He was honking about the price of logs: "Forty-five pounds a ton-it's a rip-off. If you go down Pontralis, you can get them for lo-three." I sat and listened, and over the next few days I pieced together what I could about all the characters.
Nosh was built like an athlete but apparently very rarely trained or ran and was a thirty-a-day man. He was passionate about anything to do with the air and had logged in excess of a thousand free fall jumps.
He struck me as incredibly intelligent; he'd be sitting there, picking his nose, farting, and burping but chipping in with comments that sounded like paragraphs from the Economist.
Frank Collins had ginger hair, was about my height and weight and came from up north somewhere. He was fairly quietly spoken and more forthright than blunt. It seemed that he was starting to get into born-again Christianity. Everybody was giving him a slagging about it.
A copy of Holy Blood, Holy Grail was going the rounds, with people reading it avidly for ammunition to give Frank a hard time with. They had a copy of the Bible with them as well, as a cross-reference. It made an odd sight, all these rough, tough men in the middle of the jungle listening to people reading out passages from the Testaments and checking them against this book.
I'd seen Al Slater before. He was the training corporal giving recruits a hard time in the 1983 BBC series The Paras. He was about six feet, lean, and he looked like an officer. I could still remember him shouting at the recruits, "Getting noticed is absolutely the last thing you want to do."
Al's special seat was a massive bag of rice. There had been a fresh day just before I arrived. Al had asked for a large bag of rice, thinking in terms of a two- or threepound bag. To everybody's amazement, a fifty-pound bag had turned up. Al immediately adopted it as his chair.
He used to sit on it, scoop out some rice now and then, and throw it in a pot. Over the next few weeks we had rice pudding, fried rice, rice with onions, rice with dried meat, rice with fish, and Al's arse got lower and lower.
With the same drop, the mail had come through. Al was sitting on his bag of rice and put his book down to open his letters. He looked inside one envelope and started rolling up. "I think somebody's put a major hint in here." He laughed, pulling out three sheets of paper, a self-addressed envelope with a stamp on, and a pencil.
Nosh was having a brew one day and said, "We ought to have a Seven Troop sun trap, somewhere we can wear our shades. We've got a reputation to keep up."
I wondered what on earth he was on about.
A couple of days later we were mincing around in the base camp, cooking away and gabbing off, and Nosh decided that the time had come.
He had a fag in his mouth and _ a golack in his hand and was walking around a massive buttress tree right on the edge of our area.
He didn't say anything, but we suddenly heard ching, ching, ching.
Colin walked over. "What the fuck are you doing, Nosh?"
"Sun trap," Nosh said, one hand down his trousers, scratching himself.
"If I do the cuts right, it'll fall downhill towards the river."
"You sure?"
"Trust me."
If the tree fell the other way, it would come down right on top of our basha area. All day we heard ching, ching, ching. Finally the noise became ching ching creak.
The tree started to groan.
Nosh came over to Mat and said, "I think you'd better move, mate.
It might go your way as well. I'm not too sure. I think I might have fucked up here."
People were running around with their weapons and belt kits, but nobody was too sure which way to run. in the end we stood and watched.
With an almighty scream and a screech the tree finally toppled, falling just inches from Mat's basha.
"There you go," Nosh said. "Very professional job."
It was, too. A big beam of light suddenly appeared through the canopy, and 7 Troop got its sunglasses out.
Food plays such an important part in anybody's life in the military-not so much for the calorific value and the fact that it keeps you warm as for the fact that it's one of the only areas where you're going to get variety and can spend time doing something entirely for yourself.
We talked a lot about what we were going to cook and how, and all the different mustards or spices we'd be using. It was a diversion from normal routine. Some people would go and catch fish to supplement the rations. Others would set a trap and see what they caught, then make a big stew out of it.
Al Slater was having a wash in the river one morning.
We heard a couple of five-round bursts going down the river and rushed to see what was going on. It was Al with big Hissing Sid coming up to him, now deceased.
We ate it that night. It tasted shit but was fine after being marinaded in Tabasco.
Tiny and Eddie made a friend that they refused to eat.
His name was Stan the Scorpion. He lived in a hole below Tiny's pole bed and seemed to like the Spam that was fed to him.
We were sitting on the floor in the middle of nowhere one day. It was pissing down with rain. I was drenched, rivulets of rainwater running through my matted hair and trickling from my chin. I put up a little shelter sheet to stop the embuggerance of everything dripping off my nose while I was trying to brew up.
As I stood up, trying to sort my belt kit out, I felt something drop down my leg. I didn't think much of it; there's always beasties making best friends with you in the jungle. Then I felt a warm and wet sensation around i my bollocks and thought, right, I'll have a look and see what's going on. I pulled my trousers and pants down and found that the whole of my groin area was covered in blood. Fuck! It was capillary bleeding, exacerbated by the fact that the skin was so wet with -all the rain and sweat.
I was flapping good style trying to see what was going on and pulled my trousers right off. Down by my boots was the world's fattest, happiest leech, as big as my thumb. It had got inside my clothing somehow, attached itself to my cock, and then drunk so much it fell off.
When leeches bite, they put in an anticoagulant and anesthetic twist ball, so you keep bleeding and you don't feel a thing. I had instant visions of other leeches crawling up my pride and joy, so one of the boys had to have a quick look inside to make sure everything was all right.
The leech was very proud of himself, very full up. I kept him to one side for ten minutes or so while I tried to decide what to do with him.
Eventually I gave him a burst of mozzie rep, which really pissed him off. Then he died, poor soul.
It took ages for the bleeding to stop. Afterward I had a bite mark that looked like a cigarette burn, which would stay there for life. It was quite a shock, and the blokes were very solicitous. Then they spent the next week reminding me that the leech was considerably bigger than the morsel it had eaten for dinner.
