by Andy McNab
The penalty kick that one of the lads aimed at my jaw knocked me backwards into the ditch. Water sluiced into my ears, and white blotches of intense light filled my vision. I opened my eyes. Through the star bursts I saw the world closing in with people and a clear blue sky that was about to rain rifle butts.
Even when you're winded your body's self-protection mechanism makes it spin itself over. Face down in the mud, I curled up into a tight ball.
There's an old saying in parachuting, if it's a bit windy and you know the landing is going to be fearsome: "Feet and knees together and accept the landing." I had to accept this one; there was nothing I could do to stop it. Compared with being shot, it was almost a pleasant surprise.
They were like little animals, putting in a bit of a kick, moving off, coming in again, starting to gain confidence. They grabbed hold of my hair and wrenched my head back. As they kicked and thumped my body in a frenzy of pent-up frustration, they screamed: "Tel Aviv! Tel Aviv!"
They jumped from the bridge onto my back and legs. You feel each impact but not its pain. Your system's pumping too much adrenaline. You tighten your stomach, clench your teeth, tense your body as much as you can, and hope and hope they're not going to start to give you a really serious filling-in.
"Tel Aviv! Tel Aviv!" they shouted over an dover. It dawned on me what they were getting at. This was not a good day out.
It can't have lasted for more than five minutes, but it was quite long enough. When they finally backed off, I turned over and looked up at them. I wanted them to see how confused and pitiful I looked, a poor fellow soldier who was terrified and meek and deserving of their pity.
It didn't work.
I knew it was going to start all over again, and I rolled into a ball, trying this time to get my arms underneath me. My mind was numb, but I was more or less conscious throughout. The thudding instep kicks to my head and sides were punctuated by telling, well aimed toecap blows to the kidneys, mouth, and ears.
They stopped after a few minutes and hauled me to my feet. I could hardly stand. I was in a semi crouched position, trying to keep my head down, staggering about, holding my stomach, coughing up blood.
I swayed and lost my footing. Two boys came either side. They did a rough search-no more than a perfunctory frisk to make sure I didn't have a gun-then they knocked me to my knees and pushed my face down into the mud. They pulled my hands behind my back and tied them. I tried to get my head up so I could breathe, but they were standing on it to force me down. I gasped and inhaled mud and blood. I thought I was going to suffocate. All I could hear was hollering and shouting, and then the noise of more firing in the air. Every sound was magnified. My head raged with pain.
The next thing I knew, I was being frog marched towards the vehicles. My legs wouldn't carry me, so they had to support me under the armpits.
They were moving fast, and I was still coughing and snorting and trying to get some air into my lungs. My face was swelling up. My lips were split in several places. I just let them get on with it. I was a rag doll, a bag of shit.
I was thrown into the rear of a Land Cruiser, in the foot well behind the front seats. As soon as they put me down, I tried to get myself nice and comfy and sort myself out. It felt strangely secure to be in such an enclosed space. At least they'd stopped kicking me and I could breathe again. I felt the warm heater and smelled cigarette smoke and cheap aftershave.
I got a rifle butt to the head. It hurt severely and took me down. I wasn't going to come up from that one even if I'd wanted to. I was a bag of bollocks. There was massive pain in the back of my head, and everything was spinning. I took short, sharp breaths and told myself that it could be worse. For a second or two it looked as though I was going to be right. I wasn't being filled in any more, which I thought was rather nice. Then two lads jumped in the back and thumped their boots hard up and down all over my body. As the vehicle lurched across the field, they kept up the tempo.
I couldn't see where we were going because I had to keep my head down to protect myself from the flurry of boots. It would have been a pointless exercise anyway. As far as I was concerned, they were just going to shoot me. I had no control over it; I just wanted to get it over and done with. I'd had the initial shock of being captured, then the demoralizing glimpse of the Syrian border. It suddenly hit home. I was right on top of Syria and I'd got caught. It was as if I'd run a marathon in Olympic time and been disqualified a stride from the tape. I wondered again when they'd shoot me.
