After a couple of months in Singapore we were redeployed to Borneo. This time my troop was sent to a place called Stass, four hours’ walk from the nearest road head and right up on the Indonesian border with Sarawak’s First Division region.* Stass was then so isolated that all our resupplies of stores, food and ammunition were air-dropped or helicopter-delivered into a small clearing that we cut in the jungle nearby.
My Troop of around thirty Marines built a little fort under a house on stilts on the edges of the kampong (local jungle village), which we defended against attack by armed guerrilla groups coming over the Indonesian border with barbed wire, fields of panjis and improvised explosive booby traps. Every night I would lay my sleeping bag down next to the sentry, who always manned one of our Bren guns, so that I could be easily woken if he saw something. We frequently had new Marines joining us from the UK, and it usually took some time for these new arrivals to get used to the night sounds of the jungle. The result was that I would often find myself leaping from a deep sleep to the roar of the Bren gun firing and a sentry swearing on his life that he had seen something at the perimeter wire, which almost invariably turned out to be a pig or some nosy nocturnal jungle animal. These events were not always so benign, however. My neighbour manning the next ‘fort’ down the line, across the mountain ridge that marked the eastern edge of my area, was a young and very gifted Royal Marine officer called Ricky Rolls. He had been attacked on several occasions. One early morning the sentry alerted him to the fact there were enemy on the wire. He wasn’t convinced and went forward to take a look for himself, leaving his Troop Sergeant in charge. Shortly after he had gone the Troop Sergeant saw a figure in the murky light and, assuming this to be the beginning of an enemy attack, let loose a full magazine from the Bren gun. In fact the figure was Ricky, who was killed instantly.†
We operated out of Stass for three months, patrolling and seeking to dominate our designated operational area of around a hundred square miles of jungle. To assist us, I recruited and trained a band of some fifty irregulars from among the local tribesmen. At this stage we were not allowed to cross the Indonesian border. But they could, and, knowing the jungle, were highly effective at taking the fight to our enemy. They returned from their first expedition flushed with victory and proudly related to me how they accounted for four of the enemy in an ambush. To prove their success, they produced a bag out of which rolled four human heads. I remonstrated with them, saying that, while I knew taking human heads from the dead after a battle had been their tribal tradition for centuries, in the modern age it was wrong. They looked rather offended and asked me how, in that case, they were to prove their prowess? After some discussion we compromised on ears (or, to be precise, the right ear). Out there, miles from anywhere and separated from what we are pleased to call civilisation, it seemed a fair compromise at the time. But today, with blanket Press coverage I am very clear that if this had come to light publicly, readers back in Britain would not have understood, and it would have caused a great (and no doubt justifiable) scandal about desecrating the dead.
It was vital to win the battle for hearts and minds with the local jungle tribes. We soon discovered that one of the things which made us most welcome was the medicine in our first aid packs. Every patrol included someone qualified in first aid (known as a ‘medic’), and the medics very soon became known to all in the villages through which we passed. Whenever we stopped in a village, they would be inundated with people asking to have ailments and wounds treated. On one occasion I found one of our medics strapping a Paludrine tablet to the forehead of a local man who had a badly cut leg. Paludrine was a prophylactic which we took orally every day to prevent getting malaria – it had to be ingested and had no effect whatsoever against anything except malaria – so I asked my medic what on earth he was doing. He said that he and the other medics were finding themselves so overwhelmed with requests from local people for medication that, after the first day, they had no medicines left for the rest of their patrol. So they had reached agreement amongst themselves that they would announce the arrival of a new wonder drug – Paludrine, which, if strapped to the forehead, would cure anything. He even claimed that a number of his ‘patients’, believing that this wonder drug would cure them, had actually been cured!
