 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, welcome back to my four part series on what it takes to earn one of these. The coveted Royal Marines commando, Green Beret, Beret, Berry, who cares. I'm going to just be a little bit more straight talking now and maybe not have so many photos and bells and whistles, right? If you've come this far, you're obviously someone who knows how to pay attention. You either enjoy my videos or you're really keen to join the Marines. So let's just crack on, huh? So week three, you've left the induction block, the foundation. You now settled in your six man rooms in the accommodation blocks. And one thing I didn't mention in part one is drill. Drills kind of interesting because you get issued a drill rig. It's called your parade gear. I'm not going to tell you what it is, but it's just semi smart stuff, right? You get also get issued these hobnail boots. Literally these boots with with iron studs in the bottom to stop them wearing out and they're your parade boots and they have this little toe cap on. You have to learn how to gloss it with parade gloss. It's a special kind of polish. It's like your Kiwi shoe polish. Young people are thinking, what the frickin hell is this guy talking about shoe polish? We don't polish our shoes. We just throw them away and buy new ones. Well, when I was a kid, we were too poor to do that. Every kid, like you polished your shoes and then you went to school unless you was one of the really poor kids and then you kind of didn't. So anyway, this parade gloss is a special kind of Kiwi shoe polish, right? And you get a little tin of water and a bit of cotton wool. You dip the cotton wool in the water and then you polish your boot. You keep putting with a cloth, a little bit more polish on the boot then you polish it off again and eventually you get it shining like a mirror black. And then when you go to your unit, you learn that you just paint them. You get this special paint that's really shiny and you just paint them. It's called Jack of Being Dark Oak. So that's your drill. You're on the parade for your first three weeks. You haven't obviously had a weapon and you just do drill. You just learn to turn right, turn left, march forward, about turn, march on the spot. It's called marking time. I'm not going to bore you. It's just drill. One of the one of the you get a troop t-shirt made up in at Limpston and it's got your troops logo on it. I'm going to sneeze. Watch this, you just don't get that on the Joe Rogan show. So, yeah, get your troop t-shirt made up. And I can't remember what ours was. I honestly can't. I think it was 558 troop death before drill. So that's what I mentioned it. In the gymnasium, things start to become a bit more physical. For the first, I'm not sure how many weeks this this part is. We're just going to say about eight weeks, right? You're doing IMF, initial military fitness. And some of it's quite funny because it's like the stuff they used to do at Butler's holiday camp back in the 50s and the 60s, right? So it's like, arms bend and stretch and to the front, to the side, bend down. And you're doing all this stuff with your feet and it's massively gay. And it's great. No, it's all right. It's just, you just do it, right? It's just funny. So, yeah, you're doing that. And then as you move on through these kind of eight weeks, you're incorporating more work. So you're starting to, you hook your feet under the bars around the walls. They've got bars, right? Like climbing bars. You hook your feet under the bottom one and you do these press-ups and you go one, two, three. Oh, and you've got to hold it like that. And then you do the same with your feet. And it's like feet left and down, left and up. And hold it, hold it. You get the picture and that's working your abs and you do dorsal raises for your back. So you put your hands behind your back and you like this. And then you do all your kind of, that end of the gymnasium go, that end of the gymnasium go. Sit down, stand up, roll over. You're doing all this stuff as well. And then as you progress, it gets more interesting because you do rope work. I don't remember in this initial stage of training doing a lot of running, you might get to put your training shoes on and just run around the back lanes like a four-miler, not a massively fast pace. But when you're young, it's an awful lot faster than what I would choose to run now. I like to run sort of, I don't know, nine-minute miles. When I'm running, like when I ran the length of Great Britain, I was just trotting along at maybe 10-minute miles, right, sort of speed, march pace. When you're a youngster and you'll buy it up and key and you're going to be running like seven-minute miles and thinking nothing of it. Probably running with the troopers between seven and eight, but don't stress it, you'll just do it, right? So yeah, but as you progress through the gymwork, you start to do the ropes. You pull out this swinging arm into the gym and it's got, let's just say, eight ropes dangling from it. And they've got maybe four of those arms. So half the troop can go at the same time. The other half sort of stands there up to attention watching. And rope climbing isn't art. It's you either get it or you don't. And some people didn't. And if