Mad, Bad & Dangerous to Know

by Sir Ranulph Fiennes

  By now I realised that my Whitehall file was marked in indelible red for caution. I might wriggle my way up to major over the years but I would go no further. I had no wish to mark time in khaki mediocrity and so made up my mind to call it a day as soon as my three years’ contracted service were up. Such was my state of mind when my Greys friend Major Richard John suggested I volunteer to serve in Oman in the Sultan’s Armed Forces. Postings lasted two years for seconded officers and the pay was marginally better than in Germany. More important, there was sun, sand and excitement aplenty. My CO approved my application without delay, in fact with indecent haste.

  My old world was breaking up. I felt no urgency to marry and settle down. Far from it. I had a powerful urge to do and see things and to be free as I had never truly been before. I thought not at all of married life, but a great deal about Ginny. I knew I could have easily lost her after Castle Combe and, soldiering in remote Oman, might risk her again. Sitting in Ginny’s battered Mini van in a Midhurst side street, the tarmac shining from a summer shower, I asked her to marry me. By then I had loved her for twelve years.

  At the end of June I left England for Arabia.

  3

  Fighting for the Arabs

  In the late 1960s few people had heard of Oman or knew of its links with Britain. So long as Britain had held neighbouring Aden, the Omani Sultans were able to keep their country together, but the British withdrew from Aden in 1967. Marxism then had a firm base in Arabia, and Dhofar, the impoverished southern sector of Oman, was a natural Soviet target. Oman was also all that blocked the way between Aden, now the People’s Republic of Southern Yemen, and the Straits of Hormuz, gateway to the Persian Gulf, through which two-thirds of the free world’s oil needs were daily tankered. The aged Sultan of Oman did nothing to prepare for the impending storm. At the time I joined the Sultan’s Army there were but 200 fighting men in Dhofar under a dozen British officers and their standard weapons were bolt-action rifles dating back to the Second World War.

  With seven other officers I flew out to Muscat via Bahrain where we were marooned for eight days by a BOAC strike back home. It was here I learned that a British officer had just been flown out from Muscat with one shoulder and a portion of his chest shot away by the Communists, and I was told, ‘They say he was on a stretcher in the mountains for ten hours before they evacuated him. Your Sultan uses mules instead of helicopters. What a place to volunteer for!’

  I asked the officer’s name. It was Richard John, my only friend in Oman.

  The vintage Fokker to Muscat staged via Sharjah where we took on our first real-life mercenary. The Sultan hired freelance officers as well as seconded Brits as insurance against the British government getting cold feet. The new arrival, Captain David Bayley, was from Hove, so we had common ground.

  More to the point he had recently spent three interesting years fighting for royalist guerrillas in the mountains of North Yemen. Nerve gas attacks by Egyptian aircraft on his cave headquarters, he explained, were the most dreaded events.

  I was destined to command a reconnaissance platoon in Dhofar. The men were a mix of Omanis and Baluchis who cordially hated each other, so I had to be doubly careful to appear even-handed at all times. The enemy were the adoo, and a large part of our task was to ambush them before they could target us. The adoo, well trained and armed in the Soviet Union, knew all the tricks of night warfare without benefit of Hereford.

  My immediate priority before we went south was to nurse our meagre equipment up to combat condition. Weapons were cleaned and oiled. Some were in a filthy state and the two-inch mortar had gone missing altogether, a fact which in the British Army would have involved a major enquiry and heads would have rolled. I set out to find a replacement mortar. Richard John was still away recovering from his wounds and there was no other British officer in his company at the time, so I ‘borrowed’ a mortar and, for good measure, a machine-gun from his armoury. Over the next two years neither was missed by its previous owner and both weapons saved our lives more than once.

  On our patrols we were sometimes offered coffee, even in remote cave dwellings. This was always poured to guests in order of importance. Sometimes I came after all the others for, being a Nasrani or Christian, I rated lower than the poorest Muslim.

  Sick people would come to our vehicles. We had first-aid satchels but no medical orderly. The population was riddled with eye trouble and our aspirin and Optrex dispensing seemed starkly inadequate.

  ‘Hundreds of our people go blind each year,’ said my staff sergeant, Abdullah. ‘There is nothing to be done about it. To God be the praise.’

  There were three hospitals in all Oman and eight out of every ten babies born died within a year. The Sultan would not allow foreign units such as Save the Children Fund into his country. He seemed determined, as far as I could make out, to perpetuate his country’s backwardness and poverty. When I cross-questioned Abdullah about the lack of medical care he was not impressed. ‘The government has little money. We are not a wealthy country. There are more pressing matters. Anyway this southern region is a poor area with miserable people. Illness comes to those who sin.’

  My conscience was increasingly ill at ease: I was clearly a part of the military machine that upheld the Sultan in denying 800,000 Omanis their rightful inheritance. Away from the large towns of the north the people did not know what they were missing but ownership of cheap transistor radios was spreading and discontent increased alongside awareness.

  All around us the Arab world was in ferment – from Egypt to Jordan, from the Sudan to the Yemen. Oil revenue was changing lifestyles radically for our nearest neighbours along the Persian Gulf, known to the Omanis as the Arabian Gulf. I listened in to Aden Radio because it was good for my Arabic and heard the People’s Republic of Yemen urging the Omanis: ‘Throw off the harness of British imperialism. Take back the wealth that is yours but is stolen by the Sultan.’

  Before heading the 500 miles south to the Dhofar war zone with my own men, I was sent there without them for a familiarisation month’s secondment to the Northern Frontier Regiment. At B Company headquarters in Umm al Ghawarif David Bayley and I were issued camouflaged clothing and headcloth, three blankets, 100 bullets and a bolt-action Mark 5 .303 rifle. Also a set of maps of the mountains on a weird scale I had never seen before, 0.36 inches to the mile. There were few place-names and many of the existing ones had the words ‘position approximate’ in brackets beside them. We were each given command of a platoon.

  Our work at first was simple and unpleasant. We were to scour the wadis and cave-riddled cliffs and arrest every able-bodied male who might conceivably be an adoo. The policy was to subdue the people of the plain and the foothills into refusing food supplies to the guerrillas. Arrests, harassment and interrogations would in theory cow the locals. In practice our patrols served only to increase their hatred of Army, government and Sultan. It was only fear of being branded a coward that prevented me from resigning from the Sultan’s forces as the adoo regrouped in force and threatened the major towns of Salalah and Marbat.

  Back in the north again after my first taste of Dhofar, I confided my doubts about the efficacy of what we were doing to Staff-sergeant Abdullah. But he was adamant that the British were better than the Communist alternative.

  ‘You must not feel the British do wrong here, sahib. They do not meddle with our way of life or our religion. Listen to me.’ He lowered his voice. ‘It is said in the sooq that Qaboos, the son of the Sultan, will rule before long. With oil money, he will give us those very things the Communists are promising, but without taking away our religion, as they will do. If you British leave before that can happen, then the Communists will take over without a doubt. They will force us to denounce Islam or they will kill us.’

  I was impressed by Abdullah’s sincerity but unconvinced. It was several days later that I finally came to justify my own role without misgivings.

  Captain Tim Landon, from whom I had taken over the Recce P
latoon, had returned briefly from an intelligence course to see old friends before going to a different part of Oman. He had, I knew, a special relationship with Qaboos bin Said, the Sultan’s son. They had been at Sandhurst together but then had gone to separate regiments in the British Army, Tim with a cavalry regiment and Qaboos to a Scottish infantry unit. In due course Qaboos was ordered back to Salalah by his father. Because their family history included an unhealthy number of inter-familial coups and even murders, Qaboos was kept by his father under a sort of loving paternal house-arrest for seven years in the Salalah palace. To keep him happy, the Sultan allowed him a weekly visit from his old Sandhurst friend Tim Landon. This seemed harmless enough to the old Sultan who was unaware that they were plotting a coup to oust him. I knew nothing of this, of course, but recognised Tim’s extensive knowledge of Oman and the current crisis. After talking to him I felt reassured with our role in fighting Marxism.

