The effect was the same as if someone was on the ground pulling the rope, which was why Fat Boy and Joe went first; it took a lot of aggression. Sometimes it all went to rats.h.i.t and people landed up banging into the heli and getting caught up. This was a quite funny sight, especially if they then started to lose control of the rope and got to the ground with lumps all over their heads and hands that looked as if they'd been in a toaster.

The engineers were by now giving points for style.

"Not as good as the team last month, but the heli has stayed in the hover better," they were probably saying as they went for their third c.o.ke and changed position for a better tan.

Once the boys were down they would man the ropes and control the kit that was to follow. We would rig it the same as if it was a body and then heave it out one at a time after the count of three. We tried a different method every time, but it was just reinventing the wheel; we decided the best way was to grab it and just throw it out. Once all that was done we followed; the heli' would then leave and get back to base as soon as possible. Like us, the pilots were hoping to get back for 4:00 P.m. tea and toast, the second most exciting thing to happen in camp. The Land Rovers would come and pick us up; the Royal Engineers would drag their chairs back to their lair.

"Not as fast as D Squadron when they were here, but there you go.

Shall we have another c.o.ke?"

The rest of the time we'd go out and patrol, gathering information and basically preparing for if the Guats invaded. We'd go as maybe a four- or six-man patrol, dropped in by helicopter, and spend ten to fourteen days on different tasks in and around the border. I loved it.

The only local industries seemed to be grapefruit, 'juana, whoring, and supplying and working for the marl British Army. I was told that a third of Belize's income came from cannabis. Apparently there used to be big frenzies where the police would go over and burn a couple of fields just so that the government could say, "That's it, we're fighting the drug problem." But for every field it burned, there were another twenty left. It brought in revenue, so there was no way they were going to destroy it. We had nothing to do with countering the drugs problem in Central America; everybody just accepted it as part of business that went on in that part of the world.

About an hour away from our camp on a dirt road lived Gilbert. He was an Indian with a smallholding that fed his large family. To help him make ends meet, he would come into the jungle with us and help build shelters and tach helicopter crews and Harrier pilots jungle survival; if they were still living once they'd creamed in, they could keep themselves ticking over until we got there. He would also come with us when we trained NCOs of the new battalion manning the garrison in jungle tactics so that they could teach their men. Belize was an operational posting, and the battalion had hard job ahead of it. This was the good part of the tour for us as at least we did achieve something.

Gilbert's house was built from breeze blocks, corrugated iron, and noise. Inside was just one very big room, with a curtain dividing off his bedroom from the two double beds that housed his eight children.

The running water was a hose pipe connected to a main; the outside toilet was a pit. He always made us welcome with coffee and some food; we would take a bottle of Famous Grouse to return the hospitality. He had lived in and around the jungle all of his life, and there were always new things that he could show us. We drove up to see him about a course that was going to be happening and started talking about the amount of drugs that seemed to leave Belize for the U.S.

He said, "People do not see it as a problem here. if they want to use it, fine; people here are more than happy to make money from it.

If you go thirty minutes further along this road, it becomes very good, no potholes and each side is cleared of trees and bush. This is where the drugs are picked up. They mark the road with cars, and it's used as a runway. At night you can hear the planes coming in to pick it up.

Who cares? If America wants to use drugs, let them."

It was a relief to get away from that sort of stuff. In the bergen we'd carry just enough food for the duration of the patrol. We had just one main scoff a day, which normally consisted of rice or pasta, something that was dehydrated that we'd add water to; as in all jungles, there was no problem here with water.

As my dry clothing, I took a pair of trainers, a pair of socks, a camouflage T-shirt, and a pair of OG (olive green) shorts-fifties khaki National Service Far East shorts that look like something out of It Ain't Half Hot Mum. I had a's.p.a.ce blanket to wrap around me at night, a poncho, and a hammock, and that was it. The less I had to carry, the less knackered I would get.

Belt kit consisted of spare magazines, a T.A.C.B.E (tactical beacon radio) per man, water, first-aid kit, and emergency rations. On my belt kit I used to carry three water bottles-six pints of water-but would continually fill them up anyway, always adding Steritabs for decontamination. The water tasted s.h.i.t, and tea made with it tasted no better. Part of the SOPs (standard operating procedures) was that every man carried a fifteen-meter loopline (inch-thick nylon webbing strap) and carabiner.

