SAS: Secret War in South East Asia

by Dickens, Peter;

  Needing friends not things, the packs induced a sense of abandonment; dumped, shapeless, full of erstwhile useful articles now to be ransacked by pigs and honey-bears, rotted by damp and fungus, and at last obliterated by the remorseless growth of the jungle. That train of thought was inadmissible however, and a water-bottle lying apart promised better. His thirst was raging, and as the precious liquid softened his parched mouth and swilled around his acid teeth his assurance revived, only to crash even lower than before as his stomach utterly rejected the intrusion and returned it with the addition of evil-tasting digestive juices in that eruption of nature apparently designed to cause total desolation.

  The choice open to Thomson was the same as the previous evening’s but more pressing; he could either curl up and die, which a benign providence gently urges when his degree of weakness and hopelessness is reached, or not. He chose the latter because the former just was not done in the Regiment and he could not bear the thought of their even suggesting that he had ‘chucked in’. Perhaps he had not fully appreciated before where all the training in endurance and perseverance, which he had enthusiastically accepted, was leading, but he did now; to the limit. Fair enough; if any bugger was going to let the Regiment down, it would not be him.

  He crawled on. Crawling was the opposite to curling up, but it may be that the clarity of his mind was becoming less bell-like than he thought because it might have been wiser to have hidden near the bergens, whose position would be known to any rescuers and must surely be the focal point for a search. As it was he plunged once more into the limitless jungle towards Sain, 5,000 yards away. He had covered 200 when he reached the limit of his self-propulsion.

  Thomson pulled himself under some bushes beside a stream on the friendly side of the watershed and lay there comfortably, though not contentedly as Lillico had done. He wanted to be found, ever more intensely as the likelihood of his being so by friends seemed to diminish. The possibility of the enemy coming first possessed his mind so that it became the probability, and himself a hunted, wounded, snarling animal at bay. Images forced themselves into his consciousness; real ones without a doubt, but his evaluation may have been less than objective because of his troubled state of mind. There were the two parties of Indos who failed to see him because he took good care that they should not, but were they really Indonesians? There is no way of telling for sure, but the unhappy fact is that the Gurkhas certainly did pass that way to reach the rendezvous.

  Then there was the helicopter. That it might be friendly and concerned for his welfare never crossed his mind, and certain that it brought enemy troops for his destruction he opened fire. Aiming at the noise through the tree canopy there was little danger of hitting, nor did David Collinson the pilot notice, but who would be an RSPCA inspector trying to rescue a wounded tiger? One’s belief, whether true or false, dictates one’s actions and misunderstanding is the more common especially when stress is present. The shots must have been those which Lillico heard and interpreted despondently.

  The afternoon began to slip away, and so did Thomson. He was well accustomed to weakness and exhaustion, but, whereas those could be corrected by rest, this draining of the life force itself was a new sensation; he recognized it for what it was and this time he had no choice. Its nature was kindly and seductive, like the brook beside him curving smoothly over sandy clay; downhill to be sure, but why should it want to go up? Peacefully, he contemplated his glade and saw it to be beautiful. Tall straight trunks of jungle giants culminated in heavy foliage so that all beneath was softly shaded like a beechwood he knew on Dinedor Hill outside Hereford, and shrubs grew only sparsely, revealing their elegance. There were vine-stems sweeping upwards, delicate tree-ferns, a bush with spiky leaves several yards long and only an inch or two wide, and another with broad lush ones as in the foyers of grand hotels, palms used by the natives for thatching their roofs and random coils of rotan cane with which the British clear their drains; but although men could venture there the great harmony was wholly independent of him, owing him nothing, and Ian Thomson thought at last, ‘What’s my old Mum going to think because I’m going to die here and be eaten by pigs and nobody’ll ever find me?’

  (‘Come off it!’ taunted realist Bill Condie, pint to hand in the Ulu Bar of the ‘David Garrick’ at Hereford where the landlord, ex-SAS Sergeant Major Frank Williams, catered for the Regimental thirst. ‘You were stoned to the eyeballs.’ And Thomson excused his weakness; ‘Yes, it must have been the morphine.’)

