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When you meet professional soldiers there is a calm exterior to them. A confident control built up over years of ‘taking care of business’. Des Enoch fits the bill perfectly. Quiet and unassuming, but you can sense that he is typically in control of situations around him. For a quarter of a century he proudly served in the Royal Marines, finally leaving at the rank of Warrant Officer, and having faced active duty in most of the World’s favourite hot spots from the Falklands to Bosnia, Northern Ireland to the Gulf, an area he now calls home.
“We moved here as soon as I left the military, and the Palm is a perfect location. I do a bit of business in Abu Dhabi these days so I need to be straight on the Sheik Zayed Road in the mornings and away”
‘A bit of business’ means jumping out of perfectly good aeroplanes at 10,000 feet repeatedly, although not quite as often as he used to, and bizarrely, not quite as often as he would like to.
“I suppose you could describe me as a ‘Freelance Parachute Instructor’ although most of my time now is spent supervising a team of guys. We take care of members of the public, but also do a lot of stuff for the UAE Military, making sure they are the best that they can be.” He’s done about 1700 jumps, statistically 1 in 1000 ‘go bad’ so he must be either good or lucky, maybe a bit of both.
“You get a few ‘exciting’ incidents with students. They take a bad body position, which makes them spin, or they don’t pull their rip cord, so we have to help them out.” I would have thought pulling the rip cord would be high on the list of things that you would want to do as you plunge to the earth, but apparently not for everyone.
“Some people get a bit of sensory overload and can’t take it all in and so we need to guide them through. It’s really about not taking things for granted and not being complacent. Complacency will kill you.” he assures me.
“We deal with the general public who fall into two schools. Most want a one-off tandem jump, typically 12,000 feet; free fall for 40-50 seconds to about 5,500 then deploy. We can do 25 or so of them a day on a busy day. Then there is the guy who wants to learn properly and we teach them accelerated free fall. That’s usually over 8 jumps and we teach them a series of disciplines and approaches culminating in a graduation jump featuring all of the maneuvers and turns that they have by now perfected. It’s not for everyone, but adrenalin is addictive”
The military connection is a little more shrouded, I’ve never spoken to a ‘professional soldier’ who wants or indeed needs to talk about his job and so a lot is assumed and left unsaid, but with the CV he has and the fact that one countries armed forces bring you in to help there’s, speaks volumes. In candid moments he talks a little about active service but not in a Hollywood way “… 90% boredom and then 10% sheer terror …” is the way he describes a typical ‘day at the office’ from his front line experience. “I suppose sailing down to the Falklands was a bit like waiting for a job interview. You sort of sit round playing over scenarios in your head until the big day arrives then you just slip in to ‘work mode’ and get on with it.” The same could be said of his day job, when he trains the UAE military a skill set that he hopes they never need for a conflict that he hopes they never have.
When he first arrive in the UAE, Des took up a more vocational role, instilling military style discipline into wayward 14 to18 year old Emiratis. It was a program run by the Rulers of Abu Dhabi to address some of the less well publicized social issues in the Emirates, and was a diversion from the hard core military life, but rewarding in its’ own way. “Yes, you get some good results. Kids who were heading in the wrong direction who end up with placements with solid employers, and with a life back on the tracks, and for a while it was an enjoyable thing to do, you know, to put a little bit back, but you miss the camaraderie of military life and so I’m happier now back working amongst them.”
I find it mind blowing that an apparently sane individual would throw themselves out of a perfectly good aeroplane almost 2000 times, and then we are joined by his wife Susie, she has made about 1,000 parachute jumps, but that’s a whole other story...
