Soldier I

by Kennedy, Michael

  Meanwhile, back on Jibjat with the West group, we had been employed on clearing patrols round the area. On one such patrol was heard the greatest misjudgement since Chamberlain waved his piece of paper in the air and proclaimed the immortal words 'peace for our time'. We had just come under fire from an Adoo patrol and managed to get the SF into cover. I closed the top cover on a belt of

  200 rounds, and as the gun hammered out a burst of fifty rounds, a movement to the left caught my eye. A figure sat cross-legged out in the open, totally unafraid, totally convinced of his own immortality.

  It must be the squadron headcase, I thought. No soldier in his right mind would expose himself in such a deliberate way, with the lead flying viciously overhead.

  'This is the biggest non-event of the year!' shouted the headcase.

  Suddenly a round zipped by and hit him in the leg. He moved with an agility that defied description, and in such a state of panic that he burned his arm on the hot metal of the GPMG barrel, before coming to rest among the empty shell-cases that littered the ground behind Sean and me. With a pained expression on his face he pointed to the injured limb. I ripped at his OGs and exposed the wound. To my amazement, it was not the entry wound I'd expected. Luckily for him it had been a spent round, and there, just visible below the skin, I could make out the dark-brown shape of a 7.62mm short, an AK-47 round. It had hardly drawn blood. I held the leg as a shell dressing was applied. We waited for the firing to die away and then, with the help of Pete from the mortars, carried the first SAS casualty of Operation Jaguar to the airstrip for casevac. Some non-event, I thought!

  Colonel John and the Duke now set their sights on yet another move further west for us. They particularly had their eyes on an Adoo area known as the Ain waterhole. A probing patrol on 6 October had resulted in two Adoo killed, one Firqat wounded, and Steve from call sign 21 having to control the mortars onto an Adoo Guryunov heavy machine gun to cover the withdrawal.

  The advance on the Ain waterhole began on 9 October. We arrived in the area in the early morning without making contact with the Adoo. That was the first stage. The second stage wouldn't be so easy. We were on high ground dominating the area of the waterhole. To our front was a huge horseshoe of high ground which formed a natural amphitheatre. Most of the high ground was hidden by thick thorn bushes, ideal cover for a waiting enemy. The waterhole itself was about 600 metres away, at the far end of the U-shape formed by the legs of the horseshoe, which opened up towards us. The plan was straightforward. The mortars, call sign 25, and the SF team, call sign 26, would hold the high ground and give fire support if needed to the three action groups, call signs 22, 23 and 24, and the FKW, call sign 21. These four call signs would advance tactically into the bowl and secure the waterhole.

  The legs of the tripod made a metallic clunk as they hit the stony ground. I made a quick adjustment to the mount position and tightened the locking levers. I levelled the cradle and locked off. Next I centralized the deflection and elevation drums, then fitted the gun, pushing the front mounting pin home until the locking stud clicked into position. Sean now flicked up the rear sight-leaf and set it on the 300-metre graduation, laying the sight onto a rocky outcrop on the tree-line by use of the deflection and elevation drums. Finally the legs were sandbagged and the sight rechecked. The master blaster, as Sean had christened the SF, was now ready. Jimmy had found us an excellent concealed firing point with panoramic views of the whole area. If a firefight developed, we would have a grandstand view.

  The discussion began just before the FKW were due to begin their descent into the bowl. One party wanted to mortar the high ground and fry the tree-line with a mixed-fruit pudding before the call signs moved off. The other party insisted that time was running out and that every Adoo in the area would be homing in on the waterhole if we didn't make a rapid move to secure it. A tricky decision. So a compromise was reached. As the FKW, followed by call signs 22, 23 and 24, moved off, Derek, the boss of the mortars, silently registered the high ground, marking possible Adoo firing points on the plotter board.

  I closed the top cover of the gun on a belt of 200 rounds and Sean cocked the action. The safety-catch remained at 'fire'. The atmosphere in the sangar was tense. It didn't seem right leaving the high ground when the tree-line remained uncleared. Sean sat with his index finger feathering the trigger of the gun. Lou scanned the area with a pair of binocs. Jimmy sat by the radio. The whole area was quiet and still in the early-morning sun. The only sounds were the rustle of clothing and the clink of equipment as the call signs passed close to the SF sangar heading down towards the waterhole.

