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‘I don’t think we’re wasting our time,’ Ken replied. ‘I believe the boss. All our practical experience has been in Borneo and that won’t help us here.’
‘I wish I’d been in Borneo,’ Ben said. ‘I bet it was more exotic than this dump.’
‘It was,’ Larry said ironically. ‘Steaming jungle, swamps, raging rivers, snakes, scorpions, lizards, giant spiders, fucking dangerous wild pigs, and head-hunting aboriginals blowing poison darts. Join the SAS and see the world – always travelling first class, of course.’
‘At least here we’ve only got flies and mosquitoes,’ Taff said hopefully, swatting the first of the morning’s insects from his face.
‘Plus desert snakes, scorpions, centipedes, stinging hornets, spiders and Arab guerrillas who give you no quarter. Make the most of it!’
Having silenced the new men and given them something to think about, Les grinned sadistically at Ken, then glanced out of the uncovered truck as the Saladin in the lead roared into life. Taking this as their cue, the RCT drivers in the Bedfords switched on their ignition, one after the other, and revved the engines in neutral to warm them up. When the last had done the same, the rearmost Saladin followed suit and the column was ready to move. The Bedfords and the Saladin acting as ‘Tail-end Charlie’ followed the first armoured car out of the camp, throwing up a column of billowing dust as they headed out into the desert.
The route was through an area scattered with coconut and doum palms, acacias, tall ariatas and tamarisks, the latter looking prettily artificial with their feathery branches. They were, however, few and far between. For the most part, the Bedfords bounced and rattled over parched ground strewn with potholes and stones until, about half an hour later, they arrived at an area bounded by a horseshoe-shaped mountain range. The RCT drivers took the Bedfords up the lower slopes as far as they would go, then stopped to let the men out.
The soldiers were lowering their kit to the ground and clambering down when they saw for the first time that one of the Bedfords had brought up a collection of heavier support weapons, including a 7.62mm GPMG (general-purpose machine-gun), a 7.62mm LMG (light machine-gun) and two 51mm mortars.
‘Looks like we’re in for a pretty long day,’ Les muttered ominously.
‘No argument about that,’ Ken whispered back at him.
When the Bedfords had turned around and headed back the way they had come, Jimbo gathered his men around him. Dead-eye was standing beside him, holding his L42A1 bolt-action sniper rifle and looking as granite-faced as always.
‘The Bedfords,’ Jimbo said, ‘will come back just before last light. Until then we work.’ Pausing to let his words sink in, he waved his hands at the heavy weapons piled up to his left. ‘As you can see, we’ve brought along a nice collection of support weapons. We’re going to hike up to the summit of this hill and take that lot with us. I hope you’re all feeling fit.’ The men moaned and groaned melodramatically, but Jimbo, his crooked lip curling, waved them into silence. ‘For most of you,’ he said, ‘your previous practical experience was in jungle or swamp. A few of us have had experience in the African desert, but even that didn’t involve anything like these mountains. You are here, therefore, to adapt to a terrain of mountainous desert, with all that entails.’
‘What’s that, Sarge?’ Ben asked innocently.
‘Wind and sand. Potentially damaging dips and holes covered by sand, soil or shrubs. Loose gravel and wind-smoothed, slippery rocks. Ferocious heat. All in all, it calls for a wide variety of survival skills of the kind you haven’t so far acquired.’ He cast a quick grin at the impassive Dead-eye, then turned back to the men. ‘And the first lesson,’ he continued, nodding at the summit of the ridge, ‘is to get up there, carrying the support weapons and your own kit.’ Glancing up automatically, the men were not reassured by what they saw. ‘It’s pretty steep,’ Jimbo said. ‘It’s also covered with sharp and loose stones. Be careful you don’t break an ankle or trip and roll down. And watch out for snakes, scorpions and the like. Even when not poisonous, some of them can inflict a nasty bite…So, let’s get to it.’
He jabbed his finger at various groups, telling them which weapons and components they were to carry between them. Corporal Ken Brooke, Lance-Corporal Les Moody, and Troopers Ben Riley and Taff Thomas were assigned as the four-man GPMG team. Lance-Corporal Larry Johnson, already burdened with his extra medical kit, got off scot-free.
‘We picked the wrong specialist training,’ Les complained. ‘Johnson gets off with everything.’