you don't get it, you're going to suffer massively. Because if you can't, this is going to surprise you. You climb a rope with your feet. Does that surprise you? Just lie, just lie. Say, yes, Chris, that really surprises me. It surprises you. Good. Well done. You climb a rope with your feet. Yeah, I'm serious. Of course you use your hands, but you put your hands up and then you pull your legs up and you lean back and you lift your feet and you wrap them and your shins around the rope and then you push up. So you're pushing with your feet to get up the rope. That's how you climb a rope. You don't pull yourself up with your arms. As we progress through training, some of us who are good at climbing ropes, we could climb to the top of the 30-foot ropes wearing with full equipment and a weapon just using our arms. But at this initial stage, you're not doing any funny stuff like that. You're just trying to climb the ropes in the gym. And it's technique. And then once you start to get that technique weighed off and you can go up and down the ropes, you might go up and down them five or so times during your IMF session, which is about an hour and a half. And then you can start doing the clever stuff. And I talk more about this for families today, I believe it is, but you start climbing up and then they say, I can't remember the terminology. It's like, make fast. And you can put your arm around the rope like that and then put your other arm like that. And it's like some sort of circus trick. And then you can do the same upside down. And then you can come down the rope just holding on by your feet. I need to turn that part of the video upside down, right? So yeah, you do all this clever stuff. It all goes back to the Navy, right? Rope climbing, ships, ropes, anchors. Moving on, core history, you're going to have lectures and you learn about, it's very important to learn about your core history. Because if you believe in the core, you'll fight for the core and you're going, you know? You guessed it, kill other working-class teenagers to steal their oil, give it to Tony Blair and George Bush and all their ultra-elitist, mega-rich, sociopathic morons, right? That's another thing. So you learn your core history. You learn how many VCs the core has won. Victoria Crosses. You're going to learn about Tom Hunter. You won his VC at Lake Camacho, I believe it was. Although to be honest, it was a while ago I was in. I don't remember such things and I don't massively care, life goes on, right? But yeah, you're going to learn that. You're going to learn about the core crest, the globe and laurel and what each part of it means when the marines became royal and they got the royal lion on it, for example. When they got the laurels, the globe and laurel. When they got the globe, you're going to hear things about the battle of Gibraltar, all this kind of stuff. The first exercise, I think it's called early night now, it was called, oh no, sorry, early night is your first armed exercise. For us it was called twosome. We used to call it gruesome twosome. And this is getting you familiar with going on an exercise up on Woodbury Common, doing the field craft you learn, taking care of a weapon. And if there's one thing you really need to remember during your whole time in the Rizzies, don't put that weapon down for a minute. And if you lose it, and I've seen two guys over the course of my career lose their weapons and it's not nice for them. It's a court martial offense, basically. I'll tell you more about that in the part four on our final exercise. We lost two weapons over the course of our training. Anyway, so this is getting you used to having a weapon and they're going to start chucking in things in the middle of the night that go bang! So one night we're asleep, I'm in my bivvy with my bivvy partner and it's called crash moving you. Before you all go off to bed and you work out your sensory duties, the training team will tell you an RV, an ERV, emergency rendezvous, right? You have to remember where that is. That is why when you get up in the middle of the night, you're taking your boots off, you put your training shoes on, right? So you can get up and go, always keep every bit of kit packed away and you keep your weapon literally like that next to where you sleep. Some of the lads kept it in their sleeping bag, right? You're going to wake up and it's going to be rusty. Even when it's sunny, you're going to wake up, that weapon's going to be rusty. And you don't want a rusty weapon, believe me. And so in the middle of the night, you're snoring away and suddenly everything go bang! The training team are letting off thunder flashes, right? So fireworks, firecrackers, really loud bangs. They're so powerful they can blow like a tree branch off, right? And they do and think bits of wood are flying around and they're letting off flares. Flares go up in the sky. One thing they teach you about flares, what you do when a flare goes up, freeze, and then you sink with the shadows of the flare, okay? The shadow, they teach you what to do for different kind of eventualities, right? If you just drop down when a flare goes up, the enemy are going to see you. That's why, right? So yeah, so everything's going off. You've got the training team screaming and swearing