The vehicle swerved and lurched to avoid the crowds. When they slowed down, I could hear people hollering and shouting. Everybody was in a frenzy; they were really happy boys.
The jundies fired their weapons from inside the Land Cruiser. The AK47 is a large-caliber weapon, and when you fire it in a confined space, you can feel the increase in air pressure. It was deafening, but the familiar tang of cordite was oddly comforting. I started to taste the blood and mud in my mouth. My nose was blocked with clots.
I was bouncing up and down, the vehicle moving fast over the ploughed ground. The suspension groaned and screeched. All I wanted to do was snuggle up in a corner somewhere and be out of the way. One half of my brain was telling me to close my eyes and take a deep breath, and maybe it would all go away. But at the back of your mind is that tiny little bit of survival instinct: let's wait and see, maybe they won't, there's always a chance
The crowds were making the fearsome Red Indian warbling noise. They were jubilant that they'd caught somebody, but I couldn't tell if the warble was a victory salute or a sign of even worse things to come. As we lurched over the field, I tried to concentrate on identifying the troops from their uniforms. They wore British-pattern DPM (disrupted-pattern material), with chest webbing that held five magazines, and high laced boots. They had Para wings, too, and red lanyards, which marked them out as elite commandos. It was only much later that I learned that the lanyards were to commemorate a victory from the Second World War, when they fought under Montgomery's command, of which they seemed quite proud.
We hit a meta led road and the bouncing stopped. I wasn't much concerned with where we were going at this stage-I just wanted to get there and to stop being filled in by these boys' boots. The soldiers jabbered at me fast and aggressively.
The vehicle stopped. We seemed to be in the town. Noise surged around us. I heard voices, many voices, and I knew from their tone that it was an angry mob. The sound of hatred is ugly and universal. I looked up.
I saw a sea of faces, military and civilian, angry, chanting, shouting abuse. I felt like a child in a pram with a gang of adults peering in.
It scared me. These people hated me.
An old man dug deep into his TB-riddled lungs and fired a green wad into my face. Other salvoes followed, thick and fast. Then came the physical stuff. It started with a poke in my ribs, a testing prod at the new commodity in town. The poke became a shove, then a slap, then a punch, and the crowd started pulling my hair. I thought it was going to be a case of mob rule. I felt I was going to get lynched, or worse.
They started to climb aboard. There was uncontrolled frenzy. Perhaps it was the first time they'd seen a white-eyed soldier. Perhaps they held me personally responsible for their dead and wounded friends and family members. They closed in and slapped and punched, pulled my mustache and hair. There was a gagging stench of unwashed bodies. It was like a horror film with zombies. All daylight was blocked out, and I thought I was going to suffocate.
More and more shots were fired into the air, and I began to worry that it wouldn't be long before they got bored with using clouds as targets.
The useless thought came to me that they must be taking casualties from firing in built-up areas. Rounds have spent their explosive force when they come down, but they still come down with a deadly momentum. No doubt they'd blame me for those deaths as well.
What were the soldiers going to do, I wondered-just let the civvies have me? Kill me now, I thought. I'd rather have the squad die
s do it than the crowd. The soldiers started pushing the people away. It was a wonderful feeling. Just a minute ago they were bearing me up; now these boys were my saviors. Better the devil you know
I was lying on my stomach at the back of the Land Cruiser, my hands still tied, and they started to drag me out feet first. The hollering of obscenities got louder. I concentrated on looking dejected and badly injured and on working out how I was going to protect my face as I fell two feet or so onto the tarmac. The solution was to spin around on to my back because then I could keep my head up. I managed to do it just in time. I lifted my head, and the base of my spine took the force of the drop, detonating an explosion of pain inside my skull. All the breath was knocked out of me. The soldiers were really playing the macho man, waving at everybody, shaking their AKs in the air Che Guevara style. They looked so butch, I thought, doing this in front of the girls. They were the real local teddies; they'd obviously be scoring tonight.
