Eye of the Storm

by Peter Ratcliffe

  Nevertheless, one of my first duties was to the men under my immediate command. They had a right to be told some of the news I had received, and it was only fair that they should know that some of their friends and fellow soldiers were missing, and that the Regiment had already suffered at least one casualty. Early that afternoon, therefore, I called an O-group – orders group, in this case a briefing of all vehicle commanders – and brought them up to date on regimental news. Their faces became very sombre as I spelled out the bare details of the D Squadron patrol’s skirmish with the enemy.

  It didn’t make for cheerful listening. One member of that patrol was known to have been shot in the stomach, and was missing with six other men who had become separated from the main unit during the fighting which, even with the sparse information I had been given, sounded as though it had been pretty fierce. At the moment there was no report of other casualties, but during the contact one vehicle had been completely destroyed and a second badly damaged. As the news sank in some of my guys began to look really upset, and there were a number of groans and impromptu exclamations of sympathy.

  ‘But it wasn’t all one-sided,’ I told them. ‘Our guys also managed to knock the stuffing out of Saddam’s people.’ They perked up at this, and I continued, ‘There were forty Iraqis in the enemy force and our patrol killed ten of them, wounded others, destroyed three vehicles and eventually drove the rest of them off.’

  This lifted my vehicle commanders’ morale considerably, and I decided to grab the opportunity to remind them of our own concept of operations. ‘First, to locate and destroy Scud missiles and launch sites. Second, to gather intelligence. And third, to take offensive action. Which means dealing with any enemy forces or enemy locations we come across.’ The last raised an appreciative grin on most of their faces, and brought a chorus of ribald suggestions about appropriate measures to be taken against any Iraqi troops we might stumble over.

  I gave them a moment, then motioned to them to quieten down. ‘Tonight we will head north another fifty kilometres,’ I said. ‘Which means that our LUP in the morning will be in our centre of operations.

  ‘I intend to stay there for thirty-six hours, which will give you all a chance to rest up. We’ll also start with foot patrols, which will give you a chance to develop a better feel for the ground. We move out at seventeen hundred again this afternoon. So let’s start packing everything away.’ It seemed that, for the second day running, we were going to start our night trek in a positive frame of mind. The men were now itching for a fight, and several of them came up to me to ask when we would see some action.

  ‘Don’t worry, it’ll happen soon enough,’ I told them. They certainly seemed enthusiastic, but watching them disperse towards their vehicles I was acutely aware that I hardly knew any of them at all.

  I was getting to know the two other members of the crew of my 110, however. As I have said, Mugger was the ideal driver, a quiet type with whom everybody got on well and against whom no one had a bad word to say. He didn’t have a strong accent or, beyond his size, any notable mannerisms or characteristics; he was simply solid and dependable and decent, with a great sense of humour. If he couldn’t say something nice about a person then he wouldn’t say anything about them at all. During the whole time I knew him I never heard him slag off anyone.

  It was in his role as demolitionist, though, that Mugger really came into his own, for the moment he had explosives in his hands he became like a man possessed. His eyes would light up and he would grin from ear to ear at the merest hint of there being something that needed blowing up. The bigger the potential bang, the happier Mugger became. Indeed, I have never known another soldier quite so in tune with his work, and it was wonderful to watch the transformation that came over him whenever his fingers came into contact with plastic explosive, fuses, detonators, timers, mines, and all the other tools of his lethal trade.

  The third man aboard our Land Rover, Harry, my signaller and the vehicle’s rear gunner, was also a quiet type. He looked as though he needed six good meals a day to put some weight on him, but contrary to appearances he was incredibly fit and tough, and was a superb longdistance runner. Apart from the fact that he was an expert signaller as well as a first-class soldier, I liked having Harry aboard because he was happy to eat nothing but hardtack biscuits and bacon grill. The latter, which came in small tins, was a substance like luncheon meat which, when fried, tasted like bacon. Harry loved to eat it cold, and would happily swap his other rations for our bacon grill. Since both Mugger and I loathed the stuff, we were very glad to have him with us.

