"You start with the two end pieces in the shape of an A. These don"t need to be more than two or three inches in diameter, just strong enough to support your weight.
Then you get two more lengths of wood, again no more than two or three inches in diameter, to support your hammock. You slip the two poles through the holes in the hammock and push them down over the apex of the As and tie them on. All being well, what you"ve created is a bed that"s a couple of feet off the floor.
"Once that"s done, you then put a poncho over the top and then just bungee it off onto the trees. Now you"re protected from the rain, and then underneath that you can put your mozzie net. There"s nothing macho about sleeping in your A-frame without a mozzie net; getting bitten means that you"re more uncomfortable the next day, and that means you"re less able to operate. If you take the time, sort yourself out, you"re a much better commodity the next day. It"s not wimpy kit; it"s sensible.
There"s times when you"ve got to be in the s.h.i.t, and then okay, you do that, but there"s a lot of times when you don"t have to be. If you"re back in a base area, you make yourself as comfortable as possible."
Some people apparently built another platform under the bed level, to store their bergens and other kit. The ground was soaking wet and teeming with ants, scorpions, and other beasts that would end up biting if they got close enough. The more kit we could keep off the ground, the more comfortable we were going to be when we put it on.
The DS took us to our patrol area and said, "Sort yourselves out.
I"ll be back later; any problems, come and get me."
"Sorting ourselves out" meant building ourselves an A-frame.
Raymond got his up in less than an hour and then chopped more wood to make himself a platform to stand on.
"This"ll last about two days before it sinks into the mud," he said. "So then you just bung another load on top."
"I see," I said, still only a quarter of the way through I building my ricketty bag of s.h.i.t.
Once we had all finished, we sat down and got a hexy burner going for a brew. To cook with, we"d brought an empty grenade tin that held about five pints of liquid.
We filled it with water from our bottles and brewed our first mug of tea in the jungle. I was starting to feel a little more at home.
We talked about how we were going to crack the jungle phase.
Everybody knew what the DS were looking for: people with apt.i.tude, who could blend in.
I said, "What we must do all the time is back each other up and not get the hump with each other."
Mal, leaning back with a f.a.g in his mouth, said, "Well, our leader, you"d better be doing all the work then, and don"t f.u.c.k up."
Then he lay on his back and blew out a long trail of smoke.
It was time to go back down to the schoolhouse. We put on our belt kits and picked up our golacks and weapons. All the DS were there. We sat on the log benches in the schoolhouse and they were outside, facing us.
The training wing sergeant major said, "This is the routine within the admin area. Every morning and every night you stand to-half an hour before first light, half an hour after first light, and the same at last light, around your own basha [shelterlarea.
"You can send out letters once a week. There will be fresh [fresh food] once a week. The area where the DS live is strictly out of bounds. If you need to go through, you have to stop and call for somebody to give you permission. Right, go back to your areas. I want you back here at eight o"clock tomorrow morning."
We packed everything away in our bergens and sat on them for an hour for the stand to, weapon b.u.t.t in the shoulder, covering our arcs.
As I watched the daylight fade, there was a sudden burst of high-pitched, purring bleeps all around us.
"Basher-out beetles," Raymond said. "That"s your indication that it"s going to be last light very soon."
The darkness buzzed with airborne raiders; most of them seemed to be heading in my direction. I put more cam cream and mozzie rep (mosquito repellent) on my face and hands, but it made no difference.
They still hovered and swooped like miniature Stukas, biting and stinging. Above the steady buzz and hum of insects came the occasional rustling in the undergrowth and canopy.
Apart from the bites, I loved it.
When the hour was up, we picked up our bergens and walked into the admin area. Torch batteries had to be conserved, so we lit candles. I lit a hexy burner, put the grenade box on top, and the blokes tipped in their sachets of beef stew and rice for a communal scoff.
Mal was quite confident about things, stretched out in the mud with a f.a.g in his mouth. Tom was asking questions or worrying about something every five minutes in his usual hyper fashion: "We must get up tomorrow morning for stand to, we mustn"t forget," he ranted, with one eye on the food and the other on his boots as he laced them up furiously.
Everybody was still pretty tired after the rigors of Hong Kong and feeling drained by our new environment. We weren"t acclimatized yet and were covered in lumps and b.u.mps where the beasties had got in. I was looking forward to getting on my pole bed.
