Eye of the Storm (43 page)

I had retained Pat as my second-in-command and in charge of one half of the unit and four of the Land Rovers. I had the other four Land Rovers and the Unimog, while the motorcycles worked with either group. The only times these two groups would ever split was when we were travelling in parallel formation, operating on either side of a large wadi or wide valley.

The other senior NCO in the patrol, Sergeant ‘Spence’, was also in Pat’s section, Alpha Two Zero. I had known him for several years and always thought of him by his nickname, ‘Serious’. He had earned this not only because he had a serious manner, but because everything he did he referred to as being serious. If you saw him smoking and greeted him, ‘All right, Spence?’ he would reply, ‘Aye. I’m just having a serious smoke.’ Or I might spot him leaving the mess on a Saturday carrying a bag, and if I asked what he was up to he would say, ‘All right, Billy. I’m just going to do some serious admin.’ This meant he was going into the town centre to do his laundry, or to buy something from Boots, or some other mundane errand. Everything was ‘serious’ to him, and it became a standing joke among the lads. He was ‘Serious’ to one and all.

This was not meant unkindly, for he was a pleasant enough individual. Of medium height, he had dark, slightly curly hair, and during the course of the patrol had grown a black beard and moustache. He had joined up as a boy soldier, and I think that that was the cause of everything being serious to him. In my opinion, all the lads who signed on for the army as boy soldiers and then progressed to regiments as adults tended to be far more institutionalized than the recruits who came in from Civvy Street aged eighteen, nineteen or twenty. The boy soldiers had joined straight from school, and most had been thoroughly brainwashed by the system. They somehow lacked the all-round, more abrasive experience the rest of us had enjoyed – or endured – during our late teens before we had opted for the Queen’s shilling. Some years after our experiences in the Gulf I came across a book by one ‘Cameron Spence’ called
Sabre Squadron
, which seemed to be an account of the author’s experiences in Iraq with Alpha One Zero. I had never heard of ‘Spence’ and was surprised to find on reading the book that he was none other than Serious. Perhaps I should not have been surprised, for
Sabre Squadron
certainly contains some serious untruths, which I will come to later.

Pat also had an officer in his section. Captain Timothy was a thoroughly nice guy who had come to us from an infantry regiment. Having only recently passed Selection he was with the patrol primarily to gain experience, and so had only a limited role to play. I found him a tremendous asset when it came to making constructive suggestions, however. On the occasions when I called the senior men together, after deciding on a course of action I would ask for suggestions, and he could usually be relied upon to come up with ideas that could be incorporated into the main plan. Rather than being put at the back and told to shut up he was invited to offer his own contributions. He understood the part he had to play in the patrol, but equally understood that his ideas were welcome. I could have wished that everyone had been as positive and constructive.

Pat’s driver was a case in point. For someone whom I found so negative in the field, I was surprised by how gung-ho Corporal ‘Yorky’, as he was nicknamed, made himself out to be in his book
Victor Two
, which first appeared under the pseudonym ‘Peter “Yorky’‘ Crossland’. As with Serious ‘Spence’s’ book, I will deal with some of Yorky’s claims later. He was a big man with a shock of dark hair and a rather bland face. His broad Yorkshire accent, coupled with a slightly gormless expression, especially when wearing his steel helmet, made him appear harmless enough, but later I learned from some of the other patrol members that he seemed to have a great deal of influence over Pat, which in turn may have contributed towards some of the previous OC’s poor decisions. For myself, I found Yorky’s behaviour erratic, and it was clear to me that the situation – being active behind enemy lines – had got to him. Not much fun for him, I agree, but also potentially dangerous for the rest of Alpha One Zero.

Active service affects different people in different ways. Soldiers can be exceptionally good during training and in exercises. When it comes to reality, however, matters can be completely reversed. No one knows how he will react to battle until he’s been in a firefight. Training, discipline, a sense of self-worth, loyalty to one’s fellow soldiers and one’s unit, all these and other factors have a part to play in making a good fighting soldier, but he is still an unknown quantity until he has been in action for the first time.

