by Jon E. Lewis
The SCUD-Hunters
In 1990 the ministry of Defence once again called on the 22nd Special Air Service Regiment’s special service and sent it to fight Saddam Hussein in the Gulf War. It was almost a homecoming for the Regiment, for it had been raised in the desert fifty years before. And as the story of the 22 SAS patrol codenamed “Bravo Two Zero” shows, the intervening years had done nothing to diminish the professionalism and physical capability of the SAS trooper. John Amos tells of the hunters of Saddam Hussein’s Scud Missiles.
The 22nd SAS Regiment was alerted for action within hours of Saddam Hussein sending his armour rolling into oil-rich Kuwait at 02.00 (local time) on 2 August 1990. At Stirling Lines, the SAS camp situated behind a nondescript 1950s redbrick housing estate on the edge of Hereford, a small batch of troopers was issued desert kit and briefed. They were flown out to Saudi Arabia later that month, carrying hand-held designators (which “paint” targets for the laser-guided bombs of Allied aircraft), as part of the United Nations’ Operation “Desert Shield”, the securing of the Saudi border from further Iraqi encroachment.
More teams of SAS followed. Initially, it seemed that the SAS would be employed in their role as hostage rescuers. The commander of the 40,000 strong force which made up the British contribution to the anti-Saddam Coalition, Lt-General Sir Peter de la Billiere (“DLB”), had previously fought with 22 SAS in Oman and Malaya, and commanded the Regiment during the Falklands conflict. He had also planned the 1980 seizure of the Iranian Embassy at Prince’s Gate. Now, in the Gulf, he was faced with another hostage situation, Saddam’s use of “guests” as human shields at important military installations. Eventually however, de la Billiere ruled out an SAS mass rescue mission. The hostages were constantly moved and the intelligence inside Iraq was not good.
Meanwhile the number of 22 SAS at the regimental holding area in Saudi Arabia grew steadily. By early January 1991 the force assembled totalled 300 badged SAS soldiers, plus 15 volunteers from the elite reserve team of the part-time Territorial Regiments, 21 and 23 SAS. It was the biggest gathering of the unit since the heady days of World War II.
For an agonizing period, however, it looked as though the unit would be given no role in Operation “Desert Storm”, the Allied offensive to remove the Iraqis from Kuwait. The SAS were gathered like so many racehorses before a race, but not sure if they would be allowed to run. The Commander-in-Chief of the Allied forces, US General H Norman “Stormin’ Norman” Schwarzkopf, intended to degrade Saddam’s military capability by a huge air campaign, while finishing him off with a completely conventional – if tactically brilliant – infantry and armoured envelopment. Also, like many senior military figures, the irascible Schwarzkopf was no admirer of Special Forces. Reputedly, he had met a contingent of US Special Forces in the Gulf with the greeting: “I remember you guys from Vietnam . . . you couldn’t do your jobs there, and you didn’t do your job in Panama. What makes you think you can do your job here?” However, de la Billiere, the only non-American on Schwarzkopf’s planning staff, CENTCOM, was determined to find a job for his old Regiment. In the second week of January, de la Billiere identified a task for 22 SAS, to cut roads and cause diversions in the enemy rear, thus pulling troops away from the front. After a presentation by the SAS themselves, Schwarzkopf gave 22 SAS the go-ahead. They would cross the Iraqi border right at the beginning of the air campaign. This was scheduled to begin on 29 January. The SAS was in the war.
As the Regiment made itself ready at its holding area, the world was hypnotized by the deadline by which President Bush insisted Iraq implement United Nations Resolution 660 (Iraqi withdrawal from Kuwait), midnight on 16 January. Saddam refused to blink or budge.
The Regiment was as surprised as most other people when hundreds of Allied aircraft and Tomahawk Cruise missiles began bombarding targets in Iraq just before dawn on 17 January. Within twenty four hours the Iraqi airforce was all but wiped out and Saddam’s command and communications system heavily mauled. Allied commanders retired to bed at the end of D-Day most satisfied.
The only nagging area of Allied doubt was Iraq’s Scud surface-to-surface (SSM) missile capability. Though an outdated technology, a Soviet version of Hitler’s V2, the Scud was capable of carrying nuclear and bio-chemical warheads. It could be fired from a fixed site or from a mobile launcher. Could Saddam still fire his Scuds? Would he? On the second night of the air campaign, Saddam answered all speculations by launching Scuds (all with conventional warheads) at Saudi Arabia and Israel. The six which landed in Israel injured no one, but they were political dynamite. If Israel responded militarily the fragile coalition, which included several Arab members, would be blown apart. Israel declared itself to be in a state of war, but frantic diplomacy by the Allies managed to dissuade Israel from taking immediate punitive action. Batteries of Patriot ground-to-air missiles were dispatched to Tel Aviv, Jerusalem and Haifa. The Allies diverted 30% of their air effort to Scud hunting. But in the expanses of vast Iraqi desert all too often the air strike arrived to find the Scud fired and the mobile launcher elusively camouflaged. Previously, the US military had believed that its hi-tech satellite observation system could detect Scuds before launch. Now it was finding that the Scuds could be many minutes into flight before being betrayed by the flare from their motors. Asked by the media on 19 January about the Scud menace, the normally upbeat Schwarzkopf was obliged to say that “the picture is unclear”, and to grumble that looking for Scuds was like looking for the proverbial needle in the haystack.
If the C-in-C was unclear about what to do, the Scud factor gave 22 SAS an absolutely clear-cut mission. De la Billiere signalled 22 SAS that “all SAS effort should be directed against Scuds”. That very same day, 19 January, the SAS was rushed 1500 km from its holding area to an FOB just inside the Saudi border with Western Iraq. The move was made in a non-stop 24 hour airlift by the RAF Special Forces flight.
The Regiment decided on two principal means of dealing with the Scud menace. It would insert into Iraq covert 8-man static patrols to watch Main Supply Routes (MSRs) and report on the movement of Scud traffic. There would be three such patrols, South, Central and North. When Scud sites and launchers were identified, US F15 and A10 airstrikes would be called down to destroy them, directed to the target by the SAS patrol using a tactical airlink. (Though the SAS patrols carried laser-designators to “paint” targets for Allied aircraft they only used them infrequently.)
Alongside the road watch patrols, there were four columns of heavily armed vehicles, “Pink Panther” Land Rovers and Unimogs, which would penetrate the “Scud Box”, an area of western desert near the border with Jordan which was thought to contain around 14 mobile launchers.
As is traditional in the SAS, the decision how to deploy was left to the patrol commanders and reached after democratic discussion.
The South and Central road watch teams were inserted on 21 January, and both found that the eerily flat, featureless desert offered no possibility of concealment. The South road watch patrol aborted their mission and flew back on their insertion helicopter. The Central team also decided that the terrain was lethal, but before “bugging out” in the Land Rovers and stripped down motorcycles called down an air strike on two Iraqi radars. After a four-night drive through 140 miles of bitingly cold desert the patrol reached Saudi Arabia. Four men needed treatment for frostbite.
Road Watch North, codenamed “Bravo Two Zero” had the most isolated insertion, landed by RAF Chinook 100 miles north-west of Baghdad. The weather was appalling, driving wind and sleet, the worst winter in this part of the Iraqi desert for thirty years. Led by Sgt Andy McNab (a pseudonym), the patrol took food and water for 14 days, explosives and ammunition for their 203s (American Ml6 rifles with 40 mm grenade-launchers attached), Minimi machine guns, grenades, extra clothes, maps, compasses and survival equipment. Each man was carrying 209 lbs of kit. Watching a main supply route, the patrol saw a Scud launch and prepared to send their first situation report (“Sit Rep”
) to base. In the first of several fruitless efforts, Bravo Two Zero’s signaller, Trooper Steven (“Legs”) Lane prepared the radio antenna, encoded Sgt McNab’s message and typed it ready for transmission. There was no answer and no amount of adjusting the set got a response.
On the second day an Iraqi military convoy rumbled across the desert towards the team and sited a battery of low-level antiaircraft guns only yards from where they were hunkered down. The team was now in grave danger of compromise. In mid afternoon the compromise came. A young Iraqi goatherd looked down into the patrol’s lying-up place (LUP), a shallow wadi, saw the troopers and ran off towards the Iraqi soldiers. Bravo Two Zero rapidly prepared to move, checking equipment and gulping down as much water as possible. They had a “fearsome tab” (march) in front of them.
