SAS Heroes

by Pete Scholey

  Lying still on the damp, mossy hillside behind the jagged rock, Tommy could feel the chill of moisture penetrating his Gore-tex jacket. He flexed the gloved fingers of his right hand and then returned them to rest on the trigger guard of his M16. The rifle was cold. It made the gunmetal seem impossibly brittle, as though it might shatter when the first round exploded in its chamber. This was a far cry from the blistering heat of the tropical sun on Ascension Island, where he had sat in the shade slotting rounds into the rifle’s magazines. Forcing himself to stay alert, he blinked, flexed his toes inside his boots and slowly moved his left hand from the grip around the M203 grenade launcher. He had to keep his mind on the job. There was no point in thinking about how cold he was. Everyone was lying behind his own rock, just as cold as he was. Everyone was in the same boat. Slowly, so slowly that even had anyone been lying right next to him they would not have noticed, he shifted his weight from his right hip to his left, searching for any scrap of comfort he could find on the cold ground. His eyes returned to the target area lying in the valley in front of him. The moonlight made it all seem grey and dead.

  From his vantage point he could see down the hillside to the low ferns and bracken that carpeted the valley floor. That was where they would come. That was where they would die. That was his killing ground. He scanned the expanse of boggy ground as far as he could see, searching for any sign of movement, a glint of moonlight on a carelessly unshielded piece of Argentine kit. There was nothing. Tommy glanced across at Pete Winner, lying nearby with a clutch of grenades, pins unsplayed, ready for use, sitting close at hand beside him. Pete caught his eye and slowly shook his head. They’d lain out like this several times before, waiting for targets that never turned up. Even when they did manage to snare an ‘Argie’ patrol, they never put up much of a fight. They would nail two or three of them and maybe take a couple of prisoners, but the rest legged it from any firefight first chance they got. You couldn’t blame them. The Argentines were mostly conscripts who hadn’t chosen to be there and weren’t willing to risk their necks. Running was the wrong thing to do, though. From the look of most of the prisoners Tommy and the others had seen, they were better treated by our side than they were by their own. The Argentine special forces were different. They were better trained and generally up for a scrap. Maybe some of them would come walking up the valley. Tommy peered out into the moonlight again. There was still no sign of any foot patrol.

  Despite the cold, the patrol could not afford to risk compromising their position by attempting to light a fire or brew up some tea. Even when the sun rose and they were lying up during the short daylight hours, they would be on hard routine. No fires, no hot drinks, no hot grub, no cigarettes and no talking. They’d have cold food from their ration packs – pretty unsatisfying stuff and, even when they could heat any of it up in a mess tin over a hexi block, it wasn’t exactly a gourmet meal. But hunger wasn’t the biggest problem they had to face. The trouble with lying there so long was the sheer boredom. Yet you had to stay alert. You had to keep watching. You had to be ready for anything. If you weren’t, then you ran the risk of letting everyone else down. You had to do your job. You had to look out for your mates. At least the cold helped you stay awake. Tommy sucked in a lungful of South Atlantic air and let it out slowly, calming himself, concentrating on the killing zone.

  Slowly, the moon and stars grew a little less bright, the sky a little less dark. The first light of dawn began to dilute the night and eventually the sun appeared, bringing with it a harsh, frosty morning. Still they lay there, watching, waiting. Eventually a silent signal was passed from man to man – the ambush was a turkey. This was another no-show. The harsh brightness of the morning, once the sun had dragged itself into the sky, did little to take the edge off the anticlimax. No one feels a sense of relief in a situation like that. When you have invested time and effort into an operation, what you really want is a result. Tommy, never one to be satisfied hanging around with nothing to do, was perhaps the most disappointed. When he was at home in Hereford, even if he was feeling a bit under the weather, he had to get out of the house and take himself off for a run, maybe even have a swim in the river, no matter what time of year it was. Tommy needed to be active. He had taken an instructor’s job back in Hereford once, in order to be able to spend more time with his wife and children, but he had hated not being part of a Sabre Squadron and had lasted only 18 months in the new job.

