: Mike Trueman
: The Storms Adventure and tragedy on Everest
: Vertebrate Digital
: 9781898573951
: 1
: CHF 5.30
:
: Sonstige Sportarten
: English
: 300
: Wasserzeichen
: PC/MAC/eReader/Tablet
: ePUB
In August 1979 twenty-seven-year-old Mike Trueman set sail from the south-west coast of Wales, en route to Cornwall. The young army helicopter pilot was helping to move his friend's yacht from Northern Ireland to the south coast of England. But as they sailed out into the Irish Sea, the sky turned progressively darker and the winds gathered pace. Over the next twenty-four hours the two young sailors battled to survive force-10 gales in what became known as the Fastnet disaster and which claimed the lives of fifteen sailors off the coast of Ireland. Almost seventeen years later, Trueman was at Camp 2 at 6,400 metres on Mount Everest as the May 1996 tragedy unfolded high above him. As stricken guides, clients and Sherpas tried to survive the fierce storms which engulfed the upper mountain, Trueman was able to descend and - using his twenty-four years of experience as an officer in the British Army - coordinate the rescue effort from Base Camp. The Storms is the remarkable memoir of a British Army Gurkha officer. Trueman, a veteran of twenty expeditions to the Himalaya, gives a candid account of life inside expeditions to the highest mountain in the world. He gives a unique personal perspective on the 1996 Everest storm, as well as on the fateful day in May 1999 when Briton Mike Matthews disappeared high on the mountain after he and Trueman had summited.

– Chapter 2 –


Boy Soldier


I joined the British Army as a ‘boy soldier’ at the age of sixteen in 1968. Some thirty-nine years later I was head of a United Nations team tasked to remove ‘soldiers’ of a similar age from the ranks of the Maoist army at the end of the civil war in Nepal. While my friends at the grammar school I had just left were enjoying their final two years of education, I was part of a hard regime which was ‘beasted’ from before dawn until well after normal people would have gone to sleep.

Most of the instructors who guided us through those embryonic days of our military service were experienced soldiers, well-skilled in passing on their knowledge, but there were the exceptions. The last post-Second World War conscripts had left the British Army in 1963 and in 1968 the odd instructor still relied on harsh bullying from this era to guide their charges.

I have few fond memories of those exacting days, except for the times, every three months, when we were given the opportunity to take part in adventurous activities. I canoed, climbed and went on a parachute course, but it was my experience at the Army Outward Bound School that was to have the most long-term effect. In those days we were graded on the course and I was fortunate enough to be given a rarely awarded ‘A’ grade, which was to have an impact on my career. It certainly helped to counteract the report I received at the end of my time as a boy soldier, which to some extent reflected my response to an ogre of an instructor. At some stage during most weeks of my last term, I appeared for a disciplinary interview in front of my company commander, on a trumped-up charge made by a particular bully of an instructor.

I knew a lot about the weapons of the British Infantry when I became an ‘adult’ soldier in 1970, but I knew very little about life outside of the army. I was naïve and rightfully failed a selection process to become an army officer, and this led to disillusionment with my chosen career. It wasn’t, however, a case of giving a month’s notice. Having ‘signed on’ for a number of years, the only way to get out of the system – and even this took many months – was to purchase a discharge and the army made sure that this was a very expensive option.

I transferred to an air despatch unit at Thorney Island on the south coast of England. This was the start of four very happy years, during which I changed from a disillusioned teenager into an ambitious adult. The unit was tasked with delivering supplies and equipment by parachute to forces around the world, and also with providing support during civilian emergencies, such as the distribution of food during the famine which hit Nepal in 1973 – a task I sadly missed.

In the early 1970s Britain’s army was focused on operations in Northern Ireland, a necessary security role, but somewhat separated from the type of soldiering I dreamed of being involved in when I joined the army. The enemy could have been anyone who you passed on the streets of Belfast, a city hardly different from any other part of the United Kingdom. The extreme verbal abuse – which would have offended a sailor in Nelson’s navy from the mouths of children not old enough to go to school – through to elderly people older than my grandparents, was a sad reflection of the depth of hatred which existed in post-war twentieth century Britain. It would be years before I would experience a similar level of hatred in the war in the former Yugoslavia.

One of the tasks of 55 Air Despatch Squadron was to support Britain’s Special Forces, and in the early 1970s the opportunity to be attached to an SAS squadron during the war in Oman’s southern province of Dhofar was as emotionally exciting at one end of the spectrum as soldiering in Northern Ireland was emotionally depressing at the other end. I first went to