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    After about twenty minutes I was into the swing of it again. My mind was switched off; I was listening to jingles in my head. It was bitterly cold, and the wind was getting in all the little gaps. Until I got a good sweat on, it was a horrible feeling, especially after getting out of the cozy sleeping bag I'd been lying in for the hour-and-a-half drive.
    Most of Endurance was in darkness, and because it was wintertime, there was even less daylight. Everybody looked quite excited but apprehensive. I was feeling confident and fit. I had no bad injuries, just bergen sores.
    They called out the names, and off we went. The bergen was the heaviest it had ever been, about fifty-five to sixty pounds, because of the extra food and water. I always took water from the camp because I knew it wasn't contaminated. I didn't fancy drinking water from a stream, even with sterilizing tablets, only to see a stinking dead sheep upstream; if you start getting gut aches, it's going to slow you down.
    The extra weight was worth it.
    We were not allowed on roads. If the checkpoint was on one, we had to hit at an angle, not aim off and then move along it. We couldn't use tracks or pathways either; everything had to be cross-country. We'd get to the checkpoint, where sometimes they had water. If there were other people coming in, they might hold us for five minutes, and that was the time to fill up from the jerry cans if there were any. If they weren't going to hold us, I wouldn't waste time filling up.
    If I met other people on the route, there was never time to say more than "All right?" before shooting off again.
    All I wanted to hear them say was that they were late, and I'd think, That's good. If it was so bad that they said, "Fuck!" I was even more pleased. It didn't make me go faster, but it made me feel better.
    I was just bumping along, my head full of jingles, thinking about the route ahead, trying to remember what was on the map so I didn't have to stop. "If you stop every five minutes for thirty seconds," Max had said, "that's minutes taken up every hour." I did my map checks on the move.
    I had an extra pouch on my belt that was full of aniseed twists and Yorkie bars, which I had stocked up on just for Endurance. I didn't use them on other tabs, but for some reason I just went downtown and bought them for this one. Now I was digging in and eating and wondering why I'd never done it before.
    I tabbed through the second night. On the last five or six kilometers the batteries went in my torch. I knew because of the lie of the ground that I had to go downhill, hit the reservoir, chuck a right, and then head for the bridge, which was the final checkpoint.
    Unable to use my map, I was cursing the gods at the top of my voice. On the side of the reservoir was a big forestry block. I searched for a firebreak to get through, honking to myself and remembering why I failed last time.
    I found a firebreak, a good wide one. No problem. I was moving along, but then I hit, fallen trees. Extra sweat, extra cuts. Every few meters I'd have to get the bergen off, throw it over a horizontal trunk, roll over it myself, find the bergen in the pitch-blackness, put it back on. I was flapping; I couldn't believe my future was in danger through making the same mistake twice.
    I.was relieved to see the first rays of moonlight and made my way down to the bottom of the reservoir. I knew I had to turn right, and off I trogged, dragging along.
    I reached the last checkpoint after a tab of twenty-one and a half hours. I was pretty chuffed with myself, but George had got in before me. So what was new?
    I noticed a distinct change in the attitude of the DS. It was as if we'd turned a corner, as if a phase was over and done with. There was no praise or anything, but they said, "All right, are you? Right, dump. your kit down, and there's some brew by the wagons."
    The medic was there for any problems, but everybody was too elated to notice if he had any.
    The QMS on training wing turned up with big slabs of bread pudding and tea, which he laced with rum. I discovered there was a big tradition with the Regiment that when on arduous duties they got this G10 rum, called gunfire. They saved up the rum ration and served it up on big occasions. I hated rum, but this didn't seem the time to say so. I didn't like bread pudding either, but I threw a lot of that down my neck as well.
    One of the ruperts came up to me and said, "Bloody hell, were you having some problems down by the reservoir?"
    I explained what was going on and he said, "I could hear you. All I could hear was this 'Fucking fuck, fuck ya!"
    " He had been caught up in another firebreak, having the same problem.
    We climbed into the wagons for the last time. Everybody was happy but subdued. Nobody was sleeping; we were all too deep in thought.
    I had the big Radox bath and tried to get all the strapping off my legs.
    It was two-inch tape which like a dickhead, I'd put on the sticky way around. All I'd needed it for was support, so it could have been the other way around. I was in the bath, talking to George, and erring and blinding as I ripped the tape off. By the time I had finished, half of my leg hairs had disappeared.
    One of the DS came around and said, "Everybody be in the training wing lecture room for eight o'clock in the morning."
    I was feeling confident. There were some who were on a dodgy wicket who weren't too sure, but they were soon going to be finding out.
    As soon as the DS said, "The following people go and see the training major," I knew that they were binned. If they didn't call my name out, I'd know that I'd passed.
    He called out ten names. No McNab.
    "The rest of you, are there any injuries? The medical center's open now; go and get them sorted out."
    There was one little job I had to do first. One of the blokes who had failed needed driving to the station, and I had offered. There had been an unfortunate incident on the hill-at least according to his version of it. He was doing well and had got to a checkpoint at night where he was held because a rupert had arrived in shit state and binned it. He was told, "Go with this officer, make sure he's all right." He got the man safely down to the next checkpoint but by now was very late.
    "I was told to wait," he told the DS.
    The DS just said, "Tough shit."
    He was held because of the rupert, and quite rightly so; his job was to make sure the rupert got down to the next checkpoint that had a vehicle; he would then carry on. But he was late because of it, and they didn't seem to take it into account. Maybe there was a cock-up in the administration. Whatever, this boy was stuffed. As I drove him to the station, he was crying. This had been his second attempt; for him there were no more tomorrows. I could imagine how he felt.
    We had the weekend off, and it was very much needed. My feet swelled up as if I had elephantiasis and I couldn't put my shoes on. I had to cut holes in my trainers with a pair of scissors.
    I wanted to tell everyone that I'd passed Selection, that I was a big boy now. But it meant jack shit to the blokes in the camp.
    Apparently a lot of them did Endurance once or twice a year anyway. It was good for them to get up on the hill; it showed example and also meant there were more people in the area for safety reasons.
    Some people slipped through the safety net. Two weeks later a fellow from R Squadron was missing after a tab, and the standby squadron was called out to search for him. They found him in his sleeping bag, half in, half out, with biscuits in one hand and a hexy burner in the other.
    He must have died in that position.
    We had passed Selection, the only phase that we had a certain amount of control over. Now, as we entered the lecture room on Monday morning, we were going into the unknown.
    The training sergeant major stood up and said, "You are starting continuation training now. There's going to be a lot of work involved.
    Just switch on, and listen to what's being said. Remember, you might have passed the Selection phase, but you're not in yet."
    From the original intake of 180, we were now down to just 24.
    Sitting around me were people from many different organizations-blokes from the signals and Royal Engineers, infantry, artillery, and a marine.
    It was accepted that everybody would have different levels of expertise and different levels of experience. In terms of training, it was back to the drawing board.
    The first step was to train us in the use of the Regiment's weapons. "If you finally do get to the squadrons," the DS said, "you might find yourself arriving, and going straight on jobs. They won't have time to train you; you've got to go there with a working knowledge of all the weapons."
    The standard expected of us would depend on our previous experience. I was a sergeant in the infantry; weapons were my business. But the last time a lance corporal in the Catering Corps had touched a weapon might have been a year ago, and even then it would probably just have been a rifle; he'd know nothing about the GPMG, sustained fire, or any of the technical stuff.
    He'd find it more difficult than I would but wouldn't necessarily be doing any worse. The DS said that to their way of thinking, if one person hadn't got the same experience as another but was learning, and was getting to a good standard compared with the more experienced bloke, then in essence he was learning more.
    It was very much like a Bible story I remembered, when the rich man turned up at the church and dumped off six bags of gold and everybody was thinking how wonderful he was. Then an old woman came in and she had two coins, her whole wealth, and she gave one of them to the church.
    The fact was, this woman gave more to the church than the rich man did because the six bags of gold was jack shit to him. The instructors were looking at us in the same light. They were looking at what we were, and what they expected us to become. It was during this stage that we lost the marine corporal, who, as far as they were concerned, had a standard of weapon handling that wasn't as good as it should have been for a corporal in the Royal Marines.
    I suspected that our personalities were also under the microscope.
    From the way the DS looked at us I could almost hear the cogs turning:
    Is the experienced soldier helping the less experienced corporal in the Catering Corps to get on, or is he just saying, "Well, hey' I'm looking good"? Was a bloke maybe such a dickhead that he spent his time joking away with the DS? They'd joke back with him, but at the end of the day they'd probably think, What a big-timer. It was their job to make sure that people who were going to the squadrons were the best that they could provide. They had to go back to the squadrons themselves; they might be in command of us.
    They took the responsibility very seriously.
    We trained with the personal weapons that were available to the squadrons. First were the 5.56 M16 and the 203, the grenade launching attachment that most people went for, apparently, because of its increased firepower. Some people, however, still liked carrying the SLR, which fired a 7.62 round. They-were in a minority because it meant that the patrol had to carry two types of small-arms ammunition.
    Another weapon at patrol level was the Minimiagain, firing 5.56 rounds. The Regiment also still used the GPMG, the standard army section machine gun. I knew it to be an excellent weapon at section level, and we were told that a lot of people preferred it to the Minimi.
    There were quite a few jobs where people would insist on taking a GPMG: it was reliable and very powerful.
    We worked with Browning pistols, Colt 45s, and a number of different semiautomatic weapons. For some jobs people might prefer a certain type of pistol, but the majority would go for the Browning.
    Then there were shotguns-the Federal riot gun, a pump-action shotgun that had a folding stock and was an excellent weapon. Each squadron had its own assortment of mortars-81 MM, 60 MM, and 40 MM-and the Milan antitank weapons. There was also the LAW 90, a 84 MM rocket, the standard rifle company antitank missile. Then there was Stinger, an American-made antiaircraft fire-and-forget missile.
    "Stingers turned up in the Falklands, and nobody really knew how to use them or what to do with them," the DS said. "It was just a case of, 'Here they are, get to grips with them." So the boys were sitting around on the grass one day, reading the instructions and having a brew, when over the horizon came a flight of Puccaras.
    A D Squadron member stood up and put the Stinger on his shoulder.
    It was like the kid in the old Fisher Price ad: 'How's this work then?
    What does this do?" The bloke was pressing all the buttons to make it fire, and it did. It took down a Puccara. So the first time the Stinger was used in anger was by a Brit firing at an Argentinian aircraft."
    The story didn't end there. About two years later apparently, D Squadron went over to Germany to the Stinger training center run by the Americans. The training was in simulators because the weapon was so expensive. The American instructors got to fire only one a year and had certainly never used it in war.
    "We've got this wonderful weapon," said one of the instructors.
    "Any of you guys seen it before?"
    The bloke put his hand up, and the instructor smirked. "In a simulator?"
    "No, I shot down a jet with it."
    Besides the British and American hardware, we were trained with all the Eastern bloc weapons: AK47s-the Russian, Czech, and Chinese ones-all the mortars, their medium antitank weapons, and masses of different pistols, such as the Austrian Steyr. We were told that a lot of times we'd be on tasks where we wouldn't be using our own weapons; we'd have to go to a country and use what we could find.
    The AK family were excellent weapons. The' fired y 7.62 short, which meant you could carry more 7.62 than our 7.62 for the same weight. It was a good reliable weapon because it was so simple. The only drawback was the big, thirty-round magazines; when you lay down, you couldn't actually get the weapon in the shoulder to fire because the magazine hit the floor. A lot of the Eastern bloc policy on attack showed in the AK.
    With the safety catch, the first click down was automatic; then the second click down was single shot, so the mentality was clearly: Give it loads. On Western weapons it was the other way around: single shot first, then onto automatic.
    We did live firing down at Sennybridge, practicing live attacks.
    Sometimes they'd tell us things on the range, such as how to hold our weapon, that were contrary to what some of us had been taught. We were doing standing targets at a hundred meters; the way I fired was to put the butt into my shoulder and-have my hand underneath the magazine, resting my elbow on the magazine pouch. It seemed to work for me. One of the DS came over and said, "What are you doing? Put your hand on the stock, lean forward, and fire it properly." There was no way I was going to say, "Actually, I shoot better like this, and this is the way I've been doing it for years." I just nodded and agreed, put my hand on the stock, and carried on firing.
