Corporal faces court martial after filming brutal training

The Army instructor filmed shouting abuse was nothing I haven’t seen before – or dished out

AN ARMY instructor is facing a court martial after filming a recruit who was reduced to tears as she underwent brutal training.

Mobile phone footage of the incident was uploaded to Facebook and has been viewed more than 300,000 times.

It shows the corporal subjecting the distraught trainee to a torrent of verbal

‘I hope that the identity of the corporal is discovered and that he is removed from the Army at the earliest time’

abuse during a bayonet exercise.

After wading through a stream, the recruit is summoned before the instructor, who repeatedly yells that she is “------- weak” and demands to know whether she is a killer or a mouse.

She is marched towards a pile of sandbags which represent the enemy and ordered to attack them but is chastised for her efforts. The corporal feigns sympathy and asks why she is crying before he launches another attack and says she is “nowhere near the end”.

It comes just weeks after the Army launched a “softer” recruitment campaign targeting a broader base, which emphasises it is OK for soldiers to cry.

The footage, which names the recruit, has been mocked up online to mimic one of the new adverts, branded with the slogan “This is Belonging.”

Lord Dannatt, the former head of the Army, said the instructor’s behaviour was “unacceptable”. He told The Mail on Sunday: “I hope the identity of the corporal is discovered very quickly and that he is removed from the Army at the earliest possible moment. Tomorrow would be a day too late.”

Johnny Mercer, a Conservative MP and former Army officer, said bayonet training had to be brutal but criticised the decision to film it, which was a “deep breach of trust and respect”.

An Army spokesman said: “We are aware of mobile phone footage of military training, it is now the subject of an investigation and it would be inappropriate to comment further.”

An Army instructor is facing a court martial after a video of him shouting abuse at a young female recruit went viral. He’s in trouble for filming the scene without the recruit’s consent, but what seems to have shocked most of the 500,000plus viewers of the clip is his language. “Are you a f---ing killer or a mouse?” he shouts. “What you crying for? Show me your war face!” Lord Dannatt, the former head of the Army has described the corporal’s behaviour as “totally unacceptable”.

Filming the tirade was out of line. But what he says? Sorry, but I’ve heard far worse in my time. I’ve dished it out too, when I was a corporal training young recruits. When you’re teaching young men and women to become soldiers, you’re taking people from the real world and putting them into another world. We’re not forming a knitting circle: the job spec of a soldier is to destroy the enemy in close combat. What it boils down to is getting a young 20-something to be able to put a rifle butt into their shoulder or fix a bayonet to kill another human being, and to be able to survive that, not just at the time, but later on, in their thirties and forties, when they’re married with children.

If you don’t train them to have the mental and physical ability to carry out that task, they’re going to die and we’re going to lose. Yes there are people’s rights, and the politically correct atmosphere we all live in now, but in the Army, this is what we do, and this is how we do it.

In the real world, we might find that unsavoury, but that’s what’s needed for success. You can’t put real-life expectations of employment into a contract where you have no liability. You’re signing up with the possibility that in doing your job you might get killed. And when things kick off and people are in the fight, they’re expected to be a lot more brutal than what you see in that video.

Part of the Army’s duty of care is to produce soldiers who not only look presentable and can march, but who, when they’ve been in the field for three weeks and they’re scared and their mate’s just been killed and they’re scared they’re going to get killed too, will still, when their commander shouts “fix bayonets”, do it – not only to do their job but to keep themselves alive. If you haven’t got that sort of product at the end of 28 weeks’ basic training, you haven’t got an Army. So the Army’s duty of care is not just for moral reasons, but for tactical and financial reasons too. It’s expensive to train soldiers – ultimately, we want them to be around for at least 12 years so we get our money’s worth.

The system is actually pretty good. Within the Nato standards of training we rate extremely well. We produce really good soldiers because of that duty of care. And this is not about men versus women. Women have always been part of the Order of Battle. The military recruits from society, and as long as someone can do the job, who cares what gender they are? Not me.

The military is constantly evolving. The Army is overhauling physical training at the moment, using new sports science techniques to reduce injuries from “hell for leather” training, where new recruits are physically thrashed in the early days. We’re preparing recruits for more specific physical demands in the field. We’re bringing in different body armour which is lighter and less bulky. Recruits aren’t as fit as they once were, but the Army can’t moan about it, they’ve got to work out how to get them from there to here. And when these young recruits join their units, they’ll still be tabbing (running with weight) because that’s what you do in the Army – it’s a critical advance to battle. We can tweak the kit, but you’ve still got to be able to do the job.

And it’s the same when it comes to basic training. Yes, this video shows someone who’s clearly not great at instructing and who quite rightly is likely to be hauled up for videoing without permission. But a bit of shouting? That’s how we do it. At the end of the day, we’re a volunteer army. If you don’t like it you can leave, but the Army has a saying that has been learnt the hard way: “Train hard, fight easy. Train easy, fight hard and die.”

To think men and women aren’t or shouldn’t be affected by this stuff is wrong. But if they are, maybe they need to look at doing another job.