Immediate Action (35 page)

    High humidity combined with sweltering heat meant that in theory there was a definite limit to how much kit a man could carry; the maximum should have been around fifteen kilograms, but it could be much more.

    Mess tins were thrown away because they were pretty useless things anyway. All that was needed was a metal mug and a small nonstick frying pan, ideal for boiling rice.

    The most popular weapon to take into the jungle was the M16 or 203. It rarely needed cleaning, so we didn't have to waste time and energy trying to keep our weapons in good condition.

    One bloke never used to touch his M16 at all, out of principle.

    He said, "I know that it's going to work, I know that the weapon's reliable, so I don't need to clean it." And the fact is, if you squeeze the trigger and it goes bang and a round comes out of the end, that's all you want.

    There were some practices in the jungle that newcomers perceived as bone when in fact they weren't. One of them concerned headbands; in the normal army such fashion accessories were perceived as la'ry-big-time and Ramboish. But moving through the jungle meant losing a lot of body fluids. Your face was covered with cam cream and mozzie rep, and if it ran into your eyes, it stung fearsomely and attacked your vision: not advisable if you're out there as scout.

    Hence the headbands.

    Every time we walked into a village near the border the locals would scatter. The Guats used to come over the river and steal their women at gunpoint, and to the villagers one set of jungle camouflage looked very like another because they couldn't see the pattern for mud and wet.

    The villages were little more than a collection of wooden huts.

    Pigs wallowed in puddles of mud; chickens and children ran between the huts or on the small football pitch that every village had. The kids didn't care if we were Guats or Brits; they always came up, hoping we were going to give them something. I loved them; they didn't understand us and we didn't understand them, but we had some good fun.

    Some vi lages were just starting t'o get electricity on a generator and visits from American Peace Corps volunteers. Like modemday missionaries, these fresh-faced twenty-year-olds were bringing in hygiene and preventive medicine, and the lot of the villagers was improving-or so the volunteers said. The fact was, these people had lived like this for hundreds of years. They now had new illnesses, a new culture and religion. The soul of these villages had been dragged away to the town. The kids now wanted to wear Levi's and smoke American cigarettes. As soon as they were old enough, they left.

    First stop on our visit was always the headman. we,d go up, shake his hand, and say, "Hello, mate, all right then? How's it going? Any chance of using your hut, or what?" He, too, would start gabbing off, probably taking the piss. His hut would also be the local town hall, and we were usually welcome to put up there for the night-in exchange for a magazine or something from the rations. Using that as a base, we'd do our little hearts and minds bit. As soon as the villagers realized we weren't Guats but friendly Brits with a party-size medical pack, they'd be turning up with babies and young kids with coughs and runny noses and old men with sores and cuts. Although we were carrying loads of medical equipment, we had to be careful in what we dispensed.

    These people were not used to Western drugs yet; give a bloke two aspirins and he'd be flat on his back. Half of what we gave them was placebo, a spoonful of water that we pretended was a magic concoction.

    Throw it down the baby's neck and the mother was happy.

    The long wooden hut with a grass roof would house a whole family, from grandparents to babies. In one corner there would be a mud cooker and a sheet of metal that was used as the grill. This was where the tortillas were cooked; the basic food was corn that they grew by burning down the jungle and spending weeks clearing.

    Coming in and out would be small pigs, chickens, and more kids.

    The hut would be thick with smoke, both wood and cigarette.

    The villagers lived an incredibly basic lifestyle, but I enjoyed being allowed to share a little of it. I got a buzz out of going back to a village six weeks later and seeing that an injury I'd sutured up had healed or that a kid who had been on her back with croup was running around on the football pitch again.

    We weren't there entirely to patch up their injuries and illnesses, of course. While I was treating them, I'd be asking about the Guats and whether any of them had been over. We slowly built up relationships, and over the period of a tour we would come to recognize each other.