We had to cross a lot of rivers; the first man put the snap link around him with the loopline and swam like a man possessed over to the other side. He rigged up the loopline and everybody else came over with his kit attached to it. The rivers were incredibly swollen and screamed along.

On my body all the time were my two Syrettes of morphine, my golack, my watch, my Silva compa.s.s, and my map. My golack hung on a bit of paracord around my waist, and was now a Gurkha kukri rather than the British Army issue, known as a tree beater, which was no good to man or beast; all it did was beat the tree up, it didn't really cut it.

Indigenous people in the jungle use a golack where the top of the blade is heavier, so that the momentum of the blade does the cutting.

Most people tended to use the old Than type of golack or, like me, a kukri. It had a nice heavy bit at the top and could slice through trees like a chain saw.

Kit-for-task included the patrol radio and medical pack. If we were doing anything around the borderputting an observation post in, say-all the materials for that would have to be taken in as well.

High humidity combined with sweltering heat meant that in theory there was a definite limit to how much kit a man could carry; the maximum should have been around fifteen kilograms, but it could be much more.

Mess tins were thrown away because they were pretty useless things anyway. All that was needed was a metal mug and a small nonstick frying pan, ideal for boiling rice.

The most popular weapon to take into the jungle was the M16 or 203. It rarely needed cleaning, so we didn't have to waste time and energy trying to keep our weapons in good condition.

One bloke never used to touch his M16 at all, out of principle.

He said, "I know that it's going to work, I know that the weapon's reliable, so I don't need to clean it." And the fact is, if you squeeze the trigger and it goes bang and a round comes out of the end, that's all you want.

There were some practices in the jungle that newcomers perceived as bone when in fact they weren't. One of them concerned headbands; in the normal army such fashion accessories were perceived as la'ry-big-time and Ramboish. But moving through the jungle meant losing a lot of body fluids. Your face was covered with cam cream and mozzie rep, and if it ran into your eyes, it stung fearsomely and attacked your vision: not advisable if you're out there as scout.

Hence the headbands.

Every time we walked into a village near the border the locals would scatter. The Guats used to come over the river and steal their women at gunpoint, and to the villagers one set of jungle camouflage looked very like another because they couldn't see the pattern for mud and wet.

The villages were little more than a collection of wooden huts.

Pigs wallowed in puddles of mud; chickens and children ran between the huts or on the small football pitch that every village had. The kids didn't care if we were Guats or Brits; they always came up, hoping we were going to give them something. I loved them; they didn't understand us and we didn't understand them, but we had some good fun.

Some vi lages were just starting t'o get electricity on a generator and visits from American Peace Corps volunteers. Like modemday missionaries, these fresh-faced twenty-year-olds were bringing in hygiene and preventive medicine, and the lot of the villagers was improving-or so the volunteers said. The fact was, these people had lived like this for hundreds of years. They now had new illnesses, a new culture and religion. The soul of these villages had been dragged away to the town. The kids now wanted to wear Levi's and smoke American cigarettes. As soon as they were old enough, they left.

First stop on our visit was always the headman. we,d go up, shake his hand, and say, "h.e.l.lo, mate, all right then? How's it going? Any chance of using your hut, or what?" He, too, would start gabbing off, probably taking the p.i.s.s. His hut would also be the local town hall, and we were usually welcome to put up there for the night-in exchange for a magazine or something from the rations. Using that as a base, we'd do our little hearts and minds bit. As soon as the villagers realized we weren't Guats but friendly Brits with a party-size medical pack, they'd be turning up with babies and young kids with coughs and runny noses and old men with sores and cuts. Although we were carrying loads of medical equipment, we had to be careful in what we dispensed.

These people were not used to Western drugs yet; give a bloke two aspirins and he'd be flat on his back. Half of what we gave them was placebo, a spoonful of water that we pretended was a magic concoction.

Throw it down the baby's neck and the mother was happy.

