 Hello friends, I'm Chris Ruhl, I'm a former Royal Marines Commando to an author, adventurer and extreme endurance athlete. In this series of videos I'm telling you what life in the Royal Marines is really like. Not the stuff that they tell you in the recruiting office. So if you thought Royal Marines was like this, then you're probably in for a bit of a shock. So please subscribe and support the channel and remember you get one life. If you live it right, one is enough. Hello friends, I hope this finds you well. Welcome to another edition of the Bought the T-Shirt podcast. I'm your host, Chris Ruhl, I'm sure most of you know that by now and today it's just me. So I thought I'd tell you the story of when the Royal Marines met the US Marines. Now this took place, well I mean you know the British Royal Marines and the United States Marines have met I'm sure on a number of occasions but obviously I'm going to talk about my own experience. It was when I was on the aircraft carrier HMS Invincible as some of you will already know I served as part of a 12 man high security detachment protecting the top secret weapons on board. So there were anywhere up to well over 2,000 ships crew and air crew when we were at sea and there were just 12 of us Marines walking around the ship carrying 9mm pistols and as I say our job was to protect things I'm probably not supposed to speak about and this was primarily when we were alongside so when the ship was in port to make sure nobody boarded us illegally. Not to travel to some really nice places on HMS Invincible and I thoroughly enjoyed being at sea it's one of the things I think I enjoy the most. And we went on what's known as a med trip if you're European or if you're British you know I'm referring to the Mediterranean right. We visited well first stop was Gibraltar then it was Istanbul or Turkey we visited a lot of places Egypt a lot of us got off the ship and we got a bus to Cairo and we had a great three days in Cairo seeing the pyramids and everything but the most one of the most memorable parts of that trip was stopping in Sicily. Sicily being the home to the I don't know if that's the right music but the Italian mafia of course La Cosa Nostra when you're in when you're on Sicily which is an island in the Mediterranean off Italy you see lots of sneaky looking men carrying violin cases in fact every single guy there has a violin case and you kind of wonder why. Anyway there we were our ship was in in the port and my friend Steve who we called Ogilog and we called him Ogilog because when he had his hair cut and he had a bit spiky on top he looked like a turkey so we's every time he had his hair cut the other 11 of us would go so I started calling him Ogilog and that that name stuck well Steve or if you prefer Ogilog said I said to him Steve what are you doing today and generally when ships are alongside pretty much everybody in the ship's company who's not on duty goes ashore they find either the nearest bar or they find a famous bar that's all the ships that have been for many many years before all their ships companies go you've got to go to this bar and that just becomes the place everyone goes well I never really did that I mean I wasn't adverse to doing it but when I was in such foreign location such exotic climbs I wanted to make the most of it I wanted to go sightseeing and seeing all those things that I've seen on the television growing up perhaps I'll talk more about that in another podcast but one time the whole of the ships company went in one pub it's in Gibraltar is it Penelope's can some of my military or Matlow friends remind me is it Penelope's the famous bar in Gib with a whole of the ships company when we had a day in Gibraltar all went in this bar from 9 o'clock in the morning when it probably opened and I think we put we all piled out of it about two or three in the morning but in the earlier part of the day I visited the famous rock in Gibraltar went up and fed the monkeys who are not shy and coming backwards those things will you know they're not afraid to jump on you if they can get any food so saw the fame or went up the famous rock I then went to visit the petrol station where there was a very famous incident in the 80s some of you will remember it's where an SAS team undercover shot dead an active service unit from the Irish Republican Army so the IRA the military had got intelligence that this four-man team were in Gibraltar and that they were planning to set a bomb off so I went to see this petrol station you could still see the bullet holes in the petrol pumps where this ambush had taken place I think it was four possibly three IRA soldiers were killed one of them was a woman I seem to remember and somebody had got a photo of it and they'd put it in one of the one of the very first men's magazines that was kind of like the lads mag magazine type thingy was it called sky again someone who can remember it it was one of the first magazines aimed at men growing up basically you know sort of adolescent men and someone and then they ran an article on this ambush and they put this photo in the magazine and it was an eye opener for somebody even who'd been in the forces to see these I don't know if it was three or four SAS men just dressed like I am now or as they would have been in the 80s faded denim jackets hat baseball cap training shoes jeans but all just putting their pistols back in their holsters so I'm just pausing there because my computer has just come on which means we've got noise there with me right we're back so this magazine had a photograph in and as I say it was of these and they were all reholstering their pistols not browning nine millimeters it was quiet quiet and I eye opener