"Three hours."
There was traffic. Even so, we were the lucky ones.
The other half of B Squadron was going elsewhere, and that was four hours away-"when there is no traffic."
We arrived at first light at the police camp where we"d be staying. As we came up the drive,. it looked quite a pleasant site.
The paramilitaries" camp looked well maintained and very clean, with large, long buildings that were old but in good repair. Then we turned left and landed up in a stinking old hut the size of an average sitting room. There were bunk beds and a table, and shower room off to one side. There was no storage s.p.a.ce. It felt like we were living in a submarine.
"We"ve had to use the shower as a storeroom," I honked to Gar.
"Just as well," he said. "There"s no water anyway."
We soon found out that the toilets didn"t work either, so they also became a cache for bergens and other kit. I put my sleeping bag on the nearest bed, and that was it: home.
In the morning we had a walk around the camp with Tony, who had been on my second Selection but failed.
He had come back straightaway and pa.s.sed the second time.
The police were very much the paramilitary force I was expecting to see.
Their equipment was mainly supplied by the Americans, but I also spotted a lot of European kit. Their weapons were also a mixture of U.S M16s and Israeli Gauls, and quite a few Russian AKs.
However, the patrols that we were to be training just had the Galil-basically AK47 parts with a different barrel and furniture.
"An excellent weapon," said Tony as he stopped to shake hands with people that he knew. "Unfortunately they don"t know how to use them yet."
The boys were dressed smartly, and all looked very organized. He introduced me to them, and they struck me as very open and sociable people.
"The camp"s looking good on the outside," Tony said, "but in fact it"s a heap "of s.h.i.t once you scratch the surface. Their living conditions are not very good at allbetter than ours, but still not good. The food is absolutely heaving, even by their standards."
I wasn"t sure whether to believe him, until we went past the cookhouse and two boys who had just eaten breakfast came out and puked it all up again on the ground. The building reeked like a s.h.i.thouse in an abattoir.
"These people are the creme de la creme, but they aren"t particularly well treated," he went on. "However, if you"re a peasant farmer with jack s.h.i.t, six kids, and a donkey, why not become part of the system? At least you"re getting paid, and in theory the family are getting looked after."
Having seen the people outside the cookhouse, I decided to stick to what we"d all brought with us. As usual, we had arrived laden down with tins of tuna, bags of pasta, and bottles of curry sauce.
Billy from G Squadron, the"world"s smallest and most aggressive curly blond-haired jock, was sleeping on the bottom bunk. As soon as he woke up in the morning, he unzipped his sleeping bag and got his little petrol cooker going on the floor. The water went on for his brew; then he mixed his porridge up.
I peered over the edge of the bunk. "Oh, good, what"s for breakfast?" I asked pleasantly.
"I"m surprised you"re hungry, you b.a.s.t.a.r.d," he said.
"We"ve spent all frigging night chewing on your farts."
"Sorry," I said. "Jet lag." I got up, sat next to him, and then kept looking at him and smiling until he gave me a mug of hot chocolate and some porridge. Over the next few days he got more and more annoyed that I wasn"t making my share of the breakfast, which was exactly my intention. Finally, honking at me for being a lazy b.a.s.t.a.r.d, he picked the cooker up to throw it at me and forgot that he"d just used it.
There was a sizzling sound, the smell of burned flesh, and the shape of the cooker top burned into his hand. It made quite a nice pattern, I thought.
Since the shower room was now the storeroom, we had to go and wash at outdoor taps around the corner.
The water was freezing.
The weather was a bit nippy in the morning but then wonderful when the sun rose in the sky. We were high up in the hills and were warned that we"d be getting out of breath for the first couple of days until we acclimatized. Of course no one took any notice, and all went up the hills for a run. Billy was loving it as. we were all in s.h.i.t state.
Everything was a compet.i.tion to him and he enjoyed stopping and shouting, "B Squadron, a bag of s.h.i.te."
I. watched the arrival of the people we were going to train.
There were about forty or fifty of them all told, and they swaggered malevolently about the place like a convention of nightclub bouncers.
The mentality of the Latin American male was very macho; we were somehow going to have to harness the machismo and try and turn it into something of substance.
We were sitting against our hut wall watching them a.s.semble.
Billy started to laugh and said, "If they stick their chests out any more, they"re going to explode. I love this part-watch this!"
He then got up and walked into the middle of them and started shouting out commands to get them organized. After all this macho stuff they were getting ordered about by a two-foot midget barking at their kneecaps.
Whenever I met troops that I was going to be staying with, their body language was nearly always "We don"t need you; we"re hard as f.u.c.k."
Above them, the prime personalities in the organization also resented us to an extent because we were undermining their authority.
We"d have to be really tactful in the way that we treated them; no lording it over thetil and playing the Great I Am, because that wouldn"t get the results. We"d have to show respect to their leaders at even the lowest level so they didn"t turn against us, but at the same time we had the problem that familiarity breeds contempt. By and large, however, we"d just I make sure we were friendly and approachable; everything was a learning opportunity, and we hoped to learn as much from Ithem as they from us.
