"These tales remind me of being on the mobile defence force at Leuchars. Essentially made up of sprogs who were of no use to their normal trades, we tore around in stripped down landies armed to the teeth with SLRs and LMGs.
Creeping round the northern HAS after intruders one dark night it all felt very Rambo until I felt a hand over my mouth and a whispered Gotcha! in my ear. I was led round a HAS to find the rest of the patrol looking sheepish under guard.
I think the Scots guards were the intruders.
They let us capture them the next day though."
Reminds me of a similar experience at Buchan in the mid 80's when 45 Commando came up to play as intruders. All manner of fun and games ending on the last day with them hovering a Commando Sea King about 5ft off the roof of the BiF, before storming the joint throwing flash-bangs around in most of the Execs offices. Bet that went down well....
Have to say though, considering that most of the time we were more used to being intruded by the Lossie & Leuchars rockape Sqns (who in those days werent averse to giving one of us 'guins an SLR butt in the chops if they dared to try and resist capture), most of the station's guardforce learned more in those three days from 45 than we had done in years.
They fully debriefed the whole guard force at the end of each days play, which was something the Rocks didnt do (maybe figured it was up to the Station Regiment WO to pass on lessons learned instead) which went along the lines of: "This is what happened in this particular exercise inject; this is how you reacted and this was the end result; Now, this is how we think you
should react in future, given your level of training and equipment." Top blokes.
Mind you, as has been rightly observed, most of, if not all of UKADGE would have been wiped out by AS4 strikes (or worse) in the first few hours anyway. Documents I remember seeing at the time were predicting raids of 5-7
regiments in size at a time.
How many Bears/Badgers/Backfires per regiment in those days??