at the top of their voices and it's intimidating as hell. You obviously think that they're screaming at you. So you get up, you grab all your equipment, don't panic, take your time, get everything. They're not gonna, all they can do is scream, right? Don't think they hit people. They have done in the past, but you know. And you run to the emergency rendezvous and of course, once you get there, you sleep out with whatever you've got. So if you left your bivvy behind, you have to sleep in the wind, the rain, the cold with whatever you've got. And if you've got nothing, some people rock up with no weapon. You're just sat freezing all night. In the morning, the training team come, they empty out the sleeping bags that people have left. And in the sleeping bags, you're just praying a weapon doesn't fall out that some numpty didn't take his weapon. And there's always one, right? Some people just panic and run. And all this stuff's coming out, socks, mess tins, you know, camping cookers, all this kind of stuff. And of course that gives the training team the excuse to beast you. And what they do is they do something called pays to be a winner, where you have to run up and down a feature. In this case, it's the grassy knoll. It's kind of this little mountain. And you all have to run up it. Whoever gets the top first is the winner. Hence why it pays to be a winner because you can sit down, smoke a ciggy if that's your thing, right? The rest of the guys go back down. So if you've got 50 people in your troop at this point, you can do the mass, right? That's 50 times you're running up and down if you don't get out, basically. What do you do? You just judge it until all the racing snakes have gone and you're looking like this at your fellow recruits. And when you think, yeah, now's my time, just got to put on that little bit of burst of energy to get out. So yeah, that's getting beasted. And when they beast you, and another thing, another beasting is they'll put you through a jacuzzi. Jacuzzi is this brown stagnant pond that stinks like the drains. We used to fish marbles out the drains at school as kids, right? And the drains stunk. That's what the jacuzzi smells like. And you've got to crawl through that jacuzzi. I don't know how many times I can't remember, but you've got to crawl through, put your head under water and it's filthy, right? Sometimes they tell you there's a Rolex in the jacuzzi, go and get it out. So anyway, yeah, that's getting beasted. And you think the training team is really angry with you. Of course, they're not. They're just putting on the anger because they've got to beast you into shape, right? You've got to whip a bit of humanism out of you so you'll kill on command, basically. Yeah, speed marching. When you come back off that because that's your first proper speed marching full kit. Once again, I thought, ah, all the other lads, you know, they seem to be okay by it. I'll be all right. Whoa, how wrong was I? One of the hardest things I ever did. That four miles back to camp, I absolutely died, physically exhausted. I was just looking down at the verge, wishing I could just collapse on it. Your mind's thinking maybe I should, maybe I should, but my nature is just like I could never do that. So I just would hang in there and I guess the other lads I passed out and got a green berry with obviously had the same mentality, right? I wasn't going to drop out because I wasn't going to go home. I didn't have anything at home. That was it, it's your first speed march. So you've got to run, you've got to keep the pace, you've got to keep in step. Speed marching is running, walking or jogging really, jogging, walking. So you walk, you walk the uphills, you jog the flat and the downhills, 10 minute mile pace. You're going to get exercises that introduce you to mat reading or you'll just have sessions where you'll get in a four ton truck, go up to Woodbury Common, you do mat reading, right? I won't bore you with it, but out of all the skills you could learn before you join up, that is what I would have done because it's a real art and I think like a lot of people, I was never that brilliant. You've got to learn the basics because otherwise you're going to get lost and you need to know where you are. You need to navigate across any terrain, right? You've got to learn it, you just have. If you don't, you're going to fail, you know, you're going to fail training because you'll be tested on it, right? But some people just seem naturally really good and there's all these tricks you can do with a compass once you understand it in the map. So you take a bearing on something, then you can do what they call a back bearing. So that means when you're coming back the other way off of patrols say, you can reverse that bearing and you know that you're starting point with somewhere on this axis, right? Yeah, map reading, worth learning. And military map reading is different from civilian map reading because civilians are idiots. No, because civilian map reading, it's just for a bit more across Dartmoor on a weekend, right? They only have 360 degrees on their compass. On a military compass, you have way more someone can put in the comments if you can find out how many degrees are on the face of a military compass, put it in the comments, I'll