  Change was inevitable in Oman. Either the Sultan must use his new oil revenue for progress or a more enlightened ruler must take over. The critical period was now. Unless the British ensured the status quo during this dangerous time, the Communists would, via Dhofar, take over all of south-eastern Arabia. Once Dhofar fell, the rest of Oman would follow. If Dhofaris were not soon given at least basic proof of support by their existing government, they would continue to swell the ranks of the adoo, or to use their official title, the People’s Front for the Liberation of the Occupied Arabian Gulf (PFLOAG).

  From Tim Landon’s summary it was clear to me that I must stay and do all in my power to help keep PFLOAG at bay, at least for as long as it took Tim and others to remove the Sultan and replace him with Qaboos.

  Weekly reports signalled from Dhofar indicated that newly trained adoo bands with modern weapons had arrived in many regions of the Jebel. Their tactics were imaginative, their firepower impressive and their shooting accurate. I was given eight weeks to prepare Recce Platoon for operations there.

  My five years with Centurion tanks had done little to prepare me for an infantry Recce Platoon, but I did find my SAS training useful. One of the few hard and fast Hereford rules was movement by night whenever feasible and my previous brief visit to Dhofar led me to apply this maxim. In the SAS four men form a basic operational group, not two dozen, so I had to work on my own system of control by night. The resulting drills were not to be found in any textbook but they emphasised speed, simplicity, silence and common sense. All our training involved live ammunition and advances over broken ground by night, with frequent switches from single file to line abreast and back to file, practised time after time, along with twenty simple hand signals.

  I took my six weeks annual leave while my platoon transferred to Dhofar’s safer northern zone, and when I caught up with them again they were operating from the desert base of Thamarit. As the plane taxied in the men rushed out from the shade of the huts to grab my bags and gun and pump my right hand in greeting. I felt moved by this unexpected welcome. I knew all thirty men by name now and they called me Bachait bin Shemtot bin Samra, for reasons which I never discovered. The nearest English equivalent is John, Son of Rags, Son of the Thorntree.

  For weeks I trained with the men in the gravel wastes outside our Thamarit base. Searing hot winds from the Empty Quarter blew sand through the air day after day. The camp, a long-deserted oil prospectors’ base, was beside a well where bedu of the Bait Kathiri called with their thirsty camels. I went to greet each new arrival and we gave out flour or aspirins in exchange for information about the adoo. It was a one-way trade: all aspirins and no information.

  From Thamarit the CO ordered me to the Yemen frontier to verify a suspected adoo infiltration route by locating camel tracks. This was at the time approaching Ramadan, the month of fasting, when the men were excited about a proper sighting of the new moon which would signal Ramadan’s beginning. In Muscat it was already in force.

  ‘In Pakistan,’ muttered one of the Baluchis, ‘three chief qadis fly up in an aeroplane to see the moon arrive. Once they report by radio, it is Ramadan for all.’

  When our ‘local’ moon arrived a sigh came from the men and all of them knelt to pray. I remained standing but I also prayed since it felt appropriate. I prayed for my mother and sisters and Ginny.

  For two days we pushed south, shedding broken-down vehicles and their men to fix their own repairs since we had too little water to wait for them. Huge boulders blocked our way and the wadi narrowed to a winding corridor as dark as a Manhattan alleyway. The men began to complain. The Army had never been in these parts before. It was Ramadan, no time to be pushing heavy vehicles through soft sand until the forehead veins bulged. The Baluchi mullah was especially vociferous but I told him we must obey orders. I too had scrupulously drunk and eaten only during the sunless hours so my argument did not seem unfair.

  We came to the high, bald escarpment of Deefa, not far from the Yemen border, the farthest west that we could travel without risking certain cut-off in enemy-held territory. The adoo grip on Dhofar was tightening and we returned to Salalah to be briefed on further ambushes.

