Early 70s at Laarbruch when RAFG was obsessed by Tacevals and life on the station was dominated by a seemingly endless round of maxevals, minevals and hyper sensitivity whenever the grapevine detected that the NATO Taceval Team had “left barracks”. The result of this focus on being instantly ready was that every eventuality was covered albeit some more realistically than others. One of the ubiquitous preparatory measures was the sandbagging of windows which as achieved by simply placing a notice on every window stating that “this window is sandbagged”. An expedient that seemed to satisfy the Taceval umpires but I suspect would have failed to defeat the Warsaw pact. My role during exercises was mobile defence commander which allowed me the freedom to roam the station in a 3 tonner with my team of trained killers from the avionics centre; normally arriving 5-10 minutes after an incident in time to see the umpires disappearing in the opposite direction for the next planned event. On one such occasion the incident that we narrowly missed was adjacent to one of the RAF Regt 40mm bofors gun emplacements which had the distinction of being the only sites on the station that were actually sandbagged. On arriving I was amused to see that in a neat reversal of what was to be found everywhere else on the station a sign inside the emplacement stating that “This sandbag is a window”