by Shaun Clarke
Glancing down, he felt dizzy. He saw a vertical tunnel of darkness. Down there, nearly forty-five metres below him, was the floor of the jungle. Breathing deeply, he relaxed, let his racing heart settle, hung there for at least another minute until he knew what to do. Reaching out, he grabbed a thick branch, praying to God that there were no snakes, then pulled himself onto another, even thicker, branch and pressed himself to the tree trunk. Feeling secure, he thought more clearly, looked up and saw the sky, other paratroopers floating down from the Valettas, first in slow motion, then coming down fast, finally smashing through the trees on all sides.
He was not the only one trapped. Other men were cursing and wriggling. One man screamed as he kept plunging down too fast, smashing brutally through branches, bouncing repeatedly off the tree trunk and finally hitting the ground with a sickening thud.
‘Jesus Christ,’ Marty whispered. He took another deep breath, tried not to look down again, then removed his fighting knife from its sheath and slashed through the tangled cords of the parachute, cutting himself loose. When he was free, clinging carefully to the branch, he removed the knotted abseiling rope from his webbing, tied it around the thickest branch, tugged hard to check that it was secure, then began his descent. He went down carefully, trying not to burn his hands, planting his feet on any branch he could find, using the tree as a ladder. It took a long time, filling his body with aches and darting pains, but eventually, just as his lungs started bursting, he dropped to the forest floor, landing on hands and knees. He remained there, taking deep, even breaths until he knew he was all right.
Once satisfied that he hadn’t damaged himself, he adjusted the heavy Bergen rucksack on his shoulders, stood up, glanced around him. Other troopers were doing the same, wiping foliage off their OGs and checking their personal weapons, looking unreal in the gloom of the forest floor. But they were real for all that.
Bulldog Bellamy was there. So were Tone and Roy Weatherby. Taff Hughes, blond-haired and blue-eyed, was smiling beatifically at Lieutenant Kearney who, after abseiling down his tree, was wriggling out of his harness. Rob Roy and Pat O’Connor emerged from the jungle, looking pleased with themselves. Marty sighed with relief.
The supplies were still falling under their parachutes, though some of the parachutes were entangled in the treetops with the crates dangling just below the canopy. Some troopers, including Marty and Tone, were assigned the dangerous, arduous task of climbing back up the trees, over forty metres up, to cut the supply crates loose and let them drop to the foliage-strewn ground. Most of them smashed open on impact, spilling the heavier weapons – GPMGs and two-inch mortars – and extra supplies over the forest floor. When these had been gathered together and distributed among the men, the patrol was ready to march into the ulu.
Even as the first of the troopers were moving out behind Bulldog Bellamy, out on point as lead scout, Lieutenant Kearney was on the No. 88 wireless set, calling in a casevac chopper to lift out the man who had crashed all the way down through the trees. The hurt man was on a stretcher, unconscious, covered in blood, and someone whispered that he’d broken both legs and most of his ribs. He was left there in the care of three other troopers while the rest of the men began their long hike into the ulu.
The men in the single file were spaced well apart, making Marty feel acutely isolated. Holding his SLR across his chest, he comforted himself by recalling that B Squadron was not alone: that other branches of the Security Forces were closing in on the same target from different directions and by different means.
According to Kearney’s briefing on the previous day, the CT had recently been attacking kampongs, isolated police stations, telecommunications posts, railways, buses, rubber plantations, tin mines and the British SF. British infantry, with the help of Gurkha and police patrols, had responded by cutting off food supplies going to the CT in the jungle and also booby trapping supplies of rice, fish and other foods prepared for collection by the terrorists. With the subsequent removal of 400 Chinese squatters’ villages from the edge of the ulu to wire-fenced enclosures defended by the SF, the terrorists were deprived of another source of food, supplies and manpower. For this reason, they had moved even deeper into the ulu, to the Belum Valley, where they were attempting to grow their own maize, rice and vegetables. In order to do so, they’d had to make an immense cleared space in the ulu– and that space had been spotted by Auster light observation aircraft flown by the Army Air Corps. The SAS mission, therefore, was to advance on that clearing and take out the guerrillas.