    Some of the blokes would actually say, "No, that's wrong," but what was the point of arguing? We wanted to be with them, not the other way around.
    People had weird and wonderful qualifications that they thought were going to be an asset, but the DS soon put them straight. "If the squadrons need specific skills, they'll send their own people off for training. The most important thing is that we send them somebody with the aptitude to do a certain type of work and the personality to get on with other people in closed and stressful environments. Then they have the baseline. Then they can send you out to become the mortar fire controller or whatever."
    I heard a story about a fellow from a Scottish regiment on a previous Selection. When they started training on the weapons, he sat muttering in the class, "I don't want to be doing this shit. This is what I do in the battalion. I want to get on to the Heckler and Koch and all the black kit." The instructors heard it, didn't say anything; they just got on with the lesson. But they'd pinged him as a big-time Walter Mitty; they took him quietly to one side afterward and gave him directions to Platform 4.
    I was phoning up Debbie once a week, and occasionally I'd write her a letter, but she was second in my list of priorities; I wanted to crack on and get into the jungle. As far as I was concerned, she was fine.
    She was still working; she was having a good time with her friends.
    The telephone conversations were tense and stilted.
    I'd say, "Is everything all right?"
    "Yeah, fine," she'd say, offhand. "What changes here?
    Still going to work, still bored, still nothing to do."
    Never mind, I thought, at the end of the day everything will be sorted out. We'd get the quarter; the problems would disappear.
    We started to learn the techniques we'd be using in the jungle, and why they were used-the way to L.U.P (lyingup point), the daily routine, hard routine, how to ambush, how to cross rivers. We'd go down to the training area and walk around in plain fields and forestry blocks as if we were in the jungle. Anybody looking at us would have thought we were a bunch of dickheads, prowling around right up close to the trees.
    "When you get into your tactical L.U.P," the DS said, "you put up a hammock-as low as possible, so your arse is just a couple of inches off the ground-and fix up a poncho above you. If you've got to sleep on the floor, you've got to sleep on the floor, but why do that if you've got the means not to? When you do get up in the morning, you're more effective if you haven't been bitten to bits during the night and you've had a good chance to get some sleep. You're more refreshed and better able to go and do the task."
    Some people took biwi bags with them, he said. As well as keep the rain off, it kept the dry clothing dry; the wet clothing would just stay outside and get soaking wet anyway, that was no problem. If we could keep ourselves well maintained and free of embuggerances, the better tactically we would be. There was nothing 'soft about it. We were told it was far more sensible than playing the he-man and ending up being effective for about two and a half minutes.
    "People live in the jungle for months at a time like this, with no adverse effects at all. In fact it's a wonderful environment; it's far better than any other environment you've got to operate in because you've got everything there.
    You've got food if you need it, you've got continuous supplies of water, you've got cover, the weather's good, you don't have to worry about the elements-everything you need is there. So why go against it?
    Just switch on, and keep -as comfortable as you can when you can."
    We got all our injections done and filled in more documentation.
    I was delighted; I felt it somehow meant we were starting to get further into the system.
    The atmosphere was changing slightly, becoming slowly more sociable. I was careful it didn't give me a false sense of security, however. it was easy to forget that I could still be binned, that they were still seeing if they wanted me in their gang or not. There were months and months to go, and trying to make an impression on a DS over a cup of tea wasn't going to get anyone anywhere.
    All the drills we were learning, we were told, were based on actual experience, things that had gone right, things that had gone wrong.
    We practiced contact drills. The task of the Regiment in the jungle was not to go out and start shooting people; it was to go out to get information, come back, then go back again with other people or a bigger force.
    "During the Malayan days," said one of the DS, a veteran himself, "a lot of the four-man patrols got through enemy ambushes without the ambush being initiated simply because the people manning the ambush thought, There's the recce group; let's wait for the main group to come through."
    There was still lots of physical training. They'd beast us about in the gym, but I found it enjoyable because there was no discipline.
    There didn't need to be: If we didn't want to be there, we were at liberty to walk. Nobody hassled us about the rooms, but we kept them clean anyway, because that was what was expected of us. I loved it; it was a really wonderful atmosphere.
    At this stage the only areas we were allowed into were the training section and training wing accommodation, but I still felt part of the organization. We were no longer segregated from the other blokes in the cookhouse now, and I bumped into one or two people I'd met in the battalion or on courses They were happy to chat over a cup of tea. One day I saw Jeff, who was now on the counterterrorist team. He still looked younger than Donny Osmond.
    "Still here then?" He grinned. "When do you go to the jungle?"
    "In about two or three weeks."
    "Know who your DS is yet?"
    "No idea. They're going to start putting us.in patrols very soon."
    The next morning we were given batteries of tests.
    First was language aptitude. I looked around the training wing theater, trying to work out who would be the most intelligent at this sort of stuff. jake, the American, was a main man. I knew that he spoke Farsi and could write the script, so I thought, There's the brainy fucker, I'd better start edging my way next to him. I went for a piss with the idea of sitting as near to him as I could when I came back. I found that twenty-two other blokes had had exactly the same idea. Like a lot of other people in the vicinity, I cheated, copying off jake.
    Next was the pilots' quick-reaction test. We were handed a list of calculations and given a minute and a half to do each one in. They were weird and wonderful things like mean averages and square roots, concepts way beyond the basic math I'd taught myself with the Janet and John book from Peckham library. Then there were lots of items like the Mensa tests they had in newspapers. I doubt my results would have got me into the Noddy Club, let alone Mensa.
    I kept thinking, If we fail these, are we binned, or what? Have we got to be brain surgeons or are we going to be soldiers? It went on all morning, and it became a bit of farce, with everybody cheating off everybody else.
    The DS must have known what was going on.
    One thing they had been teaching us from the very first day was decision making. In the training wing corridor there was a big picture of a load of sheep in a pen, and underneath was the message: "Either lead, follow, or get out of the way."
    It was a big thing: Don't dillydally; make a decision.
    If it was wrong, it was wrong; if it was right, it was right. One of my new decision processes was to think: What's done is done; if I've failed I've failed.
    When we went into the cookhouse at lunchtime, we were like kids walking out of an exam room.
    "What did you reckon to number sixteen?"
    "I made the answer two hundred and fifty."
    "Oh, fuck."
    Whatever the results were, we were issued with our jungle kit the next day: jungle fatigues, mosquito nets, bergens, different types of ponchos. I was like a pig in sugar.
    The same afternoon we were going to be told what patrols we were in and who our DS was going to be.
    Everybody wanted to get together with the people who'd been in the jungle before because in theory they were going to have an edge and be able to help.
    I was made a patrol commander because I was an infantry sergeant.
    In the patrol we had a bloke, Raymond, a Falklands veteran, who'd done a six-month tour in Belize as a lance corporal with 2 Para. He was very thick-set with jet black hair; if he had a shave at six o'clock, by eight o'clock he'd need another one. Raymond knew all about pole beds and the routine of living in the jungle; the closest I'd been was a school trip to Kew Gardens when I was seven years old, and my only memory of that was of the other kids having ice creams afterward and me not having enough money to buy one.
    Another member of the patrol was Mala corporal in the Royal Anglians. He came from London and was about the same size and height as I was, but with the world's biggest teeth. A couple of them were missing, and he always had a smile on his face and a fag in his mouth.
    He reminded me of the Tommy Atkins character from the First World War.
    He didn't seem to give a stuff about anything but was very confident in what he did. If he hadn't been in the army, he would have been a market trader down Portobello Road. He was the scruffiest prson I'd ever seen.
    He looked as if he'd been dipped in glue and thrown through the window of an Oxfam shop. He was a good soldier, without a doubt, but he was so laid back he was almost lying down. Because he found things very easy, it looked as if he had no commitment.
    Tom was a corporal from 29 Commando, part of the Royal Artillery attached to the Royal Marines, and he was completely the opposite, hyped up about everything. He was the funniest bloke I'd met since Dave left.
    He had a sag eye: If he was looking at his shoelaces, one eye would be looking at the moon. He was also the tallest of us, just on six feet, and athletically built. He was very loud; I suspected he was deaf after a lifetime of artillery pieces banging off in his ear.
    I was still phoning up Debbie, writing her letters and telling her how exciting it was. When she wrote or spoke, I didn't listen or read between the lines. It didn't occur to me that she might be bored shitless. I was in the,UK doing something I wanted to do, and she was in Germany just plodding on, not really doing that much. I couldn't have cared less; me, I was off to Brunei. n March we flew to Hong Kong, en route to Brunei.
    We came into Kaitak Airport at night, and I couldn't believe what I saw.
    The aircraft did a steep turn, then flew in really low. I could see people walking in the street and pottering around in their apartments.
    We stayed at a camp near the airport. It was the first experience I'd had of somebody in authority in the army giving me money, a ration allowance because they wouldn't be feeding us. It was supposed to be money for food, but of course it paid for a night on the town, with just enough left over to buy a bag of chips on the way home. I thought, Hell, yes, I need to keep in here, they give you money!
    Hong Kong was one of the places I'd always heard about but never thought I'd see. Now I just wanted to take as much of it in as I could in case I never came back. The city was packed and never seemed to stop. it was full of neon, food shops open everywhere, dense traffic, and this was at ten o'clock at night. We could sleep on the plane to Brunei in the morning; tonight was ours to enjoy.
    Raymond had been to Hong Kong before when he did an emergency tour with the Parachute Regiment in the New Territories. "No problems," he declared, "I know broke into a horrendous sweat and found it hard to get my breath.
    We had to cross a river. Logs had been positioned over it to make a small bridge, and as we started to cross, I caught my first glimpse of a palm-leaf shelter and, nearby, a group of tribesmen. The Regiment had enjoyed a long association with the Ilbans, dating back to the Borneo conflict.
    "They're good blokes," the DS said. "We employ some of them to help build all the atap [foliage-covered] huts for the admin area, including what is going to be your schoolhouse. They also help with a lot of the survival training."
    As we went past these boys, squatting on their haunches and smoking away, it hit me that we really had come into a totally different culture in a totally different part of the world. We were going to be self-contained in our own little world, miles and miles from civilization, for at least a month-whether we liked it or not.
    This was exciting stuff.
    Looking at the rain forest around and above me, I couldn't help wondering how people survived in the claustrophobic green-tinged semidarkness. The tall trees of the primary jungle, profusely leaved, blocked out the sun. Humidity must have been running at close to 90 percent. I was hot; I was short of breath; I was sweating; I was getting bitten to bits. It seemed every animal there wanted to have a munch out of me. I looked at the Ilbans, relaxing against the shelters with just a pair of shorts on, as happy as sandboys.
    We got into the "schoolhouse," which was in fact little more than a roof over two rows of log benches. We put down our bergens, and the'DS came around for a brew and a chat.
    Each patrol's DS would stay with it all the time, we were told, though he lived in the admin area rather than with the patrol. Every time we were out on the ground, he'd be there as well.
    They spelled out a few golden rules.
    "Never go anywhere without your golack [machete].
    Never go anywhere without your belt kit and your weapon. Even if you take your belt kit off to sit on during a lesson, the golack stays attached to you by a length of para'cord. It's your most essential item of survival kit: It gets you food; it builds you traps; it gives you protection.
    "You never go anywhere in the jungle on your own; you always go in pairs. It's incredibly easy to get lost.
    You can walk five or ten meters away from the camp area and there's a possibility of getting disorientated. So even if it's going down to the river to fill up for water, go in pairs. You might be relaxing, sorting your shit out, but if somebody's got to go down and collect the water, somebody else has got to go with him. The only place you don't have to go to in pairs is the shit pit, which is just off to the side of the patrol area."
    We had all arrived with as much extra kit as we could cram into our bergens-extra water bottles, loads of spare socks, all sorts of crap.
    Now we found out that we needed very little.
    The DS explained: "To live in the jungle, all you need is two sets of clothes: one wet and one dry. Sleep in the dry, and always have your wet ones on. Even if you stand still all day, you're going to be soaking wet. There are no seasons in the rain forest; it's just wet and hot.
    You get two rains a day. Especially if you're on a spur, you can feel the wind coming, and then it will rain. If the rain doesn't get you, the humidity will.
