Soldier H: The Headhunters of Borneo

by Shaun Clarke

  Dead-eye soon put a stop to it.

  ‘What the fuck do you expect?’ he asked contemptuously. ‘We chopped those Indos to pieces with our Claymores and bullets, then took off before they could retaliate. Can you imagine what the survivors felt like when they found Burgess wounded? What did you expect them to do? Give him a medal?’

  ‘That’s no reason to …’

  ‘Some of those Indos lost their limbs,’ Dead-eye said, cutting Terry off in mid-sentence. ‘Others had the flesh stripped off their bones. Still others had burns so severe they couldn’t possibly live. That isn’t just dying, Trooper. It isn’t heroics. It’s fucking terrible, it’s happening to your friends, and the bastards who did it have disappeared. Then you find one of those bastards. He was left behind by the other bastards. He’s lying there, wounded, at your feet, and you’re not inclined to admire him. Also, you want to find out where his friends are, so you go to work on him. What would you have done, Trooper?’

  Terry had no answer to that, so he just lowered his eyes.

  ‘Right,’ Dead-eye snapped. ‘Subject closed. Let’s move out, men.’

  By last light they had reached a suitable hiding place near Poeri, still on the River Koemba, from where they intended heading north, first to Stass, then on to the RV between Bau and Kuching.

  Despite Dead-eye’s outburst, the rest of the group was slowly burning up with the thought of what was happening to Ken. Subsequently, when they had made camp, eaten and bedded down in their bashas, they had a night made even more restless by anger and bitterness than it was by the usual flies, mosquitoes, spiders, ants, and the jungle’s customary nocturnal cacophony. Their mood was in no way improved when, the following morning, they learnt over the radio that according to the most recent Dyak reports, Ken had been tortured so appallingly that he died before his captors could ‘break’ him.

  ‘Bastards!’ Pete whispered.

  ‘Cunts!’ Alf exploded.

  ‘What a shitty thing to do,’ Terry said, wiping tears from his eyes. ‘I mean … Jesus! We can’t just forget this. We must do something.’

  ‘What we do is head back to the RV,’ Dead-eye said firmly. ‘Now let’s pack up and move out.’

  Nevertheless, as they made the short hike to Poeri, from where they intended branching north, Dead-eye knew that what had happened would rankle with the men and maybe make them lose focus. He was therefore almost relieved when, just before they reached Poeri, a longboat containing three uniformed Indonesian soldiers came along the river, heading upstream.

  Dead-eye plunged into the shelter of the trees by the river bank, followed immediately by the others. Kneeling there in the firing position, they watched the boat approaching.

  ‘Well?’ Pete asked, his finger itchy on the trigger. ‘Do we just let them waltz past?’

  ‘They’re not waltzing,’ Alf retorted. ‘They’re rowing like fucking Cambridge dons … And that boat’s filled with weapons.’

  ‘And a dead pig,’ Terry observed. ‘That means food for a lot of men.’

  The three of them turned to stare at Dead-eye. He stared back, then shrugged.

  ‘Let’s not argue,’ he said.

  While Dead-eye, Alf and Terry took aim with their Armalites, Pete unclipped an ‘80’ white-phosphorus incendiary grenade from his webbed belt. ‘Let’s not take any chances,’ he said with grim satisfaction. After unpinning the grenade, he stepped forward for a better view, though still protected by the trees, waited until the boat was abreast of his position, then hurled the grenade.

  That movement was enough to attract the attention of the Indonesians in the boat. They glanced up just as Pete stepped back into the trees, raised their eyes even higher when they saw the grenade, then, shouting frantically, threw themselves face-down in the boat as the grenade fell towards them. It actually bounced off the stern, exploding with a thunderous clap, creating a great fountain of rushing, roaring water and smoke illuminated by silvery phosphorus. The stern of the boat was thrown high in the air, forcing the prow down into the water and throwing the soldiers forward, one into the other, with the third one – the one nearest the explosion – bursting into flames and catapulting over his tangled friends, into the river.

  Even as the remaining two were struggling to right themselves, one reaching for his rifle, the SAS men on the river bank opened fire with their Armalites, peppering the boat from front to rear, making the soldiers spasm epileptically in a dreadful dance of death as fragments of wood exploded upwards and rained back down over them.

