Martin goes on military manoeuvres

I’m joining five other people in staking out a white brick house where we know a group of terrorists have been hiding. We’re armed to the teeth with pistols, a machine gun, grenades and flares.

 Lying on the floor with our guns trained on a clearing below us, we can see some of the bad guys gathered about 30 yards in front of us, standing around a Land Rover, talking and smoking. As far as we know, they are oblivious to our presence.

 Suddenly, slightly to our left and about four feet in front of us, there is a rustling in the trees, a loud noise and something comes bursting into view.

 Terrorist, escaping hostage or bird? We have a split-second to decide. 

  Startled by the noise and keen to prove ourselves in military combat, my partner and I let fly several rounds from our pistols.

 It’s a good job they were blanks and the whole thing was a teambuilding exercise, or the pheasant which we shot would have been on the main course of that evening’s menu at our hotel.

 Welcome to Blackdown UK Corporate Training. The house is not in Iraq, Afghanistan or anywhere else where Her Majesty’s Forces have been doing business in the past 20 years. It’s in a forest in the East Midlands where Blackdown, a company formed by a group of ex-Army veterans and business professionals, has its’ base.

 Blackdown, as their training brochure puts it ‘provide quality training products and services by taking the military way of thinking and applying it to business scenarios.’

 In other words, they train people to expect the very unexpected and how to cope when it happens.

 I’m on a media day which is giving a group of journalists a taste of Blackdown’s itinerary. The really adventurous can take their survival expeditions to Sweden and France, but we will stay in this forest for a day which will prove unforgettable enough.

 The first thing to know is how to survive in the open. How long can you last without air, shelter, food or water? Our instructor Phil, the epitome of an Army man standing well over 6ft tall and with the archetypal military haircut, tells us the first thing we will need is shelter, so our two two-person teams are sent out into the forest with a tent sheet, bungee clips and pegs and told we have five minutes to construct our own shelter.

 I’m afraid to say your blogger’s team was still working out what was what when the whistle blew. As Phil pointed out, in a real scenario, it could have been snowing or raining sideways, we could have been caught in a sandstorm...we could have been dead.

 Having learnt how to use a short-wave radio (got that bit!), we moved on to orienteering, finding our way round what seemed a vast expanse of forest with nothing more than a map and compass. Given time, I’m sure I would have worked it out but as Phil’s colleague Ben (a pocket battleship of a man) pointed out, in real life time is the thing you may not have.

 After lunch came the bit we had secretly all been waiting for - pistol training and close-quarter battle. I quickly got the hang of handling and firing the pistols so, with paintball weapons taking the place of machine guns, it was on to close-quarter battle and into the ‘kill house.’

 This is a converted two-storey cattle shed with life-size pictures of the bad guys (and their hostages) scattered throughout. Can you tell the difference between terrorist and hostage in the dark, with a split-second’s notice, with guns and grenades going off all around you?

 I did surprisingly well, even managing to get off a couple of rounds while sprawled on the floor in the dark after stumbling over my own shoelaces. Unfortunately, when the lights went on and we debriefed, we discovered that in my adrenalin-fuelled enthusiasm to shoot at something, anything, I’d killed the hostage as well as the terrorist.

 Never again will I ask how something like that happens.

 Finally, on to what Blackdown call ‘Vehicle Contact Drills’; in other words, what to do when your car is ambushed. With Phil and Ben driving the cars and doing most of the firing, we learnt that priority No 1 for a VIP in this case (think Wills and Kate suddenly being collared by Al Qaeda) is to get the heck out of the car, roll away as fast as you can and let the security experts do their jobs.

 We had taken in an enormous amount of information in the last five hours but now came the finale - the bit we’d all been waiting for, the simulated battle.

 I won’t give away any secrets, in case this piece tempts you to get in touch with Blackdown and try it for yourself but highlights included running away from an ambushed car and heading straight into a bush full of thorns; gathering our group together following the ambush and realising the spot we had chosen was a bog two feet deep in mud; stumbling down a bank and falling over (again) after a tree branch broke off in my hand and, of course, the unfortunate incident with the pheasant.

 I couldn’t walk for two days afterwards but it was worth it for an unforgettable experience which I highly recommend. Blackdown is not cheap but for companies looking for teambuilding days with a difference, I can’t imagine anything better. 

BlackdownUK can be contacted via www.blackdown-uk.com.