AlienFTM

Just checking. As you say, no worries.

Is that a young King Hussein centre in a couple of pictures? Curiously just last week I got a letter bearing the name of his son, His Majesty King Abdullah II ibn Al Hussein of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan and Colonel-in-Chief of The Light Dragoons.

I am with the OP: Lanny. I wasn't with him at the Box Factory. Was this the Ay Nick Box Factory on the outskirts of the ESBA at Dekhelia? I was there in late 1976. If you read Pull up a Sandbag ( http://www.whsmith.co.uk/CatalogAndSearch/ProductDetails.aspx?productId=9781846830747 ) page 44 (written by me) describes my colleague hearing a Cockney voice from the Trukish trenches not very far away. Long story. I suggest you buy the book (no I won't get a back-hander: the story was lifted verbatim from Arrse.

I hope you aren't accusing me of saying there were no CVR(T)s in Hong Kong? All I said was that in 1976 the independent Recce Sqn pulled out. Doesn't mean it didn't go back in later or that there was another source of the CVR(T)s you saw. Maybe for instance the resident Inf Bn Recce Troops had them, and that's what happened to the 1 RTR jobbies when they left, because the powers that be felt it was one less unit to administer by handing recce back to the other local units in Hong Kong. My post was merely a gripe that I missed the chance to do Hong Kong. I have learned from bitter experience that if there is a chance I am wrong, I usually am.

Good job they aren't Panthers or early Tiger 1s. Imagine the pit crews' efforts when it comes to changing the inside centre roadwheel tyre.

Because it's preceded by "1", it's 1st Battalion Royal Regiment of Fusiliers

Correct me if I am wrong. Auto Windscreens went into receivership. Google confirms what I thought.

As part of its season of winter evening lectures, the Tank Museum at Bovington has invited Captain Noel Swales, Light Dragoons, to give a talk on his experiences from several tours in Afghanistan. Under the title “An Almighty Punchy Tour” he will describe the terrain, climate, logistics, casualty procedures and personal challenges, illustrated with his own stories and those of his soldiers. He will also reflect on tour lengths, R&R, communications to and from home and the reactions of young officers and soldiers to some of the fiercest fighting since WW2. A week or two after his talk, the Museum will open its new Afghanistan Exhibition, which the Light Dragoons have helped to create. You probably have not heard about the Light Dragoons Colonel’s Appeal which was launched in London in November and will be going live nationally in March. My notification came from the South West Counties Coordinator for The Appeal, through the Light Dragoons Regimental Association. The Director of the Tank Museum, Richard Smith, has very kindly agreed that Capt Swales’ talk may be a fund-raiser for The Appeal. A proportion of the revenue from ticket sales generated by this letter and all of the cash from a bucket collection at the end of the evening will be donated to the Appeal. Typically an evening lecture at the Museum attracts between 80 and 100 people. Will you help to double the audience by coming along and by spreading the word among your friends, especially those who have not served in the Services and would appreciate a soldier’s view of the war? Tickets are priced at £10; the Museum will be open from 6pm so there will be an opportunity to tour the collection of vehicles and exhibits before the lecture starts. Please contact me by PM if you are interested and I'll give you contact details to reserve your tickets; cheques should be made out to The Tank Museum and posted to the Tank Museum, Bovington, Dorset BH20 6JG.

Pull up a sandbag. My last day playing with armour on exercise. A day or so previously, the Gurkha QM's message that the Union Flag was flying over Stanley was passed verbatim in clear on all nets right down the chain of command to me, sat in the turret of the Squadron Ambulance (Samaritan) trying to get the driver (Sqn medic) to sneak up behind a 9/12L (Orange forces) Scorpion that had pulled onto the road right in front of me and blissfully unaware I was there. I wanted to nick their codes: he reminded me of the Geneva Convention. As was the norm, we had straightened the line, advancing backwards for two weeks until Orange forces ran out of steam and it was our turn to push them back over the IGB. I was sat in the back of 2 Bravo, running the combat team command net (and monitoring the battlegroup command net in my other ear). It was all turning to rat droppings as CVR(T) after CVR(T) ran into difficulties in the marshy ground. The command net was filling up with Noduff messages about vehicles requiring Bluebell assistance when, for the first time in a fortnight, we were winning. The net was disintegrating into chaos. (Combat team command nets always seemed to be busier when we were going forward. Maybe more control needing to be exercised because what happened during the withdrawal was always straight-forward whereas in the assault, there were more options.) Out of the corner of my eye I was aware of the Squadron Leader bimbling across from his Land Rover and he sat next to me. I went into the usual control signaller mode. "Hello all stations this is 2. Minimise, minimise. Out" The unmistakeable voice of the Regimental Signals Sergeant (who'd joined Command Troop shortly before I left it to return to a sabre squadron) came up. "Hello 2 this is Zero. Nothing wrong with this net. Wrong means? Over" I stared in disbelief at the pressel in my hand. I stared at the OC (who looked sheepishly back at me) and noticed his hand coming down from the junction box having just switched me from combat team to battlegroup Command Net without thinking that I was running a net here, sir. He squirmed, knowing he'd dropped me in it (it didn't take the filthy look I gave him to tell him), reset the junction box to the combat team command net and slithered back off under his rock. He got into his Land Rover and came onto the net. "Hello all stations this is two-niner. the trains are booked from the railhead for 1300 hours. Endex is at 1200 hours. Anyone else gets himself bogged down, he can recover himself or walk back to Paderborn. When we were stationed here (on Chieftain, in Fallingbostel until the start of the Omagh tour in 1974), I remember a Chieftain sinking in these marshes and it was never recovered. Out." Then he switched to battlegroup command net to send them the mundane message he'd wanted to interrupt me with.