yeah it was just quite an eye opener to see this SAS unit in in action all wearing civilian clothes so I saw the petrol station then I got a bus into Spain and I hopped aboard a ferry to Africa and I spent the day the rest of the day in Morocco met a really nice Moroccan gentleman who took me out and treated me we had a um it's Islamic country but you can drink alcohol there so we had quite a few drinks in a bar that evening and he was bringing every time you have a you ordered a drink in Morocco you got bought a little plate of food sort of like hors d'oeuvres sort of thing and one of them was goat's feet which was yeah again interesting and so oh and the end of that story was I went back to Gibraltar on the ferry had a little Moroccan lad running alongside me as I was rushing to get the ferry back he's there mr mr hashish hashish and I looked down and he's holding up this nugget of hash that was as big as a lump of coal and I don't even think I didn't I didn't even really smoke back then but I'd heard that you could eat this stuff so I said oh let's have a look and he gave me this nugget and every time he looked away I was trying I was trying to take a bite and it was all getting stuck you know this I mean hashish is it's almost rock hard but it was getting stuck in my teeth and I got on that ferry and I promptly fell fell asleep by the time I got back to the jib everybody was still in this is it Penelope's nightclub they hadn't moved all day and yet I'd done all these things that's just kind of how my mind works so going back to Sicily I said to Steve Ogilog you know what you're doing today he said Chris I'm going to go to the American air base it's it's I think it was a a naval air station it's a place called Sigonella so I said Steve do you mind if I tag along no not at all so me Steve and a third chap Pete got attacked jumped in a taxi and we drove across Sicily which is a beautiful country it's this rolling almost sort of mountainous landscape but a volcanic landscape and you is it Mount Etna I think is on Sicily Mount Etna is there in the background the the famous volcano and it really does look like something you'd see in the godfather when they do the scenes of the of the old the old country we arrived at this air base I'm going to call it I think it was a naval air station right I'll just call it an air base and they were having an open day or they were having a festival day in the way that Americans and Canadians do really well we have these really big beer festivals and it's everything sort of going off and we kind of everything in the UK's on a much smaller scale and I've got some photos here just to to remind me of how the story went yeah so Steve and I sat down we sat down at a bar an outside bar a table outside and we got a couple of Budweiser's and as we were drinking away and taking in all these people this girl came over or this girl was sat at the table and she leaned across and said something and when she heard we had British accents or English accents she went ah you guys Marines and she turned around and she went guys wait US Marines these guys are British Marines and they said they can drink you all under the table and with that this group of 10 or 15 US Marines just descended on us and it was all handshakes and how you're doing man and wow you're British Marines and I'll take this opportunity to say Americans are just so nice I'm talking generally speaking everywhere I've been on the world I've just met really nice Americans and they have to be among the most generous people on on the planet of course I'm not talking everybody right you know you get some pretty racist not so nice red necks right and and what what usually you can come up with your own examples but but the ones I've met have been so kind so open and so wanting to know about your culture or your country and so these guys came over and we're all look at my photos here we're all um yeah just getting drunk basically obviously British Marines meet the US Marines you're going to get drunk there was no rivalry all right there was nothing like you know maybe a bit of friendly banter but there was no um you know there was no nothing untoward you know it was just immediately you realize these are your brothers we might be from across the big pond but they're just your brother there's no like are you American Marines but we're Royal Marines it's just it's not like that that that kind of equate that isn't partly equation it's your Marines we're Marines we're brothers that's that's it just meet like that it's it's quite an amazing phenomenon probably uh on another day I could analyze that about how that sends young men off to war right but I'm not going to talk about that today and they took us to their clubhouse the Marines had a clubhouse they were explaining them their job to us they they were doing a similar job to us I guard duty and protecting this air base and they had to go down a bunker they had to to you know obviously do shift work and some of them had to go down this bunker they called it the hole which was interesting because on shit we had to go down the hole which was a series of kind of three decks you went down three lots of ladders and you finally got into the deep into the hold of the shit where they um stored these top secret top secret missiles but uh yeah so they went down there and for some reason they called it club now I don't know they they gave me a t-shirt Americans are so generous they're given us t-shirts and ball caps and and memorabilia and you know knives and all this stuff and we're there kind of want to be here it's just British generosity and they gave one they gave me a t-shirt I had it for years and it said have a bitching time at club now and