The Exit Club: Book 2: Bad Boys

by Shaun Clarke

  They were called upon not only to have target practice in the scorching heat while being assailed by bloated flies, dive-bombing mosquitoes and a host of other insects made ravenous by the smell of human sweat, but also to movements relating to jungle warfare.

  When Sergeant Bellamy was satisfied that each trooper had proven himself a crack shot at target practice, he moved on to lessons in the standard operating procedures (SOPs) to be carried out in case of contact with the enemy, the proper order of march practise numerous tactical the special requirements of when in the jungle, the silent signals required when changing formation, and the various drills for encounters with natural and man-made obstacles.

  As they were worked into the ground by Bulldog, repeating the tedious, exhausting exercises over and over again, they gradually learned that he had minimal interest in drill and uniform, but loathed ‘sloppiness’ when it came to battle discipline. He punishments for socalled ‘sloppiness’ were salutary.

  ‘Ach, he’s fuckin’ ruthless, I tell ya,’ a shocked and still trembling Rob Roy Burns informed the others as they kicked off their boots in the barracks and prepared to shower and change for yet another drill. ‘I accidentally fired a shot from my rifle out there and that mad bastard took the rifle off me, removed the safety pin from a hand grenade, gave me the grenade, then told me to carry it for the rest of the evenin’, sayin’ that by last light I should know how to handle my weapon. I shat bricks for the rest of the day, I’m tellin’ ya. I’ve learnt my lesson all right.’

  ‘He was the same in North Africa,’ Marty told those not too exhausted to listen. ‘He has his own way of doing things.’

  ‘Bloody right,’ Tone added. ‘He even imposes discipline in what he calls the good old-fashioned way: with his fists instead of with the rule book. “Let’s step outside,” he says.’

  This was true enough. More than once, Bulldog, instead of placing insolent or rebellious troopers on a charge, had invited them to “step outside” to settle the matter with a bout of fisticuffs. The hot-tempered Rob Roy Burns and the volatile, sometimes violent, Pat O’Connor were only two of those who had been invited to “step outside”, but so far no one had managed to beat Bulldog and all of them, even when making fun of him, respected him for it.

  In Marty’s view, the fisticuffs were merely an extension of Bulldog’s obsession with ‘realistic’ training and certainly most of the training was realistic to a dangerous degree. Bulldog even had them throwing unpinned hand grenades and then diving for cover in the deep monsoon drains running around the camp. In fact, this was only one of his many dangerous drills with live ammunition – drills that disregarded the normal safety rules for firing ranges. They were also dangerous to innocent passers-by – REME, Ghurkhas, Royal Marines, RAF– because the camp lacked proper facilities for such exercises and so they had to take place on the sports ground and other clear spaces.

  The working day usually ended at ten in the evening, leaving the troopers a couple of hours free before lights out. As there was nowhere to go for relaxation – they were surrounded entirely by the jungle – they drank a lot of beer, became drunk too quickly, and often got up to boyish pranks or engaged in fist fights. Rob Roy Burns and Pat O’Connor, both highly volatile, were particularly prone to the latter and caused lots of aggro.

  ‘I wouldn’t trust those two fuckers as far as I could throw them,’ Tone confided in Marty. ‘A pair of troublemakers. From what I hear, they caused so much shit in their old regiments that their NCOs made them apply to the SAS just to get rid of them.’

  ‘See no evil, hear no evil,’ Marty said. ‘The less we know, the better, mate.’

  It was true, however, as Bulldog informed Marty over beers in the NAAFI canteen, that a drastic shortage of manpower in the early days of the regiment’s re-formation had led to many men being selected without proper regard to their past history– men who had transferred to the SAS simply because they were persistent troublemakers, or cowboys, whose original commanders had been happy to see them go elsewhere. To make matters worse, owing to the speed with which the Malayan Emergency had built up, there had been little time to select or train them properly.