There were further frantic efforts to radio base that they were now compromised and requested “exfil asap”. There was again no response. The F radio was being rendered near useless by ionospheric distortion. The men loaded their bergens and moved quickly westwards. As they cleared the bottom of the wadi they heard tracked vehicles approaching from the rear. They dropped into a depression and turned to face the enemy. An Iraqi Armoured Personnel Carrier (APC) opened fire with a 7.62 machine gun. With a scream of “Fucking let’s do it!”, the SAS patrol fired off a fusillade of 66 anti-armour rockets, rifle grenades and Minimis. They held off the Iraqis twice, destroying armoured personnel carriers and infantry trucks and cut down scores of troops.
It started to get dark and the patrol decided to get out of the contact area, moving as fast as they physically could manage with their heavy bergens. As they cleared a slope the Iraqi Triple-A battery sighted them and opened fire. A 57 mm ack-ack round hit one trooper in the back, ripping open his bergen. When extracted from it he was found to be uninjured. The rest of the patrol voted to “bin” their bergens for more speed, and eventually lost their enemy in the gloom. At a rallying point, Sgt McNab decided to use their four personal short-range TACBE (personal rescue beacons) to get in touch with an orbiting AWACS plane to bring strike aircraft down on the Iraqis. Again there was no reply. McNab did a quick appreciation of their situation. The Iraqis would expect them to make south for Saudi Arabia. Jordan was due west but was a non-combatant ally of Saddam Hussein. A hundred and twenty kilometres to the north west was Syria, a member of the anti-Saddam coalition. McNab decided to go for Syria.
Moving fast towards the Syrian border, Bravo Two Zero walked 50 miles that night through driving sleet, pausing to rest only four times. Two troopers were in a parlous state, however. Sgt Vince Phillips had fractured a leg in the contact with the Iraqis and was finding it difficult to move. Trooper “Stan” was becoming dangerously dehydrated.
The sound of aircraft high overhead prompted another call on the TACBE. Finally, they got a response. An American pilot on a bombing mission acknowledged their call. The message was relayed to the British Special Ops HQ in Saudi Arabia. British and American helicopters went into Iraq to search for the patrol, but a specific run to a pre-arranged rendezvous was ruled out as too dangerous.
The stop to use the TACBE proved unlucky. In the swirling, raining darkness, Sgt Phillips, Cpl “Chris” and Trooper Stan carried on walking and became separated from the rest of the patrol.
Sgt McNab and his four companions had no option but to continue on without them, hoping they would meet up later. The rain turned to snow. During rests they huddled together for warmth. In their soaked clothes the wind-chill was starting to kill them. Throughout the night they slowly made their way to the Syrian border. Resting during the next day they decided that, if they were going to make it, they would need to hijack a vehicle, preferably something inconspicuous. Watching by a main road they ignored military trucks. In the gathering darkness of evening they spotted the lights of a single vehicle and flagged it down. The incident has already entered Regiment folklore. Instead of the hoped for 4WD, they found before them a bright yellow New York taxi proudly sporting chrome bumpers and whitewall tyres. The five SAS men pulled out its amazed occupants and hopped in, putting the heater on high. They made good progress towards the border, their shamags pulled up around their faces to conceal their Caucasian identity until they became confused in the lacework of roads near the border. Along with other traffic they were stopped by Iraqi soldiers at a vehicle checkpoint. An Iraqi “jundie” (squaddie) knocked on the driver’s window to ask for their papers. Trooper Legs Lane shot the Iraqi in the head with his 203. The SAS men leaped out, shot two more soldiers and ran off into the desert.
By now the lights of a town across the border were clearly visible. As they neared the border they again ran into an antiaircraft battery. Shells and small arms fire landed all around. There were now over 1,500 Iraqi troops looking for them. The SAS men had barely six miles to go, but the moon was bright. An Iraqi patrol found them hiding in a ditch. A running firefight broke out in which the SAS soldiers killed scores of Iraqis, but became separated from each other in the process. Trooper “Mark” was wounded in the elbow and ankle and captured. Another Trooper, Robert Consiglio, a Swiss-born former Royal Marine was hit in the head as he covered the withdrawal of Trooper “Dinger” and Lance-Corporal Lane. Consiglio was the first SAS soldier of the campaign to die from enemy fire. He received a posthumous Military Medal. Lane urged “Dinger” to join him and swim the Euphrates, then in full icy flood. Lane emerged on the far bank in a state of collapse. His companion stayed with him and hid him in a nearby hut. When it became clear that Lane was going to die from hypothermia “Dinger” attracted the attention of a civilian working nearby. By the time the Iraqi retrieval team got to Lane he was dead. He, too was awarded a posthumous MM. “Dinger” tried to escape but was captured.
