Everybody was tensed up on the tailgate, looking at the red lights either side. As soon as they went green, everybody would shout, "Ready, set, go!" It had to be as loud as you could yell to get above the noise of the aircraft, wind, and the oxygen mask.

The aircraft started doing corrections, jacking us around. We had to hold on to keep standing. The loadie gave the cutthroat sign and did a circle in the air, which meant he'd got the wrong track, so we were going to go around and try again.

I tapped Steve again and gave him the cutthroat sign; he nodded.

Then he put his head back down, and I put my head back down. We were bracing ourselves; we knew the aircraft would have to do some quite steep turns.

The wind was rushing in, and it was cold. I saw lights now and again from distant towns.

Steve was resting his helmet on the bundle; everybody was tired because we had all our kit on and it was a pain in the a.r.s.e, holding on to each other for balance as the aircraft moved position. Then the two-minute warning came again, and everybody sorted himself out, getting ready to go.

I tapped Steve but got no reaction. I gave him a shake and nothing happened. I couldn't figure it out. Then I thought: s.h.i.t! I lunged across the bundle, grabbed hold of his oxygen bottle, and checked the reservoir gauge. It was showing red.

I grabbed hold of the loadie, shook him, and started pointing at the reservoir. gauge on my bottle and pointing at Steve. He got on the net, and straightaway the aircraft went into a steep nosedive.

The tailgate was coming up. The troop was looking around, and within seconds everybody realized what was going on. The oxygen NCO came screaming up, dragging Steve back to the main console. Steve was lying on the floor, on just about his last breath. The NCO pulled the tube from Steve's reservoir and put it into the main console. He was flapping good style, his eyes like goldfish bowls; the oxygen bottles were his responsibility.

The aircraft came down below twelve thousand feet, and we were out of the danger zone. The jump was aborted, but the aircraft couldn't land in the dark at the airstrip we should have been dropping onto, so we had to go and stay in a smart hotel in Muscat, which w'as a blow.

The hotel had a wonderful restaurant with indoor palm trees, a pianist tinkling away in the corner and nice crisp tablecloths. All the diners were dressed up in suits and ties and long evening dresses.

Enter Air Troop in their flying suits, hair sweaty and sticking up after being under a helmet all night.

We ate in somber mood, until Mat said, "Don't worry, it won't have affected Steve. He was brain-damaged anyway."

It turned out Steve had been issued with a defective bottle. He obviously got a slagging the next day and was branded a big-time w.a.n.ker for it ' jump. Tying to get out of the I was fascinated by the local customs and wondered if what I thought I was seeing was necessarily what was happening. They might be drinking Coca-Cola, chewing Wrigley's gum, and driving air-conditioned Land Cruisers, but their whole way of thinking was very different.

We sat down and drank tea with these people. The Regiment was the least racist group of people in the British Army I had ever met, no doubt because they came from so many different backgrounds, religions, cla.s.ses , and nationalities. n.o.body was ever derogatory about indigenous populations. How could we be running around with local guerrillas, for example, if we were thinking, What a bunch of d.i.c.khead hillbillies? Nine times out of ten, their cultures are much more established than ours, and they're more true to their origins.

We're just slags compared with a lot of the people that Westerners considered backward, Third World, and dirty. We're putting our Pepsi and Levi's culture in comparison with theirs, which might be older and wiser. At least when it comes to holding beliefs, they're not like us, as flexible as Access cards.

The Omanis had feasts called haflas where they'd bring a goat in and cook it in the fire. It was always a fantastic gathering. They'd turn up in their Land Cruisers in the middle of nowhere, put the carpets out, and start a fire up. Sometimes they'd tow in a small water bowser as well. There was a huge amount of ritual involved; the animal was treated with immense respect before it was killed, in accordance with Islam.

I really used to enjoy sitting there and pigging out.

Western protocol didn't exist; everybody sat down, ate, then just stood up and walked away. Once you were finished, you were finished.

We had a whip-round one day to buy some meat.

