Immediate Action Page 11

  "During the Malayan days," said one of the DS, a veteran himself, "a lot of the four-man patrols got through enemy ambushes without the ambush being initiated simply because the people manning the ambush thought, There's the recce group; let's wait for the main group to come through."

  There was still lots of physical training. They'd beast us about in the gym, but I found it enjoyable because there was no discipline.

  There didn't need to be: If we didn't want to be there, we were at liberty to walk. Nobody hassled us about the rooms, but we kept them clean anyway, because that was what was expected of us. I loved it; it was a really wonderful atmosphere.

  At this stage the only areas we were allowed into were the training section and training wing accommodation, but I still felt part of the organization. We were no longer segregated from the other blokes in the cookhouse now, and I bumped into one or two people I'd met in the battalion or on courses They were happy to chat over a cup of tea. One day I saw Jeff, who was now on the counterterrorist team. He still looked younger than Donny Osmond.

  "Still here then?" He grinned. "When do you go to the jungle?"

  "In about two or three weeks."

  "Know who your DS is yet?"

  "No idea. They're going to start putting us.in patrols very soon."

  The next morning we were given batteries of tests.

  First was language aptitude. I looked around the training wing theater, trying to work out who would be the most intelligent at this sort of stuff. jake, the American, was a main man. I knew that he spoke Farsi and could write the script, so I thought, There's the brainy fucker, I'd better start edging my way next to him. I went for a piss with the idea of sitting as near to him as I could when I came back. I found that twenty-two other blokes had had exactly the same idea. Like a lot of other people in the vicinity, I cheated, copying off jake.

  Next was the pilots' quick-reaction test. We were handed a list of calculations and given a minute and a half to do each one in. They were weird and wonderful things like mean averages and square roots, concepts way beyond the basic math I'd taught myself with the Janet and John book from Peckham library. Then there were lots of items like the Mensa tests they had in newspapers. I doubt my results would have got me into the Noddy Club, let alone Mensa.

  I kept thinking, If we fail these, are we binned, or what? Have we got to be brain surgeons or are we going to be soldiers? It went on all morning, and it became a bit of farce, with everybody cheating off everybody else.

  The DS must have known what was going on.

  One thing they had been teaching us from the very first day was decision making. In the training wing corridor there was a big picture of a load of sheep in a pen, and underneath was the message: "Either lead, follow, or get out of the way."

  It was a big thing: Don't dillydally; make a decision.

  If it was wrong, it was wrong; if it was right, it was right. One of my new decision processes was to think: What's done is done; if I've failed I've failed.

  When we went into the cookhouse at lunchtime, we were like kids walking out of an exam room.

  "What did you reckon to number sixteen?"

  "I made the answer two hundred and fifty."

  "Oh, fuck."

  Whatever the results were, we were issued with our jungle kit the next day: jungle fatigues, mosquito nets, bergens, different types of ponchos. I was like a pig in sugar.

  The same afternoon we were going to be told what patrols we were in and who our DS was going to be.

  Everybody wanted to get together with the people who'd been in the jungle before because in theory they were going to have an edge and be able to help.

  I was made a patrol commander because I was an infantry sergeant.

  In the patrol we had a bloke, Raymond, a Falklands veteran, who'd done a six-month tour in Belize as a lance corporal with 2 Para. He was very thick-set with jet black hair; if he had a shave at six o'clock, by eight o'clock he'd need another one. Raymond knew all about pole beds and the routine of living in the jungle; the closest I'd been was a school trip to Kew Gardens when I was seven years old, and my only memory of that was of the other kids having ice creams afterward and me not having enough money to buy one.

  Another member of the patrol was Mala corporal in the Royal Anglians. He came from London and was about the same size and height as I was, but with the world's biggest teeth. A couple of them were missing, and he always had a smile on his face and a fag in his mouth.

  He reminded me of the Tommy Atkins character from the First World War.

