"Энди Макнаб. Немедленная операция (engl) " - читать интересную книгу автора "Where are you?"
I had to show him on the map where I was. If you put your finger on a map, you're covering an area of five hundred or six hundred meters-unless you've got big stubby fingers, in which case it might be a kilometer. You've got to point exactly where you are with a blade of grass or a twig. "You are going to Grid four-four-one-three-five-three. Show me where that is." I showed him. "Show me what direction you are going in." I took my bearing and showed him. He said, "Well you'd better get started because the clock's running." There, was one bloke in my group, Trey, who was so hyper and revved up that he ended up doing everything the wrong way around. Instead of going north, he would go south. He got off the wagon one day and got called over by the DS. He said, "Where are you?" He showed him on the map. "Which way are you going?" He pointed the way he was going, which was correct, then went off in totally the wrong direction. The DS turned around to us and said, "Where the hell's he going?" He let him go for about a hundred meters, then shouted: "Oi, dickhead, come back here! For fuck's sake, where are you going? Show us your bearing." Trey showed him, and the DS said, "Then fucking go in that direction. A lot of the time, if I was going for a high point, I could see it, and it never got any closer. My mind would start wandering off on to different things. Sometimes I'd start singing stupid songs to myself in my mind, or little advertising that I'd always hated anyway. I'd get to the checkpoint and lean forward, my hands on my knees to rest the shoulders. The DS'd say, "Show me where you are." Then: "You are going to Grid three-four-five-six-seven-eight. Show me what direction that is." Off I'd go. Sometimes I'd get to a checkpoint where they'd have a set of scales. For that day's marches, perhaps the bergen had to weigh forty pounds. They'd check the weight, and if a bloke was under, they'd put a big rock in his pack, sign it with a lumicolor, and radio on to the next couple of checkpoints that Blue 27 had a rock in his bergen because he was a snidey bastard. It meant that instead of carrying forty pounds, he would now be humping around with fifty-five pounds for the rest of the day. When measured in sweat and blisters, fifteen pounds is a lot of difference. The big mistake was to take forty pounds as the all-in start weight of the bergen, including the water. As soon as you'd drunk one pint, you'd be under;weight. When they said forty pounds, they meant forty pounds at the end of the day, not the beginning. When we came in off the hills, we'd be sorting ourselves out. The training team would come around, calling out names. These, we soon learned, were the people who were getting binned. |
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