But Western medicine was not always best. On one patrol on a nearby mountain feature called Gunong Raya (the scene a year or so later of a furious battle in which Rambahadur Limbu, a young Ghurkha, won a VC), I was putting out panjis around our night bivouac when I tripped and fell on one, cutting my left bicep nearly to the bone. Our patrol medic, a great strapping Marine who was famous for his lack of delicacy in all things, was called for. He came up enthusiastically brandishing the suture kit from his first-aid pack and making ready to sew up my wound. While I was contemplating whether leaving a gaping and painful wound would not be a better option than submitting myself to his less-than-tender ministrations, our tracker intervened to ask me if I would mind leaving it to him? Almost anything seemed a better option, so I said yes. He went to a nearby ant heap, which he had spotted earlier, and picked out, one by one, about two dozen very large soldier ants which he put in a box. Then, squatting beside me, he proceeded to close my wound with one hand and place a soldier ant with its mandibles open, one on each side of the wound. This kind of soldier ant, he explained, is blind and, once it grips, will die before it lets go. One by one, the soldier ants closed their mandibles, sealing the wound almost painlessly, after which he nipped their bodies off. After about five minutes I had some thirty neat sutures of soldier ants’ heads closing my wound. Ant bites contain formic acid, which disinfected the wound, and as it healed the ants’ heads fell painlessly out.
About halfway through our time in Stass one of my patrols returned with some leaflets they had found nailed to trees and scattered on a jungle path they had used. These caused much amusement among the Marines, for they turned out to be crude propaganda left by our opponents from across the border in the hope of lowering our morale and encouraging us to go home. They featured some scantily clad, but very out-of-date, ladies who looked as though they had been taken from a ‘What the butler saw’ slot machine of the 1890s, underneath which was printed the stern instruction, ‘Go hom Johnny – someone else is fuking your wife.’ They became something of a collector’s piece, and it was not long before every Marine had one above his bed space, alongside the latest pin ups from the centrefold of Playboy magazine. One of my Marines said to me one day, ‘They are obviously short of good pictures of nudes, boss. Why don’t we send them some of ours?’ It seemed to me harmless and rather a good joke. At the time there was still a good deal of traffic between registered trading posts across the border, with rice, vegetables and tobacco the main commodities exchanged. The flow of trade was chiefly from Sarawak to Indonesia, and every traded package was wrapped in old newspaper. So I hit upon the idea of collecting all the old unwanted copies of Playboy and similar magazines from the lads and giving them to the trading post to use as wrapping paper for parcels going back over the border. This did a great deal for the volume of trade from the Sarawak side and soon resulted in requests from purchasers on the other side of the border not to bother with the rice – just provide the magazines! I even got a written request from the Indonesian Army Lieutenant who was my opposite number on the other side of the frontier, proposing that we should go into business together, and please would I send him any magazines directly and not give them to the locals?
I treated all this as a great joke and reported it back only for amusement value. But one day the joke took a serious turn when a helicopter flew in and, unannounced, delivered into my care a rather elderly man with a vast shock of grey-streaked, unkempt hair, a disturbing look in his eye and a habit of speaking so fast that the words tripped each other up as they poured in a torrent from his mouth. He told me, rather conspiratorially, that he was from the Psychological Warfare Unit (which I had never heard of), based in Singapore. This turned out to be an o
rganisation left over from World War Two and staffed by people who had learned the dark arts of their trade in that conflict. A special unit had apparently been formed in the Far East with the task of undermining morale among the Sarawak rebels and the Indonesian forces who backed them.
Judging by my new visitor’s enthusiasm and the stories he told me about how they had gone about their task, this was clearly jolly good fun, though whether it had any practical effect is rather more doubtful. ‘Anyway,’ he exclaimed, ‘we are terribly excited about your splendid idea for undermining Indonesian morale, and we want to build on it.’