  He thought further and to better purpose. Even the Indos can’t do much to me now. What have I got to lose? And consciously abandoning his ingrained policy of concealment, he fired three deliberate signal shots into the air. The positive action annulled the calm of resignation and he became a cornered animal again, aware only of danger. He could receive clear impressions and respond instantly and fiercely, but lacked the mental energy to reason beyond the moment; and when the soldier came, feline with sinuous movement and tense alertness, dark eyes in the olive face scanning the ground minutely and rifle following the eyes, Thomson had no thought but, Bloody Indo! Well, if I’ve got to go, this bastard’s going with me.

  He could still raise and aim the Armalite under inch-by-inch control without alerting his target. The range being short the best point of aim was the head, a quick kill being imperative. But having eased the safety-catch soundlessly and hooked his finger to the trigger, he could not help but notice that the foresight was steady on a red hatband. He recalled only dimly that this might have some meaning, but it was enough to make him hesitate. The hesitation became a pause, and the pause prolonged itself until, with a sublime outpouring of bated breath and griping tension, his weapon sank gently to the forest floor.

  ‘Johnny … Johnny!’

  When Lillico judged that the enemy had moved far enough for him to bring in the helicopter safely it was no longer there, and no amount of Regimental spirit could construe that as fortunate. The stress engendered by his eyeball to eyeball near miss with the tree-climber had left him weaker even than before. Few hours of daylight remained, and although his resolution remained unimpaired, his chance of surviving another night without medical attention had to be dispassionately assessed as small; and he was still in enemy territory.

  This last consideration offered him at least an excuse for action; and despite the Herculean effort needed to move at all being compounded by the strain of unremitting wariness, that was a great deal better than wallowing like a pig in far from glorious mud with ever dimming hope. He moved a good 200 yards, right onto the border ridge itself where, although the enemy might still be encountered, he was the more likely to be found by friends. He had also made the helicopter’s task easier, a ridge being more negotiable than a slope. But although the country was still ‘belukar’ and the pilot could descend close to the ground, tree-stumps, felled logs, saplings and undergrowth precluded landing.

  Exhausted again, he could now do nothing but look, scent, and above all listen. Wanting the precious daylight hours to pass slowly, he made the mistake of checking their progress by the shadows which the tropical sun, falling plumb from zenith to jungle horizon, caused to lengthen very fast indeed. The forest knew before he did that the light had begun to dim, and signalled the event with a perceptible increase of insect noise that he could have done without. Straining through the thrumming for not greatly dissimilar rotor-beats, he could have imagined them at any time had he let himself; but there was no question of that, he was entirely in control of himself and intended to remain so.

  Perhaps it was on this account that he delayed acknowledging an alien sound until it had repeated itself, or that being tuned to helicopters he was slow to adjust to something else. Thunder; not isolated cracks but deep, rolling, prolonged and, when he had assessed its implication, sinister. The light faded faster than the sun decreed as a huge black cloud swept up from behind the mountain and there were no more shadows to measure; a breeze stirred the tree-tops, bland at first but full of
portent, and then lightning slashed the cloud and lit his hiding place. It would be no mean storm, though not unusual for Borneo; you could not expect tropical rain forest to grow without tropical rain, but neither could you expect a light chopper to fly through it, that was not reasonable.

  Reasonable or not, suddenly there it was. Its noise, masked by the thunder until right overhead, roared generously and unmistakably. He had to fumble for the Sarbe, held for so long at instant readiness but recently laid aside. Even now he hesitated. How close were the enemy? Dare he use it?

