The Regiment

by Michael Asher

  During those few minutes, some members of the patrol claimed to have seen Iraqi troops advancing towards them, but their accounts do not agree on details. Some saw armoured personnel-carriers, others didn’t. Ryan saw a tipper-truck, no one else did. It will never be known exactly what happened and the extent to which a battle was fought with troops (as opposed to civilians).

  95. ‘No pain, only shock’

  The patrol regrouped. They decided to head south to the drop-off point. Free of their Bergens, they raced across the desert, covering the distance before midnight. They lay there in the blasting wind for two hours, but the heli didn’t arrive. They concluded she wasn’t coming. They couldn’t stay, and they didn’t want to head south towards Saudi-Arabia: that was the way the enemy would expect them to go. The OC B Squadron had advised them to make for Syria. It was nearer, but McNab knew they’d never make it directly across the desert: they weren’t carrying enough water. The only place they could be sure of getting water was the Euphrates. That route would be risky – the Euphrates valley was densely populated, and crawling with enemy troops and installations. The alternative was dying of thirst.

  The main problem was that McNab hadn’t filed this plan with the ops officer, so any search and rescue mission would be looking in the wrong place.

  McNab put together a rough deception scheme. They’d march due west for a while, then wheel north and hit the same road they had been watching from the LUP. He reckoned the enemy wouldn’t expect them to double back. North of the road there was a stretch of flat desert, then another road heading west to Krabilah, the border post.

  They started about 0100 hours, tabbing into a wind so cold that it seemed to slice through their smocks. T. E. Lawrence, who had fought in this desert with the Bedouin in the First World War, said that nothing could be more debilitating than the north wind. ‘[It] cut open the skin,’ he wrote, ‘fingers lost power and sense of feel: cheeks shivered like dead leaves until they could shiver no more, then bound up muscles in a witless ache.’

  It was a shock for all of them when big Mal, the ex-Rhodesian army man, collapsed from dehydration. He was the only one wearing thermal underwear. Despite sub-zero wind-chill, he’d sweated so much that his body was drained of moisture. Ryan revived him with rehydration salts dissolved in a water-bottle. Mal managed to get up and McNab put him with Ryan and Phillips at the front of the patrol. Not long afterwards, they descended a falaise into a deep wadi running roughly north. McNab, near the back of the file, heard the roar of aero-engines. He reckoned they were Coalition jets, and stopped to try to contact the pilots on TACBE – a ground-to-air radio-beacon with a range of seventy kilometres. He got a garbled response from an American flier, but there was no confirmation that his text had gone through. By the time he’d put the TACBE back in its pouch with stiff, frozen fingers, three of the patrol had vanished into the night. Ryan was in the lead, carrying the patrol’s only night-sight, followed by Phillips and Mal. None of them noticed they’d separated from the rest until they reached the MSR. Mal was still weak, and Phillips had been hobbling along for hours in agony from an injury he’d sustained during the contact. The weather conditions were atrocious, and getting worse. There was a telltale lightness over the eastern horizon, which meant they’d soon have to go to ground. They staggered on for another ten klicks, until they stumbled on what Ryan took to be a ‘tank berm’: it was actually a rainwater-harvesting hollow dug out by the local Bedouin.

  They lay up near the ‘berm’ for most of the day. They couldn’t believe how cold it was. Soon after first light, it began to rain. The rain was followed by sleet. Ryan dozed off and woke with a feeling of pins and needles in his cheeks, and his limbs quaking uncontrollably. He was covered in a thin layer of snow. It was actually snowing in the desert.

  In fact, snow was common here in winter. T. E. Lawrence wrote about it in Seven Pillars of Wisdom – the most famous book ever penned on warfare in this desert. It seemed that none of the intelligence staff had ever read it – certainly the SAS patrols hadn’t been informed. By the time they set out into the blizzard at last light, all three were hovering on the edge of hallucination. Phillips was incoherent. He staggered, dragging behind the others. At one point he screamed that his hands had turned black. He was wearing black leather gloves. Ryan told him to put his hands in his pockets and tramp on. Within an hour he’d gone down. Ryan and Mal were so disoriented they didn’t realize he was missing until it was too late.

