by Damien Lewis
The Land Rovers were nicknamed ‘Pinkies’, for they were painted the same light shade of desert pink that had proved such an effective camouflage for David Stirling’s Special Forces during the North African campaign of the Second World War. In fact, the Pinkies were pretty much the same kind of vehicle that Stirling’s SAS had used to attack German and Italian forces some sixty years before.
Penetrating hundreds of miles into the empty wastes of the Sahara Desert, Stirling’s SAS had used light jeeps to mount lightning raids on enemy targets, hitting especially hard at their airfields. Many argued that Stirling’s SAS – plus its sister force, the Long Range Desert Group – had managed to destroy more enemy aircraft in North Africa than the entire RAF. The commander of the German Afrika Korps, Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, admitted their forces had caused him ‘more damage than any other British unit of equal strength’, and the Pinkies had certainly proved their worth.
The driver on Grey’s Pinkie was Dave Saddler, otherwise known as ‘Moth’. Moth had pale skin through which you could see the blue of his veins, and there was an air of silent mystery about him. With his near-albino features and his watery-eyed, unblinking stare, he had a distinctly alien look. Moth was in his early twenties and he’d not long been with M Squadron. He’d transferred across from the SBS’s swimmer delivery vehicle (SDV) unit, and he was a specialist at underwater missions.
The swimmer delivery vehicle is a top-secret midget submersible, designed to transport combat divers over long distances to target. Needless to say, such underwater missions were a far cry from desert mobility ops, and Moth had the appearance of one who would be far more at home under water than under a burning Iraqi sun.
In terms of land-based combat ops Moth was a complete virgin, and Grey worried how he’d handle the forthcoming deployment to war. Grayling was a far more experienced vehicle operator, and he knew that he was going to have to force himself to hold back in Iraq if Moth was going to find his way as the driver on his team. Grey sat in the vehicle commander’s – the passenger – seat, behind a general-purpose machine-gun (GPMG) mounted on a pivot on the bonnet. In sharp contrast to himself and Moth – the former grim-faced, the latter decidedly spooky – the gunner positioned behind them in the wagon’s open rear was a cheerful breath of fresh air.
Chris McGreavy was an open-faced young American who’d somehow found his way into British Special Forces. He was one of the newest guys in the Squadron, and one of the tallest to boot. At six-foot-four he towered over most of them. He’d earned the nickname ‘Dude’ for the simple reason that he was seriously laid back, and he peppered his every sentence with that word. McGreavy never seemed to tire of nattering on, and it was all ‘Dude this’ and ‘Dude that’.
Grey didn’t particularly mind the Dude’s easy-going talkative ways. With Moth and Phil – the fourth member of his team – he’d got a couple of right still-waters-run-deep types, and McGreavy was good for filling in the long silences. In fact, the Dude was the odd one out in a lot of ways. No matter how hard they might try to smarten themselves up, both Moth and Phil were far from easy on the eye, not to mention hopelessly scruffy. And as for Grey, with his hooked and broken nose he was one ugly, scary-looking bastard. By contrast, the Dude sat tall and proud astride his perch on the rear of their wagon, like an advert for Rip Curl.
M Squadron being Special Forces, McGreavy was allowed to wear his beach-blond hair shaggy and long, framing his rugged good looks. But what really set the Dude apart as far as Grey was concerned was his family background. McGreavy was highly educated and he hailed from a mega-wealthy dynasty based in Houston, Texas, the oil-rich capital of the USA.
None of the others in Grey’s team – himself included – had more than scraped together a few O-levels. Grey couldn’t imagine what on earth had brought the Dude into British Special Forces, but he was determined to find out. During the weeks ahead he’d catch a quiet moment with him, fix him with his killer stare and get the full story out of him … that’s if McGreavy survived their coming Iraq missions.
The Dude was the least-practised operator in the Squadron, having been with the SBS for less than a year. He’d only just finished his probationary period – the months after selection during which a new operator has to learn and assimilate dozens of specialist skills. He was also bloody tall for a rear gunner. The .50-cal operator sat high on the vehicle’s rear, and Grey worried that having McGreavy perched up there was like an invitation to getting his head blown off.
Dude and Moth had been part of the M Squadron assault force that had hit the MV Nisha over those storm-swept December seas, but that was about the entirety of the action they’d seen. It had all been over in a couple of hours max, and it was very much a maritime operation. Once the Squadron deployed to Iraq Grey felt certain they’d be seeing combat, and he was determined to bring every man on his team out alive.
