Immediate Action (33 page)

    The aircraft came down below twelve thousand feet, and we were out of the danger zone. The jump was aborted, but the aircraft couldn't land in the dark at the airstrip we should have been dropping onto, so we had to go and stay in a smart hotel in Muscat, which w'as a blow.

    The hotel had a wonderful restaurant with indoor palm trees, a pianist tinkling away in the corner and nice crisp tablecloths. All the diners were dressed up in suits and ties and long evening dresses.

    Enter Air Troop in their flying suits, hair sweaty and sticking up after being under a helmet all night.

    We ate in somber mood, until Mat said, "Don't worry, it won't have affected Steve. He was brain-damaged anyway."

    It turned out Steve had been issued with a defective bottle. He obviously got a slagging the next day and was branded a big-time wanker for it ' jump. Tying to get out of the I was fascinated by the local customs and wondered if what I thought I was seeing was necessarily what was happening. They might be drinking Coca-Cola, chewing Wrigley's gum, and driving air-conditioned Land Cruisers, but their whole way of thinking was very different.

    We sat down and drank tea with these people. The Regiment was the least racist group of people in the British Army I had ever met, no doubt because they came from so many different backgrounds, religions, classes , and nationalities. Nobody was ever derogatory about indigenous populations. How could we be running around with local guerrillas, for example, if we were thinking, What a bunch of dickhead hillbillies? Nine times out of ten, their cultures are much more established than ours, and they're more true to their origins.

    We're just slags compared with a lot of the people that Westerners considered backward, Third World, and dirty. We're putting our Pepsi and Levi's culture in comparison with theirs, which might be older and wiser. At least when it comes to holding beliefs, they're not like us, as flexible as Access cards.

    The Omanis had feasts called haflas where they'd bring a goat in and cook it in the fire. It was always a fantastic gathering. They'd turn up in their Land Cruisers in the middle of nowhere, put the carpets out, and start a fire up. Sometimes they'd tow in a small water bowser as well. There was a huge amount of ritual involved; the animal was treated with immense respect before it was killed, in accordance with Islam.

    I really used to enjoy sitting there and pigging out.

    Western protocol didn't exist; everybody sat down, ate, then just stood up and walked away. Once you were finished, you were finished.

    We had a whip-round one day to buy some meat.

    Everybody chipped in three rials, and off the boys went to market.

    We were sitting on the carpets in the late afternoon, building up the fire, when we heard a family lar chug and a Toyota pickup appeared in a cloud of dust. Roped down in the back was our meal for the night, a young and very pissed-off-looking camel.

    The rituals were observed, and the meat was chopped up. Some was hung up to dry in the sun to make camel jerky, and the rest was soon in the pot. Within an hour, out came the camel and rice. There were a hundred of us, sitting under the stars on ten carpets joined together; each of us had a huge plateful and just sat around and spun the shit for the rest of the night.

    The Omanis, like all locals everywhere, wanted to show us their culture; they wanted ius to see that there was a bit of finesse about what they were doing. It might have looked basic, but it wasn't.

    There was an art in how to squeeze the rice, and how to choose the best bits of meat. In some of the old villages down in the south they had their own culinary delight, sausages made in goat's gut. The meat was prepared in a very interesting way. Basically the old girls took mouthfuls of goat meat and chewed it until it was soft and gooey, then spit it into the sausage skins. They twisted them into sections just like British bangers and then cooked them. When I was offered one, I wished I hadn't seen the old girls in action. But I had to take it; there was no way I could turn it down.

    By the end of the trip the SSM had made a fortune out of everybody, and now it was time to spend it. "We'll have a big barbecue down at the beach club in Muscat," he announced.

    The local expats' rugby team was invited to have a game with us, and we all moved down to Muscat for the last few days. We won the match, and as it came to last light, we hit the beach club. There were fridges full of beer and five or six big barbecues burning away.

    Everybody was determined to'spend all the cabbage that had been extorted from us.

    We heard a few local stories. Down at Seeb there was a -military base, with an old Arab storeman who'd lost an eye and a leg. He was retired from the army but ran the blanket stores to keep his interest in life.

    The camp was full of young recruits, and what they tended to do at weekends was roll up their mattresses and hitch a lift back up into the hills where they'd come from, near Niswa.

    One day the storeman offered a young lad a lift. The recruit staggered back to the camp a few hours later and alleged that the old boy had raped him.

    A British company commander was taking orders that day. He called the lad in and listened to his story, then got the old storeman in for his version of events. Then he called both of them back in and passed sentence.

    The storeman was sent to.military prison for a long term.

    Then the officer turned to the young lad and said, "Look at the state of the man who attacked you: He's old, he's knackered, he's got one eye and one leg, and you're a young, strong man. Basically you didn't put up enough of a struggle." And he sentenced him to six weeks in jail as well.

    Toward the end of the night the SM was running around again.

    "Slow down on the drink, we'll take some of this back to the UK!"

    He was told: "Fuck off! We're going to drink it."

    Things were starting to get out of control. The city rugby team started a fight with our team, so there was fisticuffs all over the beach. Then the nurses arrived. An invitation had gone out to all the European nurses who worked in the city; as they started coming down the steps toward the beach club, there were shouts of "Piss off!" They walked off in disgust, as one would.

    The SM closed down the barbecues and bars, and everybody got his head down on the beach. Tiny woke up on the sand in the morning and said,

    "I'm bored."

    The squadron was assembled, and the SM said, "That's the last time we have a squadron do when we leave anywhere. It got totally out of control."

    Some of the senior blokes stood up and said, "What do you fucking expect? You tear the arse out of the VCs, you tear the arse out of the cost of the drinks, then we're told it's for a party, and when we have the party, you're running around trying to stop us enjoying ourselves."

