Gold Rush

by Jim Richards

  ‘In the P Company dictionary, sympathy comes between shit and syphilis,’ he informed us. That was the only piece of formal advice I ever got on P Company. The rest came in the form of beasting.

  Beasting is a particular cultural trait of the Paras, which consists of a member of staff screaming at full volume two inches from your ear, telling you what a worthless piece of shit you are. The aim, somewhat perversely, is to make you speed up. To be an outstandingly eloquent beaster was a point of considerable professional pride among the staff.

  A long steeplechase run kicked things off, followed by circuit training in the gymnasium. After that we forced down lunch. You always felt sick at lunchtime. I think it was the fear of what was to come in the afternoon: the tab – Para slang for a route march, just faster.

  So we paraded for our first tab, holding an FN rifle (captured in the Falklands) and carrying a bergen (a type of rucksack) weighing 35 pounds (16 kilograms). For some reason, officers had also been instructed to carry a clean white handkerchief in their breast pocket.

  Then we were off and at a blistering pace. As we ran across the footbridge at Bruneval Barracks, I lost my footing and sprawled forward. The weight of the bergen and rifle propelled me into the asphalt and I lost layers of skin on my hands and elbow that gave me scars I still have to this day.

  ‘Get up, sir, you bloody actor, you want a fucking Oscar?’ screamed a staff sergeant. Crikey, they weren’t kidding about that sympathy thing.

  Get up, keep up.

  Soon my lungs were absolutely bursting. Every now and then I noticed the occasional candidate collapsing at the side of the track. They were beasted to their feet by the staff.

  Some got up sheepishly and carried on while the staff mocked them mercilessly. Others jacked (Para slang for giving up) and got into the ambulance that ominously followed us wherever we went.

  After a nightmare hour, we came to a halt among what would otherwise have been a pleasant clearing between some steep hills.

  ‘Thank fuck for that,’ said my officer neighbour. ‘Time to get a breather.’

  ‘Right, gentlemen,’ said the staff. ‘We have now arrived and will commence our afternoon’s activities.’

  Commence! Oh shit, I thought that tab was our afternoon’s activity. Everyone around me looked about as glum as I felt. Oh well, at least we were all equally in this together.

  Not so.

  In P Company, I was learning that the officers were more equal than the other ranks.

  ‘The first activity is officers’ playtime,’ the staff said.

  Now the significance of the white handkerchiefs became apparent. All the officers now had to follow a staff member, running up and down the hills waving their white handkerchiefs in the air and shouting, ‘Hurray, I love officers’ playtime!’ One of the officers did not take kindly to this treatment. He jacked and retired huffily to the ambulance. This seemed to delight the staff, who continued officers’ playtime with a renewed zeal.

  That afternoon we were beasted from pillar to post, but I just about hung in there. This routine continued for the first two weeks, until a third of the initial candidates had either retired hurt or had jacked, including several of the officers. Those of us who remained psyched ourselves up for the final ordeal: Test Week.

  To pass P Company you had to pass Test Week, which consisted of a series of innocuous-sounding tests: stretcher race, log race, steeplechase, tab. Everything seemed to be a bloody race, apart from the trainasium – an aerial confidence test set nearly 50 feet (15 metres) above the ground that scared the crap out of most of us.

  First up was milling, designed to test for aggression. Milling is a form of boxing with a perverse Para twist. You were not allowed to defend yourself, only attack. It made a good spectator sport and for our contest there was a healthy turnout, including even the regimental colonel.

  I was one of the first up. Just for a bit of fun, the staff put me up against a much taller man who had extremely long arms. By this time I was in no mood to do anything other than be totally aggressive. After all the crap I had been through I wasn’t going to wimp out now.

  The bell went and I ran at the other guy full pelt.

  Bang. I was on the floor with a bleeding nose. He had simply put up his left hand and I had run straight onto the glove. I cursed and immediately shot up. I ran at him again.

  Bang, I was on the deck once more, blood spurting from my nose.

