Immediate Action (13 page)

    We'd sit together in companionable silence and wait for the wagon to fill up. George was tall and lean, with varicose veins behind one of his legs. It looked like a relief map of the Pyrenees.

    The day came when it was time for Sketch Map.

    There was no way I was going to cock up this time, and I didn't.

    We got back to camp at about 3:00 o'clock in the afternoon after a 4:00 A.M. start. At 10:00 o'clock that same night we'd be setting out for Endurance, so it was straight in, sort the kit out, and have a bath.

    I'd always been a shower man, until I'd seen all the boys going in with boxes of Radox,and I thought, Right, I'll have some of that for Endurance. But I put far too much in. It was like floating in the Dead Sea. I didn't know if it did me any physical good, but in my mind I felt that it did.

    We drove to Talybont, one of the reservoirs. When I got off the wagon and put the bergen on, I started getting pins and needles in my hands because the weight on my shoulders was restricting the flow of blood. I had that initial pain of getting it on, then even more pain as welts broke out where it was rubbing. And then after about ten minutes, as soon as I got moving, my skin started to tingle because I was starting to leak. I got the wetness around my neck, and it started to get at the base of my hair. That was always quite an uncomfortable time, that very first ten minutes or quarter of an hour, because my legs were really stiff. Then I started to get my second breath and everything started to loosen up.

    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.