`It was the weather that did us'

`When you're in a hole, stop digging. It's basic military training'; `All careers have hiccups. Ours happened in the full glare of publicity'

Cock-up or excellent adventure? A year after getting stuck in the Borneo jungle, Robert Neill and Ron Foster talk to Jim White

On the 29th day of their expedition to conquer Low's Gully, in Borneo, Lieutenant-Colonel Robert Neill and Major Ron Foster, as they lay in festering damp clothes in wet sleeping bags under a rock overhang on a ledge 6,000 feet above sea level, each ate the following meal: a teaspoonful of meat-paste, half a biscuit and a small quantity of coffee granules. The combined nutritional value of which Major Foster calculated at 13 calories. But it was a better prospect than what lay ahead. Two days later, after they had polished off the indigestion tablets and throat pastilles in their first-aid pack, the menu would consist entirely of water.

Back in Britain, unbeknown to them, Neill and Foster were on the front page of every newspaper. Their attempt to conquer Low's, a massive, sheer-sided ravine that abuts Mount Kinabalu, was characterised in the press as an unmitigated disaster, a tragic, pointless cock-up to rival Captain Scott's. After three weeks lost in the jungle, it was generally assumed they were dead. No one could believe they were stuck on a ledge overlooking a sheer rock-face, surviving on a diet that would stretch the metabolism of a mouse.

"I never despaired," says Lt-Col Neill, one year on and now, after losing three stone to the Gully, back to his normal, wiry, build. "Honestly. Except for when Ron beat me to mate in four moves in a game of chess."

Neill's expedition - called Jungle Heights 4 - was part of the Army's adventurous training scheme, its goal to be the first to get from top to bottom of the Gully. Under the command of the 46-year-old lieutenant- colonel, the party included 53-year-old Major Foster; Richard Mayfield, a 23-year-old corporal with rock climbing instructor's qualifications; four other young NCOs who were handy climbers; and three Chinese soldiers from the Hong Kong regiment, men with limited mountaineering experience.

Neill divided the party into two groups: the five NCOs would forge on ahead, find the best course and report back. The two officers would nursemaid the Chinese down.

Half-way down the Gully, however, the forward recce group, going much quicker, became separated from Neill's team, for reasons which were - to the say the least - moot. As they pressed on towards the bottom, the slower party missed a rendezvous and decided to camp for the night on a ridge and wait the recce team's return. They never came.

Overnight the weather changed, a late monsoon broke and the rock walls of the Gully transformed into impassable waterfalls: Neill's party couldn't go on. As the recce boys got to the bottom and pushed on through the jungle, Neill's group were stuck. Five days later, half-starved and battered by the elements, the forward team emerged, and, eventually, raised the alarm. A couple of them - Richard Mayfield in particular - hinted that the five left behind were there because they were incompetent.

It took 10 days for the combined efforts of the Malaysian Army, the SAS and the RAF mountain rescue team to locate the lost five, who had remained where they had got stuck because, according to Lt-Col Neill: "When you're in a hole, stop digging. It's basic military training. Boy scouts, too, probably. If in shit stay put."

When, emaciated and bearded, they were eventually rescued by helicopter, the world took Mayfield's view that Foster and Neill were useless. Indeed, the subsequent Army inquiry commended Corporal Mayfield for his bravery in leading the recce party to safety and rapped Lt-Col Neill and Major Foster over the knuckles for losing control of the expedition and being "over-ambitious". It was an ignominious end to their great operation.

A year on, the two officers have decided to go public with their side of the story. They have collaborated on a booktitled SOS, and, without a bivvy bag or climbing rope in sight, made camp at a central London hotel one day last week to promote it. They arrived, incidentally, bang on time.

"There was such media interest, and so much of it was inaccurate. In view of some of the criticism, we felt the only way to do ourselves and the Army justice was to write a book of what actually happened," says Lt-Col Neill, an angular man with the give-nothing-away manner of talking that comes from being in the Army all your adult life. "It is also such an adventure story. For all 10 of us, it was the adventure of our lives."