  On the Falklands mountainside, their wasted night was followed by another wasted day. They waited out the daylight hours, using their bivvy (sleeping) bags to try to keep themselves warm. When the sun finally set in the late afternoon, they stole away under the comforting cloak of darkness. They had to get out without being spotted by the Argies and without their knowing that they had ever even been there. One night soon they might have to set up this ambush all over again. They made their way back up the mountainside, moving as quickly as they dared, slipping here and there where a frost- or ice-covered rock sent a footstep slithering sideways. Peering out into the darkness, ever wary of walking into the kind of ambush that they themselves had just abandoned, they at last started to warm up, the effort of traversing the steep slopes sending the blood coursing through their veins and re-energizing muscles that had seemed set on hibernation. Once they crested the last ridge before the LZ, taking care not to skyline themselves or present a tempting target for any hidden Argie sniper with a night scope, they fanned out to secure the area. Then it was just a case of waiting for the Sea Kings to come swooping in and ferry them back to Sir Lancelot.

  Their night on the mountainside had been typical of so many of the patrols undertaken in the Falklands. Not every one culminated with the exhilaration of a contact. There were other compensations, though. When Port Stanley was finally liberated, Tommy and Pete Winner commandeered a Mercedes wagon for which the Argies no longer had any use and busied themselves organizing a major celebration. Tommy’s scrounging skills were put to good use as he called on a Royal Navy contact to supply a few cases of beer. The two cans a day the lads were officially allotted by the Regiment were nowhere near enough for a proper party. There was no way they were going to be able to feast on field rations either, but Tommy had picked up the name of another man who would be able to put some proper food his way – a pile of good steaks was what he had on order. He and Pete also tried to make money at the Post Office in Stanley. Stamps issued by the Falkland Islands postal authorities were highly collectable back home and since the Argies had taken over the Post Office, they had been overprinting them with their own ‘Malvinas’ post marks, making them even more valuable. Unfortunately, by the time Tommy and Pete got there, the Post Office was back under orderly control. Their party, however, was a great success. There was no doubting Tommy’s resourcefulness or determination. He had proved that countless times before, not least during the 1980 siege at the Iranian Embassy in London.

  On 30 April 1980, the well-heeled district of Kensington in west London, home to a number of foreign embassies, high-class hotels and some of the most expensive properties in Britain, reluctantly became the focus of the world’s media attention. At 11.30 am six men approached the front entrance to the Iranian Embassy in Princes Gate. Overpowering PC Trevor Lock, who was standing guard on the front steps of the embassy, they bundled him inside, producing machine-guns, pistols and hand grenades.

  PC Lock had raised the alarm via a ‘panic’ button on his radio as he was manhandled inside the building and the police were swiftly on the scene, although by the time they arrived the six terrorists had taken complete control of the embassy. Inside they held 26 hostages, including the head of the embassy, Chargé d’Affaires Dr Gholam-Ali Afrouz. Among the hostages were nine visitors to the embassy. These included two BBC staff, the only other British hostage apart from PC Lock being embassy chauffeur Ron Morris.

  As the area around Princes Gate was sealed off by the police, the terrorist leader, who identified himself only as ‘Oan’, announced to the
police negotiating team that his group was part of ‘The Democratic Revolutionary Movement for the Liberation of Arabistan’. He was quick to issue his demands. He wanted independence for the oil-rich region of Khuzestan in Iran, the release of over 90 political prisoners held in Iranian jails, mediators from Arab embassies to conduct negotiations and the safe passage for the group with an aircraft to fly them to Iraq.

  Negotiations with Oan continued for five days, during which the occupants of the embassy were supplied with food and cigarettes and five of the hostages were released. One of these was the BBC newsman Chris Cramer, who had been taken ill. Along with the other hostages, he was able to supply vital information about how well the terrorists were armed, their disposition around the building and the way they had rigged the embassy with booby traps. This confirmed what the thermal-imaging cameras and listening devices, via which the police were already monitoring the situation inside the building along with the SAS CRW team, had already indicated.

