Immediate Action Part 9

The fact was, this woman gave more to the church than the rich man did because the six bags of gold was jack s.h.i.+t to him. The instructors were looking at us in the same light. They were looking at what we were, and what they expected us to become. It was during this stage that we lost the marine corporal, who, as far as they were concerned, had a standard of weapon handling that wasn't as good as it should have been for a corporal in the Royal Marines.

I suspected that our personalities were also under the microscope.

From the way the DS looked at us I could almost hear the cogs turning: Is the experienced soldier helping the less experienced corporal in the Catering Corps to get on, or is he just saying, "Well, hey' I'm looking good"? Was a bloke maybe such a d.i.c.khead that he spent his time joking away with the DS? They'd joke back with him, but at the end of the day they'd probably think, What a big-timer. It was their job to make sure that people who were going to the squadrons were the best that they could provide. They had to go back to the squadrons themselves; they might be in command of us.

They took the responsibility very seriously.

We trained with the personal weapons that were available to the squadrons. First were the 5.56 M16 and the 203, the grenade launching attachment that most people went for, apparently, because of its increased firepower. Some people, however, still liked carrying the SLR, which fired a 7.62 round. They-were in a minority because it meant that the patrol had to carry two types of small-arms ammunition.

Another weapon at patrol level was the Minimiagain, firing 5.56 rounds. The Regiment also still used the GPMG, the standard army section machine gun. I knew it to be an excellent weapon at section level, and we were told that a lot of people preferred it to the Minimi.

There were quite a few jobs where people would insist on taking a GPMG: it was reliable and very powerful.

We worked with Browning pistols, Colt 45s, and a number of different semiautomatic weapons. For some jobs people might prefer a certain type of pistol, but the majority would go for the Browning.

Then there were shotguns-the Federal riot gun, a pump-action shotgun that had a folding stock and was an excellent weapon. Each squadron had its own a.s.sortment of mortars-81 MM, 60 MM, and 40 MM-and the Milan ant.i.tank weapons. There was also the LAW 90, a 84 MM rocket, the standard rifle company ant.i.tank missile. Then there was Stinger, an American-made antiaircraft fire-and-forget missile.

"Stingers turned up in the Falklands, and n.o.body really knew how to use them or what to do with them," the DS said. "It was just a case of, 'Here they are, get to grips with them." So the boys were sitting around on the gra.s.s one day, reading the instructions and having a brew, when over the horizon came a flight of Puccaras.

A D Squadron member stood up and put the Stinger on his shoulder.

It was like the kid in the old Fisher Price ad: 'How's this work then?

What does this do?" The bloke was pressing all the b.u.t.tons to make it fire, and it did. It took down a Puccara. So the first time the Stinger was used in anger was by a Brit firing at an Argentinian aircraft."

The story didn't end there. About two years later apparently, D Squadron went over to Germany to the Stinger training center run by the Americans. The training was in simulators because the weapon was so expensive. The American instructors got to fire only one a year and had certainly never used it in war.

"We've got this wonderful weapon," said one of the instructors.

"Any of you guys seen it before?"

The bloke put his hand up, and the instructor smirked. "In a simulator?"

"No, I shot down a jet with it."

Besides the British and American hardware, we were trained with all the Eastern bloc weapons: AK47s-the Russian, Czech, and Chinese ones-all the mortars, their medium ant.i.tank weapons, and ma.s.ses of different pistols, such as the Austrian Steyr. We were told that a lot of times we'd be on tasks where we wouldn't be using our own weapons; we'd have to go to a country and use what we could find.

The AK family were excellent weapons. The' fired y 7.62 short, which meant you could carry more 7.62 than our 7.62 for the same weight. It was a good reliable weapon because it was so simple. The only drawback was the big, thirty-round magazines; when you lay down, you couldn't actually get the weapon in the shoulder to fire because the magazine hit the floor. A lot of the Eastern bloc policy on attack showed in the AK.

With the safety catch, the first click down was automatic; then the second click down was single shot, so the mentality was clearly: Give it loads. On Western weapons it was the other way around: single shot first, then onto automatic.

We did live firing down at Sennybridge, practicing live attacks.

