Commando: On The Front Line provides a compelling insight into the making of a Royal Marine Commando through the gruelling eight month training regime, and – for the first time – follows successful recruits onto the front line in Afghanistan. Award-winning director/cameraman Chris Terrill not only follows the 50 raw recruits of 924 Troop, he also trains alongside them.

Why was it important to you to make the series and to train alongside the recruits?

‘I wanted to bring people’s attention to the extraordinary nature of the Royal Marine Commandos and to do it in a very different and very personal way.

‘I’ve had a long running link with the Royal Navy having done several film series over the years, including HMS Brilliant and Shipmates. Also, I come from a naval background, so I have a deep rooted feeling for the Navy and Naval people.

‘I’d got to know Marines, or ‘Bootnecks’ as they’re called, pretty well over the years, but I’d never focused my own camera on them. The way I work as a trained anthropologist is to live with people, to share their lives and to participate with them until I am accepted and trusted. I realised that the only way I could do this with the Royal Marines was to get well and truly stuck into their training regime. I had to prove myself in their terms. I knew I had to attempt the gruelling Commando Tests.

The Royal Marine authorities agreed but with a strict proviso: ‘OK,’ they said. ‘if you can manage it by all means come and train with us, but we’re not going to make it any easier for you and if you fail at any point or get injured we’re not going to make any allowances – you sink or you swim’. By a combination of perseverance, bull-headedness and a lot of luck I somehow managed to stay the course.’

How did you go about securing such unprecedented access to the training and action on the front line?

‘My work history with the Royal Navy was my springboard to achieving the access.
Nevertheless, when I started filming, there were still some suspicions about my motives. But when they saw that I was absolutely determined, come what may, to push through in the training and get as close as I did to those guys, they realised I was there for the long haul. It was a trust thing on both sides: they had to trust me that I was there for honourable reasons and though they realised straight away I wasn’t there to do a PR job they also had to be sure I was not there to stitch them up. By the same token I needed to know that they were hiding nothing from me because I had to paint as honest a portrait of them as I could.’

How fully were you embedded within 924 troop during the entire 8 months?

‘It wasn’t part-time, it was full time: I lived on camp and I dressed as they did in uniform.

’95 per cent of my time, 24-7, I was with 924 troop but I was also given time to follow Bertie from the Officer’s training course. Unusually and uniquely at Lympstone, recruits and officers train in the same place so it was very easy for me to switch when I needed to do some filming with Bertie and so I followed him and his fellow Young officers to America as well as to Scotland for exercises.

Do you think you were treated differently to the rest of the recruits?

‘I didn’t have to call anybody ‘Sir’ and everybody of all ranks called me Chris, but I still had to take my punishments! I remember very, very well one day when Jon Stratford, the PTI [Physical Training Instructor] in charge, was hauling the recruits across the coals for some transgression. As one of their number I was hauled over with them. And it was important that I did take my punishments with the recruits because I did not want to be seen as a fair weather Marine. I suffered the mud run with them for example and I got drunk with them: it was very important for me to join in every experience – the good and the bad, the painful and the enjoyable and the safe and the dangerous…’

How physically prepared were you to take on this enormous challenge?

‘I was in pretty good shape, notwithstanding my age. I’ve always kept myself very fit. I’m a competitive triathlete, an ultra-distance runner and a keen boxer – I have regular weekly sparring sessions. So I was fit, but I was sports-fit, I wasn’t battle-fit and that’s what the Royal Marine Commando course teaches you to be. It’s a different sort of fitness and although I was, as I say, in pretty good shape, I had no idea just how much more in shape I had to be before I was able to go anywhere near competing for the Green Beret.’

How did you feel being with recruits who were in their late teens and early twenties?