send you a copy of my book. Yeah, so that's map reading. You're going to learn first aid, how to patch people up on the battlefield. You'll learn about sucking chest wounds and what do you do with a sucking chest wound? You cover it with the plastic from a first field dressing. So the person's lungs can start working again, right? You're going to learn when you can give morphine, when you can't give morphine. And what do you do when you give morphine? You put an M on someone's forehead, right? Survival X, you go up to Dartmoor or you may go somewhere else. We got given rabbits. We had to look after this rabbit for a day and then you've got to break its neck. To be honest, if you don't know how to kill an animal and then gut it and take the fur off it and cook it, probably a bit of an idiot. I mean, it's not difficult, right? You're obviously not going to eat the intestines. So I didn't really think it was necessary to kill a rabbit. I thought they could have shown you how to kill one, right? But my partner was like, whoa, give it here, I want to do it, I want to, you know, everyone was a bit keen to show off their match on this, I think. So yeah, we had to kill a rabbit and eat it, but it was tasty. When you go, you strip off, so you've got nothing hidden, although there's ways to smuggle. I think we all smuggled a five or a 10er and some of you get a survival tin and you can put a little knife in it or a razor blade and some rabbit snares and fishing line and all this kind of stuff that, you know, I don't know how much it's going to help you and I don't know what the statistics are of people ending up in survival situations. It's probably really, you know, minimal, unless you're a pilot in the Second World War, of course, in Vietnam or somewhere. But yeah, you do that, you march into this area and on the way, we done two things actually, our section. We'd hired a car the weekend before and the lads drove down to Dartmoor. We all gave them 60 quid and they buried a load of food because one of the lads had been in training before and he knew where this exercise area was, right? And before they drove down there, they all drove home for the weekend. So they're spending our money on petrol to go and visit Newcastle and Middlesbrough and such places. And that was one thing we did, right? The other thing was as we were yomping into this exercise, we had about a 10 mile yomp. Fortunately, you're not carrying anything because it's a survival exercise. You've just got overalls on, foraging cap like this and boots, that's it. And you're a survival team, which some lads had just chucked all, they didn't even bother taking any gear. They just filled it with tobacco and I don't blame them actually. And so we're yomping into this exercise and we said to our corporal who's 50 years old or well, he probably wasn't that old but he looked that to us. And a lot of these old boys in the Marines, they're all skinned all the time because they've got so many wives and kids and girlfriends all over the place. And so they'll do anything for money. So as we were yomping in, he broke his flask. So we said, cool, cool. If we buy you a new flask, can we nip in that shop? And he's like, I didn't see anything. So we nipped in this shop and we all bought pasties. That's how we started our exercise. And these lads have buried this food and out of my 60 quid, I got a Mars bar and a Ginsters. You don't know what a Ginsters is, Google it. It's a pasty made in a factory in Cornwall. They taste like cement and you get them in all your Marines bag rats, which is your daily bag ration, like your packed lunch, right? If you go, say shooting for the day, you get a packed lunch and there's a Ginsters in it. And all the lads from up north that don't like pasties, just throw them away or swap them for something. So that was that. And then your exercise, survival exercise freezing, absolutely freezing. A lot of the lads found caves and they had fires in the cave and it looked really luxury. Me and my buddy, I think I've got a photo here. We just built, we just built a basher, you know, from like sticks and leaves and built a fire into it. And it was, even though it was only September, it was bitterly cold every night. Yeah. As rumors that lads have like killed sheep on survival acts because they were butchers in civilian life and this sort of thing, you don't want to get caught doing that. You'd get big time. Family's Day is cool if you've, you know, it's quite funny for me because my parents were lovely, but I think they had a few issues, right? And, you know, kind of ended up taking it out on those kids over the years. And what I'm trying to say is that I don't hold grudges against anything, right? And they kind of like more than come good for me over the years, but back when I was a kiddie, things weren't that good in our household, right? And because they both kicked me out of home, I wanted him to come to my family's day to see that I was getting on in the Marines, just because they, my old man said, you'll never make it as a Marine. They won't want you. Great encouragement, right? But the family's day come and we did our gym pass out on that day. I'm not sure if that's the same for everyone. So we're doing all this rope stuff upside down on the ropes and