Knife Edge: Life as a Special Forces Surgeon (7 page)

Bored with our now established diet, I felt it was time for a change so went searching beside the small freshwater lake our island haven supplied. To one end of the water were some light green, rushlike plants. I have no idea what they were. By then I had already found several dozen new ideas to take back to my companions. None of my earlier finds had been any trouble, so I took a large handful of light green plant and ate everything. I would have done credit to a cow. For a brief moment all was fine, but then the agony hit me. A furious, sharp, searing pain shot down my gullet. I could hardly breathe. I broke into a ferocious sweat and then the most intense stomach cramps overwhelmed me. I retched and vomited everywhere. Nature has a strange way of protecting us and vomiting is an excellent method of eliminating poison. I had broken the rules and had paid for it. I do not know what it was I ate. However, if you are tempted to live off the land, do avoid those tall, thin, rush-like things at the end of a freshwater lake. They will make you sick.

It is all very well finding food, but your catch has to be cooked. The books say you should find a metal container washed up on the beach and use that. Something akin to an old oil drum would do, once suitably cleaned. Real life is not so helpful. Have you ever tried to find a
metal
container on a beach these days? Everything is plastic and plastic melts when you heat it. We were saved by the policeman. Somehow he had managed to smuggle past our captors a complete mess tin and a packet of rice. I have no idea how he did it and he was not letting on. For sure these are not items that would fit easily into a cigar tube.

We made it in the end, a week later, somewhat lighter and significantly unkempt. The SBS did send out helicopters to look for us while we tried to survive. They are another factor you can do without. The secret is not to look up when one flies over you. They make a loud noise and should give you reasonable warning to lie face down, camouflaged against Mother Earth. Its pilot, navigator or loadmaster will nevertheless be looking for you. Not only do they look forwards and sideways, they also look backwards. Consequently, if you look upwards once it has flown over, your white face will be perfectly contrasted against the green vegetation. You will be seen. It is essential to keep your head down until they have flown well past.

You are not allowed to rest on your laurels in the SAS. A special skill, preferably more than one, is mandatory. The typical, traditional, SAS patrol comprises four men: demolitions, signals, language and medical. The medical man is usually called the patrol or SAS medic. In practice, each operative needs a grasp of every skill, but you need one who is in overall charge of each specialty. My first shot, being a medical student, was to become a patrol medic. I thought it would be easy. After all, I was dealing with medical problems every day in my civilian life. I was wrong. I had not realized the level of sophistication of SAS medical training delivered by its various medical courses. Needless to say, the teaching given by the UK’s medical schools to their students is no use whatsoever to the SAS medic operating behind enemy lines. The medical student learns to deal with patients on a hospital ward. The SAS operative may be working under a hedge somewhere, without the trappings of modern medical care. I failed my SAS medical course, I am ashamed to say. It was a failing I was happy not to advertise at the time. It was due to no other reason than my cockiness. I felt certain a medical student was bound to know all the answers. In the event, I failed as I did not know the dosage of certain commonly used medicines. Aspirin was one of them. I felt suitably chastened and did not attempt the course again.

For the first time I began to have doubts as to whether my ambitions were viable. The vagotomy operation had highlighted how difficult it was to develop the skills a surgeon requires. If I were a patient, I would go for a manually adept surgeon for my operation, not necessarily a clever, hamfisted one. Intellect and manual ability do not always go together. It was difficult enough to become a surgeon, without the added complication of developing SAS skills as well. A small voice, Satanic this time spoke in my ear. I worried if I would ever make it. At times I even wondered whether I should forsake surgery altogether and take up soldiering full time. The SAS was certainly demonstrating there was an excellent, challenging life outside medicine. I would feel this way most often when I returned from SAS activities around the land. The moment I re-entered my hospital, however, I knew I could not turn my back on medicine. The Third World still beckoned and also orthopaedic surgery. I would simply have to find a way of doing them all.

