The Regiment

by Michael Asher

  The second officer was treed by a salvo that ruptured his rib-cage and slashed off the side of his head. Spence lamped forward to the twitching body of the first officer and hauled it over, searching for grenades or hidden weapons. Two men closed in on the Gaz vehicle and fished out another Iraqi officer, squealing and struggling. They threw him on the ground and cracked him with a rifle-butt until he shut up. A map found on one of the enemy suggested they were encircled by an entire Iraqi artillery regiment. They had fired between twenty and thirty rounds, and anyone within two klicks would have heard the shots. The odds were that the enemy was already homing in on them. The priority was to move out – fast.

  OC Major Graham seemed hesitant. His instructions were to move north into his designated area of operation. Instead, Graham ordered the patrol back south. It was the wrong decision. ‘… I don’t think he was scared so much as gripped by an inability to be decisive,’ Spence commented. ‘He didn’t like being deep inside Iraq. It was alien to him and the way he’d been trained … right from the start he was the wrong guy for the job.’ They moved out within thirty minutes, taking the Gaz jeep, the prisoner, and the two bodies with them.

  Back in the ops room at al-Jouf, Lt. Col. ‘J’’s delight over the Regiment’s first reported contact soon turned sour when he found out that Graham was withdrawing. ‘I thought the CO, who was always ultra-cool, was going to explode,’ said RSM Peter Ratcliffe. ‘This time he completely lost his rag, and his comments about Alpha One Zero and its commander … didn’t make pretty listening.’ ‘J’ told the RSM he was sending him in next day to relieve Graham of his command. Ratcliffe wondered if he’d heard right. The only instance he knew of a squadron commander being relieved of his command was the case of John Moss in the Falklands war. But that was at Hereford, before the squadron had gone into action. Never before in the history of the SAS had a squadron commander been relieved in the field and replaced by a noncommissioned officer.

  After a moment’s thought, Ratcliffe saw sense in the proposal. The original idea, to send him as 2IC, wouldn’t have worked, as his advice would have been overruled. As he boarded the Chinook next day rigged up for a war he’d never expected to see at the sharp end, the CO put his arm round his shoulders and bawled over the roar of the engine, ‘What I have done is a first. What it won’t stand is a major contact in the first twenty-four hours.’

  Ratcliffe lit off the Chinook’s tail-ramp into deep-freeze cold. The wind knifed him through his duvet-jacket. The patrol that turned up to meet the chopper were almost blue – and they’d layered themselves with every stitch of clothing they had, including NBC suits. When they saw the ankle-length sheepskin coats the RSM had brought, it felt like Christmas. As they helped the crabs unload the stores, Ratcliffe sent one of the men for the officer commanding.

  Ratcliffe knew the next few minutes would be SAS history in the making, and he had turned the scene over in his mind again and again. He thought there was a possibility that Graham might resist, and had primed two senior NCOs accompanying the heli to restrain him if necessary. All the same, it wasn’t every day an RSM took over a major’s squadron, and Ratcliffe hadn’t been looking forward to the confrontation. When Graham appeared, the RSM said nothing except ‘I’m sorry,’ and handed him a letter from the CO. ‘You are to hand over your command to the RSM,’ it read. ‘He can take whatever action is necessary to ensure that you leave your present location.’2 ‘When he’d finished [reading] he looked up,’ the RSM recalled, ‘his face working with some powerful emotion … then he walked away.’3 He needn’t have worried. Graham behaved impeccably. He fetched his kit, said goodbye to his 2IC, and got on board the chopper alongside the Iraqi prisoner. ‘The worst part of my job was over,’ Ratcliffe said.

  Within minutes off taking over, the RSM had ordered the patrol back north and demolished any defiance from the men. He told Graham’s 2IC, Staff Sergeant ‘Pat’, that he was now patrol commander. He was there to give the orders, and the 2IC was there to take them: when he wanted suggestions he’d ask for them.

  The patrol covered fifty kilometres that night – roughly the distance they had withdrawn earlier. At the bivvy, Ratcliffe gave orders to burn the Gaz jeep and the corpses. He gathered the half-squadron, and told them there would be no more pissing about: they were here to hit the enemy and that was what he intended to do. When he’d finished he stuck his chin out, daring anyone silently to challenge him. No one did. The post of Regimental Sergeant-Major was virtually sacred: Ratcliffe was the most experienced soldier in the British army’s most elite Regiment. He was no physical giant, but the boy from the Salford slums who’d been champion recruit in the Paras had the qualities of a Paddy Mayne. He had the same sureness of touch, the same calculating disregard for danger. Even the doubters were fired-up. ‘[Ratcliffe] isn’t your master tactician,’ Cameron Spence commented, ‘but he’s the right bloke to have around if it’s action you’re looking for.’4

  97. ‘Shut the fuck up and keep shooting!’

