The Falkland Islands, specks of land almost lost in the vastness of the South Atlantic, had been British owned since 1833. Argentina, however, had long laid claim to the ‘Malvinas’, and on 2 April 1982 the leader of the nation’s military junta, General Galtieri, decided to back that claim with a full-scale invasion of the islands.
Immediately on hearing the news of the invasion, the Director of the SAS Group, Brigadier Peter de la Billière, and the commander of 22 SAS, Lieutenant Colonel Mike Rose, put the Regiment on standby and lobbied hard for a role in the military campaign for the islands’ recovery, should one be launched. It was. The Argentinian junta was not minded to give up their new possession; the British prime minister of the day, Margaret Thatcher, was equally determined that the islands should become British once more. War was on. The Special Air Service, de la Billière intended, should share the burden of war and – dare it be said – the limelight, in what might be Britain’s last colonial war.
The SAS appeal fell on favourably inclined ears. Three days later, after SAS soldiers had been frantically summonsed back from leave, training courses and patrolling in Armagh’s bandit country, an advance party from D Squadron flew south to Ascension Island. A small D Squadron contingent also embarked the carrier HMS Hermes, sailing from Portsmouth Harbour. The remainder of D Squadron, together with all their kit, was airborne for Ascension twenty-four hours later, and so was G Squadron and the regimental headquarters. The swift send-off was a telling tribute to the efficiency of the quartermasters at Stirling Lines.
Although Ascension Island, pinned in the middle of the Atlantic just below the Equator, was 3,885 miles from the Falklands, it was the nearest British territory of serviceable use. Hot and cramped, the island had little to recommend it and D Squadron’s ninety troopers were not sorry to find that their sojourn was soon curtailed. Margaret Thatcher was keen that a dramatic and immediate military action was undertaken against the illegal occupiers of Britannia’s southern outposts. The chosen target was Grytviken, the former whaling station on the island of South Georgia, 870 miles south-east of the main Falklands group.
The execution of Operation Paraquet (soon corrupted to Operation Paraquat, after the branded weedkiller) fell to D Squadron, alongside a patrol from M Company, 42 Royal Marine Commando (‘The Mighty Munch’), and a section of the SBS – some 235 men in all. On 21 April the small assault force, carried in HMS Endeavour, HMS Antrim and HMS Plymouth, came in sight of South Georgia, an ice-bound mountainous wilderness which formed, before the Argentinian occupation, the base for the British Antarctic Survey. Little was known about deployment of Argentinian forces on the island, so Major Guy Sheridan RM, the commander of the assault force, ordered covert recces. Captain John Hamilton’s 19 Troop of D Squadron was inserted by helicopter in near white-out conditions of driving snow. Carrying 77 lb of kit and hauling heavily laden pulks (sledges), the troops inched down the Fortuna glacier, but after a night of hurricane-force winds Hamilton had no choice but to request extraction. Three Wessex helicopters successfully landed on the glacier. The weather conditions were so extreme, though, that the take-offs were blighted. Corporal Davey, Squadron SAS, recorded:
The helicopters lifted off, the Mark 3 Wessex with navigational equipment leading and the two Mark 5s following. I was in the first Mark 5. The flight plan was to follow the glaciers down to a land fall and then out to the ships. The Mark 3 put in a shallow right-hand turn, height probably about 200–300 feet, the first Mark 5 started the turn but was hit by a sudden white-out in which the pilot lost all his horizons and we crashed into the ice. The pilot managed to pull the nose up before impact so that the tail rotor hit first and the helicopter rolled over on its left-hand side. The main door being uppermost everyone got out quickly, the only injury being Corporal Bunker who had hurt his back.
The remaining Mark 5 and Mark 3 then landed and we transferred to them … the two helicopters lifted off again and exactly the same thing happened, white-out followed by crash. This time the Mark 5 rested on its right-hand side. The Mark 3, unable to return because of extra payload, then flew back to Antrim. I and the other passengers were taken to the wardroom where an emergency medical room had been set up. After refuelling, the Mark 3, with the same crew still aboard, returned to the area of the second crash, but was unable to land because of weather. It returned to the ship, having contacted the troops on the glacier who had no serious injuries. They had in fact managed to erect a survival tent carried by the helicopter and had also retrieved equipment from the first crash.
The Mark 3 then returned again to the second crash, and this time picked everyone up and returned to Antrim. It had seventeen passengers, very much overloaded, and the pilot had to fly the helicopter straight on to the flight deck as he was unable to hover and approach normally. It was now 22 April.
The pilot of the returning Mark 3 Wessex was Lieutenant Commander Ian Stanley RN. For his valour and professionalism, Stanley was awarded the DSO.
With the South Georgia Task Force’s helicopter capability reduced by two-thirds, the planners decided to launch D Squadron’s boat troop. Although two of their five Gemini inflatables suffered engine failure, three crews got ashore to set up watch on Leith and Stromness on the night of 22 April. Three days later, Ian Stanley successfully inserted an SBS patrol a few clicks below Grytviken. Choppering back to Antrim, Stanley spotted the Argentinian submarine Santa Fe on the surface; he immediately attacked, straddling her with a pair of depth charges. These inflicted sufficient damage to prevent her diving, and she was shortly attacked by helicopters from Endurance and the frigate Brilliant. The Santa Fe limped into Grytviken, where her condition, plus the sight of pursuing British helicopters, caused panic among the 130-strong enemy garrison. Despite only having seventy-five men immediately available, Major Sheridan and D Squadron’s commanding officer, Major Cedric Delves, decided to exploit the Argentinians’ set-back. To the roar of supporting gunfire from Antrim and Plymouth, an SAS composite troop and two composite RM/SBS troops landed in the vicinity of Grytviken. Screened from the settlement by a small mountain, the SAS struck out for the port. Some elephant seals, mistaken for Argentinian troops, were shot up and a suspected enemy position was promptly demolished by a Milan missile; the stronghold, alas, turned out to be a piece of scrap iron. These hazards negotiated, the SAS team ascended to the top of Brown Mountain to see the wooden buildings of the port below festooned with white flags. The garrison surrendered without a shot being fired. With barely a pause to get his breath, SSM Lawrence Gallagher of D Squadron hauled down the Argentinian flag and raised the Union Jack. To their incredulity, the SAS assault party discovered that they had blithely trolled through the minefield ringing the Argentinian weapons pits. The next morning, 26 April, two troops from D Squadron, together with an SBS team, took the peaceful surrender of the Leith garrison. South Georgia was once again in British hands.
While D Squadron had South Georgia on its mind, G Squadron 22 SAS was sailing towards the war zone on the RFA Resource. Since there was little in the way of aerial or satellite pictures of the Argentinian positions on the Falklands, G Squadron was earmarked for some old-style ‘eye-ball’ reconnaissance. Beginning on 1 May, four-man patrols were inserted by Sea King, an earlier plan to parachute them in being cancelled at the last moment. The forward observation posts in the featureless terrain often consisted of a mere shallow depression covered with ponchos. Life in the hides was unrelentingly grim, with little or no chance to brew up hot food or drink, and with cold, wet weather that seeped into the bones. The record for staying in a hide was twenty-eight days, set by Sergeant Mather and his team above Bluff Cove.
There was always the danger of discovery. On 10 June an SAS covert ‘hide’ containing Captain John Hamilton – who had rejoined the main task force after the successful taking of South Georgia – and his signaller was uncovered; in the ensuing firefight with the Argentinians, Hamilton was killed as he tried to cover the signaller’s escape. For his bravery, Hamilton was awarded a posthumous MC. On more than one occasion SAS and SBS patrols ran into each other and opened fire. One such ‘blue-on-blue’ incident ended tragically, with the death of SBS Sergeant ‘Kiwi’ Hunt.
Despite these set-backs, the recce teams achieved conspicuously successful results. One four-man patrol, led by G Squadron’s Captain Aldwin, set up a hide on Beagle Ridge, directly above Port Stanley, in an area heavily patrolled by the enemy. From the hide, the team spotted a night dispersal area for helicopters between Mounts Kent and Estancia; when the intelligence was relayed back to the fleet, two Harrier aircraft attacked the site and destroyed three enemy helicopters.
Besides reconnaissance, the regiment was tasked with the carrying out of its quintessential activity: offensive raiding behind the lines. An early target was the Argentinian airstrip on Pebble Island, off the northern coast of West Falkland, the base for 1A–58 Pucara aircraft. Sergeant Peter Ratcliffe was among those slated for the Pebble Island job:
At about eleven o’clock on the morning of 15 May, the Boat Troop commander sent a signal which will go down in the annals of the Regiment. Coded and transmitted in Morse, once deciphered it read, ‘Eleven aircraft, repeat eleven aircraft. Believed real. Squadron attack tonight.’
The timescale was very tight – clearly Ted saw the matter as urgent. In the light of this, the squadron commander and the senior planners got together and worked out that any attack launched against the aircraft on the Pebble Island airstrip would have to be completed by 0700 hours the next day to allow sufficient time for the raiding parties to be recovered by helicopter. The reason for this was because the Task Force ships closed up to the islands at night, but steamed away into the South Atlantic so that they should not be vulnerable to air attack when daylight came some time after 1100 hours. As they sailed out of danger, so the distance the helicopters would have to fly back to the ships increased.
The plan began to go wrong from the first. Because of bad weather conditions and Hermes miscalculating her run in to a position eighty miles offshore, which would bring Pebble Island within helicopter range of the ships, the operation started running late almost from the start. The South Atlantic lived up to its foul-weather reputation, and the aircraft carrier had to sail in fierce headwinds and mounting seas. Movement on board was risky, which meant that the Sea Kings on the hangar decks could not be safely readied by the technical crews in the time allowed. Once they were ready, there were more delays while the choppers were brought up to the flight deck for lift-off.
The helicopters were carried up from the hold of Hermes by huge lifts let into the flight deck, for all the aircraft, Sea Harriers as well as Sea Kings, were kept below deck at all times when they weren’t flying. The mood and atmosphere among D Squadron was electric, with everyone raring to go. By then our faces were covered in cam cream and we were all tooled up. Each SAS man tasked for the raid carried an M16 rifle with three spare magazines taped to the butt, and another 200 to 400 rounds of 7.62mm GPMG ammunition in belts. Everybody carried two mortar bombs, one of high explosive and one of white phosphorus, which we were to drop off when we reached the mortar pits that would be established near the airstrip. Several of the guys also carried LAWs – M72 light anti-tank weapons – which are extremely effective against aircraft on the ground.
