A Fortunate Life (14 page)

The camp could then settle down for the night. No noise was allowed at any time.

The following morning the sentries woke the camp half an hour before dawn, and all ‘stood to’ in their fire positions until it was fully light. You then changed back into your wet clothes (a horrible moment), and carefully put your dry ones back in their waterproof protection. Then you washed and shaved as best you could, breakfasted, packed, tried to cover up traces and moved off, ideally not later than nine o’clock.

During the day the patrol would usually rest for ten minutes in every hour and have an hour’s break for lunch. Smoking was not allowed (the smell of cigarette smoke carries a long way), except in the evening after the sentries were out.

The popular perception is that jungle warfare involves a lot of hacking, cutting and slashing of undergrowth. This is completely wrong. Jungle warfare is very close-quarter. In most warfare you fight with your eyes. In jungle warfare you fight with your ears. So moving silently is the essence. Cutting noisily through branches, therefore, is just what you should
not
do – and by and large it is not necessary. But there are exceptions. We always dreaded being caught in a thicket of rattan creeper (the Malay word is
rotan
), from which the famous cane furniture is made. In the jungle, rattan grows in thick, impenetrable tangles of creepers whose outer surface is covered with row upon row of extremely sharp, hard spikes. The Australian troops in Malaya christened this plant ‘wait-a-while’ which is a very good name; it is a much-feared menace, which has to be cut through if it cannot be bypassed.

Most of our patrols were fourteen days or less. But there were also longer patrols of three weeks and more. During these, it would be necessary to take delivery of a fresh supply of food and ammunition. This was done by picking an open patch of grassland or by cutting a hole in the jungle, which allowed us to be resupplied by helicopter or parachute drop.

I returned from one such long patrol in February, to open a letter from my mother which told me that my brother Robert had been diagnosed with leukaemia. He died on St Patrick’s Day a year later, aged fourteen. It was a terrible blow, not least because I had no one with whom to share the burden of my grief. But it was the effect on my parents I worried about most.

Soon afterwards I received orders to mount an extended operation in the mangrove swamps of Brunei Bay to try to find the leader of the rebels, Yassin Effendi, who was thought to be hiding there. In my Troop at the time I had two outstanding Marines, Sergeant Gillie Howe and Marine Ted Tandy, both SBS-qualified and later to become close personal friends. Over the next three months they taught me more about soldiering and how to do it than I learned in all my two-and-a-half years’ officer training at ITCRM. Our patrol in the mangrove swamps was to be entirely water-borne, so I tasked these two with adapting some local dugout canoes to take forty-horsepower Johnson outboard engines on the back. These could carry five Marines and were extremely fast but, when we needed to, we could also easily and silently paddle them along the waterways of the mangrove swamp.

My first step was to set up stationary blocking positions, each manned by five Marines posted in fishing huts guarding the main intersections and exits of the waterways that criss-crossed the mangrove swamp. Then we began meticulously to comb the swamps themselves. We often did not put a foot on dry land for days on end, sleeping at night in our hammocks, slung between the mangrove branches. The mosquitoes were terrible. I remember commenting on their size to one of my Marines, after suffering particularly badly from their carnivorous attacks one night. He told me that two mosquitoes had crawled into his sleeping bag during the night and one had said to the other, ‘Shall we eat him here or shall we drag him outside?’ The other had replied, ‘Best eat him here. If we drag him outside, the big ones will only get him!’

Despite our best efforts we did not catch Yassin Effendi,
*
for, as I learned then (and relearned forty years later when we were trying to catch Radovan Karadžić in the mountains of Bosnia), it is very, very difficult to catch a single wanted person moving in inaccessible country amongst a population that is willing to support them.

But not all our searches were in vain. Indeed, in the early days we had to detain quite a number of prisoners before handing them over to the Sarawak authorities. On one occasion, after returning from a short patrol, I discovered one of our Marines hitting one of these detainees who had been captured a few days earlier. I have a furious temper, and on this occasion, to my shame, lost it completely, knocking the Marine across the room. I could easily have been court-martialled for this if anything had been made of it. But it wasn’t, and from then on everyone understood that mistreating prisoners was out of order. I claim no special morality in this. My act was one of irrational fury not thought-through principle. But when the story of the My Lai massacre in Vietnam broke six years later, I knew that that act of appalling brutality and horror had just been the last step in an escalation of violence that had been tolerated in William Calley’s unit. I do not think that people leap from innocence to terrible violence in one bound. I think, rather, that anyone can succumb to the evil that steals up on us, little step by little step, and that what Lieutenant Calley did at My Lai could well have appeared to him to be just a small step beyond what had probably been perfectly acceptable common practice in his unit. Evil, it turns out, is not the great Beast of myth and legend. Rather, it imitates the bilharzia worm,
†
slipping in imperceptibly between your compromises to start its long progress towards possession. If leaders do not have the courage or alertness to stop the relatively small transgressions against accepted values, then they risk initiating a chain of escalation which can end in horrors they would never have imagined or tolerated when it all started.

When our three-month tour of duty came to an end we sailed back to Singapore in HMS
Bulwark
. In my absence Jane had had a terrible time, falling ill with a bad dose of dysentery. She came down to the
quayside with the other wives to welcome the ship home, but was so emaciated that I did not at first recognise her.

Despite this, however, it was a wonderful homecoming. But not, alas, a long one; after a brief rest with our families we started retraining and preparing for our next tour in Borneo.

By now the rebellion had been snuffed out in Brunei, but it had been replaced by a wider insurgency, which was Indonesian-supported and mounted from bases the other side of the border by the
Tentera
Nasional Kalimantan Utara
(North Borneo National Army), or TNKU for short. The TNKU sprang out of the
Parti Rakayat Brunei
or PRB (Brunei People’s Party), which was founded in 1956 and dedicated to bringing Brunei to full independence after British rule. The original British plan was to transition Malaya, Singapore and the three British colonies in north Borneo, Sabah, Sarawak and Brunei, into the Malaysian Federation. This was opposed, not only by Indonesia, but also by the Philippines. Although there has never been any evidence that President Sukarno of Indonesia had territorial ambitions over the three north Borneo states, as the British claimed at the time, he probably did want to have governments on the island which would be amenable to the influence of Jakarta. There was some left-wing and communist influence on the TNKU, coming chiefly from the urban Chinese population of the three states, but it was primarily a nationalist movement. It wanted full independence from Britain in the early days, and did not want to be included in Malaysia after the British left. I have to say that, given the levels of corruption I witnessed during Malay rule over Brunei, I privately had some sympathy with the rebels’ wish to avoid Sarawak and Brunei being swallowed up in Malaysia. In the event, the Sultan of Brunei effectively conceded to the rebels by subsequently deciding not to join the Malaysian Federation, and in this he was followed shortly afterwards by Singapore, which also remained outside.

Whatever my opinions at the time, however, my job as a soldier was to carry out the policy of Her Majesty’s Government, and that was to defeat the TNKU so that Sarawak could become part of Malaysia when British colonial rule came to an end. It was clear by now that the Brunei rebellion of December was only the beginning of a much wider affair: a long war that would extend to the whole of Sarawak.

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!