Going all the way to the 1970s. We may have been there to keep 3 Shock Army the other side of the IGB, but Heaven protect a crewman from the wrath of a Forstmeister if he caught him cutting branches for cam or driving a nail in to hang a net from.

They'll be rare pictures indeed. In 1976, after an 18-month tour of Omagh, B Sqn 15/19H were down on the Arms Plot to do Hong Kong Recce Sqn. Sadly the tour got pulled because it was decided that there was no longer a requirement for a Recce Sqn in Hong Kong and 1RTR, our predecessors, were the last regiment to provide a Hong Kong Recce Sqn. We had to make do with six months as UNFICYP Force Reserve Sqn instead.

I'd have said green / black cam before I saw the first picture, in which the black cam appears to be showing through the green, which reinforced my opinion.

D10. Was it not two cables of D5, each comprising 2 steel (for strength) and 3 copper (for conductivity), making 4 steel and 6 copper in total? I didn't tend to investigate too closely: I only really cared because because the prickers for cleaning the jets on petrol cookers were like rocking-horse droppings and we used to cut a couple of inches of D10 off, strip back half an inch of insulation, remove the bared copper wires and leave just the one steel wire which could then be used to clear the soot out of the cooker jets (but it was under-calibre and wasn't as effective as using a proper pricker. It was a long time ago so I stand to be corrected.

I was wearing 84 pattern from mid-85. I preferred the previous issue jacket (but the 84 pattern trousers that didn't come up to your nipples) but I knew I would be posted in November 1985 and I wanted my new combats nicely faded before I got there so that I wasn't mistakenly identified as a noob pay clerk with two years' service under my belt (turned out I was posted to the Professional Training Wing at the depot, full of noobs, so it was a good call). This was a REME backwater: I suggest that general availability was 85 not 86.

I take your point.

The problem Chieftain suffered was that it was specced to have a multi-fuel engine. Run on petrol, diesel, whisky, anything that could spark that could be sourced a week after 3 Shock Army came over the IGB. Rolls Royce designed a multifuel engine and Procurement said to build it, at which point RR told them to go away in short, sharp, jerky movements observing a regimental pause of TWO THREE. They did not want to be associated with such a poor engine. BLMC (or whatever they called themselves that week) had no such qualms and happily built a multifuel engine from the RR design. One flaw in the entire multifuel concept is that different fuels have different (erm compression ratios? I am not a D&M bigot) so that the engine's compression ratio ( ? ) was a compromise and didn't work particularly well with any fuel, too high for petrol, too low for diesel (whatever way round it was). Or so I have always been led to believe.

If I were sat in the turret and saw tracer coming uprange, I'd be sending plenty back downrange at the source!

We were meant to hand in our DPM hoods along with our Jap caps late 702 - early 80s. I let the Jap cap go but hung on to the hood cos I found if I stretched it just a little I could get it to fit over a helmet then pull the drawstring tight, then with the helmet scrim over the top, it looked far warrier then a plain helmet.

Here's the review I put on Arrse: http://www.arrse.co.uk/content/242-review-magazine-military-times.html (Don't worry that it says Auld_Yin: that was before we'd worked out how to attribute the reviews to the author.)

More fortunate for the Germans was that their villages and farms tended to be only about 1.5km apart, so that their reservists could be trained to use disposable AT weapons, knock out the lead tank or two and withdraw to the next farmstead or village and whittle them down. This was certainly considered in the early 80s, an ATGM or RPG or similar in every farmhouse.

In one of the games of the Command and Conquer franchise (possibly Tiberian Sun?) NOD can develop an experimental "UFO". Get one of yours shot down and you hear the pilot go "Oops" just before ploughing in. It always amused me. Haven't played it in years. In fact, that particular game was rather single-threaded and I never thought a bundle of it, but it was almost worth it for that "Oops" and whenever such an "Oops" moment occurs, the image flashes back.

No problem. The only squaddies who even knew it existed where those who wore it and their immediate colleagues. The question would have to be, "What do you think that is? Why do you think you should wear that? Get it off." And, yes, I'd have great delight in putting them back in their box. Then there's the Freedom of Paderborn badge, only issued to a dozen 15th/19th Hussars in 1982. Pull up a sandbag. Paderborn's local recce regiment, Panzeraufklärungsabteilung 7 was to be awarded the freedom of Paderborn in a cermony on Sennelager Training Area in July 1982. They thought it would be nice if the parade included some of the regiment's comrades in arms. As Paderborn's BAOR recce regiment, 15/19H were invited to sent a selection of CVR(T)s to participate. I was volunteered to command the B Squadron Samaritan. ... Oh look, my research shows I already told this story on the Army Rumour Service: http://www.arrse.co.uk/intelligence-cell/155702-medals-you-shouldnt-wouldnt-wear-3.html Saves me typing it all out again. WARNING: The words "Army Rumour Service" and "political correctness" do not belong on the same page. Think before visiting Arrse in the presence of anyone who might be offended. ;o)

I am a member of the Book Review panel on the Army Rumour Service. This morning I put my name forward to review iirc (server is reported as down at the moment) "the definitive description of the Iranian Embassy Siege." Sorry cannot give you the name right now: server down. Found it: For Review: Go!Go!Go! The Definitive Inside Story of the Iranian Embassy Siege Anyone fancy it? Pse PM me with your name & address if you do. P.S Clearly the review will need to be good lest your bedroom windows explode one night ......

I found a couple of interesting series on Military last week including one on the Wehrmacht and another on the Duke of Wellington, all now series linked on Sky+ along with Spearhead on MoveisForMen that started with series 1 episode 1 yesterday. Do I have enough slack on the Sky box for Lock and Load? I doubt it. Catch up with it next time it comes around.

Ermy persuaded Kubrick to give him the part. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R._Lee_Ermey