‘Yeah, what?’
‘How did you get to be so ugly with just the one head?’
‘Fuck off, go play with Noddy, Big Ears …’
To the rear sat Captain Grant Harris, our 2iC, and by now his shoulders were rocking with laughter. I’d made Grant sit behind me, because in contrast to Wag he was the pin-up of the unit. A youthful twenty-six, Grant was blessed with classic dark good looks and he had the gorgeous girlfriend to go with it. I hated him for it, though only in jest. Still, Wag and me were forever ribbing Grant and hitting him with the wind-ups.
The slagging stopped just as soon as Wag gave us a heads-up on the phone call he’d just had. 1 PARA had been warned off for immediate deployment to some obscure African nation none of us had ever heard of before – Sierra Leone. Their mission was to make a last-ditch effort to evacuate British citizens from the nation’s capital, which was under threat from a bunch of rebels threatening wholesale murder and mayhem.
None of us knew the slightest thing about where or what the country was exactly, except the obvious – that this was the dark, chaotic, war-torn heart of Africa. But the best news of all was this: 1 PARA’s CO had asked for as many Pathfinders as we could spare to deploy on the mission.
When I’d started that morning’s run I’d had not the slightest inkling that this might be in the offing. I hadn’t even known we had a spot of trouble brewing in one of the ex-colonies. But needless to say this was a very pleasant surprise. It was a golden opportunity for the Pathfinders to get some operational action in a far-flung, war-blasted, benighted corner of the world.
Top news.
Eddie ‘The White Rabbit’ Newell, the Platoon’s Colour Sergeant, joined us in the office. Like me and Wag, The White Rabbit was a long-serving member of the unit. His role as Colour Sergeant made him a glorified stores man, but it was a necessary stepping-stone to him getting Ops Warrant Officer, once Wag moved on. With his pale, spooky, almost albino look there was no guessing how Eddie had earned the nickname; his hair was as white as snow, and his skin looked as if it never got to see any sunlight.
The White Rabbit measured five-foot-ten, weighed 15 stone and worked out in the gym a lot, but he was known as something of a tortoise-like plodder on the runs. He was no speed athlete or racing snake, yet you’d be sure of Eddie always getting there in the end. He was the third unshakeable pillar of our outfit – one of a three-cornered pyramid formed by Wag, Eddie and me.
Along with Eddie, Captain Robert Donaldson, the Officer Commanding (OC) of our unit, pitched up. They were like beauty and the beast. Tall, suave, with swept-back blond hair, Donaldson had been OC Pathfinders for the past several months, and he was approaching the halfway point in his two-year posting.
From the very first Donaldson had reminded me of Prince Charming from the movie Shrek. Needless to say, he and I couldn’t fail to rub each other up the wrong way. Early on I’d been sent away to do a two-month Arctic survival cadre with the Swedish Special Forces, plus some other elite units. By the time I’d returned Wag had confirmed my worst fears: the verdict of the men was that Donaldson was struggling to make the grade as the Pathfinders’ OC.
A quiet tension simmered just below the surface whenever we were in the same room. But right now we put our differences to one side, for we had some urgent number crunching to do on the Sierra Leone mission. The twelve men on R1 couldn’t deploy. They were on standby for emergencies that constituted a direct threat to the UK. Barring those who were sick or on training, that left twenty-seven Pathfinders ready and able to go.
I headed down to the Interest Room to brief the blokes. The moment the warning went out that we were about to deploy, we’d cut all communications with the outside world. We’d go into strict isolation, with no calls or emails allowed to wives, girlfriends or family. That morning fathers had kissed their kids goodbye and gone into work expecting it to be just another day. Now all of that was about to change. This could be the start of a six-month deployment – for that’s what you signed up for when you joined the Pathfinders.
I started the briefing by outlining what we knew about the mission, which was pretty much bugger all. Then I dropped the bombshell – those who were and weren’t going.
‘R1 guys, you know who you are – you’re staying. The rest of you fit and able blokes not on R1 – get ready.’ I read out the list of names.
The sheer elation on the faces of the chosen was a picture. By contrast, those slated to be left behind instantly started trying to jockey for a position. I silenced the lot of them with a wave of the hand. Plenty of time for that after the briefing was over.
