(no subject)

[squeeful.livejournal.com]

Okay, I started off writing this as a response to a comment/posst from several months ago that I've been thinking about since then and as I'm on a strange, insomnia-induced sleep schedule, I just spent the past three (four?) hours or more with a lot of history books and British army recruitment and service articles. I had to work my way backwards to make sure things lined up correctly, but hopefully I gave a somewhat coherent telling and summary at the end. So enjoy. :-)



Yeah yeah, I know, wandering back into an old discussion, but I've always wondered, really, how much of a city boy he is. Or more specifically, familiar with London. If you take the comparing of years at the Hatstand and add some more research, there isn't a lot of time available for him to be stalking around London or any city. He'd a military record from 1971-1976. Now, the SAS requires at least 39 months left of service after completing the 6 month selection course. So that's 45 months or three years and nine months devoted to the SAS. Joining the SAS IS a secondment, troopers remain members of their original units, so it's not a shuttling sideways, he had to have gone through the whole process. No bending the rules for Bodie. You pretty much have to assume that the 1976 end of military record is at the very beginning of the year because in order for Doyle's comment of 2 years and three months to jive with the dates, the end of his army career has to overlap with CI5. Training maybe? Working backwards, that's 1975, 1974, 1973, and the tail end of 1972 in SAS service. First 12 months probationary. So, finished selection end of September 1972, began around early April that year. Six months stomping around in rural Wales and SE Asian jungles.

That gives him at most a little over a year to join the army and/or Paratroopers and rise to the rank of sergeant. Zippy career there, neh? Not going to do that trekking around London. After joining the British army he would have been in training in Catterick, North Yorkshire as part of the 2nd Infantry Training Battalion, Parachute Regiment Training Company. Training for that would have taken 28 weeks. 26 weeks standard course plus two weeks Pre-Parachute Selection (PPS) course. That's a nice, even 7 months.

So, that really gives him less than a year between regular army and the SAS. If he joined in 1971, spent seven months in training and joined the Parachute Regiment we can assume that's when he was in Northern Ireland because the Paras were big there during "The Troubles". Which would have been the place for the meteoric rise through the ranks he made in about 5-8 months. That means he would have been right there for Bloody Sunday on January 30th, 1972. Ouch. Sounds like the time to put in for SAS selection. From elite unit to eliter unit.

We've a quote that he returned to England TO join the army so unless there's a flub in prepositions it sounds like a quick jump from Africa to the armed services. Before that was Biafra which was a short-lived (May 30, 1967 to January 15, 1970) secessionist state from southern Nigeria. That leaves us the year of 1970 -- until he joins the British army in 1971 -- which we can speculate is the "dubious activities in Jordan". (Which, in another spectacular jump, is several thousand miles from Nigeria in the western bend of Africa.) Open fighting broke out in June 1970 and a ceasefire was arranged September 22 that same year. Sporadic fighting continued until July 1971, but if we want Bodie to have time to join the army, finish training, tour Northern Ireland, and rise to the rank of sergeant so that he can join and complete his term with the SAS and hook up with Doyle, he has to have left before then. A brief, tumultuous time in the Middle East for our man Bodie. He would have run-in with the PLO there, on whatever side.

Here it's fuzzier. For the previous years to make sense, we have to briefly revisit Biafra which we remember lasted from May 30, 1967 to January 15, 1970. This overlaps with Bodie's unknown amount of previous time in Angola as their war of independence lasted from 1961-1975. This also overlaps with the Congo Crisis. In order for him to fight, it has to have been the Democratic Republic of the Congo, then Republic of the Congo, formerly Belgian Congo. So he's there sometime during the Congo Crisis (1960-1965). And somewhere before any of those he spent three years in the Merchant Navy before hopping off in Dakar, Senegal. Which is thousands of miles from the Congo. How does he get around?

Congo, Congo. There were a lot of foreign mercenaries running around during those wars and, in fact, they were the core of the forces when the province of Katanga declared independence. Their mercs were recruited in Belgium (funny, because Belgium was the imperial country they were declaring independence from) so either Bodie joined them along the way or he fought in a later insurgence in 1964. The UN tried several times to, mm, expel all mercenary forces. It didn't work. No, wait, he ran guns during the Congo stuff. Interesting. The whole series of events and confrontations is really much more complex and convoluted, but I don't have the time, space, or brain power right now to go into them.

Angola. Officially the Angolan War of Independence lasted from 1961 to 1974, but after the initial uprising in 1961, some train derailing in 1967, and infighting during the end of the decade, it was relatively quiet until the 70s. By which time Bodie's gone. Don't know how much he could have mercenaried there.

Okay, it's late so I'm probably repeating things several times, but he goes through the Merchant Navy, hops off in Dakar, is a bouncer, runs around in Congo from 1 to 4 years depending on which end he began, plays with trains and Communists (did I mention Che Guevara was there?) for some time in Angola, turns to solid mercenarying in Biafra for a little over two years, skips over to Jordan and does stuff only he probably knows for a year, leaves the Middle East and joins the army and we're back to where I started at the beginning of this long, rambling wind through history.

Other than an unknown amount of time in some club likely in Dakar, I'm not seeing much opportunity for Bodie to go running around in major cities. It wouldn't surprise me if the first he spent an amount of -- or any! -- time in London was when he joined CI5. He's got Doyle for that. Bodie brings in the world knowledge of all that travel and the force of a very(!) elite army background while Ray brings the intimate, detailed knowing of London, police procedure, and an established network of informants. I'd offer to wallop the next person to say that the urban jungle is any less a nest of nastiness, cruelty, misery, and human suffering than the literal one, but that's a whole other post...


Or what you get when the insomniatic nerd with an obsessive need to know and research gets a hold of too much information.