Eye of the Storm (2 page)
Authors: Peter Ratcliffe
T
HE
half-moon that had lit our way to the target dipped over the horizon. A little later came the dawn – thin streaks of light that gradually unrolled the darkness across the valley to reveal a scene of raw beauty and unexpected tranquillity. We continued to keep watch on the target – a
bait
(native hut) on a rocky hillside – from our concealed ambush positions, every man keyed up for a sight or sound that would let us know the adoo were approaching, unaware of our presence.
The patrol commander gestured for Jimmy and me to move forward to a dry-stone wall, which formed one side of an open pen where the goats were kept, though it was now empty. I was carrying a 7.62mm GPMG, a belt-fed weapon, some 4 feet long and weighing just over 24 pounds, and with a nominal rate of fire of 1,000 rounds a minute. It’s a ferocious weapon with a killing range of up to a mile in the right circumstances.
I flicked down the bipod beneath the barrel and rested its feet on top of the wall, keeping my head down as I sighted along the weapon, even though any adoo in the hut couldn’t have seen me in my new position. Then I heard a low murmur to my right, ‘They’re in the back of the bait. Stand by.’ Now I could really feel the adrenalin pumping.
Just then a man in a green shirt came out of a side entrance in the bait. He was very dark-skinned and was carrying a rifle.
‘Is that an adoo?’ I whispered to Jimmy, not wanting it to turn out that the first person I ever shot was a civilian. But before he could answer the man had gone back inside and another, even darker-skinned Arab came out, wearing only a sarong.
‘No, he’s a jebali,’ muttered Jimmy.
‘No. Not him, the other one,’ I hissed.
‘What other one?’ Our whispered conversation was starting to sound like a comedy turn.
Almost immediately another man appeared from the back of the hut. He was lighter-skinned than the other two, and was carrying what looked like an AK-47 light automatic rifle – the famous Soviet-designed weapon which is capable of firing off a thirty-round magazine in less than three seconds. He walked right round to our side of the hut before he spotted us. By now he was perhaps thirty feet away and I could see him clearly.
I watched his eyes narrow as he recognized his predicament. He started to go into a crouch as he swung the rifle in his right hand forwards and upwards, at the same time grabbing the barrel in the palm of his left hand as he tried to bring the weapon up to a firing position. It was then that I squeezed the GPMG’s trigger.
The adoo never had a chance. My first two-second burst – more than thirty rounds – took him right in the body. I could see fragments of flesh being torn out of his back by the exiting bullets, and he was slammed backwards against the bait wall by the sheer weight of the fire hitting him. I fired again, and one of my rounds must have struck the magazine on his rifle, for it suddenly blew up. The upper part of his body was simply torn to shreds.
Just as this gruesome sight was registering with me, I heard Jimmy shout, ‘There are two more getting away at the back.’ I couldn’t see them from my position, so I yanked the machine-gun off the top of the wall and, holding it up to my shoulder like a rifle, crabbed along sideways until I could see the adoo backing down the hill, all the time firing short bursts towards them. Above my head and somewhere off to my left I heard the zing-like crack of high-velocity rounds going past as the men behind me opened up.
I opened fire again, sending the rest of the rounds in the ammunition belt streaming towards the two men in one long burst. There were others firing alongside me so I’m not sure who killed the second man, but he suddenly spun round and dropped his weapon. Great gouts of blood spurted from multiple wounds in his chest as he went down.
Less than five minutes after it had started the shooting was all over. Silence once more returned to the hillside. Cautiously we moved forward, and three members of Mountain Troop went in and cleared the hut, which Jimmy and I skirted as we headed down the hill. One of the two men who had fled from the back of the hut was dead, although it was impossible to know if I had had a hand in his killing. He had been hit by at least half a dozen rounds. His companion appeared to have got away, though he may have been wounded. The fourth man had been shot dead on the far side of the building by other members of the patrol. I hadn’t even seen him until we came across his body.
I was feeling strangely high – the kind of high you get after a few drinks, but before actually becoming drunk – although I knew that this reaction was caused by the adrenalin still chasing about inside my system. I had come through my first contact with an enemy. My first firefight. And I had killed a man for the first time.
It was a strange feeling. Later, as we made our way back to White City, I thought, ‘This is really good. I’ve just seen my first action, and I’ve done all right.’ I had no regrets at all. A little sadness for the man I’d killed, perhaps, that he might have had a wife and a family as some of our guys had wives and families. Yet in the end he had courted his own fate by becoming a terrorist.
Jimmy was pleased with the way I’d performed, but cautioned restraint. Patting me on the back, he told me, ‘It’s easy to dish it out, but it’s a different story when you’ve got to take it. So don’t go thinking you’re a vet. You’re still just a young pup.’ In truth, I didn’t feel very different, and certainly not like a hero. But what I did know was that I felt genuinely proud to have done my job, and to have taken down an enemy who, given a few more seconds, might well have finished me off instead.
I had been with D Squadron of the SAS for about three months when, in January 1973, my squadron was first posted to the Sultanate of Oman. Strategically placed at the southern end of the Arabian Gulf, this tiny independent state controlled the right of free passage over the richest oil tanker sea lanes in the world. In the wrong hands, Oman could pose a huge threat to the West – and that was where we came in. The SAS were discreetly there on loan to the Sultan, to stop communist-backed terrorists, known locally as
adoo
(Arabic: enemy), from seizing power and turning the country into a Marxist state – with catastrophic results for the flow of Gulf oil to the West.
Whatever their ideology, the adoo were brutal, cold-blooded and uncompromising killers, and on most days I and my fellow SAS soldiers found ourselves on the receiving end of rifle and machine-gun fire, under grenade and mortar attack, or targets for Soviet-built high-explosive rockets.
