It was a big occasion. All the hippies had gathered around to watch the clever Brits reach down to the first freshwater they'd ever seen on the island. That only made it even more embarra.s.sing when the charge didn't penetrate. We tried again, and then we ran out of explosives.

"I've heard sulfurous water is good for you." I beamed at the ex-scaley.

"Maybe you could market the place as a spa?"

We had three days walking around the hotel making excuses; then we headed back to the mainland with our tails between our legs. No water, no money.

In the jungle even a simple cut can become a serious problem.

Fungi, parasites, and exotic diseases battle to prevent your body from healing. Fat Boy went out on a patrol and came back in s.h.i.t state.

He'd gone down with bilharzia and a liver infection and looked like a ghost.

He was in the military hospital for a long time.

Soon after the San Pedro trip I went back on the border and got an injury on my knee; within days the joint had swollen up like a football covered in scabby zits.

When I bent my knee, pus oozed out, and I could hear the joints creak.

Before long I had trouble moving at all, and had to be casevacked out.

It was nearly Christmas, and I thought, This is all rather nice, I'll be home in time for the Morecambe and Wise show.

Casualties had to be escorted back, and I was told that a nurse was being sent over from Woolwich hospital to come and get me. In my mind I had a vision of a Bo Derek look-alike holding my hand and soothing my brow all the way to Washington and then on to the UK. By the time we got to Woolwich, I had us practically engaged.

I packed my kit and was all ready to go on the Wednesday night flight. I was lying on my bed when the nurse arrived and was introduced to me. Bo had aged a lot-and lost a lot of hair and grown a big mustache and beer belly. There wasn't much of a sense of humor about Nigel either. I got the feeling he belonged to one of those end-of-the-world-is-nigh sects and would retire to San Pedro.

I spent two or three days at Woolwich hospital but was back in Hereford in time for turkey and Christmas pud. Not long after that, I heard that my offer had been accepted on a house in Hereford; at last I was a fullyfledged homeowning yuppie. All I needed now was ten thousand more empty c.o.ke bottles and I'd be able to buy something to sit on. it was a two-up, two-down thing, one of those new Westbury-type houses.

The asking price was twenty-five grand, but. I was feeling really good because, the big-time negotiator, I'd got it down to twenty-four and a half.

The place was very basic, and I didn't have the time or money to do anything about it. To save on bills, I didn't have the gas reconnected, and boiled water for food with a hexy burner sitting in the stainless steel sink. The kettle came from my room in the block.

Next payday I got a microwave, so anything that went ping after forty-five seconds, I'd be eating it. I got a telly, then a small stereo, and that was about it, the ultimate singley's place: bare walls, a chair, a bed, and a china ornament of a cat the previous owner had left on the mantelpiece.

The garden was overgrown, and I didn't have a lawn mower or tools; I had to borrow them from a friend who lived around the corner. I bunged all my washing in the laundry at camp. I had my Sunday dinners at work as well, or I'd go down to the pub that put out trays of sausages and clear them out. Otherwise it was Chinese takeaways all the way, collected from the town in my decrepit Renault 5. However, I was happy. I was one of Thatcher's children.

Roundabout Christmas time I got talking in a bar one night with a girl called Fiona. The conversation came around to where we both lived.

"I've bought a house near the camp," I said, naming the road.

"Number four."

"I don't believe it!" she laughed. "I live at number two. You must be my next door neighbor!"

She told me that she came from Hampshire. She'd moved up to Hereford to be with her partner, but the relationship hadn't worked out. She didn't want to go home, so she rented the house and was working in the town.

She was tall, with long brown hair, and very confident. We really enjoyed each other's company and started going out. I thought, This is good news-a new house, a microwave, and now a new girlfriend. What more could I need? But no sooner had we got together than it w'as announced that the squadron was going to Africa.

The chief opposition force to the apartheid regime in South Africa was the African National Congress. It had been crippled by the arrest of Nelson Mandela and his colleagues in the early sixties but revived after the Soweto riots in 1976. Each time the government banned a moderate black opposition group, the A.N.C's membership swelled. In 1980 it began a successful bombing campaign, attacking plants manufacturing oil from coal.

In December 1982 the South African military raided Lesotho and killed forty-two members of the A.N.C in Maseru. In May 1983 a car bomb outside the Ministry of Defense in Pretoria killed nineteen people and injured over two hundred, including many black civilians. The bombing campaign increased after the 1984-86 riots.