‘It’s not just the fact that I’m our medical specialist,’ Larry replied, beaming smugly. ‘It’s because I have charm and personality. It comes natural, see.’
‘So does farting from your mouth,’ Ken shot back. ‘Come on, Les, let’s hump this thing.’
The four men tossed for it. Ken lost and became number two: the one who had to hump the GPMG onto his shoulders. Sighing, he unlocked the front legs of the 30lb steel tripod, swung them forward into the high-mount position and relocked them. Then, with Les’s assistance, he hauled the tripod up onto his shoulders with the front legs resting on his chest and the rear one trailing backwards over his equally heavy bergen. With the combined weight of the steel tripod, ammunition belts of 7.62mm rounds, and rucksack adding up to 130lb, Ken felt exhausted before he had even started.
‘You look like a bleedin’ elephant,’ Les informed him. ‘I just hope you’re as strong.’
‘Go fuck yourself,’ Ken barked back.
The four-way toss had made Les the gun controller, Ben the observer and Taff the number one, or trigger man. Between them, apart from personal gear, they had to carry two spare barrels weighing 6lb each, a spare return spring, a dial sight, marker pegs, two aiming posts, an aiming lamp, a recoil buffer, a tripod sighting bracket, a spare-parts wallet, and the gun itself.
‘This doesn’t look easy,’ Ben said, glancing nervously up the steep, rocky slope as Les distributed the separate parts of the GPMG.
‘It’s a fucking sight easier than humping that tripod,’ Les informed him, ‘so count yourself lucky.’
‘Move out!’ Jimbo bawled.
The whole squad moved out in single file, spread well apart as they would be on a real patrol, with the men who were carrying the support weapons leaning forward even more than the others. The climb was both backbreaking and dangerous, for each man was forced to navigate the steep slope while looking out for sharp or loose stones that could either break an ankle or roll from under his feet, sending him tumbling back down the mountain. In this, they were helped neither by the sheer intensity of the heat nor the growing swarms of buzzing flies and whining mosquitoes attracted by their copious sweat.
Almost driven mad by the mosquitoes, the men’s attempts to swat them away came as near to unbalancing them as did the loose, rolling stones. More than one man found himself suddenly twisting sideways, dragged down by his own kit or support weapon, after he had swung his hand too violently at his tormentors. Saved by the helping hand of the man coming up behind him, he might then find himself stepping on a loose stone, which would roll like a log beneath him, sending him violently forwards or backwards; or he would start slipping on loose gravel as it slid away underfoot.
By now the breathing of every man was agonized and not helped by the fact that the air was filled with the dust kicked up by their boots or the tumbling stones and sliding gravel. The dust hung around them in clouds, making them choke and cough, and limiting visibility to a dangerous degree, eventually reducing the brightening sunlight to a distant, silvery haze. To make matters worse, each man’s vision was even more blurred when his own stinging sweat ran into his eyes.
The climb of some 1500 feet took them two hellish hours but led eventually to the summit of the ridge. This had different, more exotic trees scattered here and there along its otherwise rocky, parched, relatively flat ground, and overlooked a vast plain of sand, silt and polished lava.
Throwing themselves gratefully to the ground, the men were about to open their water bottles when Jimbo stopped them. ‘No,’ he said. ‘Put those bottles away.’
‘But, Sarge…’ Taff began in disbelief.
‘Shut up and listen to me,’ Jimbo replied. ‘As you’ve all just discovered, the heat in the mountains can wring the last drop of sweat out of you much quicker than you can possibly imagine – no matter how fit you are. If you allow this to happen, you’ll soon be dehydrated, exhausted, and if you don’t get water in time, dead of thirst.’
‘So let us drink our water,’ Les said, shaking his bottle invitingly.
‘No,’ the sergeant replied. ‘Your minimum daily intake of water should be two gallons a day, but on a real operation we won’t be able to resup by chopper because this would give away the position of the OP. For this reason, you’ll have to learn to conserve the water you carry inside your body by minimal movement during the day, replenishing your water bottles each night by sneaking down to the nearest stream.’
‘So we should ensure that the OP site is always near a stream,’ Ben said, ‘and not on top of a high ridge or mountain like this.’
