"Энди Макнаб. Немедленная операция (engl) " - читать интересную книгу автора than our 7.62 for the same weight. It was a good reliable weapon
because it was so simple. The only drawback was the big, thirty-round magazines; when you lay down, you couldn't actually get the weapon in the shoulder to fire because the magazine hit the floor. A lot of the Eastern bloc policy on attack showed in the AK. With the safety catch, the first click down was automatic; then the second click down was single shot, so the mentality was clearly: Give it loads. On Western weapons it was the other way around: single shot first, then onto automatic. We did live firing down at Sennybridge, practicing live attacks. Sometimes they'd tell us things on the range, such as how to hold our weapon, that were contrary to what some of us had been taught. We were doing standing targets at a hundred meters; the way I fired was to put the butt into my shoulder and-have my hand underneath the magazine, resting my elbow on the magazine pouch. It seemed to work for me. One of the DS came over and said, "What are you doing? Put your hand on the stock, lean forward, and fire it properly." There was no way I was going to say, "Actually, I shoot better like this, and this is the way I've been doing it for years." I just nodded and agreed, put my hand on the stock, and carried on firing. Some of the blokes would actually say, "No, that's wrong," but what was the point of arguing? We wanted to be with them, not the other way around. People had weird and wonderful qualifications that they thought were going to be an asset, but the DS soon put them straight. "If the squadrons need specific skills, they'll send their own people off for training. The most important thing is that we send them somebody with the aptitude to do a closed and stressful environments. Then they have the baseline. Then they can send you out to become the mortar fire controller or whatever." I heard a story about a fellow from a Scottish regiment on a previous Selection. When they started training on the weapons, he sat muttering in the class, "I don't want to be doing this shit. This is what I do in the battalion. I want to get on to the Heckler and Koch and all the black kit." The instructors heard it, didn't say anything; they just got on with the lesson. But they'd pinged him as a big-time Walter Mitty; they took him quietly to one side afterward and gave him directions to Platform 4. I was phoning up Debbie once a week, and occasionally I'd write her a letter, but she was second in my list of priorities; I wanted to crack on and get into the jungle. As far as I was concerned, she was fine. She was still working; she was having a good time with her friends. The telephone conversations were tense and stilted. I'd say, "Is everything all right?" "Yeah, fine," she'd say, offhand. "What changes here? Still going to work, still bored, still nothing to do." Never mind, I thought, at the end of the day everything will be sorted out. We'd get the quarter; the problems would disappear. We started to learn the techniques we'd be using in the jungle, and why they were used-the way to L.U.P (lyingup point), the daily routine, hard routine, how to ambush, how to cross rivers. We'd go down to the training area and walk around in plain fields and forestry blocks as if we were in the jungle. Anybody looking at us would have thought we were a bunch of |
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