I took my wet clothing off, rolled it up and put it on the shelf under my A-frame. I put my dry clothes on aild a pair of trainers; we didn"tow what surprises the DS might have in store, so even if they b.u.mped us during the night, at least I knew I could just jump out and start functioning. I got my head down under the mozzie net and listened to the jungle conducting its life around me: crickets, beetles and other insects clicking and buzzing, unknown things scratching around in the undergrowth.
It started to rain, and it was the most wonderful feeling in the world to be snug under my basha, listening to the water splash onto the roof.
I didn"t sleep too well, tossing and turning, thinking about everything that lay ahead. "Let"s just get the month over and done with," I said to myself, "and hope that you pa.s.s." At times I looked over and I could see that everybody was having the same problem. In the darkness around Mal"s pole bed I saw the glow of a cigarette end as he inhaled. I slowly started to drift off.
All of a sudden Tom leaped up.
"We"re late! We"re late! It"s half six! Stand to!"
Bodies tumbled from pole beds into the mud as we scrabbled for our kit.
I pulled on my wet clothes, keeping an eye out for the DS. If they came around now and caught us still in our beds, we"d be in severe s.h.i.t. It would be seen as incredibly bad self-discipline.
Mal was trying to put his boots on while standing up and fell over. I heard a soft fizz as his f.a.g hit the mud.
Tom was still ranting loudly when Raymond said, "Stop, stop, stop.
It"s f.u.c.king midnight, you d.i.c.khead.
It"s not half six."
Tom had woken up in the middle of the night, looked at his watch, and misread the hands. He wasn"t exactly flavor of the month as we sorted ourselves out again and got back into our beds.
Our first lesson was in how to administer ourselves in the field.
"First thing in the morning," the DS said, "slap loads of mozzie rep all over your clothes, face, and arms. As you will soon find out, it"s so strong it melts plastic."
He pa.s.sed around his compa.s.s. He"d been there three weeks, and it had started to lose all its lettering and the roamers that measured the grid references. Mozzie rep melted through plastic, and there was us slopping it on our skin.
As soon as we"d done that, we had to take our Paludrin antimalarial drug.
We learned more or less straightaway how to blow landing sites and winch holes because we might have to do it. If somebody broke his leg, we"d have to stabilize him, cut a winch hole, and wait for the helicopter.
"When blowing an LS for a long-term base, you can put direction on the way the tree falls," the DS said.
"The higher the ground the better, because as the taller ones fall, they"ll take the smaller ones with them. The explosive pack is called packet echo; ask for it, and a big wad of chain saws and explosives and augers will be dropped, enough to blow a site."
We went out one day with explosives to practice blowing trees.
Tom was flapping as we studied the ma.s.sive b.u.t.tress tree we"d just packed with PE4.
"Do you reckon that"s enough? I don"t. I think we need more."
"I quite agree," I said. "P for Plenty."
We wadded another pound or two of explosive into the holes. In theory we should have been using as little as possible, but it did look like a very big tree.
"Sure this will be all right?"
"Yeah, no problem."
We moved back with our firing cable. Everybody else was doing the same; we were going to fire them all off one by one and see what happened.
Raymond and Mal were by their tree. Keith, our DS, said, "Put your cable into the initiator and fire."
They fired the electric current into the det, which detonated some det cord and blew up the plastic explosive.
There was a boom, and we all looked up to make sure nothing was going to fall on our heads. The tree fell perfectly.
"Good stuff, well done. Next one."
Tom and I put our firing cable in.
"Stand by. Firing!"
There was a ma.s.sive explosion that shook the ground.
The tree went straight up in the air and disappeared from sight.
"How much f.u.c.king P.E [plastic explosive] did you put in that?" the DS raged. "The correct amount," I said. "We did the formula, honest."
"b.o.l.l.o.c.ks!" Keith stormed over to where the P.E was stored. There was almost none left.
"That"s tearing the a.r.s.e out of it," he said, and I waited for the b.o.l.l.o.c.king 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 b.o.l.l.o.c.king 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 compa.s.s, 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 b.u.mp 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 h.e.l.l 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 b.u.t.t 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 b.u.mped 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.