"Энди Макнаб. Немедленная операция (engl) " - читать интересную книгу автораslow Donny Osmond numbers.
I was slowly getting pissed, and I didn't really pay that much attention when my new friend said, "Call me Pierre." To me, Pierre was a French blokes name. I hadn't realized it was also a Chinese woman's. Then, very, very slowly, I started to get the picture. I looked around and realized that everybody in the bar was a bloke. I looked again at Pierre-and the awful truth sank in. "Just going to the toilet," I said, disentangling her hand from my thigh. I did a runner, haunted by the faces of all the blokes I'd seen looking at me through the windows. I was going around for days afterward laughing manically and saying, "They do the best Spanish omelet in Gibraltar down the Capri. It's full of dodgy character's, of course, but it's worth it for the food." The battalion were coming back to England in November and heading more or less straightaway for South Armagh. I would be too young to go with them immediately; you had to be eighteen, because years before there had been too many seventeen-year-olds getting shot. It was bad PR, so they'd upped the age limit. I'd have to wait until after my birthday. We went to Lydd and Hythe for infantry buildup training. We spent a lot of time on the M.U.F (marksmanship under fire) range and were trained in all the different scenarios we were likely to meet. "We are going to be based in South Armagh-bandit country," said our company commander, "and B Company are going to Crossmaglen, a town that makes the rest of bandit country look like Camberwick Green." There was a shooting during the buildup training, and for the first time I started to read more of the newspaper than the TV page. Toward the end of the training we were issued with an optic sight for our weapons. I'd never seen this bit of kit before, but I knew that it existed. That was it; I thought I was the international sniper. In the infantry at that time all the clothing was incredibly basic. We had a uniform, but no effective waterproofs or warm clothing. If you wanted stuff like that, you had to buy your own. The most exotic item we were given to help us through the rigors ahead was a pair of thick arctic socks. I was eighteen years old. I'd already been in the army for coming up to two years, but this was 'my first operational tour. Everything was great. The way I looked at it was I was having a good experience, I was with the battalion, I thought I was hard as fuck, and I'd have enough money to buy a car and show Christine a good time when I got back. Crossmaglen, a cattle market town known to us as XMG, was right on the border. This meant the players could prepare in Dundalk on the other side, then pop over and shoot at us. There was a big square in the center, with a number of small buildings with metal railings in front to hold the livestock. It was overlooked by Baruki sangar, which was less than a hundred meters away from the security forces base that we lived in. Named after a paratrooper called Baruki who got blown up, the sangar was a big corrugated iron and steel structure. Inside were three GPMGs (general purpose machine guns), an M79 grenade launcher, smoke dischargers, radios, and, most important, flasks of tea and sandwiches, because we were |
|
|