Originally Posted by
ShyTorque
In the 1980s, at very short notice I was made heli detachment commander for supporting a NATO joint special forces exercise in Denmark. I was told a sub-imprest was ready for collection. Having not been to Denmark before and having just come back from another det in Belize (and being based in Germany), I had no idea about exchange rates. I counted out the money (which seemed to take forever and filled most of my nav bag), signed for it, went back to the squadron and we departed very shortly afterwards. On arrival, I discovered we were living in very basic conditions at a training camp (sleeping in a bunkhouse with no furniture) and there was no secure place on site to lodge the cash because there were no permanent staff. After a few days it suddenly dawned on me how much cash I actually had in my bag...it was more than the value of a small house! I used my nav bag as a pillow for the rest of the week. When I took the money back to base SHQ it took them two hours to re-count the cash - thankfully all was correctly accounted for. It appeared someone at Gutersloh had made a mistake with exchange rates and issued me with ten times the value of the cash I was supposed to have taken.
You may be interested, or otherwise, to learn that your own, and many others, trip to Denmark directly benefitted from my own on 431 MU.
Denmark was our "jewel in the crown " location, made a change from the usual RAFG locations after all, and XV kindly provided the opportunity when two of their Buccs had a brief but passionate meeting mid air when operating from Karup. The trip was "memorable " from the onset, however, it was the not so little matter of LOA that came to prominence .We were pleasantly surprised to learn we had to pay for our food and that the cheapest meal cost Dkr 9 which was the total daily sum of the LOA. This clearly did not leave much to contribute to the local economy not helped by, when we said as much to Bruggen, the bean counters asking the very last person they could have chosen to confirm all was well, a senile C/ T who drove non stop "to save money ", the RAF's, not his, from Bruggen to Karup and who found one meal a day was more than adequate, for him, plus his nights did not involve anything more than Horlicks.
Our boss, being one of the very few Engo's who actually knew about both engineering and management decided to investigate himself. He diligently followed our advice, to comply with driving regs, obviously, to night stop in Hamburg and then carried out a detailed investigation on arrival at Karup over the course of about 5 days. The result, on his return, was an almost overnight increase across the RAF as a whole to an LOA of Dkr27....how he managed this we never found out but he did have some useful contacts it seems.
Back to the tedium of the topic and it wasn't my fault I was soaring over Bruggen one Saturday when on O/Cpl when it was lunch time and one of the delights was to sell meal tickets at the Mess. Some people got a bit upset about this so called dereliction but, as I pointed out, had it been that imperative they could have contacted me on the infamous "Storno " we were expected to cart around, and which I duly had with me. Unfortunately, "Storno's" could be temperamental as we know and the "on / off switch was notable in this respect. Thankfully, the glider radios were less so and the broadcast to report "immediately !!" was heard by somebody returning to the launch point.