They were not alone in this. Gurkhas, Royal Marine Commandos, Malayan Police and other SAS patrols were already approaching the site on foot from a mountain valley that ran along the Thai border. That advance was actually underway when B Squadron, acting as a ‘stop’ or ‘blocking’ party, parachuted into their confined DZ near the area and began their advance. How long this would take could not be accurately ascertained since, as Lieutenant Kearney had warned them, the terrain could not be gauged precisely from aerial photos. Kearney’s estimate of anything from a few days to a fortnight was based on the knowledge that they would have to hack their way through the undergrowth, might find their way blocked by swamps, and would almost certainly run into rains so heavy that they could practically wash a man way.
Marty was already becoming uncomfortably aware of something else he had been warned about during the briefing: that even in good weather the jungle canopy was so thick, little light reached the forest floor and visibility was rarely more than fifty metres. Right now, it was less than that. Also, he and the others had been warned that no matter how tough they felt themselves to be, they might have to overcome a natural fear of the jungle environment, which was claustrophobic in the extreme and could cause severe lethargy owing to stress. While not quite lethargic yet, Marty was certainly feeling claustrophobic in the ulu’s gloom and humidity.
Here, far inland, the ulu was dense and dark, with the trees as high as forty-five metres, where they formed a solid canopy of green, with patches of sky visible only occasionally. Little sunlight penetrated to the marshy forest floor, which was covered with a thick carpet of dead leaves and seedlings, though no grass or flowers were to be seen. An undergrowth of young trees and palms of all kinds climbed to a height of nearly four metres, obscuring the giant roots of the trees. The tree trunks, though similar in that they were all of a uniform thickness and straining up towards the dim light, were of every colour and texture: smooth and black, scaly and ochre, pale grey or green with moss, some as finely dappled as a moth’s wing.
Also, the tree trunks were often hidden by jungle vines, the rotan, which had creepers with sharp thorns and in places broke out into enormous, equally sharp, leaves. Elsewhere, the rotan hung straight down from the branches to the ground, where they had taken root again, looping themselves from tree to tree like the strands of a gigantic spider’s web. Up in the treetops, where the great trunks suddenly burst into branches, were hanging gardens of moss and ferns covered in tangled webs of liana and creepers. This canopy of dense foliage provided few windows through which the sky could be glimpsed and certainly kept the sunlight out, though the air remained hot and dreadfully humid.
Marty had started sweating profusely within minutes of commencing the hike. Even worse, the dreaded whining of flies and buzzing of mosquitoes were soon filling his ears, the insects made ravenous by the smell of human sweat and the blood that had seeped from the many small cuts caused by thorns and sharp leaves. After a couple of hours of this, Marty, feeling dazed with exhaustion, his clothes soaked in sweat, his every muscle aching, thought the hike couldn’t possibly get worse – but it did.
Shortly after they had crossed a relatively less dense patch of forest, which made them heave a collective sigh of relief, they moved back into forest that was worse than the one they had just left. Known as belukar, it was land that had once been cleared but returned to secondary jungle, with swampy thickets of thorn, bracken and bamboo, and, of course, the trailin
g creepers known as rotan. Even more dense and impenetrable than the original growth, it contained vast stretches of swampy ground covered with mengkuang, a gargantuan leathery grass with sharp blades, about six metres long and ten or twelve centimetres wide, with a row of curved thorns along each edge. In one hour of back-breaking work, only approximately a hundred metres would be covered. Another obstacle was the sharp-edged lalang, which were grass clumps nearly twice the size of a man, with sharp edges that could, like the mengkuang, slice human skin open.
Nevertheless, sometimes bleeding and constantly attacked by vicious red ants as well as the flying insects, the patrol kept inching forward, with the tension increasing, every man aware that this agonizingly slow progress made him a good target to the enemy and that the easiest, quickest routes through the ulu would have to be avoided for fear of ambush.
This particular fear had encouraged Paddy Kearney to order the hike to be made in single file, with Bulldog Bellamy out front as lead scout, Kearney just behind him as patrol commander (PC) and the steam-breathing Sergeant Doyle bringing up the rear though exhausted, sweating, as Tail-end Charlie. While Bulldog had to cover an arc of fire to the front and Doyle an arc to the rear, the men in between, the rest of the squadron, were compelled to cover arcs of fire to both sides. This necessitated a constant turning from left to right, adding more stress to that already being caused by the hostile elements.
