English: Sergeant
Peter Aldrich of the Reconnaissance Platoon of the Bermuda Regiment (now the
Royal Bermuda Regiment) explains the workings of the
General Purpose Machine Gun to Sergeant Paul Moose, a team leader in Bravo Company of the
2 Reconnaissance Battalion of the
United States Marine Corps at
Camp Lejeune in
Jacksonville,
North Carolina.
Although both Sergeants, the two do not share the same ranks or roles. In the British Army and Royal Marines infantry, a Sergeant (NATO rank OR-6) is the rank normally held by the Second-in-Command of a Platoon. In the US Marine Corps and the United States Army infantry, a sergeant (NATO rank OR-5) leads a fire team of four men, a role performed in the British forces by a Lance-Corporal (OR-3) (as second-in-command of a section and commander of its delta fire team). Section Commanders in the British forces are normally Corporals (OR-4).
The Royal Bermuda Regiment is a part-time unit of the British Army tasked primarily with home defence of the tiny
British Overseas Territory of
Bermuda, where a reconnaissance sub-unit would seem superfluous. Despite this, its predecessors (the
Bermuda Militia Artillery and the
Bermuda Volunteer Rifle Corps) sent contingents to the
Western Front during the
First World War and to fight in North-West Europe, Italy, the Far East and elsewhere during the
Second World War, and the regiment's training ensures it is capable of an expeditionary role. Due to the limited landmass and high population density of Bermuda, much of the Royal Bermuda Regiment's field training takes place at Camp Lejeune. This partly results from the proximity of North Carolina, the nearest landfall to Bermuda at 640 miles (ensuring close historical ties with Bermuda having been settled accidentally in 1609 by the
Virginia Company as an extension of the future North Carolina's northern neighbour of
Virginia, and the
Province of Carolina having been established by the settlement of
Charleston by settlers from Bermuda under
William Sayle in 1669), and partly from a close relationship built up between the Royal Bermuda Regiment and the US Marine Corps, which had maintained detachments to guard the
United States Navy bases in Bermuda from the 1940s to the 1980s (the US
Naval Air Station Bermuda Annex,
Naval Air Station Bermuda, and
Naval Facility Bermuda). The US Marine Corps handed its guard role to US Naval Air Station Bermuda Police and withdrew from Bermuda several years before all of the United States Naval bases in Bermuda were closed in 1995.