  I reached for the spare binocs and focused in on the FKW as they skirmished forward in an extended line. They had gone about half the distance to the waterhole when suddenly they began dropping to the ground and adopting the prone position. Several of them lifted their arms and waved the action groups forward. This wasn't in the plan. The FKW were supposed to go all the way. It was their tribal area, their waterhole. They should be taking the position to boost their morale. By now the action groups were cautiously moving through the line of Firqats.

  A high-velocity round cracked overhead, shattering the still of the morning. My ears rang as it passed close by. There was a split-second pause, then the whole of the high ground erupted – AK-47s, RPD light machine guns and somewhere a heavy machine gun hammering out its deadly rhythm. A stream of green tracer floated high over the mortar position, harmlessly disappearing at 1,100 metres – the tracer burnout point.

  'There it is!' screamed Jimmy and Lou in unison. Jimmy rattled off a fire-control order. 'Range 400 metres. Go right 100 metres from the rocky outcrop. Heavy machine-gun concealed in the tree-line. Lay.'

  My eyes were drawn to the area indicated. It looked like a fire in the tree-line, streams of bluish smoke rising from the top branches of the thorn bushes. It was the HMG. It must have just recently been dragged out of the arms cache, the preservation grease and oil burning as the weapon grew hotter. It was a mistake, a real giveaway. I was once more thankful for the thoroughness of our own preparations.

  'Rapid fire!' screamed Jimmy. Sean squeezed the trigger and hammered out the burst of thirty rounds to ensure a close pattern of shots in the target zone.

  I watched the stream of reddish-orange tracer as it overshot the target. We were all right for line, but firing high. 'Fire another long burst and I'll turn it down on the elevation drum,' I shouted. I unlocked the elevation drum and gave it a quick tweak downwards. Sean fired a long burst, and, with another small turn on the elevation drum, I watched with satisfaction as the tracer descended into the area of the smoke.

  As I locked off the elevation drum, Jimmy screamed, 'On!' I clipped a fresh belt of 200 rounds onto the old belt and began feeding the beast. Stream after stream of tracer zapped into the area of the heavy machine gun, the sound of the GPMG drumming in my ears. The mortars had now begun firing, adding to the din of battle, the phosphorus rounds exploding in cascades of white flashes among the thick thorn bushes.

  The battle raged on. The Adoo HMG had stopped firing, but the crackle of small-arms fire came from all directions. The mortars kept up a steady bombardment, setting fire to the tree-line. The mixed-fruit pudding was cooking up nicely. Sean was doing a traversing shoot along the high ground above the waterhole, the tracer ricocheting skywards.

  Suddenly the radio crackled into life – 'Valdez is hit'; and Jimmy relayed the ominous words, 'Ambush party, high ground to the right, watch my tracer.' He dropped the radio receiver, grabbed his SLR and fired off about a dozen tracer rounds into the high ground on the right flank, indicating the Adoo firing position. Sean swung the gun round, laid the sight on, and sent a stream of tracer hammering into the ambush area, blasting the ambush party to eternity.

  At last, under the sheer weight of SAS firepower, the Adoo attack began to slacken off until only the odd round cracked over the position. It had not gone as planned. Valdez had been seriously wounded and the action groups had h
ad first-hand experience of a reluctant Firqat. On the plus side, it appeared that the Adoo had broken contact and we had acquired a new piece of real estate. I felt strangely elated; I was still on an adrenaline high. It could have been a lot worse, we could have taken more casualties. I heard Jimmy talking over the radio. He finished the message and placed the receiver on the ground. 'The casevac chopper is on its way,' he said quickly.