Everybody chipped in three rials, and off the boys went to market.

We were sitting on the carpets in the late afternoon, building up the fire, when we heard a family lar chug and a Toyota pickup appeared in a cloud of dust. Roped down in the back was our meal for the night, a young and very p.i.s.sed-off-looking camel.

The rituals were observed, and the meat was chopped up. Some was hung up to dry in the sun to make camel jerky, and the rest was soon in the pot. Within an hour, out came the camel and rice. There were a hundred of us, sitting under the stars on ten carpets joined together; each of us had a huge plateful and just sat around and spun the s.h.i.t for the rest of the night.

The Omanis, like all locals everywhere, wanted to show us their culture; they wanted ius to see that there was a bit of finesse about what they were doing. It might have looked basic, but it wasn't.

There was an art in how to squeeze the rice, and how to choose the best bits of meat. In some of the old villages down in the south they had their own culinary delight, sausages made in goat's gut. The meat was prepared in a very interesting way. Basically the old girls took mouthfuls of goat meat and chewed it until it was soft and gooey, then spit it into the sausage skins. They twisted them into sections just like British bangers and then cooked them. When I was offered one, I wished I hadn't seen the old girls in action. But I had to take it; there was no way I could turn it down.

By the end of the trip the SSM had made a fortune out of everybody, and now it was time to spend it. "We'll have a big barbecue down at the beach club in Muscat," he announced.

The local expats' rugby team was invited to have a game with us, and we all moved down to Muscat for the last few days. We won the match, and as it came to last light, we hit the beach club. There were fridges full of beer and five or six big barbecues burning away.

Everybody was determined to'spend all the cabbage that had been extorted from us.

We heard a few local stories. Down at Seeb there was a -military base, with an old Arab storeman who'd lost an eye and a leg. He was retired from the army but ran the blanket stores to keep his interest in life.

The camp was full of young recruits, and what they tended to do at weekends was roll up their mattresses and hitch a lift back up into the hills where they'd come from, near Niswa.

One day the storeman offered a young lad a lift. The recruit staggered back to the camp a few hours later and alleged that the old boy had raped him.

A British company commander was taking orders that day. He called the lad in and listened to his story, then got the old storeman in for his version of events. Then he called both of them back in and pa.s.sed sentence.

The storeman was sent to.military prison for a long term.

Then the officer turned to the young lad and said, "Look at the state of the man who attacked you: He's old, he's knackered, he's got one eye and one leg, and you're a young, strong man. Basically you didn't put up enough of a struggle." And he sentenced him to six weeks in jail as well.

Toward the end of the night the SM was running around again.

"Slow down on the drink, we'll take some of this back to the UK!"

He was told: "f.u.c.k off! We're going to drink it."

Things were starting to get out of control. The city rugby team started a fight with our team, so there was fisticuffs all over the beach. Then the nurses arrived. An invitation had gone out to all the European nurses who worked in the city; as they started coming down the steps toward the beach club, there were shouts of "p.i.s.s off!" They walked off in disgust, as one would.

The SM closed down the barbecues and bars, and everybody got his head down on the beach. Tiny woke up on the sand in the morning and said, "I'm bored."

The squadron was a.s.sembled, and the SM said, "That's the last time we have a squadron do when we leave anywhere. It got totally out of control."

Some of the senior blokes stood up and said, "What do you f.u.c.king expect? You tear the a.r.s.e out of the VCs, you tear the a.r.s.e out of the cost of the drinks, then we're told it's for a party, and when we have the party, you're running around trying to stop us enjoying ourselves."

We came back to the UK and were told we had the weekend off but were to be in the squadron interest room for eight o'clock on the Tuesday morning because the CO wanted to talk to us. We thought he was going to say, "Well done, lads, good trip."

The colonel walked in, followed by the SM and squadron O.C. "I've got a letter here that I want you to listen to," he said. He read it; it came from Cabinet level, and it was complaining about noisy and unruly behavior at the beach club in Muscat. There must have been some very well-connected ex ats there that night. p When he had finished, the colonel turned to the SM and said, "Right, you've got the sack."

