Immediate Action Part 11

"Rally! Rally! Rally! Rally! Rally!"

We ran over logs, jumped behind trees; it was all over within fifteen seconds. Then the DS shouted, "Stop!"

After each contact the DS would debrief us. We'd be panting away, trying to catch our breaths; it was only a short, sharp burst of activity, but even patrolling I'd get out of breath. The body was tensed up; the brain was concentrating. It was live ammunition, and we were being tested.

I was already finding the jungle as physically hard as Selection because the pressure was unrelenting. I a.s.sumed that all the time they were asking themselves the questions: Would I want him in my patrol?

Has he got the personality? Has he got the apt.i.tude? The closed, harsh environment of the jungle, where everybody depended on everybody else, would show us in our true light.

"Why did you take that bit of cover there? Look over there-the world's biggest tree. That'll stop seven-sixtwo."

The DS, Keith, walked us back to the static target The canopy had retained the pall of smoke and the smell of cordite from the contact.

I took a swig of water from my bottle as I listened.

"When you saw that, you were right on top of it.

Walk back five meters, turn around, and now look. You can see it now, can't you? The reason you can see it is that you know that it's there.

You've got to be good enough to notice it before you get there, and the only way you're going to do that is getting up and down here, and watching, and practicing.

"Let's now go and see if you hit what you saw."

There wasn't a scratch on the target Mal and I had been firing at.

"What's the point of firing if you're not going to kill him?"

Keith said. "It's all well and good getting that constant fire down to get away, but what you're trying to do is kill them so they don't follow you up and kill you."

We built up to four-man contact drills. The lead scout would be moving very slowly, stop, observe the area, start moving. If we had a rise to go over and the other side was dead ground, he would tell the patrol to stop, and go over, b.u.t.t in the shoulder, using the cover of the trees.

If that was okay, he'd just wave everybody on.

The rest of us would be covering our arcs as we walked.

The lead scout might have missed something; we might end up with a contact right or a contact rear.

The one piece of advice I'd got from Jeff in D Squadron was: "b.u.t.t in your shoulder, sights up." It was tiring to move so slowly and deliberately. I was breathing really hard and deeply-, concentrating so much on what I was doing.

In any slack time we were expected to mug up on what we had been taught the day before. Mal was so good at everything that he didn't need to.

He'd just lie there with a f.a.g and a brew. It was impressive. I was jealous; I would have done the same, only I was way behind because my Morse was s.h.i.+t. Any spare time I had, I cracked on.

The jungle ca.n.a.lizes movement. The dense vegetation, deep gullies, steep hills and ravines, and wide, fast rivers are obstacles that make cross-country movement very difficult. However, it's got to be done.

High ground and tracks are where every Tom, d.i.c.k, and Harry move and where ambushes are laid.

We navigated across country, using a technique called cross graining. Up and down, up and down, not keeping to the high ground.

It took us much longer to travel a small distance, but tactically it was better: We weren't getting ambushed; we weren't leaving sign; we weren't going to b.u.mp into any opposition.

The DS said, "You never cut wood; you move it out of the way, patrol through, and move it back. If somebody's tracking you, he's looking for two types of ground sign-footprints and top sign. If you see cobwebs, you don't touch them; you go around them. If a tracker isn't getting cobwebs over his face, it's another good indication that somebody has walked past."

People were getting severly on one another's t.i.ts now, especially during the navigation phases. The navigation was not just a matter of taking a bearing and off you go.

We had to confirm regularly where we actually were; we could not see any lower or higher ground at any distance because of the vegetation and canopy. It was pointless going down from a high feature if we'd gone down the wrong spur. That would mean that we'd have to come all the way back up again and start again. So we had to stop, sit down, work out where we were-where we thought we were-and then send out recce patrols.

