by Shaun Clarke
Though the Sakai and Iban scouts had not been changed by their two-week hike through the ulu, Marty and most of his mates were shocked by what they saw in those mirrors. Indeed, they were astonished to see just how much weight they had lost– their bones stuck out everywhere. Even more disturbing was the discovery that their skin had turned a sickly yellow and was mottled with the purple spots of hundreds of leech bites. Their hands, knees and faces were covered with a network of cuts. Their clothes were in tatters.
‘We look like the walking dead,’ Marty said. ‘We’re alive and we’re still walking,’ Tone retorted, ‘so let’s count our blessings.’
‘Who dares wins,’ Marty said.
Chapter Nine
The capture and utilization of the CT jungle hide set the pattern for all subsequent SAS operations in the ulu. Once the camp had been secured and the prisoners handed over to the green slime for interrogation, the camp was taken over by the SF and turned into a forward operating base filled with Gurkhas, Royal Marine Commandos, Malayan Police, Sakai and Iban scouts, and the SAS. Fresh supplies, weapons and equipment were dropped by parachute from a Blackburn Beverley transport. By the following morning, with all the resups on the ground, the construction of the FOB began.
The guerrillas’ camp had consisted of not much more than a few thatched huts and lean-tos scattered around the clearing near open trenches filled with human excrement, urine, thousands of seething, stinking maggots and, even worse, the decomposing bodies of the guerrillas who had desperately dived in among the maggots to avoid detection, only to be torn apart by SAS hand grenades and bullets.
‘What I want,’ Lieutenant Kearney explained to the men gathered around him above one of the stinking trenches, now covered by clouds of buzzing flies, ‘is to construct a fully circular base camp surrounded by a cleared track, hemmed in with wire, and protected by anti-personnel mines and sentry posts. However,’ he continued, gazing down at the hideous mess below him, ‘the first task is to clean out these trenches. Please attend to it, gentlemen.’
‘Attend to it?’ Tone asked rhetorically, holding his nose and trying not to look down into the hellish trenches as Kearney, throwing Marty a quick grin, sauntered away. ‘How the fuck do we do that?’
‘Petrol,’ Taff Hughes informed hi m, taking in the seething maggots and corpses with his blue-eyed, unblinking gaze. ‘Just pour petrol in and set it alight. Burn the whole mess away.’
Mindful of how the seemingly mild Taff had ruthlessly despatched the parang-wielding female guerrilla with a bullet to the back of the head, Marty was not unduly surprised at how pragmatic he was now.
‘Good thinking,’ he said. ‘So let’s go and get some petrol and have us some bonfires.’
Though even the ‘bad boys’ of the unit, such as Rob Roy Burns and Pat O’Connor, looked slightly ill as they got on with this unsavoury task, they poured the petrol into the various trenches as instructed, set it alight, and jumped well back as the flames leaped up and the stench of roasting flesh filled the air, accompanied by the sizzling sound of burning maggots. The bonfires burned for a long time, while the rest of the work proceeded in earnest.
‘It’s vital,’ Kearney explained at one point, ‘that the FOB can be defended by only a handful of us when the rest of us are out on patrol. For this reason, the camp has to be designed within a circular cleared track that divides it from the surrounding jungle. It will in effect form an open area that will have to be crossed by anyone, friend or enemy, wanting to enter the camp. Go to it, gentlemen.’
The circular track was dug out of the ground over a period of days by SAS troopers with shovels and spades. While this job was underway, other troopers were put to work digging a series of defensive slit trenches at regular intervals around the camp, on the inner side of the circle, to be used as permanent sentry positions that would face out in every direction. The defensive trenches were similar to rectangular observation posts in that they had room for at least four men and shallow ‘restingup’ scrapes. However, unlike long-term OPs, though rather like sangars they lacked roofing and were exposed to the open air.
More trenches were dug out in a small circle near the centre of the compound where the Sakai were constructing a large HQ. This would be surrounded by similar constructions to be used as accommodations, cook house and mess hall, quartermaster store, armoury, and even a small sports ground for football and general exercise. As the camp would have no vehicles, there was no need for a motor pool, but a helicopter landing pad was levelled in the south-east corner of the circular compound.