    "The important thing is to keep your dry kit dry; we're a bit short on tumble dryers around here. So put it in a dry wrapper; then put that in another dry wrapper.
    Once you're wet, you're fucking wet, and that's it."
    The DS then gave us a practical demonstration of how to build an A-frame.
    "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 shit, 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 shit.
    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 aptitude, 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 fag in his mouth, said, "Well, our leader, you'd better be doing all the work then, and don't fuck 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 butt 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 fag 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 bumps 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 bumped 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 pass." 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 shit. 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 fag hit the mud.
    Tom was still ranting loudly when Raymond said, "Stop, stop, stop.
    It's fucking midnight, you dickhead.
    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 passed around his compass. 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 massive buttress 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 massive explosion that shook the ground.
    The tree went straight up in the air and disappeared from sight.
    "How much fucking P.E [plastic explosive] did you put in that?" the DS raged. "The correct amount," I said. "We did the formula, honest."
    "Bollocks!" Keith stormed over to where the P.E was stored. There was almost none left.
    "That's tearing the arse out of it," he said, and I waited for the bollocking 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 bollocking 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 compass, 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 bump 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 hell 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 butt 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 bumped 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.
    "Rally! Rally! Rally! Rally! Rally!"
    We ran over logs, jumped behind trees; it was all over within fifteen seconds. Then the DS shouted, "Stop!"
    After each contact the DS would debrief us. We'd be panting away, trying to catch our breaths; it was only a short, sharp burst of activity, but even patrolling I'd get out of breath. The body was tensed up; the brain was concentrating. It was live ammunition, and we were being tested.
    I was already finding the jungle as physically hard as Selection because the pressure was unrelenting. I assumed that all the time they were asking themselves the questions: Would I want him in my patrol?
    Has he got the personality? Has he got the aptitude? The closed, harsh environment of the jungle, where everybody depended on everybody else, would show us in our true light.
    "Why did you take that bit of cover there? Look over there-the world's biggest tree. That'll stop seven-sixtwo."
    The DS, Keith, walked us back to the static target The canopy had retained the pall of smoke and the smell of cordite from the contact.
    I took a swig of water from my bottle as I listened.
    "When you saw that, you were right on top of it.
    Walk back five meters, turn around, and now look. You can see it now, can't you? The reason you can see it is that you know that it's there.
    You've got to be good enough to notice it before you get there, and the only way you're going to do that is getting up and down here, and watching, and practicing.
    "Let's now go and see if you hit what you saw."
    There wasn't a scratch on the target Mal and I had been firing at.
    "What's the point of firing if you're not going to kill him?"
    Keith said. "It's all well and good getting that constant fire down to get away, but what you're trying to do is kill them so they don't follow you up and kill you."
    We built up to four-man contact drills. The lead scout would be moving very slowly, stop, observe the area, start moving. If we had a rise to go over and the other side was dead ground, he would tell the patrol to stop, and go over, butt in the shoulder, using the cover of the trees.
    If that was okay, he'd just wave everybody on.
    The rest of us would be covering our arcs as we walked.
    The lead scout might have missed something; we might end up with a contact right or a contact rear.
    The one piece of advice I'd got from Jeff in D Squadron was: "Butt in your shoulder, sights up." It was tiring to move so slowly and deliberately. I was breathing really hard and deeply-, concentrating so much on what I was doing.
    In any slack time we were expected to mug up on what we had been taught the day before. Mal was so good at everything that he didn't need to.
    He'd just lie there with a fag and a brew. It was impressive. I was jealous; I would have done the same, only I was way behind because my Morse was shit. Any spare time I had, I cracked on.
    The jungle canalizes movement. The dense vegetation, deep gullies, steep hills and ravines, and wide, fast rivers are obstacles that make cross-country movement very difficult. However, it's got to be done.
    High ground and tracks are where every Tom, Dick, and Harry move and where ambushes are laid.
    We navigated across country, using a technique called cross graining. Up and down, up and down, not keeping to the high ground.
    It took us much longer to travel a small distance, but tactically it was better: We weren't getting ambushed; we weren't leaving sign; we weren't going to bump into any opposition.
    The DS said, "You never cut wood; you move it out of the way, patrol through, and move it back. If somebody's tracking you, he's looking for two types of ground sign-footprints and top sign. If you see cobwebs, you don't touch them; you go around them. If a tracker isn't getting cobwebs over his face, it's another good indication that somebody has walked past."
    People were getting severly on one another's tits now, especially during the navigation phases. The navigation was not just a matter of taking a bearing and off you go.
    We had to confirm regularly where we actually were; we could not see any lower or higher ground at any distance because of the vegetation and canopy. It was pointless going down from a high feature if we'd gone down the wrong spur. That would mean that we'd have to come all the way back up again and start again. So we had to stop, sit down, work out where we were-where we thought we were-and then send out recce patrols.
    Two blokes would go out and confirm that at the bottom of this spur there was, for example, a river that ran left to rig ' lit. If that was happening a couple of times an hour, people were getting hot, pissed off, knackered, and frustrated. It started to grate. I calmed myself by thinking: Take it slowly and send out your navigation patrols; you'll do it; there's no problem.
    The physical exertion of being on the range or patrolling on two or three-day exercises was very debilitating.
    Then we had written tests or had to plan and prepare for a scenario. We were under constant pressure. There was never enough time. The DS would always be behind us saying, "We've got five more minutes. Let's get this done."
    At the debriefings they would dish out fearsome criticism. "You fucked up! You didn't see the target! Why didn't you look right? As lead scout, that's your job."
    I was on my chinstrap one day. We'd probably covered twice the distance we should have done because of the amount of recces we were doing, going up and down; we were all over the fucking place.
    It was my turn to map-read, and as I started to go down from what I thought was the highest ground, to the right of me I saw higher ground.
    That was wrong; I'd cocked up. We stopped; Raymond and Mal were the next two to go on a recce patrol, and I could see in their eyes that they were not impressed. I said, "At the bottom of this spur there should be water running left to right. If not, I've severely fucked up."
    They were gone for about an hour and a half. When we got back that night, I said, "Fuck, that was a long recce you guys did."
    Raymond said, "Yeah, well, we just got to the bottom, had a drink, and sat in the river for half an hour to cool down and get all the shit off."
    I was hot and sweaty all the time, stinking and out of breath. As I 'sweated, the mozzie rep I'd put on my face would run into my eyes and sting severely. It didn't seem to matter what amount of mozzie rep I put on, I still got bitten. And I was covered in painful webbing sores.
    And all the time, the DS were watching. They seemed so calm and casual about it; there seemed to be nothing embuggering them.
   Nothing seemed to fuss them, and we were standing there like a bunch of rain-drenched refugees.
    We would be soaking wet, all bogged down, and we'd have to go on ye. it another navigation patrol.
    I asked myself, "How do you survive here? How do you get comfy?"
    The only enjoyable experience about the place was sitting and having a communal brew and scoff at the end of the day-if it wasn't raining.
    Then I loved getting into my A-frame, revising by candlelight and listening to the rain on the poncho.
    I was really missing Debbie. I felt vulnerable in the jungle; there was no one to vent out to my personal -anxieties and fears of failing, and I wanted to feel attached to something beyond my immediate environment. I wrote to her regularly, trying to tell herv'what was happening. "I really hope I pass, because it will be great. We'll get to Hereford, we'll be able to afford a house, and everything will be fine."
    I found the jungle harder than Test Week-much harder. All we had to do in Selection was switch off and get over those hills. Here it was just as physical, but we had the mental pressure as well, of learning, of having to perform and take in all this information.
    We were tested to the extremes, mentally as well as physically.
    They took us right up to the edge, and then they brought us back.
    Then they took us up there again.
    ' We got better and better, but always at the back of my mind was the thought that the DS were looking at everything-not just tactical skills or practical skills but my personality, whether I would blend in with a closed environment like ungle, whether I'd blend in within the squadron.
    I could see it in their eyes; I could see their minds ticking over. Does he take criticism well? Does he want to learn, does he ask relevant questions or does he ask questions just for the sake of asking questions, to look good?
    The jungle, Peter, the chief instructor, said, was absolutely full of food-from beetles and spiders down to the bark on a tree.
    "If you've got something' but you're not too sure whether you can eat it, you rub it on your skin and see if there is a reaction. Then you wait, and a couple of hours later rub it on your lips and see if there's a reaction, then on the tip of your tongue, then around your gums. Then you just taste a little bit, then eat a little bit, and ' if there's no reaction, you take the chance and eat it."
    We were sitting by the Than huts down near the river, quite a pleasant, flat area. The helipad was on the spur on the other side of the stream, and I could see shafts of sunlight streaming down.
    Fish under four inches long didn't have to be gutted, the instructor said; you just cooked them. There was a plant called the jungle cabbage that was like a small tree.
    You split the bark, and inside was a pulp that was absolutely beautiful.
    It tasted like a soft cabbage. You could also make tea with the bark.
    "On operations, you don't eat lizards and snakes and all that sort of stuff unless you absolutely have to. It's pointless. If you've got to, that's fine, but why not take in food that is going to give you the nutrition so you can do the job? Also, you've got less chance of getting disease or gut aches. Can you imagine having the shits and being totally out of it on operations for two days?
    You've gone into an area, you've got no support, you've got no way of coming back, and you're eating lizard heads, and then you get gut ache.
    You can't do your job-at least, not a hundred percent. Anyway, the amount of energy and time it takes to collect food, you wouldn't have any time to do anything else, so you take the food and water with you."
    We were sitting on our belt kits along the riverbank, cradling our weapons. The lbans were with us; they had a few little fires going and were smoking their huge rollups as they showed us various fishing nets and traps that they'd made. We had a go ourselves and everything we made fell to pieces.
    One of the lbans held a small termite nest over the water with a stick.
    The termites tumbled into the water, and the fish rose to eat them.
    "We also have the red buttress tree," Peter said. "It holds a natural source of fluid."
    We thought this was all rather interesting, especially when he went around the back and pulled out several six-packs of beer. It was the first time we'd got anything overtly friendly from the training team.
    Once a week we had "fresh." We were given an egg, a couple of sausages.
    One particular afternoon they said, "Go away, eat the fresh, and then come back; we've got a lecture two hours before last light."
    It was lovely to be able to cook in daylight, and afterward, as we came back at the appointed hour with just our belt kit, golacks, and weapons, everybody was full and content. I settled down for the lecture, thinking about what I'd do afterward, which was to sort out my webbing sores and the sore inside my thighs. I was looking forward to getting some army-issue talcum powder between my legs, lying on my bed and going through my notes.
    No sooner had the DS started than the ground was rocked by explosions.
    Rounds whistled through the air and thumped into the ground.
    "Camp attack! Camp attack! RP, RP, RP [rendezvous point]!"
    We bomb-burst out of the schoolhouse. There was smoke everywhere and bits and pieces of shit flying through the air.
    It was a complete pain in the arse. It was week three, we were starting to get fairly comfortable, starting to adjust to life in the jungle, so all of a sudden they had hit us with "night out on belt kit."
    I made my way to the troop RP. We all had emergency rations in our belt kits, but no hammocks. We had to sleep on the floor. A lot of armies think it's dead hard to lie on the ground in the jungle, but there are so many other factors to fuck you up in that environment, without having to lie in the mud getting bitten and stung and being so wary of scorpions and snakes that it's impossible to sleep. It's not macho, it's stupid, and the idea of, 4 night out on belt kit" was to treat us to that little experience. We got it in spades because it poured with rain all night.
    During one five-day exercise I was moving into a troop RP one evening.
    We were patrolling tactically, moving really slowly, to get into an area from where we could send out our sitrep (situation report). It had been a long day, I was tired, and it was raining heavily.
    As I sat down to encrypt the message to be Morsed out, my hand started to shake. Seconds later my head was spinning. My eyes couldn't focus.
    I took a deep breath and told myself to get a grip.
    It got worse, and within a minute the shaking was uncontrollable.
    I tried to write, but my hand was all over the place. My vision was getting more and more blurred.
    I knew what was happening.
    We were doing a lot of physical work in the jungle.
    We had heavy loads on, we were under mental pressure, yet the body was still trying to defend its core temperature. To maintain a constant temperature, the heat loss must equal heat production. But if the heat production is more than the heat loss, the temperature's going to rise.
