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

contact 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.
There were all these different terminologies and personalities, and I
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,