For nearly 15 years, Major Marco Ciotti has had a front row seat to island life.
As the Aide de Camp to three Lieutenant-Governors he has had the privilege of meeting people from all walks of life in more situations than you can imagine.
Major Ciotti’s past military experience meant he was prepared for some of the work he has undertaken over the past 13 years including ceremonial aspects of the Lieutenant-Governor’s work, but he told me that his experience of working in PR and hospitality also helped him deal with the wide variety of situations he has faced.
On the cusp of his retirement, he told me that he hopes to have much more free time going forward, which he will be able to spend on his fishing boat, pulling his crab pots, and rescuing his vegetable patch from the weeds which have taken over.
He also intends to spend more time with his family, including his wife, two children, and his parents.
They were all a huge support to him, he said, as he travelled the world during his military career before returning home to Guernsey where he embarked on a new career at Government House.
Major Ciotti’s professional life started in hospitality he remembered – working alongside his father at times – but he was yearning for something else as he hit his late teens.
“I initially thought about joining the Navy, but my eyesight wasn’t good enough, so I joined the Army, planning to go into the Royal Corps of Transport.
“I found this out because I met some guys off a ship who were over here. I was out with some of my friends and we started chatting, and I said to one of them that I’ve been thinking about joining the Navy, but my eyesight was a bit low. He said, ‘oh, no problem, you could join our lot’. So, I became interested.”
Young Marco left hospitality behind him as he joined the army in 1982, enlisting as a soldier. He completed several weeks of training before moving to Sandhurst for another three-months of training.
He was commissioned into the Royal Corps of Transport during 1983.
This could have led to Marco working on board ships, as he had originally wanted when he had ideas of joining the Navy, but life doesn’t always work out as planned…
“I had to do six months in a truck unit, which most people in the Royal Transport Corps did, so that I could see how the Corps worked, because the maritime bit was a niche part of it, but if I did six months as a Troop Commander in a truck unit then I could go and work in maritime for the rest of my time, which was three to eight years.
“So, I did my six months in a big transport unit in Aldershot, which was good fun, and then I went for my medical. I spent the whole day in there doing this medical and at the end of it, the doctor came out and said to me ‘what’s the eyesight standard for Army Seaman Officer?’, which is what I was going for. I said, ‘I’ve got no idea what, you’re the doctor, you tell me’.
“He said they didn’t see many of them, so he went back into this medical library. He was in there for hours and at the end he came out and said, ‘I’m really sorry to say it’s exactly the same as the Royal Navy’.
“By this stage, I’d already been in the army for two years so I went back to my unit and carried on and finished my posting and actually that turned out to be the best thing that could happen, because I ended up doing a lot of things that were more interesting.”
Despite his eyesight not being up to Navy standards, his physical fitness was exactly what the army needed for a ski unit being deployed to Germany.
“I was posted as the Officer to run the Biathlon Team, and I did that for a couple of years, which was amazing. We had some fantastic skiers, not me – I was as good as I had to be, but we had a few guys from the Olympic team.
“There was about 12 of us, people used to come and go because they were part of the British team, and they’d come back to us for bits of the season. We used to go off at the start of November and we’d be away until end of April, which was quite something because I was the only Officer so it had its high points and it had some very difficult times because soldiers, when you’re away, can get quite unmilitary. When you’re out of a military environment, there’s no rank structure, so it was much more of a sports team than a military unit, that was very interesting and good fun. It was professional sport effectively.”
Parts two and three to follow…
This article first appeared in CONNECT: