‘Is that what you’d do if you were under fire?’ Jimbo would bawl. ‘See a spider and jump up like an idiot to get shot to pieces? Get your face back in the dirt, man, and don’t get up again until I tell you!’
While some of the men resented having firing practice when most of them had not only done it all before but had even been blooded in real combat, what they were in fact learning was how to deal with an unfamiliar terrain. Dead-eye also taught them how to time their shots for when the constantly swirling dust and sand had blown away long enough for them to get a clear view of the target. Finally, they were learning to fire accurately into the sunlight by estimating the position of the target by its shadow, rather than by trying to look directly at it. By lunchtime, when they had mastered this new skill, they were thoroughly exhausted and, in many cases, bloody and bruised from the sharp, burning rocks. They were suffering no less from the many bites inflicted by the whining mosquitoes.
‘I look like a bleedin’ leper,’ Ben complained as he rubbed more insect repellent over his badly bitten wrists, hands and face, ‘with all these disgusting mosquito bites.’
‘Not as bad as leeches,’ Les informed him smugly as he sat back, ignoring his mosquito bites, to have a smoko. ‘Those little buggers sucked us dry in Borneo. Left us bloodless.’
‘By the time they finish with us,’ Taff said, ‘you could throw us in a swamp filled with leeches and they’d all die of thirst. I’m fucking bloodless, I tell you!’
In the relative cool of his poncho tent, Ken removed his water bottle from his mouth, licked his lips, then lay back with his hands behind his head and closed his eyes.
‘If you go to sleep you’ll feel like hell when you wake up,’ Larry solemnly warned him.
‘I’m not sleeping,’ Ken replied. ‘I’m just resting my eyes. They get tired from the sunlight.’
‘Getting hotter and brighter every minute,’ Larry said. ‘It’ll soon be like hell out there.’
‘We’ll all get there eventually,’ Les told him, ‘so we’d better get used to it.’
‘Amen to that,’ Ken said.
Immediately after lunch they rolled out of the shade of their bashas to return to the baking oven of the ridge, where, although dazzled by the brilliance of the sky, they took turns to set up, fire and dismantle the 51mm mortar. It weighed a mere 13lb, had no sophisticated sights or firing mechanism, and was essentially just a simple tube with a fixed base plate. Conveniently, it could be carried over the shoulder with its ammunition distributed among the rest of the patrol. The user had only to wedge the base plate into the ground, hold the tube at the correct angle for the estimated range, then drop a bomb into the top of the tube. Though first-shot accuracy was relatively difficult with such a crude weapon, a skilled operator could zero in on a target with a couple of practice shots, then fire up to eight accurate rounds a minute. Most of the men were managing to do this within the first hour, and were gratified to see the explosions tearing up the flat plain below, forming spectacular columns of spiralling smoke, sand and dust.
Even though they had protected their faces with their shemaghs, they were badly burnt by the sun, on the road to dehydration, and very close to complete exhaustion when, in the late afternoon, Jimbo and Dead-eye called a halt to the weapons training and said they would now hike back down the hill to the waiting Bedfords.
Believing they were about to return to the base camp, the men enthusiastically packed up their bashas, humped the support weapons back onto their bruised shoulders, strapped their heavy bergens to their backs, picked up their personal weapons and hiked in single file back down the hill. If anything, this was even more dangerous than the uphill climb, for they were now growing dizzy with exhaustion and were forced to hike in the direction of the sliding gravel and stones, which tended to make the descent dangerously fast. Luckily, they were close to the bottom when the first man, Taff, let out a yelp as the gravel slid under his feet, sending him backwards into the dirt, to roll the rest of the way down in a billowing cloud of dust and sand. He was picking himself up when two others followed the same way, either tripping or sliding on loose gravel, then losing their balance before rolling down the hill. The rest of the group managed to make it down without incident, though by now all of them were utterly exhausted and soaking in sweat.
‘Right,’ Dead-eye said. ‘Hump those support weapons back up onto the Bedford, then gather around me and Sergeant Ashman.’
The men did as they were told, then tried to get their breath back while wiping the sweat from their faces and, in some cases, vainly trying to wring their shirts and trousers dry. They were still breathing painfully and scratching their many insect bites when they gathered around the two sergeants.
Any hopes they might have held of heading back to the relative comforts of the base camp were dashed when Jimbo gave them a lecture on desert navigation, much of it based on his World War Two experiences with the Long Range Desert Group. The lecture took an hour and, to the men’s dismay, included a hike of over a mile, fully kitted, out into the blazing-hot desert. This was for the purpose of demonstrating how to measure distance by filling one trouser pocket with small stones and transferring a stone from that pocket to the other after each hundred steps.
‘The average pace,’ Jimbo explained, ‘is 30 inches, so each stone represents approximately 83 yards. So if you lose your compass or, as is just as likely, simply have no geographical features by which to assess distance, you can easily calculate the distance you’re marching or have marched by multiplying the number of stones transferred by eighty-three. That gives the distance in yards.’
Though the exhausted men had been forced to walk all this distance in the burning, blinding sunlight, they had been followed by one of the Bedfords. Fondly imagining that this had come out to take them back, they had their hopes dashed again when some small shovels, a couple of radios and various pieces of wiring were handed down to them by the driver.
Jimbo and Dead-eye, both seemingly oblivious to the heat, then took turns at showing the increasingly shattered men how to scrape shallow lying-up positions, or LUPs, out of the sand and check them for buried scorpions or centipedes. Dead-eye was in charge of this particular lesson and, when he had finished scraping out his own demonstration LUP, he made the exhausted men do the same, kicking the sand back into the scrapes when they failed to do it correctly and making them start all over again. When one of the men collapsed during this exercise, the inscrutable sergeant patiently aroused him by splashing cold water on his face, then made him complete his scrape, which amazingly the man did, swaying groggily in the heat.
A short break was allowed for a limited intake of water, then Jimbo gave them a lesson in special desert signalling, covering Morse code, special codes and call-sign signals; use of the radios and how to clean them of sand; recognition of radio ‘black spots’ caused by the peculiar atmospheric conditions of the mountainous desert; setting up standard and makeshift antennas; and the procedure for calling in artillery fire and air strikes, which would be their main task when in their OPs in the Radfan.
Most of the men were already rigid with exhaustion, dehydration and mild sunstroke when Jimbo took another thirty minutes to show them how to make an improvised compass by variously stroking a sewing needle in one direction against a piece of silk and suspending it in a loop of thread so that it pointed north; by laying the needle on a piece of paper or bark and floating it on water in a cup or mess tin; or by stropping a razor-blade against the palm of the hand and, as with the sewing needle, suspending it from a piece of thread to point north.
Mercifully, the sun was starting to sink when he showed them various methods of purifying and conserving water; then, finally, how to improvise water-filtering systems and crude cookers out of old oil drums and biscuit tins.
‘And that’s it,’ he said, studying their glazed faces with thinly veiled amusement. ‘Your long day in the desert is done. Now it’s back to base camp.’
‘Which you can only do,’ Dead-eye told them, ‘if