  Phillips’s body was found the next day by a Bedouin named Mohammad – a relative of Abbas bin Fadhil. He was crossing this stretch of desert in his pick-up when he saw something black lying on the surface. It was Phillips. Mohammad searched his clothing, and found a Browning pistol and a pair of mini-binoculars, which he kept. He lifted the cadaver into the back of his pick-up and shipped it to the police-station in nearby al-Haqlaniyya. He returned to the area with some relatives to hunt for the others whose tracks he’d clocked near Phillips’s corpse. The authorities were now aware that the soldiers involved in the firefight two days earlier were heading north.

  Lying up to the north-west, McNab’s section had also been tormented by the snow. ‘I had known cold before, in the Arctic,’ he recalled, ‘but nothing like this. This was lying in a freezer cabinet, feeling your body heat slowly slip away.’1 They tried cuddling up for warmth, but by mid-afternoon they were desperate. McNab decided that if they didn’t move they’d all be dead by last light. They pressed on into the whiteout for the rest of the afternoon, and long into the night. By dawn on 26 January they had struck the route from al-Haqlaniyya to Krabilah – an asphalt road about five metres wide.

  Resting up not far from the road, they had more bad luck. They were spotted by an old shepherd, who came over to talk to them. After he’d gone, they moved their location about fifteen hundred metres, but just before last light they clocked two three-tonners pulling up near the point where they’d made contact with the old man. They estimated that the lorries were carrying thirty to forty troops. McNab was certain the Iraqis were searching for them, and that they’d been alerted by the shepherd. He didn’t realize Phillips was dead, and that his body had been found that morning.

  The Syrian border lay a hundred and twenty kilometres to the west. McNab knew they might not survive another night in these conditions, and decided to hijack a vehicle. The plan was simple. McNab and Consiglio were both swarthy and might be taken for Iraqis, especially with shamaghs wrapped round their faces. Consiglio would pretend to be injured, and McNab would stumble on to the road, half-carrying him, and flag down a car.

  There were few vehicles on the road. When one appeared suddenly, McNab dragged a moaning Consiglio on to the hardtop. As the lights approached, he waved his arms frantically. The car slowed down. The other three leapt out of the ditch, and jabbed weapons at the driver and passengers.

  Accounts differ as to how many people were in the car. All agree, though, that among them was a man in uniform, who shrieked that he was a Christian and showed them a Madonna icon. He was Adnan Badawi from Mosul, serving in the local gendarmerie. McNab and Coburn both maintained that the vehicle was ‘a New York yellow cab’. Adnan, who had no reason to lie over the issue, revealed that it was a white Crown Toyota taxi.

  The SAS herded the driver and passengers into the ditch. Adnan was so evidently intimidated that McNab thought he might be of some use to them. He bundled him back in. The five SAS-men piled in with him, and as they luxuriated in the sudden warmth McNab drove towards Krabilah.

  About forty minutes passed. Most of the patrol were dozing off when they hit a vehicle checkpoint. It was manned by armed police. There was a tailback of vehicles extending about seven hundred metres, and McNab stopped. Dinger stepped out and popped the bonnet in case anyone got suspicious. McNab told Adnan they would bypass the checkpoint on foot. He instructed him to drive through and meet them on the other side. Consiglio snorted that he’d ‘dob them in’ as soon as they disappeared. Coburn felt they should
have slotted him, but not even he wanted to shoot Adnan in cold blood. Instead, they jogged off into the desert.

  That evening, an Iraqi police sergeant named Ahmad was on duty at the main police-station in Krabilah town when Adnan slunk in, pale-faced. He was terrified that he’d be accused of abetting the enemy. He told Ahmad he’d been kidnapped by five Brit commandos. He’d reported them at the checkpoint, but the police had sent him on here. Ahmad collected seven or eight comrades. They drove back. An air-raid alert was on – the road was chock-a-block with cars going like the clappers with their headlights off. About three klicks from the checkpoint Ahmad clocked two men in camouflage gear on the side of the road – one playing possum, the other flashing a torch at cars zipping past. ‘Is that them?’ he asked Adnan.

  The Christian nodded. ‘That’s exactly what they did with us,’ he said.