Having failed the SAS medical course, I decided instead to become a signaller. It was a skill I thoroughly enjoyed. An SAS patrol is no use to anyone if it cannot report its findings to headquarters. I learned everything I could and was soon fortunate to win the Regimental signals prize. Morse code was vital. It is impossible. Dah, dah, dah, dit, dit, dit. The various combinations of dahs and dits are enormous. Eventually, I learned it from the back of my motorbike. To and from work every morning I would transpose the number plate of the car in front into Morse. Dit-dah, dah-dit-dit-dit, dah-dit-dah-dit, it might go. There I would be, ditting and dahing furiously at traffic-light stops all over London. Whatever my fellow commuters felt, it was an excellent way of learning the code.

The aim of the signaller is to send his message in the shortest possible time. Out there are people who want to know what you are up to. Spending too long on the air allows them to work out both your location and who you are. The way a signaller handles his Morse key is as unique as a fingerprint. Everyone uses the same dits and dahs, but the way they can be sent over the air is variable. A trained operator, working for the other side, will pick this up and specifically identify location, signaller and unit from the nature of the dits and dahs. This is direction finding, or ‘DFing’ for short. Being DF’d is not a good idea. It is difficult to imagine, when you are in the back of beyond, that anyone can be listening at all, but they are. On one occasion I was asked to test a new military radio. It was big and bulky, but had all manner of knobs and buttons that allowed you to change frequencies as often as you liked. The earlier SAS radio, the PRC-316, had only a limited frequency choice. As a result it was easier to DF, despite being a lovely machine to use. The new design was meant to avoid such troubles.

I took it to some woods near London and started sending fully encoded messages to our radio base. I do mean fully encoded. Fast, efficient message keying in numerical format, using destructible one-time pads, held by me and the radio base only. Security was as foolproof as it gets. And yet it wasn’t. Within five minutes of keying my first message, an unidentifiable but strong Morse message came over my set. Dit-dit-dit, dit-dah, dit-dit-dit. Dit-dit-dit, dit-dah, dit-dit-dit. Those are the Morse symbols of the letters ‘S.A.S.’ Someone, somewhere, had identified me on this new, marvellous, supposedly undetectable radio. Not only had they isolated my frequency, but they had established my unit, something a trained signaller would never transmit uncoded. I had been DF’d well and true. A very spooky feeling when stuck in gloomy woods near south London. Furthermore, it was impossible to say who had DF’d me. Russians, Americans, Chinese? I had no idea.

As a trained signaller, many doors are open to you. It is not a skill that everyone takes to. However, security tests were my interest. Some were easy, some not so easy, but I soon became master at breaking into all manner of civilian or military establishments. I remember one very well. Our patrol had been tasked to penetrate a storage depot in western Scotland, in order to lay dummy charges against some missile warheads. The depot was miles from anywhere, frequently patrolled by Ministry of Defence personnel, the MOD police, with dog handlers and some military support. They were all told we might attempt an attack. Other SAS patrols meanwhile were ordered to infiltrate alternative establishments around Scotland, including the sabotage of a nuclear submarine. The submarine group was completely successful.

We decided to infiltrate by night, reconnoitre (‘recce’) the place, and return twenty-four hours later for the definitive attack. Aerial photographs had been given to us, the primary target of the warhead store being barely 100 feet from the MOD police base. We were also given a secondary target, a transformer, in case our efforts on the warhead store failed. As part of our pre-operation planning we had established that the primary target’s main door was secured by a huge, bulky padlock. Carrying a thermolance, a device like a welding rod, was impractical, so the technical boys in London made a special tungsten carbide hacksaw blade. We were assured it would cut through anything within ninety seconds. That would be fine, I agreed.

The recce went well. Dropped off some distance away by Land Rover, we approached the depot across country from some ten kilometres. The area was largely uninhabited, which was good to see. Locals can be the enemy on occasions such as this. They notice if even a blade of grass has been moved and are on the telephone immediately to the police. The annual exercises in Scandinavia were classics in this respect. There, the whole civilian population was warned, well before the SAS ever arrived, that UK troops would attempt to sabotage their various key establishments. Advertisements would be pinned up everywhere. The result was the entire civilian and military populations would be mobilized to catch you. Families would go for picnics, dogs would be taken for a walk, in the desperate hope they would stumble over an SAS trooper.