  He didn't seem to give a stuff about anything but was very confident in what he did. If he hadn't been in the army, he would have been a market trader down Portobello Road. He was the scruffiest prson I'd ever seen.

  He looked as if he'd been dipped in glue and thrown through the window of an Oxfam shop. He was a good soldier, without a doubt, but he was so laid back he was almost lying down. Because he found things very easy, it looked as if he had no commitment.

  Tom was a corporal from 29 Commando, part of the Royal Artillery attached to the Royal Marines, and he was completely the opposite, hyped up about everything. He was the funniest bloke I'd met since Dave left.

  He had a sag eye: If he was looking at his shoelaces, one eye would be looking at the moon. He was also the tallest of us, just on six feet, and athletically built. He was very loud; I suspected he was deaf after a lifetime of artillery pieces banging off in his ear.

  I was still phoning up Debbie, writing her letters and telling her how exciting it was. When she wrote or spoke, I didn't listen or read between the lines. It didn't occur to me that she might be bored shitless. I was in the,UK doing something I wanted to do, and she was in Germany just plodding on, not really doing that much. I couldn't have cared less; me, I was off to Brunei. n March we flew to Hong Kong, en route to Brunei.

  We came into Kaitak Airport at night, and I couldn't believe what I saw.

  The aircraft did a steep turn, then flew in really low. I could see people walking in the street and pottering around in their apartments.

  We stayed at a camp near the airport. It was the first experience I'd had of somebody in authority in the army giving me money, a ration allowance because they wouldn't be feeding us. It was supposed to be money for food, but of course it paid for a night on the town, with just enough left over to buy a bag of chips on the way home. I thought, Hell, yes, I need to keep in here, they give you money!

  Hong Kong was one of the places I'd always heard about but never thought I'd see. Now I just wanted to take as much of it in as I could in case I never came back. The city was packed and never seemed to stop. it was full of neon, food shops open everywhere, dense traffic, and this was at ten o'clock at night. We could sleep on the plane to Brunei in the morning; tonight was ours to enjoy.

  Raymond had been to Hong Kong before when he did an emergency tour with the Parachute Regiment in the New Territories. "No problems," he declared, "I know broke into a horrendous sweat and found it hard to get my breath.

  We had to cross a river. Logs had been positioned over it to make a small bridge, and as we started to cross, I caught my first glimpse of a palm-leaf shelter and, nearby, a group of tribesmen. The Regiment had enjoyed a long association with the Ilbans, dating back to the Borneo conflict.

  "They're good blokes," the DS said. "We employ some of them to help build all the atap [foliage-covered] huts for the admin area, including what is going to be your schoolhouse. They also help with a lot of the survival training."

  As we went past these boys, squatting on their haunches and smoking away, it hit me that we really had come into a totally different culture in a totally different part of the world. We were going to be self-contained in our own little world, miles and miles from civilization, for at least a month-whether we liked it or not.

  This was exciting stuff.

  Looking at the rain forest around and above me, I couldn't help wondering how people survived in the c
laustrophobic green-tinged semidarkness. The tall trees of the primary jungle, profusely leaved, blocked out the sun. Humidity must have been running at close to 90 percent. I was hot; I was short of breath; I was sweating; I was getting bitten to bits. It seemed every animal there wanted to have a munch out of me. I looked at the Ilbans, relaxing against the shelters with just a pair of shorts on, as happy as sandboys.

  We got into the "schoolhouse," which was in fact little more than a roof over two rows of log benches. We put down our bergens, and the'DS came around for a brew and a chat.

  Each patrol's DS would stay with it all the time, we were told, though he lived in the admin area rather than with the patrol. Every time we were out on the ground, he'd be there as well.

  They spelled out a few golden rules.

  "Never go anywhere without your golack [machete].

  Never go anywhere without your belt kit and your weapon. Even if you take your belt kit off to sit on during a lesson, the golack stays attached to you by a length of para'cord. It's your most essential item of survival kit: It gets you food; it builds you traps; it gives you protection.

