SAS: Secret War in South East Asia

by Dickens, Peter;

  Lillico therefore made his dispositions for checking out the camp. If there was nothing to indicate that the enemy might be there, neither was there any proof that he was not; beyond the frontier he must be assumed present every second of the time or the soldier’s life will be short and his purpose unachieved, and each move, however apparently routine, must be planned as a tactical operation. He designated the night stopping place as the Emergency Rendezvous, to which anyone becoming separated should return, and left half his force there. For the task in hand, the smaller the team the less likely it was to give itself away. Four men was the optimum number so as to include all specialist skills between them. Lillico selected Thomson and two others, rejecting a promising youngster called Kevin Walsh who had an uncontrollable cough that debarred him absolutely, as far more serious disorders need not have done.

  Leaving behind their heavy packs (called bergens) for greater mobility, they set off with only their belts, which contained everything needed for a short period, and, of course, their weapons. A soldier can be as effective in the jungle as the creatures who are born to it, but only when he has learnt to treat his weapon, like theirs, as an integral part of himself. Without it he might endanger his friends as well as himself so that retaining it to the end transcends necessity and becomes a matter of honour. Thomson carried a 5.56mm Armalite light automatic rifle. It is the lead scout’s unenviable role to be first into danger, to which, happily surviving the first onslaught, he must respond instantly and furiously with a volume of fire that can sometimes nullify the enemy’s advantage of surprise. The rest had 7.62mm self-loading rifles (SLRs), the British Army’s standard infantry weapon with a hefty punch and great accuracy, which fired single shots as fast as the trigger could be pulled.

  They contoured round the mountain at first until they reached the spur leading down to the camp. To be lead scout of a jungle patrol in enemy territory is an art made up of many skills, and Lillico had no doubt that Thomson was the right man; a short, compact lump of gristle with a vivid imagination, quick perception and reaction, and a gift of Scottish gab when circumstances permitted, which now they did not. To move in the jungle was to be vulnerable because the enemy could hide so easily, and only the slightest clues could be hoped for to warn of his presence in time; far slighter for instance than a fag-end, which would stand out like a motorway sign to a trained jungle soldier and was not to be expected. Thomson pressed all his senses into service; his eyes to look through the first green wall of foliage to the next for as small an abnormality as a single leaf hanging awkwardly; his ears to detect the least sound not made by nature, and his nose to catch the faintest whiff of, perhaps, hair cream, which could hang for hours in the lifeless air, saying it with perfume. The SAS did not use the stuff, of course; enthusiastic to a degree for anything that would enhance operational effectiveness, they scorned irrelevances such as sartorial elegance, and looked like the ruffians they were not.

  All this was routine, the forest was virginal for the whole 1,500 yards to the camp. When Thomson reached the outskirts he stopped, motioned discreetly with his Armalite, and the others stopped too without bunching. SOPs then required a longer wait with even greater alertness, and for ten full minutes Thomson peered round the left side of a massive bamboo clump at the clearing, unchanged since yesterday. The bashas were interspersed between many similar clumps, and tall trees acted as screens against prying eyes from aircraft or mountain-top. To his left was a massive rock and beyond that trickled one of many small streams in a gully; this was ‘ulu’, headwaters country, as far as you could I get from anywhere.

  Nothing was remotely suspicious, and their only tension was the self-imposed one of always expecting the unexpected. Thomson turned his head slowly to query Lillico with his eyes and, receiving a barely perceptible nod, he lifted the bamboo frond behind which he had hidden and stepped out into the open.

  The place er-r-r-rupted. Oh God, it’s hard to describe.’ The ground at his feet spurted into his face as though propelled by a subterranean force, and where there had been absolute stillness he was engulfed by roaring, rattling, reverberating, tearing, throbbing, jarring noise.

  ‘How I got away with it I’ll never know. There was this guy with a light automatic laid down beside a tree no more than twelve yards to my right front. He must have known I was there all along yet he couldn’t hit me, must have been even more scared than me.’ That was indeed likely, the common if surprising experience being that the man waiting in ambush with all his advantages becomes even more tense at the prospect of inevitable action than his opponent, whose mind is uncluttered, ready to receive impressions and to react instinctively.