  In seconds the two soldiers were dead and the hull of the boat was disintegrating and starting to sink as the SAS men continued firing in an orgy of vengeance. A minute later, when they had finally stopped firing, the boat was practically in pieces, taking in water and going down as the water turned crimson with the blood of the dead men;

  The dead men drifted with the boat’s debris in swirling blood-red currents, then all evidence of the attack – the wooden flotsam, the bodies, the bloody water – was carried away downstream and eventually disappeared.

  ‘Satisfied?’ Dead-eye asked his men.

  ‘Yes, boss!’ they replied, one by one.

  ‘Right,’ Dead-eye said. ‘Let’s go.’

  As the dead men drifted down river, being swept towards their living comrades in some far off, hidden camp, the SAS patrol headed back across the border, beyond which were more hellish swamps, belukar and primary jungle. They tried not to think ahead.

  8

  Further along the border, on the lower slopes of Gunong Rawan, near Tebedu in the 3rd Division, Sergeant Alan Hunt and Corporal Ralph Sanderson, at the head of their patrol, were moving down from a ridge on a jungle track towards an old Indonesian border-terrorist camp that had been discovered the day before and appeared not to have been used for many months. Nevertheless, as both men knew by now, appearances could be deceptive, so they both advanced on the camp with great care, with Sanderson at the front as lead scout and Hunt second in line.

  Hunt was an amiable giant of a man from rural Oxfordshire, with thinning red hair, a constantly flushed, blue-veined face (his heavy drinking only showed there; certainly not in a drinker’s paunch) and a body which, for all of its weight, was pure muscle and bone. Thirty-four years old, he had been wounded when engaged with the Gloucestershire Regiment in their epic battle on the River Injon in Korea, damaging his right arm so badly that it became paralysed and required four years to repair. Once recovered, however, he had applied to the SAS, got in with flying colours, and sustained his already admirable reputation with his work during the Malayan Emergency. Now, here he was, big and wind-blown, yet oddly graceful, moving down the densely forested slope with all the stealth of a tribesman, holding his Armalite at the ready and expert in using it. He was a man worth admiring.

  Sanderson admired him. Up at the front on point for the sergeant he knew so well, aware that Indonesian troops could be hiding anywhere, ready to spring an ambush, Sanderson was glad to have Hunt backing him up. Ever since the disaster at Long Jawi, when everyone but Sanderson had lost his life, Sanderson had been more aware than ever of how easy it was to die in this war. A product of the Fifeshire coalmines and the Queen’s Own Highlanders, he took pride in being a good soldier and respected only those who felt the same way. Being a good soldier was being a worthy man and Sanderson wanted to be just that.

  Reaching a curtain of bamboo, he knelt on the ground and listened intently for any unfamiliar sounds. As no breeze could penetrate the dense canopy of the jungle, let alone reach the ground, and since the animals were always careful to conceal their presence from alien presences, such as humans, Sanderson heard nothing other than the occasional cry of a long-armed gibbon or the squawk of a distant hornbill. Apart from that there was nothing but a total, oddly disturbing silence.

  Staring carefully between gaps in the bamboo curtain, he saw the Indonesian camp stretched out just below. Built in a clearing between the jungle and a stream that flowed down to the Riv
er Sekayan, it consisted of many bamboo-and-thatched lean-tos without roofs, obviously used as bashas; open-air latrines now covered with swarms of flies; and a series of sunken rectangles that had clearly been gun emplacements and defensive slit trenches. The Indonesians had not bothered to fill in any of these when they moved on. Also, as Sanderson saw when he used his binoculars for a closer inspection, they had not bothered to clean up their debris, which included the black ash of camp-fires, hundreds of cigarette butts, the bones from cooked chicken and pigs, and a lot of rusty food tins with labels stating in Malay that they contained rations for the Indonesian Army. A very careless commander, Sanderson realized, had made no attempt to cover his battalion’s tracks.