    When the core temperature rises, more blood reaches the skin, where the heat is then released. This works fine as long as the skin temperature is higher than the air temperature. But in the heat of the jungle the body absorbs heat, and the body counters that by sweating. This has limits. An adult can sweat only about a liter per hour. You can't keep it up for more than a few hours at a time unless you get replacement fluids, and the sweat is effective only if the outside air is not saturated with moisture. If the humidity is more than 75 percent, as it is in the jungle, the sweat evaporation isn't going to work.
    We were sweating loads, but the sweat wasn't evaporating. So the body heat was rising, and we were sweating even more. The way the body tries to get rid of that is by sending blood to the skin, so therefore the vessels have to increase in size. The heart rate increases, and sometimes it gets to a rate where its automotive function loses control and it starts to go all over the place. Less and less blood flows to the internal organs. It's shunted away from the brain, so the blood that goes there is going to be hot anyway. The brain doesn't like hot blood going to it, so it responds with headaches, dizziness, impaired thinking, and emotional instability. Because we were sweating so much, we were losing loads of electrolytes, sodium, and chlorides, and the result was dehydration. We were losing noncirculating body fluids.
    The problem is that just a few sips of I-quid might quench somebody's thirst, without improvinig his internal water deficit. You might not even notice your thirst because there is too much else going on, and that was what was happening to me. I was mooching through the jungle, the patrol commander, under pressure to perform, trying to make decisions. The last thing I was thinking about, like a dickhead, was getting the fluids down my neck.
    "When you have a piss," the DS had said, "you look at it. If it's yellow and smelly, you're starting to dehydrate. If it's clear and you're pissing every five minutes, that's excellent, because the body always gets rid of excess water. You can't overload with water because the body will just get rid of it. So as long as you've got good clear piss, you know that everything's all right."
    I turned around to Raymond and said, "Fucking hell, I'm going down here."
    Everything stopped; the whole effort switched to making sure I was all right. Raymond got some rehydrates and boiled sweets down me, put a brew on, and gave me lots of sweet tea. Fortunately the DS didn't see what was going on; it was my fault I was dehydrating.
    Within half an hour I was right as rain again, but I had learned my lesson.
    We came back in off the exercise and they checked our bergens for plastic bags of shit. We weren't allowed to leave any sign, and that included body effluents. We had to shit into plastic bags, and collect our piss in plastic petrol cans.
    They checked another patrol as we came in. "You've not got much shit there," the DS said. "You constipated or something? Where's all your shit?"
    The fellow made an excuse, and the DS just said, Okay."
    Sometimes I wished they would just give us a bollocking, to get it out of the way. They'd told us why not to shit in the field-because the enemy would know people were there. They had even shown us how to shit into a plastic bag by getting somebody to do it. If we weren't doing it, it was bad discipline.
    Sometimes we'd go back to an area we'd used that day to look at some of the problems we had created.
    They might say, "See the marks on the trees? Soft bark is easily marked; hard isn't so you leave no sign."
    Because they'd shown us that, they didn't expect it to happen again. If we didn't learn it must mean we didn't want to learn or didn't have the aptitude.
    The jungle phase ended with a weeklong exercise that was a culmination of everything we'd learned, involving patrolling, hard routine, CTRs (close target recce), bringing everybody together at a troop RP, preparing to do an ambush, springing the ambush, the withdrawal, going to caches for more stores for the exfil (exfiltration). At some time in the future we might go into a country before an operation and cache food, ammunition, and explosives. We could then infil (infiltrate) later without the bulk kit, because it was already cached. We had learned how to conceal it and how to give information to other patrols so that it would be easy to find.
    By now physically we were not exactly as hale and hearty as when we first went in. We were incredibly dirty, our faces ingrained with camouflage cream. Everybody had a month's beard, and we had been wearing the same clothes all the time.
    One thing I had never got used to was getting out of my A-frame or hammock and putting my wet kit on. It was always full of bits and pieces that gathered as we were patrolling along, and it was cold and clammy. It grated against my skin for the ten minutes or so until it had got warm.
    We had our belt kits on all the time, and some of the pouches,would be rubbing on the sides and producing sores. I went through a phase of not wearing any pants, to try to keep the sores from between my legs. I tried little things that I thought might help, such as undoing my trousers, tucking everything in, and - doing it up again.
    I came to the conclusion that nothing worked. I was in shit state, and in shit state I would stay.
    Once the exercise had finished we all RP'd at a bend in the river; that night we went nontactical, waiting to get picked up the following day by the lbans in their dugout canoes with little outboard engines on the back.
    They took us downstream to a village, where we were going to get picked up because there were no landing sites in the area.
    It was like a scene out of a film. There was all the jungle, and then there was a clearing, with grass, chickens running around, little pigs and goats and all sorts, in the middle of nowhere. There were no roads, just a river. They had a schoolhouse, with a generator chugging away.
    There were TV aerials sticking up out of these Than huts made out I of wood, atap, and mud. All the kids were going to school in just shorts, and the teacher was dressed as any other schoolteacher would be.
    The DS said, "When you come into these places, you've got to introduce yourself to the head boy. Show him respect; then the next time you come in he won't fuck you off."
    For the first time in days people were allowed to smoke. Blokes were sitting on the riverbank, sharing their fags with the DS. The training major got his out and offered one to Mal. There was a mutual understanding between them; it made me envious not to be a smoker, joining in the camaraderie.
    I just sat there, drinking in the scene. As far as I was concerned, it was done now. I'd passed or I'd failed; I was just pleased that it was over.
    The rest of the day was spent cleaning weapons, cleaning kit, eating scoff. In the evening there was a barbecue for everybody who had anything to do with the jungle school. The DS produced crates of two-pint bottles of Heineken, and the cooks sorted out the steaks and sausages.
    "Might be the last time you ever come here, lads," the DS said.
    "Get on the piss!"
    We did. I was drunk on three bottles of the Heineken, threw up at about midnight, and went to bed with the jungle spinning.
    There was a day off in the capital, but it was a Muslim country so there was only drinking in one hotel. Everybody felt so sick anyway they didn't bother. I went shopping with Mal, Tom, and Raymond, buying armfuls of bootleg tapes, Walkmans, cameras, and watches. All the traders seemed to be wearing David Cassidy T-shirts.
    I had lost a stone. One of the blokes, the Canadian jock who had been our snowplow during Selection, came out looking like a Biafran.
    Like a dickhead, he hadn't even been cooking scoff for himself at night because he wanted to go hard routine all the time.
    We'd been under the canopy and not seen daylight for a month. I came out looking like an uncooked chip. I was all pasty, full of zits and big lumps. No matter how many showers I had, I still had grime under my nails and big blackheads on my skin. Some of the mozzie bites had scarred up a bit from where I'd scratched them, and they'd welted up.
    Basically I looked stinking.
    We had a few hours in Hong Kong and then flew back on a British Caledonian charter. Four long-haired blokes who were sitting near us looked the typical "Here we go, here we go" lads, wearing hideous orange and purple flowery Hawaiian shirts, jeans and flip-flops. I sat there wondering if they'd had a slightly more enjoyable time in the Far East than we had, frolicking-on a sex holiday in Thailand or smuggling drugs.
    I felt quite subdued and started to get my head down.
    One of the DS, a fellow called Dave, was in the seat in front of me. The four drug smugglers got out of their seats and gave him a cuff on the head. I was just wondering what I was supposed to do about it when Dave turned around and grinned, "All right, mate?"
    It was four blokes coming back from a team job, routed through Hong Kong.
    "Good shirts!" Dave said. "Good job?"
    Yep.
    They'd obviously done their job somewhere in the Far East, and now they were settling down with their gin and tonics for a nice flight home. I thought again, I really hope I get in. I need to be here!
    "Any chance of a lift back?" they asked the DS. "You got your wagon there?"
    "Yeah, we can sort that out."
    Then they chatted away to us, which was wonderful. it was my first real contact with strangers from the squadrons.
    "How did you find it?"
    "Oh, it was good." I didn't know what to say. I just sat there smiling, not wanting to commit myself.
    "Have they told you if you've passed yet or not? Go on, Dave, tell them, don't be a wanker!"
    But he didn't.
    We arrived back in Hereford on a Friday morning and were given the rest of the day off.
    "Be back in the training wing eight o'clock tomorrow morning," the training wing sergeant major said That night everybody went out on the piss and had a really good night. Again, for all any of us knew, it might be the last time we'd ever be there. We turned up on Saturday morning with bad heads, stinking of beer and curries.
    The sergeant major said, "Right, combat survival, Monday morning, half eight. All the details are on the board. However… the following people, go and see the training major."
    We were sitting in the training wing lecture room, in three rows.
    I was at the end of one of them.
    He started reading out the names. He called out Mal's first. I couldn't believe it. Mal was good; as far as I was concerned, he was really switched on. I had to stand up to let him pass, and we exchanged a knowing glance. He shrugged his shoulders and smiled. While I was still standing, the sergeant major called Raymond's name.
    Then Tom's. That was that then. Everybody from my patrol was getting binned. I just stayed standing up.
    There didn't seem much point in sitting down.
    My name wasn't called. Then I realized-maybe these were the people that had passed. Maybe it was the knobbers like me left behind that were going to be binned.
    Out of twenty-four who went to the jungle, there were eight of us left on the benches. The sergeant major made eye contact with each of us, then said, "Well done, That's another bit over with. Next is combat survival.
    Monday morning, half eight. Anybody got any medical problems?
    No, okay. Remember, you're not in yet."
    I thought: I've passed! There was no way I was going to fail combat survival.
    "Right then, fuck off. Everybody except McNab and Forbes. The training major wants you to stay behind."
    What was this about) Everybody-else left, a'nd the training major spoke to Forbes, the rupert, about officers' responsibilities and the extra duties he'd have to do.
    Then he said, "Right, McNab, do you know why I've got you here?"
    "No, I haven't got a clue."
    "You've passed. The only problem is, you've got to fucking watch yourself."
    "Why's that?"
    "We've got you down as gabby. just listen to what people have got to say and take it in. Don't gab off."
    As I walked from the lecture room, I couldn't work it out; I'd tried so hard to be the gray man. Then I remembered the incident with the explosives. I should have just shut up and taken the bollocking and let it go. But like an idiot, I hadn't. Luckily the training team had obviously made the decision that although I was a gabby git, I'd got what they wanted and just needed to be told to wind my neck in.
    Which I did. Fucking right I did. telephoned Debbie as soon as I found out I'd passed.
    She was excited; I was excited. The only obstacle now, I said, was three weeks of combat survival, and there was no way I was going to fail that.
    The feelings and thoughts I'd had about her in the jungle had evaporated as soon as I was back in the UK; I was firmly back in selfish mode.
    She'd kept her job because if I failed, I'd be going back to Germany for a while, but I didn't ask her how she was getting on; it was all me, me, me.
    By now there were eight of us left: myself, George, the Royal Engineer, a Household Cavalry officer, a para, two signalers, a gunner from the Royal Artillery, and jake, a member of the U.S Special Forces.
    He had come over with a colleague on a three-year secondment, but they still had to pass Selection first. Jake did; the other fellow failed the first month.
    All prone-to-capture units, from all three services, send their people on the combat survival course-aircrew, helicopter crew, Pathfinders from the Parachute Regiment, elements of the Royal Marines, and elements of the Royal Artillery, which has forward observation officers.
    After the jungle it was more like a holiday for the first couple of weeks, but we were warned that we could still be failed. An external agency, JSIW (joint Services Interrogation Wing), had the power to bin us. As the training wing sergeant major never stopped telling us, "You ain't in yet!"
    I was starting to talk to Johnny Two-Combs, who was already in.
    He was telling us about his Selection, for which he had done the winter combat survival course.
    "Two of the blokes landed up in hospital with trench foot," he said. "I got frost nip around my fingers and toes. You'll crack it in the good weather, it's a piece of piss. just keep your head down, find the biggest bush to hide in, and you'll be all right."
    It was the Regiment's responsibility to teach the survival phases.
    We learned how to tell the time by the sun, gather water, and forage for food-the most important aspect, I reckoned, being the equation between the energy spent finding something to eat and the energy to be got from eating it. We went to one of the training areas and learned how to build shelters. There was a permanent stand with shelters made out of leaves, branches, turf, and bin liners. It looked as though Wimpey's had won the contract. With my experience of making an A-frame, I knew there was no way I'd be making anything that looked remotely as professional.
