by Shaun Clarke
Callaghan glanced left and right, from one row of faces to the other, trying to glance at each trooper in turn, even if only for a few seconds. ‘Any more questions?’ When most of the men shook their heads, Callaghan nodded.
‘Some points to note,’ he said, wrapping it up. ‘For these particular raids, the important thing is not how much you can carry, but how far you can travel with the minimum of equipment. You can’t go head down, arse up in this kind of situation, so prior to your departure we’ll be weighing your bergens to check that they’re not a single ounce over the maximum weight of 50lb. If they are, certain items will be taken out, no matter how much you value them, until the weight is reduced to the permitted level.’ He ignored the groans of disgust. ‘Also, between now and when you leave, your NCOs will be making random urine and blood tests to ensure that you’re all taking your Paludrine against malaria. I don’t care if you wash them down with beer, but make sure you take them.’ He grinned at the rolling eyes and murmurs of protest. When these had subsided, he raised his hands, calling for complete silence. ‘All right, gentlemen, I think I’ve had my turn. Now it’s yours. Good day and good luck.’
The men applauded him unreservedly.
6
The first cross-border raids were tentative probes over the ridge into Indonesian territory by unaccompanied groups of between two and five men carrying exactly the same equipment and weapons they had used before. The same team that had made the unproductive hike to Batu Hitam, still under the command of Dead-eye with Corporal Sanderson as his second in command, was given the task of reaching the River Koemba, which ran for three miles parallel to the border of western Sarawak.
‘This border from Cape Datu in the north,’ Captain Callaghan explained to Dead-eye in his private office in the Haunted House, ‘crosses the coastal plain where Gurkhas and Royal Marines of the Special Boat Squadron have patrolled from time to time. It then runs north–south along the Pueh Range,’ he continued, tracing a line with his forefinger on the map spread out on his desk, ‘and turns south-eastwards across the flat lands north of the Sentimo marshes.’ He tapped the marked area with his forefinger, looking rather distracted. ‘Here the Sarawak border runs across trading tracks leading to Stass. The only major routes crossing the border for the next 30 miles of frontier run along mountain ridges north of the Koemba and further eastwards parallel to the Sentimo marshes.’
‘So, the obvious, if not necessarily easy, crossing for any Indonesian invasion,’ Dead-eye replied, looking down at the map, ‘is still through Stass and on to the Sarawak capital of Kuching.’
‘Exactly,’ Callaghan said, always pleased by Dead-eye’s quick, intuitive grasp of military strategy. ‘So that’s where we want you to cause your little disruptions.’
‘No problem,’ Dead-eye said.
‘Unfortunately, there is a problem. SAS patrols sent out earlier this year reached the edge of the Sentimo marshes and the headwaters of the Koemba, but were unable to penetrate the marshes north of the river. You might come to the same grief.’
In fact, Dead-eye’s group did. They spent over a week trying to reach the upper part of the river and the mountain plateau separating it from the Sentimo marshes. This involved hiking through dense primary and secondary jungle. In the latter, known as belukar, the foliage had been cleared and was growing back again, thicker than ever, to form an often impenetrable tangle of palms, tree-ferns, bracken, seedling trees, rattans and other sharp thorns. Here, too, the moss-covered tree trunks often soared to over 100 feet, wrapped in another tangle of huge leaves, thick creepers and liana, forming an almost solid canopy above which blotted out the sun. Because of this lack of light the ground was wet and often slippery with mud, making progress slow and dirty; it also reminded the already struggling men that the actual swamps could not be far away.
This turned out to be true. Finally emerging from a gruelling struggle through a stretch of belukar, the men found themselves faced with primary jungle filled with large swamps. These were hell to cross. The muddy water often came up to the waist, and sometimes the chest. It was covered with drifting debris, including large, razor-sharp leaves, thorny brambles, broken branches, seedlings, and spiders’ webs succumbing to the slime. This debris was in turn covered with dark swarms of flies and mosquitoes that buzzed and whined frantically around the men, covering their unprotected eyes, lips and noses. The men were further tormented by this because they could do nothing to prevent it, being forced to hold their weapons above their heads while trying to feel their way with their booted feet over an underwater bed rendered treacherous by shifting mud, tangled weeds, sharp or rolling stones, thorny branches that also moved when stepped on, and unexpected holes that could trap the feet.