    Besides giving us information, they'd give us useful tips about the jungle, such as where the fish were hiding and which were the best plants to boil up and eat.

    We did a lot of liaison work with the Harriers. Part of our job in the event of hostilities would have been calling in air strikes on predesignated targets on the other side of the border, such as power stations and desalination plants. We would go in, mark the targets, and talk the Harriers in. We spent a lot of time practicing on the net with the pilots, because it was quite difficult to bring an aircraft in over the canopy. We used air-marker balloons, which penetrate the canopy and leave an orange balloon stuck up above the tree line as an identification marker and would then talk them on from that.

    Being an idle fucker, I liked jungle living. There were only two bits of kit to look after-wet and dry. Most of the time we were sitting down, brewing up and drinking tea with the locals. But best of all, we weren't spending money. I still didn't have enough money to put a deposit on the house, so I was using this trip to save up every penny I could. To save on stamps, I wasn't writing home to anybody, and there were no letters coming back.

    Sandy had come into the Regiment a year after me.

    He was a public schoolboy who went wrong somewhere and joined the army as a torn. I knew he was clever because he used a fountain pen to write letters with. He was about my age and height and was very into the weights. He wasn't massive, but he had a male model's physique, which annoyed me. Luckily he had really horrible hair, like a mass of rusty wire wool. He was having deja vu, having just spent six months in Belize with his battalion before going for Selection and was mightily pissed off.

    He said it was even more boring for him than last time around. at isrize I'd first met him when we were free-falling Norton. He had a midair collision with one,of the instructors; as they both fell to earth with their canopies like a bag of washing, I saw Sandy start kicking to get out of the tangle. As he landed and sorted himself out he said,

    "Fair one," and left it at that. He knew he couldn't put the blame on the instructor as they would close ranks. He had only been two hundred feet from creaming in.

    Sandy and I came in off a two-week patrol around the border, and after sorting our weapons out, we headed straight for the shower rooms for the big degunging process. You take everything in with you: all your clothes, all the kit that you'd used, your webbing, your belt kit, and you just dump it in the shower and scrub it all clean.

    When that's done, you get yourself sorted out; the priority, as always, is your weapon, your kit, yourself.

    There was Sandy and me standing under the cold shower, fully clothe cleaning our frying pans and other bits and pieces.

    "Are we going to sort this wagon for Cancun at Christmas?" I said.

    ' ' 'We'll have to get hold of Joe and find out who's going to be on standby. We can hire a Land Rover and,get down there."

    After the kit we showered ourselves with our uniform and boots on, washing our clothes with soap as if we were washing our bodies. Then we took it off, rinsed out our boots, and finally washed ourselves.

    Once that was done the real business started. In the jungle, you get infested with little ticks, and you've got big zits on your back and all this sort of shit. Most of them are in places that you can't reach yourself, so your mate has to oblige.

    Sandy came out of the shower and said, "I've got some ticks in my back.

    Are you going to get them out for us?"

    He bent over the sink while I got up behind him and busied myself with grooming his back, and that's how we were, both in the nude, when an R.A.F officer came in to use the urinal. He sort of trumpeted like a rogue elephant, did a smart about-turn, and marched off to report two homosexuals in the shower block. It was quite funny after the fuss had died down and our explanation had been accepted, and whenever I saw the officer after that, I always made a point of blowing him a kiss.

    There was a delightful place toward Belize City called Raoul's Rose Garden. The first time I was taken there I was expecting some sort of elegant colonial tearoom with a pianist and little cucumber sandwiches, but it turned out to be a run-down breeze block building with rickety tables and chairs and even more rickety whores.

    It was a typically stinking Central American setting. I got bitten by more mozzies inside than outside, and the band played nonstop Central American classics. The one good thing about the Rose Garden was that it was out of bounds to all the squaddies. The young lads would always be trying to get in there or the other whorehouses and coming back with horrendous syphilis.