We had an American with us called Dan Dan the Chain Saw Man. On secondment from Delta Force, the U.S equivalent of the Regiment, he was in his late thirties and deeply macho. The problem with Dan was that he was running around too much, trying to impress everybody, when there was no need to. He'd brought a chain saw with him and wanted to chop the whole forest down for everybody so they could build things.
Hammocks or A-frames were not for Dan. "The jungle floor is good," he drawled.
Within a week he was in shit state. He wouldn't use a poncho; he built'a sort of tepee with leaves and branches. He would scream and shout, "Goddamn shit!" in the middle of the night as things bit him.
He had lumps and bumps all over him, but there was no way he was going to submit.
One of squadron HQ came down and said, "Look, here's a poncho."
"Naw, don't need it."
One of the blokes was down on his haunches making a brew one day.
He looked up and could see into Dan's atap shelter. Dan had been using the poncho after all, but he'd covered it with leaves so he wouldn't lose face.
Gotcha, Delta!
Dan lived in his own little world in more ways than one. 0. the day Tiny, who was well into demolitions, was preparing a thing called an A-Type ambush. it was an explosive ambush, tripped by any patrol that walked into it. Dan had made a DIY claymore mine out of his little soap dish, and he wanted Tiny to try it out. This A-Type ambush consisted of about forty pounds of P.E (plastic explosive), plus about five or six 81 MM mortar rounds, claymores, and homemade claymores.
It was a massive accumulation of explosive, to which Dan in also sisted on adding his soap dish. The explosion took the top off the spur, flattening an area of about twenty meters square so it looked like a landing site.
Dan came up and said to Tiny, "So, how did the soap dish do?"
Tiny said, "Ever watched a mouse rape an elephant?"
We finished the trip and had six days off. A lot of blokes were going to go to Thailand and to see the Burma railway. The Kiwis were going to sponsor the rest of us in Singapore. Dan couldn't wait to get there.
When we reached the base area at Kluang, the SQMS (squadron quartermaster sergeant) had laid on tables of beers and food. But everybody knew he had to clean his weapons first. Well, everybody except Dan.
I had the GPMG at that stage. It was a section weapon, so everybody was responsible for cleaning it, not just the person who carried it. In my battalion days a corporal had to dish out the weapons, because everyone selfishly just did his own. Tiny came over and started to help me, then another bloke came over and took another bit, and somebody took another, which was all rather nice. It made me feel a bit more part of the group. We'd been together now for about two months, but I was still on probation. I could still be fucked off if these blokes didn't want me.
Meanwhile Dan Dan the Chain Saw Man was nowhere to be seen. He was too busy throwing two-pint bottles of Heineken down his neck, and had gone on overload. Instead of sorting his kit out, he just went straight on the piss because he thought it was the manly thing to do.
It was nice to have a party after work, get the barbecue going, have a few beers, but there were priorities. Everybody was looking forward to having a couple of beers, then going downtown and having a proper shave.
Nobody, however, wanted to get stinking and out of his head; you just lose the day.
We got a wonderful picture of Dan to be put up in the squadron interest room when we got back to the UK.
After an hour on the Heineken Dan was out on the floor. We heard later that about two weeks after he returned to the States, he shot his neighbor's son for ljumping over his fence. Nothing about Dan would have surprised me.
We went down to the local town of Kluang. It was the first time I'd been to Malaya, and I wanted a barber's shave and a look around.
Three or four of us wandered around, bumping into some of the others from time to time. We went and had some fried chicken, visited a bar and listened to karaoke, hit another bar, had another bit of chicken and more beers. By the end of the night we were stinking, and soon only George and I were left. We were walking around the town at two o'clock in the morning, and we couldn't remember where the camp was.
"We'll get a taxi," George said.
"What taxi?" I said.
We knew the camp was uphill, so we set off. After a few minutes George said, "Let's nick a car."
"Well ' I land up getting hung for this," I said.
A few hundred yards further on we came across a large red tricycle with a trailer on the back.
"Perfect."
We both jumped on it, George in the saddle, me in the trailer. We got to the steep uphill bit, and George couldn't pedal, so we got off and pushed. When we got to the camp, it was such a large place we couldn't remember where we were supposed to be. The gate was closed.
"We'll leave the bike there and get over the fence," I said.
Within minutes we were in our beds and fast asleep.
In the morning we were lining up to get some money and the sergeant major was pacing up and down. "Is George about anywhere?" he said.
"That's me," George said.
"Did you have that bike away last night?"
"Er, I might have."
"Well, I think you ought to go and get it, cycle it back down to the town. That's probably someone's livelihood you've got there.
Don't fuck these people about."
George looked at me, but I had developed sloping shoulders and a wide grin. The last I saw of him was a rear view as he wobbled off toward the town. When he eventually reappeared an hour or so later, he was struggling with the world's biggest sheaf of long green vegetables on his shoulder.
"Men, nice souvenirs," I said.
"You owe me a fucking tenner," George said. "I was cycling down the hill when the owner spotted me going past his vegetable stall. The only way I could calm him down was to buy this lot."
Off we went to Singapore, and the occasion was designated a bone shirt night. We had to look like dickheads, but not blatant anorak wearers; we had to do it in such a way that people thought, Hmm, strange!
Everybody else had brought one with him; a few of us had to s end a day running around Singapore looking p for a decent specimen.
I went into one shop, half pissed, and said, "I've come in for a bone shirt."
"Ah, bone shirt! You know Tiny! Number one!"
I ended up with a rather sophisticated Hawaiian number, sun jet orange with green palm trees and great big purple flowers.