US Marine Drill Instructor Passes Royal Marines Commando Course | Bought The T-Shirt Podcast CLIPS

[Music] dying to talk to you about your your police work but can we just um talk about your time at lincoln yeah when did that take place so i was i just before i went over i was a drill instructor so i had i had been a drill instructor in the us um this is mid 90s and at the time it was a two-year tour so i i was just finishing up my my second year as a drill instructor in the u.s and um i was getting ready to to go to my next unit and and you kind of have a little say and the longer you're in the more say you have about where you want to go next and i intended to go back to an operational unit go back i was actually going to go back to a reconnaissance unit i had orders which meant you know i'm ready to i'm ready to move on i had a move date and everything and i had i didn't even realize we had that we had five u.s marines who were on exchange with the royal marines i didn't even know it existed i'd never heard of it and and maybe two months before i was due to to rotate to my next duty station a guy just mentioned it one day and he said that uh he had brought it up that there was someone at limston who which we call it the drill instructor exchange but really you know as well as i do that the true sergeant is not a drill instructor by any means you know you have one dl over there whereas we have all our drill instructors are you know the guys with the big funny hats and their offspring and it's such a different system for you for you guys but um so i i inquired to my what we call a monitor which is the person that monitors your career kind of um makes sure people get to the right place and all billets are filled and i i asked him he said yeah i'm actually getting ready to to pick someone for that i have you know about 10 people who have applied um are you interested and i said yeah very and so i i put in a package for it and uh like just before i would have deployed i got word that that i had been selected to go and so he changed my orders and i think it was june of 97 i flew over reported into limpston and they don't they don't make you go to the all-arms course um but of course for me there was no option i was like i gotta i gotta earn me barry you know and just wow so i spent the first month or two because they i think they were just finishing up an all-arms course and they just really they set me up for success most days i think i spent three days a week on bottom field um and i would just work out with the recruits so i would do bottom field three times a week and i had pretty much by time i got on the all arms i had done everything i i had done the assault course i didn't do the full tarzan assault um as a warner you know as you do in the course but i had i had gone through all of it i had done the pretty much everything you could do but in little pieces so i felt really good about going on course um of course once once that 12 weeks i believe at the time the honors was 12 weeks you know once that hit and you went through it it was just it was unbelievable i mean it was so just ball busting it was 12 weeks non-stop i lost two stone um yeah i came out the other side and i was i'd lost so much weight because it was just day after day relentless doing the commando tests and bottom field pass out and uh and then the exercises in between you know up in um up in woodbury common or or out in dartmoor and and so they really set me up for success so and then uh i got on course which so i passed out in december so i guess i would have started in late october maybe somewhere in october i started the course and uh and i remember so when i had done when i was doing bottom field one of the ptis that was working with me he he was showing me everything and he told me don't the worst thing that can happen to you is that you fail the initial rope climb because you'll get another shot at it after you do the rest of the course but you'll never make it because there's no way because you're going to be hanging out so bad now now you've done the whole course you've done the full regain you've done everything else and now you're going to try to climb the rope again and he goes you'll never make it so don't let it happen to you so on the morning it was it was drizzly rainy typical limpston day and i remember i got to the rope i was feeling good i i felt so well rehearsed and everything was good i was in probably the best shape of my life i think i was 31 when i went through and uh i start climbing the 30-foot rope and i just start to slip and i'm climbing and slipping and my head is i just start to just start to psych myself out and i i'm just looking up and i'm not gonna make it and finally i realize i'm not getting to the top of the rope and that pti's words just were just banging in my head you'll never make the second rope climb it's not going to happen so just pack it in you know i mean that's how i felt and of course i didn't um and i did the rest of the chorus did the regain and so now i've got to climb this rope again and and i remember just it had dried up a little bit the rain had stopped and there was just no way i wasn't gonna make the top of that rope and so that got the second attempt and i just got up to the top and i i got up there i know you had to slap the top and i don't remember what you had to say but you had to yell out something that you would made it and i just i just stood there for a minute i looked out over the over the river x or the flats and just uh yeah i just couldn't believe that i made that but that was you know one small piece of that whole course and it just got worse from there i mean you know it never stopped so how how do i i'm gonna do a comparison uh think thing here robert i might actually just put this out as a little clip because it's quite fascinating um was it so was it a massive eye-opener to see what the british how they train because of course we're commandos which just you know it it's like a different role from the infantry roles it's like another thing again um was that kind of a shock to you was that a lot different to the usmc training that you've done yeah especially so you know our recruit training our boot camp is um what is it now i gosh i don't even know what it is now i've been retired so long i don't keep up on much of it but so i think it's uh 13 weeks maybe our boot camp our recruit training which is about the same as the commando cor you know the all-arms command of course but uh it's