  Once we were scaling a hillside when we encountered a herd of cows. In the dark we listened to the sharp tac-tac of the herds-man’s stick. Then someone halted above us and there came the falsetto cry much used by Dhofari herders. One of my men whispered, ‘They heard the Land Rovers and sent the cowman to find us. Those men move their cows only by day. We must be more careful. He smelled us, sahib. We must cover ourselves.’ We smeared the liquid green spattering of the cows on our shirts and trousers and smelled satisfactorily unpleasant, but it took another day holed up in a cave before we could make good our retreat undetected. We became skilled at the game of cat and mouse in the mountains. Ambush or be ambushed.

  To stop the flow of heavy weapons from the Yemen into central Dhofar, our colonel devised the Leopard Line – a loose blockade running north from the coast to the sands of the Empty Quarter. Our company manned the line on the plain and in the foothills. To cover such a vast region with only five Land Rovers meant non-stop patrolling and recognising adoo signs when we chanced upon them. For this our bedu guide was invaluable. Water points dictated the route of camel travel and he knew the location of most of the springs in the Nejd, a narrow band of steppe country between the monsoon belt and the true desert. By kneeling beside the prints of a lone camel he could glean a mine of information. Sometimes he knew the name of the camel’s owner by the shape of the hoof, where and when it had last drunk by the amount and frequency of its droppings and, by their texture, in which wadi it had last eaten.

  Early in 1969 I was referred to patrol the ancient Dehedoba camel trails in the rugged country immediately north of the Qara mountains and up to the Yemeni border. For months we lived on the move in the scorching, gravel deserts, dodging enemy traps, suffering ulcerating desert sores, straying many miles over the Yemeni border and never developing a routine. The key was always to respect the enemy, but never to allow that respect to overawe and blunt the scope of our own strategy.

  In the Sands we were more at ease. The men talked into the small hours, squatting with fingers sieving the pure sand or simply watching the stars. They never spoke derisively of one another or tried to score over a neighbour as British soldiers are wont to do. Each man had his say and the Baluchis sat at peace among the Arabs. The months of shared dangers had dissolved previous hostility. They were happy to talk for the pleasure of communicating, and needed no alcoholic stimulus nor swearwords to help express themselves. I thought of other nights by other fires: of the Jocks in Germany, the clatter of beer cans, the filthy language with every sentence and the crude laughter as someone rose to urinate into the fire. I felt happy and at one with these Muslim soldiers in a way I had never felt in Germany or with the SAS.

  We did one night mission for Tim Landon deep into enemy-held territory to intercept some important adoo we had been told about by an informer. We had to scale steep cliffs and the men were jittery as we jogged from
cover to cover, racing the dawn. Then we waited through the heat of the day, burrowed into a thorn bush and observing, a few hundred metres below our tiny hide, the movements of our enemy building stone sangars in defensive positions. A narrow goat trail ran between our thicket and the top of a steep grassy slope. Two tall men were approaching along it. I saw their dark clothes and the glint of weapons in their hands. The second adoo wore a shiny red badge in his cap, not the Mao button badge worn by many of the militia, but the hexagonal red star of a political commissar. These were our men. I was sure of it. There was no time to think. They were fifteen yards away. The first man stopped abruptly, appearing to sniff the air. His face was scarred, his hair closely shaven. I watched his fully automatic Kalashnikov, its round magazine cradled in his elbow, swing round as he turned to face us. Inch by inch I lifted my rifle. The sun outlined the man. He peered directly at me now. I remember thinking, he has seen us. He is weighing his chances.

  My voice seemed to come of its own volition. ‘Drop your weapons or we kill you.’

  The big man moved with speed, twisting at the knee and bringing his Kalashnikov to bear in a single movement. I squeezed my trigger. He was slammed back as though caught in the chest by a sledgehammer. His limbs spread out like those of a puppet and he cartwheeled out of sight. Behind him the commissar paused for an instant, unsure what to do. I noticed his face beneath the jungle cap. He looked sad and faintly surprised. His rifle was already pointing at my stomach when a flurry of shots rang out from either side of me. The man’s face crumpled into red horror, the nose and eyes smashed back into the brain. Further bullets tore through his ribs and a pretty flowering shrub caught his body at the top of the grassy slope.