"Энди Макнаб. Немедленная операция (engl) " - читать интересную книгу автораcontact drills.
The Communist insurrection in Malaya had started in 1948, and twelve hundred guerrillas, under the leadership of Chin Peng, still subsisted in the mountains along the Malay-That border. It had been one of the longest wars in Asia, but fairly inconsequential; however, hundreds of people had been killed during anti-Chinese riots in Kuala Lumpur in 1969. The New Zealanders had a battalion stationed in Singapore. They operated in Malaya, but they couldn't commit the battalion to work in the north, for whatever political reason. We were there to demonstrate a presence. As Colin and I were patrolling, we saw a target. I remembered my drills well; I got some rounds down, turned, and ran back. Inexplicably Colin gave it a full magazine, dropped in another one, and kept going forward. He turned and shouted, "What the fuck are you doing?$) "We weren't taught to do it like that." "Oh, for fuck's sake.$' Every squadron did it differently, I discovered, and so did every troop. For the rest of the day Colin had me running to and fro on the range until I was decimating targets with the best of them. When we finished that night, I felt quite good. I'd shown a shortcoming, but I had done what was expected of me: I had learned. I felt a little bit accepted. We were sitting round in a fuddle that night, and I sampled my first "fruit cocktail," a unique B Squadron concoction made from rum and boiled sweets. I didn't have a clue what or who anybody was talking about. had no idea. I had to ask for translations. I gathered that Colin had been rebuilding his house. He was honking about the price of logs: "Forty-five pounds a ton-it's a rip-off. If you go down Pontralis, you can get them for lo-three." I sat and listened, and over the next few days I pieced together what I could about all the characters. Nosh was built like an athlete but apparently very rarely trained or ran and was a thirty-a-day man. He was passionate about anything to do with the air and had logged in excess of a thousand free fall jumps. He struck me as incredibly intelligent; he'd be sitting there, picking his nose, farting, and burping but chipping in with comments that sounded like paragraphs from the Economist. Frank Collins had ginger hair, was about my height and weight and came from up north somewhere. He was fairly quietly spoken and more forthright than blunt. It seemed that he was starting to get into born-again Christianity. Everybody was giving him a slagging about it. A copy of Holy Blood, Holy Grail was going the rounds, with people reading it avidly for ammunition to give Frank a hard time with. They had a copy of the Bible with them as well, as a cross-reference. It made an odd sight, all these rough, tough men in the middle of the jungle listening to people reading out passages from the Testaments and checking them against this book. I'd seen Al Slater before. He was the training corporal giving recruits a hard time in the 1983 BBC series The Paras. He was about six feet, lean, |
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