The last grave in the line was a new one. I stooped down. The man’s camouflaged webbing belt had been folded in four and laid carefully between two urns of flowers across the freshly dug soil. I picked up the belt and felt the solid, reassuring weight of the canvas weave. For a moment, the distant roar of the traffic penetrated my awareness again. Then just as quickly it faded away. I folded the belt into four again and placed it gently back on the mound.
I stood up and walked back towards the stone wall at the end of the plot. A large winged-dagger plaque was set into the wall, and on either side a row of ten smaller plaques. As I drew nearer, I could see a crop of tiny white balsa wood crosses planted in the grass just in front of the wall. Silent Valley! The sight of the crosses sparked a flash of recollection of that sombre graveyard scene in Aden all those years before when I was a regular soldier with the Royal Engineers. I’d come a long way since then. I was lucky. The sand was still trickling through my hourglass.
To the left of the winged dagger and lower down, a quote from the Regimental clock had been reproduced, a quote I’d glimpsed as I scrambled out of the training-wing theatre after the Colonel’s opening address on the first day of selection. I now read the words slowly and deliberately, letting the meaning sink deeply within:
I’d been across that angry sea, I’d been beyond that mountain barred with snow. The pilgrimage continued. But for these lads the journey was at an end. They would go no further. Back at camp, their names were inscribed in white lettering on the bronze panels at the base of the clock: it was a mark of utter finality. In Regimental terminology, they had been unable to beat the clock.
I looked at the moving messages inscribed on the urns.
To the world you were a soldier;
But to me you were the world.
The fresh flowers in the urns swayed slightly as I read the words. Each inscription was like a thump in the chest.
Your love lies within my heart.
Until our spirits touch.
A breeze sprang up as if from nowhere. The skin across my cheekbones was drawing tight with the cold and my hands were going numb.
Loving husband and Daddy.
I thought of my own son, now eight years old. What would he have been feeling now if I’d gone down with them, if I’d not come back?
The inscriptions on the small plaques were uniform, stark in their simplicity: number, rank, name, date of birth, date of death. A relentless sense of tragedy gripped me as my eyes read from left to right and saw, repeated again and again, the same date of death: 19.5.1982. The Falklands helicopter crash.
The sadness was welling up. It tightened my throat. I kept on swallowing unconsciously, trying to get rid of it, as if it were a piece of food stuck in my gullet – but it refused to go away. I knew there was only one way to relieve the feeling. I needed a drink and a chat with the lads to get things back in perspective.
The warm, bustling, smoky, beery atmosphere of the pub was a great comfort as I carried drinks to the table and sat down with Paddy and Iain Thomson – the strangest variation you could imagine on the theme of the Englishman, Irishman and Scotsman! The beer quickly took effect and the stories started to flow. This was what I enjoyed the most. A couple of pints to release the tensions, and the world suddenly seemed a better place to be. With the stories came the glow of reminiscence; with the recollections came the warmth of camaraderie.
‘Iain, you never did tell me the full story on those thirteen morphine syrettes in Borneo. How come you took so many?’
‘Ah yes. The Borneo ambush. I remember it as if it were yesterday. Mind you, it’s thirsty work telling stories. It’ll cost you a double Grouse.’
‘Yer on,’ I said without hesitation.
Iain took a sip of beer and settled back. ‘It was at Gunong Rawan, Sarawak. We were on patrol against the Indonesian KKP, myself and seven other lads from D Squadron. I was lead scout. I’d been in Malaya on a trackers’ course with the Maori SAS. Being a non-smoker, I could smell scents in the jungle very easily. It was seven o’clock in the morning and we’d just come across a track leading to a clearing. I had a bad feeling about it, a premonition.
‘The next moment the world erupted. Rounds were hitting the ground at my feet and ricocheting off the rocks into the trees. Bits of branches were falling on my head. I felt a terrific thump in my thigh and went flying backwards through the air. As I hit the ground, an Indonesian KKP popped up. I was lucky – I hadn’t dropped my Armalite when I got hit. I swung it round and blew him away. As I crouched back down, a spurt of blood hit me in the face. My femoral artery was severed and I was already feeling very weak. I whisked off my face veil, wrapped it around my leg as far into my crotch as I could get it, pulled it tight and tied it off. I whipped out my commando dagger, twisted it around the veil, then stuck it through the leg of my OGs. The bleeding stopped!
‘The firing continued, pushing the rest of the patrol down the valley, leaving me stranded. By this time, I’d already banged in my second syrette. I was lucky. I’d spotted a pile of morphine just as I was leaving the Gurkha base at Kuching before the patrol. Being a canny Jock, I’d stuck it into my breast pocket.
‘I started to crawl in the direction of the emergency RV. I wasn’t going to stay there and rot if I could help it. I could feel the femur crunching together. There was no pain; the morphine had started to take effect. By nightfall, and four morphines later, I crawled into a pighole under a tree to hide from the Indos. I covered myself with mud and pig shit as camouflage. I couldn’t smell anything, I was too high on the morphine.
‘I crawled throughout the next day. My thirst was terrible. Every time I tried to drink water, I spewed it up again. My system just couldn’t accept it. About 1630 hours, I reached a stream. I was hugely relieved. It was the watershed of the border. I rolled about in the water to get rid of the maggots which covered me from knee to waist. The fish must have had a field day! I started to fire shots in the air, three at a time, the emergency signal. Suddenly I spotted a movement above me. I rolled behind a rock and somehow managed to get my Armalite pointing in the right direction. Someone ran behind a tree. Indo bastards, they’ve found me! I made my mind up to have a go as much as I could, then banjo myself. I remembered what had happened to Paddy Condon when they caught him.
‘It was then I saw the red hat and the Bren gun. The Gurkhas! Salvation! Then I saw Kevin, the airborne wart, as large as life and twice as ugly! I cried my eyes out against his broad Yorkshire shoulder. Never was I so glad to see a fellow Para.