Adrenalin raged through our systems like rivers of fire, giving us an enormous rush. Armed to the teeth, forty-five of us boarded the Sea Kings; with us also went a naval-gunfire support team from 148 Battery, 29 Commando Regiment, Royal Artillery, whose task was to direct the bombardment from the 4.5-inch guns of the ships lying offshore. We all embarked on the hangar deck, and eventually the Sea King that my troop was to fly in was brought up to the flight deck. The helicopter’s engines roared into life. We waited on deck for at least fifteen minutes, only to be told that one of the Sea Kings carrying another troop had developed mechanical problems and would have to be replaced. All in all, this took over an hour, leaving our time on the ground less than adequate, as everything had been planned on the basis of the distance between Hermes and Pebble Island and the range of the Sea Kings, making timing absolutely critical.
At last we lifted off, flying low-level over the sea in blackout conditions, occasionally gaining fleeting glimpses of the waves below. I had never experienced surges of adrenalin to the same extent. To be part of the largest SAS raid since the Second World War was something that I would not have missed for anything, especially when I remembered that I should have been back in Birmingham drill hall completing my two-year stint as an instructor.
The navy pilots were terrific, lifting off in the dark and, despite very high winds, flying only forty or fifty feet above the waves to dodge any enemy radar cover. For all their efforts, however, because of the atrocious weather we were already running an hour late when they dropped us off three miles from the airstrip. We estimated that it would take us about two hours to reach the target.
On landing we were met by Captain Ted, the Boat Troop commander, and his men. They had spent the last four days lying up on Pebble Island, watching the enemy without being seen; now it was their job to lead us to the target. The squadron commander and the ‘head sheds’ of each troop were briefed by Ted. Once the briefing had finished, we were told that this was not a night for tactical movement; instead, we had to get our arses in gear and get to the target as quickly as possible, since otherwise we wouldn’t have enough time to carry out the mission and rendezvous with the helicopters before the latter had to return to Hermes, The plan was for Mobility Troop to attack the eleven aircraft on the ground and destroy them with plastic-explosive (PE) charges. Air Troop was tasked to mask off the settlement, and Mountain Troop was to be held in reserve at the mortar pit, from where they would be able to go instantly to the aid of any troops that might be in trouble.
My troop, Mobility, was commanded by Captain Paul and his number two was Bob, a staff sergeant; I was number three in the pecking order. Considering the ground and the darkness, we got off pretty quickly. It was not quickly enough, however, for the going was against us. The ground was mainly of peat, spongy stuff that made walking difficult, especially in the dark, and there were lots of fences and walls to cross. Just the kind of thing you’d expect around a sheep settlement.
Realizing that precious time had been lost, the squadron commander decided to speed-march in single file, one man behind the other. As a result, rather than observing patrol procedures, which would normally involve a stealthy approach, we often broke into a run. But when we came to a wall or a fence, we adopted ‘obstacle procedure’, which dictated that each man should be covered by others while he crossed, and this slowed us considerably.
When moving in an extended single file, the soldier in front is responsible for the soldier behind. So long as he can see the man ahead of him and the man behind, then everything is fine. That’s the theory, anyway, but what we didn’t know was that while we were painstakingly crossing obstacles, the squadron OC and the other troops were leaping walls and fences and racing towards the target as though their boots were on fire.
Inevitably, we lost contact with the troop in front. They were travelling much faster than we were, and before long the man at the head of our troop could no longer see the last man of the troop ahead. Going over undulating ground at night, you can simply disappear into the darkness, and once the chain is broken you are as good as lost. In the pitch blackness we couldn’t see a thing, even through our night scopes, so our only means of contacting the leading troops was by the radio carried by the troop signaller. When Captain Paul realized our predicament he radioed the OC, who was somewhere up in front of us in the dark, and asked him for a steer. The squadron commander came back on the radio and said he didn’t have time to wait for us – if we didn’t catch up with him by the time we reached the rendezvous position, we were to stay in reserve by the mortar pit, the task originally given to Mountain Troop.
We didn’t catch up. However, a contingency plan had been agreed before we left Hermes. Under this, if anything happened to Mobility Troop prior to our reaching the target, then Mountain Troop was to pick up the baton and lead the attack. Its members were carrying enough explosives to complete the mission.
By the time we reached the mortar pit, we knew we had lost our starring role in the attack. Almost beside ourselves with anger and disappointment, we realized that we had been relegated to being just a bunch of extras.
Looking back on that night, the troop sergeant should have detailed someone to be in front as the lead scout. Captain Paul was a good officer and was trying to do things properly, and it was not his fault that a gap had developed, for on this particular night there was drifting mist that continually came and went. To make matters worse, we were the only troop that didn’t have a member of Boat Troop attached to us as a guide – a mistake, since by then they knew the way to and from the airstrip better than the backs of their hands.
Nevertheless, there can be no excuses. Mobility Troop’s delay in arriving at the target was the result of incompetence, and it should not have happened. The important thing to remember, however, is that the Regiment is not infallible. We do sometimes make mistakes. In this respect the SAS is like any other regiment, and its soldiers are not immune from sometimes getting things wrong, especially in the confusion of war.
‘David’, a soldier with another troop, takes up the story:
At this point it became apparent that we had lost the troop that was supposed to carry out the attack on the actual planes. In all fairness to them, it is sometimes quite hard to locate a six-figure grid reference in the pitch-dark in the middle of nowhere in a place where everything looks the same. And they were one of the troops who did not have a guide. Nobody knew they were missing until we arrived at the forward RV. We had assumed they were out in front of us. We had to change plan immediately. We waited for a bit to see if they would reappear but they didn’t. We now had exactly thirty minutes to complete the assault.
Mountain Troop, led by John Hamilton, was designated to do the assault. My troop became the fire-support team for the assault. Thank God for that. We were so lucky. It meant we didn’t have to do the house-clearing assault on the settlement. We later found out that there were 200 Argentinian soldiers in the wool shed, which was the starting point for our operations. There were sixteen of us. That would have been interesting.
The attack opened with a naval bombardment on to the feature directly overlooking the settlement. Then our own mortar opened up, lighting the whole place up like it was bright daylight. The mortar man was having a lot of trouble. Every time he fired the bloody thing, the whack of the pipe was kicking the base plate further into the ground. If the angle of the plate changed, he lost his trajectory and elevation. Despite this he kept up continuous fire, eventually giving the order ‘check fire’ before we withdrew.
After a few more minutes the assault troop went in. As they reached one end of the airstrip they got into a firefight. An Argentine officer and an NCO were in a bunker to the side of the strip and opened up. They were rapidly dealt with. After that there was virtually no enemy fire on us, so the boys got stuck into the planes.
They split into seven two-man teams. It was a bloody big strip and they had a lot of ground to cover. It’s not as if the planes were all parked in a nice neat row. They were all over the strip. And all the time the boys were running against the clock. Five planes were destroyed using the explosive charges that they had with them. The Pucara was the tallest of the aircraft. As they approached each plane, one bloke would give the other a leg up on to the wing. Once up, he then leaned down and hauled the other one up to join him. The Skyvan was not a problem. The Mentors were very small, and with one great leap the guys got themselves up on to the wings.
The other six planes were attacked at close quarters by hand. It’s not like in the movies, when you shoot the fuel tank of a plane and it explodes. Planes are built to withstand bullet holes, at least up to a point. Still, the lads used their initiative. They riddled the planes, especially the cockpits, with machine-gun fire and chucked in grenades for good measure. Some of the lads, including Paddy A., got so worked up with adrenalin and enthusiasm that they actually ripped instrument panels out of the cockpits with their bare hands.
During the withdrawal there was suddenly this almighty explosion. The Argies had planted command-detonated mines, and as we were leaving someone on their side decided to get brave and initiated one of them. We had no knowledge that they had even been planted. The guys who had done the assault were withdrawing in groups of four. Fire and maneuver. One team of two is on the ground providing cover for the other two as they move. One foot on the ground, one moving. Leap-frogging. Two of our guys were caught in the blast of the mine. One had shrapnel wounds and the other was just winded. They were recovered and helped to the original central rendezvous point near the mortar. The base plate had to be dug out, it had sunk so deep. As soon as we could, we set off back to the coastline. There was so little time.
I was in the last chopper to leave. As we were taking off I remember looking back over my shoulder. I’ll never forget it. The whole place looked as if it was burning. It was terrific. We all went nuts.
Corporal Davey was one of two SAS men injured in the raid. He wrote of his part in the operation:
Captain Burls led 19 Troop on to the airstrip via the forward RV manned by Captain West and Sergeant Major Gallagher. Once on the edge of the airstrip we began to engage visible aircraft with small arms and 66mm rockets. By this time naval gunfire and illumination were being produced by HMS Glamorgan and our mortars also fired some illuminating rounds. We were aware of some incoming enemy small arms fire, but it was totally ineffective.
I was a member of Staff Sergeant Currass’s patrol and was the extreme right-hand man. I was hit in the lower left leg by shrapnel at about 0700 hours. Staff Sergeant Currass helped me put a shell dressing on the wound. The troop moved on to the airstrip and started systematically to destroy the aircraft with standard charges and 66mm. Captain Hamilton covered Trooper Armstrong who went forward to destroy the last aircraft. The troop then shook out and started to fall back off the airstrip. We were at this stage silhouetted against the burning aircraft. A land mine was command detonated in the middle of the troop, Corporal Bunker being blown some ten feet backwards.
I was beginning to feel faint from loss of blood and consequently was told to head back towards the forward RV with two others. Just off the airstrip we heard Spanish voices, at least four or five, shouting some fifty metres towards the settlement. I opened fire with M203 and put down some sixty rounds in the direction of the voices. Two very pained screams were the only reply. The troop came down behind us and we moved back through the forward RV at about 0745 hours. During the move back I was helped over various obstacles and so was Corporal Bunker. The helicopter pick-up was on time at 0930, and the flight back to Hermes lasted about one hour twenty minutes. Corporal Bunker and I went directly to the sick bay where we were looked after admirably.
It had been a textbook job. It passed through the thoughts of more than one SAS trooper that night that, swap the South Atlantic for the desert, the Argentinians for the Germans, and the RAF helos for the LRDG taxis, 22 SAS was doing exactly what Stirling, Mayne and Lewes had done forty years before.