For an adventure story, the book is short on Indiana Jones stunts. Not that it needs them. Largely taken from the diaries the two wrote at the time, its prose is the emotion-free matter-of-fact of an Army dispatch. It reveals that the soldiers faced death with a phelgm that made their response to their predicament all the more poignant, heroic even. This, for instance, is the description of the morning of Friday 25 March 1994, or Day 30:

"The crucial time was about 0730: it was then that there had been action on earlier days. But no helicopter appeared and at 0800 Neill once again made a gloomy note to the effect that no search seemed to have started. With the weekend coming up he told the Chinese not to expect any more activity. `Oh well,' he wrote. `There's always next week and I'm sure we'll last till then, even if it won't be pleasant.' His urine had turned an even more sinister colour, dark yellowy-brown."

Both officers claim, however, that despite the grim privations they never despaired.

"When things look desperate soldiers get on with what they have to do. Self-discipline is vital, never panic," says Major Foster, whose stockier build meant he suffered the less on the mountain. "I established a routine on the rock, getting my kit ready assuming we'd be rescued, watching for choppers. You've got nothing but your own mind to control, and you have to do that positively. One of the Hong Kong lads said to me: `We're going to die here.' I said: `No we're not. Take your mind off it. Play a game of hangman."

But, despite the even-handed, spare language of the book, and the jaunty, emotion-free way the men remember their ordeal, you sense a real anger lurking between the lines. These officers are not happy about what happened down the Gully, and at the image they have acquired since. Not happy at all. Ask them if they made a mistake at any point, in the selection of the party, for instance, or the manner in which they led it, and they answer with a bullish lack of repentance.

"The finest mountain rescue team in the world couldn't get down the Gully far enough to find us," said Lt-Col Neill. "They were driven back by the weather. Yet I, with a team of less experience, got there with no difficulty, before the rain came. It was the weather that did us. Nothing else.

"It would obviously not be acceptable to our families for us to return. Other than that I see no other reason not to make another attempt. Obviously we would do things differently, you learn from your first experience. But basically we got it right."

But didn't the Army suggest the lieutenant-colonel was at fault in his leadership?

"The Army tends to see things in black and white," says Neill. "The expedition was considered to have gone wrong. I was its leader. If the Army decided I had been over-ambitious, then so be it. But my conscience is clear. Certainly Ron's should be."

None the less, the officers' party had required a rescue mission that cost hundreds of thousands of pounds, while Mayfield and his NCOs had made it out of the Gully under their own steam. At the mention of Mayfield's name, Lt-Col Neill smiled wryly.

"The key to it was I was separated from my rock-climber," he said. "It is a basic military tenet that you don't abandon comrades. You show loyalty to each other. The rescue service showed terrific loyalty to us, and it paid off. I spent the whole time on the ledge thinking the recce party had died. I felt I had five people's deaths on my hands, even if I was not responsible for their actions. The first question I asked when we were rescued was, `Are the others all right?'. When I heard that they were, I was knocked for six."

Lt-Col Neill is still a serving officer:"There is this view that somehow our careers are finished. But all careers have hiccups. Our hiccup happened in the full glare of publicity." As such he is circumscribed by what he can say. Major Foster, now retired from the Army and working in financial services, has no such restraint.

"I wasn't convinced they were dead," he said of the forward party. "Actually I didn't think too much about them. I felt aggrieved. I felt abandoned. In the back of your mind is always the thought that if we'd stayed together, if 10 of us were on that ledge, we'd have got out. We only had one qualified rock climber. We counted on that person. But I'm not bitter. There's a taint on my record I want removed like a stain on a pair of trousers. But in the meantime, I'd prefer to look on what's positive to have come out of this."

Such as?

"Well, the increased knowledge. The fact that adventurous training procedures are being tightened up. The fact my experience could be of benefit to other people."

What, he might be prepared to go down the Gully again?

"That would be up to the wife. She suffered in all this more than me. I went back to the mountain with her recently. It holds no fears for me. Besides someone's got to go down there. We all left our rucksacks behind."