"Энди Макнаб. Немедленная операция (engl) " - читать интересную книгу автора Everything stopped; the whole effort switched to making sure I was all
right. Raymond got some rehydrates and boiled sweets down me, put a brew on, and gave me lots of sweet tea. Fortunately the DS didn't see what was going on; it was my fault I was dehydrating. Within half an hour I was right as rain again, but I had learned my lesson. We came back in off the exercise and they checked our bergens for plastic bags of shit. We weren't allowed to leave any sign, and that included body effluents. We had to shit into plastic bags, and collect our piss in plastic petrol cans. They checked another patrol as we came in. "You've not got much shit there," the DS said. "You constipated or something? Where's all your shit?" The fellow made an excuse, and the DS just said, Okay." Sometimes I wished they would just give us a bollocking, to get it out of the way. They'd told us why not to shit in the field-because the enemy would know people were there. They had even shown us how to shit into a plastic bag by getting somebody to do it. If we weren't doing it, it was bad discipline. Sometimes we'd go back to an area we'd used that day to look at some of the problems we had created. They might say, "See the marks on the trees? Soft bark is easily marked; hard isn't so you leave no sign." Because they'd shown us that, they didn't expect it to happen again. If we didn't learn it must mean we didn't want to learn or didn't have the aptitude. of everything we'd learned, involving patrolling, hard routine, CTRs (close target recce), bringing everybody together at a troop RP, preparing to do an ambush, springing the ambush, the withdrawal, going to caches for more stores for the exfil (exfiltration). At some time in the future we might go into a country before an operation and cache food, ammunition, and explosives. We could then infil (infiltrate) later without the bulk kit, because it was already cached. We had learned how to conceal it and how to give information to other patrols so that it would be easy to find. By now physically we were not exactly as hale and hearty as when we first went in. We were incredibly dirty, our faces ingrained with camouflage cream. Everybody had a month's beard, and we had been wearing the same clothes all the time. One thing I had never got used to was getting out of my A-frame or hammock and putting my wet kit on. It was always full of bits and pieces that gathered as we were patrolling along, and it was cold and clammy. It grated against my skin for the ten minutes or so until it had got warm. We had our belt kits on all the time, and some of the pouches,would be rubbing on the sides and producing sores. I went through a phase of not wearing any pants, to try to keep the sores from between my legs. I tried little things that I thought might help, such as undoing my trousers, tucking everything in, and - doing it up again. I came to the conclusion that nothing worked. I was in shit state, and in shit state I would stay. Once the exercise had finished we all RP'd at a bend in the river; that |
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