Presumably, the ‘Head Shed’ at Stirling Lines felt the daring hand of L Detachment’s history on their shoulders when they conjured up Operation Mikado, in which B Squadron would attack Exocet-carrying Super Etandard fighters on Rio Grande airstrip on the Argentine mainland. In one fell SAS-swoop the war would be shortened. Some members of the squadron thought the operation suicidal – the airstrip was defended by 1,300 Argentinian marines and state-of-the-art AA guns – and the squadron sergeant major even resigned over the issue. When the squadron’s commanding officer, John Moss, showed less than requisite enthusiasm, DLB summarily returned him to unit. If not a death wish, others in the squadron considered that the Paras would be better equipped to undertake such a coup de main. The pessimists grew gloomier when the helicopter inserting the recce team was compromised; the Sea King, at the very maximum of its range, tundra-hopped to plop down just over the Chilean border. At best any attack would henceforth be blind. Tom Read of B Squadron recounts the plan, preparation and frequent postponements of Mikado:
Apart from the various troop briefings, we have larger squadron meetings to discuss the full operation. The initial patrol will set up the LZ on the dual carriageway, allowing the RAF pilots to bring in the C-130s.
The squadron will then brass-neck it, driving straight along the main road on motorbikes and in right-hand-drive Land Rovers. I like the audacity of that. Our intelligence lads have interviewed a Canadian who used to work at Rio Grande airfield. He’s given us details of the layout and the location of the local military base. There are two guards on the security gate and Des has been assigned to take out one of them, while Harry McCallion takes care of the other.
The open-top Land Rovers have mounted machine guns as well as Browning 30s and a handful of M-202s – American-made white phosphorus grenade-launchers that look like something out of a James Bond movie. They’re only as long as a shotgun, but they have multi-barrels and when you squeeze the trigger there’s a gentle explosion and a wall of flame. It can destroy an aircraft in seconds.
At H-hour we’ll pour through the front gate and spread out, splitting into smaller groups and hitting different targets. One patrol will take out the control tower, another will blow the fuel tanks and a third will attack the accommodation bunkers and try to kill the pilots. My Land Rover is to head for the aircraft hangars and use the M-202 to destroy the Super Etendards.
‘Okay, you’re probably wondering what the enemy will be up to while we’re doing all this,’ says Ian C., the new OC of the squadron. ‘Our intelligence says the airfield has a limited troop presence. About two miles away there’s a military base with about 1,800 Marines. That’s why one of the primary targets is the comms centre. Assuming these troops are alerted, hopefully by the time they get their shit together and weapons out of the armoury we’ll have finished and gone.’
Discussion turns to our escape, but the options are limited. The nearest Task Force ship will be 500 miles away, and the choppers on board have the fuel capacity to reach us but not get home again. This leaves us with a dash towards the Chilean border, forty miles away. Basically we’ll have to drive as quickly as possible towards the border on one of two roads until we hit road-blocks or are compromised. After that, it may be a case of tabbing over the tundra.
‘Take any vehicles you can get, but try not to kill any civilians,’ says Ian C. ‘Once you’re across the border, surrender to the Chilean authorities.’
It’s not much of an escape plan and Rhett, one of the older lads, pipes up, ‘Boss, I think I should point out that I shouldn’t be here, because I cheated on Combat Survival.’ Everyone laughs.
Call it youthful enthusiasm, but I don’t even contemplate failure. More experienced heads than mine are going to decide what’s right. There are no escape maps or cover stories in case of capture. The Argies will doubtless seal off the roads and put up helicopter gunships. Once the element of surprise has gone, we’ll be deep in hostile territory and vastly outnumbered.
Until the green light is given, we spend our time going on runs over Green Mountain and doing weapons training. I take the M-202 down to the beach, loading up the barrels and firing it at various rocks. A lot of the lads want to have a go because it’s a new weapon. On another day, I go fishing with Charlie and we catch enough red snapper for a squadron barbecue.
A week later, the operation is confirmed. We leave in twelve hours. The compo boxes are opened and we sort out rations and ammunition. I’m jumping with the minimum of kit, just a chainsaw. The rest of my gear is in one of the Land Rovers.
After packing everything away and writing letters home, we get word of a hold-up. Twenty-four hours later it’s on again and then off again. This happens all week, and each morning B Squadron goes for a run, trying to work off the frustration. Apparently, there’s disquiet in Downing Street about the predicted 60 per cent casualty rate of a mainland operation. Prime Minister Thatcher isn’t happy with the odds. Equally, the RAF isn’t thrilled about abandoning a burning aircraft and leaving the crews to tag along with us.
The mainland option seems to be falling apart when, on 8 June, the Sir Galahad and Sir Tristram, both British transport ships, are hit by Argentinian Skyhawks and Mirages in Bluff Cove. The ships are torched and dozens of soldiers die, most of them Welsh Guards. Some of the injuries are truly horrific. Suddenly, the mainland operation is back on again. We are due to leave on a flight at 0700. I’m in the baggage party, humping all the gear into the cargo hold in the pre-dawn cold. The sky is growing light but I’m sweating. A lot of the younger lads like me are raring to go, but the older blokes are more circumspect. Maybe their instincts for self-preservation are more acute.
A Land Rover arrives beside the aircraft and the news is broken – the operation has been cancelled. Apparently, a British newspaper had published a story saying that a SAS squadron based on Ascension Island was practising for a mainland operation. Within hours the Argentinians had started moving their planes away from the airfields and scattering them about the countryside, parked under camouflage nets. The chance of striking a blow against the Super Etendards had been lost.
Mikado might have been aborted, but there was plenty of ‘old-style’ SAS stuff to come. On the night before the main Task Force landings at San Carlos, the SAS mounted a series of diversionary raids. These included the landing of sixty D Squadron men, who then marched for twenty hours to reach the hills north of Darwin and attack the garrison at Goose Green. To put the wind up the Argentinians they simulated a battalion-sized (600 men) attack, raining down a torrent of LAW rockets, Milan missiles, GMPG rounds and tracer into the Argentinian positions. So ferocious was the barrage that the enemy failed to probe the SAS positions and could only manage desultory return fire. By mid-morning, the main landings accomplished, the SAS disengaged from Goose Green, ‘tabbing’ (only Marines ‘yomp’) north to meet up with 2 Para as they made their way inland. En route, the SAS were intercepted by a Pucara ground-attack aircraft. Fatalities seemed certain, but as the planes winged in an SAS trooper launched a heat-seeking Stinger missile. He scored a direct hit on one plane, which whumphed into disintegrating fire, smoke and metal. Unfortunately, the trooper was a novice with the new American-made Stinger and did not realize that it required recharging with compressed gas; after his next two missiles, worth £50,000 each, flopped after just twenty metres the Commanding Officer ordered him to desist firing. The rest of the patrol had dived for cover.
Over the next fortnight SAS patrols continued their recces and probing missions. At the end of May, D Squadron seized Mount Kent, forty miles behind enemy lines, and held it for several days until reinforced by 42 RM Commando. This was despite aggressive – and courageous – patrolling from Argentine special forces in a sequence of sharp nocturnal firefights. Following their relief, D Squadron was in action again when five teams landed on West Falkland. The considerable enemy garrisons at Fox Bay and Port Howard enjoyed excellent radio-direction-finding equipment and responded vigorously. It was on West Falkland that Captain John Hamilton had lost his life.
Meanwhile, to reinforce SAS numbers in the Falklands, a troop from B Squadron was flown from Ascension in Hercules C130s; the troop was to join the Task Force by parachuting into the Atlantic, from which they would be plucked by Gemini inflatables. Tom Read wrote later:
We reach the convoy and quickly prepare for a static-line jump from 1,000 feet, directly off the ramp. Whitecaps stretch from horizon to horizon. My dry suit will give me about five minutes in the freezing water before I lose consciousness. It has a hood and feet, but no hands. I stuff my training shoes inside my leggings because the rest of my kit is already bundled and packed into huge boxes to be dropped after us.
There are twenty-one of us on board, and seven jump on each pass because there are a limited number of inflatable boats to pick us up and ferry us to the warships. Timing is crucial, because three ships have maneuvered into a U-shape to act as a landing zone. The C-130 flies up through the middle and the green light flashes on. Another seven blokes go off the ramp. As I hook up my static line, Doomwatch Des is busy looking out the window, with his eyes bigger than portholes. He doesn’t want to be here. Reports of enemy action in the area have him totally spooked.
On the ramp, I can see lads in the water and inflatable boats moving towards them. The pilot doesn’t want to make another pass because he’s worried he won’t have enough fuel to get back to Ascension. Come on, don’t lose your bottle now, I think, as the C-130 does a sharp turn and heads back towards the convoy.
Red light …
Green light …
Go!
The canopy swirls upwards and opens. Looking up, I make sure none of the lines are twisted and then ditch the serve chute, gone for ever in the sea. The last man is drifting dangerously close to one of the ships and almost bounces off the stern, unable to steer the round parachute.
A few feet from the water, I hit the release box on my chest and jettison the chute. I break the surface and let the water slow me down as my body surges under. The cold slaps me in the face like a punch and I get the worst ice-cream headache imaginable. From a thousand feet, the swells hadn’t looked too bad, but now they’re huge. One minute I’m in the bottom of a valley and the next I’m on top of a hill. Entire ships are disappearing in the troughs. Full credit to the marine coxswains, banging around in their dinghies – they surf off swells and risk capsizing to get to us within a few minutes. I feel the cold leaking through the suit and see the boat bouncing over the wash. Strong hands reach out and pull me on board.
The aircraft makes a final pass and drops the equipment. The boxes, wrapped in cargo nets, burst open on impact and the contents spill out. The seas are now so rough the navy won’t risk sending the inflatables back out. Instead, they try using helicopters to winch boxes on board, but only manage to save a few.
As I climb the side nets on to the Andromeda, someone wraps a blanket around my shoulders. I turn to see my Bergen, rifle and webbing flop through the side of a net and sink to the bottom. Everything I’d personalized, my letters from Chris, a painting that Jason had sent me … all of it gone.
Taken down below, I have a shower, a scoff and then head for the Warrant Officers’ Mess for a beer. The assault on Port Stanley airport has been overtaken by events. The land forces are within striking distance of the capital, so we are to relieve D Squadron patrols in the West Falklands.
It wasn’t to be B Squadron’s war. It was then tasked with ambushing the enemy reinforcement of the garrison at Fox Bay, but the enemy failed to turn up. By now it was becoming clear to all that the war was in its last days.
There remained one major SAS raid, which was mounted in East Falkland on the night of 13 June. To take the pressure off 2 Para, who were assaulting Wireless Ridge a few miles west of Port Stanley, the SAS volunteered to put in a raid to the enemy rear – from the sea. Two troops from D Squadron, one from G Squadron and six men from the 3 SBS rode into Port Stanley harbour on high-speed Rigid Raiders with the aim of setting fire to the oil-storage tanks. As troopers from the Regiment later conceded, the raid was more audacious than wise. Searchlights from an Argentinian ship in the harbour caught them as they approached, and the Argentinians opened up with every available weapon, including triple-barrelled 20mm Rheinmetall anti-aircraft cannon depressed to their lowest trajectory. These spewed out a constant stream of metal, which obliged the raiders to rapidly withdraw if they were not to suffer heavy losses.