  "You never go anywhere in the jungle on your own; you always go in pairs. It's incredibly easy to get lost.

  You can walk five or ten meters away from the camp area and there's a possibility of getting disorientated. So even if it's going down to the river to fill up for water, go in pairs. You might be relaxing, sorting your shit out, but if somebody's got to go down and collect the water, somebody else has got to go with him. The only place you don't have to go to in pairs is the shit pit, which is just off to the side of the patrol area."

  We had all arrived with as much extra kit as we could cram into our bergens-extra water bottles, loads of spare socks, all sorts of crap.

  Now we found out that we needed very little.

  The DS explained: "To live in the jungle, all you need is two sets of clothes: one wet and one dry. Sleep in the dry, and always have your wet ones on. Even if you stand still all day, you're going to be soaking wet. There are no seasons in the rain forest; it's just wet and hot.

  You get two rains a day. Especially if you're on a spur, you can feel the wind coming, and then it will rain. If the rain doesn't get you, the humidity will.

  "The important thing is to keep your dry kit dry; we're a bit short on tumble dryers around here. So put it in a dry wrapper; then put that in another dry wrapper.

  Once you're wet, you're fucking wet, and that's it."

  The DS then gave us a practical demonstration of how to build an A-frame.

  "You start with the two end pieces in the shape of an A. These don't need to be more than two or three inches in diameter, just strong enough to support your weight.

  Then you get two more lengths of wood, again no more than two or three inches in diameter, to support your hammock. You slip the two poles through the holes in the hammock and push them down over the apex of the As and tie them on. All being well, what you've created is a bed that's a couple of feet off the floor.

  "Once that's done, you then put a poncho over the top and then just bungee it off onto the trees. Now you're protected from the rain, and then underneath that you can put your mozzie net. There's nothing macho about sleeping in your A-frame without a mozzie net; getting bitten means that you're more uncomfortable the next day, and that means you're less able to operate. If you take the time, sort yourself out, you're a much better commodity the next day. It's not wimpy kit; it's sensible.

  There's times when you've got to be in the shit, and then okay, you do that, but there's a lot of times when you don't have to be. If you're back in a base area, you make yourself as comfortable as possible."

  Some people apparently built another platform under the bed level, to store their bergens and other kit. The ground was soaking wet and teeming with ants, scorpions, and other beasts that would end up biting if they got close enough. The more kit we could keep off the ground, the more comfortable we were going to be when we put it on.

  The DS took us to our patrol area and said, "Sort yourselves out.

  I'll be back later; any problems, come and get me."

  "Sorting ourselves out" meant building ourselves an A-frame.

  Raymond got his up in less than an hour and then chopped more wood to make himself a platform to stand on.

  "This'll last about two days before it sinks into the mud," he said. "So then you just bung another load on top."

  "I see," I said, still only a quarter of the way through I building my ricketty bag of shit.

  Once we had all finished, we sat down and got a hexy burner going for a brew. To cook with, we'd brought an empty grenade tin that held about five pints of liquid.

  We filled it with water from our bottles and brewed our first mug of tea in the jungle. I was starting to feel a little more at home.

  We talked about how we were going to crack the jungle phase.

  Everybody knew what the DS were looking for: people with aptitude, who could blend in.

  I said, "What we must do all the time is back each other up and not get the hump with each other."

  Mal, leaning back with a fag in his mouth, said, "Well, our leader, you'd better be doing all the work then, and don't fuck up."

  Then he lay on his back and blew out a long trail of smoke.

  It was time to go back down to the schoolhouse. We put on our belt kits and picked up our golacks and weapons. All the DS were there. We sat on the log benches in the schoolhouse and they were outside, facing us.

  The training wing sergeant major said, "This is the routine within the admin area. Every morning and every night you stand to-half an hour before first light, half an hour after first light, and the same at last light, around your own basha [shelterlarea.

