Immediate Action

by Andy McNab

  "Slow down on the drink, we'll take some of this back to the UK!"

  He was told: "Fuck off! We're going to drink it."

  Things were starting to get out of control. The city rugby team started a fight with our team, so there was fisticuffs all over the beach. Then the nurses arrived. An invitation had gone out to all the European nurses who worked in the city; as they started coming down the steps toward the beach club, there were shouts of "Piss off!" They walked off in disgust, as one would.

  The SM closed down the barbecues and bars, and everybody got his head down on the beach. Tiny woke up on the sand in the morning and said,

  "I'm bored."

  The squadron was assembled, and the SM said, "That's the last time we have a squadron do when we leave anywhere. It got totally out of control."

  Some of the senior blokes stood up and said, "What do you fucking expect? You tear the arse out of the VCs, you tear the arse out of the cost of the drinks, then we're told it's for a party, and when we have the party, you're running around trying to stop us enjoying ourselves."

  We came back to the UK and were told we had the weekend off but were to be in the squadron interest room for eight o'clock on the Tuesday morning because the CO wanted to talk to us. We thought he was going to say, "Well done, lads, good trip."

  The colonel walked in, followed by the SM and squadron O.C. "I've got a letter here that I want you to listen to," he said. He read it; it came from Cabinet level, and it was complaining about noisy and unruly behavior at the beach club in Muscat. There must have been some very well-connected ex ats there that night. p When he had finished, the colonel turned to the SM and said, "Right, you've got the sack."

  He turned to the O.C and said, "The only reason you're being left here is because I've got nobody to replace you."

  Then he turned to us and said, "They're looking at disbanding B Squadron. If that happens, you're all in the shit." Then he walked off.

  Fuck, I thought, I've only been in twelve months, and I'm out on my ear. went home and told Debbie all about it. By now we had a quarter, and she had settled in well. She had a job in Hereford and was enjoying being back in the UK. I, however, was still busy messing up the marriage. I couldn't see past the end of my own selfish nose; my priority was finding out what time the singleys were going down town for a night out. I had everything I could have asked for-the Regiment and a partner to share the benefits of that with-and I was screwing it up.

  "It's outrageous," I said to her, describing the CO's threat. "It could all be over."

  "Oh, that was interesting," she said, miles away. "I'm off to work now."

  As I watched her drive away, it dawned on me that she had her own life now. Maybe, by being back, I was an embuggerance to her. But there was no time to dwell on such thoughts or try to sort anything out; there were phone calls to be made, a night on the town to be organized.

  We went to her sister's flat for the weekend, staying in the spare bedroom. The flat was above her mums greengrocer's shop, and to get in or out, we had to go through the shop and up two flights of stairs. At night, the door was locked and her sister kept the keys. All day Saturday I had a strong sense of unease, a feeling of something not being right. I couldn't work it out, but that night, as we were getting ready for bed and I heard her sister locking up, I thought: It's because I'm being locked in. I don't want that door to be locked and somebody else to have the key. And then it hit me: It wasn't the door; it was me. I was in a marriage that was going nowhere, because I had never given it a chance-and I didn't feel any inclination to start now. But if I carried on, all I'd be doing was screwing about with her life. The instant I'd had the thought, I said, "Debbie, I've got something to tell you. I don't really want to be here."

  She looked up from the dressing table and smiled.

  Okay, we'll leave in the morning then. We can't really leave tonight; it's too late."

  "No, no. You don't understand. I want to go. I want to leave everything."

  "What?" The smile slipped from her face as she realized what I was saying. She started to cry. It made me feel even more of a shit, but I thought, If it's got to be done, let's get it done before we get into the realms of children.

  I left there and then, I threw a few things in a bag, went downstairs to the first-floor window, and jumped.

  I only 'ever saw her once again after that.

  I moved into the block and started to save money to put a deposit on a house. It was hard going as I was not yet getting Special Forces pay.

