Ghurkas and the Afghans think banging heads is all in good fun. What scares the hell out of the world about Ghurkas is that they fight like Afghanis.
Fighting fit for foreign Queen and country
Helen Rumbelow
January 2, 1999
A YOUNG boy sprinted up the mountain with the watchful encouragement of a retired Gurkha officer, his father.
Captain Budhikumar Gurung, who reached the prestigious post of Queen's Gurkha's Orderly Officer, one of a pair serving the Royal Family, returned to Nepal three months ago. He has the difficult task of adjusting from life at Buckingham Palace to living in the seventh poorest country in the world.
Like most of the 26,000 retired Gurkhas, he did not stay in Britain, instead settling next to the Pokhara base that gave him his chance in life more than two decades ago. As with all other Gurkhas, he had a course to help him to adapt to a homeland that he visited only briefly in his adult life.
Taught farming, banking and business administration, he is typical in managing to save enough to own businesses and property, supplemented by an officer's pension of more than £100 a month. Most Gurkhas serve a standard 15 years before recieving a soldier's pension of up to £40 a month, depending on rank and service.
On the slopes of the Himalayas, Gurkha homes are easy to spot, built out of brick, not mud, and with flowered gardens reminiscent of the English countryside. While working, the captain earned more than a Nepalese government minister. Now his pension earns him double a teacher's wage, and immense respect.
A former Gurkha can leapfrog the caste system that bars most of his kinsmen from the plum jobs in Kathmandu, and gives a great advantage in finding a second career. His son, Nabin, said it was a combination of riches and respect that made him want to follow his father and grandfather into the Second Gurkha Rifles. "When my father walks down the street, they look up to him."
Nabin, 19, has excelled in his recruitment tests, a testimony to the private boarding school education his father was able to give his son for ten years while serving in Hong Kong. "I once thought of being a doctor. For a normal Nepalese it's a very good salary. But being a Gurkha is better."
He is one of 36,000 competing for just 230 of this year's places with the British Gurk-has, a wing of the army made up of Nepalese hillmen, who are feared and respected as elite warriors. Among others is a skinny, 20-year-old orphan, Lakh Bahadur Gurung, who won the most dreaded and gruelling of the challenges that the would-be recruits face. In 31 minutes he managed to race two miles up a steep mountainside with two thirds of his body weight in rocks strapped to his back.
Now he is assured of a job fighting for Britain - a country he believes is punctual, clean and wealthy. Later this month, he will be at a damp army base in Hampshire, learning how to swim, use a knife and fork, and flush a lavatory, as well as handling weapons other than his kukri, an all-purpose knife for chopping firewood and, should the need arise, enemy necks.
When he returns for his first visit home in three years' time, his £538-a-month job will have made him a local hero, earning 12 times the average wage and with girls competing just as hard to catch his eye.
After foreign aid, tourism and carpets, Britain's trade in its fit young men is Nepal's biggest money earner, although this year the competition is even stiffer as the army is demanding brains as well as brawn.
Gurkhas have been recruited from the central and eastern mountain surrounding the town of Gorkha for 180 years, ever since a smugly invading British army was shocked by the ruthless opposition of the proud warrior tribe whose first principle is better to die than be a coward.
So much British blood poured down the run-off notches on kukris that a peace treaty was hurriedly drawn up, including a clause to allow the British to recruit from this short and tenacious stock of natural soldiers they had so painfully discovered.
Gurkha numbers have dropped from the 112,000 men who were fighting in the Second World War to around 4,000 today, depleted in the 1990s by the closure of their main base in Hong Kong and by army restructuring.
Although numbers are on the rise again, the army now wants supremely fit athletes and boys who must be able to speak good English and be able to solve complicated algebraic equations. Two thirds of the young hopefuls will be rejected by Colonel Richard Coleman, the officer in command of the base.
One of his problems is that the Basic Fitness Test used for all British recruits is too easy for the Nepalese. Instead of the 11 minutes allotted to an infantry applicant to run a mile and a half, a Gurkha recruit must run it a minute and a half faster.
Although hill boys find running on the flat unnatural and bizarre, this still proves effortless for boys brought up on constant physical exercise, whose legs have the knotted muscles of professional sprinters. So the infamous Doko race was devised, where the traditional wicker rucksack or "doko" supported by a forehead strap must be filled with 70lb of rocks and speeded up a small Himalaya in under 40 minutes.
Most Westerners find even walking up the steep shingle a breathless effort, and army officers say that if the test were applied at home British recruitment would drop to one or two men a year.
History of gentlemen fighters
GURKHAS began their long friendship with Britain in a bloody, year-long war. The British East India Company went to battle against the warrior tribes living around Gorkha in 1814, with an army outnumbering the locals by 21,000 to 16,000.
They quickly established their reputation for both bravery in battle and nobility, slaughtering many British with their trademark "kukri" while "in the intervals of combat, showing us a courtesy worthy of a more enlightened people", said one impressed British soldier.
A peace treaty hastily drawn up by the heavily hit East India Company (or "John Company") gave the British the right to recruit from the area, as well as the origin of the nickname "Johnny Gurkha". The Gurkhas quickly established a reputation for loyalty to Britain during the siege of Dehli in 1857, protecting the British under three months of continuous fire and losing three quarters of their 490 men.
More than 100,000 Gurkhas served in the First World War. A similar number served in the Second World War, when Nepal volunteered 20 extra battalions after France fell and Britain was vulnerable. After Indian independence, four of ten regiments in the Gurkha Brigade transferred to the British Army, the rest to the Indian Army.
Since 1947 they have defended British interests in Malaya, Borneo and Cyprus. The Victoria Cross has been awarded to Gurkhas 26 times.
Copyright 1998 Times Newspapers Ltd.