  The senior vehicle commander in my section, Alpha One Zero, was Des, the troop staff sergeant who was one of the few A Squadron members I’d come across before the patrol. I knew him to be someone who could be trusted absolutely and relied on in all situations. I also knew that he was incapable of saying one thing to my face and another behind my back. Of medium build, he had a very dark complexion and was beginning to lose his hair. He was normally quiet, unless made angry, and he and I seemed to be on the same wavelength, perhaps because, like me, he too was a former Para. Two members of the patrol who wrote books about their experiences in the Gulf War described Des as a brownnoser, constantly sucking up to me. Not only was this not true, it was extremely unfair to say such a thing about an excellent, positive and professional soldier. It was because of Des and others like him – and I was to discover that most of the other guys were, like Des, also on the same wavelength as me – that our mission was able to stay on track.

  I had retained Pat as my second-in-command and in charge of one half of the unit and four of the Land Rovers. I had the other four Land Rovers and the Unimog, while the motorcycles worked with either group. The only times these two groups would ever split was when we were travelling in parallel formation, operating on either side of a large wadi or wide valley.

  The other senior NCO in the patrol, Sergeant ‘Spence’, was also in Pat’s section, Alpha Two Zero. I had known him for several years and always thought of him by his nickname, ‘Serious’. He had earned this not only because he had a serious manner, but because everything he did he referred to as being serious. If you saw him smoking and greeted him, ‘All right, Spence?’ he would reply, ‘Aye. I’m just having a serious smoke.’ Or I might spot him leaving the mess on a Saturday carrying a bag, and if I asked what he was up to he would say, ‘All right, Billy. I’m just going to do some serious admin.’ This meant he was going into the town centre to do his laundry, or to buy something from Boots, or some other mundane errand. Everything was ‘serious’ to him, and it became a standing joke among the lads. He was ‘Serious’ to one and all.

  This was not meant unkindly, for he was a pleasant enough individual. Of medium height, he had dark, slightly curly hair, and during the course of the patrol had grown a black beard and moustache. He had joined up as a boy soldier, and I think that that was the cause of everything being serious to him. In my opinion, all the lads who signed on for the army as boy soldiers and then progressed to regiments as adults tended to be far more institutionalized than the recruits who came in from Civvy Street aged eighteen, nineteen or twenty. The boy soldiers had joined straight from school, and most had been thoroughly brainwashed by the system. They somehow lacked the all-round, more abrasive experience the rest of us had enjoyed – or endured – during our late teens before we had opted for the Queen’s shilling. Some years after our experiences in the Gulf I came across a book by one ‘Cameron Spence’ called Sabre Squadron, which seemed to be an account of the author’s experiences in Iraq with Alpha One Zero. I had never heard of ‘Spence’ and was surprised to find on reading the book that he was none other than Serious. Perhaps I should not have been surprised, for Sabre Squadron certainly contains some serious untruths, which I will come to later.

  Pat also had an officer in his section. Captain Timothy was a thoroughly nice guy who had come to us from an infantry regiment. Having only recently passed Selection he was with the
patrol primarily to gain experience, and so had only a limited role to play. I found him a tremendous asset when it came to making constructive suggestions, however. On the occasions when I called the senior men together, after deciding on a course of action I would ask for suggestions, and he could usually be relied upon to come up with ideas that could be incorporated into the main plan. Rather than being put at the back and told to shut up he was invited to offer his own contributions. He understood the part he had to play in the patrol, but equally understood that his ideas were welcome. I could have wished that everyone had been as positive and constructive.

