Beasting in the Army

Someone asked me what a Beasting in the Army entails, and so I thought it was a good excuse, or at least an excuse to write a blog post.
Remembering, as you will that this is from my personal experience in the Army Air Corp over six years.
A Beasting is basically a physical exercise punishment, and not bullying or a beating as some people have stated. It is purely exercise to the extreme.
Obviously, in the Army there is a lot of physical exercise involved, especially during training, however, if a Beasting is deemed necessary, you wish you had never been born.
The one (of many in extreme cold (I remember having to do a Beasting in the snow in shorts and it was minus 20) and extreme heat) is when I was doing my Junior Cadre Course.
I’ll pause here, whilst you pull up a sand bag.
Anyhoo we had been on a three day exercise that involved sleep deprivation to see if you could handle the stress and fatigue you get from doing everything with no sleep for three days.
As you can imagine, when we finally finished and got back to camp, there were a lot of very very very tired bunnies. However, the first thing you do in the Army is look after you kit, and then look after yourselves. So we had to wash all the vehicles (that the instructors rode around in as we had to march everywhere) and then clean your weapons and hand them in at the Armoury.
When some of the lads sat down on the end of their beds to clean their weapons, they immediately fell asleep, and unfortunately one of the NCO’s walked in and saw them asleep. Well they went ballistic!
So they lined us all up (as we were to be punished as a squad) and ran us down to the Gym in full kit. We then loaded up on medicine balls and set off on a ten mile run…….
You can imagine or probably not, never having been through that, that it was more than tiring or exhausting, it was … well words escape me. People were dropping like flies, but we had to pick them up and force them to carry on running.
Then once back in the camp we were told that if they caught one single person asleep before all the weapons were cleaned, inspected and put away, that we’d be out again for a 20 mile run.
Although we were obviously a hell of a lot more tired than before, NO ONE FELL ASLEEP.
So there you are a chance for me to regal you with an old Army tale, and to impart to you the knowledge that a Beasting in the Army, to my knowledge and experience is just an extreme exercise routine.
Later Days