"Энди Макнаб. Немедленная операция (engl) " - читать интересную книгу автора

bush to hide in, and you'll be all right."
It was the Regiment's responsibility to teach the survival phases.
We learned how to tell the time by the sun, gather water, and forage
for food-the most important aspect, I reckoned, being the equation between
the energy spent finding something to eat and the energy to be got from
eating it. We went to one of the training areas and learned how to build
shelters. There was a permanent stand with shelters made out of leaves,
branches, turf, and bin liners. It looked as though Wimpey's had won the
contract. With my experience of making an A-frame, I knew there was no way
I'd be making anything that looked remotely as professional.
This stuff was all very interesting, but as far as I was concerned, I
wanted to learn it only so I could pass. I looked at it as an embuggerance.
Then people who had been prisoners came and spoke to us about their
experiences, ranging from those who were in Colditz during the Second World
War and prisoner of war camps in the Far East to the Korean and Vietnam wars
and the indoctrination of Allied soldiers by the Communists. It was a
humbling experience to hear about some of the women from S.O.E (Special
Operations Executive) who were parachuted into Holland and France after
minimal training, captured, and subjected to horrendous and prolonged
torture. jaws dropped all around the room.
I couldn't believe the outrageous inhumanity. "When I got captured,"
one woman said, "they took out a lot of frustrations on me.
I was raped and burned." She had been kept in solitary confinement in
freezing cold conditions and was continually abused, yet she was speaking as
if she was talking about a shopping trip to Tesco's. I supposed it showed
that the human body and mind could put up with a lot more than might be
expected, but I couldn't help wondering how I would bear up under the
hammer.
We listened to an American pilot who had got shot down near the Choisin
reservoir. He was still very much the all-American boy, dressed in a green
bomber jacket with missing in action memorial badges and various flashes. It
was easy to imagine his freckly face and light blond hair as a young man. He
had landed up in a model prison that was used for propaganda purposes.
He was held in a cell, but at least he was fed. He went through the
mental problems of being incarcerated but survived and came back to his
family, going straight back into the air force. The biggest problem he'd
had, he said, was guilt. "I walked around with my head down for a long
time," he said. "I couldn't handle being treated so well when so many others
had suffered."
The next speaker, a British infantry corporal in his late fifties,
jumped to his feet. "There's no way you should feel guilty," he said.
"I positively wish I'd been in your camp!" A soldier in the Glorious
Glosters, he had been through a fearsome amount of indoctrination, on
starvation rations. He caught dysentery and had to bung himself up with
charcoal from the fire. Eventually he had been force-marched across North
Korea in winter, without shoes. He saw many of his friends die on the march.
He came home in shit state, having been beaten continually and lost all his
teeth. He was so psychologically damaged by it all that he alienated himself
from his family and ended up alone. "I've got over it all now," he said,
"but I still don't buy anything Korean."