The Regiment

by Michael Asher

  The Hunters had swept the Arabs off the high ground, but de la Billière was grimly aware that the shield would go down at last light. He knew the Arabs knew it too. Sunset was the time they liked to attack. In the ops tent, Mike Wingate-Gray was sifting through schemes to extract the boys before dark. There was no shortage of volunteers for rescue missions, but Wingate-Gray wanted a clean extraction with no casualties. A Wessex chopper went in with another A Squadron troop to try to pull the patrol out. The heli stuttered back to the FOB with .303 rounds punched through its rear rotor and petrol-tank. The RHA gun-battery lobbed twenty-five-pound shells along the approaches to the position, without much effect.

  At about 1630 hours, L. Cpl. Paddy Baker got zonked in the leg with .303 rounds as he adjusted position. ‘I’m hit!’ he hollered. The patrol medic whaled extra field dressings at him. Baker caught them and lapped them on with gritted teeth, trying desperately to stay out of sight. Arab lead churned overhead, scorched air, butterflied off hard ground. Baker thanked his lucky stars the Arabs were using do-it-yourself ammo that lacked the hitting-power of standard ball. Bullets were still bullets, though, and he’d copped two of them. As he worked the dressings on, his blood pooled on the hotplate stones.

  Two Arabs were flanking in on them from cover. Sgt. Alf ‘Geordie’ Tasker, a beefy redhead with a walrus moustache, poked the muzzle of the Bren their way, pulled metal, double-tapped. Rounds thumped. Crimson whorls licked white dishdashas. Arabs rolled. Baker ripped covering rounds to dissuade any other heroes. The enemy stayed in cover, ricky-ticking shots.

  The sun’s fire was cooking out slowly, but the hills still after-glowed with heat. Edwards scoped the shadows ballooning, the grooves in the jewel-faceted ridgebacks thickening purple. The whole area was now looped in a pool of shadow from the high ridges. The Hunter strikes were losing effect. The enemy had been increasing in dribs and drabs all day, and Edwards guessed they were massing for an assault.

  As the last fighter-bombers hauled off into the pink towards the coast, Edwards told his patrol to prepare to move. They would evacuate the position in darkness, using fire-and-movement. Four men would bob out of the sangars into the rocks and the rest would drop into the wadi under covering salvos. Edwards told signaller Nick Warburton to let the OC know they were moving.

  At Thumier, de la Billière rogered the message, then heard the radio fizz. There was no answering call. He thumbed the pressal, reciting the patrol’s call-sign like a mantra. Static warped in from the void. He hoped it was a technical hitch, but that seemed a shaky bet, because Warburton had been coming through loud and clear all day. He looked up to see the drained faces of Wingate-Gray and his SSM, Lawrence Smith. They were all aware of the most likely scenario – that the enemy had overrun the position.

  On the hill, Edwards realized Warburton hadn’t moved in half a minute. He crawled over, and found the signaller straddled over the radio set with a slug in his head. The set had been shattered, which meant they were out of comms: they were on their own. The SAS-men filled mags, clipped them in place, checked gas-plugs, pumped 7.62mm rounds into chambers, psyched up for take-off. Enemy rounds fried oxygen, whizzed and belled off stones. Edwards inquired if everyone had taken their Paludrin. Big Geordie Tasker snorted, wondering whether Edwards was serious. If they got out of this, a bout of malaria would be small beer.

  The sun sank and faded into cherry and mauve, its fire absorbed by the cloak of night. The moon wasn’t yet up. Edwards had arranged an artillery barrage to cover the withdrawal. When the darkness was full, he croaked the order to move. Half the team sneaked out of cover, threw themselves into rocks and blimped bullets. Tasker worked the Bren, boosting tracer at adoo shooters behind the boulders fifty metres away. As the other half of the team speedballed to the wadi, Edwards timbered over, struck in the head. He was dead before he hit the downslope. The others dogged into cover, punched fire. Muzzle-flashes flacked. The four men left on the hill streaked after them, as Arabfire thrashed empty sangars. Twenty-five-pound shells from the far-off Horse Artillery yawed through darkness, smashed into the position, volcanoed up in the night. The seven survivors of the Edwards patrol monkey-jogged down the wadi, clambered silently up the side, found the goat-track on top, and patrolled back towards base.

  At 0500 hours, de la Billière jerked up from the camp-bed he’d taken a snooze on two hours earlier, and asked for news. There wasn’t any. He and Wingate-Gray gulped tea and hung on the radio till blocks of wan light dropped through the door gap, when the set suddenly bristled. They sat up. Three men of Edwards’s patrol had been picked up by armoured cars only a klick from the base. They grabbed weapons, piled into a Land Rover, and shot off to investigate.

  The men turned out to be Paddy Baker, Geordie Tasker and a third man. Baker said that they’d got within sight of base two hours before first light, but had held off in case the sentries opened up. Edwards and Warburton were dead. The other four were probably somewhere behind. He told the officers that they’d dogged the goat-track along the lip of the wadi in case the adoo tried to cut them off, but the whole withdrawal had been weird. After moonrise, they’d seen enemy where there weren’t any, heard sounds, mixed up boulders for tents. Baker had hobbled along behind the rest with another trooper who’d taken a hit, bugged by a feeling someone was following them. They dropped into the rocks and clocked moonlight on a white dishdasha. They let the Arab come almost abreast before they took him out, bopping twenty rounds apiece at three more shadows tagging behind him. Baker had kept on squeezing the trigger after his mag was empty, so light-headed from blood-loss he wondered why his weapon wouldn’t work.

  The other four members of the patrol came in during the day. De la Billière was shattered by the loss of his friend Edwards, and blamed himself for the fiasco. He knew he’d rushed the boys into the job without considering all the possibilities, and was so plagued by remorse and guilt that he had to stalk off into the desert and sit on his own for a while. The survivors didn’t seem weighed down by grief, though. ‘When fighting for your life with a fifty-fifty chance, you’ve got to enjoy it,’ said Alf Tasker. ‘It was a good day.’

  As a result of the contact, the parachute drop was scrapped and the op postponed. Later, a whole brigade was sent in to do the same job. The bodies of Edwards and Warburton were decapitated and their heads exhibited on stakes in the North Yemeni town of Ta’izz. Two days later, Maj. Gen. J. H. Cubbon, GOC Middle-East, informed the press. De la Billière was furious – the families of the dead men hadn’t been notified, and didn’t even know they were abroad, although Cubbon was not to know this.

  The SAS continued patrolling the Radfan till the end of the month, but Wingate-Gray didn’t think the job a good use of their skills. There was no ‘hearts and minds’ element, and the Parachute Regiment could do short-range patrolling just as well. Besides, A Squadron was needed to relieve D Squadron in Borneo, where 22 SAS had been operating for the past two years.

  76. ‘I think we should expect to fight to the death for this’

  The ‘Confrontation’ in Borneo had grown out of the conflicting aspirations of Malaya’s President Tunku ‘Abd ar-Rahman, and the President of Indonesia, Ahmad Sukarno. The world’s third largest island, Borneo was mostly jungle, river and mountain, but was divided into three small states and one large one. The large one, Kalimantan, occupied three-quarters of the island’s land-mass, and was part of Sukarno’s Indonesia. Of the smaller ones, two – Sarawak and Sabah – were British colonies, and the third, the Sultanate of Brunei, a British Protectorate. Sukarno wanted to make them part of his expanding empire, while all three were potential members of the budding Federation of Malaysia, being fashioned by Tunku ‘Abd ar-Rahman.

  A Sukarno-inspired revolt against the Sultan of Brunei in December 1962 had been put down by British troops from Singapore. The rebels, driven across the border into Kalimantan, continued to receive Indonesian support. Sukarno had openly declared his hostility to the Malaysian Federation. He was convinced tha
t the people of northern Borneo supported him, and in the case of the minority races – Chinese, Dayaks, and some jungle aborigines, including Ibans and Muruts – he was correct. There were even elements among the majority Malay population who favoured an Indonesian state over a western-oriented Malaysia.

  The task of British Director of Operations Major-General Walter Walker was to guard the frontier with Kalimantan and maintain internal order. Walker, an outspoken ex-Gurkha, knew of 22 SAS from Malaya, and wanted to deploy the Regiment as an airborne quick-reaction force capable of tree-jumping. Commanding officer John Woodhouse had reservations about tree-jumping, and told Walker his boys would be wasted as a back-up unit. They were jungle-trained, and could operate independently in the ulu for months on end. They had the medical skills for a ‘hearts and minds’ campaign, and many of them spoke Malay.