The Sakai were expert at constructing such buildings out of local foliage and did so with the aid of fascinated SAS troopers. The framework for each building was made from twelve-to-fifteen-centimetre poles or green timber. The stronger timber from standing trees was used to support the main beam of the roof. As most of the Sakai were expert axe-men, they felled and trimmed the poles while the SAS troopers went out collecting the rattan required to bind the joints. When rattan of suitable thickness was found, two or three troopers hauled it in after pulling it out of the ground or down from the trees. Using a small, sharp knife, the Sakai craftsman split each rattan into two separate parts or, for finer lashings, into strips, then he cut away and discarded the inner part.
While some of the Sakai were splitting the rattan or building the framework of the huts, others were teaching the SAS troopers to plait atap for the roofing material. Large clumps of atap palms were to be found nearby, with drooping fronds six to nine metres long. The fronds were pulled down with a crook and the top two metres of the pithy stalk cut off, stacked in special racks to prevent the leaves from being damaged, then carried back to the camp in bundles. To plait the atap, the leaves on one side of the central stem had to be bent back sharply, then threaded under and over the leaves on the other side, giving a plaited surface fifteen or twenty centimetres wide. The atap was placed horizontally on the framework of the roof, starting at the bottom, then lashed in two places with fine rattan. At the apex of the roof a number of plaited atap were laid along the join of the two sides and pegged beneath the roof beam. The gables of the huts were filled in with atap placed just near enough together to form an unbroken surface, with the sides and ends left entirely open.
Initially, some of the SAS men, particularly Burns and O’Connor, resented having to take instructions from the aboriginals, but Kearney soon put them right.
‘The word “Sakai” means “slave”,’ he told them, ‘but call them that, or try treating them like that, and you’ll get a spear in your belly. Treat them with respect.’
Having already noted that the Sakai always carried their spears with them and looked as if they would be quick to use them, the troopers took note of what they had been told and treated the aboriginals with respect, if not great affection.
‘I don’t think I’d look good,’ Rob Roy said, ‘with one of those spears sticking out of my arse– so, you know, I’ll be careful.’
‘Verycareful,’ O’Connor said.
For the SAS sleeping accommodations, now nicknamed ‘bashas’, an aisle about two metres wide was left down the centre of each hut, with the timberframed beds, or sleeping benches, on either side raised about sixty centimetres off the ground. The beds themselves consisted of elephant grass and palm leaves woven through branch cross-pieces supported on lengths of stripped bamboo. Some of the troopers were able to sleep comfortably on these; others rolled their sleeping bag out and used it as a mattress. All the buildings were raised off the ground on stilts to lessen the chance of invasion by poisonous snakes, centipedes, scorpions and giant jungle rats.
‘We’ve got every creepy-crawlie known to man,’ Tone complained to Marty. ‘Anything you can find in your worst nightmares you can find in this pisshole.’
‘They don’t bother me,’ Taff Hughes said, dreamily checking the sharpness of his fighting knife by running his finger along the gleaming blade. ‘They’re just nature’s creatures, after all. They don’t give
mebad dreams.’
‘Does anything give you bad dreams?’ Marty asked, now convinced that the normally mild, babyfaced Taff was a natural-born killer.
‘No,’ Taff replied.
‘He’s fucking inhuman’ Tone said. ‘Those big babyblue eyes are quietly mad.’
When the fires of the latrine trenches had finally stopped burning, which took a few days, thatched lean-tos were raised over the separate trenches, with bamboo walls between them affording a modicum of privacy to the users. The trenches were then filled with a mixture of quicklime and petrol to prevent the return of the hideous maggots.
‘Not that they’d bother Taff,’ Tone said to Marty as they studied the blond-haired, blue-eyed, babyfaced killer. ‘He’d probably eat ’em for breakfast.’
‘I don’t doubt it,’ Marty said.