The paramilitaries were an incrdible sight. They were wearing the world"s supply of belt kit and webbing, with knives hanging off them everywhere and six-shooters in holsters around their hips.
Gar and I swapped glances. We couldn"t just say, "This is a heap of s.h.i.t-get rid of this, get rid of that," because it wouldn"t work.
They"d go against us, and we wouldn"t get what we wanted. So to start with, we didn"t say anything.
Each one of us was given ten blokes, and it would be our responsibility to take them from the basics and build them up. The very first thing to do was sort them out. with some equipment. We gave each of them a bergen, a sleeping bag, a sleeping bag liner, a waterproof outer, and a compa.s.s. You"d have thought we were giving them the crown jewels. A compa.s.s to them was gold dust. Even at officer level, none of them could read a map ok use a compa.s.s, so these blokes had credibility straightaway with all their contemporaries; they were the team with compa.s.ses. n.o.body knew what to do with them yet, but that was beside the point.
Before we could start teaching them any sort of tactics, we had to get to grips with their shooting. Their idea of firing a weapon was to loose off countless rounds on full automatic and make lots of noise.
It was totally ineffective. The weapons started to go high, and they mostly missed the targets.
"Very good," I beamed. "Now can I show you a few little tricks somebody taught me recently?"
The camp we were in was built on the top of a hill of sandy soil, the sides of which made excellent ranges.
The first lesson was to teach them to conserve ammunition. "It"s a good idea to make every round count," I said. "If you"re getting through a magazine every five seconds, your ammunition won"t last long.
If you want to look after your a.s.s, look after your ammunition."
We took them back to first principles, starting with how to lie down with a weapon and fire at a target, nice and controlled. Once we"d got to that stage, we taught them in the kneeling and standing positions. We taught them on the ranges, not under pressure, but in a friendly atmosphere-no shouting, no hollering, just attempting to get good results.
These boys were soon starting to perform well on the ranges, and the other police who were not part of our group were jealous, especially those of higher rank.
None of them knew how to use their weapons properly; I saw some Gauls and M16s that were still smeared with the grease they had been packed in when they arrived.
I was on the ranges one day with the boys. We"d got to the stage where they were moving from the lying position into the kneeling position and then into standing, doing timed shots at about a hundred meters. The equivalent of a sergeant major from another group came storming over and said, "My weapon does not work.
Every time I fire it, it alms off. I need you to correct it."
It was nothing to do with us, but I got the zeroing tool out and did a couple of twists to the foresight and rear I t sight. I looked, hrough and said, "Yep, that"s much better. You have look, see what you reckon." . He got the weapon into the shoulder, looked through it, and was as happy as a sandboy. As far as he was concerned, he was ready for Bisley. just as with young recruits "at Winchester, there was no such thing as a bad soldier, only a bad instructor-once you had the right material. We got them to the stage where they could fire their weapons and frequently hit what they were aiming at. Whether they could do that under pressure was another matter, and our lives could depend on it at a later date.
We started incorporating live firing exercises. The average contact in the jungle was going to be at a range of about five meters; they"d have to recognize a target and shoot quickly and accurately.
We"d go out into the hills and rig up a scenario: They"d walk down it first as individuals, recognize a target, snapshoot and kill it, then move back. Then we"d do it in pairs, firing and maneuvering, moving down the range. It reminded me of Selection.
When we sat with them at lunchtime, we"d be chatting away, trying to find out how they lived. It was easy to see what the food was like.
The storeroom their ration packs came from was obviously Infested with rats because everything that wasn"t canned was chewed to bits.
They threw it away and opened the cans.
We were away from the camp training one day. The air was crisp, the sky more blue than I thought possible.
Everybody was boiling water on hexy burners, us for our pasta, them for their coffee.
"What about all this fantastic coffee I"ve heard so much about in television commercials?" I said.
I knew there were some coffees that you couldn"t take out of the country, the penalty being something like a six-year prison sentence.
They were throwing out tons and tons of drugs all over the world, but if you took coffee beans home, you landed up in prison.
"Yeah, what"s the best coffee to take home from all the different blends and roasts and so on?" Slaphead asked.
"You don"t want any of that s.h.i.t," one of them said.
"Our favorite is Nescaf instant."
And ag we found out, they were right. Some of the coffee was dire.
The first morning I took the group, I"d asked their names. "I am one of three Joses," this boy had said; in my confusion at using Spanish for real for the first time, I took it to be one of those long compound Spanish names and replied, "Pleased to meet you, One-of-three-Jos&s."
The name stuck.
We talked about the situation here with the cartels running everything and the fact that all the farmers were workin for them.