Nor could the troopers prevent themselves being covered by the slimy, worm-like leeches that crawled onto them from wet vegetation and sucked their blood as they waded through the swamp holding their weapons aloft. But even more tormenting was the fact that in many areas of the swamps the lower branches of the trees stretched out across the water, often practically touching it, forcing the men to either work their way around them, which could double the distance travelled, or duck under them. This latter course of action presented the risk of being cut by thorns and sharp palm leaves or, even worse, could cause them to accidentally shake more leeches, poisonous snakes or spiders off their wet leaves, branches or glistening webs filled with trapped insects.
In fact, one of the main dangers of wading through the water was the possibility of an encounter with venomous sea snakes, which had flattened, paddle-shaped tails and, being the same brownish colour as the broken branches, could easily be mistaken for them until it was too late. Luckily, no one was attacked.
Nevertheless, it took a few more days to make it through the swamps and marshes, which meant that they had to sleep there as well. Sometimes, if they were lucky, they could sling hammocks between tree trunks. But when this was not possible they were forced to sleep standing upright, often waist-deep in water, usually tying themselves to a tree trunk to prevent themselves falling over. While acutely uncomfortable, this did allow them a little sleep, though it was rarely deep or truly restorative.
If the jungle’s silence was oppressive during the day, by night it gave way to an eerie cacophony of croaking, hissing, flapping, snapping, rustling, squawking, buzzing and whining that penetrated the senses of those sleeping and frequently jerked them awake. To this kind of disruption of normal sleep was added their own fear, which also kept them awake, of slipping out of their ropes and sinking into the water, too tired to realize what was happening before they drowned; or of being bitten by venomous snakes or eels while their bodies sagged in the water. The leeches fed off their blood all night, but this no longer concerned them.
Finally, after five days of such horrors, already exhausted and only halfway through the patrol, the men reached the upper part of the river – only to find that the sheer cliffs of the plateau offered no possible route to the jungle over 800 feet below, on the other side of the mountain range.
They had to turn back.
To make matters worse, on their return journey across the border, through the hellish swamps, then the dense belukar, and finally the dark, humid primary jungle leading to the rendezvous point, they almost shot up some of their own men, when, hiding at night in the jungle, they heard what they could only assume was an Indonesian or CCO patrol coming along the path they were overlooking.
Immediately they dropped low and took aim with their Armalites, preparing to open fire. The first ‘enemy’ troops appeared around a bend in the path, not attempting to hide themselves, and only when Dead-eye recognized the 0.3-inch Ml carbines they were carrying did he realize that they were actually a patrol of Dyak Border Scouts, coming to meet up at the wrong RV.
‘Don’t fire!’ Dead-eye bawled instantly, then he leapt out upon the startled Dyaks, some of whom nearly opened fire at the sight of him. After an acrimonious exchange, Dead-eye’s group joined t
he confused tribesmen on the short hike back through the darkness to their correct RV.
Frustrated by the failure of his SAS groups to get beyond the Sentimo marshes and still constrained by not being permitted to use them for overtly aggressive actions, Major Callaghan revised his strategy and, instead, concentrated on planning offensive cross-border operations by the Gurkha battalions, with the SAS acting as scouts.
While this still led to a certain amount of frustration for some of the SAS men, notably those such as Dead-eye, they all conceded that it was better than doing nothing and could even be quite relaxing, particularly after the relative isolation of the earlier patrols, which had emotionally drained many of them.
Terry Malkin was one of those convinced that scouting for the Gurkha battalions was almost pleasant when compared to the R & I patrols through the ulu, when the silence and gloom, combined with the frightening isolation of the five-man team, had given him more than one bad night.
