by Pete Scholey
In the first instance, the SAS patrol would set up a hide near a village, or kampong, and watch the activities in the village for a few days without being seen. Once they had established that there were no Indonesians in the kampong, they would introduce themselves to the headman or elder, showing that they had no hostile intent. In many cases, the SAS unit would contain the first white men the villagers had ever seen, so the soldiers would take care to observe protocol, respect local customs and act with utmost tact and courtesy. They would visit the village each day and retire to their own camp each night, covering their tracks as best they could. By offering gifts and basic medical aid, conversing in a mixture of Malay and sign language, they would befriend the villagers, warning that evil men lived across the mountains. These men would come one day and if they were ever seen, the villagers were encouraged to let the SAS know about it. Eventually, the SAS team would set up camp on the edge of the village, embarking on patrols of the local area that might last several days, looking for evidence of any Indonesian activity in the area. If they found a fresh enemy trail, the team would radio HQ, using Morse transceivers, for support to set up an ambush. This system proved to be an effective tactic. Movement in the jungle was tediously slow for everyone but by using helicopters, an ambush team could be inserted further down the trail to lie in wait for the enemy.
Using the network of kampongs in their ‘patch’ as their eyes and ears, the SAS teams were able to make it far more difficult for the Indonesians to infiltrate the border area undetected, but on 28 September 1963 the British suffered a major setback when a group of Gurkhas and Border Scouts (locals armed by the SAS and trained by the Gurkhas) was attacked at a post they had established in the village of Long Jawi in Sarawak. The 30 men defending the village had little chance against the force of around 200 Indonesian soldiers and were unable to radio for help due to poor atmospheric conditions. Only two Gurkhas and one Border Scout survived, escaping through the jungle to make a four-day trek to the Gurkha HQ. Gurkha ambush squads were immediately dispatched by helicopter to lie in wait along the Indonesians’ anticipated routes of retreat and when their escape craft were discovered on a river bank, the Gurkhas destroyed them, leaving the raiders to face a series of jungle ambushes in which many were killed. More were hunted down in small groups over the following month before they could reach the safety of their own border.
Further raids were mounted by the Indonesians throughout the year, until there came a major turning-point in the campaign in December 1963. A force of more than 120 guerrillas launched an attack against the village of Kalabakan in eastern Sabah, killing eight and wounding 19 members of the Royal Malay Regiment. As the raiders withdrew towards the Kalimantan border, they were ambushed by Gurkhas who killed or captured most of their number. At least 21 of these so-called ‘guerrillas’ were identified as regular Indonesian marines, confirming the long-held suspicions about Sukarno’s direct involvement in the conflict. In January 1964, further evidence, if any were needed, came to light when British troops discovered an enemy camp on the Sabah/Sarawak border. The camp was attacked and seven Indonesians were killed before the others fled into the jungle. Documentation found at the scene provided irrefutable proof of Indonesian Army involvement in recent attacks and when Sukarno was confronted with this evidence, he called a ceasefire, asking for negotiations to end the hostilities.
The ceasefire lasted only a few weeks, however, before the Indonesians abandoned the talks and recommenced military action against the British and Malay forces, making no attempt now to disguise the fact that their regular army, rather than an independent guerrilla force, was involved. By March 1964 they were once again employing their usual hit-and-run tactics, attacking small, vulnerable garrisons before disappearing back over their own border, happy in the knowledge that British forces were forbidden to pursue them into Kalimantan territory. They believed they could launch their attacks from forward bases in Kalimantan and enjoy complete safety once they withdrew back to those bases. Their complacency was about to be shattered.
In the spring of 1964, the SAS began covert cross-border patrols into Indonesian territory in Kalimantan. Their aim was to seek out the Indonesian forward bases, identify routes used by the enemy to approach the border and create detailed maps of both. If compromised by the Indonesians, the SAS patrols knew that they would be on their own. Reinforcements could not be called in when the patrols were operating in enemy territory, as the British government would immediately be accused of invading Indonesia. The patrols wore regular British Army uniforms and carried standard-issue SLR rifles so that, should any of them be killed or captured, the British could claim that they were ordinary soldiers who had become disorientated in the jungle and strayed across the border by accident. Such an excuse would hold little water if the men were identified as being SAS. The reconnaissance patrols were limited to a maximum of three weeks, after which the patrol members would often emerge from the jungle looking like zombies. Their clothes would be in rags, they would be exhausted and half-starved, having survived on rations that provided only about 3,500 calories a day compared to the recommended 5,000 calories – nobody ever put on any weight during a jungle patrol. Good results were obtained, however, allowing British forces to become more pro-active, intercepting the Indonesians as they launched an incursion rather than simply waiting to react to the latest cross-border attack.
