George Barrington Hunter

We three cooked a meal on the mini camping stoves provided in the Compo ration packs. Dinner was a mug of oxo, curry made from a tin of Irish stew and a sachet of curry powder eaten without rice and followed by a slice of tinned treacle pudding.

It was the accepted rule that all three in a bivvy would be on guard at the same time, Officers and NCO’s included. Dinner over, because we were first up for guard duty we laid out our bed rolls and dry kit ready to change into later.

By six-thirty it was dark and everyone turned in. We set up the guard posts either end of the camp with one man patrolling and every twenty minutes we rotated.

The first stint was quiet and immediately after changing into dry clothes, socks and plimsolls and hanging our wet gear over nearby branches we turned in.

Our second stint was equally quiet and with the sulphur smell of tiger spray in the air at two o’ clock we changed into our dry gear again and slept fitfully for the rest of the night.

As dawn broke the guard woke us by shaking our toes. Chunky, always the brightest first thing, said, ‘Cheers, mate,’ and reached for his wrist watch up by his head.

I heard the hiss and Chunky’s scream at the same time. I instinctively rolled away and landed on top of Ginger and in the murky light I could see a cobra with its imposing hood poised ready to strike again.

Chunky was yelling and crying as he wriggled out of the bivvy cradling his right arm. Ginger was fighting to get out and I had to hold him down.

‘Ginger, where’s your machete?’

‘Under you. Move your fat arse!’

‘Lay off it. I’ve got feelings you know.’

‘You’ll have more than bloody feelings if that thing gets angry. Move over and do snake impressions.’

‘How’s that go?’

‘Hunter, you’ve had plenty of practice at crawling.’

I gave him an elbow in the ribs, and slid slowly on my stomach across the bivvy waving my hand gently from side to side like I thought a cobra swayed.

This snake was short sighted and moved in time with my hand and I just prayed it didn’t get affectionate. Meanwhile, Ginger slid his machete from its sheath and in a flash sliced the head off our uninvited guest. In his frenzy he reduced it to bite size chunks.

In an effort to slow the progress of the venom we bound Chunky’s arm tightly with a couple of medi-bandages and kept it rigid with a splint but the injection of venom had been deep and already he was in intense pain and feeling drowsy.

Totally despondent we rolled the camp up in silence, but with a sense of urgency while munching on hardtack biscuits in place of breakfast. We strapped Chunky into a makeshift stretcher made up of two rifles lashed to some bamboo poles with groundsheets tied around them and with the head of the snake in a plastic bag we struggled, sometimes knee deep in mud or waist deep in water as we followed a jungle stream. At one time we had to link our rifle slings together as a makeshift rope in order to lower the stretcher over an outcrop.

Three hours later we reached an area where a Wessex helicopter could land. I accompanied Chunky to the British Military Hospital in Ipoh but the flight took thirty valuable minutes and when we handed him over to the Medics he was delirious and calling for his Mum. The visible part of his hand was blistered, swollen and black and I had a gut feeling which I kept to myself.

Chunky died an hour later, a victim of nature. How do you explain that to his wife and kids? The C.O. wrote to them but it didn’t make it any easier and it could just as easily have been me.