The first thing I need to tell you is that this really happened. I know it's all very unlikely but remember one in a million chances happen nine times out of ten.
First let me describe myself. My name is Martin.
I'm not exactly what you'd call attractive but then nor am I hideous. My complexion isn't what I'd want it to be but I'm not repugnant as such. Pretty much normal really. Average height but maybe a little short for my weight, if you know what I mean. Oh, and I'm eighteen and, well, a bit geeky if I'm really honest.
When I say geeky, I mean that I spend my time with like-minded peers playing computer games, discussing new technology, the latest episode of Heroes or a comic. What I don't do is anything athletic or anything related to girls.
Girls are completely out-of-bounds. Don't get me wrong, I love girls. I love looking at their pretty radiant faces and their gorgeous beckoning curves. I spend as much time as I can tossing off to my fine collection of pornographic magazines or surfing the most excellent content of the interweb. I am immensely intimately familiar with the anatomy of the female sexual organs, or at least their two-dimensional representations on paper and screen.
But I don't talk to actual real girls because they are terrifying. When a girl talks to me, I get tongue-tied and anxious; I blush like a neon sign and mumble incoherently like an idiot. And, of course, then they laugh at me, not always in an unkind way but alarmingly all the same. Which makes it even worse.
So although I go to a large mixed school with a lot of girls, I stick to my own kind as much as I humanly can, only talking to the opposite sex when absolutely unavoidably forced to do so.
I said I don't do anything athletic which is a bit of a lie. There's one thing I have to do. You see the school I go to is an old-fashioned English public school, although there's no boarding, so we all have to do some extra-curricular stuff such as a sport or, in my case, CCF.
CCF stands for Combined Cadet Force, which is basically a bunch of school-kids playing at being soldiers and the like. I took the CCF option because it was better than a mandatory sport such as Rugby (brutally physical), Cricket (I have no hand-to-eye coordination) or Rowing (just not fit enough).
Instead we get to prance around in a uniform, playing with ancient (unloaded) weapons and pretending we're Rambo. Or in my case perhaps more Rimbaud. Anyway, I'll be honest, I do kind of enjoy the drilling, the shoe polishing and the range shooting. Maybe because you don't have to a physical behemoth to do them so I can compete if that's the right term.
I chose the Army over the RAF because, as far as could see, the RAF cadets don't actually get to go flying; they just talk about it a lot. And anyway their uniform just looks a bit camp. At least as an Army cadet we get a beret and a shiny badge and access to WW2 rifles and big short wave radios.
The bit that really isn't any fun at all though is the exercises. I don't mean press-ups or squat-thrusts, I mean all of us going away for the weekend to some god-forsaken part of Hampshire or Berkshire to run around in the woods firing blanks like we're real soldiers. That's not so bad by itself; what I do object to though is the fact that these exciting episodes are punctuated by hiking for miles lugging around a ridiculously heavy radio pack or a virtually antique yet preposterously weighty .303 rifle which all seems pointless in a world where Land Rovers have been invented and work very well. After all we're only pretending to be soldiers.
But worst of all is the effect of the lack of supervision on my schoolmates. It's not quite Lord of the Flies but there is without a doubt a level of feral regression when you send out a bunch of school-kids and tell them to walk a few miles until they find this other bunch of school-kids and then pretend to fight them. And what's even worse is when you impose a formal command structure.
You see I've been doing this for a good five years now, getting by with the minimum I can in order to satisfy requirements and I've been promoted to Lance-Corporal. For those you not familiar with the ranks of the British Army this is just one step above a Private who are the lowest of the low. All my peers are at least Sergeants if not higher which shows that life really is a popularity contest, I guess.
But what that means is that I've got sixteen-year old kids who outrank me and can order me around when we're on exercise. And of course they do, incessantly, gratuitously and unpleasantly. Little bastards one and all.
Of course there are some teachers who are ex-forces and officers from the Territorial Army involved but they can't cover a hundred cadets over a ten mile by ten mile area, so abuses of power happen.
Which brings me to the exercise I've just been on, the last of the school year and therefore my life.