    This stuff was all very interesting, but as far as I was concerned, I wanted to learn it only so I could pass. I looked at it as an embuggerance.
    Then people who had been prisoners came and spoke to us about their experiences, ranging from those who were in Colditz during the Second World War and prisoner of war camps in the Far East to the Korean and Vietnam wars and the indoctrination of Allied soldiers by the Communists. It was a humbling experience to hear about some of the women from S.O.E (Special Operations Executive) who were parachuted into Holland and France after minimal training, captured, and subjected to horrendous and prolonged torture. jaws dropped all around the room.
    I couldn't believe the outrageous inhumanity. "When I got captured," one woman said, "they took out a lot of frustrations on me.
    I was raped and burned." She had been kept in solitary confinement in freezing cold conditions and was continually abused, yet she was speaking as if she was talking about a shopping trip to Tesco's. I supposed it showed that the human body and mind could put up with a lot more than might be expected, but I couldn't help wondering how I would bear up under the hammer.
    We listened to an American pilot who had got shot down near the Choisin reservoir. He was still very much the all-American boy, dressed in a green bomber jacket with missing in action memorial badges and various flashes. It was easy to imagine his freckly face and light blond hair as a young man. He had landed up in a model prison that was used for propaganda purposes.
    He was held in a cell, but at least he was fed. He went through the mental problems of being incarcerated but survived and came back to his family, going straight back into the air force. The biggest problem he'd had, he said, was guilt. "I walked around with my head down for a long time," he said. "I couldn't handle being treated so well when so many others had suffered."
    The next speaker, a British infantry corporal in his late fifties, jumped to his feet. "There's no way you should feel guilty," he said.
    "I positively wish I'd been in your camp!" A soldier in the Glorious Glosters, he had been through a fearsome amount of indoctrination, on starvation rations. He caught dysentery and had to bung himself up with charcoal from the fire. Eventually he had been force-marched across North Korea in winter, without shoes. He saw many of his friends die on the march. He came home in shit state, having been beaten continually and lost all his teeth. He was so psychologically damaged by it all that he alienated himself from his family and ended up alone. "I've got over it all now," he said, "but I still don't buy anything Korean."
    That struck a chord with me; my dad's brother had been killed by the Japanese in a prisoner of war camp, and even forty years later Dad wouldn't buy anything made in japan.
    "How did you cope?" somebody asked.
    "I don't know. All I knew was that I didn't want to die."
    "Would you have signed all the confessions and so on if they'd asked you?"
    "Bloody right I would have. If it had meant getting food or getting shoes, I'd have confessed to being jack the Ripper. We sat there getting indoctrinated, and we nodded and agreed. Of course we did; it meant we got food."
    One speaker told us what a large part religion now played in his life, having found God during his time of capture. Another fellow had been a risoner of the Vietp cong for four years; when we asked him, "Did God play a part in your life?" he replied, "Yeah, it played a big part.
    Because when we had dysentery and I was shitting myself, the Bible was something that I could clean my arse with."
    We started going out on trips and visits. We went to see an old woman near Ross-on-Wye, a country person all her life, who knew every plant in creation. She had a beautiful garden and had tables covered with trays and trays of different flora. It was a funny scene, this frail old lady running around the fields and forests with a bunch of big boys towering over her and hanging on her every word.
    We were sent out on two- or three-day exercises to make our shelters, light a fire, forage about, put a few snares out. The non-Regiment characters were well into it; for some of them it was the biggest course they'd ever be on. Once they had passed they'd be qualified as combat survival instructors and could go back to their own units and train people in the techniques. All I wanted to do was get through it.
    One of the instructors, a massive old country boy with big red cheeks and hands the size of shovels, had been on the training team for years.
    He did the firefighting demonstrations and got to the one where he was rubbing two bits of wood together to start the fire. It was,quite a big thing for him; he obviously prided himself on his skill. So he's there and he's rubbing away, and nothing is happening.
    "Any minute now, lads, just you wait."
    Nothing.
    "Right, we'll give it another five minutes."
    He rubbed furiously, but still he couldn't do it. We had to move off to the next lecture, but about ten minutes into it he came running down the field, shouting, "It's started! Come and see!" We all had to troop back up the hill to save his pride.
    During these periods when we'd be going out and building shelters and living in them for two or three days at a time, we started roducing the stuff that we were p going to use on the last week of combat survival.
    They'd taught us how to make clothes out of animal skins, and weapons out of sticks and stones. People were spending hours making jackets out of bin liners and rabbit fur hats that would have passed muster at Ascot. I did the minimum I thought I needed to pass.
    On one of the exercises a large crate turned up.
    "Right lads," the sergeant major said. "Chicken time.
    The only problem is, there's only one chicken between every six of you.
    If you don't get one, you'll have to go to somebody who has one and hope he'll share it."
    We were sent to the bottom of the hill, the chickens were released, and on the command it was every man for himself. The Worzel Gummidge convention raced up the hill; I pulled off my combat jacket as I ran and threw it over the first hen within range. That night it was cooked in the fire and shared with three others.
    The old poachers came in and gabbed off about how to catch a salmon. We had one weird lecturer who worked for the Water Board, in charge of all the lakes.
    He was a real Herefordshire boy with a craggy old face and greasy blue nylon parka and a checked cap that was probably older than he was.
    He was in a world of his own as he passed on his expertise.
    "When you put your net out here, don't 'ee worry about that," he'd say mystifyingly, chuckling to himself on the riverbank as he seemed to remember old stories that he then didn't share with us. Then suddenly he was telling us, 'When you go into a pub, lads, make sure you've got your back to the wall." We were rolling up.
    The DS said to us afterward, "We let him get on with it because we don't want to upset him. He's, so good at what he does."
    After the first two weeks we'd had all the theory, we'd had all the practice, it was time to go and do it for real.
    We were put into groups of four. The scheme was that we were going to navigate for seven days from point to point as if we were on a "rat run," the system of passing escaped POWs from agent to agent in an occupied or enemy country. It was down to us to move from RP to RP; the only navigation kit we were allowed was the button compass we'd have around our necks and the escape map that we'd made ourselves-the whole of Wales on a piece of parachute silk the size of a handkerchief.
    We were told that sometimes on operations we'd be given a ready-printed one, but more often we would make our own.
    We were told that in the areas where we'd be operating, the Regiment invited in all the farmers and householders for a big barbecue. They were told that combat survival was on again, that it would be very much appreciated if their land could be used, and that if they were approached by any people wearing bin liners and rabbit fur hats, they were to Turn them away and report it. It was emphasized that they had to be cruel to be kind; feeding us wouldn't help us because we wouldn't be learning.
    A Guards rifle company would be the hunter force out to capture us. They would be in vehicle and helicopters and would be using dogs.
    As a performance incentive, each soldier was told that if he made a capture, he would be given two weeks' leave and money.
    We turned up in the training wing with all our survival equipment, including a small tobacco tin of bits and pieces that would be all we could take apart from what we had made. The contents included a razor blade, a spare compass, water sterilizing tablets, matches and bits of magnesium block to start fires with, a magnifying glass, a heliograph, and a condom. This last piece of kit wasn't in case we got lucky on the top of the Black Mountains; a condom can be used to make a catapult, collect water in, or even as an emergency flotation device.
    All our kit was searched and checked and put into the toilets that were going to be the changing room.
    Each of us in turn was sent in to see the doctor.
    "Strip off your tracksuit and put it in that bin liner," he said.
    "Then sign this."
    Bollock naked, I signed a bit of paper to say that I didn't mind being internally checked. As I signed, I could hear the rubber gloves going on.
    Then it was a quick squirt of KY jelly and, "Right, touch your toes."
    With a swift, practiced movement the doctor plunged his finger up my arse as far as it would go, presumably to check that I hadn't cached a box of Milk Tray.
    The MoD police were mooching around outside with their dogs, making sure no one was going to try to do a runner and sniffing for hidden food. I had it all squared away; I'd known that the toilets would be used as changing rooms and had wrapped chocolate, peanuts, and raisins in polythene bags and hidden them in all the cisterns. When I went back to the toilet block to change, I said to one of the police, "Just going to have a quick dump."
    I went into the toilet, smiling all over my face, and lifted up the cistern.
    Empty.
    A week before that George and I had also had put out caches of food all around South Wales. We had no idea of exactly where we would be going to go but made an educated guess. For most of a weekend we were running around buying c;ins of tuna and hiding them at prominent points. Tesco's made a fortune out of us.
    We were issued with a set of battle dress from the Second World War, a pair of boots, and a greatcoat, and that was it. Onto a vehicle and off we went. We were driven at night to a dropoff point, and from there we were told where our next RP was going to be the following'night. The idea was to move during the night, as tactically as we could in groups of four.
    My group included a fellow from the PT corps and two navy aircrew, one of whom had terrible flatulence.
    All the Selection people had been split up. I took one look at my teammates and decided to detach myself from them at the earliest opportunity; nothing personal, but I didn't want to get caught, and I thought I'd be better off on my own. The first time we got bumped by the Guards I would do a runner.
    We moved tactically at night, and in the daytime it was just a matter of finding the world's biggest, prickliest, most antisocial bush, getting right in the middle of it, and hiding. At last light we would start moving again into the area of the RP, to meet up with the agent who was going to put us further onto this rat run. In real life the agents would want as little to do with us as possible because they wouldn't want to compromise themselves; to add realism, therefore, the DS, who were the agents, were being hunted by the A.R.F (airborne reaction force) as well.
    At the RP one of us would go forward and make contact, while the other three stood back; I always held back and made sure somebody else went forward, because he had a better chance of being caught. The bloke who had gone forward would get the information, come back and brief us, and off we'd trog.
    We had our little tins and were supposed to be trying to catch rabbits, but we had too much distance to cover for any of that nonsense. For security, we were never going to put a fire on, we were never going to have flame. We went hungry, apart from at one checkpoint where the PT instructor came back with a dark plastic carrier bag with a knot at the top.
    "They gave me some scoff!" He beamed. He undid the knot and looked inside. His face fell. "What the fuck's this?"
    I looked. "Tripe," I said. "My granddad used to live on the stuff.
    It's heaving."
    We ate it raw, and within an hour the navy character was piping us aboard.
    I had a premonition that things were going to go wrong. The P.T.I fellow was jumping clumsily over fences, which would then twang for about another fifty meters down the line. He was going at obstacles like a bull in a china shop; he'd obviously never been taught that you take your time, take it nice and gently. Every time I heard a twang I was flapping; I had it in my mind that to be captured was to be binned.
    The two navy guys had no sort of tactical sense whatsoever. They weren't to blame; it wasn't their job, and passing the course didn't matter for them; it was just a three-week embuggerance before they went back to the wardroom for a few pink gins. So they were wanging over fences as well, and all of them, even the PT instructor, were knackered.
    "Don't forget," I said, "the drill is that as soon as we get bumped, we split up to make it harder for all of us to get captured.
    Then we regroup at the last emergency RP."
    We were waiting at one particular RP, which was a rise of ground overlooking a small road bridge over a river in the middle of nowhere.
    It was cold just sitting still in the shadows. We were sitting within a meter of one another in cover in a dip and had agreed that two of us would stay awake and the other two would get some sleep. It was just a matter of getting the collar up and retreating inside the greatcoat and dozing off.
    I heard helicopters running around, but that was no problem as long as we stayed still.
    I was in a semidaze when I heard a voice bark, "Stand still!
    Don't move!"
    The two on stag had fallen asleep.
    As I looked up, I saw a semicircle of guardsmen closing in on us with pick handles. I thought, Fuck! I was really annoyed. I put my hands in the air, yawned with exhaustion, got slowly to my feet, and bolted.
    I ran and ran, but only as far as the cutoffs they'd put in. I was brought to the ground by a rugby tackle and four of them piled on top. I struggled, but one of them rammed a pick handle down on my neck and shouted, "Stay still! Stay still!" That was me caught. They turned me over and kept their feet on my neck while they tied me up with plasticuffs. They prodded me and said, "what's your name? What's your name?"
    I gave my name and number.
    "What rank are you?"
    I told them and gave my date of birth for gooa measure.
    They dragged me away to their helicopter.
