by Andy McNab
You just fire the weapon and throw it away. It's good because it's simple. The simpler something is, the more chance there is that it'll work. The round has a shaped charge on the end, which is designed to punch through armor. The fuse arms itself after about 30 feet; even if you just graze the target, it blows up. The 66 doesn't explode in a big ball of fire as in the movies. HE never does that unless there is a secondary explosion.
We carried white phos grenades as well as the ordinary L2 explosive grenade. Phosphorus burns fiercely and lays down a rather good smokescreen if you need time to get away.
Grenades no longer have the old pineapple shape that people tend to think of. White phos is cylindrical, with the letters WP written across it. The L2 is more egg shaped and consists of tightly wound wire around an explosive charge. We splay the pins even more than they already are so that it takes more pressure to extract them. We also put masking tape around the grenade to hold the handle down as an extra precaution in case there's a drama with the pin. White phos is not much used in training because it's so dangerous. If you get it on you, you have to pour water very slowly from your water bottle to stop it getting oxygen, then pick it off. If you're not successful, it's not a nice way to die.
We had at least 10 magazines each, 12 40mm bombs, L2 and phos grenades, and a 66. The four Minimi gunners had more than 600 rounds each, plus 6 loaded mags. For an 8-man patrol it was a fearsome amount of firepower.
Those of us with 203s checked there was a bomb loaded. Bob was checking that the belts of ammunition for his Minimi weren't kinked-the secret of belt-fed ammunition is that it goes into the weapon smoothly. If it's twisted, you'll get a stoppage. I saw Vince checking the box of ammunition that clips on to the side of the weapon to make sure it was not going to fall off. His gang were going to provide all-round cover by moving straight out to points just beyond the wash of the aircraft.
As they were running out, the rest of us would be throwing the kit off the tailgate as fast as we could.
Stan checked his white phos to make sure it was easy to get at.
Everybody was mentally adjusting himself ready to go. Blokes jumped up and down to check that everything was comfy. You do simple things like undo your trousers, pull them up, ruck everything in, redo them, tighten your belt, make sure your belt kit is comfortable, make sure your pouches and buttons are done up. Then you check and recheck that you've got everything and haven't left anything on the floor.
I could tell by the grind of the blades that the heli was maneuvering close to the ground. The tailgate started to lower. I peered out.
You're incredibly vulnerable during the landing. The enemy could be firing at the aircraft, but because of the engine noise you wouldn't know until you were on the ground. The ramp came down more. The landscape was a black-and-white negative under the quarter moon. We were in a small wadi with a 13-foot rise either side. Clouds of dust flew up, and Vince and his gang moved onto the tailgate, weapons at the ready. There was a strong smell of fuel. The noise was deafening.
The aircraft was still a few feet off the ground when they jumped. If there was a contact, we wouldn't know about it until we saw them jumping straight back on.
The pilot collapsed the Chinook the last couple of feet onto the ground.
We hurled the kit, and Stan, Dinger, and Mark jumped after it. I stayed on board while the lo adie went across the floor with a cyalume stick in his hand in a last-minute sweep. The noise of the rotors increased, and I felt the heli lift its weight off the undercarriage. I waited. It's always worth the extra ten seconds it takes to make sure, rather than discover when the heli has gone that you've only picked up half the equipment. The balance, as ever, is between speed and doing the job correctly.
The lo adie gave the thumbs up and said something into his headset. The aircraft started to lift and I jumped. I hit the ground and looked up.
The heli was climbing fast with the ramp still closing. Within seconds it was gone. It was 2100 and we were on our own.
We were on a dried-up riverbed. To the east was flatness and dark. To the west, the same.
The night sky was crystal clear, and all the stars were out. It was absolutely beautiful. I could see my breath. It was colder than we had been used to. There was a definite chill in the air. Sweat ran down the side of my face, and I started to shiver.
Eyes take a long time to adjust in darkness. The cones in your eyes enable you to see in the daytime, giving color and perception. But they're no good at night. What takes over then are the rods on the edge of your irises. They are angled at 45 degrees because of the convex shape of the eye, so if you look straight at something at night you don't really see it: it's a haze. You have to look above it or around it so you can line up these rods, which then will give you a picture. It takes forty minutes or so for them to become fully effective, but you start to see better after five. And what you see when you land and what you see those five minutes later are two very different things.
Vince with his hoods was still out giving cover. They had gone out about 30 meters to the edge of the rise of the wadi and were looking over. We moved off to the side to make a more secure area. It took each of us two trips to ferry the berg ens jerricans, and sandbags.
Mark got out Magellan and took a fix. He squinted at it with one eye.
Even small amounts of light can wreck your night vision, and the process must start all over again. If you have to look at something, you close the eye that you aim with, the "master eye," and look with the other.
Therefore you can still have 50 percent night vision, and it's in the eye that does the business.