As operations intensified, the Indonesians began to move their forward bases back from the immediate border areas. This meant that patrols had to penetrate deeper into enemy territory. Previously limited to infiltrations of only 3 miles (5km), they were now permitted to extend this to 12 miles (20km). There was now no point in attempting to use the ‘map-reading error’ excuse and the SAS patrols began to use more unconventional weapons, including hunting shotguns and the American Armalite rifle, both ideal for jungle operations. It was around this time, too, that what were known as ‘Claret’ operations were sanctioned. The object of these sorties was to seek out Indonesian special forces bases and pre-empt any build-up prior to an Indonesian attack, harassing the Indonesians through ambushes and attacks on their supply routes within their own territory. These operations were deemed top secret as, technically, Britain was not at war with Indonesia. The Indonesians, however, were soon on their guard.
This was the situation, then, in February 1965 when Jock, as lead scout, found himself at the head of a five-man patrol just inside the Kalimantan border, tasked with seeking out an Indonesian special forces unit thought to be operating in the area. With the patrol commander, Geordie Lillico, following a short distance behind him, Jock led the group down from a jungle ridge onto a rough, narrow track that wound its way through thick bamboo towards a clearing where an old Indonesian camp had been spotted the day before. It was thought that the camp had been abandoned some six months previously, but as Jock pushed aside a curtain of bamboo across their path, a flicker of movement to his right caught his eye. Raising his head after ducking under the bamboo, he spotted an Indonesian soldier less than 20ft (6m) away. The soldier opened fire, hitting Jock in the upper thigh and knocking him off the track. Jock let out a few bursts from his Armalite as he went down and landed in the bamboo just a few feet away from another Indonesian. As the enemy soldier moved to bring his weapon to bear, Jock shot him.
Meanwhile, Geordie Lillico, who had rushed forward immediately on hearing the gunfire, had also been hit. He had taken a bullet in the hip that had blown a big hole in his back as it exited. Geordie collapsed on the track. He couldn’t move his legs, but he could still use his rifle and returned the enemy fire. Jock hopped over in Geordie’s direction to join in the firefight but Geordie, having seen Jock apparently on his feet, yelled at him to make his way back to the rest of the patrol. He didn’t realize that Jock’s femur had been smashed and that Jock was little better off than himself. If they stayed together, however, each of them knew that they were both going to be found and killed. Jock reluctantly did as he was told and c
rawled away.
The remainder of the patrol, unable to see exactly what was going on, decided that rather than charge forward into what appeared to be a well-prepared Indonesian ambush, they would follow the standard ‘shoot- and-scoot’ policy and withdraw to a pre-designated rendezvous (RV) point. They knew that they were certainly outgunned, the Indonesians operating in far larger numbers than the SAS, but fired their weapons in the air, making plenty of noise to give the enemy the impression that there were dozens of British troops somewhere on the ridge. Hopefully, this might persuade the enemy fighters to keep their heads down in their ambush position instead of venturing out to hunt down their prey. Had Geordie and Jock not been wounded, that might have bought them enough time to get away.
By now Jock was beginning to realize just how seriously he had been wounded. There was no way he could get to his feet, or use his wounded leg, so he dragged himself back up the track to the ridge where he fired several bursts from his weapon in the general direction of the enemy fighters, hoping either to lead them away from Lillico or to persuade them to withdraw altogether as British reinforcements were arriving. He continued to fire two rounds every 15 minutes, the standard recognition signal for any search party out looking for him to home in on. This also, of course, meant giving away his position to any Indonesians close enough to identify where the shots were coming from. He was losing a lot of blood, so applied a tourniquet to his thigh and bandaged the wound as best he could with a field dressing. Using a tourniquet, however, is a dangerous procedure and it must be released from time to time to prevent gangrene, among other complications. Then he had no choice but to continue towards the border, clawing his way hand-over-hand along the fetid jungle floor. Every few minutes, every few feet, he had to stop and partly unwind the tourniquet. He injected himself with morphine to help him cope with the excruciating pain and during one short break even managed to write a brief report of the engagement on part of his blood-stained map. The maps we used in Borneo had large areas where the grid squares had been left blank, signifying only that no accurate survey of that part of the jungle had been completed. In one of the blank sections of grid Jock wrote: ‘As far as I could see there was only a patrol. They heard us coming through the bamboo. I killed their leading scout. Just in case I don’t make it. They had a tiger flash. Jock.’
This was potentially important information, Jock’s observations suggesting that the Indonesians might be sending out patrols similar in size to our own, possibly even to look for us. Certainly the ‘tiger flash’ shoulder patch Jock saw them wearing suggested that this was an Indonesian special forces patrol. Naturally, all the time, Jock was wondering about Geordie. The gunfire had petered out about ten minutes after the initial contact. That either meant that the Indonesians had backed off, as was normal in jungle skirmishes, or that Geordie had been captured or killed.
As darkness fell, Jock slumped in a muddy hollow to wait out the night. He drifted in and out of consciousness until, at first light, he forced himself to start moving again. His painful progress saw him cover about 0.6 miles (1km) during the course of the day, about half the distance to the Gurkha border post for which he was heading. As he lay in a stream bed around 6.00pm, contemplating another night out in the open, he was found by a rescue party.