  ‘For Christ’s sake,’ a frustrated Bulldog told Marty, ‘we even picked a bunch of English deserters from the French Foreign Legion. They’d escaped by swimming to shore from the troop ship that was taking them to the war in Indo-China. So here we are, lumbered with the bastards, and believe me, they’re trouble. Right now, they’re on patrol in the ulu, hopefully getting their balls shot off. I’m actually praying that they don’t make it back, which I suppose says it all.’

  Indeed, it was perfectly clear to Marty that even his own recently badged squadron was not without its cowboys: men such as Rob Roy Burns and Pat O’Connor who, though excellent soldiers in many ways, were undisciplined, insolent and often uncooperative with the other members of their patrol or the squadron in general. Another problem was the heavy drinking that often followed the long, arduous days of relentless training in the ulu’s draining humidity. It was this that had led to many fist fights and dangerous pranks, such as the setting off of minor explosions in the canteen, the barracks and the latrines, or the ‘spiking’ of food and drink with laxatives and other upsetting substances.

  Lieutenant Kearney had gradually solved this problem by slapping RTUs on the more persistent troublemakers. Bulldog had done it by asking them to ‘step outside’ or by making them perform arduous drills for hours at a time. Within a matter of weeks, between Kearney’s ruthless RTUs and Bulldog’s expert fisticuffs and other nerve-racking punishments, the ‘bad boys’ had been weeded out and the good, albeit troublesome, troopers, such as Rob Roy and Pat O’Connor, had been pulled into line and, though sometimes still a nuisance, had proved themselves to have been worth the trouble. When that stage had been reached, the men were deemed ready to be moved out of the base camp and into the jungle.

  Chapter Six

  Initially they were only driven to a nearby kampong to live in primitive conditions and acquire new skills with the Sakai villagers and Iban trackers brought to Malaya from Sarawak, Borneo. They did not actually live with the Sakai, but instead raised their poncho tents beside the Sakai’s thatched huts and otherwise shared in village life as best they could, eating coconuts and pineapples brought down from the soaring trees, catching fish in the surrounding rivers and cooking them on open fires, pissing and shitting in the undergrowth, and being particularly careful, as they had been warned by Lieutenant Kearney, not to ogle or exploit the often bare-breasted Sakai women. They also constructed a crude thatch-and-wood medical hut and dispensed basic medical treatment from it. In return, the grateful Sakai taught them their primitive, often highly effective, jungle survival skills.

  Their first lessons were in the use of the parang, or Malay jungle knife, needed for hacking through dense undergrowth. This was not as easy as it looked and was, indeed, brutally hard work, making the troopers sweat profusely, causing sharp pains to stab along arms and between shoulder-blades, even leading to sprained bones and muscular cramps. It also required a high degree of skill and in the course of learning it a lot of the men cut themselves.

  Wounded or not, bandaged or not, they were given no respite when it came to learning the vitally necessary skills of tracking in the jungle and swamps. This was another exhausting business requiring constant observation and concentration. While a top speed of approximately 1.5 kilometres per hour could be attained in a jungle environment, going that quickly was discouraged as it could mean missing important clues regarding the passage and location of the enemy. Instead, a slow, cautious, ever-vigilant advance in single-file formation was encouraged, with the lead scout taking the ‘point’ up front, followed by the Patrol Commander, or PC, and the signaller with the second-in-command, or 2IC, bringing up the rear as Tail-end Charlie. The scout had the Owen submachine gun, the PC had an SLR, and the other two men carried M1 carbines or Browning autoloader shotguns.

  For the pur
poses of training, one four-man team would head into the ulu and make camp at a preselected RV. The second group then had to track down the first. This they did with the aid of an experienced Iban tracker, who showed them what to look for by way of telltale signs, such as broken twigs, faded footprints, or threads and strands of cotton from drill fatigues that had been caught on branches when the first team, the ‘enemy’, passed by. The Iban tracker also taught them how to magnetize a needle to act as a compass by rubbing it across a piece of silk and dangling it from a string, how to do the same with a razor blade by stropping it against the palm of the hand, and in general how to navigate in the ulu using the minimum of natural and artificial aids.