showing our family this thing. And then we're doing drill with our weapons. They teach all these sort of arms moves, bang! All this kind of stuff. And then, yeah, I'm gonna kind of whiz through this or it get boring. LSW, you learn how to fire the support weapon, which is, it's like your SA-80, which is now called a different name. You'll know the name for it. That's the weapon the Marines use now, right? This is just one with a tripod on and it's got a handle at the back, I think it is, that you can hold when you get it into your shoulder. And this is where you'll, and it's got a longer barrel. So it functions as a support weapon for laying down covering fire when the rest of the section is attacking a position. I didn't actually mention weapons training, it's there at the beginning. The weapons training, you go down to these start, what they call weapons stances. These little hexagonal or half moon-shaped buildings where you sit in on a bench, the PW, which your training team will be made up of four PWs, they're your cork calls that look after you. PW means platoon weapons. So it's the platoon weapons instructor when they're in a commander unit, right? And they're gonna teach you how to use your rifle, not a gun, it's a rifle. And you learn how to take it apart, how to clean it, how to put it back together. You learn the drills, so safety catch, change lever, that's your automatic or your single shot. You obviously always keep it on single shot. Very rarely you fire an automatic, that's like what they do in the American movies, right? You go, brrr, you're not really gonna hit anything unless maybe you're in an ambush and then you've got to have it on, the whole troop has it on automatic and you just put down a blanket of fire, right? Safety catch, change lever, off magazine, cop the weapon, look inside, check fords, check rear, mechanism board, safety catch, off, fire off the pull the trigger, that releases the mechanism, check your top round, put it back on the weapon, right? It becomes second nature after a while but when I was on active service in the Northern Ireland conflict, you'd be so surprised how many people, safety catch, change lever, hang on, my computer's coming on, all on its own. Good night, Vienna, safety catch, change lever, cop the weapon, they look forward, they don't bother to look back, release the mechanism, of course they just actually cop the weapon, when they fire it off, they release the firing pin, bang, they have what's called a negligent discharge, that's like probably the third thing you don't ever wanna do in your career, cost you a month salary, right? I was so almost anal about it, I'm not, I'm never gonna have a negligent discharge, I do it, just do it by the book, right? You learn all this, it's really confusing at first, kinda, especially if you don't come from a weapons type of family, I always had air rifles as a kid but even then I, you know, it's some, you really concentrate and you don't wanna be the one that gets it all wrong, yeah, that's weapons training. So, chemical, biological and radiological nuclear training, that was just called NBC training, when I was in nuclear, biological and chemical, warfare training, and that's wearing the protective gear, hood pulled up, you pull it tight with these toggles, you put your respirator on, not a gas mask, a gas mask is what they had in the Second World War, right? When the Germans would, in case the Germans ever dropped gas, don't think they ever did. Not on cities, I mean, obviously they did in the trenches in the First World War, quite a lot. Yeah, you learn how to put on the equipment, put your respirator on, gloves, special boots, and this is supposed to protect you from splashing chemicals, your respirator's hard to breathe in and later on in training, when you go to the rifle ranges, you've gotta do all your, some of your shooting with the respirator on, plus running around and it's a little tip to you there, I just used to unscrew my canister. If you unscrew it, you break the seal and then you can just breathe normally. So yeah, topped it from Uncle Chris there, right? But the worst part of the chemical training is where you go into a building, you shut the door and the instructor lights these little, they look like indoor fireworks, but they're not, they're these CS gas tablets and they fill the room with CS gas. So the riot gas, you see the, or the stuff, you see the police spraying, that kind of thing, right? And you all stand there and it's fine with your respirator, only you breathe normally, it's just like breathing normal air, but then one at a time, you've got to step in front of this guy and you'll say, right, respirator off, you've got to undo your hood, take your respirator off in a certain manner, then you've got to stand there and you've got to say, recruit, throw, P.O. 4809, three, blah, blah, blah, born, London, live, you give your home address, birthday. And the idea is you've got to say all this stuff so you're breathing in this gas and you're supposed to get such a hit of it and it's horrible, you go outside, you're coughing, eyes are supposed, or they're supposed to be running, everything where you've been sweating is really sore and it's torture, basically it's torture, right? But I said all my set piece