When Jock and Geordie had failed to make the rendezvous, the rest of his patrol, knowing that they stood little chance of finding them on their own and every chance of walking into another ambush, had moved quickly back to the Gurkha post, collected reinforcements and immediately formed a search party. At the time I was out with another patrol, led by Lofty Large, so the first I heard that Jock had been hit was when we stepped off the helicopter, having just been lifted out of the jungle. Major Woodiwiss, our squadron commander, was there to meet us and told us what had happened. We still had a full day’s rations, the chopper was still ‘burning and turning’ and Lofty immediately volunteered us to go back into the jungle and help the search teams. We were all up for it, but the major said the situation was under control and we were sent off for debriefing. In fact, by then Jock had already been found. His own patrol, with the help of their Gurkha back-up, had heard his two-shot recognition signal and zeroed in on him. Ginge Tyler (see Chapter 7) was part of Jock’s patrol and was the one who tended to his wounds in the stream bed. He later recalled:
The maggots in the wound were not a pleasant sight, but I knew they were cleaning the wound. I then administered morphine and penicillin and strapped his legs to his Armalite as the injured one was twisted and could not be manipulated.
I then put him in the most comfortable position (so he said), gave him a cup of tea and then a chopper came overhead and tried to drop the winch and stretcher. The trees were too tall – the stretcher was within 10 feet and we could do nothing about it.
As it was getting dark, the chopper had to return to base. Ginge detailed four Gurkhas of roughly the same height to carry Jock’s stretcher, reasoning that four of the same size could take a corner each and keep Jock level and as comfortable as possible. Conditions were as slippery and treacherous as anywhere else in the jungle and the four sure-footed Gurkhas were the best bet to get Jock out without causing him any further injury. They made for an RV where there were shorter trees and Ginge tended to Jock through the night until another helicopter arrived in the morning to take them both to Kuching hospital. When they were there, Ginge was told that another SAS soldier had been brought in. It was Geordie. He had taken morphine and passed out in a clump of bamboo after the firefight, then, although unable to walk, managed to evade the Indonesian troops and drag himself 440 yards (400m) up the ridge. He eventually used a search and rescue beacon to signal a helicopter (having let several flights pass by because he knew the enemy was too close), which winched him aboard.
Sergeant Lillico was awarded the MM for his actions that day and Jock was mentioned in dispatches. This was by no means the end of Jock’s career with the Regiment, though. I didn’t get the chance to visit him in the hospital in Kuching as we were kept pretty busy between patrols. There was no time for hospital visits, so the next time I saw Jock was when we were all back in the UK. I went to see him in hospital the first chance I got. The surgeons had done a wonderful job on his leg, but he was hating every second of his time as an invalid. Jock simply wasn’t the type to be content with loafing around all day waiting to get better.
No one was surprised, then, when he came hobbling into the base in Hereford on two walking sticks. It was only nine or ten months since he had been shot in the jungle and sustained the wounds that would probably have finished off a lesser man, but here he was, upright, mobile and demanding to know who was coming out on the town with him for a booze-up! It wasn’t long before he discarded the sticks altogether and he worked with his usual determination to get himself fully fit again. Unfortunately, despite the reconstructive surgery, he suffered permanent damage to his wounded leg, which ended up marginally shorter than his good leg, and even Jock eventually had to admit that he’d never be operational with a Sabre Squadron (operational fighting squadron) again. He was adamant, though, that this wouldn’t be the end of his career with the SAS. It was quite unusual for anyone to transfer from a Sabre Squadron to the SAS signals unit, but Jock taught himself all there was to know about radios and the communications networks on which we relied, becoming as skilled in the technical aspects of signalling as he was with the weapons and equipment we used in the field. When we went out to the Middle East, Jock came too, setting up radio relay stations and doing every bit as proficient and reliable a job with the signals boys as he had done when on operations.
Jock even went back to parachuting again after arguing relentlessly that he was fit enough to jump. The jump master used to joke that he’d try to land Jock by a hole in the drop zone to make up for his short leg. Eventually, Jock returned to The Parachute Regiment, from where we had both come, then had a stint with a Scottish regiment and served as an instructor with a TA light infantry unit bef
ore flying out to Beirut to work as a security consultant. He worked with both the Polish and the Americans in Beirut, receiving the Zloty Krzyz Zaslugi (the Gold Cross of Honour) from the Polish government in 1985 for his distinguished service with them, and a similar award from the Americans.
Yet if this short appraisal of Jock’s career should make him appear to be a completely carefree adventurer, it should also be remembered that, like most of us ‘lifers’, he was married and had a family life at home. Even battle-hardened veterans like Jock need to feel the comfort of knowing, when crouched in a shell-hole thousands of miles from home with bullets zipping over your head, that there is someone at home waiting, hoping, praying that you will come back unharmed. Jock’s compassionate nature and generosity extended even beyond his own family. He ‘sponsored’ a young girl in West Africa, donating a little from his earnings each month to help pay for her schooling and to try to help give her a good start in life. This may not sound like much, but Jock’s attitude was that if everyone like him who could afford to do so gave just a little, we would all be giving a whole lot to help those less fortunate than ourselves.
Sadly, Jock died in 2004. He is sorely missed by all who knew him and will forever remain one of my greatest heroes.