We lay in all-round defense, covering the whole 360degree arc. We did nothing, absolutely nothing, for the next ten minutes. You've come off a noisy, smelly aircraft, and there's been a frenzy of activity. You have to give your body a chance to tune in to your new environment. You have to adjust to the sounds and smells and sights, and changes in climate and terrain. When you're tracking people in the jungle you do the same: you stop every so often and look and listen. It happens in ordinary life, too. You feel more at ease in a strange house after you've been in it a little while. People indigenous to an area can sense instinctively if the mood is ugly and there's going to be trouble; a tourist will bumble straight into it.
We needed to confirm our position because there's often a difference between where you want to be and where the R.A.F put you. Once you know where you are, you make sure that everybody else in the patrol knows.
Passage of information is vital; it's no good just the leader having it.
We were in fact where we wanted to be, which was a shame, because now we couldn't slag the R.A.F when we got back.
The ground was featureless. It was hard bedrock with about two inches of rubbly shale over the top. It looked alien and desolate, like the set of Dr. Who. We could have been on the moon. I'd been in the Middle East many times on different tasks, and I thought I was familiar with the ground, but this was new to me. My ears strained as a dog barked in the distance.
We were very isolated, but we were a big gang, we had more weapons and ammunition than you could shake a stick at, and we were doing what we were paid to do.
Bombing raids were going on about 10-20 miles to our east and our northeast. I saw tracer going up and flashes on the horizon, and seconds later I heard the muffled sound of explosions.
Silhouetted in one of the flashes I saw a plantation about a mile to our east. It shouldn't have been there, but it was-trees, a water tower, a building. Now I knew where the barking had come from. More dogs sparked up. They would have heard the Chinook, but as far as any population were concerned a helicopter's a helicopter. Problems would only come if there were troops stationed there.
I worried about how good the rest of our information was. But at the end of the day we were there now: there wasn't a lot we could do about it. We lay waiting for signs of cars starting up but nothing happened.
I looked beyond the plantation. I seemed to
be staring into infinity.
I watched the tracer going up. I couldn't see any aircraft, but it was a wonderful, comforting feeling all the same. I had the feeling they were doing it just for us.
"Fuck it, let's get on with it," Mark said quietly.
I got to my feet, and suddenly, to the west, the earth erupted with noise and there was a blinding light in the sky.
"Fucking hell, what's that?" Mark whispered.
"Helicopter!"
Where it had sprung from I didn't have a clue. All I knew was that we'd just been on the ground ten minutes and were about to have a major drama. There was no way the heli could be one of ours. For a start, it wouldn't have had its searchlight on like that. Whoever it belonged to, it looked as if it was coming straight towards us.
Jesus, how could the Iraqis be on to us so quickly?
Could they have been tracking the Chinook ever since we entered their airspace?
The light seemed to keep coming and coming. Then I realized it wasn't coming towards us but going upwards. The bright light wasn't a searchlight; it was a fireball.
"Scud!" I whispered.
I could hear the sighs of relief.
It was the first one any of us had seen being launched, and now that we knew what it was, it looked just like an Apollo moon shot, a big ball of exhaust flames about 6 miles away, burning straight up into the air until it finally disappeared into the darkness.
"Scud alley," "Scud triangle," both these terms had been used by the media, and now here we were, right in the middle of it.
Once everything had settled down, I went up and whispered in Vince's ear for him to call the rest of the guns in. There was no running or rushing. Shape, shine, shadow, silhouette, movement, and noise are some of the things that will always give you away. Slow movement doesn't generate noise or catch the eye so easily, which is why we patrol so slowly. Plus, if you run and fall over and injure yourself, you'll screw everybody up.
I told them exactly where we were, and confirmed which way we would be going, and confirmed the RV that was forward of us. So if there was any major drama between where we were now and our proposed cache area and we got split up, everybody knew that for the next twenty-four hours there was a meeting place already set up. They would go north, eventually hit a half buried petroleum pipeline and follow that till they hit a major ridgeline, and we'd meet there. It had to be that vague because anything more precise would mean nothing to a bloke in the middle of the desert with just a map and compass: all the map shows is rock. After that, and for the next twenty-four hours, the next RV would be back at the point of the landing site.
Now we had to patrol up to the proposed cache area. We did it in a shuttle, as we had practiced, four blokes ferrying the kit, the other four giving protection, then swapping over. Because we were patrolling, everything had to be done tactically: we'd stop, check the ground ahead, and every couple of miles, when we stopped for a rest, the 4-man protection would go out; then we'd check the kit to make sure that we hadn't dropped anything, that all pouches were still done up, and none of the sandbags had split.
The water was the worst because it was like carrying the world's heaviest suitcase in one hand. I tried mine on the top of my bergen until the strain on my back got too outrageous. But then, nobody said it would be easy.
Moving as quickly but as tactically as we could, we had to get to the MSR well before first light to give us time to find somewhere to cache the kit and hide up. In my orders I'd put a cutoff time of 0400 the next morning; even if we hadn't reached the proposed cache area by then, we'd have to start finding an LUP. That would give us an hour and a half of darkness to work in. The ground worried me. If it carried on like this it was going to be too flat and too hard to hide up in. If we had to lie in open ground in broad daylight we'd stick out like the balls on a bulldog.