‘Right, patrol commanders,’ I continued. ‘Get away and get some background on Sierra Leone. Get a bloke up to the Maps Room. Do we have 1:25,000 or 1:50,000 scale, or air maps only? You’ll need another guy on the local flora and fauna, plus any climatic conditions that’ll dictate what kit we take. Medics – I need to know about disease types, prophylactics, malaria, and if we have the right drugs to hand …’
The Pathfinder medics had all attended the Patrols Medics cadre – four weeks of intensive training on how to deal with gunshot and shrapnel wounds, plus whatever else might hit us in the types of terrain in which we operate. After that, they’d completed a six-week attachment in an Accident and Emergency unit at a hospital in the UK – dealing with cuts, lacerations, burns, breaks and the like. Finally, they’d done a stint at the Army Dental Corps, learning emergency dental work – chiefly how to use Cavit, a temporary, press-in filling that hardens in the mouth.
At our Wattisham base we had a fully-fledged medical store, complete with a safe stuffed full of morphine, so we could deploy with that to kill the pain of injuries. But with Sierra Leone being cloaked in dense, steamy jungle, it was sure to offer a plethora of venomous snakes, blood-sucking bugs and nasty tropical diseases that we needed to be ready for. No point deploying to war if we all went down with cerebral malaria the moment we set foot on the ground.
If a 1 PARA guy suffered a snakebite in the field, more often than not it could be treated at his headquarters. By contrast, we’d very likely be deployed deep in the jungle where there are no such luxuries. We had to be 100 per cent self-sufficient – hence the high level of medical training, and the kind of kit we had to carry on missions. While on operations we had to presume we could only treat ourselves with what we carried on our persons.
We’d also need water purification kits, to cope with extended periods spent drinking from rivers. We’d need water purification kits such as Millbank bags, plus machetes and mosquito nets. The signallers would need to work out the right radio antennae for use under the deep-jungle canopy, likely battery life in such conditions, and how to keep such delicate kit dry and workable.
The list went on and on.
I finished my briefing with this. ‘Right, we basically know bugger all about this deployment. I want blokes running down every rabbit hole exploring every possibility, so we have all kit possible good to go … Everything else stops. Get on it and get it done.’
I had barely finished speaking when the first dissenter grabbed me. It was Roger Holt, a cracking soldier who’d taken an injury during a recent stint of training, which meant he was off the list to deploy.
‘Mate, get me on it,’ he begged. ‘I don’t care if I’m injured – with morphine and a bandage I’ll muddle through.’
Our unit is a meritocracy. Those who lead do so by dint of their experience, skills and ability, regardless of rank. Everything’s done on first name terms, and it’s the lack of formality and Regular Army bullshit that draws a particular kind of soldier to the Pathfinders. There is no better foundation on which to build an unbreakable esprit de corps.
I told Holty I appreciated his fighting spirit, but he was too badly injured and he’d have to sit this one out. He gave me a look like he’d just been given a death sentence. I knew how he was feeling: a mission such as this one came along seldom, if ever, in most soldiers’ lifetimes.
As blokes bolted from the room, I caught the expressions on their faces. Those who were single were buzzing. This was the chance for what they craved most – operational action. But for the married guys it was all just starting to sink in. It was a Friday, and God only knew what they’d got planned for the weekend. Instead, they were about to disappear with barely a word to their families. Needless to say, being a Pathfinder wasn’t a recipe for a long and happy marriage.
The chirpiest bloke seemed to be H. Lance Corporal Joe ‘H’ Harrison – also known as ‘Tackleberry’, a gun-toting, shit-kicking redneck in the Police Academy movie series – was young, free and single. He was already counting the beer tokens, for we’d be spending nothing while out in deepest, darkest Africa. Or maybe H was dreaming about what new guns he could buy with all the money he’d save up while we were away.
H was five-foot-eleven and had a rock-hard physique, topped off with the Freddie Mercury shaven-headed droopy-moustache look. Most of the time he’d wander around base wearing nothing but a pair of shorts and a couple of belts of shotgun ammo wrapped around his person. He only seemed to own one set of ‘going out’ clothes – a pair of battered jeans, plus a faded green bomber jacket. Where others might buy a new set of threads, H would invest in a new gun magazine, and his room was stacked high with them.