  Thomson’s response could not have been faster, but the odds were too onesided. The Indonesian soldier raised his point of aim and, ‘I was picked up and thrown to my left behind this rock; that was lucky because the guy couldn’t see me, but when I tried to get up my leg wasn’t there and blood was gushing into my face from my left thigh. I thought, Christ I’m hit! You can’t do this to Fifers.’

  ‘I sat up, and as I sat up another Indo sat up too and he was that close I could see he had a tiger’s head shoulder flash and if I’d had a bayonet I could have stabbed him; and I thought well I’ve got to get this bastard quick because he was fumbling with his rifle. It was an old-fashioned bolt-action Enfield, or maybe a Mauser or a Springfield, but I didn’t have time to see properly. Mine had been knocked out of my hand. His eyes were wide open and so was his mouth. I could see he was shit-scared … could be because I was covered in blood and yelling fit to bust, I don’t know why. He was a very young guy. I found my Armalite, which still had the safety-catch to automatic, and gave him a long burst and he went down.’

  Thomson’s decisive action probably saved his Sergeant’s life as well as his own, and opinion in the Regiment conceded that he had been ‘very quick’. He thought, where the hell’s my leg? It seemed to have gone completely because it was nowhere near the other, and that conclusion was given weight by the altogether terrifying evidence of brilliant arterial blood pulsing from where his leg should have been, in great sprays not inches but feet long. Medically trained, he knew he was watching his life pumping itself away through the huge femoral artery, and that it would be gone in a minute, perhaps two, unless he decided and acted correctly within that time; yet his objectivity remained unimpaired, and just as well because he was stuck on a dilemma with two horns that propelled him in divergent and apparently irreconcilable directions.

  Such bleeding could only be held by a tightly-bound tourniquet, so he quickly felt his thigh for a stump around which to apply one; no stump, no hope, no problem. There was. But bullets were still flying and he must not stay where he was; Sergeant Don Large had said, and he was a man one listened to, ‘When you’re hit, move; you won’t feel like it, but if you don’t you’re going to be hit again.’ So, which to do first for Christ’s sake? The bleeding gave him a minute, a bullet a split second. Move.

  That the decision was made and acted upon in less time than the nearest Indo could resolve whatever problem he in his turn may have had, can be attributed to the sort of intense training that accelerates already quick wits to the speed of a computer, rigorously suppressing irrelevant thoughts like fear, or ‘What’s my old Mum going to think of this?’ He started crawling back and to his right behind the clump. As he moved he knew he still had a leg of sorts because its inert mass was wrenched to follow the rest of him and protested, audibly it seemed to him, by grinding pieces of the shattered femur against each other until it trailed behind him.

  The clump was thick, its cover good, and he got to work. Take sweat-rag, put a lumpy knot in the middle, press firmly against the artery in the groin, tie round the limb, commando dagger through, twist to tighten and stick through trousers to hold steady. The bleeding stopped as he knew it would, yet is there not a touch of the miraculous in putting theory into practice and finding it works, especially if your life depends on it? Then a shot of morphine; that
was the drill, because although pain had not yet obtruded it soon would, and the drug would also slow his heart and the bleeding.

  Finally, he made a soldierly all-round inspection of the tactical scene. There was his Sergeant, lying quite still, with blood drained from his face and hands but all over the rest of him.

  Eddie ‘Geordie’ Lillico’s eyes were brown with clear whites and a high polish. Because they were also round and usually wide open, not because they popped out on stalks, they were likened in the sergeants’ mess to organ-stops, and through them shone a palpable and infectious enthusiasm. The enthusiasm was for his profession, and to a degree that excited comment even among his fellow enthusiasts. His shelves at home carried more books on military history and thinking than would have done justice to a retired general; it was even said that his lady friend could discourse on Ney’s tactics at Waterloo with well-briefed authority, so that Thomson was evidently misled in thinking that his idea of a pinup was a Centurion tank coming through a smokescreen.