The next morning, 14 June, it was all over. Mike Rose received a signal from the headquarters of the Argentine commander, General Menendez, asking to discuss surrender terms. By evening, the instrument of surrender had been signed.
The SAS campaign to liberate the Falklands had its price. A few days after the attack on Pebble Island, a helicopter cross-decking members of D and G Squadron from HMS Hermes to HMS Intrepid hit some airborne object, probably a giant petrel or albatross, which was then sucked into the air intake. The Sea King plummeted into the icy water with the loss of twenty SAS troopers and attached specialists, plus one of the aircrew. The dead included Squadron Sergeant Major Lawrence Gallagher and Pebble Island raider Paddy Ryan (Paddy ‘R’). It was the heaviest loss the Regiment had suffered in a single day since the Second World War.
With the end of the Falklands campaign, the SAS returned home to Stirling Lines in Hereford. Although the Regiment had won a DSO, three MCs and two MMs, and chalked up some outstanding actions and important recces, the mood was sombre. The recent history of the Regiment had been in Black Ops; few, if any, of the SAS had fought against a regular army before, and it was obvious that too many mistakes had been made. And the loss of so many men in the Sea King crash touched almost everyone. An address by Peter de la Billière in the Paludrine Club at Stirling Lines served only to lower the mood further. After some preliminary remarks about the Regiment’s victories in the Falklands, he began to berate B Squadron for being insufficiently gung-ho for the Rio Grande attack. At first there was stunned silence. Then, despite orders from the regimental sergeant major, the men began laughing derisorily. A clearly angered DLB strode stiffly from the room.
An SAS man through and through, Peter de la Billière wisely passed off the Paludrine Club fracas as evidence of the strong-mindedness of SAS troopers. That he harboured no grudge against his old regiment was amply proved in 1990, when the Iraqi president Saddam Hussein rolled his armour into Kuwait. General ‘Stormin’ Norman’ Schwarzkopf, the American in command of the coalition gathered to evict Saddam, was notoriously no friend of special forces. Encountering a group of US special forces in the Gulf, Schwarzkopf barked: ‘I remember you guys from Vietnam … you couldn’t do your job there, and you didn’t do your job in Panama. What makes you think you can do your job here?’ The one British member of Schwarzkopf’s planning staff, CENTCOM, knew what British special forces at least could do. For weeks de la Billière sought a role for 22 SAS, before finally persuading Schwarzkopf to sit down for a presentation by the Regiment on the benefits of its insertion deep behind the lines to cut roads and cause diversions to draw Iraqi troops from the front. Convinced, Schwarzkopf gave 22 SAS the go-ahead to cross the Iraqi border at the beginning of the air campaign against Iraq, scheduled for 29 January 1991.
The Regiment was as surprised as most people outside the US clique running the war when, at dawn on 17 January, hundreds of Allied aircraft and Tomahawk Cruise began bombarding targets in Iraq. Within twenty-four hours the Iraqi airforce was all but wiped out and Saddam’s command and communications system heavily degraded. The only nagging area of doubt was Iraq’s surface-to-surface missile capacity. Though an outdated technology, being little more than a Soviet version of Hitler’s V2, the Scud was capable of carrying nuclear and bio-chemical warheads. On the second night of the air campaign, Saddam answered all the speculation about ‘would he?’ and ‘could he?’ by launching Scuds (with conventional warheads) at Israel. Although the Scuds failed to cause any injuries, they were politically lethal; if the Israelis retaliated, the fragile anti-Saddam coalition would likely blow apart. No Arab state could afford to be seen to side with ‘Zionists’ or their friends. Suddenly, the Scud-hunt was on, with the coalition diverting 30 per cent of its air capability to tracking Scuds and their mobile launchers in the vast Iraqi desert. Even the preternaturally upbeat Schwarzkopf could only say before the world’s media on 19 January that seeking Scuds in the desert was like seeking the proverbial needle in a haystack.
Peter de la Billière, meanwhile, realized that the Scud menace offered 22 SAS a clear-cut mission in the war, signalling the Regiment that ‘all SAS effort should be directed against Scuds’. That same day, the 300 troopers from A, B and D Squadrons already gathered in the Gulf were rushed 1,500 km from their holding area to a forward operating base just inside the Saudi border with Iraq.
The Regiment decided on two principal means of dealing with the Scud menace. Firstly, it would insert into Iraq three covert eight-man static patrols to watch roads (what the Regiment calls Main Supply Routes, or MSRs) and report on the movement of Scud traffic. When Scud sites and launchers were identified, US F15 and A10 airstrikes would be called down to destroy them, with the SAS identifying the targets using a tactical airlink or laser-designator.
Alongside the road-watch patrols, the Regiment would infiltrate into Iraq four columns of heavily armed ‘Pink Panther’ Land Rovers, Unimogs and Cannon motorcycle scouts. The columns were to penetrate the ‘Scud Box’, the area of western desert bordering Jordan which was thought to contain around fourteen mobile launchers.
The South and Central road-watch teams were inserted on 21 January, and both found that the spookily featureless desert offered no possibility of concealment. The South road-watch team aborted their mission immediately and flew back on their insertion helicopter. Meanwhile, the Central team called down an airstrike on two Iraqi radars, before they too ‘bugged out’, driving their Land Rovers through 140 miles of biting cold desert before reaching Saudi Arabia.
Road-watch North, codenamed ‘Bravo Two Zero’, was landed by Chinook at night 100 miles north-west of Baghdad. The weather was appalling from the start, with driving wind and sleet in what turned out to be the worst winter in the area for thirty years. As is traditional in the SAS, the decision on how to deploy was left to the patrol. Despite the urging of the Regiment’s commanding officer and the regimental sergeant major, Peter ‘Billy’ Ratcliffe, Bravo Two Zero, led by Sergeant ‘Andy McNab’, decided not to take a ‘dinky’ (a short-wheel-base Land Rover) with them. They did decide to take an Everest of kit: water and rations for fourteen days, explosives, ammunition, extra clothes, maps, compasses, survival equipment, 203 rifles, guns, empty sandbags, LAW 66mm anti-tank launchers, communications gear, camouflage nets, Minimi machine guns – so much kit, indeed, that each man was carrying eighty kilograms of it.
As dawn broke on their first day, the Bravo Two Zero team saw that their map failed to contain some significant local features. Aside from a small farm across from the wadi they were lying in, there was an Iraqi S60 anti-aircraft battery less than a kilometre away. Unfortunately the ground was so hard they could not dig a hide, either for cover from the enemy or the cutting wind. The morning had not done with unpleasant surprises for Bravo Two Zero; when the patrol’s signaller, Trooper Steven ‘Legs’ Lane went to use the PRC 319 radio he could not get communications with the Regiment’s forward base at al-Jauf. Over the next hours, everybody had a go at ‘fixing’ the wireless; nobody could. At noon, McNab called the patrol together and explained he would instigate loss-comms drill, which involved the patrol relocating to the helicopter drop-off, where a helicopter would bring them in a new radio.
In the lying-up place in the wadi the next day, while the patrol waited to move out, they heard the jingle of sheep bells. Once before the sheep and their boy herder had come close to the wadi, but not so close as to see them. This time the boy herder reached the edge of the wadi, and looked down. The patrol froze. Sergeant Vince Phillips, the patrol second in command, believed he made eye contact with the boy, but wasn’t certain.
The patrol had to assume they had been compromised. As Lane sent a message ‘High possibility compromise. Request relocation or exfil’ on the emergency guard-net, the rest of the team prepared to move out, gathering kit and gulping down water. Exiting the bottom of the wadi, they heard the sound of a tracked vehicle and a diesel engine. The SAS team thought a tank or Armored Personnel Carrier was being sent in after them and broke out their LAW 66mm rocket-launchers. Corporal Chris Ryan recalled:
There we were, waiting for this tank to come into view round the corner. Every second the squealing and grinding got louder. We were stuck, pinned like rats in the dead-end of the ravine. We couldn’t tell what else might be coming at us over the flat ground above. The chances were that the Iraqis were deploying behind us, too; even at the moment, they were probably advancing on our position. A couple of hand grenades tossed over the edge would make a nice mess of us. Even so, if the tank came into view and levelled its gun on us, we’d have no option but to run up on to the plain, and chance it with the AA positions on the high ground.
By then it was 1700 hours, but still full daylight. Someone said, ‘Let’s get some water down our necks, fellers,’ and everyone started drinking, because we knew that if we had to run for it, we’d need the liquid inside us. Other guys began frantically repacking their kit, pulling off the warm jackets they’d been wearing and stuffing them into their Bergens. A couple of the lads struggled out of their NBC suits and stowed them.
No one gave any orders about what to do. We just decided that if a tank or armored personnel carrier came round the corner, we’d try to take it out, and then go past it down the wadi, using the dry watercourse as our escape-route. The rockets wouldn’t have been much use against a tank, but they might have disabled it by blowing off a track.
So there we were, getting water down our necks and having something to eat. Then I looked round at the tail ends of the rocket launchers in front of me and said, ‘Hey, fellers – watch the fucking back-blast on these things. I don’t want my face burned.’ When a 66 is fired, the danger area behind the tube extends for twenty metres. There was silence for a minute. Then, suddenly, out of fear and tension, everyone started laughing. They couldn’t stop. I thought, ‘This is bloody ridiculous. There’s a tank coming round the corner, and here we all are, giggling like schoolgirls.’
Dinger pointed at my German Army cap and shouted, ‘Hey, Chris, you look like Rommel.’
‘Fuck off, Dinger,’ I yelled back. He was dragging desperately on his fag. ‘Put that fucking thing out!’
‘Ah – fuck the SOPs,’ he said, and everyone laughed some more.
I checked my 203 magazines again, tapping them on the bottom to make sure the lip was properly engaged in the breech. I had the mags taped together in pairs, head to toe, so that I could load the second instantly by turning the empty one upside down. Each could hold thirty rounds, but I’d only loaded them with twenty-eight, to leave the springs a bit looser and cut down the chance of a stoppage. The spares were in my left-hand lower pouch.
Then suddenly round the corner came … not a tank, but a yellow bulldozer. The driver had the blade high up in front of him, obviously using it as a shield; he looked like an Arab, wearing a green parka with the hood up. We all kept still, lying or crouching in firing positions, but we knew the man had seen us. He was only 150 metres away when he stopped, stared, and reversed out of sight before trying to turn round. Obviously a local, he must have known that the wadi came to a dead-end, and his only purpose in coming up it had been to find out who or what was in there. We held our breath as the squealing and grinding gradually died away.