We navigated by bearings, time, and distance. We had Magellan, but it was only an aid. Patrolling as we were was not a good time to use it.
Apart from the fact that it could not be depended upon, the machine emitted telltale light, and it would not be tactical anyway for the operator to be looking at a machine rather than the ground.
Every half hour or so we fixed a new ERV emergency rendezvous), a point on the ground where we could regroup if we had a contact and had to withdraw swiftly. If we came to a prominent feature like a pile of old burial ruins, the lead man would indicate it as the new ERV by a circular motion of the hand and this would be passed down the patrol.
All the time, you keep making appreciations. You've got to say to yourself: What if? What happens if we get an attack from the front? Or from the left? Where will I go for cover? Is this a good ambush point?
Where was the last emergency RV? Who have I got in front of me? Who have I got behind me? You have to check all the time that you're not losing anyone. And you always have to cover your arcs and be conscious of the noise you're making.
As you patrol you start to get hot. When you stop you get cold again.
You're sitting there with all the coldness down your back and under your armpits, and your face starts to feel it. The back of your hair starts to get that horrible, uncomfortable, sticky feeling, and the clothing around your belt is soaked. Then you move off again because you want to be warm. You don't want to stop for too long because you don't want to freeze. You've been like this plenty of times before, and you know that you'll dry out eventually, but that doesn't make it any less of a pain in the arse.
We finally got into the area of the bend of the MSR at about 0445. We couldn't see any lights or vehicles in the pitch-black. We cached the equipment, and Vince's gang stayed to protect it. The rest of us were going to go forward for a recce to find a place to hide.
"My cutoff time to be back here will be 0545," I whispered to Vince, my mouth right against his ear so that the sound didn't carry.
If we failed to return but they knew there hadn't been a contact because they hadn't heard any noise, we would meet at the patrol RV near the oil pipeline. If we weren't at the patrol RV by the twenty-four-hour cutoff time, Vince was then to move back to the RV at the heli-landing site, then wait a further twenty-four hours before requesting an exfil. If we weren't there, he'd just have to get on the helicopter and go. They should also move back to the helicopter RV if they heard a contact but it wasn't close enough for them to give support.
I went through the actions on return. "I will come in the same direction as I leave," I whispered to Vince, "and as I come in I'll approach just on my own with my weapon in my right arm and walk in as a crucifix."
I would then come forward and confirm with the stag and go back and bring the other three in. I would do all this on my own because as well as confirming that it was me, I would want to confirm that it was safe to come in-they might have been bumped, and the enemy could be waiting in ambush. The other three would be out supporting, so if there was any drama, they would lay down fire and I could withdraw to them.
We set out on our recce patrol, and after about half an hour we found a good site for the LUP-a watershed where flash floods over thousands of years had carved a small reentrant about 15 feet high into the rock so that there was an overhang. We would be in dead ground, covered from view and with limited cover from fire. I couldn't believe our luck. We patrolled straight back to fetch the others.
We moved all the equipment into the LUP. The cave was divided by a large rock, so we centralized the equipment and had the two gangs either side. At last I felt secure, even though the problem with finding an LUP at night is that in the morning everything can look different. You can find that what you thought was the perfect LUP is smack in the middle of a housing estate.
Now was another period of stop, settle down, be quiet, listen to what's going on, tune in to the new environment. The ground did not look so alien now, and we were feeling more confident.
It was time to get some sleep. There's an army saying, "Whenever there's a lull in the battle, get your head down," and it's t
rue. You've got to sleep whenever you can, because you never know when you're going to get the opportunity again.
There were two men on stag, changing every two hours. They had to look and listen. If anything came towards us, it was their job to warn us and get us stood to. The rest of us slept covering our arcs, so we'd just have to roll over and start firing.
More jets went over that night. We saw flak going up and Baghdad erupting to our half right about 100 miles away. There were no incidents on the ground.
Just as it was coming up to first light, two of us moved out of the LUP position and checked that we hadn't left footprints on our way in to the LUP, dropped any kit, disturbed anything, or left any other "sign" to betray us. You must assume that everybody is better at everything than you-including tracking-and make your plans accordingly.
We arranged our claymores so that both men on stag could see them and their field of view, and be ready to detonate them with hand-held "clackers." If the stag saw or heard movement, he'd wake everybody else. There wouldn't be hectic running around, we'd just stand to.
Everything is always done at a slow pace. You'd know if it had to be rushed because you'd hear the stag firing. If somebody was in a position to be hit with a claymore, we were in a position to be compromised, so it was down to the sentry whether or not he pushed the clackers. If they came as close as the kill zone of the claymores, which were positioned as a protection of last resort, we'd just have to initiate the contact. But still the best weapon we had was concealment.
I went up onto the dead ground to double-check. Looking north towards the MSR, I saw a flat area of 2000 feet, then a slight rise of about 15 feet, and then, another 1300 feet away, a plantation. Looking east and west, the ground was flat as far as the horizon. South, to my rear, I saw another plantation about 1500 meters away, with a water tower and buildings. According to the map and Bert's briefing these locations shouldn't have been there, but they were, and they were far too close for comfort.