it had a cocktail glass on it but but club now was their nickname for going down this this hole and it was interesting you know to meet these guys who they you know they a lot of them were rednecks they were hunters they they were you know what what gets referred to as home homeboys is it um you know not homeboys as in you know like hip-hop but um it was just interesting to hear their stories one guy was telling me about how he shot it was an elk or I don't know what they call it in America is it elk or moose um and they chopped this animal's head off after they sort of skinned it and taken the meat and he was so proud that he got his he killed this elk that he wanted to take the antlers and everyone said well you'll never you you know you're too young son he was obviously young it was a younger time for him and he's like no no I will I'll carry this elk and he didn't want to leave these antlers and so he put the elk in his pack and he he kind of yomped out of this this um forest but it was interesting there's a another chat he had this Rolex on he's like yeah I like my Rolex and I'm like oh yeah yeah do you do you like my Rolex and and we got chatting and he said it's not real I said why didn't you just say it's not not real he's like no you don't tell these guys that you know you got to get power over these guys and so they all think I wear a real Rolex it was just it was something something really quirky like that and one of them brought in seeing this picture here brought his cowboy hat out for us for us to put on and then it's like you know you're with Americans and in the morning we saw them all some of them all getting ready for duty or for some form of training of their uniform which is a smart uniform but if you've seen the Royal Marines blues photo uh I'm I'm honestly not being biased here I just don't think anything beats the British Royal Marines uniform um set maybe the traffic wardens that's pretty cool the other interesting thing is when I when I serve back in the 80s and 90s our Royal Marines was predominantly white British male in in every troop or maybe even every company you might have had one black guy but it wasn't much more than that um and yet when you're with the Americans of course it's a lot of black dudes it's a lot of Hispanics and if you've ever seen a film heartbreak ridge if you haven't seen it I strongly recommend you watch it even if it's just a to have a bit of a laugh at the usmc's or Clint Eastwood's expense but it's uh it was really this air base on siginella being around these marines it just it reminded me of watching watching that film so at that point we invite oh no I didn't tell you so there we are all getting drunk with them and and one of them says guys do you want to see our weapons so it's 11 o'clock at night we're all drunk off our heads and they take us to their armory the next thing you hear this say there's some Royal Marines around here and it's their drill instructor or they know they're gunny is it gunny sergeant they're gunnery sergeant who they call gunny right gunny comes in and it's just it's like something out of a hollywood film he's shouting so loudly so full of so full of himself don't get me wrong he's a nice guy but it's like you guys for real so everyone's so loud and they opened up their armory at 11 o'clock at night and we're going inside this what is essentially a safe a vault that's locked and they've led us in there and they've got all their weapons out so we're there looking at glocks and oozy nine millimeters and you know remington pistols all this kind of thing I don't remember the the you know I don't remember the weaponry if i'm really honest just just that they got all these pistols out and all these automatic weapons and we're drunk off our heads yeah look at this one yeah wow wow and it's funny there's like do you want to drink in the morning we woke up we all woke up on their floor of their room like do you want to eat are you thirsty and of course we're all thirsty we're all really hungover right you need a Jew man you need a Jew oh so I think he's going to go and get some Jewish guy no he comes with this bottle and it's got mountain dew written on it and you got to remember this is like a a while back so we didn't have such things in the UK back then it's like you've got to drink this one man you've got to drink that you're going to love it you're going to love it drinking mountain dew for the first time I'm probably the last then the guy we said guys let let us reciprocate you come to our ship come to the aircraft carrier spend the day so yeah yeah we'll get higher cars we'll get higher cars so we went down and their bases are probably so big you could hire the cars on the base I might be wrong there I can't remember how we hired them but what I did remember is we hired about three cars it may have been four and these guys were used to driving automatic not what they call stick shift right and their guys driving had never driven stick shift cars before I don't even know what we call them in the UK because most people just drive you know don't drive automatics but let's just call it stick shift you know what I mean and they didn't understand the clutch so every single time every single time they pulled away it was foot to the floor on the accelerator and just let let the foot straight off the clutch and the cars doing this massive massive wheel spin and we drove through the centre of oh god I'm showing my my it's not my ignorance it's my bad memory the capital of Sicily come on who's going to put that in the comments we drove through the centre of the capital of Sicily with these guys just and if you've ever seen Italian traffic it's it's bumper to bumper it's literally bumper