大象传媒

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The best episode ever I saw in my life 鈥� We were up in Syria, doing a tour. Monty took all the troops out of Syria. He took all the troops out of Iraq, he took all these regiments away. These were the defence of the Gulf oil-fields.

They realised the Germans were up on the Turkish border. All they had to do was come down the Euphrates, and the war would have been over! So they decided to do a show of force. So they used a brigade as smashed-up as ours. They got a battalion of Coldstreams, 110 of the Scots and a battalion that had disappeared completely. It was being re-equipped so they sent a new batt out, 6th Grenadiers.

They decided to do a show of force. So we went over the mountains, up the coast to the Turkish border, along the border into Iraq, and back across the desert into Damascus. They took us into Alleppo.

The Syrian desert was quite 1k ft rising up to 1600ft. They brought us a mobile shower. It had a pipe on it with 8 nozzles, and a boiler like a domestic water boiler for heating. They lit the fire, that heated and it came out the nozzle. The officer had them all lined up starkers with towel and soap.

So if you had 8 men under there for 4 minutes you could do so many men with 4k gallons of water. He put the first lot under there. But they had no control over temperature.
Then he put these 8 men in. All of a sudden, steam shot out. These boys took off across the desert. Linford Christie wouldn鈥檛 have had a look-in with these blokes. They took off like bullets!
He said 鈥淐ome back in here!鈥�

There was no way he could get these guys in there again. And when he looked round, everyone else had scarpered! I鈥檇 never seen anything like it. If you鈥檇 taken a shot of that it would be worth a fortune. That鈥檚 the British army for you.

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