At the end of our course we had to decide which specialisation we wanted to pursue when training was over. I had by now already firmly decided that I wanted to go into the SBS. But they only took applicants after they had done a full tour in an operational Commando. So I applied instead to specialise in heavy weapons (mortars, machine-guns and anti-tank weapons), since I knew there was a shortage of specialists in this branch and a qualification here would therefore give me the best chance of being sent to an operational Commando and as far away from the dreaded parade ground and ceremonial duties as possible.
On Friday 1 September 1961, two-and-a-half years after we had all first met on the platform of Exton Station, we finally passed out as fully qualified Acting Lieutenants, Royal Marines. I was awarded the Sword of Honour for the two Royal Marines officer batches who had joined in 1959. It was decided that the 1959 Sword of Honour would be the sword which originally belonged to a young officer, Neville Spurling, who had been killed in an ambush in Cyprus. It was awarded to me at our passing out parade in Lympstone by his father, who could not hold the tears back in his eyes as he handed it to me.
I was, of course, very proud to receive it, though the citation engraved on the blade seemed a trifle understated, given what we had been through in the last two-and-a-half years. It reads:
Presented by the Lords Commissioners of the Admiralty to Lieutenant J.J.D. Ashdown, Royal Marines for meritorious results in examinations.
* Service field rations.
* A Royal Marines term for the sex act.
* One of my Royal Marine colleagues who was on this expedition with me, Rupert van der Horst, would later marry the niece of one of the leaders of this raid by No 2 Army Commando, known as Operation Musketoon. Along with others on the raid, he was captured and transported to Sachsenhausen concentration camp, where he was subsequently shot.
* The Wolfenden report had been published two years before, so homosexuality was no longer a criminal offence. But it was still socially unacceptable and could cause embarrassment, especially to the well known. The person referred to here is now dead. But he did not, to my knowledge, reveal his sexuality during his lifetime, so I have not revealed his identity here.
CHAPTER 5
Active Service: Borneo
ON 10 FEBRUARY 1962, five months after my training finished, Jane and I got married in her home town of Burnham-on-Sea in Somerset. I was twenty, and she was twenty-one, and we had precisely fifteen pounds between us. We couldn’t afford a honeymoon, so straight after our wedding we caught the train down to Exmouth and moved into a one-bedroom summer holiday flat, empty for the winter, which we had rented as our first home while I was on temporary posting to Lympstone awaiting my next orders. That night we blew our last pounds on a slap-up dinner at a local entertainment centre.
Our new home was ill-equipped and cold and very basic. But we didn’t mind, being newly married. And, for the first time amongst many to come, Jane turned some very unpromising accommodation into a home where we were both extremely happy.
In due course my next assignment came through. I was to go to the Army’s Heavy Weapons Training School in Netheravon, Wiltshire, where I would be taught how to use the Vickers Medium Machine-gun, the new 81mm mortar, which had just come into service, and the Wombat recoilless anti-tank gun. Afterwards I was to rejoin my old unit, 42 Commando, Royal Marines, in Singapore on 22 June 1962, to take command of a Commando Troop.
Since we were married under age, Jane did not qualify for any assistance in getting out to Singapore, and we were entitled neither to marriage allowance nor accommodation for her while she was there. So we had to say another miserable goodbye on the rain-swept streets of London, this time, potentially, for two-and-a-half years. Jane’s last words when we parted were a promise that, one way or another, she would get out to join me.
I missed her terribly during my first months in Singapore and this was made worse by the fact that I found myself underoccupied and bored. So I decided I should do something useful and learn Malay, encouraged by the fact that, according to a friend, there was one word in Malay which meant ‘Let’s take off our clothes and tell dirty stories’. If such a word really exists I never found it, but in the process I managed to learn my first foreign language and loved the thrill of being able to communicate using my new-found skill. To be honest, Malay is not difficult.* The tenses hardly decline, and plural nouns are achieved by the simple expedient of saying the word twice (thus, ‘orang’ is ‘man’, ‘orang orang’ is ‘men’, etc.). So, despite the comments about inadequate linguistic ability which had been such a recurrent theme in my school reports, it didn’t take me long to become quite proficient.