Though trying to give his attention to the immediate task, which was battling his way through the ulu, Marty frequently found himself thinking about what might happen when they reached the CT base camp in the Belum Valley. Asked at the briefing if the SAS troopers were to kill or capture the communists, Kearney had replied that he would rather have them alive than dead because the ‘green slime’ (the officers of SAS intelligence) could probably extract valuable information from them. On the other hand, the main purpose of the mission was to take them out and destroy their crops. How they did that, Kearney had said, would be decided by him at the time.
Not fearful, but certainly feeling a distinct tension in the pit of his stomach at the thought of that still distant encounter, Marty tried concentrating even harder on the immediate task: searching the undergrowth not only for enemy snipers or ambush parties, but also taking care that poisonous snakes, centipedes and scorpions did not crawl over his booted feet or, even worse, though just as likely, fall upon him from the overhanging foliage.
Wiping sweat from his eyes, he noticed that as he moved deeper into the ulu, it became more colourless and, indeed, almost alien. Here, the forest floor was covered in a thick carpet of dead leaves and seedlings, which lay around the giant roots and thick creepers of the soaring trees, entwined with tangled vines and liana. Ferns, mosses and herbaceous plants were pushing through the fungi that had formed a thick covering on leaves and fallen tree trunks. This made Marty feel even more suffocated as he followed the men up front on their still agonizingly slow advance into the ulu.
Not allowed to talk or swap bullshit while on the march, forced to communicate only with hand signals, the troopers could not ignore the sounds of the jungle and therefore were prone to imagine things, which made for even more ragged nerves.
They had already been warned that the patrol would be on the move ten hours a day with only occasional breaks and brief halts, and this turned out to be the case that first day. Their advance took them alternately from the humid swamp of the jungle to open river beds, where the harsh sun temporarily dried their sweat-soaked fatigues, but then baked their bodies and feet in fierce, dry heat, which in some ways was even worse. Also, weapons, radios and other items of equipment were a source of considerable frustration, leading to a lot of whispered obscenities. The weapons, however they were carried, scraped and bruised the hip bone, dug into the ribs, and caught on the creepers, branches and twigs of the undergrowth, sometimes tugging the unwary trooper practically off his feet. Humping the other equipment and supplies, mostly in, or tied to, the Bergen rucksacks, became a back-breaking task.
Towards the late afternoon of the first day, Lieutenant Kearney, using a map in combination with aerial photos of the terrain, managed to locate a stream that he hoped would provide an easier route to a friendly Sakai village, where he intended picking up some guides. Unfortunately, when the patrol reached the stream, it was more like a river: too deep and rough to follow easily, with banks so steep, so covered with bamboo thickets and lalang, that their progress was actually slower than it had been in the jungle. Slowing them down even more was the muddy riverbed, which made them slip repeatedly, clutching at branches to prevent themselves from falling. A lot of them ended up with torn, bloody hands.
They camped that first evening on a sandbank rising slightly above the rushing water. Before doing anything else, they had to remove the fat, bloodsucking leeches that were stuck to the skin of arms, legs, bodies and even faces. Some of them did this by simply pulling the leeches off, which often tore the skin and made the wounds bleed more profusely; others had their own particular methods.
‘Jesus, this is disgusting!’ Tone exclaimed as he stubbed the burning end of his cigarette onto one of the many leeches on his left arm, making it sizzle, smoke and shrivel up. ‘I can’t stand these things.’
‘Bloody revolting,’ Marty said, ‘but we’ll have to learn to live with them.’
Taking off his shirt and trousers, he found that he was completely covered in bloated leeches and dripping blood. Knowing that if he simply pulled the leeches off, as some of the men were doing, their minute teeth could remain in the skin and fester, he used the same method as Tone: burned them off with his cigarette, feeling queasy as they sizzled and shrivelled up. Other troopers were removing them by covering them with salt, tobacco or a solution made from the local areca nut.
