After two weeks of King Squad, the commanding officer removed my old navy blue beret and handed me my green beret. I was now a Royal Marine Commando. Soon after, I was assigned to 40 Commando in Malaya. Dad dropped me off at Heathrow to catch my flight.
“Don’t be a bloody hero, son!” he said.
“We flew out on a Bristol Britannia, the whispering giant, an old, four-prop aircraft, so it was slow. On the way out to Singapore, we had twenty-four hours of flying, with three fuel stops. Our third stop was in Bombay. Just after take-off, there was a big bang and we saw a flash from one of the engines. I called over the air hostess, “I think one of the engines has gone, love.” She informed the pilots, and we went back to Bombay. We were stuck for another fifteen hours, but eventually, we took off. A few hours later, we landed in Singapore and were loaded onto a truck.
We travelled north up through Singapore and crossed over into Malaysia; then it was another sixteen miles north up to Burma Camp. On one side of the camp were the Royal Green Jackets. They interchanged with Gurkhas now and again, as this was the jungle warfare school for both. We Marines were on the other side, where we would do our own jungle training.
As soon as the truck stopped, I heard an officer call out, “Right! Gayler, get out!”
“Yes, sir.” I jumped out of the truck with all my kit.
“Get in the guardroom.”
“What have I done, sir?” He didn’t reply, he just marched me in.
“You’ll get your meals here – there’s the shower, and there’s the toilet. You cannot leave this area Gayler. Do you understand?”
“Yes, sir, but what have I done?” I asked again.
“Do as you’re told!” He snapped.
I didn’t know it at the time, but because I was still underage, I wasn’t able to join my company until I turned eighteen a week later.
On my birthday, at six in the morning, there was a bang on my cell door.
“Get out of bed, you horrible man!”
My kit was packed, and I was marched off to B company and introduced to the commander. He welcomed me and sent me off to 6th Troop, where I met the sergeant and lieutenant.
We immediately started training for jungle warfare and all got kitted out with the proper clothing and equipment. After we’d done a couple of weeks of training, we were given our first mission. It was 1965, and here I was, just turned eighteen years old, and a Marine Commando, heading off to patrol in the jungles of Borneo.
The upper half of the island was made up of Sarawak, Brunei, and North Borneo. That was all part of Malaysia. The bottom half was Indonesia ruled by Sukarno, a communist who was not good to his people. When oil was found in Brunei, he decided he wanted the whole island for Indonesia.
Because of the oil, the Sultan of Brunei became a very wealthy man, and even though it was an independent state, Brunei was still part of the British Empire and therefore a protectorate of Britain. That’s why we were there, to protect Malaysia and Brunei.
Because of my height, I was given the heaviest weapon: a general-purpose machine gun. It was four feet three inches long, weighing twenty-four pounds, and could fire over a thousand rounds a minute. I carried eight hundred rounds on me, with 30 always in the breach, but I also had to carry my food, water, and dry clothing – the whole pack, so my number two had eight hundred rounds on him as well, with another thousand split among the rifle section. I had to be very careful how I used ammunition. If you got into a firefight and the ammo was gone, you’d had it.
There were thirty men in our troop: three rifle sections, the HQ section, consisting of officers, medics, radio, and troop sergeant, and nine other men per rifle section. We were running routine patrols from our camp down to the border with Indonesia. About six weeks after arriving, we got a report that our planes had seen a build-up on the border. It could have just been a native camp, but we didn’t know. What we did know was that the enemy troops were coming up through the jungle with baskets of grenades to detonate in Kuching, the capital of Sarawak. Our job was to stop them from getting through.
Before leaving camp, we’d fire off a few rounds to make sure the guns were working, and then we’d come through the concertina barbed wire that was set all around the perimeter. We also had what we called a grenade necklace – bunches of thirty-six grenades set about twenty feet apart, all hooked up to a wire. When you stuck both ends of that wire onto the terminals of a dry cell battery, all those grenades went off at once. Anybody coming through that barrier wouldn’t stand a chance.
It took us twenty minutes to get off the base. We moved out bit by bit, and as we did, we formed an all-around defense perimeter. We went into a fighting formation in case anyone was out there. Then the rest of our section came out, and as they did, we expanded our boundary.
There were two local tribes in the area. The Iban tribe, who lived within the jungle, and the Dayaks, who lived in the coastal area. The Ibans were headhunters. If you saw someone with a tattoo down his throat in a particular design, you knew he was a headhunter. It meant he’d killed somebody, taken his head off, and shrunk it. On our patrols, we had two Iban scouts as trackers in front. They never missed a thing, and taught us how to see the jungle, not just at it but deep into it. The enemy could be six feet away, and we wouldn’t see them because it was that thick. But the trackers could smell them! I remember some US Marines came to us through our jungle school, and we sometimes merged to do exercises. We’d be the Viet Cong, and they’d try and get us, but we kicked their asses every time because they stank of cigarettes and chewing gum, and they were constantly talking to each other. We couldn’t be careless like that. In fact, whenever we left our camp, we first headed for a little stream at the bottom of the hill, took off our equipment, and then dunked ourselves in the muddy water. After checking for leeches, we’d put our stuff back on and head into the jungle, stinking of the jungle. We couldn’t even smoke, and we had to make sure all our kit was locked down so that nothing rattled. The Iban trackers could feed us from the jungle. So we had our rations and a bit of jungle food. We patrolled like that for five days at a time.
It’s hard to express what my first experience of combat was like. It’s one of those things you just can’t know until it happens to you. When we came into contact with the enemy, everything clicked into place. The training totally took over. It’s as if I’d been wound up like a clock and was just doing it like a machine. I always kept a thirty-round belt in the breach of my gun, so when one day we had an enemy contact, I hit the deck. Within seconds, those first thirty rounds had hit the jungle, and my number two had fed in two hundred more. My mind was set on what I was doing and following the training. There were no emotions at the time. If you allowed emotions, you’d crack. There were a couple of guys who lost it. One of them was literally crying for his mother. He was a middleweight boxer who fought for the unit. We thought he was tough, but he lost it. One of the lads had to smack him around to shut him up because his noise was drawing the enemy.
We were surviving because everybody was working for each other, relying on each other. If a guy flaked on you, he became a liability. We killed three or four enemy fighters in that encounter. We took their fingerprints and sent them to the International Red Cross, who contacted the next of kin. I never got injured and even though I was under fire only a couple of times, and it was just a short period of three months, but I saw enough to understand what it was all about.
Marc Itzler Ghost Writer 