  I didn’t know how to box or how the hell to go about milling. Confused and dazed, I kept repeating the same action, and so did my opponent, with, unsurprisingly, the same result.

  Eventually the bell sounded to end the bout. I was covered in blood, snarling in humiliation, frustration and pain. A strange noise filtered through to my ears. It was waves of uncontrolled laughter.

  I looked around and, to a man, the staff, the candidates and even the regimental colonel were convulsed in hysterics.

  The major brought the proceedings to order, tears flowing from his eyes.

  ‘Richards, thank you from us all. That is the funniest fucking thing that I have ever witnessed in my entire military career.’

  The well-seasoned regimental colonel shouted, ‘Me too!’

  I sat down, wearied, bloodied, humiliated. The only good thing to come from this fiasco was that my opponent, who had done nothing more than lift up an arm, was made to go again. He got pasted.

  When the horrors of Test Week were over, nearly half the original candidates had departed. Those who remained paraded in a lecture theatre to get our results. As the names were read out, there appeared to be almost as many fails as passes.

  ‘Officer Cadet Richards.’

  I stood up.

  ‘Sir!’ I shouted.

  ‘Pass.’

  ‘Sir.’ I sat down.

  Holy shit! I had actually passed. I had never been particularly good at anything physical at school, so to take on the worst the British Army could throw at me and succeed was elating. It was beginning to dawn on me just how powerful a force personal determination could be.

  Soon after this I was offered, and accepted, an army scholarship. This would pay for my university fees and some living expenses, which together with my OTC pay would get me through college. In return I committed to four years in the military after graduating; given the lack of jobs in geology, it looked like a good deal.

  I no longer needed money from my parents to live on, and for the first time in my life I was my own man. It felt good.

  I also continued to grow through my geology studies. On any journey, I always took a geological map along and tried to work out what was going on beneath the terrain. My travelling companions were dragged off-course and taken on wild goose chases to look at old mines or fossil sites.

  A favourite spot was at the base of the old Severn Bridge, on the English side, where the striking red cliffs of Aust rise from a coarse pebble beach. I often drove from London to my parent’s house in Cardiff, so this was only a minor detour. Here the famous Aust bone beds of the Triassic Period regularly yielded 200-million-year-old parts of fossilised fish, reptiles and even on occasion large dinosaur bones.

  But the finding of gold, precious stones or other valuable minerals was still my main interest. The formal geology course got me some of the way there with studies on mineralogy, structure, sedimentology and the like, and my own preferred reading of economic geology books and papers from the library filled in the gaps.

  Finally my degree was in the bag, yet even then I had no idea of how the minerals industry actually worked. I was not the only one: not a single one of my twenty fellow graduates in geology got a job in the resources industry.

  When I left university in 1986 I considered myself lucky to have a job lined up at all. I hoped that one day I would return to geology or mining.

  Officer training began at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst. The full-time army where you got regular pay, just not much, was all about leadership. To be an army officer you had to
be a leader: the two were inseparable. What was hammered into you was the ‘Big I’: Integrity. We were taught that without personal integrity, you could not lead. So any vice was severely frowned upon, apart from alcoholism, which was strongly encouraged.

  The principle was sound: for men to follow you, they had to trust you. In order for men to trust you, you had to have personal integrity. Liars, thieves and knaves need not apply. After a couple of weeks we had all got the integrity thing, which most (but not all) of us instinctively knew already.

  Some of the other training was also excellent, notably the academic work. Yet after the rigours of P Company and the fun of the OTC, I found Sandhurst a bit disappointing. There was a bullshit mindset there of the boot-polishing kind, backed up by some staff who discouraged lateral thinking. I felt the two things were connected. It was a pity the Paras didn’t run the place.

  So when I completed the course and gained my Queen’s Commission, I was happy to be on my way back to the Paras and some real soldiering.

  I was a proud twenty-three-year-old, wearing my maroon beret as I reported for duty one morning in May 1987 to The 1st Battalion, The Parachute Regiment (1 Para), in Aldershot, UK.

