The liaison with other units out there always added to the fun.
My only hats-on telling-off for being a passenger came from the air commander after I sat up front of a Puma flying over miles of jungle to resupply Cadenas, I think, in the far south-west. Even as a passenger, I had to remark "Stan, I didn't know that there was a road down here", followed by "There are army trucks on that road" and "They're not our army's trucks!" So back we went into Belize, and when we eventually got back to APC, I was summoned from the bar to be told in no uncertain terms that I should have spoken out earlier. But jungle is jungle, as we often had to remind FACs who used trees as reference points.
One day, coasting out in a Puma, pilot checked in with Butcher. Controller: "Not yet identified, what is your altitude? Pilot: "On the QFE, minus 50ft." Unusually sharp controller: "Roger, switching to ASDIC."
Then again, there was the Butcher controller who managed to find a young lady who agreed to go with him on a trip down-country. He told me that he expected to be on a certain beach at a certain time, so if I was around, could I fly over there. Well I was, and I did, from the sea and not very high. When he returned a couple of days later, he said that the timing was such that as I flew over at the
moment critique , the earth literally moved for them, and he was indebted to me to the tune of 1 orgasm. I never claimed repayment.
