Eye of the Storm

by Peter Ratcliffe

  The firqat’s reaction didn’t seem to faze Taff, however. ‘Right,’ he said, ‘we’ll do this a different way. Tell them Palmer and I will do this alone. Billy, when we get down there I’m going to wave my white handkerchief, which is the signal that I want you to check firing, because it means that we’ll be right on top of the nearest enemy position and we don’t want you bastards shooting us.

  ‘I’ll judge just how close when I get down there. But I’ll take it to the limit. So don’t carry on firing after I wave my handkerchief. All right?’ I nodded, acknowledging that I had understood him.

  ‘Now come with me, Tommy,’ Taff ordered, and headed off downhill, the pair of them keeping low as they darted between whatever bits of cover they could find.

  By now the firqat had realized Taff was being serious, whereupon the ten of them decided to follow him down, darting between boulders and bushes as they set out for the enemy position. As for me, I just concentrated on pouring 7.62mm rounds into the enemy’s main position. I was lying down, using a bipod, and had a stack of 200-round belts next to me.

  Taff crept to within about five metres of the adoo before waving his handkerchief – at which point the troop commander shouted, ‘Check firing! Check firing! They are surrendering.’

  ‘No they’re not, it’s Taff,’ I yelled back at him. By then, however, Taff and Tommy had opened fire on the adoo with their automatic weapons. The heavy fire at almost point-blank range caught the rebels by surprise – several were just mowed down where they stood.

  It was all over after that. Those of the adoo who hadn’t been killed or badly wounded ran for it, simply vanishing into the misty drizzle.

  Taff should have been decorated for what he did that day. As it was, he got nothing save a pat on the back from Tim and another from the squadron commander. That was always the way in Dhofar, not least because the presence of the SAS there was still more or less deniable. In May 1980 Tommy Palmer would be one of the stars of the Regiment’s brilliant operation to release the hostages held in the Iranian Embassy in Princes Gate, London, an operation which, more than any other, brought the SAS to wide public notice, and initiated the media’s obsessive interest in the Regiment. Tragically, he was later killed in a car accident.

  We took one prisoner, who had been shot in the leg, and carried him on a stretcher back to Tawi Atair. He was only a teenager, and very scared. The adoo used to kill their prisoners, usually by beheading, and this boy must have thought that he was about to suffer the same fate at our hands. His wound was a nasty one, but we got him safely back to base where the regimental doctor, a legendary character renowned for his ability to enjoy himself when off duty, managed to save his leg. When he was well enough and the weather had cleared slightly he was airlifted out and put in prison. Had he surrendered, of course, he would have received the Sultan’s pardon. But this young rebel was too committed to the Marxist cause – or too frightened of reprisals by the adoo.

  As if the adoo were not enough, there were also plenty of venomous snakes where we were, although if you kept your hands away from crevices in the sandy walls they tended not to bother you. Nevertheless, it was always a good idea to check inside your sleeping bag before climbing in, and to shake your boots out in the morning before sliding your feet in, in case a scorpion or two had taken a liking to your footwear.

  Playing games was one of our chief ways of combating boredom, and we played a lot of scrabble and chess and ludo. Nick and I made a ludo board out of cornflake packets, and we derived more enjoyment from playing that than anything else. Taff, though, was a scrabble enthusiast. It has to be said, however, that he wasn’t a very good player, and he had some peculiar rules which were all his own. Still, playing with our troop staff sergeant was never dull.

  During a game one day he put down ‘head’, so when it came to my turn I added ‘round’, forming the word ‘roundhead’.

  ‘What the hell is that?’ said Taff.

  ‘“Roundhead,” of course,’ I said.

  ‘What does it mean?’

  ‘They were soldiers in the Civil War,’ I told him.

  ‘Roundhead,’ he roared. ‘You’ll be putting down black-head, squarehead and bloody Birkenhead next … Never heard of it,’ he added. ‘Get it off!’ And off it had to go.

  On another occasion I put down the word ‘heaven’, whereupon Taff asked, without any irony, ‘What the hell is that?’

  ‘Heaven. You know, like up in the sky.’