Once you have been in a firefight then you are confident of your own reactions in future situations. To the seasoned soldier, as I then considered myself to be, there was only one way for Alpha One Zero to go, and that was forward. No order, no task, no mission was impossible. To some extent I was able to use that confidence in myself to influence other people, and so boost them into a positive frame of mind, after which their own character and training took over.

Sometimes soldiers who had not experienced action, and hence did not know how they would react, were led into aborting missions without even attempting them. This was what had happened all those years earlier in Argentina. The team that was helicoptered in to Tierra del Fuego did not attempt to reach the target because, in their eyes, the task was impossible – and thus unacceptable. Having convinced themselves that they were on a suicide mission, they came to believe that since they had no chance of survival, they therefore had no chance of success. In fact, the reverse is often true – as Pebble Island or the Iranian Embassy operation had proved, success and survival go hand in hand.

Nevertheless, it is very easy to portray people in films and novels – or even autobiographies – as cheerfully accepting suicide-type missions. It is not so easy to undertake such missions in real life. Some SAS guys in Iraq, now faced with the prospect of a real firefight for the first time in their lives, had been in Hereford for many years. They had wives and children and a life outside the service. It is much more difficult to face enemy fire when you have all that going for you. If life has become comfortable and attractive, the risk of dying becomes very much harder to face. I was to see this manifest itself in various different ways as our time behind enemy lines in Iraq lengthened into weeks.

Another through-the-night drive in miserable, near-Arctic conditions brought us, on the morning of 31 January, to the centre of our initial area of operations. Once we had established a new LUP I took stock of our situation. We had by now driven for three nights in a row and were some two hundred kilometres inside Iraq, but the men were very tired, and not only physically. This kind of driving, apart from the toll it took of the drivers, meant keeping extremely alert, permanently on the lookout for any kind of enemy activity or location. Such constant vigilance was mentally exhausting, however. As a result, that morning I confirmed that we would be staying at this LUP for thirty-six hours and that I would be sending out foot patrols, partly to reconnoitre the surrounding territory, and partly to give the men some exercise. The vehicles had also taken a battering from the rocky terrain, and I charged our Mobility Troop members with servicing them and carrying out any necessary repairs.

The first radio message of the morning contained good news. The eight men of Bravo One Nine were back in Al Jouf. They had crossed the border the previous night and returned through ’Ar Ar, where they had been stopped by the local Saudi Arabian police for driving without lights. They were exhausted but uninjured, although four of them had needed treatment for frostbite. My thoughts immediately turned to Bravo Two Zero. If they had been less stubborn, and had heeded the CO and myself and taken a Land Rover, we might have been cheering their return through ’Ar Ar as well as that of their mates from the same squadron.

Twenty-four hours later came more good news. The missing seven members of D Squadron had made it back to ’Ar Ar and were en route by chopper to Al Jouf. The injured man, a trooper, was being airlifted to hospital. When I issued the news to the men a few minutes later I was also able to tell them that although the trooper had suffered a gunshot wound to the stomach there was an exit point. This was received with obvious relief, for they were all aware, through their medical training, that it was much more dangerous when bits of metal were left scattered in the body.

I waited for the comments to die away.

‘Now for our own news,’ I told them, with a broad grin. ‘We’ve been given our first specific mission outside our main task.’

I watched most of the upturned faces light up with eagerness – and some with a look of apprehension. Time to worry about that later, I thought, before continuing, ‘We are to carry out a recce of the Mudaysis airfield, which is a large Iraqi fighter base about twenty kilometres west of the main supply route. That will be our destination tonight. I hope I don’t need to remind you that we will be approaching a manned target with the likelihood of there being other enemy positions in the area. So keep your eyes peeled – and no unnecessary noise.’

That last remark raised a few chuckles from the more relaxed members of the patrol, for a stiff afternoon breeze had already begun rattling anything aboard the Land Rovers that wasn’t securely tied down or wedged against the sides. No matter how hard we tried, we were always going to sound like a mobile breaker’s yard.