True to her promise, Jane managed to borrow some money from her grandmother and got a cheap passage to Singapore on the SS Chusan, one of the last P&O liners carrying regular passengers to the Far East. She left Britain in September 1962 and crossed the Indian Ocean in the midst of the Cuban missile crisis, blissfully unaware of the fact that the world was standing on the very brink of nuclear catastrophe.
Our first few nights together were spent in a local guest house, but eventually she managed to find a tiny flat on the edge of the Malay quarter in the centre of Singapore. From our bedroom window we could look straight down the throat of the muezzin on top of the minaret of the local mosque as he called the faithful to prayer (and frequently us from our sleep), morning, noon and night. Jane also got herself a job to help make ends meet, and we got a small puppy from the animal refuge and called her Tigger.
At the time neither of us could drive, and anyway we could not have afforded a car, so we bought a rather underpowered, secondhand, red-and-white Vespa scooter on which we travelled everywhere, except to those events where the poshness of Jane’s frock made it necessary to stretch our finances to the limit and take a taxi.
And so it was that, comfortably, if impecuniously, settled, we were looking forward to our first Christmas together.
But fate had other ideas.
On 8 December 1962 we joined a host of our friends at a beach party under the forbidding shadow of Singapore’s notorious Changi prison, the scene of so much brutality during the Japanese occupation of the island during the Second World War. But our minds were not on the horrors of the past. We were celebrating a christening. The air was soft, the sea was warm, the moon was full, the drink was plentiful, the music was loud, the sand was comforting between my toes, and we were having a great time.
So I hardly noticed the Land Rover clattering to a halt, lights blazing, at the edge of the party – though I should have done, for the officer who jumped out was a friend who I knew was Duty Officer and therefore should have been back in camp, not here. I did take notice, however, when he shouted for silence, for there was a tone of urgency, and something else I didn’t quite recognise, in his voice.
‘We have just had word from London that rebels have mounted a coup and taken over Brunei, overturning the Sultan and taking a number of British hostages. You are to return to camp immediately, report to your Company Headquarters, draw kit, weapons, grenades and live ammunition. We fly at dawn.’
As a party-stopper it was difficult to beat.
As soon as we arrived back in camp, we changed into jungle-green uniform, drew our equipment, weapons and ammunition, and then checked that the Marines were all present and properly kitted. Finally we went up to the Officer’s Mess, a colonnaded building of the colonial era on a hill, and said goodbye to our wives and girlfriends just as the eastern sky reddened and dawn broke, piled high with angry cumulus clouds.
It was barely more than full daylight when the Hastings aircraft into which we were all bundled took off, and we began a very bumpy flight across the South China Sea heading for the Island of Labuan in the Bay of Brunei, the staging post for our assault to retake Brunei city. The Hastings, an ageing, piston-engined transport, was noisy and bumpy and not at all to be recommended for anyone with a queasy stomach and a most decided hangover. I found myself sit
ting next to a cadaverous gentleman in a dark grey suit who looked, to put it mildly, out of place amongst sweating Marines with their rifles between their knees, nursing hangovers and a strong sense of apprehension about the battle ahead. My companion resolutely refused to tell me who he was or what he was doing here amidst the first wave of assault troops, dressed, as I commented to him, for a funeral rather than a battle.
I was closer to the truth than I realised, for when we arrived in Labuan we were met by the coffins of four Ghurkhas, killed the night before, whose bodies were returning to Singapore on the aircraft we had flown out in. My lugubrious, dark-suited companion immediately sprang to life, taking charge of the coffins and finally revealing himself as a member of the Commonwealth War Graves Commission who had come out especially to ensure that the dead – and, one could not help reflecting, those of us who were now quick but would soon be dead – were properly looked after! Some quite level-headed soldiers become highly superstitious before battle, and this ghoulish presence amongst us was taken by many as a bad omen. Even for the completely unsuperstitious, like me, it was not exactly a morale-booster!