  "You can send out letters once a week. There will be fresh [fresh food] once a week. The area where the DS live is strictly out of bounds. If you need to go through, you have to stop and call for somebody to give you permission. Right, go back to your areas. I want you back here at eight o'clock tomorrow morning."

  We packed everything away in our bergens and sat on them for an hour for the stand to, weapon butt in the shoulder, covering our arcs.

  As I watched the daylight fade, there was a sudden burst of high-pitched, purring bleeps all around us.

  "Basher-out beetles," Raymond said. "That's your indication that it's going to be last light very soon."

  The darkness buzzed with airborne raiders; most of them seemed to be heading in my direction. I put more cam cream and mozzie rep (mosquito repellent) on my face and hands, but it made no difference.

  They still hovered and swooped like miniature Stukas, biting and stinging. Above the steady buzz and hum of insects came the occasional rustling in the undergrowth and canopy.

  Apart from the bites, I loved it.

  When the hour was up, we picked up our bergens and walked into the admin area. Torch batteries had to be conserved, so we lit candles. I lit a hexy burner, put the grenade box on top, and the blokes tipped in their sachets of beef stew and rice for a communal scoff.

  Mal was quite confident about things, stretched out in the mud with a fag in his mouth. Tom was asking questions or worrying about something every five minutes in his usual hyper fashion: "We must get up tomorrow morning for stand to, we mustn't forget," he ranted, with one eye on the food and the other on his boots as he laced them up furiously.

  Everybody was still pretty tired after the rigors of Hong Kong and feeling drained by our new environment. We weren't acclimatized yet and were covered in lumps and bumps where the beasties had got in. I was looking forward to getting on my pole bed.

  I took my wet clothing off, rolled it up and put it on the shelf under my A-frame. I put my dry clothes on aild a pair of trainers; we didn'tow what surprises the DS might have in store, so even if they bumped us during the night, at least I knew I could just jump out and start functioning. I got my head down under the mozzie net and listened to the jungle conductin
g its life around me: crickets, beetles and other insects clicking and buzzing, unknown things scratching around in the undergrowth.

  It started to rain, and it was the most wonderful feeling in the world to be snug under my basha, listening to the water splash onto the roof.

  I didn't sleep too well, tossing and turning, thinking about everything that lay ahead. "Let's just get the month over and done with," I said to myself, "and hope that you pass." At times I looked over and I could see that everybody was having the same problem. In the darkness around Mal's pole bed I saw the glow of a cigarette end as he inhaled. I slowly started to drift off.

  All of a sudden Tom leaped up.

  "We're late! We're late! It's half six! Stand to!"

  Bodies tumbled from pole beds into the mud as we scrabbled for our kit.

  I pulled on my wet clothes, keeping an eye out for the DS. If they came around now and caught us still in our beds, we'd be in severe shit. It would be seen as incredibly bad self-discipline.

  Mal was trying to put his boots on while standing up and fell over. I heard a soft fizz as his fag hit the mud.

  Tom was still ranting loudly when Raymond said, "Stop, stop, stop.

  It's fucking midnight, you dickhead.

  It's not half six."

  Tom had woken up in the middle of the night, looked at his watch, and misread the hands. He wasn't exactly flavor of the month as we sorted ourselves out again and got back into our beds.

  Our first lesson was in how to administer ourselves in the field.

  "First thing in the morning," the DS said, "slap loads of mozzie rep all over your clothes, face, and arms. As you will soon find out, it's so strong it melts plastic."

  He passed around his compass. He'd been there three weeks, and it had started to lose all its lettering and the roamers that measured the grid references. Mozzie rep melted through plastic, and there was us slopping it on our skin.

  As soon as we'd done that, we had to take our Paludrin antimalarial drug.

  We learned more or less straightaway how to blow landing sites and winch holes because we might have to do it. If somebody broke his leg, we'd have to stabilize him, cut a winch hole, and wait for the helicopter.