  Two D Squadron patrols had been roaming the Iraqi desert since 20 January, hunting for Scuds. The search was frustratingly slow. Travelling at night, you could pass within a thousand yards of a launch-site without clocking it. The desert was hard going. The 110 Land Rovers jiggered and bounced over the pebbledash surface. They often made only twenty kilometres an hour. The wind lashed the SAS crews across the Land Rovers’ unshielded frames.

  They moved in convoy – seven or eight pinkies followed by a Mercedes Benz Unimog support vehicle, with three outriders on Cannon motorcycles. The motorcyclists acted as forward scouts and couriers, carrying word-of-mouth messages between wagons, while the patrol observed radio silence. The drivers wore passive night-goggles, and the pinkies’ lights were taped over. The wagons carried winches, sand-channels, MIRA thermal-imagers that could locate troops and vehicles in low visibility, and Trimkit GPS systems for navigation. They were armed with a smorgasbord of weapons, including twin- and single-mounted GP machine guns, 0.5 inch Brownings, Mk19 40mm grenade-launchers and Milan wire-guided missiles, clamped to their roll-bars. The Brownings could pump out a thousand rounds a minute, and engage the enemy up to fifteen hundred metres away. The Milan missile was capable of taking out a main battle tank at two kilometres, and the Mk19 was handy against soft-skinned vehicles. The SAS crews had M16 Armalites, some with M203 grenade-launchers, and Minimi light machine guns. The tiny columns packed the punch of a small army.

  The night Ratcliffe joined Alpha One Zero, most of D Squadron’s units were cammed-up in a wadi near a motorway designated MSR2. They were in the ‘Iron Triangle’ – an area of western Iraq criss-crossed by Iraqi early warning and communications towers, buzzing with enemy troops and crammed with Scud launch-sites. At first light, the men of 17 Troop woke to find that they were within a stone’s throw of a Scud microwave control-tower. It was uncomfortably close, but they couldn’t move until nightfall. That morning, two Iraqi soldiers came sauntering along the wadi. One of them stopped abruptly and pointed at the nearest cam-net. A burst of half-inch slugs from a Browning gouged open his chest.

  Instantly the SAS came under riveting fire from forty Iraqi infantrymen concealed on a ridge a hundred and fifty metres away. At the same time, the Troop’s sentry on an adjacent ridge was bumped by a full Iraqi platoon. They came on determinedly, pepperpotting, whaling 7.62mm short rounds from their Kalashnikovs. Support-fire from Shoagin machine guns chunked off the rocks, whizzed and creased air around him. The sentry yelled for support. Three SAS-men ramped up with Minimis and a bagful of L2 and white phos grenades. Two of them hit dirt, tracked muzzles across the Iraqi advance, tick-tocked taps. The third man pulled pins, pitched grenades. Bombs split, oscillated shingle and dust, spun shrapnel waves, severed limps, sent Iraqis twisting in bloody parcels down the slope. Some lay horrifically shredded, blubbering and moaning. At least two rolled into cover and went on shooting.

  The SAS-men on the wagons trocked covering shots, blazing off spears of fire from mounted
twin-Gimpies and Brownings. They fired so fast their cam-nets were ripped to ribbons. L.Cpl. Taff Powell, rattling double-Gimpies from the back of a pinkie, got plunked through the guts. Blood pumped. Taff sealed the entry-wound with a palm and went on shooting with his right hand. ‘I’m hit in the legs!’ he yelled confusingly. Not realizing how badly he was hurt, another shooter on the wagon shrieked, ‘Shut the fuck up and keep shooting!’

  One trooper shished 40mm grenades from an Mk19 launcher. The bombs pivoted into the Iraqi fire-group, pintailed steel sprays. The Iraqis withdrew. The pinkies’ engines fired. The four men from the sentry position raced down to join them. The wounded Taff was hoisted on to the Unimog, where the medic stuck a drip in his arm. The convoy roared out of the wadi towards the motorway, guns still raging. The front-gunner on the lead wagon saw two white jeeps veering towards them, full of Iraqi troops. He swung Gimpies, pinched triggers, stitched both jeeps with ladders of two hundred link. 7.62mm rounds notched bodywork, webbed windscreens, hit meat. The jeeps stopped, drivers and passengers obliterated.

