A New Career
Back home I attended RCB which I failed so badly that I now had no option but to join the army as a soldier. In 1993, equipped with a plum in my mouth, sounding and looking like a potential officer, naïve and wet behind the ears, I arrived at the Scottish Division Depot, Glencorse, for basic training. I stood out like a sore thumb so was easy prey for my fellow soldiers and instructors. I was never bullied, just tested, and never broken. Instead I kept trying and discovered that after lots of hard work, I was leading my peers, physically and academically. My brain seemed to fit the military methods of instruction. I was in line for the prize of best recruit but because of my privileged education was instead awarded the prize for best shot, simply because I was also the best shot. My Platoon Commander identified me as a potential officer and insisted that the RCB had another look at me.
Two and a half years later I passed RCB with a pass to attend the Rowallan Company pre course to the commissioning course at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst (RMAS). Rowallan Company had a horrific failure rate and had to be passed to move on to the commissioning course. Injured during Rowallan Company, I had to spend time in rehabilitation but kept fighting to battle back to fitness and emerged out of it fitter than before to start Rowallan Company again. It was challenging but I kept trying and passed, and then learned that my Platoon Commander on Rowallan Company had discovered that the reason for my having to attend Rowallan Company at all was simply a typo in the report form. “Rowallan Company Yes or No”. The secretary had put the cross in the wrong box!
While on the commissioning course we had to take part in organised sports. Being more than aware of my inadequacies on the sports pitch and being able to shoot, ride, and swim, I started to train with the fledgling Modern Pentathlon team in which I was taught how to run properly. Suddenly I could run competitively and despite not being able to fence in the traditional sense, I developed a fencing strategy to keep me competitive in competition. I kept trying and competing and was eventually awarded RMAS colours. But this wasn’t enough. Wanting also to get stronger and tougher for life as an infantry officer I volunteered to box for the Academy. For almost the entire commissioning course I was never good enough for my coach to put me forward for a fight. But I kept trying and, in my very last term at Sandhurst, I secured a fight against an officer of the Metropolitan Police. Sadly I was concussed with a brilliant punch on my right temporal lobe. Despite relishing every exercise we undertook, the exercise which started a few days later was a disaster for me. I was utterly exhausted and ended up being put in a shell scrape for the remainder of the exercise to sleep.
I recovered shortly afterwards and in 1996, just four years after joining as a soldier, I was commissioned into the First Battalion The King’s Own Scottish Borderers. A few short months later, during that particularly bitter winter of 1996, despite never having scored a try I was rugby training with the battalion rugby team on a rock hard frozen pitch. I was the victim of a brilliant tackle which saw me smash my right temporal lobe off the ground. I was yet again concussed and as before, in the platoon competition that started just a few days later, despite being in with a good shout of winning it with the outstanding platoon that I had, I collapsed within a few miles of starting the long tactical advance to battle (TAB or insertion) into the exercise and was rushed to hospital with weak life signs. I recovered a few days later.
I kept turning up for rugby training even though I was never selected, until one day. The battalion was thin on the ground, so I was selected to play for the battalion in the Selkirk Sevens tournament. As King’s Own Scottish Borderers, we were playing in front of a home crowd and, despite getting trounced by the eventual winners, we kept our chins up and never gave up. The crowd would cheer us on whenever we won possession and, all of a sudden, out of the blue, I had the ball in my hands and the scream ‘RUN!’ came from the crowd and my team. I ran as fast as I possibly could, expecting to be smashed at any point. I looked for support but there was none. I kept running and waiting for that hit and, before I knew it, I was over the line and touched down the ball for a try. I had scored my first ever try just twenty years after first playing rugby. I will never forget the roar from the crowd as I did so, and the hugs from my teammates. What a wonderful feeling it was, even though we lost by over fifty points. None of the team were allowed to buy a drink all afternoon and into the evening and our hands were never empty. That was a great day.
Over the next sixteen years, I played a full part in operations in Northern Ireland, Bosnia, Iraq and Afghanistan. I also kept training as a modern pentathlete, and the Army saw an opportunity to get their male team to the Sydney 2000 Olympics. I came third in the army championships so was selected for the team and started training with the national team in Bath. Sadly, the men’s national team were not competitive enough internationally to be put forward for the Olympics, but the female team with whom we had been training were. I was no longer a potential Olympian. Instead I was Captain Douglas again and now back with the Battalion on exercise in the desert in Jordan. I was pulled from the exercise by the Battalion second-in-command and lent a transistor radio tuned into the BBC World Service in order to listen to the final of the women’s modern pentathlon. I was dancing a jig in my helmet and body armour deep in the Jordanian desert when Steph Cook won Gold and Kate Allenby won Bronze for the United Kingdom. I was over the moon for them.
I promoted to major in good time but, on the intermediate command and staff college, they identified that, like my education at school, I was significantly behind my peers in military planning. They acknowledged that I was coming to good decisions in my own ways and was an excellent briefer, team builder and manager but that I couldn’t fit into the planning process used by military planning teams. As a newly promoted operational officer this was a disaster for my career.
