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he was lying on his back part way up the grass verge with one of his legs turned out in an unnaturally relaxed manner. One of his instructors stood above him holding his rifle and watched us with a blank expression as we doubled past. We all sensed the recruit was dead. I thought of the only other dead person I had ever seen, a nun back in the orphanage. She had been our English teacher. There must have been a shortage of paper in the orphanage because we used to write mostly on the back of old Christmas cards. When you went up to her desk to ask for more paper she would hastily tear a card along its crease and draw lines in pencil across the blank part for you to write on. The lines were never straight or the same distance apart and always curved down the page to the right. One morning, instead of us all walking into the classroom at the period change, we were made to line up outside. There were about twenty of us. I was about eight. None of us knew why we were lining up. We were told to be quiet. We never disobeyed the nuns. The atmosphere was grave. When we finally filed into the small classroom we saw our English teacher lying on her back on several desks that had been moved together to support her. She was at my chest height. Her eyes were closed and her hands were crossed over her chest. After passing around her we were filed back out of the room.
    The Marine recruit had died of a heart attack.
    When the last week of the commando course finally arrived only twenty-five out of the original seventy-eight members of my squad remained. I stood on the huge parade ground the size of several football pitches in my white pith helmet, white gloves and navy-blue uniform and a Marine band marched and played in the background. I had reached the top rung of the ladder. We were the Kings’s Squad, the name given to the most senior troop in recruit training. The occasion was made more memorable by an event that had happened earlier that morning when we first arrived on the parade ground.
    Discipline, especially when marching in a column of three ranks in full dress uniform, is iron in the Marines and it’s instant death to turn your head, even slightly, to look at something – the white pith helmet would give the movement away. When we marched on to the parade ground that morning the whole troop was straining to look out of the corner of their eyes at something unusual parked in the middle of it. We were brought to a resounding halt, but still did not dare turn to look.
    The drill instructor screamed, ‘Left turn’na!’
    Twenty-five men moved as one and our feet came together with a crack that could be heard across the River Exe a mile away. We had drilled throughout the six-month training course for this day, but this final week had been spent doing little else so that we would be faultless in front of Lord Louis Mountbatten, which we were. It was with some relief that we turned for we could now see what was in the centre of the parade ground.
    It was a standard issue, single, wooden bed, sleeping for the use of, and there was a recruit sleeping in it in his pyjamas. During the night, members of his troop had carried his bed, with him in it, out of the grot and across camp to the parade ground without waking him. He must have had a few beers that night. He continued to sleep soundly even with all the heavy marching and yelling of orders going on around him. The drill instructors and NCOs remained poker-faced, none venturing near the recruit. They were all waiting for God to arrive on parade.
    The God of any camp is not the commanding officer, as most would assume, but the Regimental Sergeant Major (RSM). He is chosen for his loud voice as well as for his immaculate bearing. Recruits cowered when he walked through the camp. He could spot a loose thread or an unpolished brass buckle at fifty yards. I was once standing with a couple of my squaddies outside the NAAFI during a break (we did a lot of that). One of them leaned back