  This was clearly more than he could stand, for he looked at us and asked, ‘Have you been there? Have you been there?’ Then he got out his map and demanded, ‘Show me where this heaven is,’ before yelling, ‘Get it off!’

  With the end of the monsoon came the real heat. There was no shade and no wind, and our drinking water, which was supplied in 45-gallon metal drums brought in by helicopter, actually bubbled in the sun. The water was warm and, as I have said, tasted of the oil the drums had once contained. Drinking our obligatory eight pints a day was sheer purgatory.

  With that heat, combined with an endless diet of tinned food, tainted water and myriad flies, we frequently got the runs. But at least in Tawi Atair we had a makeshift toilet, whereas on other locations, like Diana One the previous year, we’d had to crap on the jebel and bury the results.

  Tawi Atair was almost civilized in this respect, however. We had dug a deep hole and then cannibalized wooden boxes to build a frame and a regular thunderbox over the pit. Down below there were hordes of shit beetles, a rather unnerving sight if you happened to glance beneath you. They were massive, beginning life about a quarter of an inch long but rapidly growing to the size of crabs.

  Even more frightening was finding yourself still enthroned on the thunderbox, and effectively helpless, when we came under adoo attack. Torn between the risk of catching an enemy bullet, or otherwise of falling into that heaving pit, alive with shit beetles, in an attempt to dodge the fire, all of us would have opted for the former as being much the lesser of two evils. I have to admit, however, that not all the fire came from the adoo. The officer commanding the geysh was an Australian captain, a nice chap and a good soldier – he needed to be the latter, given the quality of the geysh as troops – but inclined to be rather over-fastidious, perhaps a hangover from his former civilian occupation as a shirt-seller. One night he was using the thunderbox in, as he thought, splendid isolation, when the darkness was split by bursts of tracer over his head, punctuated by single shots. He dived for cover, thoroughly entangled in his trousers and desperate to avoid the dreadful fate of fetching up in the horrible, beetle-ridden pit; as he did so, the air all but turned blue with his choicest Aussie obscenities. He was not altogether amused later when he discovered that the firing had come, not from the rebels, but from me and three or four others, blazing away over his head with a GPMG and our SLRs. It was, looking back, rather a disgraceful thing to do – I can only plead the sheer tedium of much of our time at Tawi Atair.

  Such diversions did at least serve to take our minds off the enemy and our discomforts, but the greatest distraction of that tour was a scandal involving one of our own. Fred was a corporal, and a ringer for the kind of crooked, secondhand-car-and-anything-else-going salesman often portrayed by George Cole. By nature and preference a small-time villain and con man, Fred treated his posting to Dhofar as a personal challenge to his criminal ingenuity. It was a challenge to which he effortlessly rose, albeit with a scam which eventually backfired.

  Fred had noticed that when our 4-ton trucks showed signs of wearing out, they were usually handed on to one of the firqat or to the geysh units, having first been put back into more or less good order by a REME unit attached to us. It was almost child’s play for our smooth-talking hero to persuade a naive young REME mechanic that it was virtually his duty to ‘liberate’ a couple of the trucks and point them in the direction of the Dhofari jebalis, who were in desperate need of transport. Especially when Fred offered to slip the mechanic £200 of the £1,000 he was maki
ng by selling the trucks to a Dhofari he had chatted up in the local village.

  All went well, and in due course two trucks trundled out of the repair depot with Dhofaris driving them. And all would have remained well if one of the trucks hadn’t broken down, even before it reached the buyer’s farm. Unfortunately for Fred, the angry jebali then decided to lodge an official complaint with British Army Headquarters, and duly towed in the broken-down truck behind the other 4-tonner. When he started to demand his money back, a bored officer struggling through another dreary day pricked up his ears and decided to investigate – just to liven things up.

  In no time at all Fred and his young pal from REME were arrested, charged and sent back to the UK. After a court martial, Fred was sentenced to six months in the ‘Glasshouse’ – the army gaol at Colchester – and thrown out of the Regiment, though we never found out what happened to the mechanic. But we were all very grateful to Fred, for whatever the trouble he had brought upon himself, the gossip and speculation arising from the scandal did at least help to pass the time.