without even taking a breath. So when he said, okay, go, you can go out, I'm still holding my breath and I didn't take a breath in until I got outside. So I didn't suffer any of the ill effects except being a bit sore where I was sweating, right? Then like an idiot, he came out, he said, oh, who didn't think that was too bad, fellas? Right, you ever get asked question in the Marines, don't answer it, you never put your hand up, right? If you do, you're volunteering for something. They'll say to you, they'll say, fellas, your fancy is a parachute course. When you put your arm up like that, right? You're on duty this weekend, guard duty, right? You're like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Well, you don't, you don't say that, you just go, ah, why did I volunteer, right? This guy says, right, fellas, who didn't think that was too bad? Of course, because I put my hand up, he said, right, you, back in, and he took me back in, maybe take my respirator off again and then he kept me there for, with no respirator on for, like, well over a minute, long enough, so I was, you get to the point where you get so desperate, you're thinking, should I just try and fight my way out? It's awful, right? And then bang, just hit you big time. Yeah, that's chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear training. You're gonna learn how to use radios, comms, and when you use radios, you have something called backcode, battle code, which takes all the fun out of fighting because rather than just use your radios like the Dukes of Hazard or something, you've got to start actually encoding your messages and it takes ages, it's really complicated. You've got to then decipher messages from someone else. Grenade from, we never did, never throw a grenade gym all my time in the Marines because when we went to do that, for some reason, the NATO didn't have any grenades in stock. But yeah, grenade for our natural be fun. You're definitely gonna have to do that these days. What was your role, supporting US domination and going to the desert and I bet a fair few grenades were thrown in Afghanistan, right? Helicopter and underwater escape drills. I'm gonna do a separate video on this, but because it's really brilliant fun. I didn't do it in training, did the helicopter drills, didn't do the underwater escape drills. I did them later on in my career. But I talk you through it now as if, in a wanna. You go up to RNAS Yovelton, that's Royal Naval Air Station, Yovelton, and you spend the day jumping in and out of helicopters and this is great. Got all your kit on, all your fighting order and your weapon and the helicopter will come down. It hovers above the ground and you all gotta jump out. And then the pilots take you up and they just spin you around. Of course, probably most people's first time in a helicopter, right? They do this trick where they go up, fly high and suddenly, I don't know how they do it. They just cut the power and the helicopter just drops. And they don't, you get no warning about this. So suddenly you're flying along, not caring the world, brilliant fun. And then suddenly, whoo, and you drop what feels like 500 feet or something and your heart just comes up in your mouth. And again, you're probably gathering up, gathering, I was never really that bothered by most things. I kind of knew the second we dropped that these guys knew what they're doing, right? But I'm guessing for some people, it's terrifying. And they fly you down over the kind of woods and stuff which is great fun. In Norway, it becomes even more fun because in Norway, it's a tactical exercise. So they got to fly close to the ground and you're flying 30 feet above the ground, up these valleys and re-entrance, just over the snow and the trees, it's just incredible. So yeah, you're doing all this helicopter stuff and the underwater escape training drills, that's where you get in this mock-up helicopter. It drops you in a swimming pool. All the lights have gone out. You can't see anything. It spins around. So you're underwater, strapped in your seat, spinning around and around like a ride at the fair. So you're underwater, holding your breath in the dark, spinning around and around and around, spins around like three, four, five times. And then it stops and you can be in any position upside down and then you're all numbered. And in your series of numbers, you've got to get out a window. It's like that big. You've got to sit there holding your breath, feeling the number next to you and feeling when he's gone out the window and you just feel his boots, right? And then you've got to climb out and you go for it and the guy comes behind you. It's great. If you don't panic, it's fine. Even if you stayed in it, right? It's going to come up before you lose your breath. It's just to stay calm. Of course, some people really panic. There's divers down there to rescue you if you have a funny term, right? Great fun. You do, you've got an exercise running, man, right? I'm not sure what hours was called, but you yomping. It's more about, this is where you're starting to carry weight and you've got your weapon, you've got your bergans on, you're carrying let's say around about 20 kilos. And just as with anything to do with running, I found it really hard, really, really