For a minute or two we felt more relief than anything else. Then it was, ‘Get the radio away, Legs,’ and everyone was saying, ‘We’ve got to go. We’ve got to go.’ Dinger lit another fag and sucked on it like a dying man. Now we felt certain that the local militia must be deploying behind us, and one or two of the lads were being a bit slow, so it was ‘Get a fucking move on’ all round. We’d already decided to ditch the surplus kit we couldn’t carry, but we pulled our Bergens on and were ready for the off. As we were about to leave, I called, ‘Get your shamags round your heads.’ So we all wrapped our heads in shawls, in case we could bluff our way and pass as Arab soldiers, even for a few minutes.
As soon as Legs was ready, we started walking southwards, down the wadi, towards our emergency rendezvous point. Finding myself at the front, I led the patrol out. Call it arrogance, if you like, but I didn’t trust anyone else to go first.
Dusk was already coming on, and I was hoping we could reach the drop-off point, less than two kilometres to the south, and put down enough fire to defend ourselves until dark fell – and then we’d have to wait until the chopper came in.
Moving out, I kept close in to the left-hand wall of the wadi, because that was the steepest, and in the lee of it we were out of sight of the AA guns. When I turned round, I found that the guys had opened up to a tactical spacing of maybe twenty metres between each; but I was thinking, ‘If we have a nonsense here, we want to be tight together.’ So I yelled back, ‘Close up!’
The bulldozer had gone out of sight, but we were moving towards where we’d last seen it. All too soon the wadi began to flatten out, and on our left a long slope ran up to the plain above. As we came clear of the steep part of the wadi wall, I suddenly saw two Arabs on the high ground above us, guns down by their sides. They were barely 200 metres away, and were standing motionless. There was something oddly inert about their appearance; they showed no surprise and did not move as we walked into their view. Both were wearing dark overcoats on top of their dishdashes (native cotton robes), which reached down to their ankles. Also they had red-and-white shamags done up on top of their heads like turbans. I reckoned they were civilians or possibly militia.
‘It’s that sodding boy,’ I said to myself. ‘He’s run like hell and tipped them off.’
‘Close up!’ I yelled again, because it was obvious the shit was going to go down. Next behind me was Bob Consiglio, and I shouted back to him, ‘Fucking hurry! Catch up!’
We kept going. But the two Iraqis began to parallel us, moving forward. In case anybody hadn’t seen them, I called back, ‘We’ve got two on the high ground to the left, and they’re walking down. Keep going.’
Behind me everyone started cursing. The tension in the patrol was electric. I felt fear rising in my chest. Afterwards, I realized that the two Iraqis were waiting for reinforcements to come up; also, they were probably a bit confused, not knowing who the hell we were. But at the time I was wondering if we could outrun them, or lose them somehow, without starting a firefight.
Then I blew it in a big way. I thought, ‘I’m going to try the double bluff here,’ and I waved at them. Unfortunately I did it with my left hand, which to an Arab is the ultimate insult – your left hand being the one you wipe your arse with. The reaction was instantaneous: one of them brought up his weapon and opened fire. Suddenly he was putting rounds down on us. We swung round and put a couple of short bursts back at them. Both dropped on to one knee to continue firing. As I stood there, I saw Vince take off down the wadi. In spite of the danger, there was something ridiculous about his gait: a pair of legs, going like the clappers under a Bergen, and not making much progress either.
‘Stay together!’ I yelled. ‘Slow down!’ We began to run, turning to fire aimed bursts. The secret is to keep them short – no more than two or three rounds at a time. Otherwise the recoil makes the weapon drift up, and the rounds go high. We ran and fired, ran and fired.
Within seconds a tipper truck with metal sides screeched to a halt beside the two Arabs, and eight or ten guys spilled out of it. Stan also saw an armored car carrying a .50 machine gun pull up. Somehow I never saw that; it may have been behind a mound from where I was standing. Some of the Iraqis began firing from the back of the truck, others from positions behind it.
Running and shooting, the SAS team found their Bergens too heavy and cumbersome and began ditching them. Eventually, Bravo Two Zero lost the pursuing Iraqis in the gloom of the early winter afternoon. Stopping to get their breath, the patrol decided to make for the Syrian border, 120 kilometres away, via the Euphrates. The Iraqis, they calculated, would expect them to head south for Saudi. Bravo Two’s decision to go for Syria may well have put the Iraqis off the scent; it certainly deceived SAS commanders at al-Jouf, because the emergency route the team had filed was different. Consequently, any search and rescue mission would look in the wrong place.
Bravo Two Zero walked fifty miles that night through sleet, pausing to rest only four times. Two of the team were in a bad way; Vince Phillips had injured his leg in the contact with the enemy, while Trooper ‘Stan’ was dehydrated because of sweat loss from his thermal clothing. Everybody else, meanwhile, was freezing to death.
Setting off again, the patrol staggered single file into the night. At the back of the patrol, McNab stopped to use his TACBE personal rescue beacon, and got a confused response from an American pilot. By the time McNab put the TACBE back in its pouch, Ryan, Phillips and Trooper Mal had disappeared into the night; McNab and the remainder of the patrol had no option but to carry on without them, hoping they would meet later. The sleet turned to snow. The wind-chill was starting to kill them; lying up in a hollow the next day McNab likened to ‘lying in a freezer cabinet, feeling your body heat slowly slip away’. By dawn on 26 January McNab reckoned they might not survive another twenty-four hours in the open. They were next to the al-Haqlaniyya-Krabilah highway, so they decided to hijack a vehicle. With shamags wrapped around their swarthy faces, Trooper Bob Consiglio and McNab could pass for Arab. The plan then was for Consiglio to be an injured Iraqi soldier and McNab his Samaritan helper, who would stumble into the road and flag down a suitable car. McNab recalled:
After about twenty minutes, vehicle lights came over the small crest and drove towards us. Satisfied that it was not a troop truck, we stood up. The vehicle caught us in its headlights and slowed down to a half a few metres down the road. I kept my head down to protect my eyes and to hide my face from the driver. Bob and I hobbled towards it.
‘Oh shit,’ I muttered into Bob’s ear.
Of all the vehicles in Iraq that could have come our way that night, the one we had chosen to hijack and speed us to our freedom was a 1950s New York yellow cab. I couldn’t believe it. Chrome bumpers, whitewall tires, the lot.
We were committed. Bob was in my arms giving it the wounded soldier. The blokes were straight up from the ditch.
‘What the fuck have we got here?’ Mark shouted in disbelief. ‘This is the story of our lives, this is! Why can’t it be a fucking Land Cruiser?’
The driver panicked and stalled the engine. He and the two passengers in the back sat staring open-mouthed at the muzzles of Minimis and 203s.
The cab was an old rust bucket with typical Arab decoration – tassels and gaudy religious emblems dangling from every available point. A couple of old blankets were thrown over as seat covers. The driver was beside himself with hysteria. The two men on the back seat were a picture, both dressed in neatly pressed green militia fatigues and berets, with little weekend bags on their laps. As the younger of the two explained that they were father and son, we had a quick rummage through their effects to see if there was anything worth having.
We had to move quickly because we couldn’t guarantee that there wouldn’t be other vehicles coming over. We tried to shepherd them to the side of the road, but the father was on his knees. He thought he was going to get slotted.
‘Christian! Christian!’ he screamed as he scrabbled in his pocket and pulled out a keyring with the Madonna dangling from it. ‘Muslim!’ he said, pointing at the taxi driver and trying to drop him in it.
Now the driver sank to his knees, bowing and praying. We had to prod him with rifle barrels to get him to move.
‘Cigarettes?’ Dinger enquired.
The son obliged with a couple of packs.
The father got up and started kissing Mark, apparently thanking him for not killing him. The driver kept praying and hollering. It was a farce.
Driving towards Krabilah, McNab at the wheel, the SAS men in the taxi made good progress for nearly an hour. In the warmth and comfort of the car some of them began sleeping. They then hit a vehicle checkpoint, which they decided to bypass on foot. By now the dumped occupants of the taxi had raised the alarm. The Iraqis were hunting for McNab and his patrol.
On the other side of the checkpoint, McNab and Consiglio tried their old flag-down-a-car trick. They were spotted by an Iraqi police patrol, who opened fire. After a quick return salvo, the SAS men legged it into the night, heading towards the Euphrates and the border. An air raid proved a useful diversion, as the patrol cautiously edged along the alleyways of a town down to the Euphrates’ bank. The river was in full spate, and McNab rated their chances of swimming across as slim. They were just ten kilometres from the border, so they decided to push along the bank looking for a crossing place. At seven kilometres from the border, an Iraqi patrol started blasting at the SAS men from the side of a wadi running into the Euphrates. A running firefight broke out. Bob Consiglio, a Swiss-born former Royal Marine, held off the Iraqis with his Minimi until he ran out of ammunition; separated from the remainder of the patrol, he ran down a track towards the Euphrates. A group of militiamen hidden in a clump of trees opened fire; one of their bullets felled Consiglio. Another round ignited a phosphorus grenade Consiglio was carrying. Awarded a posthumous Military Medal, Consiglio was the first SAS soldier of the campaign to die from enemy fire. Troopers Lane and Lance Corporal ‘Dinger’, at the back of the patrol, edged down to the black Euphrates, where Lane urged Dinger to join him and swim across, with pieces of thrown-away polystyrene stuffed in their smocks for buoyancy. Lane emerged on the far bank in a state of collapse; Dinger hid him in a bankside hut and tried to warm him up. They were spotted and locked inside. Dinger broke through the roof, but was soon surrounded and captured. As he was taken away on a tractor-drawn cart, he saw Lane’s body being brought out of the hut on a stretcher. Lane was dead.
While Lane and Dinger were swimming the Euphrates, McNab and Trooper Mike Coburn crawled across the bed of a wadi. As they emerged, a group of Iraqi police opened up. Coburn, by now left only with a bayonet in his armoury, was hit by rounds in the arm and leg. Captured, he was dragged through the mud to a Land Cruiser, to be taken away for interrogation. McNab, meanwhile, wormed along the ground, until he found an irrigation pipe and holed up. The next morning he was spotted by a labourer, who reported to the police. Screeching up in a Land Cruiser, the police pulled McNab out and bundled him into the back of a Land Cruiser. He was taken to the same barracks as Dinger. Like other captured Coalition personnel, they were subjected to days of torture.