  Flying Officer David Collinson had spent two busy days flying over trees infinite in number and impossible to see through. Although well aware that an enemy on the ground could easily see him, he could not fly at above small-arms range for fear of missing any sign of the men. But his briefing had been that they were probably dead anyway, and as he quartered the ground for the eighteenth time the task seemed hopeless. Yet every task must be accomplished with maximum efficiency or no deduction drawn from a negative result would be valid and, if apparently hopeless, the spur was even sharper so as to counter any tendency to inattentiveness. And he was young, new to the game with only 200 flying hours, and those men below whether dead or alive were very real to him.

  So when a call came from the Gurkhas to lift Thomson out and get him to hospital – quick – Collinson’s frustration was hard to contain, because the trees were just too tall for his winch-cable. He tried place after place, brushing twigs with his blades and even depressing them a little with the down-draught, but the strop dangled bafflingly inaccessible from the ground and there was no nearby clearing to which the wounded man could possibly be moved before nightfall.

  Accepting defeat with a bad grace, Collinson then saw the gathering storm, decided that his duty was to return to base before it broke – and did not. The light remained adequate as he grimly started his nineteenth pass, and barely had he left the high primary jungle for the ‘belukar’ when Lillico’s Sarbe bleeped, loud and close. Right! Collinson’s mood angrily rejected even the possibility of a second failure and was admirably suited to the challenge presented by the tangled mass of scrub beneath him.

  Lillico dragged himself clear of his log and waved. Collinson saw at once that he could expect no further movement which might simplify his own manoeuvring within the constraint of utmost speed dictated by nightfall, storm and enemy. The strop must be placed within arm’s reach, and this he did by descending clear of the man where the growth permitted and then backing his hovering aircraft like a car until the tail rotor was neatly parked between two high and jagged tree-stumps.

  But Lillico’s severest trial was still to come. He fitted the strop snugly under his armpits, that was all right; grasped his rifle and signalled to hoist, and that was all right too; but as he rose he realized with alarm that one hand could no longer support the weapon, and with dread foreboding when both together did not prevent it slipping. Yet again he called forth all his determination to force his body to his will, and would have succeeded had it not been for the friendly roughness of the crewmen who were concerned only to get him safely inside. The rifle fell, and nothing in his future mattered but the sheer awfulness of reporting back to the Regiment without it. How could those airmen just sit there grinning? But, of course, they did not understand.

  He said to them, ‘Don’t hang around, there’s Indos about.’

  They said to him, ‘The Gurkhas have got your mate. He’s all right.’

  Relieved at last of responsibility for themselves, the end of the story for Lillico and Thomson was a series of vivid but often unconnected pictures of those who had taken over. Collinson flew Lillico first down the hill to the Gurkhas’ jungle post at Sain, where the Medical Officer inspected his wound and prescribed immediate evacuation to Kuching Hospital 45 miles distant – if possible. It was, just. Lashing rain made the darkness total except when lightning flared and the gale buffeted the little aircraft so that Collinson had to fight it every inch of the way, with the jungle below awaiting mechanical failure or a false move. But that was not Lillico’s job. Then he was watching Matron cutting away his trousers, professionally undeterred by filth, blood, flesh and grubs; that was not his job either, so he left her to it and the scene faded.

  Thomson feared at first that he had been mistaken after all because the Gurkhas would not come down to the stream for him; but that was because they were professional soldiers and had first to check that the enemy was not using him as a decoy. Then Kevin Walsh was bending over him and he put his arms around his neck, which was significant because Kevin did not have the sort of face that naturally invited an embrace. The chopper came and went and the Gurkhas made him a stretcher with a poncho. It rained so they made him a tent with another poncho, and jabbed him with penicillin and streptomycin.

  Then it was morning and four of those great little guys carried him on his stretcher. He remembered that all right because it hurt like hell; it was slow going too because the Gurkhas ambushed the track behind to ensure that the enemy was not following and then had to catch up. They cut down trees with their kukris and made a landing-point, but it was on a slope and when the chopper came again it could only get one wheel down while the other still hovered and the rotor whipped the shrubs on the high side. ‘But they shoved me in and Collinson was flying it and he got a Distinguished Flying Cross and deserved it.

