Eye of the Storm (42 page)

‘Do you have an LUP picked out for us?’ I asked.

Guy nodded. ‘About two kilometres north of here. I scouted the area myself yesterday and this will do you fine,’ he said.

After that exchange there was nothing more to say. Unless there was some major rethink at HQ, we would not be linked with Alpha Three Zero again on this mission.

Captain Guy gave us directions to the LUP he had pre-selected for us, after which I thanked him and ordered my column to move out, while the three members of the other patrol vanished back into the night. We reached our LUP co-ordinates within fifteen minutes, and I silently congratulated Alpha Three Zero’s 2IC on his choice. The tallest hills in that area of Iraq are no more than a hundred feet high, but in our immediate vicinity there were lots of small hillocks all around us. Their presence allowed us to conceal the vehicles easily, and meant that we could walk about and stretch our legs without risk of being overlooked by shepherds or bedouin.

Pat and I picked out the best defensive positions and the men began settling in for the day. When I reminded them that we would not be using cam nets, however, their faces momentarily dropped. But apart from a little unintelligible grumbling they got on with it, placing a large Union jack, pinned down with stones, between each pair of Land Rovers. Only Pat tried to change my mind. He had obviously given the matter a lot of thought since I had announced my decision the morning before, and had decided to approach it from another angle.

‘Can I have a word with you?’ he asked.

‘What’s wrong, Pat?’ I said.

‘I’d like to remind you about SOPs.’ SOPs are standing operational procedures. Every regiment in the British Army has SOPs. They are guidelines, but that is all they are. They are not carved in stone.

‘Yes?’ I replied, unhelpfully.

‘Well, we’re not using cam nets, and SOPs say we should be.’

‘Well, Pat,’ I said, ‘I’m not interested in cam nets and I’m not interested in SOPs. They are simply guidelines.’ He thought about that for a moment, but obviously believed that he could take it just one step further. There was nothing wrong with his determination, but he picked the wrong argument this time.

‘The Deputy Director won’t like it if we ignore SOPs,’ he ventured.

‘I don’t give a toss what the Deputy Director thinks,’ I told him. ‘He’s tucked up in bed in Riyadh and not here. I also don’t give a damn about SOPs.
I
am the SOP as far as you’re concerned. Now drop it, and let’s get on with the job.’

A few days later we were to hear by radio that a unit of D Squadron elsewhere in western Iraq, hidden under cam nets while lying up, had been attacked by one of our own aircraft. The pilot had spotted two Land Rovers under their camouflage nets and mistaken them for a Scud missile. He had launched a Maverick air-to-ground missile which had exploded beneath the front wheels of one of the vehicles, causing major mechanical damage but, fortunately, no casualties. After hearing that titbit of news my own unit brightened up considerably, and there were no more protests about my decision not to use cam nets.

I tried on other occasions to explain to Pat how necessary it was to ignore an SOP in specific circumstances. For example, it states in Regimental SOPs that a soldier operating as a signaller must carry his codes in the map pocket of his trousers. Clearly, however, if you were wading across a river and the codes were inevitably going to get wet, you would transfer them to your shirt pocket. What was more, as I had learned after an experience during my jungle training that might have got me RTU-ed, I had good reason to know that map pockets were not necessarily secure. But Pat would never agree. To him SOPs were the Bible. You just had to comply with them. Our arguments – differences, really, to be fair – would always end the same way, with me telling him, ‘Pat, we’re at war. We can do what we like.
I
can do what I like.’

Nevertheless, Pat preferred to work within the rules, and was often egged on to approach me by others in the patrol. It was extremely frustrating, but I couldn’t make him understand. In the end, whenever he came to me moaning about some SOP or other that I had contravened, I had to tell him to leave it alone – hardly a very constructive argument.

Most of the other members of the patrol were more flexible, especially after the Allied pilot’s attack on the D Squadron Land Rovers. When I first banned the use of cam nets, however, they didn’t like it one little bit, and I found the usual banter noticeably absent as I made my rounds of our new LUP.

