"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
certain type of work and the personality to get on with other people in
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