Like many of the vagabond collection of misfits that made up our unit, H had a wicked sense of humour. Hailing from Doncaster, he spoke with a thick Yorkshire drawl. He spunked all his money on guns, gun mags and real ale, and normally he couldn’t afford to drink beyond happy hour. This deployment might change all of that – at least for the few short days immediately after he got back from the mission.
H was also a superlative operator. He was a L96 AW sniper rifle guru, and the most accomplished shot in the unit. He was fit, hard and totally reliable, plus he was a demon with the general purpose machine gun (GPMG). When operating the GPMG, H was known as the ‘Death Dealer’. If it all went tits-up he was the bloke you wanted by your side.
H was thick as thieves with Corporal Nathan ‘Nathe’ Bell, his patrol commander. Nathe was a short, stocky turnip farmer from Lincolnshire. He’d had his front teeth knocked out while playing rugby, and he wore false ones, which added a slight lisp to his slow, country bumpkin ‘aarg-aarg-aarg’ accent. Nathe had a boyish, prankster sense of humour. His party trick was to drop his false teeth into your glass when you weren’t looking, so when you drained your pint all was revealed.
Nasty.
Nathe and H were like Laurel and Hardy. They permanently ripped the piss out of each other, but they were actually the best of mates. As two blokes heading up a Pathfinder patrol they were about as good as it gets – though it hadn’t always been that way.
As a young lad on selection Nathe had missed the final checkpoint on Endurance, due to horrendous weather conditions. Being unable to pinpoint his location, we’d launched the safety procedure, which included calling out the mountain rescue team. The ‘lost procedure’ for those on Endurance was to head for the A470 Brecon to Merthyr Tydfil road, and tab towards the nearest checkpoint. En route Nathe had managed to find a friendly local farmer, who’d allowed him to make a call to alert us to his location.
Finally, we’d found him sitting by a roaring fire in the farmer’s cottage, tucking into a bowl of his wife’s finest home-made soup. From such memorable beginnings Nathe had risen to his position of patrol command admirably, becoming a superlative operator, and with H as his right-hand man he ran a tight, unshakeable unit.
The Pathfinders’ numeric call-sign is 33 – so as HQ patrol, Wag, The White Rabbit, Grant and me were 33. Nathe and H’s patrol was 33 Alpha – so the lead patrol – with the others being 33 Bravo, 33 Charlie and so on. Whatever shit we might be heading into in Sierra Leone, I’d put 33 Alpha at our point of greatest vulnerability, for I had absolute confidence in them. H was extremely capable and I knew he could take over patrol command if anything happened to Nathe.
In preparation for the coming mission Grant, Wag and me broke down the blokes into four fighting patrols – with a patrol commander, a sniper, a demolitions expert and a lead scout, plus a medic and a signaller in each. That done we tried to garner some bigger picture ground truth. First off, we needed to know where the hell Sierra Leone was and what was the best weaponry to take, and whether we’d be able to use the vehicles.
Our raison d’etre being behind enemy lines ops, that was how we had to figure Command would use us in Sierra Leone – that’s if we got used. We needed to know the type of terrain over which we’d be operating, and the possible means of insertion. Would we be going in by helicopter, or on foot, or by HALO or HAHO means? It wouldn’t be via HAPLSS, that was for sure, for we’d yet to perfect HAPLSS for use on operations.
Right now this was an ‘Operation Blind’ – we were preparing to deploy with next to zero Intel, and little sense of who the enemy might be, or their number or capabilities. All we knew was that it was a non-combatant evacuation operation (an NEO) and from that alone the five of us – me, Wag, Grant, The White Rabbit and the OC – tried to work up potential scenarios.
We might be inserted into the jungle to overlook named areas of interest (NAIs); in other words, positions from which rebel attacks might be expected. We might be sent forward as an early warning force, to watch for a rebel advance. With British and allied nationals needing to be evacuated from the capital, we had to presume the rebels were poised to seize it, so we might well be tasked to call in air power or artillery, raining down death on the bad guys.
