Today Everything Changes: Quick Read Read Free

big way and trained three times a week. It was great, but it wasn’t enough.

Chapter Six
    I was still angry with everyone who had more than me. A group of mates and I started tipping over Portaloos so we could snatch the occupants’ handbags as they tried to stop themselves being covered in shit. After all, they deserved it, I thought.
    The only problem was, not everyone saw things the way I did.
    One day, three of us were about to start wrecking a flat in Dulwich that was full of nice, shiny things that someone else had worked really hard for. However, this time the police were waiting. I made a run for it, but got cornered near the railway station by a policeman and his dog.
    At the age of sixteen, I ended up in juvenile detention, or jail for kids.
    Detention didn’t help me at all. It just made me worse. As I saw it, the reason I was in there was everyone else’s fault. It just reinforced my belief that no one cared about me. And if they didn’t care, then why should I?
    Then, one day, the army came to see if any of us wanted to be soldiers.
    ‘I want to fly helicopters,’ I said to the sergeant. He said that I could if I wanted to. They couldn’t catch this boy out. He had shown me a film with a little two-seater helicopter (called a Scout) in it. The pilot wore a pair of shorts and a T-shirt as he flew really low over the beaches of Cyprus. He was waving down at the girls, and they were waving up at him. I rather imagined myself at the controls. My biggest decision, I reckoned, was the colour scheme of my shorts.
    There and then, I took a simple test in English and maths, which I failed. I was told I was ‘functionally illiterate’, which meant I could cope with only the simplest questions. My literacy levels were that of an average eleven year old.
    But what did I care? I was going to fly helicopters!
    I was given a train ticket and went to Birmingham where hundreds of other would-be soldiers gathered for three days of tests, to see if I was good enough for the army. We had medical checks, too, and did a bit of sport. We watched films and were given talks about army ‘combat arms’ and ‘support arms’ and where soldierswere stationed around the world. I loved it. The Army Air Corps seemed to operate everywhere. Cyprus and Hong Kong looked good to me for starters.
    As I was doing the tests, though, the terrible truth dawned on me that there was no way I could become a pilot. I didn’t have a qualification to my name. The thought of all the time I’d wasted, mucking around the estate, flashed in front of me as if I was a drowning man.
    At the final interview, an officer said to me, ‘You could go into the Army Air Corps and train as a refueller. However, I don’t think you’d be best suited to that. You’re an active sort of chap, aren’t you, McNab?’
    ‘I guess so.’
    ‘So do you fancy travelling, seeing a bit of the world?’
    ‘That’s me.’
    ‘Well, why not a career in the infantry? The battalions move every two or three years, so you’d be going to different places. It’s a more exciting life for a young man. We have vacancies in the Royal Green Jackets.’
    ‘Right. I’ll have some of that.’
    After all, I was only going to do my three years, then go back to south London and become one of those well-paid panel beaters.

Chapter Seven
September 1976
    I’d got on to the train at Waterloo suffering from what I thought was the world’s worst haircut.
    There were lots of other lads on the train with their bags of gear, but nobody was talking to anyone else. We were still silent when we got into the fleet of white double-decker buses that were waiting to take us new ‘Junior Leaders’, as we were called, to the battalion’s camp at Shorncliffe, near Folkestone, in Kent.
    The idea behind the Infantry Junior Leaders Battalion was not only to train sixteen and seventeen year olds for a year to become infantry soldiers but also to become the infantry’s future leaders, the corporals,