Immediate Action (16 page)

    "How much fucking P.E [plastic explosive] did you put in that?" the DS raged. "The correct amount," I said. "We did the formula, honest."

    "Bollocks!" Keith stormed over to where the P.E was stored. There was almost none left.

    "That's tearing the arse out of it," he said, and I waited for the bollocking that I thought would follow.

    But instead he said, "Oh, well, at least it ignited, I'll give you credit for that much." It was the first time I'd seen a DS smile.

    The next day I took my patrol up to an area where we were going to blow more trees. When we arrived, we found that the explosives, which were the responsibility of the DS, hadn't been delivered.

    "We'll have to go back down to the camp and find somebody," I said.

    "Otherwise we'll screw up our timings."

    I knew the area where the DS lived was out of bounds. We got to the edge of it, called, and didn't hear anything, so I decided to take a chance and go through.

    After all, it wasn't our fault that the explosives weren't where they should have been.

    Bad mistake. The sergeant major caught us and started to rip into me.

    "Why are you doing this? We've told you not to come through here."

    "Well, the explosives weren't there, and the timings are crucial," I said. "We're not going to get everything done unless we get hold of them. I called, and I know it's got to be there on time, so I made the decision to come through."

    I thought I was in the right, and possibly I was. However, I was on continuation. I should have just shut up and taken the bollocking and let it go. But like an idiot, I didn't. I just hoped that he hadn't marked my card.

    One of the major components of our training was jungle navigation.

    The first time I looked at a map of the jungle, all I could see was contour lines and rivers. We had to learn how to travel with these limitations but, more important, simply how to recognize where we were on the ground.

    "A lot of people within the squadrons use different ids," said the DS.

    "You can get a rough idea of where ai you are on some high feature by using an altimeter, for example, but at the end of the day it all boils down to a map, a compass, and pacing."

    We did a lot of live firing drills in what were called jungle lanes. The DS would pick an area along a river and turn it into a range. We would then. practice patrolling along, as individuals to start with, looking for the targets. We'd be moving along tactically; all of a sudden the DS would pun a wire and a target would go up.

    . "You're there for a task," they said, "the majority of time as a small group of men. If you bump into something, you don't know what it is. For all you know, it could be the forward recce of a much larger group. If you're not there to fight, the idea is to put a maximum amount of fire down and get the hell out, so you can carry on with your job."

    The ranges were great. I'd never done anything like it before in the infantry. It wouldn't be allowed in the normal army; it would be seen as too dangerous. Yet the only way to get the proper level of realism and test people in this close environment was to use live ammunition.

    We did single-man jungle lanes, where we'd be patrolling as if we were the lead scout. When it was my Turn, I found my body was all tensed up;

    I walked with the butt in the shoulder, trying so hard to look for the LatgcL, picking my feet up to make sure I didn't trip over.

    Suddenly I heard "Stop!"

    What have I done now?

    "Look right."

    I looked right and found I'd just walked past the target. I hadn't seen it. Tuning in was so important.

    "Right, come back and start again."

    Next time, when I saw it, I reacted.

    Then we did it in pairs. We lay in a dip in the ground with the DS while he gave us a scenario. "You are part of a ten-man fighting patrol. You got bumped in an ambush and everybody split up. Now you're trying to make it back to your own area. You're moving along the line of this river. Any questions? Carry on in your own time."

    "I'll go lead scout first," I said to Mal.

    We moved along, me playing the lead scout, Mal playing the man behind.

    It was really hard to see these targets. Sometimes they'd be ones that popped up; sometimes they were just sitting there. I stopped by a tree, got down, had a look forward as far as I could; then I moved again. Mal was behind me, doing his own thing.

    I went along the track and spotted a small bit of dead ground about ten meters ahead. As I approached it, I just saw the top of a small target.

    Straightaway I got the rounds down.

    "Contact front! Contact front!"

    I kept on firing; Mal stepped off to the right and opened up. As soon as I heard him, I turned around, saw him to my left-hand side, and screamed past him. A couple of meters on I turned again and fired. He then turned and ran, stopped, and fired. I turned and went off to the right-hand side and down to the riverbank.

    "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 assumed 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 aptitude? 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, butt 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: "Butt 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 fag and a brew. It was impressive. I was jealous; I would have done the same, only I was way behind because my Morse was shit. Any spare time I had, I cracked on.

    The jungle canalizes 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, Dick, 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 bump 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 tits 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, pissed 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 fucked 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 fucking 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 cocked 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 fucked up."

    They were gone for about an hour and a half. When we got back that night, I said, "Fuck, 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 shit 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 embuggering 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 pass, 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.