    "Fucking good news!" one of them shouted. "We've got one of the fuckers. We've got our leave!"
    No sooner had the Puma taken off than it seemed to be landing again, in what I took to be their holding area.
    They stripped me of my clothing, so I was there in just my skiddies, and put on blindfolds. I was made to stand a pace or two from a wall, then lean forward so my hands touched the bricks and I was standing at forty-five degrees. It wasn't too difficult, but my shoulders ached badly.
    Then I had to kneel down on the ground, keeping my back straight and my hands on my head. That was a bit worse. The one I liked least was sitting on my arse, cross-legged, with my back straight and my hands behind my neck.
    At some stage, when I was back on my knees, my blindfold was removed, and I found myself looking up at the training sergeant major.
    "Am I binned?" I said pitifully, remembering how I'd cocked up in the jungle with him.
    "No, you nugget. Get back on the helicopter and don't fuck up."
    I'd caught him in a good mood. An ex-Household Division man himself, he was delighted to see the Guards doing so well.
    I was put back out in another group, consisting of three navy aircrew.
    Again, not one iota of tactical awareness. I was desperate.
    I couldn't afford to get caught again.
    We were going along the side of a forestry block one night when we heard shouting just forward and left of us. We bomb-burst away from the area; in theory we should have made our separate ways back to an E.R.V (emergency rendezvous) but I thought, Sod that, and cracked on alone.
    During the daytime it was quite good. I was hiding up, and sometimes I could hear the A.R.F. in their helicopters. Sometimes I'd hear dogs; it was quite exciting stuff.
    These boys were really close, but I was getting away with it. I now knew that if they caught me, they weren't going to muck about because they didn't know my reactions. They would hit me hard, tie me up, and take me in.
    I saw the sun occasionally, but most of the time I was freezing.
    No matter how well insulated I was, after days and days in the field my body was cold and damp.
    I tried to sleep, but it was scattered sleep. I might doze for twenty minutes, wake up, nod off for another ten minutes, acutely aware of any noises.
    It came to the last scheduled night of the exercise, and I knew that at some point very soon one of the DS would compromise me so that I was captured and put through the interrogation phase. I knew it would be quite a lengthy time, no scoff, and it would be a pain in the arse specially if I was going in hungry. I decided to do something about that.
    I did a recce on a farmhouse, which seemed to be occupied by an old couple and a daughter in her early twenties. Seemed all right. I banged on the door.
    "Hello, you haven't got any bread, have you?"
    They knew at once who I was.
    "You want something to eat? Come in."
    Decision. Do I go in? Are they going to get on the phone?
    I went in. It was a beautiful old place, oak beams and a log fire, and a wonderful smell of something or other bubbling away on the Aga. I sat down and the woman brought me a saucepan of mincemeat stew.
    As she sat there smiling, I helped myself to three or four bowlfuls, washed down with gallons of hot, sweet tea. For pudding, I was presented with a plate of Christmas cake with inch-thick marzipan.
    I ate my fill, and stuffed a couple of extra doorsteps in my pocket.
    I'd have given anything for a few minutes by the log fire and maybe a hot bath, but it was time to go. I'd pushed my luck far enough as it was.
    I thanked my hosts profusely, offering to do the same for them one day if I could, and was off.
    Later that night, approaching a checkpoint, I was still full. I tried to eat more of the cake but felt sick. Very reluctantly I had to throw it all away in case I was caught.
    I met up with the DS, who said, "Wait over there.
    We've got a cattle truck that's going to pick you up and take you to the next RP."
    Oh, yes, I thought, and I suppose Hereford will win the next FA Cup.
    Knowing what was coming, I climbed into the cattle truck and joined the others who had got their heads down on the straw. Nobody spoke; we knew what was going on. I knew where I was going, and there was nothing I could do about it. As far as I was concerned, that was the first phase of the test over with; let's now get on with the second.
    A couple of hours later we landed up in Hereford, in a part of the camp that I hadn't seen before.
    As soon as we arrived, they banged into us. The tailgate came down and they shouted really aggressively, "Everybody now, Turn round, lie down, put your hands on your heads!"
    I could hear people getting picked up and dragged away.
    Eventually somebody put his hand on my head, pushed it down, tied my hands up, and put a blindfold on. Two people picked me up and started to drag me out. They were people who did this for a livin; straight in, no words, nothing. I felt myself go down the ramp, walk over some tarmac, and go into a building.
    The handcuffs were taken off, I was stripped of my clothing and left sitting on gravel in what had the feeling of being a very big squash court. I could hear what I thought at first was an attempt at white noise; then I worked out it was air being pumped into the place.
    There couldn't have been any windows.
    I started to shiver. Two blokes came in with a set of coveralls, which they helped me get into. Then it was back on the floor, cross-legged and straight-backed, my hands behind my head. I concentrated on making my neck relax and left it at that.
    I could hear other people in the room getting moved around. From time to time they moaned and groaned; perhaps they were being put into different stress positions, or lifted for interrogations. Nobody was talking.
    After about half an hour the footsteps came up to me.
    Two boys grabbed hold of me, picked me up, and then walked me. I thought I was going for an interrogation, but they got me to a place where they threw one of my hands against the wall, then the other, and then started to kick my feet back so I was at an angle, resting against the wall. Very soon I started to get pins and needles in my hands, and then they went numb. I tried gently banging them against the wall; the guards came over, got hold of my hands, and threw them against the wall again and kicked my legs out even more.
    The hands really started to hurt. I had to push against them to keep the tension in my body so I didn't collapse.
    Fuck this, I thought. I was in pain, I was cold; soon I would be hungry. The only consolation was the thought that this was the last major step. If I passed this, I was in; if I got binned, it would be my own fault. It was just a matter of sticking in there. At the end of the day it was an exercise; they weren't going to kill me; it was just a big test.
    They grabbed me, took me somewhere else, and made me sit cross-legged with my hands behind my head and my back straight. Every time I bent my back to release the stress, they'd be in, grab hold of me, move me, and put me down again.
    There was no noise; nobody said a word. All I heard was the two sets of footsteps walking along, picking me up. Sometimes they'd put me back against the wall in another stress position. After a few hours I told myself that I needed to switch on here. "Just keep your head," I said to myself, "and you'll be all right." I told myself that it was more about giving us an experience than anything else. They would hardly be putting us through it just for the sake of fucking us about and giving us a good beating. It was probably as much an experience for the people who were doing the interrogating as it was for us. They needed training also. They needed to get the experience of reacting to people who had been under pressure for seven days on the run, not somebody who was just coming in from the canteen and playacting the part.
    As the hours ticked by in my head, there were some I people who by the sounds of things bel'eyed it was for real. I heard two or three get into such a state that they started blattering off and wanted no more of it.
    "I've had enough," somebody shouted, and it echoed around the room. I recognized the voice. It belonged to a signals captain in his forties who'd come up through the ranks and had been giving little bits of advice to all the lads on the course. He'd had his toothbrush with him all the time. "You don't need toothpaste," he said. "I always keep my teeth clean. Look at these teeth. twenty-four years in the army, out in the field all the timegood teeth. And that's because I keep my toothbrush with me."
    "I don't want this no more! I don't want this no more!" He screamed and hollered, and I heard several sets of footsteps going up and dragging him away. He was spaced out; he was gone. It made me feel really good.
    Number one, because he was gabby all the time, giving us the benefit of all his advice, and number two, because somebody had been taken off. It made me feel better that I was still hanging on in there.
    Maybe he didn't have the same incentive as the Selection blokes.
    Yet, very occasionally, I had been told, Selection blokes did fail at this late stage as well.
    This 'was extremely demanding, physically and mentally. So it should be. What they were doing was training prone-to-capture troops for a real possibility. They couldn't go around beating us up, of course, or breaking our arms and giving us electric shocks, but they could take us to such a point that we didn't know whether we were going to be able to survive or not.
    I was placed back in the stress position against the wall, and this time not even the first half hour was bearable. I had to keep the position; as soon as I went down, they came in and forced me up. I tried to grin and bear it.
    I heard some footsteps go past me to move some other people around. Then the footsteps came back, and this time the men stopped, grabbed hold of me, and I could smell the coffee on their breath. I thought I was going to be moved to another stress area, but I was off, walking carefully in my bare feet, mincing around when we hit shingle.
    We went into a building and along corridors.
    We went into a room, I was put down on a chair, and I heard a voice saying, "Close your eyes."
    The blindfold came off, and I looked down at the ground. The people walked out, and the door was closed.
    "Open your eyes."
    I looked up, opened my eyes, and there were two boys sitting there at a desk. It was a small room, white walls, an empty desk, them and me.
    Both men were in their mid-forties. One of them was wearing a black polo-neck jumper. He had gray hair and was very stern-looking.
    They both just looked at me, with obvious disdain.
    "What's your name?"
    "McNab."
    "What's your full name?"
    "Andrew McNab."
    "What's your number?"
    "Two-four-four-zero-eight-eight-eight-eight."
    "Rank?"
    "Sergeant."
    "What's your regiment?"
    "I can't answer that question."
    "What's your regiment?"
    "I can't answer that question."
    "What do you fucking mean, you can't answer that question?" he exploded.
    "We just caught you. We know what your fucking regiment is.
    But we want you to tell us. You're not helping us at all, are you?
    What's your number?"
    I went through it again.
    "What's your rank?"
    "Sergeant."
    "What were you doing when you were captured?"
    "I can't answer that question."
    "Well, if you don't fucking answer that question, you'll be in the shit.
    Do you understand me?"
    "I can't answer that question."
    "What…. were…. you… doing… down… in…. that…. area?"
    "I can't answer that question."
    "Are you in the army?"
    "I can't answer that question."
    "Well, you must be in the army because you've got a regimental number.
    What's your regimental number?"
    "Two-four-four-zero-eight-eight-eight-eight."
    "So you're in the fucking army then, aren't you?"
    "I can't answer that question."
    "Look here, sonny, if you don't fucking answer the questions, you're in a lot of trouble. Do you understand that?"
    "I can't answer that question."
    "Okay, this is the score. This is what you're going to do.
    You're going to sign that bit of paper for the Red Cross and tell them that you're okay. Then you might be getting some food. Do you understand?"
    "I can't answer that question."
    They leaped up, hollering and shouting. "Stand up!
    Stand to attention! Who the fuck do you think you are?"
    They walked around me, saying, "Are you thick or something? Are you fucking thick? I'm asking you questions and you're not answering.
    Do you understand?"
    "I can't answer that question."
    I knew that as long as I stuck to the big four-name, number, rank, and date of birth-and "I can't answer that question," I'd cracked it.
    The one in the black polo-neck turned to his mate.
    "Do you think he's thick? Yeah, he's got to be fucking thick, look at him. Why doesn't he talk to us? He's thick. Do you have a mother?"
    "I can't answer that question."
    "I bet you don't know your mother, do you?"
    "I can't answer that question."
    "I bet your mother's a fucking stinking whore, isn't she? That's why you don't know your mother, isn't it?"
    "I can't answer that question."
    I didn't mind any of it. In fact, compared with the stress positions, I actually rather liked it. The room was warm, and I could sit down. I wasn't in a stress position, and the blindfold was off. I just kept saying to nlyself: "Don't deviate from number, name, rank, date of birth, and you're home and dry."
    They went through the good guy, bad guy routine, and I got the pieces of paper that they wanted me to sign.
    "I'm sorry," I said, "I cannot do that."
    "What's your number?"
    "Two-four-four-zero-eight-eight-eight-eight."
    The session must have lasted about an hour.
    Finally they said, "Right, sit down there, and close your eyes."
    I was blindfolded again and just sat there. I heard scribbling but no talking. 'Then the door opened, and I was picked up and dragged out again. As I went down the corridor, I could hear, on the left-hand side, another interrogation going on.
    "What the fucking hell do you mean?" somebody was shouting.
    Then I felt the air being pumped in and felt the gravel, and knew I was back in the holding area. Straight back up against the wall, hands up high, and the legs kicked back.
    I could hear lots of movement. Like me, everybody was obviously starting to feel the effects of the stress positions. The boys were walking around more, moving people more because they weren't holding the positions.
    I heard people falling and hitting the floor.
    The cycle of interrogations and stress positions went on over a period of about twenty-four hours. The interrogators were brilliant actors.
