If you've ever served in the British Army…

​

• Did anyone really try and swim the channel in a Stalwart?

• Whatever happened to Wolfgang of Soltau?

• Is it possible to fall asleep on a BFT?

• What’s the best course of action when you shit yourself on a royal parade?

• Why did Hughie Green of Opportunity Knocks invade East Germany?

​

If you've never served in the British Army…

​

Here is a collection of anecdotes from the people who spent fifty years defending freedom and democracy against the Eastern Bloc. It was a mad time, with mad people and some mad experiences. And if it had ever gone from a cold war to a hot one the strategists tell us the result would have been MAD. (Mutually Assured Destruction).

By the way, don’t buy this book if you are easily offended...

​

This book is dedicated to all the Men and Women of the British armed forces who defended democracy during the Cold War.

​

 

I wrote this book because one day my 21 year old son William said to me

“What was it like being a soldier?”

I had to think for a while to come up an answer that would explain it. I told him it was a ‘very’ existence. He looked puzzled, so I explained further.

‘’Everything about it was ‘very’. We got very hot, very cold, very bored, very busy, very tired, very wet, very hungry … Everything about it seemed extreme which is why it was so addictive I suppose.’’

​

Soldiering in the Cold War was such an odd thing to do at such an odd time in world history, that it seemed a pity that as we all get older and pop our clogs, what it was like will be lost. One day I woke up and thought I need to get stories, anecdotes, the kind of thing someone tells you in a pub and put it in a book because then, if people are interested, they will be able to read that book and understand what it was like to be a Cold Warrior.

​

So, although nothing in this book is a great historical revelation, I hope it does two things; firstly, it gives people an insight into what it was like to be an ordinary person during this extraordinary time and secondly and most importantly, I hope it raises a smile on the faces of my fellow Cold Warriors who nod and think

‘Yeah, that happened to me too.’