  Lowering his binoculars, Sanderson glanced back up the wooded slope to see Hunt keeping him covered with his 5.56mm Armalite light automatic rifle. Unseen, because carefully hidden in the jungle behind the sergeant, was the rest of the patrol – three SAS troopers and two Border Scouts – armed with 7.62mm SLRs and now experienced at using them, after four weeks of successful ‘Tiptoe Boys’ raids. During that time they had travelled light, with no bergens; only their belts and personal weapons. This had made the ‘shoot-and-scoot’ standard operating procedure much easier and the raids more successful.

  Before returning his gaze to the Indonesian camp, Sanderson sniffed the air, trying to catch a tell-tale whiff of anything that would give away another human presence: scent, cigarette smoke or even hair-cream. In the windless jungle such aromas could hang around for hours, which is why the SAS men were careful not to smoke or pamper themselves with hair-creams or aftershave when on patrol. Indeed, so still was the air in this jungle that a man could avoid having his throat cut by smelling the sweat of an approaching enemy. That, in fact, had been the case with Sanderson and he had never forgotten it; no more than he had forgotten his narrow escape at Long Jawi. He considered himself a very lucky man and hoped it would stay that way.

  Looking to the front again, Sanderson surveyed the open slope between himself and the camp, which had obviously been cleared by the Indonesians to give their sentries a better view. Seeing no movement, he jumped up and ran forward at the crouch, then dropped down behind another screen of bamboo. As he did so, Hunt advanced behind him, taking up the position Sanderson had just left. The rest of the group then advanced as well, until they were spread out around the position formerly held by their sergeant. They had advanced this way for the past hour, which made the going slow and extremely frustrating.

  Again Sanderson looked out between the tall bamboo stalks. At first he saw nothing. Then he thought he saw a slight movement 45 degrees to his right. Turning in that direction, he was startled to see an Indonesian soldier five or six yards away, lying down beside a tree, taking aim with what looked like a Lee-Enfield .303 bolt-action rifle.

  Before Sanderson could move the Indonesian opened fire, followed almost simultaneously by a fusillade from his hidden fellow soldiers. Something smashed into Sanderson’s leg, bowling him over. Falling, he hit the ground hard, then found himself lying behind a small rock to his left with blood spurting up into his face from a dreadful wound in his left thigh.

  ‘Shit!’ he whispered from between clenched teeth, hardly able to hear his own voice above the racket of the battle suddenly raging in front and behind him.

  Where the hell was his rifle? Unable to sit upright, he twisted to the side and saw his Armalite just as another Indonesian, who had been lying concealed in the tall grass beyond the rock, also sat up, aiming his Lee-Enfield. The man was so close that Sanderson even saw the tiger’s-head emblem on the shoulder of his jungle-green uniform and the panic in his youthful brown eyes.

  With no time to spare, Sanderson grabbed his Armalite, blinked blood from his eyes, and fired a short burst that punched the soldier backwards and threw him into the tall grass. He fired another burst to be sure, then wiped more blood from his face and glanced back up the slope.

  Hunt was running to his rescue, zigzagging at the crouch between the clumps of bamboo as purple tracers from enemy machine-guns arced past him on both sides. Halfway down, he jerked wildly, dropped his weapon and collapsed, even as Sanderson saw the cloth of his trousers exploding and spitting twin streams of thick blood.

  The sergeant fell face-down, but rolled onto his back. He tried to sit up but failed, his shattered legs useless. So, ignoring the bullets stitching the ground on both sides, he rolled back onto his belly, aimed his Armalite and opened fire again, determined to give Sanderson cover.

  Behind him, but further up the hill, the rest of the patrol were trying to keep the Indonesians pinned down with a sustained fusillade.

  Unable to walk, but still with one good leg, Sanderson managed to stand upright and hop awkwardly up the hill towards Hunt, who was too busy firing to notice his ungainly progress. Once parallel with his friend, but about five yards away, Sanderson dropped to his belly again, gritting his teeth against the pain, and joined the fire-fight.

  The Indonesians were spread out on the ground in an arc covering the approach to the empty camp. Lying belly-down, half hidden by the tall grass and clumps of bamboo, they were keeping up a relentless barrage of fire.

  Hunt stopped, glanced back over his shoulder, up the hill, and bawled, ‘Bug out!’ He then turned back and continued firing, enabling the rest of the patrol to make their escape and return to the RV, where they could get help.