    We came back to the UK and were told we had the weekend off but were to be in the squadron interest room for eight o'clock on the Tuesday morning because the CO wanted to talk to us. We thought he was going to say, "Well done, lads, good trip."

    The colonel walked in, followed by the SM and squadron O.C. "I've got a letter here that I want you to listen to," he said. He read it; it came from Cabinet level, and it was complaining about noisy and unruly behavior at the beach club in Muscat. There must have been some very well-connected ex ats there that night. p When he had finished, the colonel turned to the SM and said, "Right, you've got the sack."

    He turned to the O.C and said, "The only reason you're being left here is because I've got nobody to replace you."

    Then he turned to us and said, "They're looking at disbanding B Squadron. If that happens, you're all in the shit." Then he walked off.

    Fuck, I thought, I've only been in twelve months, and I'm out on my ear. went home and told Debbie all about it. By now we had a quarter, and she had settled in well. She had a job in Hereford and was enjoying being back in the UK. I, however, was still busy messing up the marriage. I couldn't see past the end of my own selfish nose; my priority was finding out what time the singleys were going down town for a night out. I had everything I could have asked for-the Regiment and a partner to share the benefits of that with-and I was screwing it up.

    "It's outrageous," I said to her, describing the CO's threat. "It could all be over."

    "Oh, that was interesting," she said, miles away. "I'm off to work now."

    As I watched her drive away, it dawned on me that she had her own life now. Maybe, by being back, I was an embuggerance to her. But there was no time to dwell on such thoughts or try to sort anything out; there were phone calls to be made, a night on the town to be organized.

    We went to her sister's flat for the weekend, staying in the spare bedroom. The flat was above her mums greengrocer's shop, and to get in or out, we had to go through the shop and up two flights of stairs. At night, the door was locked and her sister kept the keys. All day Saturday I had a strong sense of unease, a feeling of something not being right. I couldn't work it out, but that night, as we were getting ready for bed and I heard her sister locking up, I thought: It's because I'm being locked in. I don't want that door to be locked and somebody else to have the key. And then it hit me: It wasn't the door; it was me. I was in a marriage that was going nowhere, because I had never given it a chance-and I didn't feel any inclination to start now. But if I carried on, all I'd be doing was screwing about with her life. The instant I'd had the thought, I said, "Debbie, I've got something to tell you. I don't really want to be here."

    She looked up from the dressing table and smiled.

    Okay, we'll leave in the morning then. We can't really leave tonight; it's too late."

    "No, no. You don't understand. I want to go. I want to leave everything."

    "What?" The smile slipped from her face as she realized what I was saying. She started to cry. It made me feel even more of a shit, but I thought, If it's got to be done, let's get it done before we get into the realms of children.

    I left there and then, I threw a few things in a bag, went downstairs to the first-floor window, and jumped.

    I only 'ever saw her once again after that.

    I moved into the block and started to save money to put a deposit on a house. It was hard going as I was not yet getting Special Forces pay.

    Not many people lived in; most who did were like me, or had their families elsewhere, or were simply new members of the squadron looking for somewhere to live. The room was small, and my kit was everywhere.

    A friend gave me a kettle; with a pack of tea bags and a pint of milk on the window ledge, that was me sorted. I was running a Renault 5, no MOT and no dashboard. I'd had to take it off to sort out the wiring one day and had never really got around to putting it back on.

    In late 1985 I heard that I was going away. In one way this was helpful. It meant I'd be away from the situation, and therefore, to my immature way of thinking, that meant the situation would go away. On the other hand, I was severely pissed ' off about where I was going.

    From what I'd heard, it was the absolute pits.

    Belize, we were told at the briefing, was formerly the colony of British Honduras and lay on the Caribbean coast of Central America.

    About the size of Wales, it had a population of 170,000-mostly black English speakers-but there was also a growing number of Spanishspeaking refugees from El Salvador.

    In the eighteenth century the British in Jamaica had begun logging hardwood on the mainland. By 1840 the territory had become a colony.

    Guatemala claimed that it had inherited the territory from Spain but nevertheless signed a treaty with Britain in 1859, recognizing British sovereignty and agreeing on the border. However, a clause in the treaty stated that the parties had to build a road through the jungle from Guatemala to the Caribbean coast. The road had never happened, and on that basis Guatemala claimed that the 1859 treaty was invalid.

    The government even inserted a clause into the 1945 constitution stating that British Honduras was in fact part of Guatemala, much as the Argentinians had with the Falklands.

    In the 1960s, as other British colonies in the Caribbean moved toward independence, Guatemala turned up the heat. In 1963 it massed troops along the border, and Britain sent forces to repel any invasion.

    British troops had been there ever since.

    In 1972 Guatemala had again assembled troops along the border, and this time Britain sent the Ark Royal and several thousand men. In 1975, after yet another threat, we installed a squadron of R.A.F Harriers.

    Finally, in 1980, Guatemala agreed to recognize Belize, but only if the famous road was built. There were riots in Belize; people were killed.

    The treaty wasn't ratified, and Guatemala went back to refusing to recognize its neighbor. Britain had kept a small garrison in Belize ever since as a permanent deterrent against incursions, and we were going there as part of that force.

    The maps consisted of vast areas of closely packed contour lines, which were hills, covered in green, which was jungle. There were no proper roads and very few tracks. As I was to discover for myself, there were still open sewers in the towns, and a lot of the locals were none too friendly. One of the lads in the unit before us had got his arm chopped off in a mugging.

    The British presence amounted to something like an infantry battalion plus all the support-Harrier jump jets, artillery, the lot.

    And part of that was an outfit called F Company, basically a dozen Regiment and SBS blokes. It had quickly been renamed F Troop after the comedy series about a U.S cavalry unit in the Wild West, manned by a load of bumbling old idiots.