Page 287 - Demo

283the next 3 days walked to the bottom, building shelters and trying to catch some fish on the way. I think Brian Russel was our Directing Staff (Ds) and there may have been someone else . We must have had woods booked for sleeping in each night and so they could see we were all there. I walked on my own, which may have been against range orders but was brilliant. We covered a lot of ground and got pretty tired. As a result, I reduced the amount of walking the students did. They needed time to concentrate on basic survival skills. We also recced parts of the range that we had never used and it opened up more opportunities for later exercises. On the last night, we had all built our shelters and there was nothing much else to do. Our DS arrived with some chicken and chips instead of a life chicken. More or less in the spirit of what we were doing. Someone said, why don%u2019t we pop down to the pub for a quick one it is early and there will not be anyone there. Well, we were still in the pub at closing time. Several punters mentioned the strange smell in the pub that night. The smell is a mixture of smoke and peat and is quite distinctive. It was a great night but trying to get into a parachute shelter and sleeping bag was quite difficult. Particularly as soon as you were in you had to get out to answer a call of nature. I learnt quite a bit from the exercise which got incorporated into the lSEs.Back at Linton at some point a course of students had hired a bus for a night out in York. On the way back they realised that there was a sign on the back window saying School Bus. They took it with them and when the company owning the bus found out, they told the CI that they must have it back. Without it they could not take the children to school. The CI called me in and said that as a punishment he wanted me to do a mini survival exercise in the bomb dump. I pointed out that someone, presumably me, would have to be with them to stop them getting out. I told him that survival training was a serious exercise and should not be used as a punishment. I said that it would have been illegal for the bus to have the School Bus sign displayed when it was being used for pri-