"If you"re a farmer,",he now said, "and the government came along and they give you two dollars an acre to grow corn-and that"s it,"no health system, just a little bit of schooling, and you"re living in a tin hut in the middle of the jungle-and then along come a cartel, and they say, "You grow for us, we"ll give you seven dollars an acre; we"ll also build a football pitch, we"ll give you medical care, and we"ll also educate your kids," what do you do? Of course you grow coca leaf; you don"t care about what happens to the gringos. The farmer just thinks, Where"s it going? It"s going to America. I hate the Americans, so I"m getting my own back; f.u.c.k them, it"s their problem, the monkey on their back."
The police knew they were losing the battle, but most of them were there for exactly the same reason-job security. They had families to feed, and they didn"t particularly give a tuppenny d.a.m.n if the Americans had the cocaine or not. All they knew was that they were making money out of fighting it and securing food for their families.
They"d got the nation behind them, and quite rightly so; if I"d been a farmer, I"d have been growing for them.
Their whole culture revcilved around the drug trade.
Marijuana and coca plants were a part of everyday life, so plentiful they even grew at the roadside. In fact the police themselves used to wrap coca leaf around sugar lumps and suck away: they believed it would make them macho and virile. As far as they were concerned, it kept them strong and alert to go and fight the cartels, and n.o.body seemed to spot the irony.
"The whole culture is based on violence," they said.
"In the towns the secret police will drag young street urchins out of the sewers where they live and kill them."
At night, apparently, the ordinary sounds of the cities were punctuated by gunfire.
"A bus crashed over a hillside in the jungle about a month before you arrived. When the rescue services arrived on the scene, they found all the local villagers scavenging through the wreckage. Many pa.s.sengers had survived but were injured. The villagers ignored them in the rush to rip the watches and the rings and wallets off the corpses."
"It"s true. The police had to c.o.c.k their weapons and start shooting the villagers to get them away," said One of-three-Joses. "And as soon as they left, some of the police started doing exactly the same."
"There is a disregard for life," another fellow said.
"Life here revolves around death."
We had two interpreters with us to get all the technical details over.
Bruce was from D Squadron and had only one arm; the other on"e had been blown off. The Regiment always kept its cripples. We had blokes with one arm, one eye, one leg; two blokes in B Squadron only had about six fingers between them. There was a wonderful picture in the interest room of them on a mountain-climbing course, trying to tie knots with only a couple of fingers each. Some blokes had lost legs or suffered disabling gunshot wounds. One bloke who turned up for every Selection to run around the hills and man checkpoints had only one arm and one eye.
It was just part and parcel of life; if they"re living quite a harsh existence and spending time on operations, people will get injured or shot or collect diseases that impair them at a later date.
They were kept in the Regiment for two reasons. First, if we were ever in the s.h.i.t, we"d know at the back of our mind that even if we were hurt, we"d have a future. Second, why pension off somebody who has experience and knowledge that could be used in training?
We started looking at the tactics we would need to carry out the task of attacking a DMP. At this stage we didn"t know exactly what we were going to be attacking, so there was a bit of guesswork involved.
We took it from the real basics, looking at the sort of equipment they had, which was essentially a bit of belt kit, a weapon, and their uniform, and that was it. Then we looked at how they were going to move with it and how they were going to live in the field. They had a problem with hard routine. They liked to have the big fires going at night to keep themselves warm and boost their morale and couldn"t immediately see the tactical benefits of shivering in a sleeping bag and eating cold food. This was where the bonding and the friendship came in. We did hard routine ourselves, and they copied us.
We got out in the field for days on end and practiced moving tactically around the jungle and the savanna.
They learned to hold up before last light, get into a little L.U.P, and stand to; at first light they stood to again, ready to move off.
After a while they actually enjoyed it; it was something different, it looked macho, and everybody else wanted a piece of the action.
We spent weeks teaching them OPs and how to hide up and watch locations.
They"d be holed up for a couple of days and have to report what they saw, and they got very good at it.
We also taught them how to do close target recces on locations: to go in, try to get as much information as possible on the target without being seen, then watch it and, when the time was right, hit it. They could destroy all the ether, chemicals, and processing equipment, but what they really wanted were the skilled people who did the processing; once they were out of the picture the cartels would have to replace them, and we presumed the supply wasn"t infinite.
Map-reading lessons were hilarious. There"s a big myth that the natives of a country will know the,"r way instinctively around the jungle. The fact is, nine times out of ten, they"re as stuffed as everybody else is without a map, and they just stick to high ground, tracks, and rivers.
In my experience of people in the Middle East, the Far East, Asia, and Africa, the locals always knew the easiest route-and they found it by following the animals, which always take the easy option. Take the boys off that route, and they"re scratching their heads.
When they travel across savanna for hundreds of miles, they"re not navigating, they"re following minimal herds. if the animals got lost, so would they.
We got all forty or fifty of them together in the cookhouse after breakfast because it was the biggest sheltered place where we could get the maps spread out on tables and get them around. I hated the sessions, because the place was stinking.
Gar taught the map reading. "This is the compa.s.s," he"d say. "We take a bearing like this."