  Ahmad drove on to the barriers. He rounded up about thirty armed men – regular police and militia – and seven vehicles. He led the convoy back to the point where he’d seen the two enemy soldiers. When the Iraqis roared up, the SAS were still trying to stop a car. McNab saw them coming. ‘We were spotted from the road,’ he wrote, ‘… vehicles came screaming along and blokes jumped out firing … All we could do was run.’2 They went to ground in a dip four hundred metres away. They returned fire. ‘They only fired a few shots,’ Ahmad remembered, ‘and we fired a salvo. It went on for about ten minutes. By that time they’d gone silent and we thought we might have hit them, but we weren’t sure, so we … worked our way round in a big circle. When we got there, though, there was no one. They’d got away.’3

  The SAS patrol passed within a hundred metres of the Iraqis as they bugged out. They melted into the shadows, heard the crump and splat of S60 ack-ack guns battling an air-attack. ‘The ground shook with the ferocity of the artillery bombardment,’ Coburn recalled, ‘a great umbrella of red tracer reaching up into the Iraqi sky searching desperately for the hated bombers.’4

  The air-raid was a useful diversion. The locals kept their heads down. The patrol scooted across the road, making for the Euphrates. They moved slowly through a warren of mud-built houses, through frozen slush to the water’s edge. They dipped water-bottles into icy meltwater. The Euphrates roared. McNab considered crossing, but dismissed the idea as crazy. The river was in full spate and half a kilometre wide. In their state of rag-order, he’d give them ten minutes.

  Coburn’s GPS racked up ten kilometres to the border. They decided to push along the river-bank as a patrol, navigating on a communications mast standing on the frontier. Its red warning lights blinked, enticing them. They were only about two kilometres away when fire stoved into them out of dark groves on their left. AK47 rounds screeched and zipped. McNab and Coburn hit the deck, clocked muzzle-flashes, heard the punking of Bob Consiglio’s Minimi on their left flank. Tracer spilt out of the shadows in long sequences of green and orange. Coburn splayed the bipod on his Minimi, spliffed a burst. McNab vanished into a gully. Coburn’s weapon clunked dead – a stoppage. There was no time to clear it. He rolled, grabbed an M16 mag from his pouch, snagged it into the housing, braced the cocking lever. He drummed off the whole mag then crawled to the gully after McNab and threw himself in freezing mud.

  Consiglio had been swallowed up by the night. None of his mates ever saw him again. Exactly what happened to him after the first contact has never been established. It seems likely he advanced through the bush and got caught in another contact. He held the Iraqis off until his ammo expired, then hugged a track at a right-angle to the Euphrates, perhaps intending to cross. He ran smack into a group of seven militiamen hidden in a copse of trees. ‘We saw this man running towards us,’ said one of them, Subhi, a local lawyer. ‘We shouted out a warning … and he turned as if to go back. We opened fire. Some bullets hit him and he fell down on the track. We opened fire again. One of the rounds must have struck a grenade he had in his equipment, because it exploded and continued to burn, and all the time he was screaming words in English. He might have been trying to surrender, but … we weren’t sure. [It] went on for about fifteen minutes and then stopped.’5 They didn’t approach the body until light, when the police arrived. Bob Consiglio was dead. He’d been shot in the mouth, and his chest was badly charred by a phosphorus grenade.

  Lane and Dinger were at the patrol’s tail-end when enemy fire blatted out. They whipped back ragged starflashes in the night. They edged nearer the river bank, lagged into black water. The cold cut them like a razor blade. The current was so vicious it tore the weapons from their hands. They found a boat and tried to detach its mooring-chain. It wouldn’t budge. They dog-paddled until they reached a sandbank, crept ashore, clocked a bridge a stone’s throw away with guards patrolling. They lay shivering, gasping for breath. Dinger found a chunk of polystyrene and broke it up. They stuffed the bits inside their smocks for buoyancy. They slid into the ice-river again, headed for the opposite bank – an island called Rummani. Lane was wheezing breath, gulping water. The cold had drained the energy out of him. He was going down. Dinger collared him, fought the current, hefted him to the shore, heaved him on to dry land. He spotted a mud-brick hut, housing a pump engine. He dragged him inside, but Lane struggled to get back into the river. Dinger heated water with his last Hexamine block. He held hot water to his oppo’s mouth. Lane knocked it aside snarling.

  When light spanned up through chinks in the roof, Dinger pulled Lane outside, hoping the sun would warm him. He was rambling. His skin was frozen; his eyes had gone opaque. He pulled him back inside again. A few minutes later a bolt on the outside of the door rammed shut – someone had locked them inside.