On 26 January, the same day that McNab was dragged out of the water pipe, Chris Ryan and Mal split up when the latter decided to approach a shepherd’s cottage and find some transport. A man in the cottage alerted the police. Mal was surrounded and captured. Now alone, Ryan struck out for the border, with only two packets of biscuits for food. Five days later, desperately short of water, he filled his bottles from a stream. Hiding away in a culvert, he sat down to slake his thirst:
I was desperate for a drink, and looking forward to one with incredible anticipation. But when I went to compress the plastic clip that held the buckle on my webbing pouch, I found that my fingers were so sore and clumsy that I could scarcely manage the simple task. Gasping with pain, I used all my strength to force the clips together. Then came a horrendous disappointment. Bringing out one bottle at last, I opened it and raised it to my lips – but the first mouthful made me gasp and choke. Poison! The water tasted vicious and metallic, as if it was full of acid. I spat it straight out, but the inside of my mouth had gone dry, and I was left with a burning sensation all over my tongue and gums. I whipped out my compass-mirror, pointed the torchbeam into my mouth and looked round it. Everything seemed all right, so I took another sip, but it was just the same. I remembered that when Stan had collapsed during the first night on the run I’d put rehydrate into my bottles, to bring him round, and I wondered if the remains of it had somehow gone off. Then I tried the second bottle, and found it exactly the same. I couldn’t make out what the hell had gone wrong. Whatever the problem, the water was undrinkable, and I emptied the bottles out.
‘Now I am fucked,’ I thought. I was in a really bad state. It was eight days since I’d had a hot meal, two days and a night since I’d had a drink. My tongue was completely dry; it felt like a piece of old leather stuck in the back of my throat. My teeth had all come loose; if I closed my mouth and sucked hard, I could taste blood coming from my shrunken gums. I knew my feet were in bits, but I didn’t dare take my boots off, because I feared I’d never get them on again. As for my hands – I could see and smell them all too well. The thin leather of my gloves had cracked and split, from being repeatedly soaked and dried out again, so that my fingers hadn’t had much protection. I’d lost most of the feeling in the tips, and I seemed to have got dirt pushed deep under my nails, so that infection had set in. Whenever I squeezed a nail, pus came out, and this stench was repulsive.
With my extremities suppurating like that, I wondered what internal damage I might be suffering, and could only hope that no permanent harm would be done. With the complete lack of food, I’d had no bowel movement since going on the run, and I couldn’t remember when I’d last wanted to pee. I yearned for food, of course, but more for drink – and when I did think about food, it was sweet, slushy things that I craved. If ever I found myself back among rations packs, I would rip into the pears in syrup, ice-cream and chocolate sauce.
I felt very frightened. First and most obvious was the danger of being captured – the fear of torture, and of giving away secrets that might betray other guys from the Regiment. Almost worse, though, was the fact that I could see and feel my body going down so fast. If I didn’t reach the border soon, I would be too weak to carry on.
Setting off again, he stumbled towards the border, which he reached on the night of 30 January. Only he wasn’t sure he was at the border:
I reached a refuse heap, where loads of burnt-out old cans had been dumped in the desert, and sat down among them to do yet another map-study. I couldn’t work things out. Where was the town, and where was the communications tower which the map marked? Where, above all, was the bloody border?
I started walking again, on the bearing, and as I came over a rise I saw three small buildings to my front. With the naked eye I could just make them out: three square bulks, blacked out. But when I looked through the kite-sight, I saw chinks of light escaping between the tops of the walls and the roofs. As I sat watching, one person came out, walked round behind, reappeared and went back indoors. I was so desperate for water that I went straight towards the houses. Again, I was prepared to take out one of the inhabitants if need be. I was only fifty metres away when I checked through the kite-sight again and realized that the buildings were not houses at all, but sandbagged sangars with wriggly tin roofs. They formed some sort of command post, and were undoubtedly full of squaddies. Pulling slowly back, I went round the side and, sure enough, came on a battery of four anti-aircraft positions.
If I’d walked up and opened one of the doors, I’d almost certainly have been captured. Once more the fright got my adrenalin going and revived me.
On I stumbled for another hour. My dehydration was making me choke and gag. My throat seemed to have gone solid, and when I scraped my tongue, white fur came off it. I felt myself growing weaker by the minute. My 203 might have been made of lead, such a burden had it become, so much of the strength had ebbed from my arms. My legs had lost their spring and grown stiff and clumsy. My ability to think clearly had dwindled away.
At last I came to a point from which I could see the lights of a town, far out on the horizon. Something seemed to be wrong. Surely that couldn’t be Krabilah, still such a distance off? My heart sank: surely the border couldn’t still be that far? Or was the glow I could see that of Abu Kamal, the first town inside Syria, some twenty kilometres to the west? If so, where the hell was Krabilah? According to the map, Krabilah had a communications tower, but Abu Kamal didn’t. The far-off town did have a bright red light flashing, as if from a tower – and that made me all the more certain that the place in the distance was Krabilah.
Morale plummeted once more. Like my body, my mind was losing its grip. What I could make out was some kind of straight black line, running all the way across my front. Off to my left I could see a mound with a big command post on it, sprouting masts. Closer to me were a few buildings, blacked out, but not looking like a town.
I sat down some 500 metres short of the black line and studied the set-up through the kite-sight. Things didn’t add up. With Krabilah so far ahead, this could hardly be the border. Yet it looked like one. I wondered whether it was some inner frontier-line which the Iraqis had built because of the war, to keep people back from the border itself. Suddenly I thought of the Int guy back at Al Jouf, unable to tell what the border looked like. ‘What an arsehole!’ I thought. ‘He should have known. That’s his fucking job.’
Whatever this line ahead of me might be, all I wanted to do was get across it. I was gripped by a terrific sense of urgency, but I forced myself to hold back, sit down and observe it. ‘This is where you’re going to stumble if you don’t watch out,’ I told myself. ‘This is where you’ll fall down. Take time over it.’
There I sat, shivering, watching, waiting. A vehicle came out of the command post and drove down along the line – an open-backed land-cruiser. Directly opposite my vantage-point two men emerged from an observation post, walked up to the car, spoke to the driver, jumped in, and drove off to the right. It looked as if the Iraqis were putting out roving observers to keep an eye on the border. I couldn’t tell whether this was routine, or whether they suspected that enemy soldiers were in the area; but after a few minutes I decided that the coast was clear, and I had to move.
At long last I came down to the black line. Creeping cautiously towards it, I found it was a barrier of barbed wire: three coils in the bottom row, two on top of them, and one on top of that. Having no pliers to cut with, I tried to squeeze my way through the coils, but that proved impossible: barbs hooked into my clothes and skin and held me fast. I unhooked myself with difficulty, and decided that the only way to go was over the top. Luckily the builders had made the elementary mistake, every twenty-five metres, of putting in three posts close to each other and linking them together with barbed wire. Obviously the idea was to brace the barrier, but the posts created a kind of bridge across the middle of the coils. I took off my webbing and threw it over, then went up and over myself, sustaining a few lacerations but nothing serious.
Still I could not believe I was clear of Iraq. The barrier seemed so insignificant that I thought it must only be marking some false or inner border, and that I would come to the true frontier some distance further on. The real thing, I thought, would be a big anti-tank berm, constructed so that vehicles could not drive across. Maybe this was why I had no feeling of elation; for days I had been thinking that, if I did manage to cross the frontier, it would be the climax of my journey, but now I felt nothing except utter exhaustion.
Ryan was in Syria. His marathon walk of 186 miles almost equals that of Jack Sillito in 1942.
While Bravo Two Zero were struggling their way to the frontier, the mobile fighting columns were having their own dramas. Three of the columns, which comprised a half-squadron each, were operating efficiently inside Iraq; however, Alpha One Zero, under an SBS major, seemed lacking in purpose. To the steaming ire of the regiment’s commanding officer, the column couldn’t actually find a way across the berm dividing Iraq from Saudi. At length, Alpha One Zero crossed into Iraq via a dash through a checkpoint. Almost immediately the column had a contact with the enemy. Its vehicles under cam-nets, the patrol had laagered up and Sergeant Cameron ‘Serious’ Spence was among those with drooping eyelids:
I sat there, taking my time over the smoke and the brew, until I felt my eyelids dropping. After three days and nights with scarcely a moment’s shut-eye, I staked out my own patch around the forward wheel that Tom had vacated, ticking off those last few things I needed to know before I could sleep. Jeff was getting some kip at the next wheel. The visibility was good – out to ten kilometres, a mixed blessing. We were just about set for the rest of the day. All Tom had to do was clean his M16 and he was done, too. Buzz had taken the forward sentry position. Everything was as it should be. I adjusted my webbing under my head, got comfortable, and within seconds had lapsed into sleep.
After what passed for five minutes – I later found out it was an hour – I heard Buzz’s voice go off in my head. He could only have whispered the warning, but it sounded like a fucking siren going off in some deep recess of my brain. The words tumbled over and over. There was something faintly hypnotic about them. For a moment, they held me in the grip of a dreamy kind of paralysis. Then, Tom was shaking me.
The words came back to me and I knew it was no dream.
Stand-to, stand-to. Enemy.
Fuck. A pang of fear hit me in the gullet, followed by a weird moment of doubt. Could this be some kind of wind-up? The fear redoubled and hit me again. Nobody, not even Tom or Buzz, would pull a stunt like this on our third day. This was for fucking real. I was up and out of the sleeping bag in a second, fumbling for my Bergen and my M16. For a few seconds more, chaos reigned, then we were taking up position. Suddenly, a vehicle appeared. It slowed, then stopped, sitting there 700 metres out; watching us, watching them. And then, it came towards us, and kept coming, until it drew up right outside our cluster of cam-nets. Two Iraqis got out. They paused to pick up their helmets, then divided. The driver moved for Tony’s vehicle, the commander headed straight for the front of our Land Rover, where Tom and I had taken up station. The officer bent down and picked up the cam-net. That was when he saw me.
The last thing I remember thinking was that it shouldn’t be like the fucking movies, but that’s how it was – the whole thing moved in excruciating slow-time like a Sam Peckinpah Western.
I had a moment to register the look of blank surprise on the Iraqi’s face as he came up under the cam-net and twigged me. He started to raise his weapon, but I fired, quick double-tap – ba-bam – and he went down. As he fell, his body was hit by at least six more rounds – bullets from other weapons that had been trained on him from the moment he’d got out of the vehicle – and he pirouetted in a macabre death-dance before hitting the dirt, face-down.
I heard more firing and saw bullets striking the second man. Several punched into his chest. One all but removed the side of his head. A voice in the back of my head started telling me over and over that I’d killed a man – bam, just like that. But it was a small voice. And it was rapidly drowned by a chorus of other thoughts. What about the GAZ? Who else was in there? Had Jeff made it with the phosphorus grenade?