‘Unfortunately, no. It’s because they’re aware of the constant need for water that the rebel tribesmen always check the areas around streams for our presence. Therefore, the site for your OP should be chosen for the view it gives of enemy supply routes, irrespective of its proximity to water. You then go out at night and search far and wide for your water, no matter how difficult or dangerous that task may be.’
‘Sounds like a right pain to me,’ Ken said.
‘It is. I should point out here, to make you feel even worse – but to make you even more careful – that even after dark the exertion of foraging for water can produce a dreadful thirst that can make you consume half of what you collect on the way back. In short, these mountains make the jungles of Borneo seem like sheer luxury. And that’s no exaggeration, believe me.’
‘I believe you,’ Les said, still clutching his water bottle. ‘Can I have a drink now?’
‘No. That water has to last until tonight and you’ve only brought one bottle each.’
‘But we’re all dying of thirst,’ Ken complained.
Jimbo pointed to the trees scattered sparsely along the otherwise parched summit of the ridge. ‘That,’ he said, indicating a tree covered in a plum-like fruit, ‘is the jujube. Its fruit is edible and will also quench your thirst…And those,’ he continued, pointing to the bulbous plants hanging from the branches of a tree that looked like a cactus, ‘are euphorbia. If you pierce them with a knife, or slice the top off, you’ll find they contain a drinkable juice that’s a bit like milk.’
‘So when can we drink our water?’ Taff pleaded.
‘When you’ve put up your bashas, cleaned and checked your weapons, put in a good morning’s firing practice and are eating your scran. Meanwhile, you can eat and drink from those trees.’
‘Bashas?’ Ken glanced down the slopes of the ridge at the barren, sunlit plain below, running out for miles to more distant mountains. ‘What are we putting bashas up for? We’re only here for one day.’
‘They’re to let you rest periodically from the sun and keep you from getting sunstroke. So just make triangular shelters with your poncho sheets. Now get to it.’
The men constructed their triangular shelters by standing two upright sticks with Y-shaped tops about six feet apart, running a length of taut cord between them, draping the poncho sheet over the cord, with one short end, about 18 inches long, facing away from the sun and the other running obliquely all the way to the ground, forming a solid wall. Both sides of the poncho sheet were then made secure by the strings stitched into them and tied to wooden pegs hammered into the soil. Dried grass and bracken were then strewn on the ground inside the ‘tent’ and finally the sleeping bag was rolled out to make a crude but effective mattress.
When the bashas had been constructed, the men were allowed to rest from the sun for fifteen minutes. Though it was still not yet nine a.m. local time, the sun’s heat was already intense.
Once rested, the men were called out to dismantle, clean of dust and sand, oil and reassemble the weapons, a task which, with the dust blowing continuously, was far from easy. Jimbo then made them set the machine-guns up on the ridge and aim at specific targets on the lower slopes of the hill: mostly clumps of parched shrubs and trees. The rest of the morning was spent in extensive practice with the support weapons, first using the tripods, then firing both the heavy GPMG and the LMG from the hip with the aid of a sling.
The GPMG, in particular, had a violent backblast that almost punched some of the men off their feet. But in the end they all managed to hold it and hit their targets when standing. The noise of the machine-guns was shocking in the desert silence and reverberated eerily around the encircling mountains.
Two hours later, when weapons practice was over, the men were again made to dismantle, clean, oil and reassemble the weapons, which were then wrapped in cloth to protect them from the dust and sand. By now labouring beneath an almost overhead sun, the men were soaked in sweat, sunburnt and gasping with thirst, and so were given another ten-minute break, which they spent in their bashas, sipping water and drawing greedily on cigarettes. The break over, they were called out again, this time by the fearsome Sergeant Parker, for training with their personal weapons.
Dead-eye’s instruction included not only the firing of the weapons, at which he was faultless, but the art of concealment on exposed ridges, scrambling up and down the slopes on hands and elbows, rifle held horizontally across the face. The posture adopted for this strongly resembled the ‘leopard crawl’ used for the crossing of the dreaded entrails ditch during ‘Sickener One’ at Bradbury Lines, Hereford. It was less smelly here, but infinitely more dangerous than training in Britain, as the men had to crawl over sharp, burning-hot rocks that could not only cut skin and break bones, but also could be hiding snakes, scorpions or poisonous spiders.
More than one man was heard to cry out and jump up in shock as he came across something hideous on the ground where he was crawling. But he was shouted back down by the relentless Jimbo, who was always watching on the sidelines as Dead-eye led them along the ridge on their bellies.