  His eyes had been wide as he watched Thomson slip through the bamboo and the stillness was shattered by two bursts from what he thought was an Armalite. ‘But it wasn’t,’ Thomson reported, ‘it was a Russian RPD because I seen it’; and Thomson certainly had an eye for weapons.

  ‘The way it came to me’, says Lillico, ‘was Head-on Contact. We had a drill for that so you didn’t have to sit around thinking what to do.’ This was the SOP known as Shoot-and-Scoot, one of the most important though not necessarily the easiest to interpret. The aim was clear enough, to prevent casualties when there was no point in fighting to hold ground, and in a surprise encounter like this a patrol was directed to put its pride in its pocket and run away. That, however, was easier said than done because to turn your back would only present it to an unruffled enemy, neither would your friends be helped to disengage. Far better would be for every man who could see a target to react instantly and violently, and only then, while the enemy was adjusting his thoughts, to scoot independently for the emergency rendezvous; but if a man was incapacitated after all, with chilling logic the rule said leave him, at least temporarily, to prevent even more casualties.

  Thomson being to the left of the bamboo clump, Lillico leapt to its right and ran forward to do his share of the shooting. He saw no one and could not understand how he was apparently kicked in the backside; it was not a powerful blow, he might even have knocked into one of the thick stems, but he went down nevertheless. Irked at the check, he made to spring up and forward, but the movement was only in his mind; his body stayed where it was, immovable.

  Did Lillico pass out? Neither he nor Thomson can recall events precisely, gripped as they were in the full shock and trauma of hideous and potentially mortal wounds; Lillico cannot remember losing consciousness, but it may be observed that a feature of passing out is not remembering and Thomson’s memory of his apparent death-mask is horribly vivid. But either way he was static and vulnerable, and almost certainly owed his life to Thomson, who had killed Lillico’s assailant before the latter could fire again.

  Thomson was keen enough to scoot, as was his duty, insofar as he could match his snail’s gait to the ill-suited word, but he was even keener to help Lillico. He did the latter and perfectly illustrated the hazards of laying down rules for hypothetical contingencies because events proved him right, even though he thought at first that the only melancholy service he could render his commander would be to confirm his death and remove the operative parts of his rifle; but as he drew near to the supposed corpse, the eyes opened, wide of course, and Sergeant Lillico was back in charge.

  The shooting phase, envisaged as lasting only seconds, was being prolonged by their enforced presence on the battlefield, leaves and even branches falling about them amid the juddering racket. Taking comfort from their mutual presence, Lillico and Thomson continued the fight. Never mind that their legs were useless, their prone positions were ideal. No longer surprised, they used their expert marksmanship and determined will to convince the enemy that it was he who had lost and had best retire. Fierce and hard with the joy of battle, they were a formidable pair of cripples.

  The clearing lay open before them. Thomson reoriented himself from his new position by noting the tree whence the guy had shot him. He could then scarcely believe his eyes, for there was the guy coming out from behind it, clearly under the impression that he had eliminated his enemy. It was an error of judgement.

  ‘Bugger-r-r-r-r-U!’ The staccato roll of Scottish Rs matched the merciless; clatter of the Armalite and the guy fell, dead.

  Lillico fired two rounds in quick succession (‘double-tap routine, gave you a slight spread of shot, needed a bit of practice’) and a fleeting movement across the camp ceased.

  ‘D’you think …’ Lillico asked between bursts, ‘… you can get back to the RV?’

  ‘Och aye, I’m fine.’

  He’s a hard little guy, thought Lillico; quite good really. Quite good, that is, by SAS standards in which only the best is acceptable and praise rare. As for heroes, they don’t believe in them.

  All suddenly became quiet, so suddenly that awareness lagged behind the event. Lillico wondered whether the enemy had temporarily surrendered the initiative. Possibly, but even so they would certainly return sometime if only to recover their dead, quite soon if it was just a matter of regrouping, or later if reinforcements were sent for; and if he and Thomson were still there when that happened and had not already succumbed to their wounds, they would surely die.