  I looked down into the bowl. Green smoke swirled upwards from a smoke grenade, identifying the location of the casualty-evacuation point. The chopper suddenly swooped in low and landed in the area of the smoke. All binocs were anxiously trained on the high ground, but there was no sign of the Adoo. They had melted away into the adjacent Wadi Dharbat. After a few minutes, the tempo of the helicopter blades suddenly increased as the chopper lifted off, and Valdez was away towards RAF Salalah and the field surgical theatre.

  Late afternoon found us on the high ground above the waterhole. We had moved across once the FKW and the action groups had secured the area. The evidence of battle was everywhere: piles of 7.62mm short empty cases, blood trails, pieces of flesh and bits of clothing – but no bodies. They had been dragged away. They had even dragged away the Guryunov HMG that we had blasted earlier on. The distinct smell of phosphorus hung in the air, filling my nostrils as I got down to the serious business of making a brew. Water was short: I emptied my last bottle into the mess tin, then opened up the jaws of the hexamine stove and balanced the tin on them. I was down to three blocks of hexamine from the last packet of eight. I picked one out and broke it into pieces to make the flames hotter and boil the water more quickly. All in all it was much better than the old Bengazi burner.

  As the flames licked around the bottom of the tin, my concentration was disturbed by a suntanned figure approaching the sangar.

  'Look at that,' said Henry, a wiry Scot from Lanarkshire. In his hand he held his tin mug. It was stained with blood. 'When we lifted Valdez onto the chopper, the flap must have been open on my waterbottle carrier, and the blood from his smashed femur must have dripped through.' He stared at the blood for a moment, then asked for a brew.

  'I've no spare water for cleaning,' I said, looking at my now-empty water bottle.

  'We're the same, it was hot down there.'

  As he looked towards the waterhole in the distance, I grasped the mess tin of hot tea and poured it onto Valdez's congealing blood.

  'I suppose I'll have a change of personality at the next full moon,' Henry said mischievously as he lifted the bloodstained mug to his lips.

  'You'll end up looking like a toby jug,' I said, roaring with laughter. This was a standing joke in the Regiment about the Fijians. Fit and swarthy when young, in later years they often lost their muscles to comfortable fat as a result of eating too many fish curries. 'What happened to Valdez down there?' I asked, on a more serious note.

  'A classic come-on, a real shit storm,' replied Henry, with a slight tremor in his voice. 'The Adoo opened fire from the high ground to our front with AK-47s and RPDs. Valdez and the Honk made a splitsecond decision to swing off to the right flank and get on the high ground just below the tree-line.'

  Henry paused and took a swig of his strange-coloured cocktail. 'As they got about halfway up, the Adoo hiding in the tree-line opened fire. An AK-47 round hit Valdez in the thigh, just above the knee, shattering his femur. The Honk came up and sprayed the area with his gimpy. Apparently Valdez wasn't too pleased with this, as it was attracting enemy fire and he couldn't move into cover. He was screaming, "Stop firing, for Christ's sake, stop firing." The Honk stopped firing and pumped a syrette of morphine into his left thigh, then dragged him away into dead ground.' Henry finished talking and once again put the bloodstained mug to his lips.

  'How did the casevac go?' I enquired.

  'Smooth as snake shit,' replied Henry. 'The chopper happened by chance to be flying over the area on its way to Jibjat. So we redirected him by sarbe onto the casualty. It did cause a problem with the Firqat, though, because the casevac was immediate. They thought we were getting preferential treatment. Apparently a Firk was seriously injured the other day and he had a wait before the casevac chopper came. I don't think pure coincidence is in the FKW book.'

  We now moved into a dangerous phase of the operation. By 12 October, the FKW, B Squadron and G Squadron 22 SAS and one company of SAF had advanced approximately twenty-five kilometres into Communist-held territory. We had built a defensive position, with all arcs covered by reinforced sangars, at a location known as White City. Now we had to move out and dominate the surrounding area. With the main Adoo stronghold in the east only eight kilometres away, in the Wadi Dharbat, it was going to be no picnic.

  By the middle of October we had experienced our first mortar attack. The Adoo gunner craftily fired a few rounds and then moved position before his mortar barrel got too hot to dismantle – and before we could get a fix on his position.