Sergeant McNab was discovered the next morning in a drainage culvert. Along with the other SAS men captured alive he suffered a month of imprisonment and torture. The latter was brutal physical and, ultimately, counterproductive. It only made the SAS men more determined not to talk. Though the Iraqi military imprisoned the men together they failed to even covertly monitor their conversations.
As for the trio missing in the desert, Sergeant Phillips was lost in driving snow on the night of 26 January. His companions, “Stan” and “Chris” turned back for him but could not find him. His body was eventually found by Iraqi soldiers and handed to the British authorities at the war’s end. Later the next day, Stan went to see if he could hijack some transport. As he approached a parked lorry an Iraqi soldier came out of the house. The Iraqi tried to pull a weapon out. Stan shot him with his 203. Six or seven other Iraqi soldiers came running out. Stan shot three of them but then his gun jammed. The Iraqis did not kill him, only beat him unconscious with their rifle butts. When Stan failed to return to the LUP, Chris decided to set out on his own. He would be the only man from Bravo Two Zero to escape to safety.
Massively dehydrated, his feet and hands turning septic from cuts and, at one point falling unconscious and breaking his nose, Chris managed to cross the Syrian border on 30 January. He had covered 117 miles, evading hundreds of Iraqi searchers, with only two packets of biscuits for nourishment.
During the final two days he was without any water. He had filled his bottles from a small stream. When he came to drink the water his lips and mouth burned instantly. The stream was polluted from a nearby uranium processing plant.
Inside Syria, Chris was initially treated with hostility. As he neared the capital Damascus, however, his treatment became more cordial. A civilian pin-stripe suit was run up for him as he bathed in the HQ of the Syrian secret police. That same night he was handed over to the British Embassy. It was the first anyone at SAS HQ in Saudi Arabia had heard of Bravo Two Zero since infiltration. The seven day walk of Trooper Chris across the desert is considered by the Regiment to be at least equal to that of Jack Sillitoe, an SAS “Original”, who crossed the North African desert in 1942 drinking his own urine to survive. In a Regiment where the remarkable is standard, Chris’s epic tre
k is still considered one of the most amazing escapades ever recorded.
The eight members of Road Watch North, Bravo Two Zero, killed nearly 250 Iraqis in their fight and flight across northern Iraq.
After the attempt to insert the static patrols, 22 SAS effort shifted to the four mobile fighting columns. Drawn from Squadrons A and D, the columns – which contained about a dozen Land Rovers or Unimogs together with motorcycle outriders – were the biggest overland fighting force put into the field by the SAS since 1945. The columns had their own Stringer anti-aircraft and Milan anti-tank missiles, plus .5 Browning machine guns, 7.63mm general purpose machine guns and 40 mm grenade launchers. One team found a sledge hammer most useful. The freebooting columns, soon operating in broad daylight, scored spectacular successes as they sped into the Iraqi desert flying enormous Union flags to identify them to friendly aircraft.
An Iraqi deputy commander of a gun battery taken POW proved to have on his person a map giving positions of Iraqi front line units. On 29 January SAS columns called down F15E airstrikes on two mobile Scud launchers, plus one fixed site. On 3 February in the Wadi Amij (“Scud Alley”) locality, a patrol from D Squadron called down an air strike on a Scud convoy. Only one airstrike hit the target, so the SAS patrol hit the convoy with wire-guided missiles, an inspired last minute addition to the SAS armoury.
These SAS attacks were the first military actions on the ground in the war except for the minor Iraqi cross-border attack on Khafji, Saudi Arabia on 29 January. Group 2 from D squadron called an air strike on a Scud convoy on 5 February and on the same day fought two firefights with Iraqi troops. Increasingly the SAS destroyed Scuds and launchers themselves, since some were escaping in the gap between their targeting by the SAS and the arrival of the airstrike.