By this time the cleared path around the compound had been completed and was lined with a barbed-wire fence in which there were two openings, one as a patrol-route entry, the other as a patrol-route exit. The defensive trenches spaced at regular intervals around the inner side of the fence were manned permanently by SAS teams with tripod-mounted Bren guns and mortars. Anti-personnel mines were laid around the camp, just outside the perimeter, on the far side of the cleared path, except for the areas directly facing the patrol-route exit and entrance. The mines were set to be operated either manually or automatically when someone, obviously an enemy, stepped on them.
The circular compound was now a well-defended combination of base camp and forward operating base.
The policy of food denial and political isolation had been successful in driving the CT deeper into the ulu. The SF were therefore obliged to pursue the enemy there, which gave the SAS a second chance to prove their value and, at the same time, enabled Lieutenant Kearney to burn off some of the excess energy of his more troublesome troopers.
While more orthodox units, such as the Gurkha, Malay, African and Fijian battalions, concentrated on harrying the guerrillas of Jahore, Kearney’s men were making their first serious contact with the aboriginal tribes of the interior. Their main task was the protection of the Sakai jungle-dwellers who, being completely at the mercy of the CT guerrillas, had been forced deeper into their service as a source of food and reluctant manpower. Now Kearney’s SAS troopers, moving out from the FOB, began to win over the Sakai, essentially nomadic tribesmen, often staying with them for long periods, sometimes as long as thirteen weeks, before being relieved by other troopers from the base camp.
One of their main tasks was to build landing strips or helicopter landing pads to enable the aboriginals to market their supplies. They also brought them medical and engineering aid. In particularly dangerous situations, where the CT were terrorizing a village, the SAS simply moved the whole village and helped the natives build new homes elsewhere. These ‘new’ villages gradually became known as just that: ‘new villages’.
‘Just like being back in England,’ Tone joked. ‘Remember that, Marty? The new towns we were going to build when the craze for prefabs died out?’
‘Right, mate,’ Marty said. ‘And here we are building “new villages” in the jungle instead. Same difference, ain’t it?’
Generally speaking, the new villages needed a remote part of the jungle, well away from any paths that might be used by any prying CT guerrillas, yet not too far from the existing kampongs, which would supply them with food. A good defensive position was needed for the guard post, if possible on the only route into the new village. Water and atap for thatching also had to be near at hand.
Most of these new villages, actually camps or kampongs, took the same form: a small piece of ground capable of being levelled for a parade-andsports ground, two long huts nearby, one for the SAS troopers, the other for the Iban trackers; a small HQ located a little way back from the others, a cookhouse, preferably beside a stream, and community latrines or ‘thunder boxes’. The new villages were then turned into mini-fortresses, complete with Malayan police posts and armouries.
Much of the success of the new villages depended on the few SAS troopers who lived in them for long periods of time to sell the Sakai the idea of selfdefence. This was part of the campaign for hearts and minds.
For a couple of months, Lieutenant Kearney engaged his SF in a special operation designed to saturate a known CT area with troops so that the guerrillas’ mode of life would be disrupted. A concentrated programme of police checks of roads and new villages was put into action, forcing the guerrillas to retreat and use up their valuable food reserves, always hidden deep in the ulu. When this was underway, more military units moved in to specific areas where it was hoped, through intensive patrols and ambushes, to force the CT out into the open or into the many ‘stop’ positions (points of ambush) established on tracks in the ulu.
Helping the SAS were Gurkhas, Royal Marine Commandos, 22 Jungle Companies of the Malayan Field Police Force, and the Iban trackers from Sarawak, Borneo – former headhunters who, though fierce fighters, had to be trained by the SAS in the fundamentals of modern soldiering. Now formally recognized as a locally raised unit of the British Army and named the Sarawak Rangers, they were issued with rifles, which they used with more enthusiasm than skill, often firing them by mistake and, just as often, in the wrong direction. Nevertheless, they were invaluable as trackers and guides.