  Pat’s driver was a case in point. For someone whom I found so negative in the field, I was surprised by how gung-ho Corporal ‘Yorky’, as he was nicknamed, made himself out to be in his book Victor Two, which first appeared under the pseudonym ‘Peter “Yorky’‘ Crossland’. As with Serious ‘Spence’s’ book, I will deal with some of Yorky’s claims later. He was a big man with a shock of dark hair and a rather bland face. His broad Yorkshire accent, coupled with a slightly gormless expression, especially when wearing his steel helmet, made him appear harmless enough, but later I learned from some of the other patrol members that he seemed to have a great deal of influence over Pat, which in turn may have contributed towards some of the previous OC’s poor decisions. For myself, I found Yorky’s behaviour erratic, and it was clear to me that the situation – being active behind enemy lines – had got to him. Not much fun for him, I agree, but also potentially dangerous for the rest of Alpha One Zero.

  Active service affects different people in different ways. Soldiers can be exceptionally good during training and in exercises. When it comes to reality, however, matters can be completely reversed. No one knows how he will react to battle until he’s been in a firefight. Training, discipline, a sense of self-worth, loyalty to one’s fellow soldiers and one’s unit, all these and other factors have a part to play in making a good fighting soldier, but he is still an unknown quantity until he has been in action for the first time.

  Once you have been in a firefight then you are confident of your own reactions in future situations. To the seasoned soldier, as I then considered myself to be, there was only one way for Alpha One Zero to go, and that was forward. No order, no task, no mission was impossible. To some extent I was able to use that confidence in myself to influence other people, and so boost them into a positive frame of mind, after which their own character and training took over.

  Sometimes soldiers who had not experienced action, and hence did not know how they would react, were led into aborting missions without even attempting them. This was what had happened all those years earlier in Argentina. The team that was helicoptered in to Tierra del Fuego did not attempt to reach the target because, in their eyes, the task was impossible – and thus unacceptable. Having convinced themselves that they were on a suicide mission, they came to believe that since they had no chance of survival, they therefore had no chance of success. In fact, the reverse is often true – as Pebble Island or the Iranian Embassy operation had proved, success and survival go hand in hand.

  Nevertheless, it is very easy to portray people in films and novels – or even autobiographies – as cheerfully accepting suicide-type missions. It is not so easy to undertake such missions in real life. Some SAS guys in Iraq, now faced with the prospect of a real firefight for the first time in their lives, had been in Hereford for many years. They had wives and children and a life outside the service. It is much more difficult to face enemy fire when you have all that going for you. If life has become comfortable and attractive, the risk of dying becomes very much harder to face. I was to see this manifest itself in various different ways as our time behind enemy lines in Iraq lengthened into weeks.

  Another through-the-night drive in miserable, near-Arctic conditions brought us, on the morning of 31 January, to the centre of our initial area of operations. Once we had established a new LUP I took stock of our situation. We had by now driven for three nights in a row and were some two hundred kilometres inside Iraq, but the men were very tired, and not only physically. This kind of driving, apart from the toll it took of the drivers, meant keeping extremely alert, permanently on the lookout for any kind of enemy activity or location. Such constant vigilance was mentally exhausting, however. As a result, that morning I confirmed that we would be staying at this LUP for thirty-six hours and that I would be sending out foot patrols, partly to reconnoitre the surrounding territory, and partly to give the men some exercise. The vehicles had also taken a battering from the rocky terrain, and I charged our Mobility Troop members with servicing them and carrying out any necessary repairs.

  The first radio message of the morning contained good news. The eight men of Bravo One Nine were back in Al Jouf. They had crossed the border the previous night and returned through ’Ar Ar, where they had been stopped by the local Saudi Arabian police for driving without lights. They were exhausted but uninjured, although four of them had needed treatment for frostbite. My thoughts immediately turned to Bravo Two Zero. If they had been less stubborn, and had heeded the CO and myself and taken a Land Rover, we might have been cheering their return through ’Ar Ar as well as that of their mates from the same squadron.