to bumper and these guys were insane but you can see that I'll show you this photo here this is me and one of the dudes we're driving down the highway and we're holding hands just good job a motorbike didn't decide to come down down the middle of us huh and so yeah we're in the uh in the jam packed city and these guys are mental they're not just doing the wheel spins all the time but they're hammering through this traffic and they were telling us a lot about their relationship with the Italians and it wasn't very good they were like oh Italian men yeah they'll give it all this they're really really they think they're fucking macho man he said but you just get out and and they soon shut up and we went to a bar in a city centre and we were sat at a bar and we're drinking these bottles drinking from bottles outside this bar and the policeman two policemen wandered up you know they're just going to like walk across us right and this yank just goes and he smashes the beer bottle on the pavement right in front of these two policemen and um and they just went walks off i'm like dude do you always do that do you treat all policemen like that they're like hey man you don't worry about those guys it's the care bears you've got to worry about and what you're on about what care bears care bears man the carabinari they're the real police in Italy so in Italy you've got these two police forces a bit like it's gone in England now except that the carabinari are these tough real hard almost like a military like police force that are geared up to to go in against the mafia whereas the regular police officers these kind of wimpy wimpy folks that won't even say anything if you smash a beer beer bottle at their feet so we went back to the ship um took these guys and seal that the harrier jump jets in this picture took these guys on board in case you're wondering no security's not a problem and you can take guests on a military base or a military ship anyway you just have to sign them in um and of course these guys had their american ID cards which which was fine so we're looking all around you know we're showing them all around the ship we show shown them where we work we're showing them our our pistols obviously and then we went to dinner and this was quite funny so in in the in the um what they would call do they call it the canteen or do they call it the galley the same as us somebody can find that out but they came into our galley and we're all queuing up at what what you call in the military the hot plate and it was a roast it was a sunday so we'd gone there on the saturday we were coming back on the sunday and the chefs had laid on this delicious roast the food's rip food in the armed forces is good and we we're all going up getting our roast and the americans came up you know after us and got theirs and we're all sat at this big one big long table and this one of their guy sits down and he's got his tray with his plate on and he puts it down and everyone's sort of talking and then the british marines just sort of looked at his plate and he's got this food halfway to his mouth and he takes a it takes a bite and then tastes the food and then realises we're all looking at him and he goes that's custard right he thought he thought that the custard which was at the end of the hot plate waiting for the desserts to come out there was a big you know big metal bowl heated bowl full of custard and he thought that was the gravy he thought there's some kind of weird british gravy and he's like that's custard right needless to say he ate it ate it anyway i've seen the marines eat a lot worse you don't want to know about that not on youtube and yeah that was it that was a thoroughly memorable experience that photo i've put it in the thumb now just sums it up a lot of my photos got bits cut out because when i went through my kind of mega drug phase i thought it'd be a really clever idea to make a collage one day and so slowly the photos i've really needed to make videos with have had to find the negatives i've got i've probably got thousands of negatives from all around the world from for our younger watchers and listeners if you're wondering what a negative is it's in the old days you had your film when you had your film developed it's um i'm not even really sure it's the negative the part of the film no it's not is it i don't even really know but the negative was what you were left with when you had the old cameras that you had to put films in and the negatives is what they give you in case you need any more prints done right and i've got thousands of thousands of these little um plastic cellulose see-through strips with them that've got your pictures on right i've got thousands of them so yeah because i keep cutting them up or because i went through this phase of cutting them up i've now got a search through thousands of negatives to find the photos that i need and then take them downtown and get them reprinted but yeah that was the time the british rule marines met the us marines wonderful guys really great fun and uh just would have been brilliant to to spend so much more time with them anyway hope you enjoyed the dit that's marine speak for story thank you so much for supporting the channel everyone if you could subscribe if you if you haven't already chuck us a like if you did like this that is and i'll see you next time friends friend thank you for watching my video i'm the only person i know that has ticked every item off my bucket list and i did so coming back from chronic addiction with no help from anybody now i want to pass some skills on to you but i can't help you unless you help me and hit the subscribe button so please do so and let's go and smash this world together