Out in the Army: My Life as a Gay Soldier Read Online Free PDF

in the shower roomlate in the evening and fighting it out. As young men do, everyone went to watch the fight, which began right on cue at 9 p.m. As the two were fighting, somebody turned on the showers and they both slipped and slid in the water as they battered each other over and over. The fight ended when Dean punched Williams in the back of the head, forcing his face to smash against the tiles of the shower room floor, covering the place with blood. Finally, it was over. I’d never witnessed violence like it, but in the army aggression and combat came hand in hand, and such events soon had little effect on me.
    In 3 Section, a great footballer called Robertshaw was a mate during the year though he became a little distant towards the end. I heard a few years later that Robertshaw didn’t remain in the military for very long after Harrogate. Ollie Reucker was another chap in 3 Section I quite liked, an American who was later awarded the Military Cross for his heroic actions in Afghanistan. I think Ollie returned to America and is now serving in the US Army. I was casually reading a newspaper some years later when I saw a full-page picture of him. His story wowed me. He turned into quite the action man.
    It’s fair to say that we were quite a mix. Some of us shared common ground – most were from broken families, for a start. There was the odd character who had had a very privileged upbringing and some who had barely made it through childhood, moving from one youth hostel to another. We can’t always get on with everyone but, for my twelve months at the college, I couldn’t imagine experiencing the changes we each went through with a different bunch of lads.
    Someone very cleverly took a photograph of us all on the first day and showed it to us at the very end. The change was unbelievable . I took many pictures over the course of the year, which I look at sometimes and consider where the boys are now, andone of the clearest messages from those pictures is that we all, every one of us, started to look more and more like soldiers as the year progressed.
    In my head, we’re all still sixteen.
    As we were all still very young, the army invested a lot of money in our training, giving us a lot more than older recruits who were joining the army in 2003. Every recruit had to choose two activities to take part in weekly, which it was hoped we’d master and possibly even take on to higher levels. I chose skiing initially, which I would do on a Tuesday night in Sunderland, and go-kart racing, which I’d find myself doing for three hours on a Thursday. These activities were great fun and, more than anything, a chance to put the stresses of basic training out of mind for a few hours every week. The skiing activity culminated in a week-long jolly to southern France in the February, which turned out to be a great week away getting drunk, underage, in the Alps.
    Mid-term we had the opportunity to swap our activities if we wished; I opted to drop go-karting and took up squash, with Perryman. The change brought Dean and me closer as friends, which was ideal as we’d both be joining the same regiment in the near future. We thrashed each other in the squash courts for six months. I considered myself a much better player but I know he’d disagree.
    A highlight of our time in Harrogate was the three-day trip to Normandy visiting D-Day battle sites along the coast of northern France. The battlefield tour was billed as educational, but it was also a clever chance to get out of Harrogate and spend some time abroad. Alcohol was involved, although not officially, and we got into a lot of trouble, which we paid for once back in Yorkshire and on the moors.
    I was awestruck by the enormity of the task the Alliedsoldiers had faced on that June morning in 1944. Standing in the machine-gun nests that the Nazis had used to gun down thousands of invading soldiers over the beaches of Normandy was chilling. I kept thinking how it would have felt