  You only get one chance to make a good first impression and I was determined to make mine count. I was sent straight up to the officers’ mess and was ushered in to lunch. I sat quietly at the end of the long dining table and someone introduced me to the all-important commanding officer (CO). He swivelled, fixed a malevolent gaze upon me and gave out a loud snort of derision. He looked totally crazed.

  About ten officers sat around the mess table, and two waiters were serving the food. The waiters were both soldiers from the First Battalion, traditionally pressed into service at the officers’ mess, yet this pair did not appear to be very professional in their waiters’ duties.

  Consequently, as they tried to serve the food these two unfortunate soldiers-cum-waiters were being loudly abused by the officers.

  ‘Matthews, where’s my bastard food, you lazy shit?’

  ‘Saunders, you worthless prick, get me a bread roll. FUCKING NOW.’

  This treatment seemed grossly unfair to me and I couldn’t believe what I was witnessing. This was not my idea of how you spoke to your soldiers, and it certainly was not what we had been taught at Sandhurst, a place I was suddenly appreciating a bit more.

  One of the waiters nervously approached the CO to serve him. He tripped and dropped the entire plate full of hot food all over the CO’s lap. The CO went berserk.

  ‘You useless cunt, how fucking dare you,’ screamed the CO at the cowering soldier.

  The CO then ripped off his stable belt, which had a large metal buckle, and started beating the soldier with it right in front of my horrified eyes. The soldier ran for the kitchen, howling in pain, the CO chasing after him, yelling and whipping him as he went.

  I started to feel sick. What the hell should I do?

  A couple of minutes later, the sweating CO returned to his now silent officers. There were splatterings of blood over him.

  ‘Right, I sorted that cunt out. Doc, get downstairs, he needs some fucking stitches to his face,’ the CO said.

  The battalion doctor hurriedly left, ashen-faced. I was aghast.

  The remaining waiter approached me nervously. I gave him an encouraging smile. The waiter then dropped a brimming plate of meatballs and gravy onto my lap. As I stood up the waiter grovellingly apologised, mopping up the gravy on my crotch with a tea towel. In fact, in his panic, he was spreading it all over my new uniform. I tried to calm him down a bit but he kept spreading the gravy all over me.

  I came to my senses when I noticed that everyone in the room, apart from myself and the waiter, were incapacitated with laughter.

  Oh, a practical joke.

  The two waiters were officers and the pretend CO was in fact a certain Captain Andy Bale. I was to learn later that his performance that day had been so authentic because Bale really was mad as a cut snake.

  Once I had cleaned myself up, pressed my spare uniform and dusted off my pride, I reported to the B Company office. The company commander gave me a warm welcome.

  ‘Enjoy your lunch, eh, Richards? Well done, good effort,’ he said.

  It looked like I had passed the critical ‘can he take a joke?’ test. Not quite what I’d had in mind for a first impression, but it was going to have to do.

  I spent the next three years leading a platoon of the finest infantry soldiers in the world. We trained and travelled throughout the UK, Europe and America. It was challenging, exciting and a privilege. My time was capped off with six months on active service in Northern Ireland.

  Crossmaglen was situated in South Armagh, which had been a lawless enclave of Northern Ireland for centuries. Lucrative smuggling and criminal activities were all woven together within half-a-dozen extended families. This created a bandit republic, where the people were answerable only to the dominant strongmen, criminals and bullies of the Provisional IRA.

  Three days before my arrival in Crossmaglen, the IRA shot down a British Army Lynx helicopter. They used truck-mounted, high-calibre DShK machine guns, M60 carbines and other assorted weapons. We arrived into this ongoing narrative of mayhem in June 1988.

  On my tour, I led a patrol of twelve men whose wellbeing largely depended on my decision making. Through various incidents and hazards, I learned that leadership was about winning your team’s trust and respect so they wanted to follow you in any endeavour, however dangerous. Between long periods of routine and monotony were moments of high-octane chaos where our training kicked in and events moved quickly.

