All the 5.56 had to be put into magazines, and the magazines checked to make sure they were working. The magazines are as important as the weapon itself, because if the springs don’t push the round into position, the working parts can’t push the round into the breech. So you check and recheck all your mags, and then recheck them a third time. The Armalite magazine normally takes 30 rounds, but many of us choose to put in just 29, which gives a little bit of extra push in the spring. It’s easier and quicker to put on a new mag than to clear a stoppage.

We checked the 203 bombs and explosives. PE4 doesn’t smell and feels very much like plasticine. It’s surprisingly inert. You can even light a stick of it and watch it burn like a frenzied candle. The only trouble with PE4 is that when it’s cold, it’s quite brittle and hard to mold into shapes. You have to make it pliable by working it in your hands.

We checked and rechecked all the detonators. The nonelectric ones that we’d be using for the compromise device are initiated by the safety fuse burning into them, and cannot be tested. Electric dets can be put on a circuit tester. If the electric circuit is going through the det, we can be sure that the electric pulse will set off the explosive inside and, in turn, detonate the charge. Fortunately, misfires are very rare.

It takes quite a while to test the timers. You have to set the time delay and check that it’s working. If it works for one hour, it will work for forty-eight hours. Then you time the device and see if it is working correctly. In theory, if it is more than five seconds early or late, you exchange it for another. In practice, I bin any timer that I have doubts about.

The last item for testing was the wiring for the claymore antipersonnel mines, which was also done on a circuit tester.

We then ran through the rigging and de rigging of the little Elsie antipersonnel mines. For many of us it had been a while since we’d had our hands on this sort of kit. We made sure we could remember how to arm them and, more importantly, how to disarm them. There might be a situation where we’d lay the explosive and Elsie mines on target, but for some reason have to go in and extract them. This makes life more difficult when you’re placing them, because not only do you have to keep a record of where they are on the ground, but also the person who sets the anti handling device should be the one to lift it.

There was a severe shortage of claymores, which was a problem because they are excellent for defense and. The solution was to go round to the cook house get a pile of ice-cream containers, and make our own. You make a hole in the center of the carton, run a det cord tail into it, and tie a knot inside the container. You make a shaped charge with PE4 and put it in the bottom of the tub, making sure that the knot is embedded. You then fill the carton with nuts and bolts, little lumps of metal, and anything else nasty you can find lying around, put on the lid, and wrap lots of masking tape around to seal it. Once the claymore is in position, all you have to do is put a det onto the det cord and Bob used to be your uncle.

Next, we sorted out the weapons, starring with a trip down to the range to “zero” the sights. You lie down in the prone position, aim at the same place on a target 300 feet away, and fire five rounds. This is then called a group. You look where the group has landed on the target and then adjust the sights so that the next group will land where you want it to-which is where you are aiming. If you do not zero and the group is, say, 4 inches to the right of where you are aiming at 300 feet, then at 600 feet it will be 8 inches to the right, and so on. At 1200 feet you could easily miss a target altogether.

One individual’s zero will be different from another’s because of many factors. Some are physical size and “eye relief”-the distance between the eye of the firer and the rear sight. If you used another person’s weapon the zero could be off for you. This is not a problem at short ranges of up to 900 feet, but at greater distances it could be a problem. If this was the case and you could see where the rounds were going, you could “aim off” to adjust.

We spent a whole morning down at the range-first to zero the weapons, and second to test all the magazines. I was going to take ten magazines with me on the patrol, a total of 290 rounds, and every magazine had to be tested. I would also be carrying a box of 200 rounds for a Minimi, which takes the same round as the Armalite and can be either belt- or magazine-fed.

We also fired some practice 203 bombs, which throw out a chalk puff when they land to help you see if you’ve got to aim higher or lower-it’s a crude form of zero.

We rehearsed for many different scenarios. The situation on the ground can change very rapidly, and you have to expect everything to be rather fluid. The more you practice, the more flexible you can be. We call this stage of planning and preparation “walk through, talk through,” and operate a Chinese parliament while we’re doing it. Everybody, regardless of rank, has the right to contribute his own ideas and rip to shreds those of others.

We practiced various kinds of LUP because we weren’t sure of the lie of the ground. The terrain might be as flat as a pancake, in which case we’d LUP in two groups of four that gave each other mutual support. We discussed the way we would communicate between the two groups-whether it would be by com ms cord, which is simply a stretch of string that can be pulled in the event of a major drama, or by field telephone, a small handset attached to a piece of two flex D10 wire running along to the next position. In case we decided to go ahead with the landline, we practiced running the D10 out and how we were actually going to speak. Legs went off and came back with a pair of electronic field telephones that even he wasn’t familiar with. They had been running from one office to another between Portakabins before he nicked them. We sat with them like children with a new Fisher-Price toy, pressing this, pushing that. “What’s this do then? What if I push this?”

The priority when filling a bergen is “equipment to task”-in our case, ordnance and equipment that could help us to place or deliver that ordnance. Next came the essentials to enable you to survive-water and food, trauma-management equipment, and, for this op, NBC protection.

The equipment in our berg ens was what we would need on the ground to operate. However, radio batteries run down and, along with many other things, would have to be replaced during our two weeks of being self-sufficient. Therefore more equipment had to be taken along and cached, simply to resupply the berg ens This was what was in the jerricans and two sandbags, one containing more NEC kit, the other more food plus any batteries and odds and sods.

It added up to an awesome weight of kit. Vince was in charge of distribution. Different types of equipment have to be evenly placed in the patrol. If all the explosives were placed in one bergen and that was lost, for whatever reason, we would then lose our attack capability using explosives. In the Falklands, the task force’s entire supply of Mars bars was sent on one ship, and everybody was flapping in case it sank. They should have got Vince to organize it. Besides the tactical considerations behind equal distribution, people want and expect equal loads, whether they’re 5’2” or 6’3”. We have a scale that weighs up to 200 Lb, and it showed that we were carrying 154 Lb per man in our berg ens and belt kit. On top of that we had a 5gallon jerrican of water each-another 40 Lb. We carried our NEC kit and cache rations, which weighed yet another 15 Lb, in two sandbags that had been tied together to form saddlebags that could go around our necks or over our shoulders. The total weight per man was therefore 209 Lb, the weight of a 15-stone man. Everybody packed their equipment the way they wanted. There’s no set way of doing this, as long as you’ve got it and can use it. The only “must” was the patrol radio, which always goes on top of the signaler’s bergen so that it can be retrieved by anybody in a contact.