Immediate Action (17 page)

    "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 shits 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 fishing 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 buttress 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 talcum 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 shit flying through the air.

    It was a complete pain in the arse. 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 fuck 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 dickhead, was getting the fluids down my neck.

    "When you have a piss," 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 pissing 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 piss, you know that everything's all right."

    I turned around to Raymond and said, "Fucking hell, 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 shit. We weren't allowed to leave any sign, and that included body effluents. We had to shit into plastic bags, and collect our piss in plastic petrol cans.

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

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

    Sometimes I wished they would just give us a bollocking, to get it out of the way. They'd told us why not to shit in the field-because the enemy would know people were there. They had even shown us how to shit 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 aptitude.

    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.

    One thing I had never got used to was getting out of my A-frame or hammock and putting my wet kit on. It was always full of bits and pieces that gathered as we were patrolling along, and it was cold and clammy. It grated against my skin for the ten minutes or so until it had got warm.

    We had our belt kits on all the time, and some of the pouches,would be rubbing on the sides and producing sores. I went through a phase of not wearing any pants, to try to keep the sores from between my legs. I tried little things that I thought might help, such as undoing my trousers, tucking everything in, and - doing it up again.

    I came to the conclusion that nothing worked. I was in shit state, and in shit state I would stay.

    Once the exercise had finished we all RP'd at a bend in the river; that night we went nontactical, waiting to get picked up the following day by the lbans in their dugout canoes with little outboard engines on the back.

    They took us downstream to a village, where we were going to get picked up because there were no landing sites in the area.

    It was like a scene out of a film. There was all the jungle, and then there was a clearing, with grass, chickens running around, little pigs and goats and all sorts, in the middle of nowhere. There were no roads, just a river. They had a schoolhouse, with a generator chugging away.

    There were TV aerials sticking up out of these Than huts made out I of wood, atap, and mud. All the kids were going to school in just shorts, and the teacher was dressed as any other schoolteacher would be.

    The DS said, "When you come into these places, you've got to introduce yourself to the head boy. Show him respect; then the next time you come in he won't fuck you off."

    For the first time in days people were allowed to smoke. Blokes were sitting on the riverbank, sharing their fags with the DS. The training major got his out and offered one to Mal. There was a mutual understanding between them; it made me envious not to be a smoker, joining in the camaraderie.

    I just sat there, drinking in the scene. As far as I was concerned, it was done now. I'd passed or I'd failed; I was just pleased that it was over.

    The rest of the day was spent cleaning weapons, cleaning kit, eating scoff. In the evening there was a barbecue for everybody who had anything to do with the jungle school. The DS produced crates of two-pint bottles of Heineken, and the cooks sorted out the steaks and sausages.

    "Might be the last time you ever come here, lads," the DS said.

    "Get on the piss!"

    We did. I was drunk on three bottles of the Heineken, threw up at about midnight, and went to bed with the jungle spinning.

    There was a day off in the capital, but it was a Muslim country so there was only drinking in one hotel. Everybody felt so sick anyway they didn't bother. I went shopping with Mal, Tom, and Raymond, buying armfuls of bootleg tapes, Walkmans, cameras, and watches. All the traders seemed to be wearing David Cassidy T-shirts.

    I had lost a stone. One of the blokes, the Canadian jock who had been our snowplow during Selection, came out looking like a Biafran.

    Like a dickhead, he hadn't even been cooking scoff for himself at night because he wanted to go hard routine all the time.

    We'd been under the canopy and not seen daylight for a month. I came out looking like an uncooked chip. I was all pasty, full of zits and big lumps. No matter how many showers I had, I still had grime under my nails and big blackheads on my skin. Some of the mozzie bites had scarred up a bit from where I'd scratched them, and they'd welted up.

    Basically I looked stinking.

    We had a few hours in Hong Kong and then flew back on a British Caledonian charter. Four long-haired blokes who were sitting near us looked the typical "Here we go, here we go" lads, wearing hideous orange and purple flowery Hawaiian shirts, jeans and flip-flops. I sat there wondering if they'd had a slightly more enjoyable time in the Far East than we had, frolicking-on a sex holiday in Thailand or smuggling drugs.