  On the whole, and despite the conditions at Tawi Atair, I found my tour of Oman in 1974 no worse than that in 1973. Furthermore, no one in D Squadron was killed, and there were, on balance, probably a great many more laughs than tears.

  It was to be a very different story in 1975, however, when D Squadron was deployed to Oman for the final time. That tour brought tragedy, and for me it would bring about a final metamorphosis. I would leave Dhofar a fully seasoned veteran, having been exposed to the kind of horrors which only modern warfare is capable of dreaming up – and delivering.

  Thereafter there would be nothing, ever, that war could throw at me that I would be unable to handle.

  Chapter Seven

  MY final posting to Dhofar came late in the summer of 1975, and from the moment we stepped off the aircraft at Salalah I knew we were in for a scorcher. We were greeted by a cloud of flies and dust, and from the look of the billowing dark clouds to the south, the certain prospect of a monsoon downpour before nightfall. To add to our discomfort, dusk would also bring out the mosquitoes in their thousands.

  Home sweet home it was not, but at least we were to be spared another soul-destroying stint at Diana One, or in the only slightly less monotonous but still wearisome Tawi Atair. This time the Sultan wanted us to shut off, once and for all, the main rebel supply route from Yemen into Dhofar. This in turn meant that we would be carrying the battle to the enemy, rather than sitting impotently in a holding location, providing daily target practice for the adoo.

  One of the first things I noticed was that the quality of our air-transfer service had improved. Instead of the weirdly shaped Skyvan transport aircraft, which required some sort of landing strip in order to get in or out of a location, we were more and more using the US-built Huey helicopter, famous for the part it played in the Vietnam War; there had only been a few Hueys in-country on my first tour, and we had hardly ever gone in them.

  The rugged, dramatic and, in its way, starkly beautiful terrain was unchanged, however. Our destination was a major border position called Simba, on the western edge of Dhofar’s great southern plateau, from where we could look down on the Yemeni coastal town of Hauf. I say ‘Yemeni’, but in fact the Sultan, having studied various hundred-year-old maps of the area, had decided Hauf was part of Oman’s Dhofar province, and was intent on reclaiming it. What further strengthened his determination was the fact that Hauf was the city from which the camel trains set out on the rebel supply route into Dhofar.

  Our main job, apart from helping with the taking of Hauf, was to block this supply route. The Sultan meant to mount his major ground offensive at the end of the monsoon season, deploying his Baluchistani mercenary army and the firqats to seize Hauf. Meanwhile he was all in favour of a little softening up of the city by air and artillery bombardments, as a taste of things to come. We had a grandstand view of the first big attack, which came in October and started when a squadron of Hawker Hunters, ground-attack aircraft of the Sultan of Oman’s Air Force operating from their base at Midway in central Oman, came out of the rising sun to blast Hauf from the sea.

  It was hardly a textbook operation, however. The pilots had either been dragged from their beds too early and were still half asleep, or they were nervous of getting in too close to the anti-aircraft guns ringing the city, because the end result was only of real concern to the fish cruising innocently below the surface of the Arabian Sea – which is where all the first wave of bombs and rockets ended up.

  We had watched this débâcle from a distance, and found it frustrating. ‘Wouldn’t it be a good idea,’ suggested one of our troop, ‘if we patched in to their wavelength and talked the pilots in from here?’ From high on the plateau, two miles to the north, we were in a perfect position to act as forward air control. The Boss gave his OK, with the result that for the Hunters’ second run we had a direct radio link through to the pilots in their cockpits.

  Bingo. It was a case of every one a winner. Not a single bomb or rocket of the second batch fell short of its target. Furthermore, that was only the start. As soon as the Hunters had had their turn the geysh set to with their big 5.5 inch artillery pieces from a position to the south of us, and kept up a constant barrage of the city for ten straight hours. I think it was probably this that made the adoo really angry, for that is what they certainly became. On the following morning they launched a massive bombardment of Simba, using mortars and Katyushas – Soviet-built multi-barrelled rocket launchers.