The long wooden hut with a gra.s.s roof would house a whole family, from grandparents to babies. In one corner there would be a mud cooker and a sheet of metal that was used as the grill. This was where the tortillas were cooked; the basic food was corn that they grew by burning down the jungle and spending weeks clearing.

Coming in and out would be small pigs, chickens, and more kids.

The hut would be thick with smoke, both wood and cigarette.

The villagers lived an incredibly basic lifestyle, but I enjoyed being allowed to share a little of it. I got a buzz out of going back to a village six weeks later and seeing that an injury I'd sutured up had healed or that a kid who had been on her back with croup was running around on the football pitch again.

We weren't there entirely to patch up their injuries and illnesses, of course. While I was treating them, I'd be asking about the Guats and whether any of them had been over. We slowly built up relationships, and over the period of a tour we would come to recognize each other.

Besides giving us information, they'd give us useful tips about the jungle, such as where the fish were hiding and which were the best plants to boil up and eat.

We did a lot of liaison work with the Harriers. Part of our job in the event of hostilities would have been calling in air strikes on predesignated targets on the other side of the border, such as power stations and desalination plants. We would go in, mark the targets, and talk the Harriers in. We spent a lot of time practicing on the net with the pilots, because it was quite difficult to bring an aircraft in over the canopy. We used air-marker balloons, which penetrate the canopy and leave an orange balloon stuck up above the tree line as an identification marker and would then talk them on from that.

Being an idle f.u.c.ker, I liked jungle living. There were only two bits of kit to look after-wet and dry. Most of the time we were sitting down, brewing up and drinking tea with the locals. But best of all, we weren't spending money. I still didn't have enough money to put a deposit on the house, so I was using this trip to save up every penny I could. To save on stamps, I wasn't writing home to anybody, and there were no letters coming back.

Sandy had come into the Regiment a year after me.

He was a public schoolboy who went wrong somewhere and joined the army as a torn. I knew he was clever because he used a fountain pen to write letters with. He was about my age and height and was very into the weights. He wasn't ma.s.sive, but he had a male model's physique, which annoyed me. Luckily he had really horrible hair, like a ma.s.s of rusty wire wool. He was having deja vu, having just spent six months in Belize with his battalion before going for Selection and was mightily p.i.s.sed off.

He said it was even more boring for him than last time around. at isrize I'd first met him when we were free-falling Norton. He had a midair collision with one,of the instructors; as they both fell to earth with their canopies like a bag of washing, I saw Sandy start kicking to get out of the tangle. As he landed and sorted himself out he said, "Fair one," and left it at that. He knew he couldn't put the blame on the instructor as they would close ranks. He had only been two hundred feet from creaming in.

Sandy and I came in off a two-week patrol around the border, and after sorting our weapons out, we headed straight for the shower rooms for the big degunging process. You take everything in with you: all your clothes, all the kit that you'd used, your webbing, your belt kit, and you just dump it in the shower and scrub it all clean.

When that's done, you get yourself sorted out; the priority, as always, is your weapon, your kit, yourself.

There was Sandy and me standing under the cold shower, fully clothe cleaning our frying pans and other bits and pieces.

"Are we going to sort this wagon for Cancun at Christmas?" I said.

' ' 'We'll have to get hold of Joe and find out who's going to be on standby. We can hire a Land Rover and,get down there."

After the kit we showered ourselves with our uniform and boots on, washing our clothes with soap as if we were washing our bodies. Then we took it off, rinsed out our boots, and finally washed ourselves.

Once that was done the real business started. In the jungle, you get infested with little ticks, and you've got big zits on your back and all this sort of s.h.i.t. Most of them are in places that you can't reach yourself, so your mate has to oblige.

Sandy came out of the shower and said, "I've got some ticks in my back.

Are you going to get them out for us?"

He bent over the sink while I got up behind him and busied myself with grooming his back, and that's how we were, both in the nude, when an R.A.F officer came in to use the urinal. He sort of trumpeted like a rogue elephant, did a smart about-turn, and marched off to report two h.o.m.os.e.xuals in the shower block. It was quite funny after the fuss had died down and our explanation had been accepted, and whenever I saw the officer after that, I always made a point of blowing him a kiss.