He turned to the O.C and said, "The only reason you're being left here is because I've got n.o.body to replace you."

Then he turned to us and said, "They're looking at disbanding B Squadron. If that happens, you're all in the s.h.i.t." Then he walked off.

f.u.c.k, I thought, I've only been in twelve months, and I'm out on my ear. went home and told Debbie all about it. By now we had a quarter, and she had settled in well. She had a job in Hereford and was enjoying being back in the UK. I, however, was still busy messing up the marriage. I couldn't see past the end of my own selfish nose; my priority was finding out what time the singleys were going down town for a night out. I had everything I could have asked for-the Regiment and a partner to share the benefits of that with-and I was s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g it up.

"It's outrageous," I said to her, describing the CO's threat. "It could all be over."

"Oh, that was interesting," she said, miles away. "I'm off to work now."

As I watched her drive away, it dawned on me that she had her own life now. Maybe, by being back, I was an emb.u.g.g.e.rance to her. But there was no time to dwell on such thoughts or try to sort anything out; there were phone calls to be made, a night on the town to be organized.

We went to her sister's flat for the weekend, staying in the spare bedroom. The flat was above her mums greengrocer's shop, and to get in or out, we had to go through the shop and up two flights of stairs. At night, the door was locked and her sister kept the keys. All day Sat.u.r.day I had a strong sense of unease, a feeling of something not being right. I couldn't work it out, but that night, as we were getting ready for bed and I heard her sister locking up, I thought: It's because I'm being locked in. I don't want that door to be locked and somebody else to have the key. And then it hit me: It wasn't the door; it was me. I was in a marriage that was going nowhere, because I had never given it a chance-and I didn't feel any inclination to start now. But if I carried on, all I'd be doing was s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g about with her life. The instant I'd had the thought, I said, "Debbie, I've got something to tell you. I don't really want to be here."

She looked up from the dressing table and smiled.

Okay, we'll leave in the morning then. We can't really leave tonight; it's too late."

"No, no. You don't understand. I want to go. I want to leave everything."

"What?" The smile slipped from her face as she realized what I was saying. She started to cry. It made me feel even more of a s.h.i.t, but I thought, If it's got to be done, let's get it done before we get into the realms of children.

I left there and then, I threw a few things in a bag, went downstairs to the first-floor window, and jumped.

I only 'ever saw her once again after that.

I moved into the block and started to save money to put a deposit on a house. It was hard going as I was not yet getting Special Forces pay.

Not many people lived in; most who did were like me, or had their families elsewhere, or were simply new members of the squadron looking for somewhere to live. The room was small, and my kit was everywhere.

A friend gave me a kettle; with a pack of tea bags and a pint of milk on the window ledge, that was me sorted. I was running a Renault 5, no MOT and no dashboard. I'd had to take it off to sort out the wiring one day and had never really got around to putting it back on.

In late 1985 I heard that I was going away. In one way this was helpful. It meant I'd be away from the situation, and therefore, to my immature way of thinking, that meant the situation would go away. On the other hand, I was severely p.i.s.sed ' off about where I was going.

From what I'd heard, it was the absolute pits.

Belize, we were told at the briefing, was formerly the colony of British Honduras and lay on the Caribbean coast of Central America.

About the size of Wales, it had a population of 170,000-mostly black English speakers-but there was also a growing number of Spanishspeaking refugees from El Salvador.

In the eighteenth century the British in Jamaica had begun logging hardwood on the mainland. By 1840 the territory had become a colony.

Guatemala claimed that it had inherited the territory from Spain but nevertheless signed a treaty with Britain in 1859, recognizing British sovereignty and agreeing on the border. However, a clause in the treaty stated that the parties had to build a road through the jungle from Guatemala to the Caribbean coast. The road had never happened, and on that basis Guatemala claimed that the 1859 treaty was invalid.