Having scoped out our likely tasks, we figured we’d need specialist observation post (OP) kit – like SOFIE thermal imaging sights, night vision goggles and GPS units, plus infrared fireflies and TACBE emergency comms beacons in case we were forced to go on the run through the jungle. The list of goodies being drawn up by The White Rabbit just kept getting longer, as we tried to think of every potential piece of kit we needed to unearth from the stores.
The Pathfinders’ armourer, Pete Brewster, was busy racking up a growing pile of the kind of hardware we might need when fighting in thick tropical bush. Trouble was, he had bugger all Intel to go on. Did the rebels have armour? If so, did we need LAW 80s – our 94 mm shoulder-launched light anti-armour weapons? Did the rebels have heavy machine guns? If so, we’d need the wagons with their vehicle-mounted .50 calibre Brownings to answer their firepower.
Ideally the 50-cal isn’t used against human targets. The GPMG is the weapon of choice against advancing troops – used properly, it rakes down their number. The 50-cal has a slower, thumping rate of fire, and we’d normally use it with armour-piercing explosive incendiary rounds – perfect against soft-skinned or light armoured vehicles, optics or radio antennae, thermal imaging kit, satellite dishes, brick buildings and command and control nodes, and out to 1800 metres range.
It was midday when we got the call to deploy via road to the Air Mounting Centre (AMC), at South Cerney, near Cirencester – the muster point for all British military operations going out by air. There we presumed we’d get issued with our ammo and food rations, plus extra mission-essential kit prior to departure.
Heading to the AMC didn’t mean that the mission was totally a ‘go’. We could still get stood down. It was never actually happening until you dived out of the aircraft over the drop zone, or drove over the border into hostile terrain.
But this sure took us one big step closer to going in.
3
The modern day Pathfinders was formed in the mid-1980s to perform a role that was seen as lacking in the British Army: covert insertion deep behind enemy lines to recce drop zones and guide in the main force, and for capture, sabotage or direct-action missions. While the SAS and SBS (Special Boat Service) are trained for such tasks, their remit is multifaceted: they have to be ready to perform sneaky-beaky espionage, hostage rescue and anti-terrorist and anti-insurgent missions, plus a host of other taskings.
A guy in the SAS’s Air Troop – their airborne
ops specialists – has to master all disciplines required of him, which means he has limited time to train for airborne missions. Our role being purely behind enemy lines ops, we’d be doing six HALO jumps to his one, and that simple fact makes us unbeatable at what we do.
In part due to its ‘black’ nature, the Pathfinders has a more fluid, opaque kind of identity than Special Forces, but with that comes real downsides. Black status means no official budget. Typically, the MOD want an elite asset without having to pay for it. That means we have to fight tooth and nail for any specialist kit, training or weaponry that we need. We don’t always get it – just as the Sierra Leone mission was about to prove.
Recently, we’d taken to signing off our comms with the piss-taking acronym: PF PL SFOW PMSAS. It stands for ‘Pathfinder Platoon; Special Forces Or What; Poor Man’s Special Air Service’. I’d done so once with a brigadier. He’d come to pay us a visit at our Wattisham base, riding his flame-red Ducati and dressed in a full set of leathers.
I’d greeted him with this: ‘Sir, welcome to PF PL SFOW PMSAS.’
‘Erm … sorry?’ he’d said, shaking his head in bemusement.
I’d spelled it out for him and he’d taken it in pretty good humour.
As with all our operations, we’d deploy to Sierra Leone wearing no unit flashes or marks of rank, or anything that might identify us as an elite British military outfit. We’d sanitise ourselves still further, removing anything that might give away who we were, or what country we hailed from: photos of family, wallets, clothing brand labels, ID documents of any sort – all of it would have to go, just in case any of us got captured or killed by the enemy.
Our unit had only recently returned from a lengthy deployment to Kosovo. Tony Blair was in power, and he’d made no secret of his desire to wage ‘righteous wars’, as he saw them. In due course Sierra Leone would become known as ‘Blair’s War’ – and we were about to head to Africa with no clearance to do so other than a private nod from the British prime minister.
Operation Mayhem Page 4