It was called Operation Bulldog. No idea why, but I suppose you need a macho name for these things. Operation Dahlia just doesn't have the same ring to it.
Anyway, it was in the spring. The weather was dry and reasonably warm, an important consideration when you're sleeping on the ground under an outstretched supposedly waterproof poncho.
It was the last day of the exercise so I couldn't wait to get back home. I was dirty and smelly and tired. Tired as in exhausted but also tired of eating non-specific canned meat and oddly tasteless biscuits, tired of drinking water from streams and tired of, quite literally, shitting in the woods.
Anyway I was in the Green platoon and our mission was to capture the colours of the other two platoons, cleverly named Red and Blue respectively. They were of course trying to do the same thing to us. Cue lots of trekking around trying to find their camp and sitting in the bushes in the vain hope of ambushing someone.
I was lucky in terms of the squad I was in. It was led by Staff Sergeant Andrews and Sergeant McRoss, both of whom were in my year at school and neither of whom felt the particular need to exert their authority by treating anyone like shit. Also we had three cadets, all fourth years, so of around fourteen or fifteen years old.
The other reason I was lucky was because in real life Andrews and McRoss were Jenny Andrews and Chloe McRoss, and they were both breathtakingly lovely. Jenny was tall, blonde and slender, with sparkling blue eyes, endless legs and a stupendous arse. Chloe was darker and a touch shorter but much curvier too, with large boobs, big brown eyes and a generous smile. When she looked at you, it was like she was seeing right into you. She could make me blush just by being in the same room. They were best friends and both were stunning and so spent a lot of time populating my varied and detailed erotic fantasies as objects of the utmost desire.
Now, it was nice to spend time with Jenny and Chloe, but in reality they pretty much ignored me as I didn't seem to be able to talk in their presence which, as you can imagine, precluded much conversation. I, along with the rest of the squad, just followed along as the two of them made all the decisions.
As one of three squads in the Green platoon, we had been assigned with the task of attacking Red's base and capturing their colours, which was basically just a flag. For once, an ambush actually worked. Unfortunately, we were the ambushees rather than the ambushers.
It happened very quickly; all I can really remember is some sort of war-cry being bellowed from my left before two huge blokes tackled me. I didn't put up much of a fight.
Within a few minutes, I was sitting with my back to a tree in a small clearing, my arms tied around the back of it with some blue plastic rope. It wasn't a big tree but it still felt very sturdy. When no-one was looking I tried to move but I couldn't.
I was worried. I had been really glad I hadn't been a member of the Red Platoon as all the senior ranks seemed to be composed of ignorant slow-witted bullies. The only thing imaginable that was any worse than being in the platoon was being their prisoner.
Not that they would physically torture me in any permanently harmful way. But, in my role as a natural victim, I didn't think I would be enjoying the next few hours much.
The two oafs who had so triumphantly captured me were actually a couple of years younger than me but they didn't hold back with their insults and empty, I hoped, promises of brutality.
We were interrupted a few minutes after my ignominious detainment when another four meat-headed morons turned up, dragging the struggling Chloe and Jenny between them. It looked like the rest of the squad had managed to get away, the cowards.
I have to say they put up a real fight of it, much more than I did. Maybe it was because they didn't think they would be struck in return, but they kicked and screamed and punched heroically until their hands were finally tied behind them. They even had to hold Chloe down until she realised that she couldn't get away.
When I saw who was in charge of the Red squad, I realised why they had struggled so much.
Kenny Carter was captain of the school rugby and cricket teams; he was preposterously handsome and outlandishly muscular; he was head of the Army section of the CCF, ranked as a Sergeant-Major. And he was a complete twat.
Don't get me wrong, this isn't about jealousy, although I'd be lying if I said I wasn't jealous of his good looks and popularity. It's just that Kenny was an unpleasant bully, someone who enjoyed a bit of casual cruelty, verbal or physical. He wasn't stupid either which just made him better at being a wanker.
And for some reason girls weren't able to see past his impossibly good-looking exterior to the ugliness inside. In fact the lovely flawless Jenny and he had been going out for a couple of years. They were the perfect couple, successful and attractive, the Posh & Becks of the school.