  As the patrol stopped firing and disappeared over the crest of the hill, one of the Indonesian soldiers, not noticing the wounded men, jumped to his feet and started racing up the hill, heading straight for Hunt. The big, cool-headed sergeant, his hips and legs drenched in blood, fired a short burst from his Armalite and felled the running man. When a second Indonesian stood up, Sanderson put a lethal burst into him, too. The rest of the Indonesians remained on the ground, but kept firing up the hill.

  Letting them get on with it, Sanderson rolled onto his back, managed to sit upright, protected by the rock, and examined his wounded leg. It was a mess. In fact, he could not feel it, nor see the wound for the blood still pumping out of it, and so was not sure if the leg was still fixed to his upper thigh or had been torn off by bullets. Delicately wiping away the blood with his fingers, he saw that the bullet, or bullets, had severed the large femoral artery and shattered the femur, though the leg was still joined to the thigh.

  Realizing that if he did not stop the bleeding immediately, he would be dead in no time – the blood was pumping out in sprays about fifteen inches long – he hurriedly removed the sweat rag from his forehead, tied a knot in the middle of it, pressed the knot firmly against the artery in the groin, tied the rest of the sweat rag around the limb, wrapped the ends of the rag around the handle of his commando knife and then twisted the knife until the cloth had tightened painfully, with the knot pressed like a vice on the artery, cutting off the supply of blood. When the blood had stopped pumping, he tied another knot in the cloth, completing the makeshift tourniquet, then injected himself with a shot of morphine and heaved a sigh of relief.

  Looking up, he saw that the Indonesians were still firing at him and Hunt. Though the bullets were turning the ground into a convulsion of boiling dust and spinning foliage, Sanderson crawled over to his friend, who, when he saw him coming, rolled onto his back and gazed up at the sky.

  ‘I can’t move my damned legs,’ he said.

  Hunt’s face was a white mask glistening with sweat. He had been shot in the hip, though his wound was much worse than Sanderson’s. The bullet had entered the left hip, almost severing the sciatic nerve, thereby paralysing and rendering numb that leg. While the hole punched in the front of the thigh had been only slightly larger than the .303-inch bullet that caused it, it had enlarged as the bullet passed through the pelvic opening, destroying a fist-sized mass of muscle in the right buttock and therefore paralysing that leg as well. Besides losing a mass of blood, Hunt had lost the use of both legs.

  ‘Fucking mess, eh?’ he said, gritting his t
eeth.

  ‘’Fraid so, boss,’ Sanderson replied.

  Another sustained burst of fire came from the Indonesian positions and more green tracer shot upwards and whipped past them, just a few feet away.

  ‘Russian RPD machine-gun,’ Hunt said. ‘I know. I saw the whites of his fucking eyes. Then he copped me.’ He winced and looked down at the blood soaking his trousers around the tattered hole. ‘Christ!’ he said softly. ‘At least it’s not a tourniquet job.’ He had not noticed the crude tourniquet on Sanderson’s leg. ‘I think I can fix this.’

  While Sanderson kept the Indonesians pinned down with single shots from his Armalite, thus conserving ammunition while remaining a viable threat, Hunt removed two shell dressings from his first aid kit, worked them in and under the torn cloth around the bloody wound, gritted his teeth and pressed them into the hole, then held them in position by wrapping his sweat rag around the thigh. After completing the job with a shot of morphine, he rolled onto his belly, beside Sanderson, and picked up his Armalite to fire on the Indonesians.

  ‘Shoot-and-scoot,’ he said.

  ‘What does that mean?’ Sanderson asked him.

  ‘It means we have to prevent casualties when there’s no point in fighting to hold ground. It means that in a situation like this, you pocket your pride and piss off. It means that we all scoot independently for the RV and that if a man is incapacitated, you have to leave him, at least temporarily, to prevent further casualties.’

  ‘Piss on that,’ Sanderson said.

  ‘No,’ Hunt replied. ‘We don’t piss on that. You go back to the RV and join up with the others. If you find enough men for reinforcements, you can come back to find me. If you still find the Indos here, you piss off and leave me to my fate. If, on the other hand, the Indos have gone you can pick me up for the CasEvac and early pension.’

  ‘I don’t like it,’ said Sanderson gloomily.

  ‘It’s not a request. Get going, Corporal.’