Lt. Col. John Philip Cross OBE (born 21 June 1925)[1] is a former British Army officer and now a Nepalese author who currently lives in Nepal.
He believed that it was as a result of working on short commons with the Temiar Tribe in Malay for such a long period that made him go blind.
A Nepali priest says he is due to live for 110 years because, in 1964, he was twice publicly announced as dead, once by Indonesian Radio 'Pontianak', which also demoted him from Lt Col to Capt, and once by the Sarawak Gazette.
[5][6] In 1943, Cross joined the British Army as private soldier and was promoted to Lance-Corporal in the Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry and chosen to go to India for officer training In 1944, Cross trained at the Indian Military Academy in Dehra Dun until December of that year when he commissioned as an officer into the Somerset Light Infantry but attached for service with the First Gurkha Rifles.
After partition he moved back into India and was deployed over the Jammu/Kashmir border until December when went to Burma to join British Army Gurkhas.
Towards the end of 1960 Cross returned to Malaya and started on an unusually demanding series of military operations against the rump of the Malayan Communist Terrorists on the Malay/Thai border.
Between 1961 and 1963 Cross managed to nullify the effects of what the great Spencer Chapman had instituted with the Chinese Communists 20 years beforehand in relation to the aboriginal population near the Malay/Thai border.
Cross personally managed to win over the Temiar tribe from the Chinese communist guerrillas after the third long operation (the second of 70 days and the third of 80).
Between 1965 and 1968 Cross commanded the Gurkha Independent Parachute Company and operated over the border of Borneo/ Indonesia during Confrontation (in what is now known as 'in an SAS role').
He ran training for a 5-nation exercise that tested the UK, Australia, New Zealand, Singapore and Malaysia how to react to a hostile threat from out of country.
The Foreign Office in London had a scheme whereby he was an adviser on jungle warfare to the Thais and the South Vietnamese for six alternating months of each year and the Singapore govt put out feelers that Cross raise, train and command a battalion of their Commandos.
This was a period quite unlike any Cross had ever witnessed before, despite having been operating against the Malayan Communists (and against the Indonesians whose tactics were similarly based), and teaching about them virtually non-stop since 1948, resulting in him having spent ten years in the jungle.
Cross was made the official adviser to the International Affairs Section of where he worked (the Research Centre for Nepal and Asian Studies) on the cold war between USSR and PRC in Asia.
He has since been a university researcher in Kathmandu (history - British Army Gurkhas and linguistic - comparison of Nepali of today with that of 60+ years ago, for 43 months and 5 days; Cross is the only foreigner ever to be asked for by name and permission given to reside in the country by the King of Nepal.