This autobiography of the military service of legendary Gurkha soldier, John Cross, now one hundred and living in Nepal, is a reprint of a first edition in 1996, a second edition in 2015/16, and now there is this third edition. This is a tribute to the interest in Cross’s life and career as a soldier, spanning forty years, mostly in Southeast Asia and the Far East, through which Cross not only acquired an impressive command of local languages, but he also led at the Jungle Warfare School in Malaya, and concluded with service in the 1970s as British defence attaché in Laos. Three strands tie together the book: the Gurkhas, Cross’s unconventional approach to soldiering, and his service in the jungle. Much of Cross’s time was in the primary forest and, with it, the smells, sounds, light, colour, animals, and aboriginal peoples. Cross’s jungle has spiritual, magical energy, and the people of the jungle, whose languages he learns to speak, drew him farther into the deep jungle. Continuous existence in the jungle and patrolling for the enemy left Cross physically debilitated. He worked closely with the Temiar jungle people as a local loyalist force in the fight against communist insurgents during the Malayan Emergency.
The book is in four parts: patrolling as a subaltern in the early stages of the Malayan Emergency in the 1950s, working with aboriginal peoples in Malaya in the early 1960s, leading the Border Scouts force of local Dayak on Borneo during Confrontation with Indonesia in 1963, and a final section of memoir after Confrontation on his work with the Gurkha Independent Parachute Company and at the Malaya-based Jungle Warfare School (JWS). Cross finished at JWS in 1971, after which he went to the British embassy in Vientiane. The last section is interesting as Cross’s work with Thai and Vietnamese soldiers training for jungle fighting pulls the reader into Cross’s part in the wider war against communism across Southeast Asia. Cross emerges from the text as a maverick, who from his earliest days in the Army preferred the difference of Asia to the sameness of Britain. The British Army required, in Cross’s view, ‘conformity in her children.’ Cross was not a conformist but a military adventurer. The rigours of life away on patrol in Malaya in the early 1950s drove away his fiancée, Jane, after which he devoted himself to being the best and getting the best from his Gurkha riflemen. The book has wonderful insights on the reality of active service: not just firefights in which weapons jammed, but errant moments, as when one officer tried to join the insurgents. Cross is strong on the human story of service in East Asia. As he surged forward in one attack, he saw that one of his Gurkhas had bloodshot eyes: ‘the lust to kill was in him.’
Cross could be sharp with his superiors, telling one brigadier that his rank was the most ‘useless’ in the Army. When asked why, Cross replied: ‘Because, sir, you are not near enough ground level to influence the fighting nor are you near enough the top to influence the planning.’ The inferior quality of equipment in the early days is striking: the lack of canvas boots, poor water bottles, clunky webbing, and weapons unsuitable for jungle fighting. Helicopters arrived in numbers during the Malayan conflict, and Cross brings to the fore their impact on tactical movement, but he also raises the poor quality of close-air support – both in terms of accuracy and impact on insurgent areas – with planes vectored in by crude balloons sent up by his men, not least as the heavy radios often did not work. (Indeed, radios failed to work in Afghanistan more recently, forcing soldiers there to use their mobile phones.) Cross’s record of photographing and fingerprinting dead insurgents is an interesting contrast to Dan Poole’s recent book on headhunting in Malaya during the Emergency, with its accounts of heads brought in of decapitated terrorists. There was also the friction of liaison work with the police, notably Malaya’s Special Branch. This is a useful window onto the significance of police-military relations during counterinsurgency. The tension between the two branches re-emerged during Cross’s time on Borneo. Was he a policeman or a soldier (and, indeed, who would be paying his pension)?
Cross’s book is a tremendous read and to be recommended. It is one of a number of books by Cross on his life as a soldier, and with the Gurkhas. The jungle was an exhausting environment in which to fight – this is clear from Cross’s book – but it was also a peculiar place that could work for soldiers, if they know what to do, how to fight, how to live in the jungle. Cross dedicated his career to making jungle life second nature for soldiers, as this book proves.

Matthew Hughes, Brunel, University of London