Jez Scott 16 Pln D Coy - Exercise Eternal Triangle
Eternal Triangle ’86 was, as I’m sure you are aware, that wonderful exercise to see just how many squaddies the Army can annoy in two weeks. It was raining when we arrived at Frankfurt, it didn’t stop raining until the Monday of the second week and they chose that day to make it an NBC day. Thanks... It was so wet and cold on Luneburg Heath that three of the lads got trench foot, I was taken off the field with hypothermia and two of the guys on the way to the field hospital to have their feet treated got hypothermia in the back of the 4 tonner. Happy days... We slept one night in a barn full of agricultural machinery, another in a school in a village which became the scene of a smoker that was capped with a 15-man bare-arsed human pyramid. I have the photo but am keeping it discreet for the sake of decency! At one point on the exercise a German farmer who was a WW2 veteran wandered over and took the piss out of our poor trenches and told a few cracking tales. The second week was almost entirely spent digging level 2 trenches then moving on to the next point to dig more level 2 trenches. We finished the fortnight with a company of Paras moving through our position amid much smoke and atmospheric dawn light as we held the nominal “HQ” position. It was wet, cold, miserable and we ran out of fags but it’s the one we always talk about.
16 pln were known as The Stinkies and Red Noses were the order of the day – this was pre-Comic Relief and they were abandoned after this. Stinkies were a platoon that were highly motivated, with exceptional morale, skill and dedication. We were often asked to be enemies for other units on exercise and regularly had reports back that we were extremely professional, even from regulars.