so different it's apples and oranges i watched a video the other day actually of a us marine who was watching a royal marines video on recruit training and i just kept i wanted to yell at this screen because you can't compare the two they're so different um ours is pretty short it's the i think it's the longest recruit training in the in the us military but it's still pretty short and it's designed it's it's you know it's the brainwashing right it's it's that indoctrination of you take this slimy civilian and you just pound usmc into them you know just 24 hours a day everything and you teach them history culture customs and courtesies how to march how to walk how to put their socks on how to eat and it's that's what it is i mean it is that for 12 weeks non-stop you don't get a day off um you get sundays in the afternoon you get a couple hours to sit in the barracks uh in the squad bay and write letters and and you know lie to your family how great it is and it's but there's no time off you never leave you never leave base um you don't have any time where you just walk around on your own just strolling about the camp and and get to to relax there's none of it non-stop and you know when i went over there i i didn't have any preconceived notions of what the training was gonna be like but i did know it was much longer um and that it was you know it's i look at it in three phases right it's like the initial phase is where you're taking a civilian you're kind of teaching them about the core you know your core and kind of giving them that transition into kind of a basic marine basic soldier you know and then you have the second phase where you teach them how to be an infantryman a rifleman you know how to fight in the field and then the commando phase where you you know you turn them into a commando and ours really isn't like that after you leave recruit training all of our recruits from every different job skill you know every we call them mos the military occupational specialty they're all in the same place so you've got you've got butchers and bakers next to next to infantry guys and so they all do the exact same thing after that they go on to their further school where they learn how to repair helicopters or um you know fire javelin missiles or whatever it is and and and so the the schooling later is more of of making you that job skill um and i know i know there are other you know commandos what what other skills do they have i mean it's not everyone's in a commando unit right yeah when you come out of royal marie's training pretty much everybody goes to a commander unit because you're kind of expected to have um experience as a commando you know for a year maybe do some um specialist training like up in the arctic where we do uh warfare training up in the north of norway or you might have a deployment obviously back in my day um it was the northern ireland conflict more recently it's obviously been the middle east and then you can look to specialize as a driver a shed a clerk when you're in your commander unit you might choose to go in the more you know you might get a bit of experience as a rifleman and then be opt to go to the more supply team you know heavy weapons this this kind of thing right but after you've done your sort of year and a half you can then you might want to be a drill instructor right normally no one wants to do that job it's not really it the thought of being at libston and that's your job on that parade square every single day it's not what everyone well i'm not saying it's a bad job or anything i'm just saying back in my day they used to ping you for you call it pinging pinging means you get told you're going to do it at which point a lot of people or many people in my day would put their chit in they they would just leave they'd say sorry i didn't join up to do that yeah it was sometimes a bit of negotiation there signaller was another one you know very professional respectable commando job but if you don't want to be a signal you don't want to be a signaler and there was a there was a dearth if that's the right word or you know a lack so people would get ping ping for that and then of course you've got the holy grail which is to join the special boat service yeah so the the navy's version of um special forces um so yeah did you find robert like for example the endurance course i mean that is it's just hard isn't it oh yeah i i reckon no disrespect to my brothers across the water there but i reckon the average american marine would probably not get too far on it before going this is yeah and at the time i i believe they've put a little more safety features underneath right at this point i believe they have i think i've seen videos where they but at the time if you fell off any of those obstacles there was nothing to catch you there was i don't think any of them had netting or anything to help if you fell we actually when i was there we there was one lad he was do you remember the double ropes where you come down the double ropes yeah and i think after that you get on the beam and then you run and do the the jump and punch through the through the netting well he was coming down those double ropes and fell and both of his uh his bones came through his wrist so he fell and landed somehow like this and and uh and he was just screaming but that i think that's a good 10 15 foot fall off the double ropes and just had open fractures on both of his wrists um yeah that's the the tarzan assault course or the tarzan course which joins us oh you were talking you were talking the endurance course i'm talking about we're very common yes yes yeah that was um yeah quite quite of course i mean and i remember the first time we did it we had just finished a week-long exercise where we were digging in uh up on woodbury common we had dug in and it rained all week and so they took us through it twice the first time just to show us the obstacles kind of walk us through it just just the part on the common and then after we had gone through it they had showed us how to do each obstacle then we did it again at full speed and then ran back all the way back to libston and it was just it was i actually passed out on that i had hypoglycemia and passed out on the way back it was it was just unbelievable i should explain for our um american brothers and sisters listening so the endurance course you you jog four miles up to the start so you do that in your three-man sec you're in a three-man section you jog four miles to the start then under