M is for Memories of a Misspent Youth!

The reconnaissance platoon of the Ist Fantasian Motor-Rifle Corps, Putlos, Schleswig-Holstein, 1986!

We made the red stars from an old fertilizer sack we found in the barn we were billeted in, while providing 'Enemy Force' for the rest of the battalion!

Left to right; top; Steve B, 'Solid', 'Beano', Stu' M,
bottom; Alan 'Muscles' G and yours truly!

They gave us a LWB Land Rover, but no tilt, so we fashioned one from three groundsheets and some broom-handles (also liberated from the barn! And returned!), however six-guys full kit doesn't leave much room for passengers, so it was interesting in the back. Stu' and Beano (IC) were alright; they were up-front - with a heater . . . of sorts!

We'd be tasked with an all-night OP or a snap VCP, or sometimes just a drive-through (so someone else in an OP could report our movements), then back to the barn and some of the best cooks in Berlin Brigade who had two catering trailers for about 30 of us, we lived like kings and it was a pretty 'cabby' week! Bloody wet though; anyone in the UK who's ever bemoaned the weather, has never been to the Jutland Peninsula in October!

It was in this Lanny we all nearly died, when we came round a corner in the middle of nowhere and found two old ladies walking down the centre of the country-lane. Stu' managed to avoid them but we ended-up careering down a ditch at 45°'s while the windscreen and driver's door (LHD) got smashed-in by a line of cut-off tree stumps!

By the time we'd all clambered out of the half-waterlogged wreckage, the two old ladies has just wandered off round the corner (don't think they even broke step or stopped chatting to look over their shoulders!) and were nowhere to be seen! We tried pulling, we tried pushing, we stuffed logs under it, but in the end a passing German farmer pulled it out with his tractor and we limped-home to a late breakfast!

He hadn't seen the old ladies either and he'd come from where they'd gone (which we'd just driven - flat fields for miles) so we wondered if they hadn't been visiting from the twilight-zone as payback for some RAF bombing raid (Oldenburg escaped the worst, but nearby Kiel was heavily bombed) in the 1940's!

You can only get away with that shit when you're young . . . and . . . those 'Deputy Dog' hats though!