    They'd start with a nice friendly approach, then suddenly throw the switch a'nd hurl a frenzy of abuse.
    I was sitting in a stress position, my legs crossed, back straight and hands behind my head, trying to find a comfortable position without moving too obviously. I had pins and needles in my head; my back and neck were strained; every time my elbows came forward to rest someone would yank them right the way back.
    I was picked up and taken for another interrogation. I tried to lift my legs up to keep them from dragging on the gravel. I heard the boys straining to carry my weight and felt quite pleased to be getting my own back.
    One boy held my head, grabbed hold of my hair to point me forward.
    They undid the blindfold, and straightaway I closed my eyes.
    A young cockney voice said, "Look forward, mate, that's all right."
    He was all ginger hair and freckles, the first younger man that I'd seen. "Sorry to mess you about, mate," he said. "Let's just go all over it again, if you don't mind.
    We're getting all cocked up here. Let's just get your details right.
    What's your number again?"
    I said.
    "Name?"
    I said.
    "All right, that's fine. Now, is that an 'Mc or an Mac?"
    That put me in a bit of a dilemma. What do I say?
    "I can't answer that question."
    "Ah, come on, mate. I'm trying to do my job here.
    We've got to sort all this out. Is it a small N or a big N?"
    "I can't answer that question."
    "Oh, all right then. What's your date of birth?"
    I gave it.
    "Okay, don't worry about the difference in the spelling then.
    We'll sort that out later. But what exactly were you doing? I'm totally confused-I've got all these notes and bits of paper all over the place from these people you've been talking to. What were you doing?"
    I saw through it: the friend, the same age-group.
    I couldn't help noticing that he had half a cheese sandwich and a cup of coffee in front of him.
    "Can we just sort this out?" he said. "What's your number again?"
    I remembered a Green Jackets officer who took over A Company, who had been the ops officer for the Regiment. When he rejoined the battalion, he started doing little interrogation exercises, and something he had once said stuck in my memory: "If you get the chance of food, take it.
    Once it's inside you, what can they do?"
    I looked at the cheese sandwich. They could hardly punish me by putting me in a worse stress position than they had already. They might drag me out and be a bit rough with me, but so what? At least I'd have a cheese sandwich and a mug of coffee down my neck.
    I couldn't see any steam coming off the coffee, so I knew it was fairly warm and I'd be able to gulp it down.
    Anyway, it was in a metal mug, and they tend to cool it down quicker. So I thought: Fucking right.
    I lunged forward and grabbed the food and drink.
    The boy recoiled. Guards came bursting in, but they were too late to stop my feast. They blindfolded me and held me down.
    The young guy, still being my mate, said, "Did you enjoy that?"
    "I cannot answer that question."
    I went into the next interrogation. It was the same routine, being picked up from the stress position, and by now I was really looking forward to interrogations because it was so painful against the wall or on the floor. It was the same two interrogators I had the very first time.
    "You're a dickhead," they said. "We gave you the chance to help us; now you're going to pay for it. Get your clothes off."
    I undressed.
    "What's your number?"
    "Two-four-four-zero-eight-eight-eight-eight."
    "Right, now say it slowly.l I did, and I had to do it again.
    Because of the training I knew to play on the injuries, looking like I was knackered, all that sort of stuff. I repeated my number for what seemed like hours, really slowly. Great, I thought; it took up more time, I was in a better atmosphere, rather than in a stress position in the holding area, and I wasn't being moved around every five minutes by the guards.
    Then I was told to jump up and down on my toes, which was even better because I started to get warm.
    They said, "We've had enough of you, you fucking idiot."
    They walked out, and two women walked in. One was in ' her late twenties and looked very prim and proper in glasses. The other, who was in her forties, was wearing jeans.
    "Take off your pants," they said.
    I took them off.
    "That's a bit small, isn't it?" The older woman laughed. "What are you going to do with that? Is that why you're a big, rough, tough soldier, to cover up your inadequacies? My little finger's bigger than that. Not going to impress many girls with that, are you?"
    She turned to the younger one and said, "Would you do anything with that?"
    "With what? I can't even see anything."
    They were trying to find a chink in my personal armor, but as far as I was concerned, everything they were saying was fair comment.
    After all, it was freezing cold in the room; in the circumstances, even Errol. Flynn wouldn't have been looking his best.
    I guessed everybody W'as learning about his own personality, his own strengths, his own weaknesses. I was certainly learning about mine. I had no trouble with the insults and abuse, but some people were starting to trip.
    When I was in the stress positions, I heard people shouting, "Fuck this!
    I've had enough of this shit!" Realistically we were having a rather nice capture, but physically doing it still wasn't nice at all.
    I clung to the fact that this was an exercise and it would end.
    I was taken for yet another interrogation. I was sat in a chair, and the blindfold came off. There in front of. me was a cup of soup and the training wing sergeant major.
    He said, "Do you recognize me?"
    I didn't say anything.
    "Do you recognize me?"
    I said jack shit. I wasn't too sure if this was a ploy.
    "Right, I'm telling you that now's the end of the exercise. Do you recognize me? If you say yes, that's fine, if you say no, we can just stay here until you do."
    He was wearing a white armband; I remembered that we'd been briefed that that would signify the end.
    "Yes, I recognize you."
    "Drink the soup."
    We had a debrief with the interrogators.
    When it came to my turn, they said that I'd stuck to the big four, which was good. It had been a bad move, however, to make a grab for the coffee and the cheese sandwich.
    "If it hadn't been an exercise, I wouldn't have done it," I said.
    "I know that in real life there would have been repercussions.
    But this was an exercise and I was hungry, so why not?"
    "How were you feeling physically? Were you as exhausted as you gave the impression of being?"
    "No, I was playing on the physical side."
    "How many interrogations did you have?"
    "Six."
    Wrong. This was interesting. I was one interrogation out. And I had been held for thirty hours, not the forty that I'd thought.
    "What about the interrogators? Was it obvious what they were trying to do? Were there any stages when you were worried about it?"
    I gave it to them straight. Some of these people had been right fuckers. They'd done their job very well.
    They were aggressive, there was aggressive handling, but we'd had to expect that. We were cold, but so what?
    It was very demanding, physically and mentally, but at least we knew there was an ending. I'd have hated for it to have been real or to have gone on for very much longer.
    The last big hurdle was over. We looked a state. We'd been out in the field for a week, and we had a week's growth. Everybody's hair was sticking up and tangled with twigs and straw. We had those really big, wide, bloodshot eyes; we were stinking. Nobody in the camp gave us as much as a second look.
    I had a shower and headed for the cookhouse and a great big plate of steak and chips. A couple of blokes were already back, and the others trickled in over the next twenty-four hours. All the stories were coming out, including one or two with unhappy endings. One bloke had been in a stress position when he felt his blindfold slipping down.
    He knew that he stood a chance of getting fucked off, purely because they would think he was actively pulling the blindfold down himself, so he ut his p hand up. Nothing happened. He stood up and sort of semitumed, and by now the mask was down. They binned him on the spot.
    The argument was that he'd pulled his mask and broken the rules.
    They fucked up, and it was unfair. But then, no one said it would be easy.
    In the pub the following night the Selection blokes compared notes.
    Everybody had been of the same opinion about the others in their team and had wanted to spread out and get away.
    Dave, one of the paras, said, "I got to a farmhouse, put an OP
    [observation post] on it, had a look around.
    Everything seemed okay, so I went up under the window and I thought I'd just listen. The tv was on, and it sounded all rather nice; then I could hear loads of people talking. I got up and had a look through the curtains and it was the whole training team sitting there. I said to myself, 'I think we'll give this one a miss."' There was a long weekend off; on Monday morning we would carry on with our continuation training.
    By now the training team had more or less got what they needed. We were starting to get a relationship, we were starting to talk about squadrons and things in general.
    They opened up a bit more, but we still had to call everybody Staff apart from the squadron sergeant major, whom we called Sir. We weren't in yet.
    There was a pub that used to put trays of sausages and French bread out on the bar on Sundays, so George and I went and had a few pints of Guinness and filled our faces out. We were walking down the road afterward, bored out of our heads, and decided to go around to see an ex-Green jacket who was in D Squadron. His wife used to work for Bulmer's, distributors of Red Stripe lager, and the four of us sat there all afternoon, chatting away, slowly getting pissed.
    After a few hours I announced that I was going to the toilet. I got to the top of the stairs and felt an ominous urge in the pit of my stomach.
    I ran into the toilet, and projectile vomited all over the floor and walls.
    Panic. I cleaned up as best I could, then fell down the stairs and into the front room.
    "Well"-I beamed-"must be going."
    In the morning I was in shit state. I went around to D Squadron lines to see what had happened.
    "Bloody hell!" he said. "She's gone ballistic!"
    I thought I was severely in the shit. I ran off and bought her a bunch of flowers and a box of chocolates. I went around to the house, hoping against hope that she wouldn't be in. I knocked on the door.
    There was nobody at home.
    I propped the gifts on the doorstep and pulled out a card from my pocket.
    "So sorry about my terrible behaviour and all the ' inconvenience I must have caused you," I wrote. "I hope that one day you will forgive me and certainly promise that it will never happen again." Then I signed it,
    "OWmi'tsh all best wishes, George."
    I telephoned Debbie and said, "I'm in! I reckon I've passed!"
    She was really pleased. I was really pleased. But the sad thing was that I was so engrossed in what I'd been doing that I didn't stop to think about what she'd been going through. She'd been stuck in Germany, unsure of whether I was going to pass or what the future might hold; she hadn't seen me for months, and all I'm doing is phoning her up and telling her how great I am. I was so selfish; she was getting two letters a month from me and maybe a phone call a week, and it was never to say, "How are you?" Maybe I didn't ask because I didn't want to hear the answer.
    The idea of continuation training was to give us an introduction to the skills that would be needed once we got into our squadrons.
    Our first introduction was to be to the CT (counterterrorist) team. We sat in the classroom on the first day dressed in civvies. It was the first time I'd ever done a soldier's work in civilian clothes, and it felt a bit strange. The training team weren't going to be teaching us for this phase, we'd been told; it would be members of CRW, the counterrevolutionary warfare wing.
    In came a bloke called Ted I knew from the Green Jackets. We'd always known him as Ted Belly because of the losing battle he fought in the inch war; now he was on the CRW. Ted was a tall, approachable cockney with hair like straw. No matter what he did with it, his head looked like a bird's nest in a gale.
    "Today we're going to learn all about the nine millimeter," he said.
    "Anything you don't know, just ask and Uncle Ted'il tell you.
    We'll have a day down here, and the rest of the week we'll be on the ranges. Maybe we'll have a few wagers-all right?"
    The 9MM Browning pistol was extremely to the Regiment and underestimated by many outside, Ted said. It was an extremely effective and powerful weapon, easy to conceal, yet hitting at a surprisingly long range. The Regiment used it for VIP protection, counterterrorist and covert operations. On the counterterrorist team, everybody's secondary weapon was the pistol.
    We had to learn every bit of theory there was to know about the Browning, as well as the stripping and assembling, all the technical details on what happened if a pin was filed this way, what happened if the trigger mechanism was slightly adjusted.
    We learned how to hold the weapon correctly and how to stand correctly.
    The method the Regiment used was totally different from the army's. It was based on combat experience, which the army hadn't got much of with pistols (I had fired one twice in my career). Ted taught us how to draw the pistol from various types of holster, how to draw it covertly when we had our jackets on, and even what sort of jacket to wear and how to wear it.
    From different firing positions, we practiced until we could hit the target with both eyes open from thirty-five meters, then fifty meters, while pushing people out of the way in a crowd. We practiced from seven-thirty each morning until dark o'clock. We'd get a tea urn in the morning, pick up loads of scoff, and scream down to the range, eight of us having a really good time with the pistol.
    I thought that as a sergeant in the infantry I'd know lots but found it was a vastly different world here. I guessed I was near the bottom of what would turn out to be a very steep learning curve.
    "When you get back to the block," the instructor said, "practice your drawings in front of the mirror.
    Don't worry, nobody will laugh. We all do it."
    We were there for an hour after dinner, practicing in front of the mirrors in the toilets. Finally Ted came by with loads of boys and said, "What the hell are you doing, you dickheads?"