  We witnessed the bombing that killed Sergeant Mick Matthews of Support Company, 1 Para, and the serious wounding of several others. I called in the choppers to that incident. While in the safety of our well-fortified base, we sustained an ingeniously executed mortar-bomb attack, during which one of my soldiers was blasted down the stairwell of the gym and others were blown off their feet. Incredibly, no one was killed.

  At the end of our six-month tour, I was thankful that all of my soldiers came back in one piece. Not everybody did.

  CHAPTER 4

  GOLD FEVER

  Upon our return from Northern Ireland, we settled back into barracks life with damning ease. Training exercises and routine duties were pretty dull after South Armagh. We did the traditional army officer runs up to London on the weekends, which was great for a party, but I was getting restless. With the exception of Northern Ireland, this was a peacetime army, and I hadn’t joined up for a peaceful time.

  I could already see the future mapped out for me. A new job every eighteen months, competing with my peers on the greasy pole of army promotions. I might make colonel if I was lucky.

  My motivation then, as now, was mainly based on outcome: I wanted to achieve things. This desire to achieve, allied with impatience (something I have long struggled to control), often led to impetuous behaviour.

  So it was, during morning tea on a wintry, wet January in 1990, in our officers’ mess in Aldershot. My eyes fell on the cover of an old copy of the Sunday Times Magazine. I stopped short, looking at one of the most startling and evocative photographs I had ever seen. Gold prospectors in Brazil, thousands of them. They were covered in mud, swarming like ants into a deep hole and carrying bags of golden dirt out on their shoulders. The photograph was taken by the famous photographer Sebastiao Salgado at a gold rush in a place called Serra Pelada.

  This was largest gold rush of modern times and one of the biggest ever. The dirt was so fabulously rich you didn’t measure the gold grade in grams per tonne like at Dolaucothi (10 grams per tonne being the ore) or even in ounces per tonne like in the Australian gold rushes (2 ounces per tonne being a good grade in hard rock). At Serra Pelada you could actually measure the gold in percentages (2 per cent gold would be 20,000 grams in one tonne, worth $770,000!).

  In that mess full of lounging and bored officers, I felt the old spark rising. The Paras had give
n me the robust self-confidence to go out and do things that I might have considered too risky in the past.

  I held up the magazine. ‘This is what I’m going to do. I’m going to join this gold rush in South America and make my fortune,’ I said.

  ‘Oh yeah? You wouldn’t last five minutes out there, Jim,’ my friend Simon Haslam said. ‘The locals would have your bollocks straight off, you’d be strung up, sodomised by every fucker in the entire jungle and forced into white slavery till you died of malaria.’

  ‘Thanks for that, Simon. And screw you. You lot can stay here and guard the frigging barracks. I’m going to do it.’

  All the enthusiasm of my geology studies and Dolaucothi had come alive again. I wanted to get out there and find some of that gold, with the chance to get rich. Also influencing this decision was a trip I had taken a year earlier, during leave from the army. I had travelled to South Africa to look at some of the geology and mines; this was an interest that had been fed by my ongoing reading of mining-related books. While there I visited Johannesburg and trekked around the museums in that city, learning about the history of the most productive gold-mining region in the world. The men who had built this industry – the Randlords: Beit, Rhodes, Robinson and others – had become immensely wealthy on the back of cheap black labour and favourable geology. At the town of Kimberley I viewed the nowderelict massive pit in the middle of town, the ‘Big Hole’, the site of the greatest diamond rush in history, and my interest in finding diamonds developed.

  There was no internet back in 1990. I researched the Serra Pelada gold rush in journals in various libraries and discovered that South America was a place full of small-scale mining. Gold, diamonds, emeralds and a host of other minerals were still being discovered in the remote jungles of South America, with some big money being made – and lost. There were plenty of new areas to explore and find your fortune. The idea turned into an obsession. I scoured the bookshops of London to research South America and made up my mind.