  Since Thomson could move and his presence would not affect the inevitable outcome, he must go. That did not mean he would be the only one to benefit; not at all. He might well die alone and miserably of his wound or by the enemy’s hand. Even if he were to reach the rendezvous a near-mile back by driving himself with a supreme effort, he would take so long that the others would certainly have left to do whatever they had thought right. But every yard he covered away from the enemy and nearer to friends must increase the chance of his being found, and that would not only be fine for him but improve Lillico’s own chances greatly; from negligible to slim. The decision, however, though reached with the impersonal deductive logic which was Lillico’s stock-in-trade as a sergeant, meant sending away the last friendly face he thought he would ever see, and surprised him by being difficult to take.

  ‘On your way’, he ordered. It had to be an order.

  Alone and more than ever alert as he covered Thomson’s withdrawal, Lillico’s suspicion that the enemy had retired was quickly proved premature. Again, he detected movement across the clearing. This time a man came into the open; two men, and a third. Lillico opened fire; the first dropped and lay still, the second fell into undergrowth, while the third had just enough time to make himself scarce for which purpose the jungle is accommodating. What had they been doing? Not attacking, surely, because their movements were too indecisive; but no immediate danger suggesting itself, the answer could wait because there was other work to do.

  First, move from a position known to the enemy, as Thomson had done. Again Lillico was helped by his friend, who had joined in the battle from some yards behind. Never mind that he could see no one; he knew where Lillico was and saturated everywhere else with stinging bullets and blistering invective. It was reassuring, and Lillico tensed to drag the inert mass which was himself into and under the bamboo where he should be almost invisible. When there was something to grip the effort was tolerable, but without a handhold his clawing fingers scraped impotently, sweat extruded under pressure, his breath rasped, and he was weak, weak; but domination by mind over matter improves with practice and, fortunately, SAS training had anticipated the need.

  With one trial surmounted, the next presented itself; more would follow. The end was unpredictable, except should he fail to meet any one of them. So be it, take them singly. He was aware of his left leg as a lump of rubber, but there was no sensation in it; his right he could feel, but no effort of will could make it move, and blood, warm and vi
scous, filled his pants. It did not spurt like Thomson’s but there was a lot, too much, and it felt comforting, which was even more dangerous. Action was needed.

  The wound was gruesome and ominous. The bullet had made a small entry-hole just in front of the left hip, half-severed the great sciatic nerve so paralysing and desensitizing the left leg, and expanding as it left through the pelvic opening had destroyed a three-inch mass of the right buttock muscle and with it all power to that leg too. ‘Fortunately’ – Lillico’s constant good fortune may be hard to appreciate, but to him it was real – ‘it missed the artery because there was no question of a tourniquet there.’ Blood welled through the lacerated flesh all the same, ‘but fortunately I always carried two shell dressings so I got them both out. No trouble with the entry-hole because it was small but the other seemed to have torn out half my arse; however, I managed eventually to trap the dressing inside my slacks and shove it in the hole.’

  There was movement yet again, and with a burst of fire Lillico warned whoever it was to keep his distance. The noises came from a dip in the ground where he could not see – muffled grunts denoting exertion combined with frustration, and what could have been a soft but heartfelt groan of pain – and did not convey aggression, rather that the Indos were evacuating a wounded man while trying to keep quiet, and were not finding it at all easy. That would keep them acceptably occupied, and all Lillico needed now was somebody to do the same for him.

  Meanwhile, he shared the battleground with three Indonesian bodies and thought there might well be more. A victory then, in effect by two men over at least six to judge by the volume of fire and its sources, and that after being ambushed unawares. Of course both Jock and he ought by rights to have died; and now that the immediate tension had partly eased, he remembered that they might still do so. He wondered whether ‘D’ Squadron and the Regiment would ever hear about their performance and, if so, whether they would consider it to have been all right.