    We looked sheepishly at the imaginary pistols in our hands while they took the piss mercilessly.
    On the final day Ted said, "Right, let's have a bit of fun then."
    He got all the targets in and marked one of them with a circle the size of a tenpence, another with one the size of a Coke can, then a larger one still. We had to fire at different timings: firing three rounds into the tenpence piece in five seconds at five meters, then back to ten meters, going back and back. We all put a fiver in at a time, and the winner took all.
    Next we did some demolitions training with basic charges, saw some more of the squadron kit, and did a bit of signals work with the squadron radios.
    "Wherever you are operating in the world, you will send directly back to Hereford," the instructor said.
    "You'll have to learn a lot of antenna theory; it's not like in the films where they've got a radio the size of a cigarette pack with a little antenna and they start sending signals off to Katmandu. It doesn't work like that at all.
    Depending on the frequencies and the time of day, you'll have to calculate the size of the antenna."
    We had introductions to all the different departments, from the education center to the Regimental Association; the only ones we didn't see were the "gray" ones tucked away that we were told we would only find out about later.
    After three weeks it was time to go to Brize Norton to be para-trained.
    It was one of those things that had to be done but that I couldn't really be arsed about; I was itching to go straight to the squadron. The one consolation was the thought that the only way I was not going to get in now was if I broke my neck-or blotted my copybook.
    I found out what squadron I was going to go to. If I'd wanted a particular squadron, and there'd been a reason, maybe I'd have got in.
    If you wanted G Squadron and you were a guardsman, for example, you would definitely get it. Otherwise it all depended on the manpower requirements. I wanted to go to D Squadron because Jeff was in it and they were the current counterterrorist team, based in Hereford. Things with Debbie were not exactly brilliant. I was paying a bit more attention now to what she said in her letters from Germany, so I knew she was severely pissed off. In reply I kept telling her that as soon as I'd passed I would organize a quarter. However, D Squadron wasn't to be; four of us were off to B Squadron, though we wouldn't be allowed anywhere near them yet.
    Blokes who were already para-trained were badged now and went to their squadrons. The rest of us went to Brize Norton, into the R.A.F's hands and out of the Regiment's system. It was like a holiday-' but one of those holidays that went on too long.
    For a month we were taught a lot of drills that we later found out were crap, but they had to teach hundreds of people a year, so everybody was pushed in together and around went the handle. Brize Norton was a sausage factory.
    The upside was that the R.A.F always tended to have superior recreational facilities. Here the N disco was called the Starlight Club. Every night the baby paras on our course turned up, all crew cuts and Brutus jeans, desert boots and maroon sweatshirts, as hard as nails.
    Two of them were pissed and dancing together one night. The next morning they were all out on parade, helmets on and ready to go. Their corporals came out and said, "Oi, Smith and Brown, come here. Smith, were you dancing last night?"
    "Yes, Corporal."
    "Who with?"
    "Him, Corporal."
    "And Brown, you was dancing last night. Who with?"
    "Him, Corporal."
    The full screw went inside and came back out with an ironing board under his arm. With the two baby paras standing at attention, he banged them rhythmically on the head: "We…. don't… dance..
    . together… in… the…. airborne."
    "Yes, Corporal."
    And off they went. All the other recruits were rolling up. It was a fun thing; they obviously had the same relationship with their recruits as my team had had at Winchester.
    We got our parachute wings and went back to Hereford to be badged.
    We turned up with our normal regimental kit on and hung around in the "Kremlin" (head shed building). I had a fantastic feeling of achievement. Everybody seemed pleased for us; probably there wasn't a single person in the Regiment who couldn't remember how he felt when he got badged.
    The RSM came out, shook our hands, and said, "Well done, congratulations. What you're going to do in a minute is go in and see the colonel. He's going to badge you, and then you start moving off to your squadrons.
    I'll give you one piece of advice. When you get to your squadron, look at somebody you think is 'the' regimental soldier, and copy him.
    Take example from him, learn from him. Don't start going off thinking that you rule the world because you don't. Just keep your gab shut, look and listen."
    The CO had a pile of sand-colored berets on the table in front of him and flipped one at each of us. No formalities, no handshakes.
    Then he said, "Just remember, it's harder to keep than it was to get.
    Right, good luck to you."
    The army doled out a horrible beret called a Kangoule. Within the army there was a definite fashion about such things; you could always tell a person by his headgear. We'd all sent away for the much smarter Victor beret.
    And that was it. George and I trooped off to B Squadron office, almost six months to the day since we'd done the Fan Dance. The first fellow we met was Danny, the clerk-skinny, no face hair, and looking sixteen.
    He was in fact in his early twenties and was, we were told, the person who really knew what was going on. The squadrons were all over the place, doing ten things at once, little gangs here, little gangs there, and the only one who had any continuity was the clerk, always there with the HQ element of the squadron. If we needed anything or wanted to know-what was going on, Danny, the clerk, was the man.
    "Nice to meet you," he said. "Everybody's away at the moment, but there's one or two people b mining around. just go and sit in the interest room anud we'll sort you all out."
    George and I spent a lot of time that day just hanging around. We couldn't contribute anything, the whole squadron was away, and everybody was busy. We were feeling rather helpless, sticking out like sore thumbs in our uniforms. The few blokes who were around were in tracksuits or jeans.
    The walls of the interest room were covered with plaques, photographs, AK47s from Borneo days to the present-all sorts of bits and pieces that people had brought back from all over the world. It was a history of the squadron written in bric-a-brac.
    Blokes came in and said, "You just joined the squadron? My name's Chas.
    Nice to see you. You coming on the trip?"
    They seemed genuinely pleased for us that we'd passed. There was no feeling of us being the rugs, as we would have got in the battalions.
    They knew what we'd done to get this far.
    "I don't know," I said. "Are we going on a trip?"
    Danny said he didn't have a clue yet. I was hoping in a way that we weren't. I'd now got everything I'd wanted, but I'very much needed to get things sorted out with Debbie. Our conversations on the telephone were still a little strained. The relationship seemed fine on the surface, but underneath I wasn't sure what her feelings were.
    She seemed to understand how important it had been to me to get into the Regiment, but I knew she was fed up with taking second place; when she arrived from Germany, I wanted the quarter to be ready. In the meantime I didn't know how she'd take the news that I was going away with my squadron for a couple of months.
    We hummed around to the stores, handed in all the equipment from training wing, and drew out our squadron equipment. Unfortunately everything we drew out was brand-new. We looked as if we'd just stepped out of a catalog"Turn up tomorrow," Danny said, "and we'll see what's going on."
    This was at ten o'clock in the morning.
    "What do we do in the meantime?" I asked.
    "Nothing. Go downtown if you like."
    This was so different from the battalion, where we'd have had to stay, even if there was nothing to do.
    When we did go back the next morning, we were told: "Malaya, Thursday. 5 We packed all the brand-new kit and drew out shiny new jungle boots.
    There wouldn't be time to break them in. On Thursday we boarded the aircraft. I still hadn't organized the quarter for Debbie; I only hoped that things would be sorted while I was away.
    Some of the blokes had already been in the jungle for quite a while by the time we turned up at the base camp, two hours' drive from Kuala Lumpur. We drew some more kit, and the next morning we were choppered in to join them: four new blokes, every bit of kit shiny and squeaking.
    I felt like a nun in a whorehouse, knowing none of the jargon and none of the people using it. Nobody wore rank, everybody was on first-name terms; it was impossible to make out who was who.
    Best, I reckoned, to follow the RSM's advice. I shut up and listened.
    The squadron setup in the jungle was very much as it had been on Selection. There was the squadron HQ element, then the troops positioned satelliting it. People had set up home in the admin areas;
    A-frames were dotted around, many of them sprouting extensions. Figure "targets had been made into sit-up angle boards as a makeshift gym.
    Tables and chairs had been made out of crates. Here and there two or three ponchos had gone up to join A-frames and make what looked like minicommunes.
    Everybody in sight had a beard and long, greasy hair.
    Some blokes were lying in their A-frames reading books; others were bumming around in shorts or squatting over hexy burners, brewing up. But whatever he was doing, every bloke had his belt kit on, as well as his golack and weapon.
    The medic came up to us and said, "Most people are out at the moment.
    When they come back, everything will be sorted. Do you want a brew?"
    While we were drinking tea, the squadron O.C came over with all his entourage.
    "Good to see you! Right, we need a bloke for each troop." He looked at each of us in turn, then said, " You look like a diver George was a mountain climber, so he said, "I'd like Mountain Troop."
    "Okay, you can go to Mountain Troop. You, go to Mobility, and you look like a free faller."
    The last bloke he was pointing at was me, and that was me in Air Troop.
    "Wait here," he added, "and somebody will be along to pick you up."
    Blokes from different troops came down to pick up their new boys.
    The O.C and his party disappeared. I was sitting there on my own, taking in a bit of the setup, watching the signalers and medics at work at makeshift tables under ponchos. People were coming up and saying,
    "All right? How you going? What troop you going to?"
    "Air Troop."
    "Bloody hell, you'll have fun-the fucking ice-cream boys! Got your sunglasses with you, I hope?"
    I didn't have time to ask what they meant. A fellow who was six feet his and four feet wide appeared, p walking on the balls of his feet. His hands were so big his M16 looked like a toy.
    "Your name Andy? I'm Tiny, Seven Troop. We'll sort out some bits and pieces, and then we'll go back up to the troop area."
    I was smelling all nice, got my new boots on, and feeling like it was my first day at big school. Off we went, my eyes scanning the ground for a patch of mud to dunk my boots in.
    As we walked up the hill he said, "What battalion are you from then?"
    "Two."
    "Great! I'm Two Para myself."
    "No, two RGJ. I was a Green Jacket."
    Tiny stopped in his tracks, turned, and said, "Well, what the fuck are you doing here?"
    "I don't know-they just told me to come."
    "Fucking hell, we haven't had anybody here for eighteen months, and now they're sending you."
    I'd never felt such a dickhead in my life.
    We went into the troop area, which was on a small spur occupied by A-frames. In the middle was a large fire. All eight members of 7 Troop were sitting around, having a kefuddle and brewing up.
    As we walked in, Tiny said, "We've got this fellow here turned up; his name ' s Andy McNab, and he's a Green jacket. What the fuck's he doing here?"
    He started having a go at a guy called Colin, who I assumed was the senior bloke present.
    Colin was about five feet six inches, very quietly spoken but extremely blunt in his replies to Tiny. He sounded as if he was from Yorkshire.
    "I'm a para, too," he said as he shook my hand.
    Christ, was anybody in 7 Troop not from Para Reg?
    They introduced themselves.
    "Nosh."
    "Frank."
    "Eddie."
    "Mat."
    "Steve."
    "Al."
    "Get yourself over there," Colin said, and bung a pole bed up."
    I went to the edge of the clearing, dropped my bergen, and got out my golack.
    I'd only ever made one A-frame, and now everybody who was sitting around brewing up was able to watch me make a bollocks of the second.
    Brunei seemed a long time ago as I thrashed at the trees and tried to chop branches to required lengths. Every time I pulled up one bit the next would fall down. God knows what they must have been thinking.
    I wanted to make a ood impression and was flailing away like a man possessed, but my pole bed was all over the place. And they were sitting there, chatting away and smoking, watching me and scratching their heads.
    I finally sorted it all out just as it started to come to last light.
    They didn't stand to. I thought, Well, what goes on now? I didn't want to intrude on their session, so I did a few exaggerated yawns and stretches and got my head down. They carried on the fuddle all night, probably thinking that I was a right -antisocial prat.
    In the morning I got a brew on and some food. Then I wandered over to Tiny and said, "What happens now?"
    "Just get ready and we'll go out, I suppose."
    "When do we go out?"
    "Don't worry about it."
    Colin took me in' his patrol. He seemed really switched on, and I clung on to him. Colin was my role model.
    We were going to do jungle lanes, very much as we'd done on Selection.
    We patrolled along in a group of two, then in a group of four, practicing contact drills.
    The Communist insurrection in Malaya had started in 1948, and twelve hundred guerrillas, under the leadership of Chin Peng, still subsisted in the mountains along the Malay-That border. It had been one of the longest wars in Asia, but fairly inconsequential; however, hundreds of people had been killed during anti-Chinese riots in Kuala Lumpur in
    
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