There were scores of attacks throughout South Africa, killing many people.

Then, in June 1985, South African forces carried out a raid on Gaborone, the capital of Botswana. Several ral homes were raided, and twelve men, allegedly A.N.C members, were killed in their sleep. The South African government alleged that Botswana territory was used by A.N.C guerrillas to launch attacks inside South Africa, including recent mine blasts that had killed white farmers near the border. Botswana rejected the claims, arguing that it did its utmost to prevent A.N.C military activities inside its territory.

Botswana appealed to the British for help; the appeal was approved by Foreign Secretary Sir Geoffrey Howe and a. Regiment squadron of eighty men was to be sent to train Botswana's soldiers to defend their country against border raids by Big Brother. Selected soldiers from the BDF (Botswana Defense Force) would be given special training, including techniques of aggressive counterattack to neutralize South African raiding parties. We were told the training would take place in the north of the country, well away from the South African border.

We would not be involved in any contact with the S.A.D.F (South African Defense Force).

The Botswana Defense Force's mobility was shortly to be enhanced by the arrival of a number of helicopters to be provided by the U.S under a ten-million-dollar military aid program. The U.S was also providing special training in counter intelligence techniques to the Botswana security forces to offset penetration by South African agents; the skills we taught them would also make it easier for the BDF to detect any counterinfiltration by A.N.C guerrillas.

We finished our planning and preparation for the job.

Everything, we were told, was TS (top secret). The squadron would be flying from Brize Norton to Kenya, because that was not an unusual troop movement. From there we'd all be splitting off into little groups, making our way into Botswana by different timings and routes.

We got to Kenya and split up. Six of us stayed in the country for a while; others were going off to other African countries for a few days before starting to filter into Botswana to our squadron RP. Some of the blokes went off on safaris while they were biding their time; I mooched around with Ben, a jock who'd just joined the squadron. We went to a place called the Carnivore, a big meat-eating place where you could eat as much meat as you wanted for about tuppence. I stuffed myself and got food poisoning and had to spend the next two days in bed.

The six of us finally got on a plane to Zaire. We spent a little time mooching around there, then flew to Zambia. The country was chockablock with Russians.

They all looked like bad Elvis impersonators from the seventies, with greased-back hair, sideburns three-quarters of the way down the face, and unfashionable suits and plastic shoes.

We wandered around Zambia departures looking at the Russians, and the Russians were looking at us. They knew who we were, and we knew who they were. The official cover story for us was that we were a seven-aside rugby team on tour. n.o.body questioned us about it, which was probably just as well. I could have been hit over the head with a rugby ball at that time and I wouldn't have had a clue what it was.

And the seven-aside story was a bit dodgy as well, seeing as there were only six of us.

We ended up sharing a small propeller aircraft with three or four Russian "officials" and a Russian pop music band that was ostensibly traveling around all the military units. The drummer had fallen straight off the cover of the Woodstock alb.u.m, dressed in flared loons, a headband, and a Cat Stevens T-shirt. judging by the way he was air-drumming on the magazine on his lap, he was no more a drummer than I was JPR Williams.

We eventually got to a small metal airstrip in the middle of Botswana. A few blokes from the squadron were already there; some of them, I could see, were nursing injuries. The squadron O.C and Fraser turned u; Fraser p had broken his collarbone and was walking around with his arm in a sling.

We got in some vehicle and went off to the squadron RP, which-inevitably-was an aircraft hangar.

Over the next couple of days the rest of the blokes trickled in from all over the place. Some came in from Zimbabwe and were in a right state.

They'd had a day out in the sun, and Toby, better known as Slaphead, having been bald since he was aged about nine, had gone up on the roof of the hotel and fallen asleep. The front half of his body was totally burned, and his face and forehead were already starting to peel.

While we were waiting, the ice-cream boys organized an Islander turbo aircraft that could take seven of us at a squeeze, and off we went jumping. We wanted to learn infiltration techniques in that part of the world, going in against not too sophisticated radars. I jumped my a.r.s.e i off over the next three or four days, getting back into the swing of free fall, going up to twelve grand, leaping out and just basically having fun.

On one particular jump I was going out as a "floater."

An Islander has only small doors, which meant that everybody couldn't exit at the same time. We were only jumping at twelve grand, so it was important to get all seven of us going off at the same time.

The technique was for various floaters to climb outside the aircraft and hold on to whatever bits and pieces they could.