The vehicle had stopped about 50 feet from a big pair of gates set in a wall 10 feet high. I got the impression we were at the local military camp. They dragged me on my back towards the gates. I had to arch to save my hands from scraping along the road. Still there was mass hysteria. I was scared: the fear of the unknown. These people looked and sounded so very out of control.
At last I was dragged inside and the gates slammed behind us. I took in a large courtyard and a selection of buildings. The macho act ended at once, and the squad dies hoiked me to my feet and pulled me on by my arms. You've got to take time to have a look around, to tune in. If you do the hard man routine, stick your chest out and say fuck you, they'll fill you in again, and that's counterproductive. If you appear to be subdued and sapped, they've got the effect they want. It's now that you've got to start going to town with your injuries. You've got to look feeble, as if everything's on top of you and you're totally and utterly clueless. Quite apart from anything else, it preserves what energy you've got left so that you're ready for your escape, which is of primary concern, I felt I'd passed a major test. I was in another world; another drama had ended. In a weird way I almost felt safe, now that the local population couldn't get their hands on me. The prospect of that seemed so much worse than anything fellow soldiers might do to me. I exaggerated the limp, shivering and coughing, and moaned every time someone got hold of me. It must have seemed a wonder I was alive, the way I was going on. I was in a bad way, but my mental state was good, and that's the one you've got to worry about and conceal from the enemy.
For a few minutes I stood there with a ring of guards around me. As I looked straight ahead, there was a meta led road going to a block about 300 feet ahead. Looking around from left to right, I saw barrack blocks to the right, following the line of the wall, and a small clump of trees.
Then I saw some poor bastard lying on the grass, trussed up on his stomach like a chicken, his ankles and wrists tied together. He was trying to lift his legs to take the pressure off his head. He'd obviously been given a good hammering. His head had swollen up to the size of a football, and his kit was torn and covered in blood. I couldn't even see the color of his hair or whether his clothes were camouflage-pattern. For a moment, as he lifted his head, we had eye-to-eye, and I realized it was Dinger.
The eyes give so much away. They can tell you when a person is drunk, when he's bluffing, when he's alert, when he's happy. They are the window to the mind. EHnger's eyes said: It's going to be all right. I even got a small smile out of him. I grinned back. I had a fearsome dread for him because he was in such a bad state, but it was wonderful to see him, to have somebody there to share my predicament. Selfishly, I was chuffed I wasn't the only one to be caught. The slagging if I got back to Hereford would have been unbearable.
The down side of seeing him was the realization that it was my turn next. He was really in a bad way, yet he was much harder than me. It occurred to me that I could be dead by the end of the afternoon. If so, I just wanted to get it over and done with.
A couple of boys with weapons were lounging against a tree near Dinger, smoking cigarettes. They didn't stop when two officers and their little entourage came out of their office and walked halfway up the road to meet us. I just stood there, playing on the injuries, working on the principle that you don't know anything until you try. Mentally I prepared myself for another filling in. As the officers approached, I clenched my teeth and pressed my knees together to protect my balls.
The local military had incurred a lot of casualties, and it was clear that these well-dressed officers, a mixture of commando officers in DPM and ordinary types in olive green with stars on their shoulders, were not impressed. My head was pushed up, and one of them took a swing. I closed my eyes and braced myself for the next punch. It didn't come.
Another officer was jabbering away, and I opened one eye just enough to see what the conversation was about. The rupert who had hit me had a knife in his hand now and was walking towards me. Here we go, I thought, he's going to show the jundies how hard he is. He jabbed it under the bottom of my smock and ripped it upwards. The smock fell open.
The jundies were told to search me, but they didn't have a clue what they were doing. They must have heard weird stories about exploding suicide devices or something because they were paranoid. In my pockets they found two pencils and inspected them as if they contained arsenic or rocket fuel. One soldier cut off my ID tags and took them away. I felt suddenly naked without them. Worse than that, I was sterile, a man with no name. Removing my tags was as good as removing my identity.