The guard routine at the depot was predictable. Every fifteen minutes someone would visually check the door, though would not necessarily go right up to it and inspect it. An occasional patrol van, complete with searchlight, would drive round the large remaining expanse of depot to ensure security of the smaller, outlying buildings. Armed with such information, I signalled London that all was in order, while the patrol laid up for the day. For a signaller there is no such thing as ‘lying up’. This is when other patrol members, during daylight hours, sleep or cook. In this lying-up position, or LUP, totally camouflaged, the signaller is still hard at work. As a radio operator, sleep is an impossible luxury. Being exhausted becomes a way of life.

We had positioned the LUP one kilometre from the target, to avoid unexpected perimeter patrols. The day passed uneventfully and by dark we were again ready to move. The approach to the depot went easily, save for one thing. Bullocks. During the day a local farmer had unexpectedly placed twenty of them in the field immediately adjacent to the depot. That night they were extremely frisky. On the one hand we were four heavily armed and camouflaged SAS soldiers crawling towards a highly secret government establishment. On the other, were twenty boisterous animals refusing to ignore us. They cramped and crowded us, butted us and pawed the ground incessantly. By the time we reached the fifteen-foot security fence we had gathered a crowd of not-so-admiring onlookers. If there is anything good to say about them, they were at least silent.

The security fence was a latticed affair, with three strands of barbed wire leaning backwards at the top. You can either go under or over such fences. By under I mean tunnelling through the ground underneath the latticed portion. However, on this occasion the fence was well bedded into the earth, so tunnelling was impractical. Cutting a hole through the wire would have been an idea, but our aim was to get in and out without detection. Leaving a gaping cavity in the security fence would have been an advertisement for all to see. So over we went. At least, over three of us went. Number 4 could not make it, however hard he tried. He was not strong enough. Fifteen feet was too far. Poor man. Here was the supposed superhuman SAS, surrounded by bullocks, struggling to get past only the first hurdle the MOD had thrown at us. Fortunately it was dark and no one else could see. Number 4 eventually gave up and waited for us at our emergency RV. There was an obvious limit as to how long we could remain at the fence waiting for him to cross.

When designing the depot, the MOD had, perhaps, the welfare of the saboteur in mind. There was the occasional hedge, and frequent earth mound, to hide behind. It did not take long to find a position immediately outside the MOD police base, directly opposite the target store. Beside the door was a metal dustbin, the entire area being bathed by orange spotlight. The angle of light, however, meant that part of the door was in shadow. At last it appeared things were getting better.

We waited for the next MOD patrol to pass. To say ‘pass’ is optimistic. It was a windy night, not conducive to staying outdoors, unless really necessary. The MOD patrol thus consisted of a policeman putting his head outside the base’s door for several seconds, checking all was in order and disappearing inside again. You rely on human failings on such occasions.

As soon as the policeman’s head had disappeared inside the warmth and security of his base, we set to work. Two of us stayed in the shadows opposite the target, to act as early warning of patrols for the third, whose task was to cut the lock. Ninety seconds was all it would take, the technical boys had advised. The lock was taped rapidly to a small, hand-sized piece of chipboard to allow it to be held securely. Number 3 set about cutting the hasp with the new, magic saw. Ninety seconds later he had barely made any impression. He dashed over to join us in the shadows.

‘Jesus! The bloody thing’s useless!’ he said. ‘What the **** are we going to do?’

We knew we had several minutes to play with, so decided to keep going, certainly until the next patrol was due. Number 3 returned to his task. The remaining two of us could always overpower anyone who became too inquisitive, though our element of surprise would then certainly be lost.

By the time we had warned number 3 of an impending patrol, judged by the shifting noises emanating from the police base, it had become apparent our task was going to take a long time. The lock was now bound to a block of wood, and partially cut. All it would take was a close, visual inspection and our efforts would have been wasted. MOD’s technical guys were not popular with us that night.