the timer your your threesome is off you run a four-month you then run a mile course cross country and it's all over it's all either up or down there's no like in between but what is in between are these tunnels some of them are up to a hundred meters long and in my day they were made of corrugated iron which had all collapsed down in so you've got mud pouring through you've got a river running down the tunnel so so it's like a stream and you've got to get in there and crawl that hundred meters and at times you've got that much air to above the water to breathe and of course you've got to try and keep your rifle right you know you're doing this in all your fighting order right so not your burden obviously because it's too small to get through these holes when you've done that four mile course you then hit the what we call the tarmac at the metal road which means tarmac and you've got to run another four miles back to the camp so at this stage you're up to 12 miles i think the course might be a bit shorter than four miles it might it might be about to two and a half or something but anyway you you you're running like 10 miles soaking wet so all of your kit and clothing is now weighing double it if if not treble i mean it feels like you've got a refrigerator on you on your back it's just insane and you've got to run four miles down that metal road back to the camps rifle range then you've got to quickly pull your the barrel of your weapon through um to clean it a little light oil but you you know all this is is it's done in super fast time and then you've got to get 10 shots on the target um which so long as your weapons clean is the easiest bit we did it in february so once we hit that first pull that you wade through this uh river up to your neck you're gonna have your rifle above your head obviously to keep it dry and you pull yourself along on this rope and it's about you know 50 meters to get to the other side and it's in february in the uk which so you're talking it's about minus six air temperature this is um celsius now so it's cold it's winter the ice on the the pool is three inches thick so the first people across have got to break break through the ice um i'm i'm just trying to sell it here because like yourself robert i've seen comparison videos online and it's it's like this guy isn't really getting this is he he i don't think he understands that this is like really [ __ ] hard yeah the hardest thing you ever do in your life and most people can it's just the fact most people couldn't do it no that's true i mean we we i remember the the troops that i that i was troop sergeant for you know you just you just watch guys drop i mean every day we used to have in the initial when they started they would take a true picture of all the recruits that were starting together and and what we would do is as recruits and i'm sure this has probably been around for years but we would we would color out the face of that recruit and so you start with let's say you start with 50 50 nods you know at the end of the troop you may have you know you may have 10 10 faces that have not been blacked out that haven't been back trooped or or just uh you know just couldn't make it moved on try something else got injured went to hunter troop and you just watched the troop dwindle and then you get new you're constantly getting new recruits as well that had been back trooped and they they pick up with your troop i don't i don't know how many i don't know what the ratio is of how many recruits make it on one tribe but it's not very high i mean it really is tough training i would say um not to not to slag off u.s marines because obviously i've been through both but yeah it's it's such hard training i mean and these are young kids and and uh physically just unbelievable you know which i think is why um the other thing i really liked over there that you guys do is you start to give the recruits um responsibility right from the get-go you would you know i mean not necessarily an induction but after that um once that once they joined the troop and training proper you have you have a recruit who's in charge of getting the other recruits outside um in the morning you know you're not like in the u.s marine corps we are yelling at them we literally get them dressed by the numbers you wake them up you stand them online they stand in an open squad bay facing each other and then you send them all you send half to the bathroom while the other half you're getting them dressed and then they switch these these this lot goes to the bathroom and then these guys are getting dressed but you're telling them like put a sock on now right sock um trousers on now pants on you know and you're just doing that step by step and um really they don't have any responsibility as recruits until much later in the training in that 13 weeks and so i don't i think i used to say after i'd done both i used to say that we turn out usmc turns out a great recruit because that's what they are they're still kind of a recruit until they go to their next their next phase and i think by the end of the commando course you've experienced leadership you've been responsible and and had to pay for somebody else's mistakes because you didn't get them ready you know you would you would but you would go out in the morning and a recruit would be there he had got everyone ready and we did that a little bit in the usmc but not as much not to that extent where guys are leading patrols you know actually uh writing an op order writing patrol order and leading a patrol and taking that leadership responsibility so i think at the end of the commando course a lot of a lot of those guys are they're ready to to go out into the the commando forces and actually operate and actually you know be uh be a leader if they have to robert i've got to ask you because um it's not often you get the chance to ask things like this but full metal jacket yeah i watched the making of it again last night it's just one of those things you can watch and watch and watch um lee uh ermey did i say his name right yeah yeah early army um yeah did a fantastic job came on the the film as an advisor and then ended up going no look just give me the part i can i can do it better than this guy right um how for those of us obviously that haven't been in the usmc how how realistic is is that for what it's actually like for the the obviously it's a hollywoodized version but it is uh it's it's pretty accurate i mean it is that's how a drill instructor is there