  The pinkies howled on to the hardtop, and formed up, engines idling. The last wagon and the Unimog had been left behind. Seven men were absent, including the wounded Taff. The missing wagon suddenly caromed up in a belch of black smoke, tossing an axle and wheels into the air. A pinky went back for the crews, but the driver saw only the burning wreck and the Unimog gutted. He fast-tracked to the rest. The wagons burned rubber down the highway, looped cross-country to the emergency RV. The crews hung on there for twenty-four hours, but the lost men never arrived.

  In fact, they were already en route to the border. After the others had bugged out, they jumped on one of the Iraqi jeeps shot up minutes before. Evading the blitz from the ridge, they drove through a tunnel under the road and emerged on the opposite carriageway. The other crews had seen the vehicle pass too far away to register that their comrades were on it.

  They hammered the jeep until it clapped out, then started tabbing. The wounded Taff refused to be carried, and staggered on. After forty-eight hours, though, the rest of the patrol knew he’d peg if they didn’t get transport. They held up the next truck that came along, shot the driver in the arm and administered medical treatment. Then they drove his truck into the desert, where it soon conked out. On foot again, they made a Bedouin camp and persuaded one of the tribesmen to sell his lorry, pooling the twenty gold ‘escape’ sovereigns each man had been issued for emergencies. By the time they made the Saudi-Arabian border after five days on the run, Taff was comatose. Only emergency surgery saved his life.

  After leaving the ERV, the rest of the patrol stayed in the field. In early February they located a column of Scud erector-launchers and escort vehicles in the Wadi Amiq, nicknamed ‘Scud Alley’. They hid up and waited till the column got under way after last light, then painted it with laser target-designators. Two waves of F-15 fighter-bombers pitched out of the night, searing the convoy with bombs and cannon-fire. The fuel went up in a balloon of napalm that fried the crews. The SAS took out more vehicles with Milan rockets.

  Another D squadron patrol, Delta Two Zero, laser-painted another couple of Scuds for an air-strike, then wrecked a Scud control centre and a nearby OP, taking out thirteen of the enemy.

  On 8 February Peter Ratcliffe’s Alpha One Zero patrol carried out a stealth attack on another microwave Scud-control station, Victor Two. Part of a large complex sited on the main Baghdad–Amman road, it was defended by two concrete bunkers. The plan was to sabotage the switch-gear in underground silos.

  This was a raid in L Detachment style. A team of five demolitions-men led by Ratcliffe himself would enter the main compound, covered by crews of three wagons in the lee of a high berm, about two hundred metres south of the road. A Milan missile on a fourth pinky would slam the right guard-bunker the moment the charges went up. The left bunker would be taken out by a team with a LAW 66mm rocket-launcher. The only sign of the enemy as they approached was two three-ton lorries parked by the road, slightly to the south of the installation. They appeared to be deserted.

  Ratcliffe and his team penetrated the complex through a gap in the wall, and were amazed to find themselves in a labyrinth of twisted steel and shattered concrete. Ratcliffe clicked that the place had been hit by Coalition bombers, and was furious he hadn’t been told. The switch-gear silos were already in ruins, but the control tower was still functioning. Ratcliffe told his chief demo-man, an ex-Para called ‘Mugger’, to blow the tower instead. Mugger said he’d prepared the charges for switch-gear, not steel-cutting: they weren’t the right tool for the job. Ratcliffe insisted. Mugger clamped charges on three of the mast’s legs and added extra plastic explosive.

  Mugger and his two assistants set the charges and primed them with two-minute delays. While they were doing it, the team assigned to take out the left-hand bunker was spotted by a driver who’d been asleep in one of the trucks. Patrol boss ‘Major Peter’ squiffed three starflashes from his M16. The driver hit the deck with three slugs in his belly, but the gunshots alerted the sentries in the bunkers, who returned fire. A Milan missile shooshed into the right bunker, slapped concrete, detonated in catherine-wheel arcs of flame. The LAW shooter on Peter’s team was about to blast the left bunker, when another Iraqi driver leapt on his back and tried to throttle him. The shooter’s mate rushed across and clumped the Iraqi with a rifle-butt.