Training, thank God, takes over. You’re not left long with the moral consequences of your actions.
I was out from under the cam-net before I even knew it. As I moved towards the still-twitching body of the man I’d shot, I could see a flurry out of the corner of my eye as Buzz and Jeff tore into the back of the GAZ. Your training doesn’t allow you to look, even though your instincts want to. I was on the body in a second, pulling it over, one hand tugging at his arms in the search for firearms, grenades, knives; you never know what the fucker might still have up a sleeve, even in his death-throes.
Secure.
I looked up and saw a similar scene being played out around the other body.
No doubt about it, they were both dead.
And then there’s a blood-curdling cry from the GAZ.
I spun around to see Buzz and Jeff dragging something – someone – out of the Iraqi vehicle. Another man had been in the back, but they’d got the drop on him. As far as I could tell, the guy was uninjured, but he was squealing like a stuck pig all the same.
Jostling, blurred action as Buzz and Jeff threw their captive to the ground, both of them yelling at the top of their voices: ‘Shut the fuck up.’
The Iraqi doesn’t get it and starts jabbering and wailing louder than ever. And then he opens his eyes and sees the muzzle of Buzz’s Commando a moment before it grinds into the thin skin between his eyebrows. At the same time, Buzz is shouting again, only now the tone is different. The shrillness that had been there in the initial adrenalin rush is gone. There’s depth and authority in his words. Be quiet, he’s telling him, or he’ll blow his fucking brains to Babylon.
This time the Iraqi makes the connection and zips it.
Silence.
In the stillness that followed, there was a fraction of a moment in which my heightened senses registered the blueness of the sky and the sound of the cam-net flapping in the wind behind me. And then it started all over again. Shouts, movements, oaths, orders, as blokes from the other vehicles pounded over to our two 110s to join the fray.
I left a group of the boys to go through the uniform of the body at my feet as I searched the scene for Alec, Tony and Graham. It was time for a fucking ‘head shed’ meeting, the fastest we’d ever had. Two, maybe three minutes had elapsed since the first shots had been fired. Everybody recognized the situation for what it was. True, we had things under control, but you could hear traces of panic in the shouts and rasped commands around you.
Back in al-Jouf the commanding officer was cock-a-hoop that Alpha One Zero had negotiated its first contact. The commanding officer’s delight died when he realized that the major commanding the column was now heading south, away from its designated area of action. Turning to Regimental Sergeant Major Ratcliffe, the commanding officer informed him that he, Ratcliffe, would be relieving the major of his command. Never in the history of the Regiment has a squadron commander been relieved in the field and replaced by a non-commissioned officer.
The next day Ratcliffe flew into Iraq on the Chinook resupplying Alpha One Zero. He wrote later:
As I walked down the tail ramp I found myself buffeted by a strong wind that had sprung up from the north and which, because of the wind-chill factor, had sent the temperature plummeting well below zero. I could see at once why the men running down the nearby slope towards the Chinook didn’t look much like the crack desert patrol I had last seen in Victor. They were mostly wrapped in their chemical-warfare suits with extra jackets on top, and had shamags, Arab headdress of the kind favoured by Yasser Arafat, wound around their heads and the lower parts of their faces. The noise from the two rotors, which continued to turn and had formed twin dust halos from the sand being sucked up from the desert floor, was almost deafening. RAF aircrew never switch off their engines during a supply run or insertion into hostile territory, in case they come under attack and have to make a quick getaway.
I grabbed one of the men as he trotted past, put my mouth close to where I thought his ear should be beneath the shamag, and yelled, ‘Where’s the OC?’ He pointed up the slight incline down which they had come and shouted something I couldn’t make out. I set off in the direction he had indicated, and on the way passed a strange-looking vehicle that had been parked with a couple of its wheels in a kind of natural ditch. It was giving off an awful stench which I vaguely recognized, but which I didn’t have the time to investigate right then.
At the crest of the slope I came across another small gang of troopers gathered around two Land Rovers. They looked amazed suddenly to see the RSM, but I didn’t give them time to ask me what I was doing there. Without preamble, I said, ‘One of you go and find the OC and bring him here to me.’
A few minutes later the commander appeared. He looked at me quizzically, but before he could say anything I said, ‘I’m sorry,’ and handed him the CO’s letter. There was enough moonlight for him to read it without a torch. When he’d finished he looked up, his face working with some powerful emotion which he somehow managed to keep bottled up. Then he walked away. I set off back for the chopper, wondering what he would do.
I needn’t have worried. He fetched his Bergen and rifle and joined me at the tail ramp of the helicopter. The unloading had been completed. The Iraqi officer the patrol had captured the previous day was brought down and I went across and walked with him over to the helicopter. I could guess what he must be feeling, especially after seeing three of his fellow officers killed, and even felt a pang of sympathy for him.
While this was happening the outgoing OC had located his number two, Pat, and was explaining to him that he had been relieved of his command. Then the two men hugged each other as though they were brothers.
The worst part of my job was over. The pilots needed to get on their way as soon as possible, and I wanted to get started. Recognizing that there was no point in wasting more time, I hustled the patrol’s former OC aboard the helicopter and gave Jim the thumbs-up signal. Now the handover was complete I couldn’t help feeling sorry for the departing major. He had accepted the order without argument, and his behaviour had been impeccable.
Moments later the tail ramp winched shut, and with enough racket to wake every Arab – not to mention his goats, dogs and camels – within three miles, the engines wound up to full power and the Chinook was away into the star-studded sky.
After arranging the burning of the GAZ and the Iraqi bodies, Ratcliffe ordered the patrol fifty kilometres back towards the action. At the lying-up position, Ratcliffe told the half-squadron they were ‘about to find out what it’s really like to be involved in a war’.
Regimental Sergeant Major Peter Ratcliffe did not disappoint. On 8 February Alpha One Zero carried out a raid on a microwave Scud-control station, codenamed Victor Two, alongside the Baghdad-Amman highway.
I led my demolition team and six other men off to the left, to make use of whatever shadow cover was available close to the berm, and then headed north towards the road junction and the final jumping-off point for the target.
Pat and his three Land Rovers drove along the same route after us. The crew of the wagon carrying the Milan, which only had thirty metres to travel, had been told to move into position ten minutes after the rest of us had left.
The demolitionists were Mugger and Ken and a quiet Yorkshire corporal named Tom. A tall guy, very fit and strong, it was he who had driven the GAZ containing the bodies of the three dead Iraqis back to where I was flown in, apparently prepared to put up with the corpses in exchange for having a closed vehicle with a heater. As backup there was myself, Des and Captain Timothy, the young officer who had joined us from the infantry. Each of us carried one of the explosive charges that had been made up back in the LUR. I had the shaped charge for the fence and Des the charge for the wall, while Timothy had the charges we would use to blow the doors in the bunker. In addition, each of us was carrying a powerful high-explosive charge with which we would take out the switching gear.
When we reached our jumping-off point we were just 200 metres from the relay station. From there all we could see of the building was the wall around it and, behind it, the steel antenna soaring into the night sky. The wall seemed to be of concrete, grey in color apart from one section, a few metres wide, which appeared to be a different shade. From that distance, however, even with the moonlight, we couldn’t make it out properly.
The six men who had moved forward with us – one of them with a LAW 80 – had already broken away and crossed the road to come up on the two trucks. To the right and less than fifty metres beyond them was the large bunker, where I could easily make out the enemy coming and going. Even though it was late there seemed to be quite a lot of activity. About 150 metres to our left the other bunker was now clearly visible. It too was brightly lit inside and had enemy personnel moving about. There were other, smaller buildings behind the left-hand bunker, and about 100 metres beyond the target was the large military encampment that we had spotted during the recce.
‘A few more than the thirty guys we expected,’ breathed Des.
‘Yeah, but by the time they realize what’s going on we’ll be back at our LUP,’ I answered softly. ‘So let’s just brass it out and get it over with.’ I looked at the other five, then nodded. Time to go.
As we stepped out in single file, slightly crouched but moving fairly quickly, I could see to our left, where the low growl of the Land Rovers had died away, that Pat had the wagons parked a few metres apart and facing the different directions from where trouble might be expected to come. We pressed on, slinking over the MSR and past the right-hand bunker.
Whether the Iraqis in the right-hand bunker actually saw us or not I don’t know. But no one shouted or challenged us and in less than a minute we had reached the wall. Ken, whose job it was to blow this first obstacle, led the way, followed by Des, who was carrying the charges. Mugger, who would bring down the fence, was next, and then me with his charges. Behind me was Tom, who would blow the bunker’s main door, and Captain Timothy carrying his charges.
Close to, we could see straight away what made one section a different shade from the rest of the wall. It was plastic sheeting. An already dodgy mission was growing stranger by the minute.
‘Pull the stuff back and let’s see what’s behind it,’ I hissed. At once Ken and Des peeled back one edge, then Des turned and said, ‘The wall’s already been blown. There’s a bloody great hole here.’
‘Well, let’s get through it,’ I said. We were crouched down by the wall, but with the moonlight we would be immediately visible to anyone who looked hard enough from the trucks, the bunkers, or even the smaller buildings to our left. It felt as though we were standing in the spotlights on stage in a packed theatre.
Within thirty seconds all six of us were through the gap and had pushed the plastic sheeting back in place. Inside, there was total chaos. The place had obviously suffered a direct hit from an Allied bomb or missile. In places the fence was twisted and flattened, and in others completely torn from its cement base. Of the main bunker there was almost nothing left. There were buckled steel girders and shattered concrete everywhere. Some of the wreckage was so precariously balanced that it looked likely to crash down at any moment.
I took a look around for an entrance to the three underground rooms, but the stairway and the rooms had been completely buried beneath the rubble. The whole site was extremely hazardous, and I realized that one or more of us could get badly injured simply walking in the ruins, especially since the moonlight on the wreckage left large areas in deep shadow. It was perfectly certain, too, that there wasn’t any switching gear left for us to destroy. Curiously, I felt a sense of anti-climax. Still, there was one thing we could do.
‘Des, you and Timothy dump all your explosives here and get back to the gap in the wall and wait for us there. Now we’re here we’d better bring down the mast, if nothing else.’ Since the mast was still up, it could still receive and transmit signals via the antennae and dishes on it – which meant the site could still get Scuds off towards Israel. Thinking quickly, I offloaded my own explosives and told Mugger, ‘Let’s blow the mast and get out of here.’
‘These charges are not really suitable,’ he replied mournfully. ‘They’re no good for cutting steel.’