He went on to explain that his unit had worked out they could get the latest edition of the main Indonesian newspaper Berita Harian (literally ‘The Daily News’) via the diplomatic bag from the British Embassy in Jakarta (which was still open, despite our ‘war’), reprint it in Singapore and ship it to us in Sarawak; we would then put it into the trading posts, where it would be used as wrapping, so that it passed over the border into the hands of the Indonesian troops on the other side. All this could be done, he claimed, about two days faster than the paper could be got out to front-line Indonesian troops direct from Jakarta. His plan was to reprint the Jakarta newspaper faithfully, with only a very few minor ‘tweaks’, and send it down this somewhat complicated pipeline for our opponents to read before they received the real thing. For instance, he explained, the Psychological Warfare Unit knew from intercepted communications that the troops across the border were suffering a severe shortage of jungle boots. Hence, in their reprinted version, they would include a large front-page advertisement announcing a massive sale of army-surplus jungle boots in Jakarta. Warming to his theme, he added that, of course, all Indonesians were highly superstitious, and the first thing they always read in their paper was the astrological predictions for their star sign. These, too, would be rewritten, advising almost all star signs that this was not a good time for taking risks – or for going out in the jungle, etc. It all seemed great fun to me, though I was sceptical about its effect. Nevertheless, I agreed to hand over my communications line to them.
I heard nothing more of it at the time. But a few years later a friend who was then in Singapore Headquarters told me that the scheme was eventually approved and had been tried out at another border post – without, as far as he could tell, any detectable impact on enemy morale. No doubt, however, a good time was had by all.
After Stass, I did two more three-month tours of duty in Rasau and Padawan, two other forward locations in the deep jungle on the Sarawak border. One day in early March, on my third tour, our chief local tracker came running into our camp in Rasau to tell me that he had found the tracks of about fifty heavily armed men coming from the Indonesian border and heading deep into Sarawak. I radioed my headquarters and said that I intended to give chase. A troop of Ghurkhas was quickly flown in, and we joined forces to form a patrol of about forty under my command. It did not take us long to find the tracks, which we followed for three days, drawing quietly closer and closer to our enemy. I loved the Ghurkhas, who formed a ready, close and mutually respectful companionship with our Marines. (The General then in charge of military operations in Sarawak, General Walter Walker,* would allow no other regiments except Royal Marines and Ghurkhas in his area of operations.) As dusk approached on the third day our trackers told us we were now very close to our enemy, who were within three hundred yards or so of our position. I discussed with the commander of the Ghurkha contingent, an outstanding officer called Lieutenant Kakraprasad, whether we could risk a reconnaissance to locate exactly where the enemy were and what were their dispositions. We agreed it was too big a risk to take. If we were discovered we would have to attack immediately, and it would be too late in the day to do a proper follow-up, giving our enemy the opportunity to escape under the cover of night.
We agreed we would attack at dawn the following morning. All fires were forbidden, as was any noise or talking, and we ordered the Marines and Ghurkhas to eat cold rations and lie down where they were for the night. The following morning we were on the move as dawn broke. I was up near the front of the column, with a Ghurkha section on point ahead of me, when a shot rang out. I discovered later that one of the enemy had come down to fill his water bottle at a stream which lay across our path and stumbled into our lead scout, who had no option but to shoot him. We would now have to go into headlong attack in order to make good our surprise. I was just calling up my Marines when the Ghurkhas, who weren’t waiting for anyone’s orders, tore through in a furious and uncoordinated assault on the enemy. Without waiting we all joined in and there followed a mad, surging mêlée of shouting and shooting, as we all charged through the forest towards the enemy position. I immediately saw that our opposition had made no attempt to defend their position and had not followed the normal jungle practice of ‘standing to’ at dawn. They were instead scattered all over the place. Some were washing, some cooking, some standing chatting and smoking in groups far from their weapons, and one was squatting down behind a tree with his trousers around his ankles. This was very fortunate, because they were numerically stronger and, had they been better prepared, we would have had a much tougher job of it.
In the event, they mostly fled in disarray, with only a handful putting up a fight. One of these fighters started to engage us with a machine-gun from behind a tree, thinking he was safe. But he did not reckon with our very high velocity SLR 7.62 rifles,* or even have time to be surprised, when one of my Marines loosed a burst of fire at him and shot him clean through the tree he assumed was protecting him.