‘You have to hand it to ’em,’ Pat O’Connor said, his dark eyes flashing dangerously as he stared at some Iban trackers. ‘They mightn’t know one end of a rifle from the other, butthey sure know the jungle.’
‘Just keep them in front of you,’ Rob Roy advised, ‘and you should be okay when they fire those bloody rifles by accident. That way, they’ll only shoot themselves and we should be safe.’
‘Amen to that, pal.’ As the SAS troopers continued to learn from the Sakai and Iban trackers, they began to live in the ulu for ever longer periods of time, engaging in a series of arduous, potentially hazardous, CT ‘cleansing’ operations that certainly burned off the excess energy of the potential troublemakers such as Rob Roy and Pat O’Connor, both of whom, when not getting drunk, picking fights or playing dangerous pranks, were exceptional soldiers.
A typical CT cleansing operation was a joint effort between the RAF and the SF. When the enemy was identified as being concentrated in a particular area, the RAF would mount a heavy bombing raid of the jungle location. A couple of SAS squadrons would then parachute into the area cleared – or, more accurately, devastated– by the bombing. They would then either take out the surviving CT or, if the survivors had fled, take command of the area, ensuring that any remaining crops were destroyed, to deprive the CT of even more food.
By now the SAS had made frequent parachute drops into the ulu and suffered many casualties in their dangerous attempts to perfect tree-jumping. These casualties had occurred mainly because of the unpredictable behaviour of the parachutes as they were ‘bounced’ by the thermal effect of air above the jungle canopy. However, in the view of many officers, including Lieutenant Kearney, the technique of abseiling down the trees was proving to be more dangerous than it was worth.
In theory, the paratrooper detached himself from his parachute, lashed a long webbing strap to a thick branch, and descended safely to the forest floor. In reality, his webbing often bulged out where it had been stitched and was snagged at high speed as it travelled down through the D rings on the paratrooper’s harness. All too often this would jerk him to a violent halt, sometimes smashing him against the trunk of the tree, resulting in broken bones or even death. The latter usually occurred when the paratrooper, badly hurt and unable to stand the pain, cut himself loose from his snagged harness and fell about forty-five metres to the forest floor. Nevertheless, as treejumping was the only way to get into the areas cleared by the RAF, it remained the standard operating procedure of the campaign.
Paddy Kearney was an officer who believed he should try things himself before asking his men to do the same. This was a sentiment he shared with Bulldog Bell
amy, and both men, subconsciously adopting Marty, whom they viewed as a natural soldier, often took him with them into the ulu when they went on their exploratory hikes. Invariably they ended up in a Sakai village where they would settle in for a few days, using it as a base camp for even deeper hikes into the jungle, these led by a Sakai guide.
To Marty, being in such villages was particularly fascinating, almost like returning to the Stone Age. The youths and older men carried long blowpipes with bamboo quivers for poisoned arrows ornamented with exotic designs. Dressed only in a scanty loincloth, each carried on his back a small bag closely woven with fine rattan to hold his tobacco, flint, steel and tinder. The older men also carried an apparatus for preparing betel nut for chewing. Many of them wore strings of coloured beads looped over their shoulders, crossing front and rear, with more beads or an amulet of some kind around their necks. Some of them also wore a circle of woven and patterned bark to keep their hair in place, invariably with bright flowers tucked into it.
The women were bare-breasted, wearing only a sarong of cloth or bark. Some had red, white or ochre paint smeared on their faces, and a few were ornamented with a match-stalk thrust through the piece of flesh below and between the nostrils. All were smoke-stained and unwashed, but a few were beautiful, with luxuriant black hair tied in a bun held up with a bamboo comb.
‘I like a little piece of Asian occasionally,’ Tone said, ignoring the fact that Marty was practically in love with Ann Lim in Penang, ‘but this lot I can do without, big tits or not.’
‘You should have more respect,’ Marty told him. ‘That’s just the way they live. They think nothing of bare breasts.’
‘The Sakai men must be blind,’ Tone retorted. ‘Only that could explain why they hardly take any notice of their women’s knockers.’