Sometimes they'd tell us things on the range, such as how to hold our weapon, that were contrary to what some of us had been taught. We were doing standing targets at a hundred meters; the way I fired was to put the b.u.t.t into my shoulder and-have my hand underneath the magazine, resting my elbow on the magazine pouch. It seemed to work for me. One of the DS came over and said, "What are you doing? Put your hand on the stock, lean forward, and fire it properly." There was no way I was going to say, "Actually, I shoot better like this, and this is the way I've been doing it for years." I just nodded and agreed, put my hand on the stock, and carried on firing.

Some of the blokes would actually say, "No, that's wrong," but what was the point of arguing? We wanted to be with them, not the other way around.

People had weird and wonderful qualifications that they thought were going to be an a.s.set, but the DS soon put them straight. "If the squadrons need specific skills, they'll send their own people off for training. The most important thing is that we send them somebody with the apt.i.tude to do a certain type of work and the personality to get on with other people in closed and stressful environments. Then they have the baseline. Then they can send you out to become the mortar fire controller or whatever."

I heard a story about a fellow from a Scottish regiment on a previous Selection. When they started training on the weapons, he sat muttering in the cla.s.s, "I don't want to be doing this s.h.i.+t. This is what I do in the battalion. I want to get on to the Heckler and Koch and all the black kit." The instructors heard it, didn't say anything; they just got on with the lesson. But they'd pinged him as a big-time Walter Mitty; they took him quietly to one side afterward and gave him directions to Platform 4.

I was phoning up Debbie once a week, and occasionally I'd write her a letter, but she was second in my list of priorities; I wanted to crack on and get into the jungle. As far as I was concerned, she was fine.

She was still working; she was having a good time with her friends.

The telephone conversations were tense and stilted.

I'd say, "Is everything all right?"

"Yeah, fine," she'd say, offhand. "What changes here?

Still going to work, still bored, still nothing to do."

Never mind, I thought, at the end of the day everything will be sorted out. We'd get the quarter; the problems would disappear.

We started to learn the techniques we'd be using in the jungle, and why they were used-the way to L.U.P (lyingup point), the daily routine, hard routine, how to ambush, how to cross rivers. We'd go down to the training area and walk around in plain fields and forestry blocks as if we were in the jungle. Anybody looking at us would have thought we were a bunch of d.i.c.kheads, prowling around right up close to the trees.

"When you get into your tactical L.U.P," the DS said, "you put up a hammock-as low as possible, so your a.r.s.e is just a couple of inches off the ground-and fix up a poncho above you. If you've got to sleep on the floor, you've got to sleep on the floor, but why do that if you've got the means not to? When you do get up in the morning, you're more effective if you haven't been bitten to bits during the night and you've had a good chance to get some sleep. You're more refreshed and better able to go and do the task."

Some people took biwi bags with them, he said. As well as keep the rain off, it kept the dry clothing dry; the wet clothing would just stay outside and get soaking wet anyway, that was no problem. If we could keep ourselves well maintained and free of emb.u.g.g.e.rances, the better tactically we would be. There was nothing 'soft about it. We were told it was far more sensible than playing the he-man and ending up being effective for about two and a half minutes.

"People live in the jungle for months at a time like this, with no adverse effects at all. In fact it's a wonderful environment; it's far better than any other environment you've got to operate in because you've got everything there.

You've got food if you need it, you've got continuous supplies of water, you've got cover, the weather's good, you don't have to worry about the elements-everything you need is there. So why go against it?

Just switch on, and keep -as comfortable as you can when you can."

We got all our injections done and filled in more doc.u.mentation.

I was delighted; I felt it somehow meant we were starting to get further into the system.

The atmosphere was changing slightly, becoming slowly more sociable. I was careful it didn't give me a false sense of security, however. it was easy to forget that I could still be binned, that they were still seeing if they wanted me in their gang or not. There were months and months to go, and trying to make an impression on a DS over a cup of tea wasn't going to get anyone anywhere.

All the drills we were learning, we were told, were based on actual experience, things that had gone right, things that had gone wrong.

We practiced contact drills. The task of the Regiment in the jungle was not to go out and start shooting people; it was to go out to get information, come back, then go back again with other people or a bigger force.

"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. n.o.body ha.s.sled 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 b.u.mped 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 apt.i.tude. 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 f.u.c.ker, I'd better start edging my way next to him. I went for a p.i.s.s 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, f.u.c.k."

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 f.a.g 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 s.h.i.+tless. 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, h.e.l.l, 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 a.s.sociation 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 claustrophobic 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 s.h.i.+t 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 s.h.i.+t 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 c.r.a.p.

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 f.u.c.king wet, and that's it."

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