  Finally, though the troopers had already been trained in map-reading and the use of the standardissue prismatic compass, they were taught how to judge distance in the jungle, how to use maps in relation to dense, impenetrable forest, how to use compass bearings and ‘pacing’ (counting the number of footsteps required) to reach a given destination, and how to take bearings and triangulate by means of the prismatic compass in daylight or darkness.

  The Iban trackers came into their own with silent killing techniques and makeshift weapons. The SAS troopers had already been trained in various methods of the former, including martial-arts blows to the heart, lungs, liver, larynx, subclavian artery and spinal column, and the cutting of the jugular vein with a knife. The Iban trackers, however, showed them how to make spears by binding a knife to a 90cm staff, shape a spear-launcher from a tree limb, make a compound bow, and improvise weapons such as a sharpened wooden stake, a bone knife, a sock filled with soil, and a garrotte made with two short wooden handles, each attached to one end of a length of razor wire.

  ‘Slice your bleedin’ head off, that would,’ Tone said.

  ‘They say a severed head remains conscious for up to twenty seconds after being lopped off,’ Taff Hughes dreamily informed them, his baby-blue eyes distracted, his blond hair breeze-blown.

  ‘My worst nightmare scenario,’ Pat O’Connor said, ‘is the twenty seconds of conversation I’d get from Rob Roy after I’d garrotted him. One second is bad enough.’

  ‘Very funny,’ Rob Roy retorted. ‘Why don’t you go fuck yourself with this improvised spear? All ninety centimetres of it, right up your arsehole.’

  ‘Don’t offer him that,’ Roy Weatherby said, trying to join in the good-humoured bullshit, but sounding as though he was at someone’s funeral. ‘He might actually enjoy it.’

  ‘Watch your mouth,’ Rob Roy said threateningly.

  Although they had already learned special jungle preventive medicine from RAMC medics back in the base camp, out here in the ulu the Sakai showed them many primitive, though highly effective, skills that were not dependent upon modern medicine. One was the cleaning of wounds where hot water was not available: the Sakai used urine instead because it was, in fact, an extremely sterile liquid. Another was the packing of infected wounds with maggots, which ate only the ‘dead’ tissue. Yet another was the removing of worms from the system by swallowing a small amount of kerosene or petrol. The Sakai even showed them how to suture severe cuts with needle and thread, making each suture individually.

  Other jungle skills, handed down through generations of Sakai aboriginals, were the improvising of a splint with sticks rolled in cloth, a stretcher from tree branches rolled in blankets, and a jungle ‘litter’, or dangling stretcher, from bamboo or saplings bound together with creepers and suspended beneath a long pole. Finally, the repeatedly amazed SAS troopers were shown how to improvise a tourniquet by wrapping a cloth three times around the limb, trying it with a half knot, placing a stick over the knot and securing it with a double knot, then twisting the stick until the cloth tightens enough to stop the bleeding.

  ‘Got to hand it to ’em,’ Tone said to Marty. ‘These bleedin’ natives are smart cunts.’

  ‘Now we’re smart as well,’ Marty said.

  Even when they had mastered their jungle survival skills, the troopers were kept in the ulu to learn special fighting tactics, such as ambush fire control procedures, contact drills, fire and movement when breaking contact (also known as ‘shoot and scoot’) and firing at close range or in darkness. When they finally emerged from the ulu, all of them had lost a lot of weight but gained considerable knowledge.

  ‘I feel like bleedin’ Tarzan,’ Tone said. ‘Now I belongin this jungle.’

  ‘I guess that was the point,’ Marty said.

  Tone’s comment about feeling like Tarzan was not too far off the mark when, returning to base, they were presented with the most frightening part of their training: tree-jumping. While this did not mean jumping from tree to tree– like Tarzan – what it did mean was something just as dangerous: parachuting into the jungle canopy, which was sometimes as high as forty-five metres, then lowering oneself to the ground by abseiling down a knotted rope.

