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

very hot or very cold.
There were no windows.
In the late seventies it was very much a foot-soldiering conflict in
South Armagh. If we weren't in the town patrolling, we'd be in the cuds
(countryside) patrolling, just us and the mud and the rain, our rifles and
our bergens (back packs), out for however many days the task took. Being the
rug (new boy), I had to carry the GPMG.
For the first month or so I was quite switched on by it all. Then it
started to get very boring. I didn't feel I was achieving anything because
nothing ever happened. I'd just done all this training where every time you
take a footstep something happens and you've got to react to it, but now
that we were here nothing seemed to be happening.
We patrolled, watched, stopped cars, put protection out at VCPs
(vehicle checkpoints), and carried out house searches, and that was it.
We used to go out on patrol in the cuds with welly boots on because of
the mud. There was a four-day routine. We'd be picked up by helicopter and
taken out for four days, living in the field. Then we'd have four days on
town patrol, wearing boots rather than wellies.
This was a twenty-four-hour presence; there were always three patrols
in the town. Then we'd do four days in sangars, doing cookhouse fatigues,
cleaning the bogs Out, and doing the area cleaning, a military term meaning
work for work's sake. On one memorable occasion the ser eant major ordered
me: "McNab, you are to go out and sweep up all unwanted puddles."
Everything we needed had to come in by helicopter: food, ammunition,
letters, people. The helipad was a structure of wooden slats outside the
camp; when a helicopter was due, sangars had to stand to, and the aircraft
would swoop in quickly. There was a housing estate next door and the boys
used to take pops at anything that moved.
The navy crews were the best, in their Wessexes; they were more daring
and always on time, which was important after a long patrol, when you were
waiting to be extracted.
I was the doorman in the sangar one day; that meant that as people
jumped from the helicopter and ran toward the door, I'd open it just wide
enough for them to run inside. I didn't have a clue who the character was
that was running toward me. All I could see was a figure bent double, with a
pile of paperwork in a wicker shopping bag with a handle like the ones
grannies do their shopping with.
"Who are you?" he said.
"McNab, sir."
"I'm Corden-Lloyd." He beamed as he shook my hand. Then, in a brilliant
piss-take of the sort of bone questions senior officers seem to need to ask
squaddies when they visit, he said, "Enjoying yourself?
Mail getting through? Food all right? Any problems?"
This was great, a colonel shaking my hand, taking the piss out of
himself, asking me how I was, what platoon I was in.
There were no military vehicles in the cuds to back up patrols because
too many had been taken out by culvert bombs. However, there were two
Saracen armored vehicles that stayed in the town. They had antiarmor metal
mesh over them to stop RPGs (rocket-propelled grenades) penetrating; the
mesh would initiate the rocket before it penetrated the armor. They were