Two blokes would go out and confirm that at the bottom of this spur there was, for example, a river that ran left to rig ' lit. If that was happening a couple of times an hour, people were getting hot, p.i.s.sed off, knackered, and frustrated. It started to grate. I calmed myself by thinking: Take it slowly and send out your navigation patrols; you'll do it; there's no problem.

The physical exertion of being on the range or patrolling on two or three-day exercises was very debilitating.

Then we had written tests or had to plan and prepare for a scenario. We were under constant pressure. There was never enough time. The DS would always be behind us saying, "We've got five more minutes. Let's get this done."

At the debriefings they would dish out fearsome criticism. "You f.u.c.ked up! You didn't see the target! Why didn't you look right? As lead scout, that's your job."

I was on my chinstrap one day. We'd probably covered twice the distance we should have done because of the amount of recces we were doing, going up and down; we were all over the f.u.c.king place.

It was my turn to map-read, and as I started to go down from what I thought was the highest ground, to the right of me I saw higher ground.

That was wrong; I'd c.o.c.ked up. We stopped; Raymond and Mal were the next two to go on a recce patrol, and I could see in their eyes that they were not impressed. I said, "At the bottom of this spur there should be water running left to right. If not, I've severely f.u.c.ked up."

They were gone for about an hour and a half. When we got back that night, I said, "f.u.c.k, that was a long recce you guys did."

Raymond said, "Yeah, well, we just got to the bottom, had a drink, and sat in the river for half an hour to cool down and get all the s.h.i.+t off."

I was hot and sweaty all the time, stinking and out of breath. As I 'sweated, the mozzie rep I'd put on my face would run into my eyes and sting severely. It didn't seem to matter what amount of mozzie rep I put on, I still got bitten. And I was covered in painful webbing sores.

And all the time, the DS were watching. They seemed so calm and casual about it; there seemed to be nothing emb.u.g.g.e.ring them.

Nothing seemed to fuss them, and we were standing there like a bunch of rain-drenched refugees.

We would be soaking wet, all bogged down, and we'd have to go on ye. it another navigation patrol.

I asked myself, "How do you survive here? How do you get comfy?"

The only enjoyable experience about the place was sitting and having a communal brew and scoff at the end of the day-if it wasn't raining.

Then I loved getting into my A-frame, revising by candlelight and listening to the rain on the poncho.

I was really missing Debbie. I felt vulnerable in the jungle; there was no one to vent out to my personal -anxieties and fears of failing, and I wanted to feel attached to something beyond my immediate environment. I wrote to her regularly, trying to tell herv'what was happening. "I really hope I pa.s.s, because it will be great. We'll get to Hereford, we'll be able to afford a house, and everything will be fine."

I found the jungle harder than Test Week-much harder. All we had to do in Selection was switch off and get over those hills. Here it was just as physical, but we had the mental pressure as well, of learning, of having to perform and take in all this information.

We were tested to the extremes, mentally as well as physically.

They took us right up to the edge, and then they brought us back.

Then they took us up there again.

' We got better and better, but always at the back of my mind was the thought that the DS were looking at everything-not just tactical skills or practical skills but my personality, whether I would blend in with a closed environment like ungle, whether I'd blend in within the squadron.

I could see it in their eyes; I could see their minds ticking over. Does he take criticism well? Does he want to learn, does he ask relevant questions or does he ask questions just for the sake of asking questions, to look good?

The jungle, Peter, the chief instructor, said, was absolutely full of food-from beetles and spiders down to the bark on a tree.

"If you've got something' but you're not too sure whether you can eat it, you rub it on your skin and see if there is a reaction. Then you wait, and a couple of hours later rub it on your lips and see if there's a reaction, then on the tip of your tongue, then around your gums. Then you just taste a little bit, then eat a little bit, and ' if there's no reaction, you take the chance and eat it."

We were sitting by the Than huts down near the river, quite a pleasant, flat area. The helipad was on the spur on the other side of the stream, and I could see shafts of sunlight streaming down.