  To keep the Adoo from closing in on the perimeters and to make our presence felt, the Duke initiated an intensive aggressive-patrol programme. Each day we would sweep out from White City and look for trouble. It was on one such aggressive patrol that I had my first brush with death. We were having a duel with a switched-on Adoo machinegunner.

  This guy was good. No wild, inaccurate bursts of fire, just wellaimed, controlled double taps. He had us pinned down behind a small hillock of broken rocks. The slightest movement would draw fire. Two or three rounds would crack savagely overhead, just high enough to let us know that if we moved position or tried to skirmish forward he would nail us.

  Sean and Lou were detached from the team that day, so Jimmy had taken over as gunner. He was losing his patience. The cold calculating bastard with the machine gun was getting to him. To compound the problem, his fieldcraft had been so good that we hadn't even been able to identify his firing position. As the minutes slipped by, Jimmy grew more and more impatient. He badly wanted this cool customer, who was getting dangerously close to malleting us. Jimmy decided we would first identify the firing position. He would fire a burst on the SF, and I would scan the area to our front to see if I could spot the location of the return fire. This is shit or bust, I thought, I'll have to be fucking quick.

  Crack-crack-crack. The switched-on machine gunner was quicker. As Jimmy squeezed the trigger and I began feeding the belt into the gun with my right hand, a 7.62mm short ricocheted off the ammunition belt, went through my little finger and finally embedded itself in Jimmy's trigger arm. The ploy had worked, however. One of our snipers over on the left got an indication, squeezed off a shot from his L42 and gave the machine-gunner a third eye.

  I rolled into cover, a stab of pain shooting up my lower right arm. I glanced down at my hand – there was a small amount of blood around the wound. I had been lucky. The round had only penetrated the fleshy outer edge of the finger near the base, close to the knuckle, missing the bone completely. The second bit of luck was having one of the best medics on the Jebel pinned down behind the same cover. Nick Dawson was the son of a Harley Street surgeon and had been a fourth-year medical student before quitting to join the SAS, fired by a compulsive desire to become an explosives expert. He now worked quickly to apply the shell dressing to my wound, saying quietly that I probably wouldn't even need stitches, it was only a graze. As Nick crawled over to attend to Jimmy, the adrenaline began to drain from my bloodstream. My body relaxed and I lay back, my face breaking into a broad grin as I reflected on how fortunate it was that the machine-gunner had reacted so quickly. A few more seconds and my head would have been out of cover and directly in the line of his sight!

  Dawn next day. I awoke from a restless sleep. The sangar was cold and silent. The steady throb in my right hand had kept me awake most of the night; I had only just managed to doze off in the last couple of hours. Now, with first light streaking in from the east, I dragged myself out of my sleeping bag and sat on an empty ammo box. My eyes felt gritty, my mouth felt dry and my hand ached uncomfortably. It was a
well-known fact that there was gas gangrene in the air and wounds tended to rot very quickly. So I decided there and then that I would go down to the FST in RAF Salalah and get my hand checked out. I didn't want to miss any of the action just because of an infected flesh wound. As my eyes wandered idly over the empty ration-box in the corner, a thought suddenly occurred to me. It was resupply day. That was it then. I would cadge a lift on the resupply chopper.

  Resupply day was always a relaxed day, a day we all looked forward to. The big bird in the sky brought such luxuries as mail from home, cigarettes, water, ammunition and possibly, if we were lucky, fresh rations. Jimmy was already down at the FST, having been casevac'd after the contact. So I cleared it with Lou, picked up my SLR and belt kit and headed towards the airstrip.

  I had reached the area of call sign 24 when I suddenly heard the raucous shout, 'Incoming'. Shit, not now, I thought. Next moment the throaty swishing roar of an incoming mortar rang in my ears, followed by the high-explosive crump of detonation. I needed a sangar – fast! I crouched and quickly looked to my left. There was a small ridge in the ground, running north to south. Built into this ridge was a sandbagged sangar with a heavily reinforced roof for defence against mortar and rocket attack. As I heard the distant thump of the next incoming mortar, I moved rapidly towards the sangar, brushed aside the blanket door and went in.