That’s quite encouraging to hear Richard - especially when I’m so cynical regarding most British military procurement!
I remember one year we were shown a Soviet suit - which certainly put ours in a quite favourable light. I do remember though that the suits had to be changed if say, for instance we came under chemical attack with liquid agent. I can’t remember the time permitted to be in such an environment, but it was all laid down in some pamphlet or other.
On occasion we did practice suit-changing and prising the damn things - brand new (obviously), folded and sealed to an extraordinary degree - from their packaging was a major hurdle. They then had to be punched out into some sort of wearable shape and then, slowly but surely, we had to replace what we were wearing, cutting away in some cases; I think it was the boots off first, followed by the top, then the trousers, it was all fiendishly complex or seemed so as we wearing full NBC kit and respirators and gloves throughout. We paired up for this but it was pretty onerous stuff.
My favourite bit of NBC good times was self-aid/buddy-aid. Teaching us to do CPR in bunny suits and substituting rescue breathing for doing callisthenics with your buddy’s arms in an attempt to turn them into a human bellows was probably the single most futile thing I ever did in green, and that includes policing cigarette butts from the NCOs smoke pit.
How the hell did we survive? Or is it that we were just young??!!
I must admit, that particular posting in Germany (77-80) was fantastic; I have never been so care -free, happy even, in my life. I was young, fit, had an interesting job (well, most of the time), had spare money, single, and the best mates I’ve ever had. I was a Corporal, so had just enough responsibility without it taking over my life; any real problems I could just push them to a Sergeant somewhere.
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That and the balloon never went up.
I will say, we crapped all over the drills at the time, but given the limited CBRN component of my current job, I do take it a lot more seriously than the majority of my coworkers. I at least know how to figure out which way the wind is blowing.
I posted this a few months back but it is bloody funny:
If you’ve a sufficiently warped militray sense of humour that is(!)
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Yes Brian I really liked them better than ours, then again we never tested them in a chemical environment of any kind but I’m sure they would have been fine.
We too practiced deconning our weapons and equipment only a handful of times and even less the changing out of contaminated suits. Hated anything that had to do with our mopp gear lol. In Germany we had training suits in our rucks and our real ones packed in sealed bags on our M113s. They were called ice packs for some reason…
I always considered us very fortunate to have mostly excellent vehicles and equipment at least when I was in.
Cynic that I am - highly likely due to the mediocre British climate and a mordant predisposition (Capricorn doncherknow) - I do tend to moan a lot! Looking back, we weren’t perhaps that badly off; I’m not an Infanteer but our kit was I suppose relatively decent despite the lack of a MICV - which I do feel - given that the Germans had one (Marder) in the early 70s, was a bit of a noticeable lack. Our personal weapons were punchy enough: the 7.62mm of our SLR would ensure that any enemy hit would stay down.
Our MBT at the time – Chieftain – was robust enough too (though not especially agile) – and yet possessed the only armament and possibly even armour, guaranteed to see off the Soviet T-64 (that is, amongst NATO at the time).
As discussed, our NBC kit was, in the scheme of things, first class.
That’s the look I usually had on my face when told we were about to do NBC training lol……
Brian, the Chieftain and Centurion too for that matter , are among my favorite tanks of all time. I have a number of the latter in different versions in my stash but only one chieftain. Gotta fix that someday lol
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Individual Chemical Equipment. Ours were kept in the tank on the M60s, and in the NBC room or our duffle bags on the M1s.
Ken
That’s right Ken I completely forgot. My memory is getting worse and worse lol. Thank you for that clarification!