By then everything was in place and the men had lit their stoves and were heating food and water for a brew. I would normally have expected one or two of them to have invited me to share a mug of hot, sweet army tea at their vehicle, but all I received were sheepish looks and averted eyes. Just like children, I told myself, and hurried back to my own stove and mug, on which I was soon warming the feeling back into my fingers as I sipped the tea I’d made.

We were camped that day in a place just to the south of the small Iraqi town of Nukhayb, and from the following night would be operating in an area north of an east-west line drawn through that town. Alpha Three Zero’s operational area was to the south of the same line. The reason for allotting patrols completely separate areas of operations is not just perfectly logical, but essential. It is to avoid any form of contact between units that could lead to a ‘blue-on-blue’ situation, a euphemism for occasions when friendly forces end up firing on one another. No SAS patrol will ever stray over the borders of its area of operations without first notifying the unit into whose area it will move.

The Regiment had been involved in a blue-on-blue in the Falklands, when a member of the Special Boat Squadron had been killed by a patrol from the SAS. It was a tragic accident, but the SBS had been operating outside their designated area of operations. A firefight had started, and it was only when someone shouted and the other side heard English being spoken that the mistake was realized. By then, however, one SBS trooper had been killed.

At our new LUP that morning I spent the whole of my free time on the radio while the off-duty men settled down to sleep. The news was not good. Bravo Two Zero had still not made contact, and a unit of D Squadron operating some fifty kilometres south-west of us had been compromised and involved in a heavy exchange of fire with the enemy. Seven men had become separated from the main unit and were missing, with one of them known to be injured. On top of this, an eight-man patrol, Bravo One Nine, who deployed on the same night as Bravo Two Zero but had sensibly taken a vehicle, had also been compromised and was now out of touch, heading, it was hoped, for the Saudi Arabian border.

On a lighter note, RHQ also passed on to me the response in London to my having been sent into action. The Director of Special Forces, a very jovial brigadier, had refused to believe the report given to him by the duty officer in the ops room in London. The Director was a real character, a genuinely funny man who was both very gregarious and extremely good company.

‘You must be fucking joking,’ was his first comment to the ops officer. ‘The RSM’s role in war is ammo and POWs. What the hell are you talking about?’ So far as I could gather, when his ops officer insisted that I had indeed been sent into Iraq to take over a patrol, the Director told him, ‘Don’t be so damned stupid. RSMs don’t fight in wartime. It’s an outrageous suggestion. Either that, or they’ve all gone stark raving mad out there.’ In the end, it took a special signal from Al Jouf to convince him that I was not nursing the ammo in Saudi Arabia, but leading Alpha One Zero behind enemy lines.

From the radio I also learned that our massive 160-kilometre push during the night had reduced some of the pressure on the CO, since it had already begun to justify his decision to replace the patrol’s original OC with me. Most of that pressure was coming from the Deputy Director in Riyadh, who could behave at times like a frustrated commanding officer, and who would occasionally meddle and criticize, without necessarily offering constructive alternatives.

So far as I – and a great many others – was concerned, however, and whatever the pressure the Deputy Director was trying to exert we had a CO who was performing absolutely brilliantly in very difficult circumstances. He never became rattled even when under extreme pressure; that night alone he had twenty-three men missing in action, but simply carried on performing as a commanding officer should. Well liked throughout the Regiment, he was also well respected – which is not always the same thing. Our CO bothered to communicate with his men, and took pains to learn their names and their worth. By trusting me he had stuck his neck out, and I was determined not to let him down. I didn’t give a damn how difficult it might be, I was going to do my utmost to pull off any mission thrown at me.

Nevertheless, one of my first duties was to the men under my immediate command. They had a right to be told some of the news I had received, and it was only fair that they should know that some of their friends and fellow soldiers were missing, and that the Regiment had already suffered at least one casualty. Early that afternoon, therefore, I called an O-group – orders group, in this case a briefing of all vehicle commanders – and brought them up to date on regimental news. Their faces became very sombre as I spelled out the bare details of the D Squadron patrol’s skirmish with the enemy.