The government even inserted a clause into the 1945 const.i.tution stating that British Honduras was in fact part of Guatemala, much as the Argentinians had with the Falklands.

In the 1960s, as other British colonies in the Caribbean moved toward independence, Guatemala turned up the heat. In 1963 it ma.s.sed troops along the border, and Britain sent forces to repel any invasion.

British troops had been there ever since.

In 1972 Guatemala had again a.s.sembled troops along the border, and this time Britain sent the Ark Royal and several thousand men. In 1975, after yet another threat, we installed a squadron of R.A.F Harriers.

Finally, in 1980, Guatemala agreed to recognize Belize, but only if the famous road was built. There were riots in Belize; people were killed.

The treaty wasn't ratified, and Guatemala went back to refusing to recognize its neighbor. Britain had kept a small garrison in Belize ever since as a permanent deterrent against incursions, and we were going there as part of that force.

The maps consisted of vast areas of closely packed contour lines, which were hills, covered in green, which was jungle. There were no proper roads and very few tracks. As I was to discover for myself, there were still open sewers in the towns, and a lot of the locals were none too friendly. One of the lads in the unit before us had got his arm chopped off in a mugging.

The British presence amounted to something like an infantry battalion plus all the support-Harrier jump jets, artillery, the lot.

And part of that was an outfit called F Company, basically a dozen Regiment and SBS blokes. It had quickly been renamed F Troop after the comedy series about a U.S cavalry unit in the Wild West, manned by a load of b.u.mbling old idiots.

I turned up in July. There were people there that I already knew, like Solid Shot, jock, and Johnny two Combs, though Two-Combs was due to return to the UK soon.

"You'll hate this place," were his words of welcome.

He was right. To a man, we loathed the garrison on sight. Our rooms were in semicircular tin huts with no air-conditioning, a really good idea in Central America.

The first thing we did was go and buy fans that then stayed on for the whole tour. In the rooms there were two metal lockers and two beds, and that was it. I shared a room with Solid Shot. The first evening there we lay on our beds putting the world to rights and thinking of ways to make our fortunes. Outside we could hear Des Doom hammering the "face of the day" on the punch bag. Des's arms and chest were covered with tattoos. "When I was single," he said, "My chat-up line was: 'If you don't find me interesting, you can always read me."' He was due to get out; he'd decided he wanted to pursue other things after only four years in the Regiment; this was deemed to be disloyal, and he'd been sent to Belize for the whole duration of B Squadron's tour. He was severely bitter and twisted about it and forever on the bag; he always had many faces to "talk to."

There was a swimming pool, but that was put out of bounds because someone had s.h.i.t in it one night in protest about the timings that favored the "families of," not the rest of the garrison. Apart from the punch bag, the only training facilities consisted of some catering-size baked bean cans, filled with concrete with an iron bar stuck into each of them to form makeshift weights.

F Troop was part of a garrison and all the bulls.h.i.t that that entailed.

Our hut was part of the sergeants' mess, but unless we were a Regiment corporal or above, we couldn't use it, even though we were still expected to pay the monthly fee the mess claimed.

The team was therefore split into two groups, those who could go in the mess and those who couldn't, and I hadn't joined the Regiment for that sort of bulls.h.i.t. Tiny was with us for three weeks, filling in s.p.a.ce between changeovers. Being a regimental corporal, he could have gone in the sergeants' mess but chose to come down to the cookhouse with us lowlife, but then that was stopped. In the end just four of us lepers would walk down to the cookhouse; in fact it turned out for the best as they used to put on a great Gurkha curry.

Part of F Troop's job was to be first-response unit if a commercial or military aircraft went down in the jungle.

We would be the ambulance brigade, steaming in with all the emergency equipment and medical aid kit in a Puma. Having stabilized any casualties, we would then establish a base and try to enable other helis to get in, which might entail anything from blowing winch holes to creating full-size landing sites.

Our entry into the crash site would not necessarily be straightforward.