  The Regiment had been informed of the siege almost as soon as it happened thanks to a former SAS man who was then working as a police dog handler. His call to Hereford had alerted the CRW team, which included Tommy and Pete Winner, who were training in the Killing House that very morning. They had packed their gear and were on their way to London by the time an official request for their presence was passed to Hereford. For five days they laid their plans for an assault on the embassy, codenamed Operation Nimrod, waiting for the moment when the police would finally relinquish control of the scene and the Home Secretary would order them to go in.

  That order came on Bank Holiday Monday, 5 May, following the sound of gunshots from within the embassy. The body of press attaché Abbas Lavasani was unceremoniously dumped on the front steps of the building and the CRW team was given the go-ahead to implement its assault plan – Operation Nimrod was now active. Two squads, Red Team and Blue Team, were to break into the building simultaneously through the front and rear windows. Tommy was to be a member of Red Team, but his part of the assault did not go entirely according to plan.

  The windows through which the teams entered were blown in with frame charges or hacked away with crowbar tools known as ‘hooligan bars’, then CS gas and ‘flash-bang’ stun grenades were hurled into the rooms. The G60 stun grenade was a formidable weapon specially designed for the SAS. It didn’t send out shards of shrapnel like an ordinary grenade, but the magnesium powder and mercury inside went off with an almighty bang and a blinding flash when the device was detonated. The noise and light were enough to disorientate anyone without proper protection for the few seconds an SAS soldier needed to pop up and slot a couple of rounds into him. Barry Davies and Alistair Morrison were the first to use them in anger when they went in with the German GSG9 team to rescue the hostages from a hijacked airliner at Mogadishu in 1977. By the time the assault team on the embassy job used them three years later, everyone was well used to handling them, but that didn’t stop the grenades setting the building on fire – this had as much to do with the terrorists having doused the place with kerosene as it did with the flash-bangs. At the embassy, the flash set fire to curtains and then whole rooms went up.

  When Tommy went in through his balcony window the curtains were a mass of flames and his respirator and hood caught light. He thought his burning kit was about to turn him into a human candle, but he quickly ducked back out of the window, ripped off the smouldering gear and dived back in again, bareheaded. He now had no protection against the CS gas that was billowing through the building, he had scorch burns to his head and neck and was slapping at his singed hair with one hand to make sure it wasn’t still burning. Not that he had much time to worry about that. One of the terrorists was crouched at the opposite side of the elegant room trying to set light to a beautiful floor carpet that had been splashed with kerosene. If he’d waited a couple of minutes, the flames devouring the room from Tommy’s end would have done the job for him. Tommy didn’t wait. As soon as his feet touched the floor he had his MP5 levelled at the terrorist and squeezed the trigger. Nothing happened. A two-second burst would have been enough to empty most of the 30-round magazine into the man, but nothing happened. All Tommy got was the ‘dead man’s click’ – a stoppage. The terrorist froze for a heartbeat, staring down the barrel of Tommy’s gun. Tommy dropped the MP5 and snatched his 9mm Browning from the quick-draw holster strapped to his thigh. In the split second he took to do that, the terrorist recovered his senses and took to his heels. He dashed through the door into the corridor as Tommy sprinted across the room, the kerosene in the carpet squelching under his boots.

  Blinking to clear his eyes of the stinging tear gas and acrid smoke from the blazing room, Tommy pounded out into the corridor. Straight away he spotted the back of the terrorist’s shirt, the man racing away from him down the hallway. In his hand, the terrorist now held what Tommy immediately recognized as a Russian fragmentation grenade. The man was heading for a room that Tommy knew was full of hostages. Two more running steps and then he took aim as the man paused for an instant outside the room. That instant was long enough for Tommy to shoot him in the head and the man dropped to the floor. Approaching the man’s lifeless body, he was joined by other members of the team and Tommy burst into the room with them, the men in black yelling ‘Who are the terrorists?’ and dispatching the ones they identified in the room before hustling the hostages down the stairs, out of the building. The whole assault had taken just 11 minutes and, unknown to the SAS team, had been filmed by TV news cameras.