  Four of Ratcliffe’s team had already taken cover on the other side of the wall. Ratcliffe and Mugger were about to dip through the gap when they heard Peter’s shots and the blam of the Milan missile, followed by a cacophony of fire. AK47 ball sizzed off the wall: tracer looped-the-loop in rococo patterns. Ratcliffe knew they were stuck. Outside, the world’s biggest firefight was going on; inside they would be stitched by their own charges in ninety seconds. There was no choice: they had to run out into the enemy fire.

  The two of them ducked through the hole and joined the others. They spread out in line abreast and made a dash across the road towards the berm two hundred metres away. ‘I swear not even the finest line-up ever made it from one end of the rugby pitch to the other at the speed we travelled that night,’ Ratcliffe recalled. They were still running when the charges went up one after the other. Ratcliffe didn’t stop to check if the tower was still standing. Rounds were zinging around his head, hiking up dust round his feet. He registered that the right bunker was in flames.

  They made the wagons unscathed, and were about to get back in the vehicles when they were spritzed by rifle and machine-gun fire from enemy on top of the berm. Two bullets holed Mugger’s shirt, and Ratcliffe felt one whamp over his head. He saw with horror that they were sitting ducks. The SAS gunners elevated Brownings, twin-Gimpies, and Mk19 grenade-launchers. Guns shuddered. Welts of brilliance torpedoed the berm. Grenades wheezed and popped. The SAS drivers started up. The men skipped aboard. A swerving wagon sent Ratcliffe flying, hurled his M16 out of his hand. He tottered to his feet, was about to go hunt his weapon, when the driver yelled, ‘Jump on or we’re fucking going without you!’ As the Land Rover bumped into the desert with enemy bullets still grooving its chassis, Ratcliffe recalled that his twenty gold ‘escape’ sovereigns were hidden in the butt of his rifle.

  Despite shaky intel, the raid had gone like clockwork – there were zero casualties. Two motorcyclists the RSM dispatched the following morning confirmed that the mast was down. At the lying-up place, Ratcliffe zipped off a blunt ‘mission accomplished’ message, lit a gasper and inhaled deeply. ‘We had done the business,’ he said, ‘and got out with all our personnel and all our vehicles intact.’1 For his bravery and leadership, Ratcliffe would later be awarded the DCM.

  98. ‘The SAS had some new curtains to choose. Saddam could go swivel’

  Next day, Ratcliffe copped orders to move south and find an area where all four half-squadron patrols could rendezvous. A resupply mission was overdue, but there were no Chinooks available to bring out desperately needed fuel, rations and water. Instead Lt. Col. ‘
J’ had decided to send the supplies overland in a convoy of three-tonners, escorted by the spare B Squadron men in six pinkies. Ratcliffe located a perfect site in the Wadi Tubal – a sealed-off ravine that could take seventy vehicles and was invisible to anyone more than a few metres from the lip. Delta One Bravo came in later, reporting the loss of their seven men. They weren’t aware that they were on the run.

  The news from the other half of A Squadron was also bad. The day after Ratcliffe had hit the microwave station, a two-wagon patrol of Alpha Three Zero, led by the SSM ‘Barry’, had driven into a trap near a communications centre. The enemy had let them come in, encircled them, bumped them from the rear. They had managed to get one of the wagons out, but Barry’s driver reversed into a ditch, and the pinky ended up with two wheels spinning free. Barry took rounds in the thigh, groin and legs. The two others hauled him behind an anthill. With slugs shaving air around them, they went into a fighting withdrawal, one man heaving the wounded SSM, the other giving covering fire. They made about two hundred metres from the crashed wagon, when the Iraqis started closing in. Barry had been slipping in and out of consciousness, but came round and clicked what was going on. He ordered them to bug out. He said he would hold the enemy off. ‘Me against a few dozen Iraqis is pretty fair odds,’ he gasped.

  One of the men offered to give him a coup de grâce. Barry thanked him, but said he’d take his chance: he was a fluent Arabic-speaker, and thought he might be able to talk the enemy into sparing him. The others weren’t convinced. They’d heard the stories about Iraqi brutality. They went off reluctantly, but considered him a dead man. The pair escaped under Barry’s covering fire, and made the RV with the rest of the half-squadron. In fact, Barry survived. It took the Iraqis a day to find him, and instead of finishing him off, they hoisted him on to a stretcher. Though he was as harshly interrogated as the other prisoners, he was also given expert surgery by a British-trained Iraqi doctor. He was later awarded the MC – one of only two ever doled out to non-commissioned officers of 22 SAS.