‘Is that what you’d do if you were under fire?’ Jimbo would bawl. ‘See a spider and jump up like an idiot to get shot to pieces? Get your face back in the dirt, man, and don’t get up again until I tell you!’
While some of the men resented having firing practice when most of them had not only done it all before but had even been blooded in real combat, what they were in fact learning was how to deal with an unfamiliar terrain. Dead-eye also taught them how to time their shots for when the constantly swirling dust and sand had blown away long enough for them to get a clear view of the target. Finally, they were learning to fire accurately into the sunlight by estimating the position of the target by its shadow, rather than by trying to look directly at it. By lunchtime, when they had mastered this new skill, they were thoroughly exhausted and, in many cases, bloody and bruised from the sharp, burning rocks. They were suffering no less from the many bites inflicted by the whining mosquitoes.
‘I look like a bleedin’ leper,’ Ben complained as he rubbed more insect repellent over his badly bitten wrists, hands and face, ‘with all these disgusting mosquito bites.’
‘Not as bad as leeches,’ Les informed him smugly as he sat back, ignoring his mosquito bites, to have a smoko. ‘Those little buggers sucked us dry in Borneo. Left us bloodless.’
‘By the time they finish with us,’ Taff said, ‘you could throw us in a swamp filled with leeches and they’d all die of thirst. I’m fucking bloodless, I tell you!’
In the relative cool of his poncho tent, Ken removed his water bottle from his mouth, licked his lips, then lay back with his hands behind his head and closed his eyes.
‘If you go to sleep you’ll feel like hell when you wake up,’ Larry solemnly warned him.
‘I’m not sleeping,’ Ken replied. ‘I’m just resting my eyes. They get tired from the sunlight.’
‘Getting hotter and brighter every minute,’ Larry said. ‘It’ll soon be like hell out there.’
‘We’ll all get there eventually,’ Les told him, ‘so we’d better get used to it.’
‘Amen to that,’ Ken said.
Immediately after lunch they rolled out of the shade of their bashas to return to the baking oven of the ridge, where, although dazzled by the brilliance of the sky, they took turns to set up, fire and dismantle the 51mm mortar. It weighed a mere 13lb, had no sophisticated sights or firing mechanism, and was essentially just a simple tube with a fixed base plate. Conveniently, it could be carried over the shoulder with its ammunition distributed among the rest of the patrol. The user had only to wedge the base plate into the ground, hold the tube at the correct angle for the estimated range, then drop a bomb into the top of the tube. Though first-shot accuracy was relatively difficult with such a crude weapon, a skilled operator could zero in on a target with a couple of practice shots, then fire up to eight accurate rounds a minute. Most of the men were managing to do this within the first hour, and were gratified to see the explosions tearing up the flat plain below, forming spectacular columns of spiralling smoke, sand and dust.
Even though they had protected their faces with their shemaghs, they were badly burnt by the sun, on the road to dehydration, and very close to complete exhaustion when, in the late afternoon, Jimbo and Dead-eye called a halt to the weapons training and said they would now hike back down the hill to the waiting Bedfords.
Believing they were about to return to the base camp, the men enthusiastically packed up their bashas, humped the support weapons back onto their bruised shoulders, strapped their heavy bergens to their backs, picked up their personal weapons and hiked in single file back down the hill. If anything, this was even more dangerous than the uphill climb, for they were now growing dizzy with exhaustion and were forced to hike in the direction of the sliding gravel and stones, which tended to make the descent dangerously fast. Luckily, they were close to the bottom when the first man, Taff, let out a yelp as the gravel slid under his feet, sending him backwards into the dirt, to roll the rest of the way down in a billowing cloud of dust and sand. He was picking himself up when two others followed the same way, either tripping or sliding on loose gravel, then losing their balance before rolling down the hill. The rest of the group managed to make it down without incident, though by now all of them were utterly exhausted and soaking in sweat.
‘Right,’ Dead-eye said. ‘Hump those support weapons back up onto the Bedford, then gather around me and Sergeant Ashman.’
The men did as they were told, then tried to get their breath back while wiping the sweat from their faces and, in some cases, vainly trying to wring their shirts and trousers dry. They were still breathing painfully and scratching their many insect bites when they gathered around the two sergeants.