I was rear floater, which should have entailed putting my left hand onto the left-hand side of the door, wedging my left foot against the bottom corner of the doorframe and then swinging out and holding on with my right hand to a bit of fuselage. However, I screwed up.

As I swung out, I lost my footing and fell, going straight into free fall long before the planned exit. To make matters worse, I was over the town.

There was no way I was going to be able to track to get the distance to reach the DZ, so I pulled quite high, hoping I'd be able to use the canopy to go in. With the wind behind me the canopy gave about twenty-five knots, but I was losing too much elevation. Soon I would have to turn back into wind to land. I scanned the ground, trying to sort myself out. There seemed to be nothing below but high-voltage pylons and cars speeding along the roads, then ma.s.ses of people running out of buildings to look at this little thing dangling from a big blue canopy.

I just managed to clear a line of pylons and hit the street, landing between cars. It was a really bad landing; I hit my a.r.s.e hard, and the canopy enveloped me. Immediately hundreds of little hands started tugging at the fabric, shouting and laughing joyously. I had visions of my parachute being ripped to shreds and shouted the first thing that came into my head.

"Okey-dokey!"

A hundred voices replied, "Okey-dokey! Okey-dokey! " I rolled the canopy up and sat at the roadside, chatting to all my new friends, while I waited for a wagon to come and pick me up.

"Okey-dokey?"

"Okey-dokey!"

The conversation was still going when the vehicle arrived, and for days after that all anybody would say to me was "Okey-dokey!"

We moved to the camp where we were going to be based. We got our camp beds or air beds out, spread out our sleeping bags, and made our own little world. The camp was a group of old, run-down buildings.

Very much like everything else in Africa, the walls had holes in them and the plaster was coming away. We rigged up some lights to the generator, and that meant we could read. Fiona had bought me a book called The Grail Romances, I'd read Holy Blood, Holy Grail just to give me enough information to give Frank Collins a hard time about the religion and had ended up really gripped by medieval history. Poor Fiona had trooped around hundreds of churches, forts, and motte-and-bailey castles with me.

They'd been used to a lot of South African incursions in the area.

Basically the S.A.D.F would come out of South Africa, chuck a left, and go up into Angola along the Caprivi strip. There was quite a lot of attention initially when we arrived; people were unsure of what we were and who we were. To these villagers, if there was a white eye and a gun, it meant a South African.

After a while we'd wake up in the mornings and there'd be hundreds and hundreds of villagers along the fence line. They'd turned up for freebies. Now and again I gave them the sweets out of the compo rations and a can of tuna or something. They seemed quite desperate, as if it was starvation stakes; there were lots of shiny cans everywhere, and they wanted them.

Then, of all things, an ice-cream van turned up one day. It was just like Blackpool, with the old ding-dong chimes. He must have traveled at least a hundred miles to get there; perhaps he'd heard that 7 Troop was in town.

We spent a week planning and preparing. A character called Gilbert, the snake man, was brought in to show us all the different types of snakes-the ones that were poisonous and the ones that weren't.

"There are two ways of dealing with a bite," he said.

"The first is to dress the wound and try to get all antidote. The second is to lie very still in your sleeping bag and wait for death."

We were standing around in a circle while this boy brought different snakes out of their bags. All of a sudden a particularly mean-looking f.u.c.ker with a deep hatred of men in shorts and flip-flops hurled itself out of Gilbert's hands and was off, spitting venom in all directions.

Within seconds all the rough-tough S.A.S men were hanging off trees and vehicles or sprinting toward the perimeter fence.. This was one very p.i.s.sed-off snake; when it couldn't find a man to attack, it started to eat one of the vehicles, trying to sink its fangs into the tires.

I had no idea how it was recaptured and put back in its bag; my view was a bit restricted from the roof of the ice-cream van a hundred meters away.

The locals were starting to pester us good style now. It happened almost every time we went into a place where Westerners had been working; people would be expecting us to give them stuff, and if we didn't, they ha.s.sled and poked. They were given so much aid from so many sources that in the end it wasn't something that they were grateful for; it was just something that they expected as of right.

The best aid foreign nations could have been giving them was education, to show them how to be productive themselves. Instead all we did was give them six hundred tons of wheat to salve our consciences. But in doing so, we created a nation of takers, who were not contributing to their own country, their own economy.