Fish under four inches long didn't have to be gutted, the instructor said; you just cooked them. There was a plant called the jungle cabbage that was like a small tree.

You split the bark, and inside was a pulp that was absolutely beautiful.

It tasted like a soft cabbage. You could also make tea with the bark.

"On operations, you don't eat lizards and snakes and all that sort of stuff unless you absolutely have to. It's pointless. If you've got to, that's fine, but why not take in food that is going to give you the nutrition so you can do the job? Also, you've got less chance of getting disease or gut aches. Can you imagine having the s.h.i.+ts and being totally out of it on operations for two days?

You've gone into an area, you've got no support, you've got no way of coming back, and you're eating lizard heads, and then you get gut ache.

You can't do your job-at least, not a hundred percent. Anyway, the amount of energy and time it takes to collect food, you wouldn't have any time to do anything else, so you take the food and water with you."

We were sitting on our belt kits along the riverbank, cradling our weapons. The lbans were with us; they had a few little fires going and were smoking their huge rollups as they showed us various fis.h.i.+ng nets and traps that they'd made. We had a go ourselves and everything we made fell to pieces.

One of the lbans held a small termite nest over the water with a stick.

The termites tumbled into the water, and the fish rose to eat them.

"We also have the red b.u.t.tress tree," Peter said. "It holds a natural source of fluid."

We thought this was all rather interesting, especially when he went around the back and pulled out several six-packs of beer. It was the first time we'd got anything overtly friendly from the training team.

Once a week we had "fresh." We were given an egg, a couple of sausages.

One particular afternoon they said, "Go away, eat the fresh, and then come back; we've got a lecture two hours before last light."

It was lovely to be able to cook in daylight, and afterward, as we came back at the appointed hour with just our belt kit, golacks, and weapons, everybody was full and content. I settled down for the lecture, thinking about what I'd do afterward, which was to sort out my webbing sores and the sore inside my thighs. I was looking forward to getting some army-issue talc.u.m powder between my legs, lying on my bed and going through my notes.

No sooner had the DS started than the ground was rocked by explosions.

Rounds whistled through the air and thumped into the ground.

"Camp attack! Camp attack! RP, RP, RP [rendezvous point]!"

We bomb-burst out of the schoolhouse. There was smoke everywhere and bits and pieces of s.h.i.+t flying through the air.

It was a complete pain in the a.r.s.e. It was week three, we were starting to get fairly comfortable, starting to adjust to life in the jungle, so all of a sudden they had hit us with "night out on belt kit."

I made my way to the troop RP. We all had emergency rations in our belt kits, but no hammocks. We had to sleep on the floor. A lot of armies think it's dead hard to lie on the ground in the jungle, but there are so many other factors to f.u.c.k you up in that environment, without having to lie in the mud getting bitten and stung and being so wary of scorpions and snakes that it's impossible to sleep. It's not macho, it's stupid, and the idea of, 4 night out on belt kit" was to treat us to that little experience. We got it in spades because it poured with rain all night.

During one five-day exercise I was moving into a troop RP one evening.

We were patrolling tactically, moving really slowly, to get into an area from where we could send out our sitrep (situation report). It had been a long day, I was tired, and it was raining heavily.

As I sat down to encrypt the message to be Morsed out, my hand started to shake. Seconds later my head was spinning. My eyes couldn't focus.

I took a deep breath and told myself to get a grip.

It got worse, and within a minute the shaking was uncontrollable.

I tried to write, but my hand was all over the place. My vision was getting more and more blurred.

I knew what was happening.

We were doing a lot of physical work in the jungle.

We had heavy loads on, we were under mental pressure, yet the body was still trying to defend its core temperature. To maintain a constant temperature, the heat loss must equal heat production. But if the heat production is more than the heat loss, the temperature's going to rise.