Any hopes they might have held of heading back to the relative comforts of the base camp were dashed when Jimbo gave them a lecture on desert navigation, much of it based on his World War Two experiences with the Long Range Desert Group. The lecture took an hour and, to the men’s dismay, included a hike of over a mile, fully kitted, out into the blazing-hot desert. This was for the purpose of demonstrating how to measure distance by filling one trouser pocket with small stones and transferring a stone from that pocket to the other after each hundred steps.
‘The average pace,’ Jimbo explained, ‘is 30 inches, so each stone represents approximately 83 yards. So if you lose your compass or, as is just as likely, simply have no geographical features by which to assess distance, you can easily calculate the distance you’re marching or have marched by multiplying the number of stones transferred by eighty-three. That gives the distance in yards.’
Though the exhausted men had been forced to walk all this distance in the burning, blinding sunlight, they had been followed by one of the Bedfords. Fondly imagining that this had come out to take them back, they had their hopes dashed again when some small shovels, a couple of radios and various pieces of wiring were handed down to them by the driver.
Jimbo and Dead-eye, both seemingly oblivious to the heat, then took turns at showing the increasingly shattered men how to scrape shallow lying-up positions, or LUPs, out of the sand and check them for buried scorpions or centipedes. Dead-eye was in charge of this particular lesson and, when he had finished scraping out his own demonstration LUP, he made the exhausted men do the same, kicking the sand back into the scrapes when they failed to do it correctly and making them start all over again. When one of the men collapsed during this exercise, the inscrutable sergeant patiently aroused him by splashing cold water on his face, then made him complete his scrape, which amazingly the man did, swaying groggily in the heat.
A short break was allowed for a limited intake of water, then Jimbo gave them a lesson in special desert signalling, covering Morse code, special codes and call-sign signals; use of the radios and how to clean them of sand; recognition of radio ‘black spots’ caused by the peculiar atmospheric conditions of the mountainous desert; setting up standard and makeshift antennas; and the procedure for calling in artillery fire and air strikes, which would be their main task when in their OPs in the Radfan.
Most of the men were already rigid with exhaustion, dehydration and mild sunstroke when Jimbo took another thirty minutes to show them how to make an improvised compass by variously stroking a sewing needle in one direction against a piece of silk and suspending it in a loop of thread so that it pointed north; by laying the needle on a piece of paper or bark and floating it on water in a cup or mess tin; or by stropping a razor-blade against the palm of the hand and, as with the sewing needle, suspending it from a piece of thread to point north.
Mercifully, the sun was starting to sink when he showed them various methods of purifying and conserving water; then, finally, how to improvise water-filtering systems and crude cookers out of old oil drums and biscuit tins.
‘And that’s it,’ he said, studying their glazed faces with thinly veiled amusement. ‘Your long day in the desert is done. Now it’s back to base camp.’
‘Which you can only do,’ Dead-eye told them, ‘if you manage to leg it back to the Bedfords.’
‘Aw, Jesus!’ Larry said without thinking. ‘Can’t we all pile into that Bedford and let it take us back to the others?’
‘That Bedford is for the equipment only,’ Dead-eye told him. ‘Besides, you men have to get used to the desert, and this last hike is all part of your training. Now get going.’
Relieved, at least, of the heavy support weapons, the men heaved their packed bergens and other kit onto their aching backs, turned to face the sinking sun, and walked in a daze back to the other Bedfords. Two almost collapsed on the way and had to be helped by the others, which slowed them down considerably; but just before last light they all made it and practically fell into the trucks, which bounced and rattled every yard of the half-hour journey back to the camp.
Battered and bruised, covered in insect bites, smeared with sweat-soaked sand and dust, hungry and unbelievably thirsty, they collapsed on their steel beds in the tents and could hardly rouse themselves even to shower, shave and head off to the mess tent. Indeed, most of them were still lying there, almost catatonic, when Jimbo did a round of the tents, bawling repeatedly that those not seen having a decent meal would be RTU’d – returned to their original unit. Though they all cursed the SAS, so great was the shame attaching to this fate that they rolled off their beds, attended to their ablutions, dressed in clean clothes and marched on aching legs to the mess tent to have their scran and hot tea. Somewhat restored, they then made for the NAAFI tent to get drunk on cold beer. Finally, after what seemed like the longest day of their lives, they surrendered to sleep like children.