  Not many people lived in; most who did were like me, or had their families elsewhere, or were simply new members of the squadron looking for somewhere to live. The room was small, and my kit was everywhere.

  A friend gave me a kettle; with a pack of tea bags and a pint of milk on the window ledge, that was me sorted. I was running a Renault 5, no MOT and no dashboard. I'd had to take it off to sort out the wiring one day and had never really got around to putting it back on.

  In late 1985 I heard that I was going away. In one way this was helpful. It meant I'd be away from the situation, and therefore, to my immature way of thinking, that meant the situation would go away. On the other hand, I was severely pissed ' off about where I was going.

  From what I'd heard, it was the absolute pits.

  Belize, we were told at the briefing, was formerly the colony of British Honduras and lay on the Caribbean coast of Central America.

  About the size of Wales, it had a population of 170,000-mostly black English speakers-but there was also a growing number of Spanishspeaking refugees from El Salvador.

  In the eighteenth century the British in Jamaica had begun logging hardwood on the mainland. By 1840 the territory had become a colony.

  Guatemala claimed that it had inherited the territory from Spain but nevertheless signed a treaty with Britain in 1859, recognizing British sovereignty and agreeing on the border. However, a clause in the treaty stated that the parties had to build a road through the jungle from Guatemala to the Caribbean coast. The road had never happened, and on that basis Guatemala claimed that the 1859 treaty was invalid.

  The government even inserted a clause into the 1945 constitution stating that British Honduras was in fact part of Guatemala, much as the Argentinians had with the Falklands.

  In the 1960s, as other British colonies in the Caribbean moved toward independence, Guatemala turned up the heat. In 1963 it massed troops along the border, and Britain sent forces to repel any invasion.

  British troops had been there ever since.

  In 1972 Guatemala had again assembled troops along the border, and this time Britain sent the Ark Royal and several thousand men. In 1975, after yet another threat, we installed a squadron of R.A.F Harriers.

  Finally, in 1980, Guatemala agreed to recognize Belize, but only if the famous road was built. There were riots in Belize; people were killed.

  The treaty wasn't ratified, and Guatemala went back to refusing to recognize its neighbor. Britain had kept a small garrison in Belize ever since as a permanent deterrent against incursions, and we were going there as part of that force.

  The maps consisted of vast areas of closely packed contour lines, which were hills, covered in green, which was jungle. There were no proper roads and very few tracks. As I was to discover for myself, there were still open sewers in the towns, and a lot of the locals were none too friendly. One of the lads in the unit before us had got his arm chopped off in a mugging.

  The British presence amounted to something like an infantry battalion plus all the support-Harrier jump jets, artillery, the lot.

  And part of that was an outfit called F Company, basically a dozen Regiment and SBS blokes. It had quickly been renamed F Troop after the comedy series about a U.S cavalry unit in the Wild West, manned by a load of bumbling old idiots.

  I turned up in July. There were people there that I already knew, like Solid Shot, jock, and Johnny two Combs, though Two-Combs was due to return to the UK soon.

>   "You'll hate this place," were his words of welcome.

  He was right. To a man, we loathed the garrison on sight. Our rooms were in semicircular tin huts with no air-conditioning, a really good idea in Central America.

  The first thing we did was go and buy fans that then stayed on for the whole tour. In the rooms there were two metal lockers and two beds, and that was it. I shared a room with Solid Shot. The first evening there we lay on our beds putting the world to rights and thinking of ways to make our fortunes. Outside we could hear Des Doom hammering the "face of the day" on the punch bag. Des's arms and chest were covered with tattoos. "When I was single," he said, "My chat-up line was: 'If you don't find me interesting, you can always read me."' He was due to get out; he'd decided he wanted to pursue other things after only four years in the Regiment; this was deemed to be disloyal, and he'd been sent to Belize for the whole duration of B Squadron's tour. He was severely bitter and twisted about it and forever on the bag; he always had many faces to "talk to."

