Back on Tack.
One of the biggest problems the Army has in jungle conditions is communications. Travel and living in that environment tends to be in the valleys alongside rivers. This creates difficulty in radio communications because VHF, the preferred system, tends to be line of sight. So it was with the Ghurkha company at Pensiangan, a village where they were based some thirty miles south west of Sepulot. Between the two there was a prominent hill called Lumatan, where from the top of one had a good view of the surrounding countryside. The summit and been loosely cleared and it was only an Ghurkha’s afternoon’s hike from Pensiangan to the top. The Ghurkhas established a rebro station there and everybody was happy.
The 51 Brigade of Ghurkhas decided to move their Battalion HQ to Sepulot. This involved a massive, for Borneo, amount of construction work for admin, barracks etc, all made out of saplings, baseboards and wrinkly tin. The area had to be cleared and this is where the Battalion Engineering Officer stepped in.
He was a South African, an ex mining engineer and what he didn’t know about explosives wasn’t worth knowing. None of this sawing trees down lark; two turns of Cordex and down it came. Thick heavy Teak trees took a bit more effort. They augured a few holes, filled them with plastic and then the two turns of Cordex. With the increase in personnel and effort came a sympathetic increase in radio traffic.
The rebro station couldn’t cope with both sites so the decision was made to enlarge it and send out in more personnel and bigger equipment. The equipment was too big to carry so it would have to be delivered by helicopter. The cleared area was suitable for winching but not for lifting in generators and suchlike. It was obvious that there had to be a helipad so the plan was put into effect.
The top of the hill was domed with a few rocks scattered about and one could almost see horizontally from the top. It would need to be levelled before a helipad could be built and this is where our man with the biltong came in. Being used to blowing rocks around underground he soon calculated how much OOMPH would be required to leave a nice flat top to the hill. Approval from Batt. HQ was sought and granted and the project went into gear.
We weren’t particularly enthusiastic about winching plastic explosive down to them so we were let off that bit. The trusty Twin Pins shuttled it out to us and we ferried it to Pensiangan. From there it was going to be carried up the hill. All we were required to do was to winch him out after he had lit the blue touch paper. Noting our reluctance this was changed to him leaving with the rest and having a longer fuse. It took a couple of days to position the copious amounts of explosive and fuses and then the great day came.
We wanted to fly around and watch it but we were warned that bits of rock etc. Could travel anywhere within visual range of Ground Zero. To this end we stayed put sheltered by a substantial ridge. We felt, and a lot later, heard the crump as it went off. A helicopter departed to Pensiangan to await him and fly him around his handiwork having a quick butchers at it before they arrived.
It was beautiful! It was as if somebody had cut of the top of an egg. There was, as far as one could see, a circle of rock about twenty feet across. Around it was a perfect fan of trees pointing outwards from the centre.. Landing on at Pensiangan before he arrived conversation with those who had shinned up an opposite hill to see the bang described it as like a volcano blowing its top. The great man arrived, we showed him his results which he seemed more than happy with and within a couple of days the helipad was fully operational.
The normal routine carried on and a couple on months later we had a warning that a detachment of the Royal Engineers were coming out to do a job. We had a general chat and it appeared that they from they from Field Survey. What they wanted to do was to go to the top of Lumatan to do some measurements.
“You will have to winch us down; that’s what they did the last time.”
“No problem; they’ve flattened the top and built a helipad there.”
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“They’ve done WHAAAT????????????”
Apparently Lumatan was their main trigonometrical reference point for the whole of Southern Sabah. What had been done was to lower the whole of Sabah by about as many feet as that had been blown off the top.
The next day we took them up there. They built a new marker out of the previous rocks that had been kicked around, resurveyed it and established its new height from the surrounding hills and then we dutifully amended our spot height by four feet.
Next Medivac to Jellystone.