After the engagement we cut a hole in the jungle for the helicopters of 848 Squadron and shipped out the wounded and about a ton of captured arms and equipment, including wirelesses, written orders giving the insurgents’ destination, a list of local contacts and about 300 Malay Dollars carried by each man. The following days were spent chasing small remaining groups through the jungle and laying ambushes to catch them as they tried to get back to Indonesian territory. What I remember most from this time was the sickly smell of putrefaction as we discovered the rotting bodies of those who had died of wounds or starvation on river banks and jungle paths. We heard later that less than half of those who set out managed to make it back across the border.*
In between three-month tours in Sarawak, we went back to Singapore for time with our families, some rest and retraining. On these occasions our Commanding Officer tried to give us all as much leave as possible, but there always had to be an officer on duty, even when the Commando was effectively closed down. One of our problems was that the Commando operated on a so-called ‘trickle’ drafting system (i.e., the Commando always stayed in Singapore but individuals arrived, did their tour and were then replaced by new arrivals when their time came to go home).
This meant that we had a constant stream of experienced people leaving and new, inexperienced people arriving to take their place. This applied, of course, not just to the Marines, but also to their wives and families, many of whom had never been out of the United Kingdom before. To them, Singapore and the Far East was a strange and frightening place. One of the things which frequently upset newly arrived wives were the small lizards or geckoes which inhabited every house and could frequently be seen running up the walls or upside down on the ceiling, chasing flies.
On one occasion when I was Duty Officer the Guard Room put through a phone call from a newly arrived wife whose husband was away and who had demanded to speak to me. She told me, in tones close to hysteria, that she had a lizard in her kitchen. I told her that this was nothing to be frightened about, they were very common and were believed by local people to bring good luck. She seemed a little mollified and we ended the conversation. She then rang back half an hour later, even more distraught and frightened. I gently calmed her again, saying that these lizards were perfectly normal, ate flies and there was nothing to be frightened about. Over the next few hours she must have rung me again three times, always with the same hysteria, to which I
always responded with the same mollifying words. Finally, she rang back and said that the lizard had now left the kitchen and come into her bedroom and she was taking refuge on top of the wardrobe. I got a bit exasperated at this stage and told her not to be so silly and to come down at once, adding, ‘Look Mrs X, these lizards are regarded as good luck. They do you a favour by eating the flies in your house. They can’t do you any harm. How can you be so frightened about something that is only three inches long?’ There was a short pause and then her small voice came back to me saying, ‘This one is six foot long!’
I told her to stay exactly where she was, dashed round with a small squad of Marines and shot it. What she had in her bedroom was not a gecko, but a large iguana which had wandered in from the nearby jungle and was quite capable of breaking a person’s leg with a single swish of its tail. I was a bit more careful with such phone calls after that.
Life may have been physically quite tough for us. But it was no picnic for our wives either. Not knowing what your husband was doing and always having a wary eye out for the dreaded unit Land Rover turning up with some bad news generated an emotional strain that told on many wives and marriages. Apart from getting a bad dose of dysentery (as a result of which she has suffered recurrent bouts of the disease ever since), Jane coped magnificently. Together with other wives she visited the wounded in the British Military Hospital and got involved when she could in the provision of welfare and support services for newly arrived wives from the UK, while holding down a regular job (much-needed because of our financial situation). At one stage our bank balance fell to a mere 27 cents of a Malay Dollar (at the time a Malay Dollar was worth about two shillings and sixpence – or 13p in decimal money). Money has always been one of the most contentious issues in our marriage and the cause of most of our rows. I am paranoid about running out, the consequence, I think, of seeing what happened to my father when his business failed. As a result, apart from a mortgage, we have never in our whole married life had an overdraft or been in debt, though we came perilously close to it on this occasion.
A Fortunate Life Page 12