  There was a swimming pool, but that was put out of bounds because someone had shit in it one night in protest about the timings that favored the "families of," not the rest of the garrison. Apart from the punch bag, the only training facilities consisted of some catering-size baked bean cans, filled with concrete with an iron bar stuck into each of them to form makeshift weights.

  F Troop was part of a garrison and all the bullshit that that entailed.

  Our hut was part of the sergeants' mess, but unless we were a Regiment corporal or above, we couldn't use it, even though we were still expected to pay the monthly fee the mess claimed.

  The team was therefore split into two groups, those who could go in the mess and those who couldn't, and I hadn't joined the Regiment for that sort of bullshit. Tiny was with us for three weeks, filling in space between changeovers. Being a regimental corporal, he could have gone in the sergeants' mess but chose to come down to the cookhouse with us lowlife, but then that was stopped. In the end just four of us lepers would walk down to the cookhouse; in fact it turned out for the best as they used to put on a great Gurkha curry.

  Part of F Troop's job was to be first-response unit if a commercial or military aircraft went down in the jungle.

  We would be the ambulance brigade, steaming in with all the emergency equipment and medical aid kit in a Puma. Having stabilized any casualties, we would then establish a base and try to enable other helis to get in, which might entail anything from blowing winch holes to creating full-size landing sites.

  Our entry into the crash site would not necessarily be straightforward.

  We would hope to get in where the aircraft had crashed as the ground might now be flattened, but what if it was still a ball of flame or just a light aircraft? We therefore had to practice abseiling into I the jungle and getting in all the emergency equipment that would be needed.

  There were four of us on standby at any given time; the rest went patrolling in the jungle for a week or two. I hated being in the camp almost as much as I loved being in the jungle. There was nothing to dc in the camp apart from going for a run, then waiting for the most exciting event of the day, tea and toast at 11:00 A.M.

  I had a definite feeling of: What have I done wrong to be here for the next five months. We felt like social outcasts. I'd wondered why people tried to avoid being sent here at all costs; I now knew the reason, One of the small reliefs from the boredom was practicing entry into a crash site. It required enough kit to fill two Land Rovers: five-gallon jerry cans of water, medical equipment, a generator, lights, food, shelters-everything we would need to get on site and start to sort these people out-plus our own bergens.

  On practice days we drove down and met the pilots by the Puma ' At this time of the year the main topic of conversation was what crews were going to be on standby over Christmas, as they wanted to book a car and drive to Cancun for the holiday.

  The pilot would say to me, the sucker with the kit, "Same place?"

  "Why not?" I'd reply. "We have to keep the troops entertained."

  They would stand there drinking Cokes and watch us load all the equipment, rig up the ropes, put our harnesses on', and sit in the heli; we'd then wait for the rotors to wind up and cool us down. The weather only ever did one of two things: It was either pissing down with rain or scorching hot. The Royal Engineers would be coming out of their own little camp they had made for themselves; using all their skills, they had constructed a bar and barbecue area with chairs and benches, and without a doubt it was the most organized area on the camp. I wished at times like this that I'd stayed at school and got some 0 levels.

  Off we went flying around Belize for a while, doors open and enjoying the view and the cool wind. The heli came to a hover at 1SO feet'above the football pitch, and the engineers, dressed in shorts and flip-flops, and by now on their second bottle of ice-cold Coke, had their scorecards ready.

  The first two at the door got ready, and I threw the jungle penetrators out. One of the blokes was Terry, an ex-Royal Marine now in Mountain Troop and known among other things as Fat Boy. Not because he was, but he had the largest chest I'd ever seen. He was about five feet ten inches and built like a brick shithouse. One of the downsides of working with the SBS-come to that, all Royal Marines-was that they seemed always to be tall and good-looking. This made us come across like a bag of shit. We decided that Fat Boy had come to the Regiment instead of the SBS because he would have failed the Good Looks Selection; his face looked as if life had been chewing on it.