  Dinger was torn between looking after his mate and escape. In a last burst of energy, he managed to smash through the roof. He limped off into the palm-trees and vegetation by the river-bank. Soon he was surrounded by civilians and captured. He was tied up and taken across to the mainland on a tractor-drawn cart. He saw them bringing Lane’s body in on a stretcher. He was certain his mate was dead.

  While Dinger and Lane were breasting the river, Coburn and McNab were belly-lurching across the bed of a wadi by the river, passing close enough to Iraqi police to see their faces. When they crept over the opposite side, they were hit with a splurge of fire from a cordon. McNab darted off in the opposite direction. Coburn tried to worm through a tomato field. He’d run out of ammo, and ditched his weapon. He was armed only with a bayonet. Ahmad, the Iraqi police sergeant who had supervised the deployment near the checkpoint, was in command of the police section dug in five metres away. ‘Suddenly a man came crawling over the lip of the wadi towards us,’ he recalled, ‘and we shouted at him to stop. He didn’t, so we opened fire … He screamed out something in English. I ordered the men to stop firing and I went over to him, followed by some others. He was badly wounded in the leg and arm and blood was pouring out.’6

  ‘There was no pain, only shock,’ Coburn remembered, ‘as if someone had taken a sledgehammer to my ankle and smashed it into a million little pieces. I was certain I had just lost my right foot … then the pain hit, totally possessing my mind, body and soul.’7 He was lugged to a Toyota Land Cruiser, and taken to the local barracks for interrogation.

  McNab was snaking back through sludge and gloom downriver. He found a wide expanse of mud, located an irrigation pipe, inched inside. He stayed there for the rest of the night. In the morning he was clocked by a labourer clearing irrigation ditches. The man wasn’t even aware there’d been trouble the previous night, but reported the sighting to a police-post. The police poled up in a Land Cruiser and closed in. They jerked McNab out, tied his hands behind his back, and threw him in the back of the Land Cruiser. At the local barracks, the first thing McNab saw was Dinger, still alive, his head bloated to the size of a football.

  Phillips, Lane and Consiglio were dead, Coburn badly wounded, McNab and Dinger captured. The same day – 26 January – Ryan and Mal split up.

  They’d survived the snowstorm. Revived by the sun n
ext morning, they’d crossed the same road on which the rest of the patrol had hijacked the taxi, and a railway line north of it. Near the town of Anah they ran into a shepherd who appeared to be slightly handicapped, and wasn’t aware there was a war going on. Mal went off to his cottage with him, hoping to find a vehicle, while Ryan waited in a wadi. At the cottage four hours’ march away, Mal spoke to a man in a Toyota pick-up who alerted the police in Anah. Mal was surrounded and captured. His claim to have shot three Iraqis before running out of ammo was denied by local police, who reported that his weapon was still loaded when he was brought to the station.

  Ryan waited for Mal until last light, then struck out for the border alone. A week later he crossed into Syria, having walked for seven days and eight nights, on only two packets of biscuits and water. His lone marathon was one of the longest solo escape-marches in SAS history, almost equalling that of John Sillito in the Sahara in 1942. He had covered a hundred and eighty-six miles.

  96. ‘The right bloke to have around if it’s action you’re looking for’

  As McNab’s men raced nearer Krabilah in the hijacked Toyota, an RAF Chinook and a US helicopter fitted with thermal imaging equipment searched the area of the original drop-off point. It was still believed that Bravo Two Zero was making for Saudi-Arabia. No trace of them was found.

  Meanwhile, Alpha One Zero half-squadron, under SBS-major Graham, had crossed the border via a checkpoint and had almost immediately got into a contact with the Iraqis. The patrol was laagered up for the day, with its vehicles under cam-nets, when an Iraqi Gaz jeep materialized out of the desert. Two Iraqi officers jumped down and headed for the laager. The first lifted a net and found Sgt. ‘Cameron Spence’, ex-Queens Regiment, and his A Squadron crew, with their weapons sighted-in. ‘I had a moment to register the look of blank surprise on the Iraqi’s face as he came under the cam-net,’ Spence recalled, ‘… fired, quick double-tap – ba-bam – and he went down. As he fell his body was hit by at least six more rounds … he pirouetted in a macabre death-dance before hitting the dirt, face down.’1