‘Fucking vampires, these little bastards are,’ Rob Roy said, pouring salt on his leeches and watching attentively as they shrivelled up and fell off him. ‘They’ll drain us dry before we get out of here. We’ll all be bloodless and end up at half our present weight.’
‘I don’t mind them,’ Taff Hughes said softly, pulling the leeches off with this thumb and forefinger, then studying them with his blue-eyed, beatific gaze. ‘They’re just nature’s creatures.’
‘So why don’t you fucking cook ’em and eat ’em?’ Roy Weatherby said. ‘Or try ’em with a little salt and vinegar? They might go down a treat.’
‘You never know,’ Taff said mildly.
When they had managed to remove all the leeches, which took a long time and was often painful, they made their laying-up positions, or LUPs, by gouging shallow ‘scrapes’ out of the soil with their small spades and then covering them with hollow-fill sleeping bags, unrolled and laid down on plastic sheeting. Above the scrapes they raised a shelter made with a waterproof poncho draped over wiring stretched taut between two Y-shaped sticks, forming a triangular shape with the apex facing the wind. Then, with the camp guarded by the troopers positioned out on all four points, Kearney gave them permission to cook some hot food on their portable hexamine stoves, followed by a much appreciated brew-up and, for many, a smoke.
As clothes saturated with sweat would quickly rot, Kearney also ordered some of the men to make a community ‘trench fire’. The men assigned to this task dug a trench of about thirty or ninety centimetres long and thirty centimetres deep, lined the bottom with rocks and stones from the stream, then lit a fire of sticks and hexamine blocks on top of the rocks. The flames of this sunken fire were protected from the wind and could not set the surrounding foliage alight; the fire was therefore also ideal for drying out their soaked fatigues.
As they could not raise their LUPs off the ground to escape the spiders, scorpions, centipedes and snakes that would be drawn to dry clothing and footwear, they solved the problem by constructing a simple raised platform of elephant grass and palm leaves woven through branch cross-pieces supported on four pieces of split bamboo. Their dried clothing and jungle boots were then placed on the platform,
which had also been constructed, for additional protection, near the allnight-burning trench fire.
Just before bedding down for the night, Marty asked Bulldog Bellamy how he and the others could protect themselves from the flying insects. Bulldog responded by telling them all to smear themselves with mud from the stream, then cover their sleeping bags with sapling and leaves. That would, he told them, keep the flying insects at bay.
Marty did as he had been advised, smearing his face and hands in mud before slithering into his sleeping bag. He then scooped the leaves up over the sleeping bag. This, however, meant that he would have to try to sleep without moving too much. This became one bar to sleeping. Another was the fact that as darkness closed in the jungle chorus, which had been hushed during the day, came to life and reached an almost deafening crescendo, with every imaginable species of grasshopper, cicada and tree-frog competing in a discordant, cacophonous medley, accompanied by a generalized humming that sounded like millions of insects trapped in glass jars. Those insects made their racket all night and almost drove Marty mad.
The final bar to sleeping was, of course, the restless mind, recollection and yearning, the fevered erotic imagination, thoughts that ranged from his children to golden-coloured pints of ale to visions of himself and Ann Lim in carnal embrace. Marty slept only fitfully, woke up, slept again, and was torn between the torments imposed by the ulu and the demons of love, lust and romantic yearning created by his still youthful wishful thinking.
‘No question about it,’ he told Tone at first light. ‘That was, absolutely, beyond any shadow of doubt, the worst fucking night of my whole life.’
‘No argument,’ Tone said.
When they moved out again, they found it to be even worse than the first day. In the depths of the ulu, visibility was reduced to even less than the previous fifty metres. Even when clambering up a steep hill, where a small window in the trees enabled them to catch a glimpse of another tree-covered hillside surmounted by sheer blue sky, they hadn’t a clue as to their whereabouts, one hill being exactly like another. Also, they were continually forced off their course by swamps, thickets, precipices, outcrops of rock, and rivers. Sometimes they clambered up hills so steep that they had to hold onto the vegetation with both hands to pull themselves up, then lower themselves carefully from branch to branch as they made their way down. On such arduous climbs and descents they met every kind of thicket, including coarse shrubs so dense that a man could clamber over the summit of a hill without actually touching the ground.