  ‘Though this technique hasn’t actually been tried

  before,’ Bulldog informed them, smiling tightly while Paddy Kearney, standing beside him, offered a sly grin, ‘we haveanticipated three specific dangers.’ He held his right hand up and counted the dangers off one by one, raising a finger for each possible catastrophe. ‘When a man crashes into the jungle canopy, the treetops, one, his parachute could snag; two, he could be smashed into thick branches; and, three, he could plummet all the way through dense scrub to the ground, smashing every damned bone in his body before he gets that far.’

  While the men stared at him in silence, not heartened by these pronouncements, Lieutenant Kearney took up the briefing. ‘I think it’s only fair to tell you that even our Parachute Regiment instructors have had no experience in this particular exercise, so they could only help us with the reminder that those trying it out should attempt to stay calm and use common sense if things don’t work out. I trust you will do so.’

  ‘I admire his aplomb,’ Mart y said to Tone after the briefing. ‘I’m just not sure of the sentiments.’

  In the event, he had little time to worry about Kearney’s sentiments, since the training began that very afternoon with what Sergeant Doyle, 1st Parachute Regiment, described sardonically as a ‘static-line course’ which would, he explained, ‘focus on the ground work’. By this, he meant that they would be taught how to deal with any problems that could arise during freefall and landing. These included what to do if the troopers sixty kilos of equipment sent him into an uncontrollable spin or if his parachute caught in branches and had to be disentangled while he was dangling maybe forty-five metres above the ground.

  Having been told what to do by the esteemed Sergeant Doyle, the troopers were made to put the lessons into practice. First, they climbed up to the jungle canopy while carrying forty-five metres of rope, knotted every 45 centimetres. Once in the canopy, they tied one end of the rope to the nearest treetop, let the other end fall to the ground far below, and finally lowered themselves back to the jungle floor by abseiling down the knotted rope. Two troopers failed to make it back down because they lost their nerve; one didn’t make it because his parachute became entangled in thecanopy and he couldn’t shake it free; and a fourth fell most of the way, smashing through the branches, and had to be choppered out with his broken bones wrapped in swaddling clothes. ‘Casevac’ the rescue operation was called: casualty evacuation.

  ‘I’m beginning to think he was luckier than us,’ Tone said to Marty. ‘At least he’s managed to avoid what we’ve got coming – and it isn’t good, mate.’

  ‘Who dares wins,’ Marty reminded him.

  In truth, Marty loved it. He even loved it when the stomach-churning abseiling was followed by a series of experimental freefall jumps, carrying a rifle and a twenty-five-kilogram Bergen rucksack strapped below the parachute, from a variety of aircraft into densely wooded areas, leaving the aircraft at an altitude of 4000 metres and opening the chute at a dangerously low 1000 metres.

  ‘Again, as high-altitude, low-opening, or HALO, jumps into densely wooded areas have ne
ver been done before,’ Bulldog helpfully explained, ‘the Parachute Regiment instructors can’t give us any advice, so we’re just going to try it and be damned. If any of you don’t want to try it, you can back out now and take an RTU.’

  No one backed out and finally, after fifty freefall jumps, some from high altitudes, others from dangerously low altitudes, the men were as prepared as they were ever likely to be.

  ‘Congratulations,’ Lieutenant Kearney said after the last HALO exercise had been completed without casualties. ‘I think you’ve all proved that you can do it. This being so, you can now do it for real. We leave for Ipoh at first light.’

  Marty had no complaints.

  Chapter Seven

  Having learnt it, they did it. Inserted by Vickers Valletta twin-engine transports, they dropped over the vast green canopy of the jungle north of Ipoh, their parachutes billowing like white flowers in the dawn’s pearly light. Marty would never forget as long as he lived the fierce roaring of the slipstream as he jumped out of the aircraft, then the jerking of the rip-cord, the sudden, startling silence as he floated down, looking down, seeing only that great sea of greenery slowly rising towards him. Slowly at first, but gaining speed, then rushing at him, suddenly becoming a solid mass spreading out to envelop him. He hit the top of the trees, smashed through branches and giant leaves, became entangled in the cords of the parachute, was spun around and swept sideways. His head seemed to explode, pains jolted through every limb, then he recovered and found himself dangling from the straps of his parachute.