There was a delightful place toward Belize City called Raoul's Rose Garden. The first time I was taken there I was expecting some sort of elegant colonial tearoom with a pianist and little cuc.u.mber sandwiches, but it turned out to be a run-down breeze block building with rickety tables and chairs and even more rickety wh.o.r.es.

It was a typically stinking Central American setting. I got bitten by more mozzies inside than outside, and the band played nonstop Central American cla.s.sics. The one good thing about the Rose Garden was that it was out of bounds to all the squaddies. The young lads would always be trying to get in there or the other wh.o.r.ehouses and coming back with horrendous syphilis.

Sometimes I'd. see them coming back from the town, arm in arm with a wh.o.r.e they had fallen in love with, girls who were basically after a quick marriage and a pa.s.sport to the UK when the unit left.

The Royal Marines were the resident battalion at the time. Every morning at six-thirty their HQ and support companies would be lined up and doing a three-mile circuit of the camp. Wandering up the road toward the guardroom would be one of the garrison personnel, like an Ordnance Corps bloke or a Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers fitter, hand in hand with some hooker, and the two hundred bootnecks would run past and give their marks out of ten.

One young bloke from the Catering Corps married a Central American Indian. She was five feet nothing and stunningly beautiful; in her mind she wasn't a wh.o.r.e, she was just earning money. She went back to the UK as a wife, spent a year in Catterick, and was getting s.h.a.gged fearsomely by anyone in uniform. Every man and his dog were roaring up this blokes wife, and she was getting paid for it as well. Obviously the marriage went to rats.h.i.t, and she came back, resuming her place on the career ladder at Raoul's and pa.s.sing around the photographs: "That's me outside the NAAFI in Catterick, and there's me on a day's shopping trip in York."

Every Friday night the sergeants' mess of the garrison had a do-an open-invite occasion, basically trying to get all the local women to come into the camp. They came in their droves, but it wasn't the music and conversation that attracted them; it was the offer of chicken and chips at ten o'clock. The local girls dolled themselves up to the nines and tried to look their best for the occasion.

We were lying on our beds, watching the fan go around and around.

One of the blokes had got a letter from his kids. They'd done a drawing of them taking the dog for a walk, but it looked more like a man in a noose. "I need that picture," I said. "I want to stick it on the wall, because that's what I'm going to do if I have to stay in Belize any longer. I'm going to f.u.c.king hang myself." jock had got a letter from his future wife, telling him that their marriage had been placed on the back burner.

He was severely down because there was nothing he could do about it from that distance, so we decided to give him a night out. We made a punch from a couple of bottles of rum and a tin of pineapple chunks and sat in his room for an hour or two, listening to the party that we were not allowed to go to and putting the world to rights. By about half past eleven everybody was revved up and I suddenly heard myself saying, "Right, we'll go down to Raoul's."

We got the admin corporal out of bed and told him to organize a Land Rover. By the time we got there, some people from the sergeants' mess had also turned up, senior ranks with their shirts and ties hanging off, chasing the working girls around the tables.

One of the senior ranks joined in with the band and tried to teach them a Mungo Jerry number. Things got out of hand, and the management-Raoul-phoned up the MPs.

Two young lance corporals arrived and told us we all had to leave.

We knew that recruits to the Military Police were immediately given a rank to give them some authority, and we didn't take kindly to these lads of nineteen or twenty saying, "Can you switch on? Get in the wagon, we'll drive you back to camp." It was the sensible thing to do, but f.u.c.k them.

They knew the sergeants would go, because they weren't going to risk being gabby to a lance jack who was only doing his job. However, there was no way they were going to take us; we had nothing to do with the garrison people and were not causing any trouble. There was a little bit of a to-do, and after about half an hour of listening to the MPs pleading, we relented. They dropped us off outside F Troop lines; the officers' and sergeants' messes were more or less -adjacent to each other, and in between was F Troop.

It was incredibly hot this particular night, and as soon as we got in, we took our clothes off and hung around in our skiddies and flip-flops.

My head was spinning. Everybody was sitting on the beds honking about all and sundry, and we finally decided to have a scoff.

I got the hexy burner out on the step and fried up bits of Spam.

There was stuff strewn all over the place because everybody was p.i.s.sed, and by now even the skiddies had come off.