  ‘Then there was this wee Malay nursie coming at me with a pair of garden shears and I thought Jesus; but she just cut off my pants and there were maggots right through my leg. I was embarrassed in fact, I was embarrassed; but she didn’t bother, she just sprayed these maggots.

  ‘And the next thing was this guy saying, “Jock, we’re going to take your leg off”, and I said, “No way are you going to take my leg off,” but it didn’t come out that way; my mind was as clear as a bell but my mouth wouldn’t do as it was told. I was gibbering like a maniac and they didn’t pay any attention.

  ‘But the Colonel came, Mike Wingate-Gray, and he’s a Scot too, and he said, “Take it easy Jock”, and I said, “If you let them take my leg off I’ll never talk to you again”, and he said, “Jock, if you don’t want your leg off, they won’t take it off”, and it was as simple as that.

  ‘I told him about the tiger’s head flash on the first Indo I shot because that was important, but he couldn’t understand; and then I remembered the guy looking at me, so young and scared, and I thought, poor wee lad.’

  Lillico was in an unhappy turmoil; of self-criticism for allowing his patrol to be ambushed and losing his rifle, and unease lest his wound should disqualify him from the SAS or even the Army. He might also be a cripple for the rest of his life, having always been superbly fit. The last straw was the money that a patrol commander carried for contingencies and had to be returned, but when he explained that it had been in his hip pocket and must have been burned with his trousers, he felt with bitter shame that he was not believed.

  Woodiwiss and Wingate-Gray set out to reassure him. There had perhaps been some risk in revisiting the enemy camp, but the SAS was in the risk business and nothing would ever be achieved without it; he would be wanted in the Operational Research Wing as soon as he was well enough, so there was no question of his being thrown out; and as for the rifle and the money, hell take them. Listening to him and piecing the story together from all sources, the two officers became convinced that his leadership, bravery and self-sacrifice had been quite outstanding, indeed inspiring. They recommended him for a Military Medal and Thomson for a Mention in Despatches, which were awarded.

  After a very long time, years, in the hands of the medical profession, for whose skill and devotion they are lavish in their praise, both men recovered. Lillico did so completely and resumed his front-line career with the SAS, but Thomson became The Clog’ with his left leg an inch and a half shorter than his right and not quite up to it, though he stayed in the Army for a period. After that he had to brave the world outside; and for one to whom the very breath of l
ife was adventure, seeking challenge and surmounting it, risking his own life in a worthy cause, civilian existence was the greatest trial of all. As Sergeant Alf Tasker of ‘A’ Squadron puts it:

  ‘I can’t talk to civilians. They don’t know what I’m talking about and I’m wasting my time doing it. They can’t understand why I like this job and I can’t explain because I don’t know why. It’s crazy; know what I mean?’

  1Tracl. Anon.

  2Small two-shot syringes operated by squeezing the flexible container.

  CHAPTER 2

  ‘IT’S A GREAT FINGER-POKING REGIMENT’

  So says that repository of SAS wisdom Frank Williams over his bar at the ‘David Garrick’, meaning that their fingers are poked mostly at themselves so as to learn from their mistakes in the unrelenting pursuit of excellence decreed by their founder David Stirling. Finger-poking from outside, however, is often less constructive. The accusation ‘murder squads’ trips readily from the tongues of such as the IRA and those who wish to see Britain impotent against a threat to civilization of unprecedented magnitude; but it is not true.

  What, therefore, is so special about them? ‘People don’t appreciate the potential of what’s in Hereford’, says Eddie Lillico; and we are not going to learn much more either, but may at least be pleased both that the potential is there and that the evildoer will be the first to discover what it is. We are, however, increasingly aware of the SAS, no longer being surprised to hear, if only by rumour, that they are watching some disquieting event, ready to take action if ordered. The military meaning of the word ‘special’ is hard to define since it can include almost any task that is not, well, ordinary, but is always sensitive and sometimes clandestine. Its essence is secrecy and its tools are small scale, bold initiative, surprise, and high skill.