  Twenty-four hours later came more good news. The missing seven members of D Squadron had made it back to ’Ar Ar and were en route by chopper to Al Jouf. The injured man, a trooper, was being airlifted to hospital. When I issued the news to the men a few minutes later I was also able to tell them that although the trooper had suffered a gunshot wound to the stomach there was an exit point. This was received with obvious relief, for they were all aware, through their medical training, that it was much more dangerous when bits of metal were left scattered in the body.

  I waited for the comments to die away.

  ‘Now for our own news,’ I told them, with a broad grin. ‘We’ve been given our first specific mission outside our main task.’

  I watched most of the upturned faces light up with eagerness – and some with a look of apprehension. Time to worry about that later, I thought, before continuing, ‘We are to carry out a recce of the Mudaysis airfield, which is a large Iraqi fighter base about twenty kilometres west of the main supply route. That will be our destination tonight. I hope I don’t need to remind you that we will be approaching a manned target with the likelihood of there being other enemy positions in the area. So keep your eyes peeled – and no unnecessary noise.’

  That last remark raised a few chuckles from the more relaxed members of the patrol, for a stiff afternoon breeze had already begun rattling anything aboard the Land Rovers that wasn’t securely tied down or wedged against the sides. No matter how hard we tried, we were always going to sound like a mobile breaker’s yard.

  That night, travelling slightly north of west, we encountered several bedouin encampments. We were able to pick these out on our MIRA thermal imagers and skirt around them. Apart from a lot of barking from the bedous’ dogs, our passing appeared not to produce any noticeable reaction.

  After weeks spent behind enemy lines during the Gulf War, I can never picture bedouin villages without coupling that image with the sound of barking dogs. The two things go together, and it would be fair to say that where you find one, you’ll find the other.

  As a result, I was highly amused by some of the things ‘McNab’ wrote in Bravo Two Zero. In one scene, he describes him and his men hearing dogs near a bedouin village. According to ‘McNab’, if the dogs approached the patrol, he and his men would use their ‘fighting knives’ to kill the creatures and carry the corpses away with them, for disposal later. Elsewhere in Bravo Two Zero he mentions that, since they had no silenced weapons with them, he and his men might well have to use their knives to take out any enemy manning a Scud launch site, so as not to attract unwelcome attention from other Iraqi forces in the area.

  The fact is, however, that no man in his right mind would go anywhere near any dog, anywhere in the Middle East – let alone
a bedouin dog. There is a very high probability that it would be rabid, quite apart from the fact that dogs are tough animals, especially semi-wild dogs. The chances of someone killing a dog silently and quickly with a blade are very slight indeed.

  More tellingly, I repeat that there is no such thing in the British Army, never mind the Regiment, as an official fighting knife. The only knives issued are small clasp knives which are mainly used for opening ration packs and removing or replacing screws in your rifle. I have known a few SAS guys who carried slightly larger knives, but only for doing ordinary things – not for stabbing people and dogs or slitting sentries’ throats. There are no instruction courses in the SAS involving the use of knives, fighting ones or any other kind. Even training in unarmed combat is only rudimentary, and the only time knives are involved is during instruction on how to defend yourself against an antagonist armed with a blade. Finally, if you have to kill someone, or some animal, in combat or otherwise while on active service, then you use your rifle or pistol. There is no unit of the British Army which uses knives – other than bayonets – garrottes or crossbows to dispose of the enemy. Any soldier who asks you to believe differently is either lying, or has himself been taken in by some of the nonsense written about the Special Forces.

  What does ring true in ‘McNab’s’ account of hearing the bedou dogs, however, is the sheer tension of being on a mission behind enemy lines, and especially in such an unforgiving landscape. I think that at first none of us felt completely at ease in the desert, for all our training and, for some of us, years of experience. Certainly spotting that first desert settlement must have rattled Pat and Yorky, because they pulled up abruptly. Mugger stopped and I jumped out and walked forward the fifty or so paces to the lead Land Rover. As I came level with Pat I asked, ‘What’s up?’