Unfortunately, just as our barbecue party was in full swing, all the officers and their wives started to come out of the mess. The ruperts had an instant monk on because there were these naked squaddies lying on the gra.s.s in star shapes, farting and shouting at each other, giggling, p.i.s.sed, and falling over. Spam was flying everywhere, and in places the gra.s.s was on fire.

One of the officers came over and said, "I think you ought to pack this in now."

Sandy replied, "I think you ought to f.u.c.k off."

The officer went storming off, and even in my state I had a funny feeling it wasn't the last we'd hear of this.

I woke up in the morning, and the place was in s.h.i.t state.

Holding a wet towel around my head, I thought, Right, we'd better police the joint. Everybody dragged himself outside with a bucket and mop, and we transformed the area. Then we had to go and see the bloke who was running F Troop at the time, who just happened to be B Squadron's SM, in Belize for three weeks.

"The s.h.i.t's. .h.i.t the fan about this," he shouted, "and the fan is not amused."

It was suggested we make a voluntary contribution to squadron funds. VCs could be anything from a fiver up to hundreds of pounds, depending on how much s.h.i.t had hit what particular fan. Three of us were awarded ,f300; two others, f250. It was a severe blow, considering that Sandy and I were saving so hard that we were even going around collecting rejected soap fragments out of the washrooms and pressing them all together to make a bar, using other people's razor blades despite the risk of hepat.i.tis, and salvaging "sums"-empty bottles from ga.s.sy drinks like Coca-Cola or Cherryade-and taking them down to the choggy shop for a refund of two cents a bottle.

I was devastated at the loss of so much money, but as one door closed, another door opened. Two weeks later a money-making opportunity presented itself.

A scaley attached to the Regiment during the time it was operating in the jungles of Borneo now owned a hotel on San Pedro, an island far out in the keys. He had I kept in contact with F Troop and telephoned one day to say that although San Pedro was a very beautiful place, what was holding the place back as a tourist trap was the fact that the water was sulfurous' However, it had just been discovered that under the layer of lime was the world's supply of freshwater.

"I can't afford to get outside contractors to bore down to it because of the expense of bringing all the machinery over," the ex-scaley said.

"You don't know anybody handy with explosives, do you?"

Just possibly.

Des, Solid Shot, and I went down to the stores and found some old-fashioned engineer's beehive charges, used to make craters in runways. They were rusting and flaking, but we hoped they would do the business, penetrate the lime, expose the freshwater, and give us all a payday. One Friday night the three of us boarded a Gemini inflatable with a Yamaha engine on the back, laden with explosives and fuel, a floating bomb. We got on the river by the airport camp and then navigated down to the coast.

San Pedro was so far away it wasn't visible from the mainland.

For navigation we had just an ordinary 1 in 50,000 tourist map; there was this little speck in the middle of the Caribbean that was San Pedro, and we just took a bearing and off we went.

After a few hours we pa.s.sed a ship en route to Belize City. The captain hailed us and asked if we were all right. "No problems." We waved and smiled, trying to cover the beehives and firing cable. We must have looked like terrorists.

"Where are you going?"

"San Pedro."

He threw his hands in the air and went back into the wheelhouse.

The first place we were trying to find with our map and Silva compa.s.s was called Hick's Island. From there we took another bearing, and four hours later, with just one fuel bladder left, we motored into San Pedro.

We spotted a body lying in a hammock and said we wanted to find the main quay, which was near the airstrip.

"Well, man," she said, "it's like further up there. Nice to see you guys, you know, like-wow." She had a lovely tattoo of a b.u.t.terfly on her ankle; pity she was in her late fifties and beaten half to death by the sun.

It was a beautiful island; most of the inhabitants were Americans seeking an alternative lifestyle. The scaley was a little lock with a big white bushy beard. He looked really excited to see us-or maybe it was the two bottles of Famous Grouse we handed over.

We started digging the next day. We had to go down about twelve to fifteen feet to reach the lime layer, but raw materials were at a premium on the island. There weren't any boards or corrugated iron sheets to put up around the sand, and every time we dug down, it caved in. We finally got down to about two foot above the lime, rigged up the beehive charge, and Des initiated it.