    Sometimes I'd. see them coming back from the town, arm in arm with a whore they had fallen in love with, girls who were basically after a quick marriage and a passport to the UK when the unit left.

    The Royal Marines were the resident battalion at the time. Every morning at six-thirty their HQ and support companies would be lined up and doing a three-mile circuit of the camp. Wandering up the road toward the guardroom would be one of the garrison personnel, like an Ordnance Corps bloke or a Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers fitter, hand in hand with some hooker, and the two hundred bootnecks would run past and give their marks out of ten.

    One young bloke from the Catering Corps married a Central American Indian. She was five feet nothing and stunningly beautiful; in her mind she wasn't a whore, she was just earning money. She went back to the UK as a wife, spent a year in Catterick, and was getting shagged fearsomely by anyone in uniform. Every man and his dog were roaring up this blokes wife, and she was getting paid for it as well. Obviously the marriage went to ratshit, and she came back, resuming her place on the career ladder at Raoul's and passing around the photographs: "That's me outside the NAAFI in Catterick, and there's me on a day's shopping trip in York."

    Every Friday night the sergeants' mess of the garrison had a do-an open-invite occasion, basically trying to get all the local women to come into the camp. They came in their droves, but it wasn't the music and conversation that attracted them; it was the offer of chicken and chips at ten o'clock. The local girls dolled themselves up to the nines and tried to look their best for the occasion.

    We were lying on our beds, watching the fan go around and around.

    One of the blokes had got a letter from his kids. They'd done a drawing of them taking the dog for a walk, but it looked more like a man in a noose. "I need that picture," I said. "I want to stick it on the wall, because that's what I'm going to do if I have to stay in Belize any longer. I'm going to fucking hang myself." jock had got a letter from his future wife, telling him that their marriage had been placed on the back burner.

    He was severely down because there was nothing he could do about it from that distance, so we decided to give him a night out. We made a punch from a couple of bottles of rum and a tin of pineapple chunks and sat in his room for an hour or two, listening to the party that we were not allowed to go to and putting the world to rights. By about half past eleven everybody was revved up and I suddenly heard myself saying,

    "Right, we'll go down to Raoul's."

    We got the admin corporal out of bed and told him to organize a Land Rover. By the time we got there, some people from the sergeants' mess had also turned up, senior ranks with their shirts and ties hanging off, chasing the working girls around the tables.

    One of the senior ranks joined in with the band and tried to teach them a Mungo Jerry number. Things got out of hand, and the management-Raoul-phoned up the MPs.

    Two young lance corporals arrived and told us we all had to leave.

    We knew that recruits to the Military Police were immediately given a rank to give them some authority, and we didn't take kindly to these lads of nineteen or twenty saying, "Can you switch on? Get in the wagon, we'll drive you back to camp." It was the sensible thing to do, but fuck them.

    They knew the sergeants would go, because they weren't going to risk being gabby to a lance jack who was only doing his job. However, there was no way they were going to take us; we had nothing to do with the garrison people and were not causing any trouble. There was a little bit of a to-do, and after about half an hour of listening to the MPs pleading, we relented. They dropped us off outside F Troop lines; the officers' and sergeants' messes were more or less -adjacent to each other, and in between was F Troop.

    It was incredibly hot this particular night, and as soon as we got in, we took our clothes off and hung around in our skiddies and flip-flops.

    My head was spinning. Everybody was sitting on the beds honking about all and sundry, and we finally decided to have a scoff.

    I got the hexy burner out on the step and fried up bits of Spam.

    There was stuff strewn all over the place because everybody was pissed, and by now even the skiddies had come off.

    Unfortunately, just as our barbecue party was in full swing, all the officers and their wives started to come out of the mess. The ruperts had an instant monk on because there were these naked squaddies lying on the grass in star shapes, farting and shouting at each other, giggling, pissed, and falling over. Spam was flying everywhere, and in places the grass was on fire.