Not that the scouting work was not demanding, both physically and mentally. Certainly, in the windless, silent days in the jungle, being a scout had its own difficulties and discomforts. For instance, no trooper was allowed to eat, smoke or unscrew his water bottle without his platoon commander’s permission. At night, sentries checked any man who snored or talked in his sleep. Whenever the company was on the move, a recce section led the way, their packs carried by the SAS men behind. Because of the long approach march, each man carried six days’ basic rations together with various lightweight additions and a small reserve in a belt pouch, but these were barely sufficient for his needs.
Nevertheless, even more demanding than the marches were the many periods when the scouts had to remain stationary to watch and listen for the enemy.
As Dead-eye explained to Terry when he had complained about such stops: ‘The man who’s stationary in the jungle has the tactical advantage. Not moving himself, making no sound of his own, he can see and hear a lot more of the enemy movements. That gives him the upper hand.’
It was for that reason, therefore, that the SAS scouts were compelled to spend as much as twenty minutes in every half hour sitting and listening, only marching during the other ten minutes. It made for slow, frustrating progress, but it kept them alive.
Nevertheless, if scouting for the Gurkha battalions had its own share of danger, tension, isolation and frustration, Terry noticed the difference in the evening when, having completed the day’s recce in the ulu, he could return, not to a tiny, cramped jungle hide with his small, relatively defenceless team, but to a whole battalion of Gurkhas in their camp. This tended to make him feel a lot safer and, in many ways, more human. It was a good feeling to be in the middle of their perimeter, warmed by a camp-fire, eating decent food, and surrounded by so many small, cheerful, brown-faced men, whom he knew were actually ferocious fighters. To see them at night in their sangars, spaced evenly around the perimeter, with their GPMGs aiming out in all directions, made the novice SAS man feel safe.
He even felt safer than normal when, just before he was due to return with the rest of Dead-eye’s team, the SAS led the Gurkhas to an Indonesian camp they had found recently. To reach the camp, they had to hike through the night, arriving just after dawn.
Completely surrounded by thick undergrowth, the camp consisted of a few thatched huts on stilts, some open latrines covered with clouds of flies, and a protective ring of sunken gun emplacements and defensive trenches. The Indonesian soldiers were seated in large groups around smoking open fires, breakfasting on roast pig, when the Gurkhas arrived and spread out in a great circle around the camp, though remaining well hidden in the forest. In that same thick undergrowth, the Gurkhas and SAS men quietly brought into position British 3-inch mortars, Soviet RPG-7 rocket launchers, M79 single-shot, breech-loading grenade-launchers, and GPMGs and Bren light machine-guns. The gun and mortar teams were in touch with one another through their small, backpacked A41 radio sets and, at the command from the Gurkha commander, they would fire simultaneously.
Kneeling in the darkness with Pete and Alf on one side of him and the inscrutable Dead-eye on the other, Terry, as signaller, was listening to his A41 with a racing heart and sweat on his brow. Though five years in the Irish Guards, he had not actually seen combat before, and realized that at last he was about to take part in a fire-fight. Any advances to be made would, he knew, be made by the Gurkhas, with the SAS giving covering fire; but that in itself was close enough to the real thing to make him feel simultaneously nervous and excited. He would be, after all, in the line of enemy fire and therefore in considerable danger. Yes, this was the real thing.
Glancing to the left, past Dead-eye’s granite profile, Terry saw the Gurkha commander raise his clenched fist, preparing to give the order to fire. Glancing back at the enemy camp, he saw the many soldiers in their jungle-greens still squatting around the open fires, waving smoke from their faces, eating roast pork and rice, laughing, joking and relaxing as if they had all the time in the world. They were inside the perimeter. Around the perimeter in the sunken gun emplacements, the sentries were, in many instances, also paying more attention to food and drink than they were to what was happening in the jungle.
Terry studied them intently. They seemed very unconcerned. He was in a trance of watchfulness, studying the soldiers around the fires, when the voice of the Gurkha commander snapped ‘Open fire!’ in Malay, his voice reverberating eerily in Terry’s headset, followed almost simultaneously by the crump-crump of mortars and the sudden, savage roar of the combined rocket-launchers and machine-guns.
