Cold War Soldier

The British Army - Cold War Germany in the nineteen seventies. Those on the Iron curtain front line waited in anticipation for what was, at the time, considered a highly likely attack by the Eastern Bloc.Outnumbered ten to one with aging and in a great deal of cases outdated equipment, they trained, waited, and carried on life in married quarters and barrack blocks as normally as possible; kids went to school, wives swapped gossip at coffee mornings with friends, while single soldiers living in the block made a regular habit of getting blasted . I joined a Royal Engineer Field Squadron from two years training as a boy soldier in November 1973. I was still six months off my eighteenth birthday when I arrived at the gates of Roberts Barracks Osnabruck. The Squadron I was joining, 16 Field Squadron, was one of the oldest recorded Squadrons in the Corps; formed in 1825.In June the following year it would be carrying out another duty - a rotational tour of four months active service in Northern Ireland, a province of the UK under siege from the Provisional IRA. This book is a true account based on my first seven months in the Squadron; from my arrival in November 1973 until our departure on Operation Banner in June 1974. It is not a gung-ho warrie story, it is a factual account of my life during those seven months and the lives of my friends. How the regiment worked and also how we trained and spent our ‘off-time’ as live-in soldiers waiting for condition ‘Black’.