Two others took the Syrettes of morphine that were hanging round my neck and went through the motions of sticking them into their arms. They were cock-a-hoop and would obviously be shooting it up later on. I had a toothbrush in a pen pocket in the sleeves of my DPM shirt, but they refused to touch it. Maybe they didn't understand what it was doing there. Maybe, if the smell of the mob outside had been anything to go by, they didn't even know what a toothbrush was. Whatever, they weren't taking chances. They made me take it out myself.
The body search was from the top down, but it was badly done and they didn't even make me take off my clothes. They removed my boots and looted every item of kit. They behaved like old ladies at a jumble sale. We always use pencils rather than pens because pencils always work, even in the rain. I had a couple of three-inch stubs, sharpened at both ends so that if I was writing and one end snapped, I'd just have to turn it around and on I'd go. They went as souvenirs. So did the Swiss Army knife and a Silva compass I had in my pocket, both on lengths of para cord Every bit of kit is attached to you securely. There was a notebook, but it had nothing in it. I'd destroyed its contents at the first LUP. There was my white plastic racing spoon from an American ration set, and that, too, was tied on a length of para cord in my pocket. My watch was around my neck on cord so that I couldn't be compromised by the luminous glow and it wouldn't catch on anything as I patrolled. Even the spare plastic bag I had in case I'd needed a shit while on patrol was snaffled.
Around my waist, however, on a one-inch webbing belt, was today's star prize: about 1700 pounds in sterling, in the form of twenty gold sovereigns we had each been given as escape money. I had fixed my coins to the belt with masking tape, and this created a major drama. They jumped back, shouting what I assumed was the Iraqi for "Let him go! He's going to explode!"
A captain arrived. He couldn't have been more than about 5'2" tall but must have weighed over 13 stone. He looked like a boiled egg. He was aggressive, speaking good English quickly and brusquely.
"Okay, what is your name?"
"Andy."
"Okay, Andy, what I want you to do is give me the information I want. If you don't, these men will shoot you."
I looked around me. The soldiers were standing in a tight cordon; if they fired, they would wipe each other out.
"What is the equipment you have there?" he asked, pointing at the masking tape.
"Gold," I said.
That word must be as international
as jeans or Pepsi, and in every army in the world the soldiers like the chance to make a little earner.
Everybody's eyes lit up -even the jundies." This was their chance to make more money in one hit than they probably earned in a year. I could see them planning their holidays and buying their new cars. I suddenly remembered a story I'd heard about one of the US soldiers who was among the troops who invaded Panama. In an office belonging to President Noriega he found three million US dollars in cash-and the knobber actually got on the radio and reported it. It was taken off to regimental HQ, and that was probably the last anybody ever saw of it.
The bloke who told me the story said he couldn't sleep at night just thinking about the opportunity that had been thrown away.
The ruperts were taking no chances. They dragged me away to another office and told me to put the belt on the table.
"Why do you have gold?" the fat man barked.
"To pay people if we run out of food," I said. "It's bad to steal."
"Open it up."
The ruperts stationed two of the jundies in the room with me and then left, presumably in case I was lying and was about to explode a string of incendiary devices. I pulled out the first gold sovereign, and the ruperts were summoned. They dismissed the two squad dies and divided the sovereigns between themselves. They tried to look so official and solemn as they did it, but it was blatantly obvious what they were up to.
It was probably thanks to the ruperts' greed that my silk escape map and miniature compass weren't found. They were both hidden in my uniform, and a thorough search would have unearthed them. I was chuffed to have them still. It was a wonderful feeling: you don't know this, big nose, but I've still got an escape map and compass, so up yours. The best time to escape is as soon as possible after capture. The further you go down the chain, the harder it is to escape, because the system caters more and more efficiently for a prisoner. Frontline troops have other problems on their minds, but further down the line the security is better and you've most likely been stripped of your uniform. From the moment I was captured I had been trying to orientate myself so that I knew which way was west. If the chance came my way, I'd need these vital items.