And I was loving every moment of it. At the age of twenty-two I had reached a position which I would not willingly have exchanged with any other living soul. I was a highly trained professional in the uniform of the world’s toughest and most admired regiment, doing what we did best. I felt complete. A contented man.
A far cry indeed from the snotty-nosed kid who had grown up in abject poverty in the northern slums of Lancashire with a more than even chance of ending up in jail.
* * *
In June 1991, eighteen years after I had been blooded in Oman and four months after my return from the Gulf War, I found myself aboard an RAF VC10, flying to the United States with the adjutant for a meeting with the US Rangers. After a couple of hours my companion looked at his watch, checked that it was past midnight in the UK, and hoisted his briefcase on to his knees. Having fished around inside it for a while he suddenly gave a satisfied cluck and took out an envelope, which he handed to me with the words, ‘I have been asked to give you this.’ It was addressed to me, but when I opened the envelope and read the letter it contained I could hardly believe what it said – in fact, I had to read it twice before its content sank in. Signed by the CO of 22 Special Air Service Regiment, it told me that I had been awarded the Distinguished Conduct Medal for my services during the Gulf War.
To me, there was something slightly unreal about the situation as the two of us clinked glasses of gin and tonic at 30,000 feet over the North Atlantic. The adjutant simply said, ‘Well done. Cheers!’ going on to explain that the reason he had not given me the letter earlier was because the Honours List was strictly embargoed until one minute past midnight in Britain.
So it came about that, one beautiful late-summer’s day a few weeks later, I went to Buckingham Palace with the other members of the Regiment who were to be decorated for their actions during the Gulf campaign. There was nothing in the newspapers about the investiture, since it was held in secret to protect the identities of soldiers serving in the SAS, but it was reported afterwards with the usual mixture of half fact and whole fantasy. What really happened was this:
On the day of the investiture I travelled to Duke of York’s HQ in the King’s Road, Chelsea, the headquarters of UK Special Forces, and there changed into my very best uniform. Then, with the rest of the guys from the Regiment who were being honoured that day, I climbed into a coach that was waiting well away from where anyone could get a picture of us. We travelled the short distance to the Palace with the curtains deliberately drawn, so that no one could photograph our arrival or our departure – it would not do for our pictures to get into the files of hostile individuals or organizations.
In the Throne Room, when my turn came I marched up and stood to attention before the Queen. She smiled slightly, and said that the Gulf War must have been very frightening. So I told her how I had felt during those weeks on patrol, at which she looked at me a bit oddly. ‘Oh!’ she said. And that was it – end of conversation. She presented me with the Distinguished Conduct Medal and simply walked away. End, also, of audience with Queen Elizabeth II of Great Britain.
When she had said the war must have been very frightening, perhaps I shouldn’t have replied as I did.
‘Actually, Your Majesty, I quite enjoyed it.’
Thirty years ago, no one would have figured me for a soldier. At the time, I was a scarcely educated, often dishonest, streetwise kid from a poverty-stricken slum home – in the end, a broken home – in the depressed industrial north-west of England. Almost without prospects, I joined the army for all the wrong reasons: to get away from a miserable, dead-end existence as a manual labourer, and because I had been thwarted in my efforts to emigrate to Australia. I owe to my regiments – first the Parachute Regiment, then, for twenty-five years, the Special Air Service Regiment – the fact that I am not still a manual labourer in a dead-end job or, even worse, in prison. I owe a great deal more than that, however, most of which I could not put into words, and all of it priceless.
Someone told me once of a remark of Dr Johnson’s, that ‘Every man thinks meanly of himself for not having been a soldier, or not having been at sea.’ I don’t know whether that’s true or not – I rather doubt it, in fact, especially nowadays, as we move further and further away from a general experience of war – but what I do know is that I gained from the SAS a sense of self-worth and confidence while soldiering with the best in any army, anywhere in the world.
This book, then, is for 22 Special Air Service Regiment and the men who made and continue to make it, with not always uncritical affection, but always with gratitude.
P
ETER
R
ATCLIFFE
,
DCM
August 2000
O
N
the night I was born – in a council flat in Salford, Lancashire, nearly fifty years ago – blizzards raged across the north-west of England for six hours. My mother remembered that the stark outlines of Salford’s dockland slums, clustered at the end of the Manchester Ship Canal, lay softened under a blanket of white that morning. It was the only time in donkey’s years that the city had looked clean, she said.
L.S. Lowry, the matchstick-man artist who spent a lifetime painting Salford’s crumbling, soot-streaked houses and soul-destroying cotton mills, seems to have missed the opportunity of capturing the moment. Not of recording the birth of a matchstick child – baby production being the major industry there at that time, since there was little work – but of showing Salford looking pretty. But then, Lowry went for accuracy, preferring his slums to look miserable, rather than as if they were covered in icing sugar.
When I was a few years older, I found out that virgin snow in Salford was usually defiled before daybreak by yellow trails of spattered cats’ piss, long before kids like me could mould it into frozen missiles, and even longer before it melted to grey slush and oily puddles that seemed to reflect the grim lives of the people who lived there.
My mother was a staunch Roman Catholic, something reflected in the number of children she had. My brother, David, had been born two and a half years before me, and three other children – Jean, Stephen and Susan – were to follow. My father was a bread-delivery man who had flirted with Catholicism, although he never converted. His interest in the faith was not religious, however, but arose because he wanted somewhere to park his car, an old Wolseley Four Forty-Four largely held together by thick layers of black paint. The parish priest had offered to let him park it for free in the church grounds if, in return, my father became a Roman Catholic, but in the event the only time he ever went near the church was to collect or park his car. For my dad there was always a means to an end.