  Woodhouse talked Walker into employing an SAS squadron as an early-warning force along the border. They would operate in troops and two- to four-man patrols, hang out with the forest tribes, including their old friends the Ibans, talking Malay, learning local dialects, working their barefoot-doctor routine, employing the headhunters as scouts and spies. They would deploy their new lightweight patrol radios, hugging skywaves, tapping out Morse. Walker could hold the rest of his forces in mobile reserve, move in when the SAS gave the alarm.

  A Squadron arrived covertly in Singapore in January 1963, under the designation ‘Layforce 136’, and was flown to Brunei. They were in the jungle within forty-eight hours, and spent the next four months watchdogging a seven-hundred-mile slice of border south of Brunei. They were too thin on the ground to patrol it all, but used the jungle tribes – Ibans, Muruts and Kelabits – as their eyes and ears. By the time they were relieved by D Squadron in April, it seemed that the danger of cross-border attacks had diminished. Walker was reined in. The US were fighting a war in Vietnam, and a ‘Vietnamization’ of all south-east Asia looked imminent. British forces would be more valuable in Singapore. Then, just as Walker was about to depart, news came through that Indonesian troops had crossed the border and bumped a police-station at Tebudu, in Sarawak, killing one policeman, wounding two more, and rifling the armoury. More cross-border raids were expected.

  The Tebudu incident changed everything. British commitment was stepped up, and helicopters were deployed. John Woodhouse moved HQ staff to Brunei and set up his head-shed in a villa near the Sultan’s palace, nicknamed ‘The Haunted House’. Tension notched up several degrees in September, when the Federation of Malaysia was proclaimed. In Jakarta a mob stormed the British Embassy, where the military attaché – ex-22 SAS officer Muir ‘Red Rory’ Walker – marched up and down outside through a shower of brickbats, wearing an SAS beret and playing the bagpipes. Walker’s action cocked a regal snook at the crowds, but didn’t stop the Embassy from being razed to the ground.

  Within days of the proclamation, Sukarno ordered his regulars to launch cross-border raids and establish ‘liberated zones’ in north Borneo. In December a hundred Indonesian troops killed twenty-seven men of the Malay Regiment asleep in a longhouse at Kalabakan, on the Sarawak border. SAS patrols sent to trail them guided in infantry companies that took out all but four of the invaders.

  De la Billière’s A Squadron arrived in Brunei for its second tour only weeks after the Edwards Patrol shoot-out in the Radfan. The squadron’s blood was up. Three months earlier, an A Squadron signaller, Tpr. James ‘Paddy’ Condon, had been murdered in cold blood by Indonesian soldiers. Condon, an Irish ex-Para from Tipperary, on loan to D Squadron, had been in a four-man patrol sent covertly across the Kalimantan frontier in response to a series of incursions by Indonesian troops.

  On 13 March, Condon’s patrol – commanded by Sgt. ‘Smokey’ Richardson – encountered a much larger enemy force. In the firefight, Condon was separated from the rest, wounded badly in the groin, and captured. The Indonesians interrogated and tortured him, then shot him dead. De la Billière, whose recent experience in Aden had shown him how deeply the death of a comrade could affect a closely-knit unit like the SAS, took pains to restrain his men’s fury. Jungle patrolling required a calm, cautious approach. ‘Given the close relationships which exist within the SAS,’ he wrote, ‘such anger was inevitable … [but] … it could be dangerous if it ran out of control.’1 The boys eventually found out the name of the Indonesian sergeant who’d topped Condon, and paid Iban headhunters to do what they did best.

  The Kelabits, who inhabited the three-thousand-foot Kelabit Highlands on the Sarawak border, were enthusiastic SAS supporters and frequently offered patrol members their women as wives. Despite their readiness to lop off Indonesian heads, though, the Ibans were still uncommitted to the Federation, and de la Billière was aware that they might decapitate SAS-men with equal abandon. He reckoned it was still too dangerous for an SAS patrol to sleep in an Iban longhouse. A settlement would be approached warily – a scout would be sent ahead to scope the place out for lurking Indos. The patrol would then enter the village and chat to the tribespeople, offering instant medical aid for toothache or broken bones. They would remain no more than half an hour, so no one had time to warn the nearest Indo unit, and would make sure they put a long distance between themselves and the village before sunset.