It didn’t make for cheerful listening. One member of that patrol was known to have been shot in the stomach, and was missing with six other men who had become separated from the main unit during the fighting which, even with the sparse information I had been given, sounded as though it had been pretty fierce. At the moment there was no report of other casualties, but during the contact one vehicle had been completely destroyed and a second badly damaged. As the news sank in some of my guys began to look really upset, and there were a number of groans and impromptu exclamations of sympathy.

‘But it wasn’t all one-sided,’ I told them. ‘Our guys also managed to knock the stuffing out of Saddam’s people.’ They perked up at this, and I continued, ‘There were forty Iraqis in the enemy force and our patrol killed ten of them, wounded others, destroyed three vehicles and eventually drove the rest of them off.’

This lifted my vehicle commanders’ morale considerably, and I decided to grab the opportunity to remind them of our own concept of operations. ‘First, to locate and destroy Scud missiles and launch sites. Second, to gather intelligence. And third, to take offensive action. Which means dealing with any enemy forces or enemy locations we come across.’ The last raised an appreciative grin on most of their faces, and brought a chorus of ribald suggestions about appropriate measures to be taken against any Iraqi troops we might stumble over.

I gave them a moment, then motioned to them to quieten down. ‘Tonight we will head north another fifty kilometres,’ I said. ‘Which means that our LUP in the morning will be in our centre of operations.

‘I intend to stay there for thirty-six hours, which will give you all a chance to rest up. We’ll also start with foot patrols, which will give you a chance to develop a better feel for the ground. We move out at seventeen hundred again this afternoon. So let’s start packing everything away.’ It seemed that, for the second day running, we were going to start our night trek in a positive frame of mind. The men were now itching for a fight, and several of them came up to me to ask when we would see some action.

‘Don’t worry, it’ll happen soon enough,’ I told them. They certainly seemed enthusiastic, but watching them disperse towards their vehicles I was acutely aware that I hardly knew any of them at all.

I was getting to know the two other members of the crew of my 110, however. As I have said, Mugger was the ideal driver, a quiet type with whom everybody got on well and against whom no one had a bad word to say. He didn’t have a strong accent or, beyond his size, any notable mannerisms or characteristics; he was simply solid and dependable and decent, with a great sense of humour. If he couldn’t say something nice about a person then he wouldn’t say anything about them at all. During the whole time I knew him I never heard him slag off anyone.

It was in his role as demolitionist, though, that Mugger really came into his own, for the moment he had explosives in his hands he became like a man possessed. His eyes would light up and he would grin from ear to ear at the merest hint of there being something that needed blowing up. The bigger the potential bang, the happier Mugger became. Indeed, I have never known another soldier quite so in tune with his work, and it was wonderful to watch the transformation that came over him whenever his fingers came into contact with plastic explosive, fuses, detonators, timers, mines, and all the other tools of his lethal trade.

The third man aboard our Land Rover, Harry, my signaller and the vehicle’s rear gunner, was also a quiet type. He looked as though he needed six good meals a day to put some weight on him, but contrary to appearances he was incredibly fit and tough, and was a superb longdistance runner. Apart from the fact that he was an expert signaller as well as a first-class soldier, I liked having Harry aboard because he was happy to eat nothing but hardtack biscuits and bacon grill. The latter, which came in small tins, was a substance like luncheon meat which, when fried, tasted like bacon. Harry loved to eat it cold, and would happily swap his other rations for our bacon grill. Since both Mugger and I loathed the stuff, we were very glad to have him with us.

The senior vehicle commander in my section, Alpha One Zero, was Des, the troop staff sergeant who was one of the few A Squadron members I’d come across before the patrol. I knew him to be someone who could be trusted absolutely and relied on in all situations. I also knew that he was incapable of saying one thing to my face and another behind my back. Of medium build, he had a very dark complexion and was beginning to lose his hair. He was normally quiet, unless made angry, and he and I seemed to be on the same wavelength, perhaps because, like me, he too was a former Para. Two members of the patrol who wrote books about their experiences in the Gulf War described Des as a brownnoser, constantly sucking up to me. Not only was this not true, it was extremely unfair to say such a thing about an excellent, positive and professional soldier. It was because of Des and others like him – and I was to discover that most of the other guys were, like Des, also on the same wavelength as me – that our mission was able to stay on track.