Unfiltered Story #296132

When I am 14 I join the cadet branch of the RAF at my school. As part of this every summer there is the chance to go on a summer camp for a week to an RAF base and join up with a couple of other schools. Here are some of my favourite stories from these.

1. Our group of 5 or so are travelling up to the base and I am navegating, this is just before GPS on your phone so I have the paper map in front of me. I’m trying to work out which exit we need on the roundabout so we go round about 3 times before exiting. On the way back we recognise the roundabout and at the same time we all yell out “Miss, can we go around again”. And we did, laughing.

2. That same trip there is suddenly a huge thunk as something hits the windscreen of the minibus. We stop at the next service station and quite clearly is a cartoon like grease mark of a bird in flight where it hit us. We spend the rest of the day making this shape and squawking at each other.

3. Part of one trip we go to the military police and see the dogs and even get a demonstration of them with one of the other offices acting as the target. The guy in charge then turns to our teachers and asks if anyone of them wants a go being attacked by the dog. One of them gets dressed up in the suit and being attacked by a police dog to wild cheers by us teenagers. It is also traditional at these camps to give paper plate awards for various memorable escapades of that week. Yep you guessed it, he got the “dog food award” complete with a drawing of a can of dog food.

4. The RAF officer assigned to us one camp turns out to be a new guy at this and we notice this when we go to the range to do some shooting with his deferential attitute towards the other RAF officer on duty that day. With no mercy at the end of the camp we give him the “St. X’s bitch award”. He takes it slightly confused and we can see him conferring with our teachers in a “what do I do with this?” manner.

6. I am walking with a couple of mates around the base to the tuck shop to get some snacks while dressed in civis so we look just like the kids from the base. Now this is RAF High Wycome so all of the top brass are here. Suddenly one of my mates stops dead and goes “holy shit we are in trouble”. Turns out that the Head of the RAF, the highest guy in the organisation had just driven past us (he has an insignea in his window to mark who he is) and we hadn’t been paying enough attention to notice and salute as we should do (and this is not optional in uniform, seriously). If we had been in uniform we would have been chewed out for at least 15 minutes and maybe kicked off the base… We stand there for a second and laugh in relief.

6. Every camp we do an evening exercise where we get a mission breifing and a task to do, like find and rescue the causlty and bring him back to base. We get a map, instructions and released into a training area. One time there are 3 groups, my one gets back first followed by the second about 10 minutes later. Another 5 minutes later we can see the teachers are getting concerned for the first group as they should have been back ages ago but there are no sign of them. When they do appear it turned out they had gone 2km off course into an acutal exercise with the real RAF using live ammunition and got chased off by guard dogs. The guys in charge thought the real soliders would be too far away for us school kids to get anywhere near them…

7 (and final story). As we are part of the RAF we have 2 main uniforms, our “blues” which is normal work attire and our “greens” which is the traditional camo pattern seen in the armed forces. With our greens comes a t-shirt to wear under the jacket which is normally green or brown. Ours however, is burgandy as our guy in charge is a super awesome guy… who is from the parachute regiment whose beret colour is burgandy. This means our t-shirts are burgandy too which is very unusual. Not everyone knows this and everything runs smoothly for the first day as we are just in our civis or blues so there is nothing to notice. The next day when we first report in our greens one of the teachers from the other school throws a fit how we are not in the correct uniform and we must immediately change into t-shirts as stated by the regulations while this guy is shouting behind us about how bigger idiots we are. Now we only have our uniforms and a few clothes for the evening when we are “off duty”. I have nothing that is the required green or brown except maybe a washed out t-shirt faded from black to a kinda dark brown. Our school group all meet up to discuss our choices before heading to get changed. The t-shirt I chose, a Nightwish t-shirt. So that is how I ended up spending a day marching around a military base wearing a heavy metal t-shirt.