Are you sure?

When I was in recruit training all of my training team⁠1 had served in Northern Ireland and the Falklands war and they didn’t suffer fools gladly. When training was tough and I was struggling to master how to assemble a rifle or actually cook the bacon burgers from my ration pack there was little encouragement from them. In fact, when you didn’t get things right immediately you were told to do 50 press-ups and then they normally told us to wrap⁠2. Give up. Stop wasting our time they would say. Over and over during the 30 weeks of training they told us to quit but you know what? It had the opposite effect, it made us want to stay. Perhaps that was their intention all along, a sort of reverse psychology type of thing. And if you are still here that means that I have done the reverse psychology thing on you then doesn’t it? Or perhaps you just want to become a teacher to have the power to sign your mates passport.

1 Corporals Les Daniels, Reggie Perrin, Buller Taylor.

2 Wrap, give up, quit.