is a stereotypical drill instructor and um i won't give away too many secrets but there's actually roles that drill instructors play um usually you have a three three-man drill instructor team and they each kind of have a role there's kind of the senior guy who we call him the papa bear he's the one who uh makes the recruits feel good um he can speak to them nicely and and kind of get him to uh respond you know he's kind of the father figure and then you've got the one who's a complete a-hole that does nothing but yell he's never never kind and just his job is just to discipline just constantly you know anybody looks around he's in their face yelling at him telling them to keep their eyes to the front and uh making him do push-ups and sit-ups and whatever else and uh incentive exercises and then there's the one who's kind of the drill guy and he's the one that focuses on drill i'm getting them to uh because i i think the usmc i think we have we're just some of the best drill people out there i mean we really take drills seriously and focus on it and recruit training as a way to build teamwork and discipline and get guys to work it together as a unit you know we do that through just um drill for hours on end but uh but yeah that's it's how it is i mean you are you are by the end of your first week as a drone structure you you can't speak anymore you've yelled so much and you're up with them from from basically from dust you're actually awake before the recruits because you wake them up and you go to bed after them and so it's just non-stop for uh for the first i would say first three or four weeks where you are just breaking them down you know as as recruits and you're just instilling that discipline and uh and as time goes on you know you're not yelling as i hopefully you're not yelling as much at the end because hopefully by then you've you've brought them and you see the the transition as they as they make their way out and go out to the fleet marine force and join units but uh but yeah it's it's pretty accurate honestly and these guys their their rig so their their clothing it is immaculate isn't it yeah yeah you you have several uniforms that you bring to work and if you get anything if you get too wrinkly or if if you uh get anything on it it gets a little bit soiled you're switching it out putting on another one and we would do things like we would put um we would spray the inside so you wouldn't sweat through um and just just different tricks you know you would do to always have that appearance and so is it true that if you don't like your drill instructor you you can just shoot them yeah you shoot them and then you and then usually off yourself on the toilet that that was um a bit of an unexpected turn in that well i guess you could see it was something not good was gonna come out of that relationship right right um it it it should be pointed out that people do die in training though don't they i mean i don't know how it was for you guys but we had guys commit suicide we one chat um shot himself in their head we had another recruit pointed his weapon at someone he was he was piss-out and around and he shot shot the guy dead um guys drowning um and this is just the in training bit there's when guys go on leave and they get up to the shenanigans on leave like um car crashes and that sort of thing you you know you lose people there as well is was that your experience yeah we have the same thing you know uh i know once you get in in the usmc i i think it is easier to kind of get out of the royal marines if you decide it's it's not for you but the usmc you're there i mean you are stuck there unless you do something really really stupid but i remember there was kids who would try to uh they would try to go you know go ua unauthorized absence they would disappear in the night try to get off base which it's it's not impossible it's tough but it's not impossible i remember when i was in when i joined in 1984 this kid had tate and i was at paris island which is you know uh it's it's like an island i mean it's proper island so surrounded by water swampy water and this kid had taken all the bleach bottles and emptied them so he could make a raft and he was going to float off of paris island to escape the madness um they could they caught him after i think he'd wasted a lot of bleach and that was about as far as he got but um but yeah i mean it's just not for everybody is it i mean some people just get there and and the shock i remember when i was in again we had this one kid he lost so much weight he was he was overweight um which is rare that you even get into the usmc overweight but he was a little overweight and we were our first day we went to the chow hall to uh to have a breakfast i think it was or maybe lunch and he passed out and you know the human the human being response to someone passing out is to go see if they need help well the drill instructor response is to scream at them and you just yell at them for passing out and you know how could they possibly be such a weak pathetic thing you know and pass out and so the drill instructors just just attacked this kid who's laying there it's just falling face first on the ground and i remember thinking what the hell have i got myself into you know these people are sub-humans um and he made it though he lost a ton of weight and and you know i think that when you make it through training whether it's the usmc or the royal marines you know that that feeling of pride it sticks with you forever right it's just something that you know you've accomplished that goal and it's just it it's with you forever i think that's why you know in the us we say once a marine always a marine you know it's it's we never say ex-marine and now they don't even say former marine they just say he's a marine you know for the rest of your life yes it's the same here but but it kind of is it's you know something goes in you you become a part of something and and and that's something that goes in and you become a part of isn't isn't nothing to do with the technical numbers that are written down in whitehall or the mod right it's [Music] you

Channel: CHRIS THRALL

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Keywords: chris thrall, royal marines, bought the t shirt, podcast, united states marine corps, swat team, police force, police officer, commandos, lympstone, swimmer scout, sbs, special boat service, sas, elite forces

Id: usSMV9SRhnM

Length: 30min 40sec (1840 seconds)

Published: Sat Nov 28 2020