 Hello friend, I'm Chris Fraule, I'm a former Royal Marines commando and I'm the only person I know that has ticked every item off my bucket list. Now if you'd like to achieve all your goals, hit the subscribe button and I'll show you how to smash it out the park. Hello friends, I hope this finds you well, today I was writing some notes for a video I've really been wanting to make for quite some time and that's because it's on one of my favourite topics, throwing yourself out of an aeroplane with a parachute I should add and probably the parachute course is the best course you can do in the British military. Before I go on I just wanted to say some of you may have noticed a teddy bear in the thumbnail for this video. I just wanted to point out that that's purely Royal Marines humour, okay? Do not go spreading the word that Royal Marine commandos carry teddy bears, do you get ones and bend and stretch, bend, let's get that baby working, yeah? And stretch, good. Now if you can't afford dumbbells, improvise, yeah? Maybe children's toy, anything like that, you got it, good, remember, big guns, yeah? So parachuting, so I just set the scene for this parachuting story. I was on HMS Invincible, the aircraft carrier. It was based in Pompey, that's Portsmouth and amongst the ship's crew which varied from about 1200 when we were alongside in Harbour to gosh, about 2600 when we were on operations, when all the aeroplanes were on board and all the mechanics and the pilots and the aircrew were with us, there were, did I say there were 12 of us Marines on this detachment and our job was to protect the weapon systems on board. Now used to spend a lot of time in Pompey dockyard obviously, out of the year I was on Invincible, we were probably alongside there, a good six months of that, if not more, that's in between nipping to Barbados, the states, Germany, Mediterranean, absolutely brilliant year, right? But when we were alongside in Pompey, our job was down what we called the hole in the ship, can't say where that is obviously, but you go down a series of ladders and you sit in this little control room, you have to man these TV cameras for 24 hours, make sure nobody untoward is trying to clamber aboard the ship and you're armed with a 9mm Browning pistol. But one day some of us were sat in the mess deck, that's like your lounge, right? And Nick had come back from doing his doby, so he's washing and he'd been doing his doby at HMS Nelson which is the nearest naval base and he came back on ship, he said lads, lads, I've just met this para over at Nelson while I was doing my doby. And we're obviously interested, what's the para doing in Pompey, I mean you never saw the parachute regiment anywhere around these parts, it's all navy, right? So he said, well, what it is, it's called Collin and his job is to go around all the naval bases, and I'm guessing other military establishments, but to go around all the naval bases to try to entice Royal Naval personnel onto parachute courses. Well, all our ears pricked up because any Marine will tell you, para courses, or so you might think are rare as rocking horse shit, we're there like, what, he can get people on parachute courses. Nick's like, yeah, yeah, yeah, he said, I've invited him on board, ah, brilliant. So next thing you know, Nick's gone off to meet this guy and he's bringing up the gangway and he's sat in our mess deck having a wet cup of tea, right, and we're chatting away, lovely bloke, Collin, he's got his cherry berry, looks like he's just been off, you know, taking out some bridge somewhere. He's got his parasmok, some of us war two, they're pretty, pretty nifty, these parasmoks, right? So he's got his parasmok and it comes down to his knees, which is just what you expect from a para, and yeah, he's all right. We're chatting away and he's like, yeah, I'll get you on courses, lads, don't worry, not a problem, so we're all like, anyway, time moves on, right? Turns out this lad has got a grot in the navy base at HMS Nelson, a grot meaning a room, and I said to him, you know, I just assumed this was part of his work, but he said, no, what it is, I'm shacking up with the girl that runs the bedding store, that's all your blankets and everything, right? It was something like this, or the girl worked in the office for this part of the ship, right? And a naval base being a ship, yeah? And so he said, yeah, I'm shacking up with her and she's like giving me the keys to a room and I'm just dossing in there for the time being, oh okay, you know, again, didn't think anything of it, right? And it comes out later when we're at Joanna's nightclub that night that I'm with a guy called George, surprisingly, he's a Geordie, really nice guy, some of you listening might know him if I say tell, but tell before he joined the Marines, he was in a parrots and he nudged me and he said, Chris, something ain't right. I'm like, George, what are you on about? He said, this, this Colin, I'm like, now I'm in that kind of naive, oblivious, I take people on face value, been mugged enough times for that, right? And so I'm like, I didn't really get George's drift. So George's like challenges this Colin, this CID card. So this Colin gets out a bit of paper. I'm tempted to say it was blue, but I'll be honest, it was a long time ago, I don't really remember, but it was this little card, right? And it wasn't an ID card. I mean, you get a little nifty ID card in the military, right? Even then, I'm not sure. I think we still had the old type of ID cards. It hadn't quite gone to the credit card thing yet, but it was the old kind of laminated ones, right? We didn't even have that. He just had this scrappy bit of paper that had been folded so many times and it had his photo and a stamp. But didn't really, you know, something was obviously suspicious about it, right? So George challenges him. He says, you, you're not fucking too para. I was too para and I would know you, right? So the guy like waffles something off and he's stepping backwards. And before you know it, he's off, right? And I just thought, oh, he's just, he, he doesn't like George's attitude. He thinks there's going to be a fight. Didn't think anything of it. Anyway, fast forward. Suddenly the military police are getting involved. So it's like the provost and the, the SIB. Someone refreshed my memory in the comments. It was its special investigation branch. That's like the Navy's CID. And they're all coming on, coming on the HMS Nelson and they're interviewing people, you know, taking them in for police questioning. Turns out Colin wasn't a para at all. Colin had been a recruit in the Paras. So is that older shot? Apologies if I'm not too much up on my para, my para stuff. But he dropped out at something like week four. That's why he still only had this paper ID card because his platoon in training hadn't yet got issued the proper ID, right? And he's just traveling around the country being a Walter Mitty. He's using this ID. He's chatting up the girls left, right and Chelsea so he can get himself accommodation. The guy standing on the gate just sees this ID card and he's like, yeah, all right, private in you go, right? And yeah, the lad was a recruit. So I'll tell you, I'll say a couple of things. First off, you only hear stories like that in the Marines. There's only two places you hear stories that are that bizarre. One is in the Marines. The other is in Hong Kong. So if you read my memoir Eat and Smoke, you'll know what I'm getting at, right? My first night out in Hong Kong, 40 people or 20 people were crushed to death in the street I was drinking in, right? Mad place, but yeah. So I'll just leave you with a thought. Was what Colin did put your answer in the comments? Was he doing a good thing there? Was that something when he's my, you know, he's old like me, he'll look back at his life and go, yeah, when I was young, right? What I did, he's got my ID card and I went round. Do you get what I'm saying? Or is this what the Americans call stolen valor? And he didn't deserve to wear that, Barry. You know, I'm guessing it depends which way you look at it, doesn't it? Personally, couldn't really give a shit. But yeah, that's just me, right? So that's it. Thank you for listening. That was the para that never was.