EVERYONE runs everywhere or marches at a punishing pace at Lympstone. They jump down steps and over flowerbeds. The place is quivering with male energy and the pride is tangible.

And no wonder. The Royal Marines have one of the proudest records in military history. It started in 1664 when the Privy Council decided it would be jolly useful to have some chaps on ships who could do a bit of fighting.

Three hundred years and 10 Victoria Crosses later, the Royal Marines have seen action in the Falklands, the Gulf War, Kosovo, Northern Ireland, Aden, Iraq, the D-Day landings and most recently in Afghanistan. It’s simpler to say where they haven’t been than where they have.

It was Royal Marines who strapped themselves to two Apache helicopters in Afghanistan to rescue a mortally wounded colleague, because ‘no one gets left behind’. They worked with aid agencies after the earthquake in Pakistan. And they are the folk who assisted Jeremy Clarkson in the world’s most impressive motor test drive, when he drove a Ford Focus off an amphibious landing craft for Top Gear.

The Royal Marines practically invented the assault course and, at 32 weeks, their basic training is the longest for any NATO force.

My visit starts at a Bottom Field Pass Out, where a troop is attempting to pass the deceptively innocent-looking assault course section. PT instructor Sgt Bart Ledger explains that there is a set and proper way to do everything, from jumping ‘two feet first’ to inching along a rope and carrying a colleague.

“This cuts down on injuries and like everything we do, has been dev-eloped through research and evaluation,” he says.

All trainees have the same PT instructor for their entire course and despite the instructor’s badge, which resembles two crossed baseball bats, they’re not what I’d expected. No shouting. No boots on the neck. No humiliation. In fact, most Marines are so softly spoken it’s difficult to catch what they say, sometimes.

“They are all volunteers, they all want to be here so if we have to scream and shout at them all the time, something’s gone wrong,” says Bart.

The only shouts I hear are of encouragement to one poor trainee, whose rope climb is hampered by an infected arm. In the past, says Bart, this could have resulted in failure but because of their ‘Backtroop’ system (if the man fails this section after one more try he will be put back to a troop recruited later) he should make up lost ground.

Injured men receive the finest medical care and join the Hunter Troop where they spend time in the Marines’ vast gymnasium, getting back to fitness. Thanks to these innovations, two-thirds of those who are backtrooped or put into Hunter go on to win the coveted Green Beret, awarded after a recruit has passed the four Commando tests: endurance (crawling through tunnels and running on a common) the nine-miles speed march, the Tarzan assault course and the notorious 30-mile Dartmoor yomp.

“We have a saying in the Royal Marines: train hard, fight easy,” says Bart.

In fact, they have loads of sayings, stories and legends, like the heroes of The Greatest Raid Of All, when their WWII forebears deliberately smas-hed a ship into the French docks at St Nazaire.

Their ethos and core values of courage, determination, unselfishness, and cheerfulness in the face of adversity are what hold them together.

Major Bruce Foster, who is liaising with the Bournemouth Air Festival, explained more about this.

“It is what is nurtured in you here,” he says, describing how Marines continually return to Lympstone for extra training and ethos-building.

Another morale-fostering point is that officers train alongside their men and this helps establish their espirit de corps, where Marines learn to formulate absolute trust in their colleagues.

“No one will be asked to do something the person asking them has not done or wouldn’t be prepared to do first,” he says.

Maj Foster explains that around seven years ago, their forward-thinking Commandant General, Maj Gen Andy Salmon, engaged the services of the highest thinking in the field to innovate the way they approached some training. It’s worked. More Marines pass out now without any lowering of standards.

The Marines run around 132 courses, inspire their recruits to take further qualifications and degrees and as a learning establishment, Ofsted rates them as ‘good’.

Maj Foster explains how their brand is platinum-plated; big companies seek them out for training, the England rugby team have visited for inspiration and during my visit I saw London Welsh RFC being put through their paces.

But in the end, it’s about the men. And for men like Captain Scotty Mills, it frequently comes down to children; theirs, ours and those like the five missing daughters of the poor man who greeted him as a member of the initial raiding force at the start of the Iraq campaign.

“He showed us the marks of torture on his body and told us about his children, taken by the supporters of Saddam Hussein.

“I wanted to tell him that while he was with me, with us, he would be safe,” he says.

Being able to make a difference, to secure our liberty at home and abroad is what drives them.

“I am so lucky to do this job, working with like minds and people of such quality,” says Scotty.

And when you’ve seen how they get like that, you know how lucky we are to have them.