Even before Terry had quite grasped what was happening, the first mortar shells were exploding in and between the gun emplacements and defensive trenches, as well as among the Indonesians around the camp-fires. At the same time, a barrage of 2.25kg missiles, 40mm fin-stabilized grenades and 7.62mm tracer bullets was flaring across the clearing and disappearing into the flames and boiling smoke caused by the first mortar explosions.
Some gun emplacements and slit trenches were destroyed instantly in violent eruptions of spewing soil, with broken bodies hurled upwards and out like burning rag dolls; but others returned the fire, their guns spitting fire and smoke, causing different-coloured tracers to race outwards from the perimeter and into the jungle.
One of the huts inside the camp exploded in flames as the jungle around Terry went wild, with shells and tracers zipping past on both sides and foliage being blown to shreds all around him.
‘Open fire!’ Dead-eye bawled.
Just about to hug the ground to avoid the return fire of the enemy, Terry instead found himself firing his Armalite at the men jumping up from their camp-fires, grabbing their weapons and running left and right to find cover as the huts blazed behind them and more shells and bullets cut them to pieces.
Another hut exploded, disintegrating in a ball of fire, with the men nearby, also on fire, hurled in all directions. Within seconds the camp had been obscured in a grim pall of smoke through which shadowy figures and brighter flames could just about be discerned; though the screams of the wounded and dying actually rose above the deafening bedlam of the roaring guns and explosions.
Terry kept firing, feeling as if he was dreaming but vividly aware of the return fire flashing and snapping angrily on both sides, kicking up the soil in front of him, then blowing apart the foliage directly above to make it rain down on him. He kept his finger on the trigger until the magazine was empty, ejected it, loaded another, and continued to fire at the shadowy figures running and falling in that hellish tapestry of flame and smoke.
He did not know if the men falling in his sights had been hit by him or by some of those firing methodically around him; nor did he care. He just could not stop. The men around him also continued firing with everything they had – mortars, rocket launchers, machine-guns, sub-machine-guns and rifles – until the return fire from the enemy camp had diminished considerably and, eventually, started to taper off altogether.
Terry was not sure if he had
heard the second command on his headset or not, but suddenly, as the smoke cleared, two assault platoons of Gurkhas moved in to clear the camp, advancing at the crouch, firing on the move, and not stopping to take prisoners or ask questions.
‘Selective firing only,’ Dead-eye ordered, switching to single-shot and starting to give selective covering fire by picking off individuals who looked like being a threat to the advancing Gurkhas. ‘We want no own goals,’ he added, meaning that they were not to accidentally shoot any of their own men, in this case the Gurkhas. ‘Do it right or stop firing.’
Terry did not stop firing. Now, for the first time, with the smoke clearing and the enemy thinning, he knew exactly which falling men had been shot by him and felt better about it. It was an odd, uncomfortable feeling, perhaps even shameful, but it filled him with an odd kind of pride as well – odd because tinged with fear.
Though most of the soldiers in and around the camp had been put out of action, either dead or seriously wounded, a number of naked, panicstricken Indonesians suddenly rushed out from around the burning ruins of a hut demolished by mortar fire. Not waiting to find out if they had arms or booby-traps behind their backs, the ferocious little Gurkhas dealt with them quickly and ruthlessly, cutting them down in a hail of fire from their SLRs and M16s. When the last of the naked men had fallen, all resistance ended.
‘Cease fire,’ Dead-eye said to the men beside him.
Standing up beside the impassive Dead-eye and his two more excited corporals, Terry saw that most of the enemy gun emplacements and defensive trenches were now blackened shell holes, that most of the camp-fires had been blown apart by gunfire, that all of the huts hit by the mortars were either still blazing or smouldering, and that the dead and wounded were scattered all around the clearing in an unholy mess of other shell holes, spent shells, buckled weapons, shreds of clothing, dismembered limbs and spreading pools of blood. Turning away from that ghastly sight, he met the fathomless grey gaze of Sergeant Parker.