This was too much. First we had intelligence that told us the place was defended, if at all, by about thirty Iraqis. Then Intel had failed to tell us that there were a military camp and fortified defensive positions around the relay station. Meanwhile, somebody had neglected to tell us, or RHQ, that the site had already received an extremely accurate air or missile raid. Finally, having successfully reached our target unseen with more than 100 pounds of explosive charges, we found that those charges probably would not do the one job that still needed doing. Well, we were bloody well going to do something, I thought.
‘Surely you can do something?’ I asked Mugger. He considered for a while, and finally nodded. ‘If we pack a charge and a third of the other explosives around each of three of the mast’s four legs, then it will give us about thirty-five pounds per leg. With luck that will do the job.’
‘Okay. Let’s do it,’ I said. ‘It sounds much too damned quiet out there for it to last.’ By now we had been almost in the centre of an enemy installation for ten or fifteen minutes. It seemed incredible that nobody had noticed us, but how much longer could we trust our luck to last? I had a strong suspicion that the answer was ‘not much’, but the demolitionists were already on the case. Mugger, Ken and Tom quickly divided the explosives into three piles, then each of them grabbed one pile and headed in a crouch for one of the steel legs of the mast.
I waited between two of the legs, aware that these three guys were playing with high explosives that could blow us all to atoms in a millisecond if anything went wrong. So while I hoped that they wouldn’t take too long, I also didn’t want them to be foolishly hasty.
Ken was the first to finish, then, thirty seconds later, Tom came over to join us.
‘What’s keeping Mugger?’ I asked.
‘He’s going to pull the three switches,’ Ken answered. By now we were scarcely bothering to lower our voices.
‘Right,’ I told them. ‘You two go and join Des and Timothy and all of you get through the wall and wait there. We’ll be right with you.’
A minute later Mugger appeared out of the darkness and gave me a big grin. ‘Okay, Billy,’ he said. ‘They’re each on a two-minute delay, so let’s head for the great outdoors.’ He was, as usual, as cool as a cucumber and, like any artist, supremely happy in his work. I didn’t need any extra prompting, and we lit out for the wall like greyhounds.
At which point our good fortune took a nosedive. We were through the tangled fence and close to the gap in the wall when all hell broke loose. There were several single shots followed by a burst of automatic fire, then the enormous whoosh of a Milan going in and, seconds later, a huge explosion as the missile struck home. Then everyone seemed to let rip together. Rounds were zipping overhead and we could hear them smacking into the other side of the wall.
There were bullets flying everywhere, riddling the sheeting covering the gap while, above, tracers created amazing patterned arches. We were safe enough on our side of the wall, but not for long. Behind us, no more than ten metres away, was over 100 pounds of high-explosive getting ready to blow in less than ninety seconds.
‘What do you reckon, Mugger?’ I asked.
‘We haven’t got much fucking choice, have we?’ he replied.
I grinned at him. ‘No. I suppose not. So let’s go.’ And with that I ducked round the plastic sheet and into the other area on the other side. The other four were all lying by the wall outside.
‘Line abreast and back to the jumping-off point,’ I yelled. ‘And let’s move it. It’s all going to blow in a few seconds.’
Surging forward, we spread out like the three-quarter line in a rugby game and belted towards the dark, looming mass of the north end of the berm. Though I swear that not even the finest line-up ever made it from one end of a rugby pitch to the other at the speed we travelled that night. Of course, we were all as fit as professional athletes, and given the amount of adrenalin fizzing around in our muscles we’d have been good for a few world records – if anyone could have spared the time to clock us.
As Ratcliffe and his team reached the Land Rovers, Iraqis on top of a nearby berm started popping them. The drivers started up, the gunners on the back loosing off Gimpies, Brownings and Mk19 grenade-launchers. A swerving Land Rover knocked Ratcliffe down, his rifle went flying into the dark. He was about to search for it – and the twenty gold ‘escape’ sovereigns hidden in the butt – when a voice yelled ‘Jump on or we’re fucking going without you.’ He jumped on. Bullets snipped the bodywork as they roared away.
A motorcycle recce next day confirmed that the tower had fallen. Every SAS man had got out alive.
Regimental Sergeant Major Ratcliffe was later awarded the DCM for his bravery and leadership at Victor Two.
With the columns running short of supplies, the commanding officer of the Regiment organized a convoy of three-tonners to take in the goods. Escorted by spare B Squadron troopers in Pink Panthers, the resupply convoy arrived at the Wadi Tubal deep in Iraq. Assembled in the wadi were three full SAS sabre-squadrons, together with R Squadron reserves and headquarters’ personnel. With the biggest gathering of the SAS in the field since 1942 around him, Peter Ratcliffe decided to mark the occasion by holding a meeting. Cameron Spence recalled:
Soon after I got back to our vehicle, word came down that Roger (Peter ‘Billy’ Ratcliffe) wanted all senior ranks to gather for a talk later in the afternoon in an area away from the resupply wagons.
‘It can’t be haircuts,’ Nick said, preening himself in the reflection of his goggles.
‘Or our beards,’ Tom added, scratching the growth on his chin. ‘We’re at fucking war.’
‘Maybe you’re not allowed into theme parks with stubble,’ Nick said. ‘They think you’re a bender or something.’
‘Who knows?’ I chipped in. A talk with the RSM was serious. Something was in the wind.
‘Do you think this could be it?’ Tom said, later. ‘The big one.’
‘Maybe,’ I nodded. ‘Let’s just hope it’s a worthwhile target.’
Later that afternoon, I grouped with the senior NCOs from A and D Squadron. While we waited for Roger to open the meeting, you could taste the excitement in the narrow gully where we’d all gathered. No question about it, this had to be the regimental work-out half of us had anticipated.
It was then that I glanced over my shoulder and saw Phil. I was still trying to work out why the Regimental Quarter Master Sergeant – our food-king – was at a planning conference that had all the makings of a war-party pow-wow when Roger stood on a boulder and the meeting kicked off.
It took a few minutes before we got the gist of what was happening here. It was a case of our ears working fine, but our sodding brains not believing the inbound message.
‘Fuck,’ I heard Tony say behind me. ‘It can’t be.’
I turned around. ‘It is.’
One hundred kilometres inside Iraq, Britain’s biggest war since Korea going on around us, and the warrant officers and sergeants of the Special Air Service had been called to a mess meeting.
It was serious business. Definitely no laughing matter. Top of the agenda was the forthcoming summer ball, followed by an outstanding mess account and the weighty matter of whether or not the sergeant’s mess could afford a new suite and some nice blue curtains.
The motions were discussed, passed and the minutes recorded in a notebook so they could be transferred back to Hereford.
On my return to the vehicle, I stopped cursing and burst out laughing.
I tried to get the words out, but the tears kept rolling down my face.
Nick, Tom and Jeff stared at me like I’d flipped. They must have been thinking: poor old sod. A month behind the lines and he’s gone, a headcase.
Eventually, I managed to tell them about the meeting in the gully.
Their reaction was pretty much the same as mine. Disbelief. Anger. Laughter. Hysteria. It took us most of the rest of the afternoon to stop crapping ourselves.
Later, I managed to see this side-show in its true light. Who cared if it was British bureaucracy at its worst? It showed that even in the enemy’s backyard, we were in control. Totally relaxed. Life went on and nothing was going to interfere with it.
The SAS had some new curtains to choose. Saddam could go swivel.
On 23 February the SAS columns were ordered to return to Saudi Arabia. The Coalition’s ground offensive had started, and there was no longer a role for the SAS behind the lines. Crossing the border back into Saudi Arabia, some of the drivers looked at their mileage clocks; the pinkies, Unimogs and motorcycles had done more than 1,500 miles. Some of the men had been behind Iraqi lines for forty-two days. Even the cynical General Schwarzkopf was impressed by the achievements of 22 SAS, to the extent of writing them a personal letter of commendation (see Appendix III). Alpha One Zero’s destruction of the mast at Victor Two was only one hit in a list that included the same unit’s wrecking of a military fibre-optics network, Delta Two Zero’s laser-painting of two Scuds for an F-15 airstrike, Delta Two Zero’s demolition of a Scud-control tower, a D Squadron patrol’s ‘painting’ of a Scud convoy for another US airstrike, plus its own Milan guided-missile attack on the convoy. (Troopers from the same half-squadron also made a bug-out to rival Bravo Two Zero’s, going five days across the desert, despite Lance Corporal Taff Powell having a bullet in the guts.) After the SAS entered the Iraqi desert, Scud launches fell by 50 per cent.
David Stirling died on 5 November 1990. That evening his body was laid to rest in a London chapel, with his SAS beret and DSO on top of the coffin, next to his Knight Bachelor. The founder of the SAS missed by only weeks the regiment’s deployment as behind-the-lines desert raiders in Iraq, in what turned out to be a glorious reprise of L Detachment’s raiding half a century before. Even the ‘pinkie’ Land Rovers of 22 SAS, festooned with kit and guns and attended by soldiers in shamags, were strangely reminiscent of L Detachment’s jeeps and men.
An historic circle had been turned. The SAS had returned to the desert, the place of its birth. But the wheel kept on turning. After a decade of ‘Green Ops’, from the Falklands to the Gulf, the SAS returned to the shadow war of ‘Black Ops’, courtesy of the conflagrations in the Balkans and, especially, the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. During a six-year campaign in Iraq as part of ‘Task Force Black’, the SAS was credited with capturing 3,000 insurgents, and killing 350 to 400. Snatching Al-Qaeda operatives from the backstreets of Baghdad might seem a world away from L Detachment’s blowing-up of Luftwaffe planes in the Western Desert, but David Stirling would have appreciated the similarity: both campaigns were for strategic ends and both had decisive impacts. L Detachment severely hampered the operational efficiency of the Afrika Korps, 22 SAS degraded the capability of Al-Qaeda in Iraq. More than that, the make-up of the SAS soldier then and now is near identical, what Stirling (see Appendix II) characterized as the ‘unrelenting pursuit of excellence’, the maintaining of ‘the highest standards of discipline’, the brooking of ‘no sense of class’, and the holding of a sense of ‘humility and humour’.
These virtues have a price, which is sometimes paid in blood. At least nine SAS soldiers died in Iraq, their names joining those on the roll of honour inscribed on the regimental clock at Stirling Lines. The clock has a verse from The Golden Road to Samarkand by James Elroy Flecker inscribed on its base:
We are the Pilgrims, master; we shall go
Always a little further: it may be
Beyond that last blue mountain barred with snow
Across that angry or that glimmering sea …
Individual pilgrims may have failed to ‘beat the clock’, but the SAS – the world’s most famous and most imitated special forces unit – most surely has. The SAS worked in 1941 and it works today. It will work tomorrow.