That night we moved into Brunei city. The Ghurkhas had already taken the city back from the rebels, but there were one or two remaining pockets of resistance that we had to deal with before consolidating our hold on the city and preparing to move forward to take the other two rebel strongholds the following morning.
Two assaults were planned. One was an amphibious assault on the main rebel-held positions in the river port of Limbang, using two flat ‘Z’ lighters requisitioned from the local port for the purpose. The second attack, to which I was assigned, was to be a dawn airborne assault on the administrative centre of Lawas, where there were reported to be a number of British hostages, including the local District Officer and his family. This was to be conducted in some army Twin Pioneer aircraft which had just arrived on Brunei airfield ready for the operation.
Our companions designated for the Limbang assault left that night for the long, slow sea and river journey to their target, which they, too, were to attack at dawn. As for us, shortly before sunrise we filed down in silence to board our little aircraft for the thirty-minute journey to Lawas. Intelligence reported that they believed the town, airfield and surrounding area to be in rebel hands, so our best hope lay in surprise, if we were not to suffer high casualties bringing thin-skinned aircraft in to land and disembark troops on a defended airfield. The pilots brought their aircraft in very low over the palm trees which fringed the rudimentary airstrip, threw them onto the ground with a bump and we leapt out, fingers curled around triggers, ready to open up at any movement.
But, blessedly, there was none. All was silence and calm. The place was deserted.
My task was to secure the nearby town, while others made their way to the District Officer’s House where the hostages were reported to be held. Running in battle formation up a low knoll on which the house stood they were surprised to be met, not with the expected storm of fire, but apparently by a florid-faced District Officer nursing a gin and tonic (it was no later than 6.30 a.m.). He hailed them heartily and bade them welcome, immediately followed by a motley collection of other people of European origin who emerged from the house, gabbling away in high spirits at our arrival.
This, according to the story we were subsequently told, is what had happened. The rebels had indeed taken over the town, and a group of some hundred or so had marched, fully armed, up to the District Officer’s house in very threatening mood. He emerged alone with a service-issue Webley pistol in one hand (the story does not relate whether he had a gin and tonic in the other, but I like to imagine he did), declared himself to be Her Majesty’s representative in the area and, in her name, demanded that they all lay down their arms and surrender. This they duly did, despite their overwhelming numbers, and were all locked up in the local jail.
The concern then was that other local rebel bands in the area would gather, and they might not prove so amenable as their colleagues had been. So the entire white population of the area had been called in to the District Officer’s house, where the women and children were given shelter and the men set about turning the house and the knoll into a little fortress. Fire positions had been built, the frame strengthened, water points established in case of fire, and ammunition gathered and distributed – as far as this was possible, given the motley collection of weapons they were able to assemble. Most impressive of all these preparations, however, was the establishment of a dense field of panjis (sharpened bamboo stakes) on the flanks of the hill approaching the bungalow, each lovingly tipped with strychnine by a local American doctor from the United States Peace Corps!
That evening the news started to filter through that our colleagues carrying out the assault on Limbang had had a much more difficult time. When, at dawn, their flat lighters broke out of the mangrove swamps for a direct frontal assault on the quayside of the town, they were met with murderous fire from well-prepared positions. The day had been won by the Vickers machine-gun troop, mounted in fully exposed positions, who had continued firing through a hail of enemy bullets and eventually suppressed the defenders’ fire for long enough for the assault to go in and win the day. Five of our comrades had been killed and five wounded in this attack, led by Captain Jeremy Moore, who as a result was awarded a bar to the Military Cross he had already won in Malaya in 1952. He would go on to be my much-loved company commander, and, in later years, to command the land forces in the successful Falklands invasion, for which he received a KCB. Later still he acted as one of my close advisers during the first Gulf War, when I was leading the Liberal Democrats.*
Thus began what came later to be known as ‘Confrontation’, or Konfrontasi in Malay, the little (but at times quite vicious) four-year conflict between Britain and Indonesia in the jungles of Sarawak.