  Tommy’s wife, Caroline, had been sitting in front of the TV with a cup of coffee watching like millions of others, as the black-clad figures swarmed all over the outside of the embassy. When she had seen him dart out of the window to ditch his burning kit, she had recognized Tommy straight away. She said later that it made a real change knowing where he was for once! A phone call a few minutes later let her know he was okay and then, when he got home that evening, everything was back to normal. Caroline asked him what it was like inside the embassy and Tommy joked about the carpets and how, if they hadn’t all been so badly burned, he might have lifted a couple to bring home. Then they let it rest. His work had to stay outside the home as much as possible. That was the way Tommy liked it. His home was with Caroline and their two young daughters. His work was a different world completely.

  Two years later, Tommy had been annoyed with Caroline when he had left their house to report to the barracks before setting off for the Falklands. He had looked back and seen her standing at the window of their front room, watching him walk off down the street. Tommy was a proud man and as tough as they come, but that had been enough to bring tears to his eyes. He had spoken to her about that when he returned home and they agreed to say their goodbyes indoors in future. That was how they had said goodbye shortly after his return from the Falklands, when he set off for a tour of duty in Northern Ireland. Tommy never saw home again. He died in a car crash on the motorway near Lurgan on 8 February 1983, when the vehicle in which he was a passenger left the road and overturned.

  Tommy was a great character and a brave soldier, a man I greatly admired. Soldiers like Tommy have made the Regiment what it is today and he will never be forgotten.

  TROOPER TOMMY TOBIN AND STAFF SERGEANT PETE LOVEDAY

  Little Tommy – we called him ‘Little’ because he was just that bit smaller than Tommy Palmer – was not what most people might expect a hard-nosed, ruthless, SAS tough guy to be. He was not loud or brash or boastful. He did not have the murderous stare of a battle-hardened combat veteran. Few in the SAS actually do have the look of the archetypal, B-movie action hero. Little Tommy certainly didn’t. He was a quiet, good-natured, good-looking young man – and, without a shadow of a doubt, a true hero.

  Tommy Tobin joined the SAS from the Army Catering Corps. The Regiment, of course, takes all sorts from all sorts of backgrounds and, should anyone be labouring under the misapprehension that the Catering Corps is nothing but a bunch of overweight cooks and b
ottle washers, Tommy Tobin was the man to set them straight. A superb all-round soldier, Tommy sailed through Selection and was posted to B Squadron where he became one of Reg Tayler’s star pupils, keen to learn and quick to acquire a range of life-saving skills that made him one of the finest medics in the Regiment. In 1972, during the SAS’s ‘secret’ war in Dhofar, southern Oman, Tommy was one of the nine SAS personnel stationed at the BATT house in Mirbat, helping to train the local militia, organizing the town’s defences and, especially in Tommy’s case, helping to win ‘hearts and minds’ by providing basic first aid and medical care for the local population.

  Medicines, the attention of a trained doctor, hospital treatment or even the most rudimentary health care were things that only the privileged ruling class, the nobility and those closest to them, enjoyed in Oman under the rule of the previous sultan. When the old man’s son, Qaboos, had taken over in the summer of 1970, he had promised that all of that would change. Two years on, while the engineers and builders laboured to construct the new roads and hospitals, and medical staff were trained at home and abroad to create the health care system that Qaboos envisaged, SAS medics like Tommy helped to fill the gap, giving the people at least some hope that there was a brighter future ahead. Tommy helped to treat not only the SAF (Sultan’s Armed Forces) and local Firquat militiamen, but also their families in the impoverished villages that were scattered across Oman’s coastal plain or clung to the precipitous hillsides up in the mountains. Tommy had a soft spot for the kids. He had a new-born baby of his own back home in Hereford.

  Mirbat wasn’t such a bad place for Tommy to be. There was a beach where the fishermen landed their boats and the sea breeze helped to make the scorching temperatures in that part of the world just a little more bearable. The Adoo would regularly lob a few mortar bombs in from positions somewhere at the base of the jebel, but these generally fell some way short of the town and rarely claimed any casualties that required Tommy’s expert attention. The Adoo always scarpered back into the mountains before a Firquat patrol could get close enough to take them on. Like the others, Tommy was anticipating the end of his tour when they would be replaced by G Squadron. He was looking forward to getting home and spending time with his new family.