  The patrols would elicit the needs of the village and provide them promptly. In some cases they set up small provision-stores, trawling for information as they doled out cut-price sugar and flour. Some SAS troopers improvised stills for tapei – rice wine – from their Bergen frames, and one sergeant, ‘Gypsy’ Smith, built a hydro-electric generator for a village out of radio-spares and a bicycle-lamp dynamo. The SAS also established the ‘Step Up’ system, calling in helicopters full of Gurkha stand-by troops within minutes, to impress the natives. ‘By such means,’ de la Billière wrote, ‘we gradually won the Ibans round.’2

  There were frequent contacts. The Indonesian invaders operated in company strength, and John Woodhouse had prescribed an SOP known as ‘shoot-and-scoot’. Most contacts in the jungle were head-on. The object was to lay down instantaneous accurate fire, and bug out immediately. The patrol had to avoid an extended shoot-out at all costs.

  One of the trouble-spots was the Long Pa Sia Bulge, a mountain region on the frontiers of Sabah and Sarawak, assigned to de la Billière’s 4 Troop, under Sgt. Maurice Tudor. By August, after three months of intensive patrolling, de la Billière judged the area clear of Indos, and pulled Tudor out by chopper to attend a Malay language course. Tudor’s patrol – four men now commanded by L. Cpl. Roger Blackman, including Troopers Billy White and ‘Jimmy Green’, and an officer attached from the Australian SAS Regiment, Lt. Geoff Skardon, made their way through the forest back to their pick-up point at Moming.

  Two days after Tudor had been lifted out, Blackman’s radio-op, ‘Jimmy Green’, copped a message from the 1/2 Gurkhas, reporting that gunshots had been heard from the area of the main track into Kalimantan, along the Moming river. The patrol hadn’t heard anything, but went to check it out. They walked smack into a platoon-strength ambush. Billy White was lead-scout. The first he knew about it was when he came round a tree and almost knocked over an Indo soldier cooking lunch. The Indo was kneeling, and White slotted him at hard-contact range downwards through the shoulder. The high-velocity 5.56mm Armalite slug bored through his body and emerged from his rear-end in a mash of blood and flesh. The Indo froze in a kneeling position, stone dead.

  Blackman, five metres behind White, shrieked, ‘Get out!’ Blackman and ‘Green’ dumped their Bergens and skidded into the bush. The jungle erupted with fire. Bullets bluebottled, clenched up humus and muck. White took a round in the thigh that sliced through the femoral artery. Bone chips flew. Blood geysered in yard-long spritzes. ‘I’m hit!’ he screamed.

  Skardon, who’d been tail-end-charlie, flipped off his Bergen and fast-tracked up to his comrade, yanking him into the cover of the tree. Indo bullets needle-tracked bark, squiffed foliage, horneted past Skardon’s ears. White was deathl
y pale. The hole in his thigh was billiard-ball sized. Blood splurged, drenching Skardon’s OGs. Skardon heaved White ten metres back into a depression. Indo slugs snapped in, spliffed mud, snapped branches. ‘I think we’ve had it, Chalky,’ Skardon said.

  ‘I know, skipper,’ White said. ‘Thanks for trying.’

  They were White’s last words. Skardon realized that the gushes of blood had fizzled out. White was already dead, but Skardon wouldn’t accept it. ‘Come on, Chalky,’ he grunted. ‘I’m going to carry you.’ Skardon lumped White to another pit, just as exposed. He laid him down. He smacked his face until it dawned on him that White wasn’t coming round. By the time he’d let go, five Indos had broken cover and were scuttling towards him, trying to cut off his escape. Skardon whapped his SLR to his shoulder, eyesighted in, jerked iron, punked off three rounds. He pulled back, flanked into a stream between high banks, splotched through dark water. Thorn spikes gouged him, snagged his belt. Skardon flicked it off, ramped up the bank and dove into dense jungle. When he stumbled into the RV at Landing Point 1, where Tudor had been choppered out two days earlier, ‘Green’ and Blackman had been there two hours. Next morning, after debrief, the three of them went back into the ulu with a Gurkha company to collect White’s body. The Indo soldier White had whacked out was still kneeling behind his tree, and not far away they found ambush positions of thirty enemy, littered with dumped shell-cases. White was there, just where Skardon had left him. ‘Never experienced anything like that before,’ Blackman commented, ‘basha-up with a chap … then next day wrap him in a poncho and bundle him into a helicopter; affects you more than you like to admit.’3