We decided one day that we'd all had enough of being ha.s.sled and told, "Give me, give me, give me." Out came the hexy blocks, which we cut into little cubes.

These were then smeared with jam and arranged on plates. Then, every time we were crowded, we f.u.c.ked them off with our confections.

They grabbed the stuff greedily and threw it down their necks.

After about three crunches the taste of the hexy got to them and they spit it out with much gagging and choking. n.o.body came back for seconds.

Being free fall troop and waiting to get into our stage of the game and try to defeat all these radars, we were very much left to our own devices. We spent our days doing our own weapon training and just generally mincing around. When a squadron went away like this, weights turned up, punch bags started hanging from trees. People would do a run around the compound and then a routine with the apparatus; a circuit might be two minutes on the bag, two minutes' skipping, two minutes' rest, then two minutes on the weights, two minutes' skipping, two minutes' rest. You'd do maybe ten circuits and then warm down with another run.

The other troops started to disappear off to do their tasks, and then it was decided that we should go with 9 Troop, who were up in a hill range called the Tsodilo hills. We set off in vehicles for the two- or three-day mooch across the Kalahari desert.

Tracks ran across vast, empty, flat plains of scrub and dust.

On the second day we came to a crossroads of tracks in the middle of thousands of acres of sandy scrubland.

A little mud hut had a sign up saying it was,a cafe. The proprietor, an old fellow in his eighties, was mincing around on a hammock. We went in, but there were no tables or chairs, or, come to that, electricity. just a few bottles of Fanta on a shelf and a sign that must have been at least twenty years old, advertising Bulmer's cider from Hereford. Once we'd felt the temperature of the Fanta bottles we left them where they were but negotiated with the old boy for the sale of the sign, which we mounted on the dashboard of the 110.

We got to 9 Troop's position on the afternoon of the third day.

It was weird terrain, totally flat and then these mountains that rose abruptly out of the ground. I wasn't the only one to notice that they had an eerie air about them.

"I did this area for geography A level," Tiny said.

"There are thousands of rock paintings in and around the hills, scenes of eland and giraffes painted by desertdwelling Bushmen hundreds, maybe thousands of years ago.

When, we arrived,.most of the troop were out on the mountain.

There was a bit of a flap on as someone had injured his back and was being carried down to the camp. It was Toby. Slaphead was a veteran of the Falklands, Northern Ireland, and countless fights up north as a policeman, all without injury; now he had jumped eighteen 'riches off a rock and damaged his back so badly he 'was on a stretcher.

He was in fearsome pain and had to have more morphine.

Tiny yelled, "Not yet, wait!" to the medic and went running to his bergen. He came back with a camera and said, "Okay, you can do it now."

Slaphead's face was screwed up in pain as he got the good news.

The picture would go into B Squadron's interest room as soon as we got back.

Eno by now was on the radio sending the Morse message that we needed a helicopter. As usual, he was Mr. Casual about the whole affair. He had been told one day by the police that his sister had been murdered; he just said, "I think I'd better go to London then." It wasn't that he didn't care; he just didn't get excited about anything.

The weather started to change. The sky was thickening with dark clouds, and the wind was getting up; there was a smell of rain-wet earth. A storm was coming; this was worrying as it could affect a heli's chances of getting in. Slaphead had been stabilized, but he needed to be taken to a good hospital.

His new KSBs (boots) had been taken off and were by the side of the stretcher. I knew he took the same boot size as I did, so I went up and said, "You won't be needing these anymore on this trip, will you?"

Slaphead told me where to put the boots, and it wasn't on my feet.

Things started to settle down; a heli was being arranged, and Eno was still on the radio standing by. Then another drama started.

It was about two hours before last light, and there was no sign of Joe Ferragher and Alan, the new troop officer. The troop were just starting to mutter dark thoughts about the incompetence of new ruperts when somebody spotted a flashing light on the mountain. We got our binos out and could just see somebody on a ledge. No one knew for sure what it was, but everybody knew something was wrong.

Eno was back on the radio again, leaning back on a canvas chair, cigarette in one hand, Morse key in the other. Three or four of Mountain Troop got radios and their kit and drove over to the mountain.

As all this was happening, the heli turned up. He couldn't do anything about the blokes on the mountain; he couldn't get that far in.

The weather was still threatening to give us a storm, and the sides of the tents were blowing out. Most of 7 Troop felt quite helpless as we didn't have the skill to climb; we just waited to see if any more help was needed.