"Энди Макнаб. Немедленная операция (engl) " - читать интересную книгу автораabout people's lives, and we all knew the value of life because we'd all had
our Nicky Smiths. True, we might make light of it and have a laugh at the dead man's auction, when all the man's kit was sold off and the proceeds sent to the next of kin. But bravery didn't come into it; if anyone was doing it for heroics, he'd soon get kicked out. The Regiment didn't want heroes; heroic blokes do things that are unpredictable and put other lives in danger. The idea was always to let the enemy die for his country, not you for yours. The op had failed, but that was just one of those things. I wasn't pissed off long term about it. No problem; it would be a long war. Sadly, later in the day, we discovered there had been a casualty, Frederick Jackson. An innocent victim of the fight against terrorism, he'd been hit with a round from one of our weapons during the firefight. The van was later found abandoned in one of the culde-sacs. The boys had legged it cross-country before hi jacking another car for their getaway. Inside the van were a shotgun, a radio, and empty cases from an automatic weapon. The players had been there to kill-at long range with the automatic or, if they had the chance, close up with the shotgun. Some lessons were learned. We had been needing a large-caliber weapon that could be easily concealed for our type of work; the SLR was too big and bulky for use in cars, and in any case 5.56 didn't give us enough stopping power if we were firing out of one car into another. The short-term answer, until the 7.62 G3s arrived from Heckler & Koch, was to acquire some Argentinian folding stock FNs that the Regiment had Later on that tour we had a "fast ball." There were a lot of close-quarter shoots going on at the time in County Fermanagh. The players would come up to a front door, knock, and just barge in and shoot as soon as somebody answered. The targets were mostly R.U.C or U.D.R people; whether on foot or by vehicle, the players would get back to safety. What we planned to do was split ourselves up over a period of a few nights to cover a number of main targets, but this time we'd be waiting on the premises. The tactic might involve a combination of being in the house and being the one who opened the door or being outside and watching them make their approach. It all depended on the terrain and the makeup of the house, garden, and outbuildings. There were four of us in one house, sitting with the main target. Of all the possible targets we could think of, this one was the most likely to be hit. It was a large bungalow in the middle of nowhere, the nearest neighbor being over a quarter of a mile away. Frank was in charge. The rest of the team was me, Eno, and a rupert called Boss S. To avoid suspicion, we had decided to make it look as if we were a vanload of friends turning up with six-packs of beer and big bags of fun-size Mars bars. He was a great old boy in his forties, full of jokes and totally nonchalant about the situation. This might have had something to do with the fact that everywhere we went in the house there seemed to be a shotgun hanging off a wall ready to give somebody the good news. |
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