Commando training is not always terribly useful once a Royal Marine has left 3 Commando Brigade. Being able to tune a high-frequency radio in the dark is unlikely to be helpful in civvy street. Leopard-crawling and fireman’s carries are not usually high on the ‘desirable skills’ section of a job specification. My wife is a trained police interviewer and I’ve exhausted all my resistance-to-interrogation techniques in our 17 years of marriage; it turns out that police questioning techniques are better.
So it was refreshing this week to discover that I am still quite handy at waiting and lying still and that this is still a useful occupation.
I became adept at waiting-and lying-still while playing soldiers against the Royal Gurkha Rifles in Brunei, Belize and the considerably less sultry heat of Brecon. Against the Gurkhas, you have to lie very still or else beware. I will never forget chuckling, chortling dervishes sweeping through an ambush I had painstakingly laid out somewhere in Wales, approaching us silently from an entirely unexpected direction and destroying it in a flurry of blank ammunition and stun grenades.
In the Balkans, Afghanistan and Iraq, waiting-and-lying-still continued to be useful by day and night as we sought to distinguish smugglers from shepherds, friend from foe. Waiting and-lying-still, we would hope against hope that it might be Osama bin Laden or Saddam Hussein and not an unwitting goat herder strolling down that track.
White-tailed eagle
Denne historien er fra May 20, 2020-utgaven av Shooting Times & Country.
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Denne historien er fra May 20, 2020-utgaven av Shooting Times & Country.
Start din 7-dagers gratis prøveperiode på Magzter GOLD for å få tilgang til tusenvis av utvalgte premiumhistorier og 9000+ magasiner og aviser.
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United we stand
Following United Utilities' decision to end grouse shooting on its land, Lindsay Waddell asks what will happen if we ignore our vital moors
Serious matters
An old gamebook prompts a contemplation on punt-gunning
They're not always as easy as they seem
While coneys of the furry variety don't pose a problem for Blue Zulu, he's left frustrated once again by bolting bunnies of the clay sort
Debutant gundogs
There's lots to think about when it comes to making the decision about when to introduce your dog to shooting
When the going gets rough
Al Gabriel returns to the West London Shooting School to brush up on his rough shooting technique
The Field Guide To British Deer - BDS 60th Anniversary Edition
In this excerpt from the 60th anniversary edition of the BDS's Field Guide To British Deer, Charles Smith-Jones considers the noise they make
A step too far?
Simon Garnham wonders whether a new dog, a new gun and two different fields in need of protection might have been asking too much for one afternoon's work
Two bucks before breakfast
A journey from old South London to rural Hertfordshire to stalk muntjac suggests that the two aren't as far detached as they might seem
Stalking Diary
Stalkers can be a sentimental bunch, and they often carry a huge attachment to their hill
Gamekeeper
Alan Edwards believes unique, private experiences can help keepers become more competent and passionate custodians of the countryside