We would hope to get in where the aircraft had crashed as the ground might now be flattened, but what if it was still a ball of flame or just a light aircraft? We therefore had to practice abseiling into I the jungle and getting in all the emergency equipment that would be needed.

There were four of us on standby at any given time; the rest went patrolling in the jungle for a week or two. I hated being in the camp almost as much as I loved being in the jungle. There was nothing to dc in the camp apart from going for a run, then waiting for the most exciting event of the day, tea and toast at 11:00 A.M.

I had a definite feeling of: What have I done wrong to be here for the next five months. We felt like social outcasts. I'd wondered why people tried to avoid being sent here at all costs; I now knew the reason, One of the small reliefs from the boredom was practicing entry into a crash site. It required enough kit to fill two Land Rovers: five-gallon jerry cans of water, medical equipment, a generator, lights, food, shelters-everything we would need to get on site and start to sort these people out-plus our own bergens.

On practice days we drove down and met the pilots by the Puma ' At this time of the year the main topic of conversation was what crews were going to be on standby over Christmas, as they wanted to book a car and drive to Cancun for the holiday.

The pilot would say to me, the sucker with the kit, "Same place?"

"Why not?" I'd reply. "We have to keep the troops entertained."

They would stand there drinking c.o.kes and watch us load all the equipment, rig up the ropes, put our harnesses on', and sit in the heli; we'd then wait for the rotors to wind up and cool us down. The weather only ever did one of two things: It was either p.i.s.sing down with rain or scorching hot. The Royal Engineers would be coming out of their own little camp they had made for themselves; using all their skills, they had constructed a bar and barbecue area with chairs and benches, and without a doubt it was the most organized area on the camp. I wished at times like this that I'd stayed at school and got some 0 levels.

Off we went flying around Belize for a while, doors open and enjoying the view and the cool wind. The heli came to a hover at 1SO feet'above the football pitch, and the engineers, dressed in shorts and flip-flops, and by now on their second bottle of ice-cold c.o.ke, had their scorecards ready.

The first two at the door got ready, and I threw the jungle penetrators out. One of the blokes was Terry, an ex-Royal Marine now in Mountain Troop and known among other things as Fat Boy. Not because he was, but he had the largest chest I'd ever seen. He was about five feet ten inches and built like a brick s.h.i.thouse. One of the downsides of working with the SBS-come to that, all Royal Marines-was that they seemed always to be tall and good-looking. This made us come across like a bag of s.h.i.t. We decided that Fat Boy had come to the Regiment instead of the SBS because he would have failed the Good Looks Selection; his face looked as if life had been chewing on it.

The other man, in the opposite door, was the troop senior, Joe Ferragher. Joe was a monster of a man, sixteen stone, and over six feet. He was very quiet; it was like getting blood out of a stone to get him to talk sometimes, but when he did, there was no stopping him.

He was the gentle giant, except for one occasion when travelers took over his house while he was away. Joe went to visit them on his return, and after ten minutes they decided that they didn't want to exercise their squatters' rights after all. To show that there were no hard feelings, Joe sent flowers to all of them in hospital.

A "jungle penetrator" is basically a heavy sack containing a rope inserted in such a way that it doesn't tangle. Because it has a weighted bottom, it smashes into the canopy and allows you to work your way to the ground. Once the two-hundred-foot abseiling rope was on the ground, Joe and Fat Boy would start to ease themselves out of the heli so that their feet were on the deck and their bodies were at forty-five degrees to the ground.

The abseller is attached to the rope by a figure of eight device.

He remains locked in position until he pulls up some slack from beneath him and feeds it into the figure of eight; the best position is one that gives least resistance to the rope as it travels through, and that is a crucifix position with the body araliel to the ground p and arms running along the rope, controlling it. If there is a drama, the' man on the ground pulls down on the rope, locking the figure of eight.

The first two down did not have that luxury. Out they went, the weight of the rope making it extremely hard to pull up enough slack.