Though the hike took only five minutes, it seemed much longer than that, and Terry sighed with relief when the group emerged into the relative brightness of an unreal grey light that fell down through a window in the canopy of the trees on the thatched longhouses of the kampong spread out around the muddy banks of the river. The dwellings were raised on stilts, piled up one behind the other, each slightly above the other, on the wooded slopes climbing up from the river. Some, Terry noticed with a tremor, had shrunken human heads strung above their doors. The spaces below and between the houses, where the ground had been cleared for cultivation, were filled with the Iban villagers – also known as Sea Dyaks because they had once been pirates – who, stripped to the waist, male and female, young and old, were engaged in a variety of tasks, such as cooking, fishing, laundering, picking jungle fruit – figs, durians, bananas and mangos – or working in a small, dry padi, where their basic food, rice and tapioca, was grown. This they did with no great expenditure of energy, except when playing odd games and giggling. Their longboats were tied up to a long, rickety jetty, bobbing and creaking noisily in the water. Buffalo and pigs also congregated there, drinking the water or eating the tall grass as chickens squawked noisily about them.
‘They fish in that river,’ Hunt explained. ‘They also hunt wild pig, deer, birds, monkeys and other animals, using traps and the odd shotgun, but mostly blowpipes that fire poisoned arrows. Annoy them and they’ll fire them at you – so don’t steal their women!’
Terry was blushing deeply, Pete and Alf were gawping, and Dead-eye was staring impassively as a group of bare-breasted women, giggling and nudging each other, approached behind a very old, wizened man who was naked except for a loincloth and, incongruously, a pair of British army jungle boots. Obviously the headman, he raised a withered arm, spread the fingers of his hand, and croaked the one word of English he had learned from Sergeant Hunt: ‘Welcome!’
Two weeks later, Terry had stopped blushing at the sight of the bare-breasted women, but felt even more disorientated and removed from himself. This had begun with his first short trek through the awesome silence and gloom of the ulu, but was deepened by his daily visits to the kampong and his increasingly intimate interaction with the Ibans. They were so gentle and good-natured that he could not imagine them as pirates, let alone as the headhunters they obviously were, judging by the shrunken heads on prominent display. Certainly, however, they lived a primitive life of fishing in the rivers, hunting animals with blowpipes, tilling the kampong’s one rice-and-tapioca padi, and constantly maintaining their longhouses with raw materials from the jungle. They also engaged in amiable barter, trading jungle products such as timber, rattan, rice, tapioca, fruit, fish, even the swiftlet’s nests used for Chinese soup, in return for clothes, boots, rifles, tins of baked beans, chewing gum and cigarettes. Bartering, from the point of view of the SAS troopers, was the easiest way to the affections of the villagers, leading to much giggling and backslapping.
Once this had become commonplace, however, the men started winning the hearts and minds of the Ibans in other ways: Pete showed them how to use explosives for various small tasks, such as blowing fish out of the water; Alf ran a daily open-air clinic to deal with their real and imagined illnesses; Terry entertained them by tuning his shortwave radio into various stations, which invariably reduced them to excited giggles; Dead-eye trained some of them in the selective use of weapons; and Hunt and Sanderson took turns with Dead-eye to teach English to the more important men of the kampong.
The SAS men spent most of their waking hours with the Ibans, which made for a long and exhausting day. Invariably, this began at first light when, just after breakfast, they would make the short hike through the ulu from their hidden camp to the kampong. After an average of twelve hours in the kampong, eating their lunch with the Ibans, they would make their way back to the camp, invariably at last light and concealing their tracks as they went, to have a brew-up and feed gratefully off compo rations.
The Ibans were very sociable, and often, in the interests of good manners and improved relations, the troopers would be obliged to stay in one of the longhouses to partake of native hospitality. For all of them, this was pure torture, particularly since the villagers’ favourite meal was a stinking mess called jarit, which they made by splitting a length of thick bamboo, filling it with raw pork, salt and rice, and burying it for a month until it had putrefied. Indeed, while Dead-eye and Hunt were able to digest this stinking mess without bother, the others could only do so without throwing up by washing it down with mouthfuls of tapai, a fierce rice wine which looked like unfermented cider, scalded the throat and led to monumental hangovers. Nevertheless, when drunk through straws from large Chinese jars, it was potent enough to drown the stench and foul taste of the jarit.
The eating and drinking, combined with the accompanying entertainments, in which the SAS men were obliged to dance for the villagers, was made no easier by the fact that many families shared a single longhouse and the air was fetid not only from their sweat and the heat. Also, because they used the floor as a communal toilet, urinating and defecating through the slatted floor onto the ground below, the pungent air was thick at all times with swarms of flies and mosquitoes.
Luckily for the SAS men, they were called upon to explore the surrounding area and fill in the blank spaces on their maps, showing waterways suitable for boat navigation, tracks that could be classified as main or secondary, distances both in linear measurements and marching hours, contours and accessibility of specific areas, primary and secondary jungle (belukar), and swamps, and areas under cultivation (ladang). They also filled their logbooks with often seemingly irrelevant, though actually vitally important, details about the locals’ habits and customs, their food, their state of health, the variety of their animals, their weapons and their individual measure of importance within the community. Last but not least, they marked down potential ambush positions, border crossing-points, and suitable locations for parachute droppings and helicopter landings. While this work was all conducted in the suffocating humidity of the ulu, it was preferable to socializing in the fetid longhouses.
By the end of the two weeks, close relationships had been formed between the villagers and the SAS men, with the former willing to listen to the latter and do favours for them.
‘The time’s come to bring in the regular troops and fortify the kampong,’ Sergeant Hunt informed Dead-eye. ‘Then we can go out on proper jungle patrols, using the village as our FOB.’
‘Do you think the locals will wear it?’
‘That depends entirely on how we put it to them,’ Hunt said with a relaxed grin. ‘I think I know how to do that. First we tell them that evil men from across the mountain are coming and that we’re here to protect the village. Then we explain that although our group is only five in number, we have many friends who’ll descend from the sky, bringing aid. It would be particularly helpful, we’ll then explain, if the necessary space could be created for the flying soldiers to land safely. I think that might work.’
‘Let’s try it,’ Dead-eye said.
That afternoon they approached the village elders, joining them in the headman’s longhouse, where they were compelled to partake of the foul-smelling jarit, mercifully washing it down with the scalding, highly alcoholic rice wine. After four hours of small talk, by which time both troopers were feeling drunk, Hunt put his case to the headman and received a toothless, drunken smile and nod of agreement. The headman then also agreed to have a landing space cleared for the flying soldiers to land on. Indeed, he and the others expressed great excitement at the thought of witnessing this heavenly arrival.
Immediately on leaving the longhouse, Hunt, trying not to show his drunkenness, told Terry to call up A Squadron and ask them to implement the ‘step-up’ technique devised by their brilliant commander, Major Peter de la Billière. This entailed warning a full infantry company to be ready to move by helicopter to a remote forward location for a demonstration of quick deployment and firepower.
The following day, when Hunt and Dead-eye were sober, the tribesmen expertly felled a large number of trees with small, flexible axes, dragged