The next four months were spent on relentless patrolling.
Since I was the only person in the unit who could speak Malay, I was first tasked with leading a patrol deep into the upper reaches of the Limbang River. The patrol lasted, if I recall, a little over two weeks over the Christmas and New Year period and extended into areas of primeval jungle which had seen very few Europeans since SOE (Special Operations Executive) had dropped agents into the area to raise the local tribes against the Japanese during World War Two. The tribes in the area we passed through were very welcoming and the rebels completely absent, so we spent most nights in local ‘longhouses’. These were single, very long, one-storey wooden buildings, raised on stilts and with a palm-frond roof (or atap). Many of them were adorned with shrunken human heads, some of considerable antiquity: the revered trophies of the tribe’s past battles. Typically, a long-house would accommodate an entire extended family, numbering at times up to a hundred adults. About ten days into our patrol, I heard from the headman of the long-house in which we were staying that an aircraft had ‘recently’ crashed nearby. I asked him how long ago, and he waved his hands and said, ‘Not long ago’, but refused to be more precise (precise time is not a concept much valued amongst the jungle tribes of Sarawak). My immediate reaction was that this must be one of our aircraft which had crashed since we had left our base, and I asked him how far away the crash site was. About five cigarettes away. Three hours later we came to a clearing at the bottom of a steep-sided valley and there, amongst the undergrowth, creepers and saplings, found a more-or-less intact Japanese Zero, complete with roundels, machine-guns in the wings and the skeletal remains of the pilot still sitting in the cockpit where he had died twenty years before.
This patrol was to be the first of many which took us into the Sarawak jungles. These are home to a host of different tribes, the three main ones in our area being the Iban,* the Bedayuh and the Kelabit. But in the deeper jungle there are also many smaller tribes. On this first patrol we came across several of them, including the elusive and shy Penan people,† who tend to be of much smaller stature than the other tribes of Sarawak and often have lighter, yellowis
h-tinted skin. Their language was unintelligible to me, but our guide told me that Penan makes very wide use of prepositions indicating ‘up-river’ or ‘down-river’ to show direction. These prepositions are used, even when there is no river in the area, in which case the preposition is applied to indicate which way water would flow, if there was any.
Almost all our trackers came from the Ibans and the Bedayuh (I had, at this time, started to teach myself Bedayuh, another relatively easy language). They were exceptional for their skill and bravery and could tell from a broken leaf or a snapped twig how many people had passed and how long ago (always in cigarettes, the standard measurement of time amongst the tribes of Sarawak), their approximate ages, who was carrying heavy loads and who light, whether any were wounded, and even, on one occasion, the fact that there was a woman in the band.
But we relied on them for much more than tracking. They also taught us how to read the jungle and see it as a friend. We learned to recognise the edible palm at whose heart is a soft white core (about the consistency of the base of a celery plant) which made a wonderful addition to our diet, and where to find the grubs the Ibans called ulat tinduh. These – like a giant version of the white grubs with brown heads that you find, especially under dock plants, in Europe – we used to fry in our mess tins until they popped and then eat the resulting slurry as a kind of thick and very nutritious white soup. Our trackers taught us, too, how to identify the jungle vine which, if you cut it at a shallow angle, gives a stream of pure and delicious water in sufficient quantity to fill a two-pint army water bottle in a couple of minutes; how to choose, cook and eat bamboo shoots; how to extract the poison from the ipoh tree that the natives used to use to tip their blowpipe darts; and much, much more.
A Fortunate Life Page 10