"Энди Макнаб. Немедленная операция (engl) " - читать интересную книгу автораsection and training wing accommodation, but I still felt part of the
organization. We were no longer segregated from the other blokes in the cookhouse now, and I bumped into one or two people I'd met in the battalion or on courses They were happy to chat over a cup of tea. One day I saw Jeff, who was now on the counterterrorist team. He still looked younger than Donny Osmond. "Still here then?" He grinned. "When do you go to the jungle?" "In about two or three weeks." "Know who your DS is yet?" "No idea. They're going to start putting us.in patrols very soon." The next morning we were given batteries of tests. First was language aptitude. I looked around the training wing theater, trying to work out who would be the most intelligent at this sort of stuff. jake, the American, was a main man. I knew that he spoke Farsi and could write the script, so I thought, There's the brainy fucker, I'd better start edging my way next to him. I went for a piss with the idea of sitting as near to him as I could when I came back. I found that twenty-two other blokes had had exactly the same idea. Like a lot of other people in the vicinity, I cheated, copying off jake. Next was the pilots' quick-reaction test. We were handed a list of calculations and given a minute and a half to do each one in. They were weird and wonderful things like mean averages and square roots, concepts way beyond the basic math I'd taught myself with the Janet and John book from Peckham library. Then there were lots of items like the Mensa tests they had in newspapers. I doubt my results would have got me into the Noddy Club, let I kept thinking, If we fail these, are we binned, or what? Have we got to be brain surgeons or are we going to be soldiers? It went on all morning, and it became a bit of farce, with everybody cheating off everybody else. The DS must have known what was going on. One thing they had been teaching us from the very first day was decision making. In the training wing corridor there was a big picture of a load of sheep in a pen, and underneath was the message: "Either lead, follow, or get out of the way." It was a big thing: Don't dillydally; make a decision. If it was wrong, it was wrong; if it was right, it was right. One of my new decision processes was to think: What's done is done; if I've failed I've failed. When we went into the cookhouse at lunchtime, we were like kids walking out of an exam room. "What did you reckon to number sixteen?" "I made the answer two hundred and fifty." "Oh, fuck." Whatever the results were, we were issued with our jungle kit the next day: jungle fatigues, mosquito nets, bergens, different types of ponchos. I was like a pig in sugar. The same afternoon we were going to be told what patrols we were in and who our DS was going to be. Everybody wanted to get together with the people who'd been in the jungle before because in theory they were going to have an edge and be able |
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