  The position at Simba was, roughly, a square of ground bordering the edge of the plateau, each of its sides measuring about two kilometres. There were a couple of major bunkers there, with twelve-foot thick rock and sand-bagged walls and corrugated-iron roofs, and dotted around these strongpoints were a dozen or more smaller machine-gun or mortar positions. The location was little more than a mile from where the rebel supply route snaked around a sharply pointed hill, known to us as ‘Capstan’, which overlooked the ancient camel-caravan trail and gave us a commanding view of what was coming in. It was from Simba that we would eventually move forward to cut off the supply route. The date for that operation had already been set for several weeks ahead, and we were still preparing the ground. What we could not see from our positions, however, was where the adoo mortar teams were located. That morning they began to shell us.

  I was with three other blokes putting the finishing touches to the sandbag defences of a substantial new sangar, in fact a sort of mini-bunker, when the mortar attack started. We were filling sandbags in order to strengthen further the walls of the sangar – which was about four metres long by two metres wide – when the first mortar rounds exploded near by. The adoo were using straight high-explosive mortar bombs, which made very little approach sound. If you were very lucky you heard a low swishing noise seconds before the round struck, and just about had time to crouch or throw yourself on the ground. If you were too close to the impact point, however, then crouching or chucking yourself down was not going to help you much anyway.

  Which is exactly what happened to Chris Hennessey that day. He, ‘Killer’ Denis and a signaller were filling sandbags when the mortar landed among them. By sheer luck I was working alone about twenty-five metres away, filling another sack with sand and shale. I didn’t even hear the bomb that caused the damage. One moment I was watching three fellow troopers, and the next I was looking at a scene of utter carnage.

  The mortar round scored down Chris’s side and exploded at his feet, killing him instantly. Yet although he took most of the blast, the signaller next to him was badly ripped by the shell splinters, and began screaming as though his lungs were going to burst. Denis, blown off his feet, vanished below the level of the sandbag wall, just as the blast hit me and knocked me flying. I was showered with stones and rock chips thrown up by the explosion but, mercifully, not by shrapnel. Shocked and disoriented, I managed to clamber to my feet and stagger the few yards to where the mortar had exploded. And then immedi
ately wished I hadn’t.

  Part of the training for the SAS should be for recruits on Selection to go and work in an abattoir for a couple of days, and squelch about in the blood and gore and guts until the sight and smell no longer affect their stomachs or minds. The smell of fresh blood and splashed-about entrails is much stronger than most people could possibly imagine, and it is not only extremely unpleasant but also extremely unsettling. After a while – or, more accurately, after a number of such experiences – the sight of mutilated bodies eventually no longer sends the stomach’s contents erupting mouthwards. But the smell – that’s something you never, ever, get used to.

  Chris could not have known what hit him, could not have felt the explosion that so violently took his life. But the signaller had. He couldn’t stop screaming. The shrapnel had caught him everywhere, almost shredding him, and he was bleeding profusely from his legs, body and face.

  I vaulted over the wall, snatched up the first-aid kit and started trying to plug some of the injured man’s more obvious wounds with one hand while I scrabbled for a morphine hypodermic with the other. That’s when I caught sight of Denis, who had been hurled backwards off his feet and ended up huddled inside against the base of the wall. What made the sight even odder was that, by some quirky effect of the blast, he was lying on the ground stark naked apart from his boots and socks. His only obvious injury appeared to be where his arse had been peppered by small shell fragments, rather like buck-shot. He was bleeding a bit, but his wounds didn’t seem to be life threatening. Given his near-naked state, I was able to tell this at a glance.

  The sight was a pretty ludicrous one, and for some reason – perhaps a combination of reaction and relief – I began to laugh. I just couldn’t help myself. ‘Fuck me, Denis, that’s not a very pretty sight,’ I told him, and that was enough to set him off too. Our roars of laughter mingled with the signaller’s screaming, until the noise must have sounded like the kind of row that would once have been heard only in the most insalubrious Victorian madhouse. Nevertheless, our laughter did us both the world of good. On the whole, the tougher the situation, the greater the need to preserve a sense of humour. Nor was there any disrespect to Chris. We knew he was dead – and later we would find a time to mourn him. Right then it was more important for us to keep our spirits up, and laughter is the greatest pick-me-up of all.