That night, travelling slightly north of west, we encountered several bedouin encampments. We were able to pick these out on our MIRA thermal imagers and skirt around them. Apart from a lot of barking from the bedous’ dogs, our passing appeared not to produce any noticeable reaction.

After weeks spent behind enemy lines during the Gulf War, I can never picture bedouin villages without coupling that image with the sound of barking dogs. The two things go together, and it would be fair to say that where you find one, you’ll find the other.

As a result, I was highly amused by some of the things ‘McNab’ wrote in
Bravo Two Zero
. In one scene, he describes him and his men hearing dogs near a bedouin village. According to ‘McNab’, if the dogs approached the patrol, he and his men would use their ‘fighting knives’ to kill the creatures and carry the corpses away with them, for disposal later. Elsewhere in
Bravo Two Zero
he mentions that, since they had no silenced weapons with them, he and his men might well have to use their knives to take out any enemy manning a Scud launch site, so as not to attract unwelcome attention from other Iraqi forces in the area.

The fact is, however, that no man in his right mind would go anywhere near any dog, anywhere in the Middle East – let alone a bedouin dog. There is a very high probability that it would be rabid, quite apart from the fact that dogs are tough animals, especially semi-wild dogs. The chances of someone killing a dog silently and quickly with a blade are very slight indeed.

More tellingly, I repeat that there is no such thing in the British Army, never mind the Regiment, as an official fighting knife. The only knives issued are small clasp knives which are mainly used for opening ration packs and removing or replacing screws in your rifle. I have known a few SAS guys who carried slightly larger knives, but only for doing ordinary things – not for stabbing people and dogs or slitting sentries’ throats. There are no instruction courses in the SAS involving the use of knives, fighting ones or any other kind. Even training in unarmed combat is only rudimentary, and the only time knives are involved is during instruction on how to defend yourself against an antagonist armed with a blade. Finally, if you have to kill someone, or some animal, in combat or otherwise while on active service, then you use your rifle or pistol. There is no unit of the British Army which uses knives – other than bayonets – garrottes or crossbows to dispose of the enemy. Any soldier who asks you to believe differently is either lying, or has himself been taken in by some of the nonsense written about the Special Forces.

What does ring true in ‘McNab’s’ account of hearing the bedou dogs, however, is the sheer tension of being on a mission behind enemy lines, and especially in such an unforgiving landscape. I think that at first none of us felt completely at ease in the desert, for all our training and, for some of us, years of experience. Certainly spotting that first desert settlement must have rattled Pat and Yorky, because they pulled up abruptly. Mugger stopped and I jumped out and walked forward the fifty or so paces to the lead Land Rover. As I came level with Pat I asked, ‘What’s up?’

He jerked his head towards the front. ‘There’s a lot of movement about a kilometre ahead. It could be an enemy patrol.’

I lifted my rifle and took a squint through the Kite sight, a night-viewing scope which attaches to an M16 or SA80
^*
and works the same as a normal telescope sight – only in the dark. Then I took a long look through the MIRA, listening hard at the same time. I began to smile.

‘There appear to be a group of tents or other quarters over there and what might be a cooking fire,’ I said. ‘Which means they could be anybody. But I can also hear dogs barking and you don’t often get the Republican Guard taking pets on manoeuvres.

‘That means bedouin to me. Aim to clear the village by about five hundred to a thousand metres and they won’t give us any trouble.

‘Now let’s get moving or we won’t make our LUP by dawn.’

True, there was a certain element of risk, but it was a risk I was prepared to take. The chances were that if whatever lay ahead was a military unit, then its sentries would probably think we were Iraqi troops on the move. And even if they did sight us and become suspicious, I counted on them waiting until dawn before trying to confirm those suspicions.

If they were bedouin, however, as I was convinced they were, then they wouldn’t give a damn about us anyway. Most of the desert tribesmen almost certainly had very little idea of what was going on in the country, cared nothing for politics, and had no strong feeling of loyalty to country or leader. If aircraft were to start dropping bombs near them then they might move out of the way, but whether soldiers driving quietly by in the night were Iraqis or somebody else generally didn’t interest them in the slightest.