  The other man, in the opposite door, was the troop senior, Joe Ferragher. Joe was a monster of a man, sixteen stone, and over six feet. He was very quiet; it was like getting blood out of a stone to get him to talk sometimes, but when he did, there was no stopping him.

  He was the gentle giant, except for one occasion when travelers took over his house while he was away. Joe went to visit them on his return, and after ten minutes they decided that they didn't want to exercise their squatters' rights after all. To show that there were no hard feelings, Joe sent flowers to all of them in hospital.

  A "jungle penetrator" is basically a heavy sack containing a rope inserted in such a way that it doesn't tangle. Because it has a weighted bottom, it smashes into the canopy and allows you to work your way to the ground. Once the two-hundred-foot abseiling rope was on the ground, Joe and Fat Boy would start to ease themselves out of the heli so that their feet were on the deck and their bodies were at forty-five degrees to the ground.

  The abseller is attached to the rope by a figure of eight device.

  He remains locked in position until he pulls up some slack from beneath him and feeds it into the figure of eight; the best position is one that gives least resistance to the rope as it travels through, and that is a crucifix position with the body araliel to the ground p and arms running along the rope, controlling it. If there is a drama, the' man on the ground pulls down on the rope, locking the figure of eight.

  The first two down did not have that luxury. Out they went, the weight of the rope making it extremely hard to pull up enough slack.

  The effect was the same as if someone was on the ground pulling the rope, which was why Fat Boy and Joe went first; it took a lot of aggression. Sometimes it all went to ratshit and people landed up banging into the heli and getting caught up. This was a quite funny sight, especially if they then started to lose control of the rope and got to the ground with lumps all over their heads and hands that looked as if they'd been in a toaster.

  The engineers were by now giving points for style.

  "Not as good as the team last month, but the heli has stayed in the hover better," they were probably saying as they went for their third Coke and changed position for a better tan.

  Once the boys were down they would man the ropes and control the kit that was to follow. We would rig it the same as if it was a body and then heave it out one at a time after the count of three. We tried a different method every time, but it was just reinventing the w
heel; we decided the best way was to grab it and just throw it out. Once all that was done we followed; the heli' would then leave and get back to base as soon as possible. Like us, the pilots were hoping to get back for 4:00 P.m. tea and toast, the second most exciting thing to happen in camp. The Land Rovers would come and pick us up; the Royal Engineers would drag their chairs back to their lair.

  "Not as fast as D Squadron when they were here, but there you go.

  Shall we have another Coke?"

  The rest of the time we'd go out and patrol, gathering information and basically preparing for if the Guats invaded. We'd go as maybe a four- or six-man patrol, dropped in by helicopter, and spend ten to fourteen days on different tasks in and around the border. I loved it.

  The only local industries seemed to be grapefruit, 'juana, whoring, and supplying and working for the marl British Army. I was told that a third of Belize's income came from cannabis. Apparently there used to be big frenzies where the police would go over and burn a couple of fields just so that the government could say, "That's it, we're fighting the drug problem." But for every field it burned, there were another twenty left. It brought in revenue, so there was no way they were going to destroy it. We had nothing to do with countering the drugs problem in Central America; everybody just accepted it as part of business that went on in that part of the world.

  About an hour away from our camp on a dirt road lived Gilbert. He was an Indian with a smallholding that fed his large family. To help him make ends meet, he would come into the jungle with us and help build shelters and tach helicopter crews and Harrier pilots jungle survival; if they were still living once they'd creamed in, they could keep themselves ticking over until we got there. He would also come with us when we trained NCOs of the new battalion manning the garrison in jungle tactics so that they could teach their men. Belize was an operational posting, and the battalion had hard job ahead of it. This was the good part of the tour for us as at least we did achieve something.

  Gilbert's house was built from breeze blocks, corrugated iron, and noise. Inside was just one very big room, with a curtain dividing off his bedroom from the two double beds that housed his eight children.