‘It was fantastic! I knew that nobody could or should make any allowances for me. I was confident that my fitness levels were as good as I thought they’d probably ever been. I’ve always believed age doesn’t really matter as long as your mind tells you it doesn’t, so I had confidence in my head and that was important. But these young 16 and 18 year olds were much more rubbery, more bouncy, more agile, more bendy: so I had to work that much harder. I knew that I did have a couple of advantages: I might not have the explosive fitness I used to have as a young man but as an experienced triathlete I’ve got stamina. But more importantly with age comes a certain ability to overcome challenges mentally: I’m not so frightened of the pain of it as maybe I was when I was younger. So, I had certain advantages and they kind of just about balanced out the physical disadvantages.’

What particular area of the training did you struggle with?

`I was reasonably confident and always quite good at the stamina stuff like endurance runs; even the 30-miler which was horrible but which never really frightened me. It was the highly technical and incredibly physically demanding assault courses that were my nemesis. These cause enormous strains on the upper body and I soon felt serious pains in my shoulders after some of the high rope work.

It was incredibly painful and I was getting by on painkillers during the training just to get by. My left bicep was throbbing constantly as well as the top of my shoulder around the clavicle. At the end of it all, when I finally left the Commando Base, I had an MRI scan: I’d ruptured a tendon. It had practically snapped and in addition the clavicle had swollen because I had worn away the cartilage.’

Did you ever think of giving up your goal of winning an honorary Green Beret?

‘Yes. At one time I was having huge problems and I simply wasn’t getting the times. I remember phoning up my friend Glenn who I box with, my best buddy, and said ‘mate it’s all over, I can’t go through with it.’ This was about 20 weeks in and I just thought I wasn’t going to crack some of the assault course techniques. I’d absolutely convinced myself I wasn’t going to pass, I was as depressed as I’ve ever been in my life. But a number of people, Glenn, my parents and more importantly the lads in 924 troop said ‘crack on, Chris’ and they energised me. That’s the point about being part of the Commando Brotherhood, the Band of Brothers: they really were rooting for me. The whole training team were great as well, especially Orlando as well as Major Dave Nicholson – the project manager allocated to my filming: they knew how important it had all become for me. Although I now know they were all privately saying ‘we don’t think he’s going to make it’ to each other!

‘My head told me that I wasn’t going to do it but my heart always had to think that I would and that’s kind of how I approached it.’

Tell us a little about the characters you film.

’50 lads arrived that fateful day. There were many different characters from many different parts of the country, all sorts of personalities: there’s Terry John who I got very close to. He’d come from St Vincent to train. What I saw in him was a sense of vulnerability: he questioned himself quite a lot but eventually found strength through his own extraordinary personality as well as the support of the other guys. He was such a terrific guy: tough and gentle at the same time.

‘There’s Jordan Slatter, 17, the second youngest in the recruit troop who’s wanted to be a Royal Marine since he was 8 years old: a very cheeky chappie; a big character and a hell of a laugh.

‘There’s James Williams, 24, who’d been a plasterer for four or five years. He didn’t like what he was doing and felt suffocated by life on Civvy Street. He had a grandfather who’d been a war hero and the war stories he’d been told on his lap as a boy played a real part in James’ decision to join the Royal Marines. James was always unwavering in his determination to succeed. Nothing was going to stop him – except injury of course – a spectre for all of us.

‘Adam Collins, a stunt man who’s been in Batman films came in with a different agenda. He’s still got a mind to being the world’s best stunt man but reckons he’ll be a much better one for having been a Marine. If that means knuckling down and going to a war zone, he’s up for it.

‘The other characters are the training team: Orlando, 21, younger than a lot of the Marines he was Troop Commander of, but tough as nails, a big character. He’d come from quite a tough childhood: he’d been fostered and was a self confessed bad boy who went off the rails. But a combination of Judo and Marines sorted him out and he’s very honest about that.

‘There’s Corporal Hamish Robb, a Scot from the Isle of Mull, only 24 but a very committed Marine. A real disciplinarian but very funny and like Orlando, he embodied humour. To get through the sort of stuff we got through in training and on the front line, humour is vital. I will never forget some of Hamish’s one liners – but I couldn’t repeat them here!’