoint, where he was withdrawn by the DS. Having passed one of the toughest military recruitment training courses in the world, the rest of us might have been forgiven for expecting some respite going into the continuation phase of our training, the skills-at-arms for soldiering in small tight-knit patrols.

Our new training staff introduced us to a Welsh cyborg by the name of Jones, a multiple Iron Man champion and uber-athlete. He had sunken eyes and the physique of a half-starved cage fighter. Alongside him was a stacked Geordie of an African persuasion on secondment from the Regular Army, there to impart the wisdom gained through his extensive and distinguished service. Geordie had encyclopaedic tattoos scrawled across his sizeable biceps and a penetrating glare that I tried hard to avoid.

Our new webbing, or fighting order, was far more advanced than the old belt kits, containing numerous pouches for carrying ammunition and survival equipment, but the trusty bergen lived on. When we were ordered to drop bergens and prepare to move I thought we’d arrived at Butlins.

‘You haven’t met Ken yet, have you?’ enquired a big Canadian bear who had joined our course.

‘No, who’s Ken?’

‘Can you hear that noise?’ asked Bear. ‘No.’

‘Exactly. He hasn’t arrived yet. You’ll know it when he does.’

‘Right, stop yappin’,’ Jones mumbled. Then he ran off up a metallic road.

Jones ran the legs off us, legs that still remembered being reduced to jelly on that long final march across the hills. Then the DS dined out on our lack of performance, our unworthiness and so on. A raft of new and unpleasant physical exercises would cure our ills. About twenty-five of us moved into a field and began doing fireman’s lifts, sit-ups, jumps, monkey crawls, endless press-ups, burpees, run, down, up, run, down, up.

A dangerous looking man appeared through a turnstile and strode towards us with clenched fists like he wanted to kick someone’s head in. He was hairless, in his mid forties, wearing the disco jungle pattern uniform popular with Paratroopers. At this point I was clinging on to Flash’s legs whilst he pedalled his arms across the ground for the final leg of a wheelbarrow race. We collapsed in an undignified heap a few metres short, then crossed the line first and heaved in the oxygen.

‘Fackin’ listen in, fellas,’ the Para began.

Someone choked on their puke and Para’s neck stretched like a meerkat in search of the culprit.

‘Fackin’ pack it in when I’m talking, yeah? You lot better start fackin’ sparking, right. Some of you are treading water. Well, your fackin’ faces don’t fit …’ and so forth.

This, I presumed, was Ken. We moved along to an innocent looking basin with a short sharp rise to a tree-lined hedgerow. At the foot was a pile of sandbags that needed shuttle sprinting to the top. After the third one, it was hard to look like you were trying when the grass was growing faster than you were moving. By the sixth, you were utterly bollocksed. Johnny fell out with chest pains. That made him a marked man in Ken’s book.

Eventually our bodies could take no more. We were told we had a long way to go to be fit enough to handle the ranges; firing and manoeuvring at pace in tight formations, firing live rounds. You’ve guessed it: if we couldn’t handle it, we were out.

There was so much information to take in: medical training, tactics and, above all, contact drills for killing the enemy. We learned patrolling skills and spent all night putting them into practice. Then came the assault course.

‘Speed, aggression and safety’ was Ken’s byword, though he never concerned himself much with the third item except on the ranges. We walked parts of the course and learnt the best way to handle the obstacles, before being taken to a section we hadn’t yet seen. I resigned myself to the fact that my body no longer belonged to