When the core temperature rises, more blood reaches the skin, where the heat is then released. This works fine as long as the skin temperature is higher than the air temperature. But in the heat of the jungle the body absorbs heat, and the body counters that by sweating. This has limits. An adult can sweat only about a liter per hour. You can't keep it up for more than a few hours at a time unless you get replacement fluids, and the sweat is effective only if the outside air is not saturated with moisture. If the humidity is more than 75 percent, as it is in the jungle, the sweat evaporation isn't going to work.

We were sweating loads, but the sweat wasn't evaporating. So the body heat was rising, and we were sweating even more. The way the body tries to get rid of that is by sending blood to the skin, so therefore the vessels have to increase in size. The heart rate increases, and sometimes it gets to a rate where its automotive function loses control and it starts to go all over the place. Less and less blood flows to the internal organs. It's shunted away from the brain, so the blood that goes there is going to be hot anyway. The brain doesn't like hot blood going to it, so it responds with headaches, dizziness, impaired thinking, and emotional instability. Because we were sweating so much, we were losing loads of electrolytes, sodium, and chlorides, and the result was dehydration. We were losing noncirculating body fluids.

The problem is that just a few sips of I-quid might quench somebody's thirst, without improvinig his internal water deficit. You might not even notice your thirst because there is too much else going on, and that was what was happening to me. I was mooching through the jungle, the patrol commander, under pressure to perform, trying to make decisions. The last thing I was thinking about, like a d.i.c.khead, was getting the fluids down my neck.

"When you have a p.i.s.s," the DS had said, "you look at it. If it's yellow and smelly, you're starting to dehydrate. If it's clear and you're p.i.s.sing every five minutes, that's excellent, because the body always gets rid of excess water. You can't overload with water because the body will just get rid of it. So as long as you've got good clear p.i.s.s, you know that everything's all right."

I turned around to Raymond and said, "f.u.c.king h.e.l.l, I'm going down here."

Everything stopped; the whole effort switched to making sure I was all right. Raymond got some rehydrates and boiled sweets down me, put a brew on, and gave me lots of sweet tea. Fortunately the DS didn't see what was going on; it was my fault I was dehydrating.

Within half an hour I was right as rain again, but I had learned my lesson.

We came back in off the exercise and they checked our bergens for plastic bags of s.h.i.+t. We weren't allowed to leave any sign, and that included body effluents. We had to s.h.i.+t into plastic bags, and collect our p.i.s.s in plastic petrol cans.

They checked another patrol as we came in. "You've not got much s.h.i.+t there," the DS said. "You constipated or something? Where's all your s.h.i.+t?"

The fellow made an excuse, and the DS just said, Okay."

Sometimes I wished they would just give us a b.o.l.l.o.c.king, to get it out of the way. They'd told us why not to s.h.i.+t in the field-because the enemy would know people were there. They had even shown us how to s.h.i.+t into a plastic bag by getting somebody to do it. If we weren't doing it, it was bad discipline.

Sometimes we'd go back to an area we'd used that day to look at some of the problems we had created.

They might say, "See the marks on the trees? Soft bark is easily marked; hard isn't so you leave no sign."

Because they'd shown us that, they didn't expect it to happen again. If we didn't learn it must mean we didn't want to learn or didn't have the apt.i.tude.

The jungle phase ended with a weeklong exercise that was a culmination of everything we'd learned, involving patrolling, hard routine, CTRs (close target recce), bringing everybody together at a troop RP, preparing to do an ambush, springing the ambush, the withdrawal, going to caches for more stores for the exfil (exfiltration). At some time in the future we might go into a country before an operation and cache food, ammunition, and explosives. We could then infil (infiltrate) later without the bulk kit, because it was already cached. We had learned how to conceal it and how to give information to other patrols so that it would be easy to find.

By now physically we were not exactly as hale and hearty as when we first went in. We were incredibly dirty, our faces ingrained with camouflage cream. Everybody had a month's beard, and we had been wearing the same clothes all the time.