hard. Just within 300 meters, certainly within half a mile, you just soak through with sweat. You have to undo your combat jacket and have it open. You're lifting your t-shirt up like this. You undo your flies on your trousers to let air out from your bottom half, right? You can undo the elastics that hold your denim, snug around your boots, just to get air flowing through your stuff. You never, water has never tasted so good. You can just drink like her leader straight down because you've got to ration it. Moving on, you have your love-its and your blues uniform fitted. So your love-its is your green suit, your blues is your, do you think it's your blue one, right? It's got stripes on it. Yeah, it's the Royal Marines blues, without doubt, is the smartest uniform in the military, in the whole wide world. The possible exception of the RAF regiment. Moving on. Exercise Baptist Run. Yeah. This, if I remember rightly, is your test exercise. You go on this exercise and they're gonna test all your, all the skills you've learned so far. So it's gonna be field craft. That's camming yourself up with camouflage, how to put that on properly. There's a special way, right? It's how to snipe from undergrowth. So you'll do snipes where you run out. They'll give you like, say 30 seconds, you've got to run towards a target. Get down, get into the undergrowth, hide. You're all camouflaged out. You learn how to cut with secateurs, how to cut your camouflage, shove it in your helmet and your equipment. And you learn different types of crawling like leopard crawl and this kind of thing. And I was always really good at sniping, right? Being a sniper, not, yeah. Anyway, I was just good at it because as soon as they said run, I would just run as far as I could toward, excuse me. As soon as they said run, I would run as fast as I could towards the enemy. As soon as they said run, I would just cover as much ground as I could, get as close to the enemy as I could. And when I went down, I'd make sure I was always in a valley, like they call it a re-entrant, right? So I could just keep running along it, outside from the target. And then when he finally went to ground, I was always, I didn't have to sort of crawl. Because some of the crawls you do, like for an hour long, if you're a proper sniper, when you later go into sniper training, that can be a day. I'm guessing in Vietnam, these snipers would crawl for like a week. It's insane, yeah. So yeah, you get all your tests, you get tested on everything, you'll get a stance where they've hidden little bits of equipment in trees and underground, you call it Kim's game. You've got to sit there with your weapon, looking through the telescopic sight, trying to pick all these bits of equipment. And like I say, it's all a test, right? Map reader as well. And if your training team don't like you, and they won't not like you for any reason, if they don't like you, it's probably because you're a knob. We had a guy in our room, got backtrooped into our troop. And it's called Owl. It's this big, solid, thick, brick in Londoner, right? And he was a bully and he was just nasty, and the training team pinged him straight away, and he's gonna fail, he's gonna fail this exercise before he's even gone it, because they don't want him in the Marines, right? So yeah, surprise, surprise, when this exercise is done, you all get called into a room, and they read out who's passed and who's failed, and your heart is going, please, not me, not me. Recruit, throw, pass. Well done. Just brilliant, seriously, brilliant. You know, you're through to the next week. Everything one day at a time, you know? So yeah, that's that. Inspections, you get kit inspections. You get a mud run, and then you get kit inspected after like two hours after the mud run, it's just insane. Talk more about that in my next video. But yeah, inspections, you get locker inspections, you get kit inspections, you get inspections on the parade square, everything has to be up to the standard. There's all these little idiosyncratic things you have to do. Irish penance, do you know what they are? You should do. No, you shouldn't. But they're those little like bits of cotton that hand from your clothes, you know? All of those have got to be snipped off. All your brasses, that's your belt buckle, it's got to be polished, highly polished, right? All this kind of stuff. Boots obviously, got to be gleaming. So yeah, then at the end of this first part of infantry training, you get first drill inspection by a big wig, and you have your arms drill pass out and your phase one pass out parade. So if you've got that far, you pass that drill inspection, bingo. You're onto the second phase of infantry training. This is not commander training. Remember, you haven't got that far yet. It's the second phase of infantry training. And that centers around battle knowledge and battle fitness. You swap from the gymnasium to the bottom field. Bottom field where the assault course and the Tarzan assault course is, right? So yeah, well done on getting this far. You've now got weekend leave, fellas, or fellasses if you're a girl that's gonna join. See you in the next video. 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 wanna pass the 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.