Phil Birch was the fourth member of Grey’s team. He operated outside the Pinkie on their dedicated quad bike. By contrast with Dude, Birch was definitely not the sharpest tool in the box, or over-easy on the eye. A slow-talking northerner, he always looked like a sack of shit – hence his nickname, ‘Mucker’.
Mucker’s grumpy persona turned a lot of blokes off, and that’s why Grey figured he’d got him on his team. But Grey actually valued his presence. He was hard as nails and a superlative soldier, plus he was totally and utterly reliable. No matter what shit went down, Grey knew that Mucker would always be there on his shoulder, his weapon at the ready.
Grey’s team had been bolted together at the start of their Kenya training. Grey was conscious of the lack of battle experience on his vehicle, and especially for the kind of missions they were likely to be tasked with once they were at war. Having Phil on his team helped balance things out a little – with a safe pair of hands being only ever a blast on the quad bike away.
Each team member had skills that he might well be called upon to use if the Squadron landed itself in the shit. Moth doubled as their communications specialist, and would be the one to call in any air strikes. He had recently qualified as a joint terminal attack controller (JTAC), which meant he could call in warplanes to drop precision-guided weapons onto targets. Small elite units such as theirs were almost inevitably going to face a larger, better-armed enemy force, and air power was one of the few ways they had in which to even up the odds a little. Grey was the team’s demolitions and sniper specialist, plus its medic.
Dude was the new kid on the block and he hadn’t yet secured any adquals (additional qualifications), but in the .50-cal he controlled one of the heaviest pieces of firepower in their Troop. M Squadron established their training camp in a remote patch of Kenyan bush and set about learning to know and love their Pinkies. Each open-topped wagon was fitted with a .50-cal heavy machine-gun or a 40mm grenade launcher, plus a GPMG up front. As a result they packed some fearsome firepower, but when loaded with ammo, water, food, fuel and associated kit they were badly overweight. There was no spare capacity for armour or ballistic matting, which meant that the vehicle’s occupants had zero protection from enemy rounds – other than speed, manoeuvrability and firepower.
At first the Pinkies seemed to suffer an alarming design fault. When out doing the Squadron’s first driving exercises in the bush, the driveshafts broke on two of the Pinkies, including Grey’s wagon. Fortunately, their Land Rover had been crawling at dead slow over a dry, boulder-strewn riverbed. Even so, the noise the driveshaft had made as it sheared in two and smacked into the rocks below had sounded pretty close to terminal.
As he was the wagon’s driver, vehicle maintenance was Moth’s baby. It had taken him just a few moments to slip out of his seat and slide under the Pinkie to diagnose the problem. Mucker had roared up on his Honda quad bike to check what was wrong, and upon Moth’s announcing that the driveshaft had sheared he was quick to give vent to his feelings.
‘Fucking wagons are a fucking pile of shit,’ Mucker grunted.
‘Not normally, mate, th
ey’re not,’ Grey remarked. ‘The Pinkie’s about as good as it gets for desert ops.’
‘Well, what kind of a wanker thinks we can take them to Iraq?’ Mucker continued. ‘Two days in and we’re two cranks down. They’re shit.’
‘Like I said, normally they’re not,’ Grey replied, with infinite patience. ‘I did six weeks in the Omani desert and never had a problem. Normally, they’re pretty much bullet-proof. I reckon we got a Friday afternoon batch with this lot.’
‘Should have been driving a Hummer, dude,’ McGreavy remarked, in his signature Texan drawl. ‘Man, those things are freakin’ unstoppable.’
The problem with the Pinkies only worsened. The crankshafts on six of the vehicles went down in as many days. It was hugely worrying. No way could the Squadron afford to carry spare drive-shafts with them in Iraq, let alone risk the time required to replace a broken one when moving covertly behind enemy lines.
Finally, the Squadron’s mechanics diagnosed the root cause of the problem: the Land Rovers had been fitted with a dodgy set of drive-shafts. The drive-shafts were replaced, and that seemed to solve the issue – which meant that the Squadron could get back to readying itself to drive and fight at war.
One of the US Special Forces operators was a Brit, an ex-Parachute Regiment bloke called Jim Smith. A few years back he’d married an American girl and joined the US military, progressing by stages into the ranks of the elite. Predictably, the men of the Squadron had nicknamed him ‘Delta Jim’. It was fascinating to hear him talk them through US Special Forces procedures for vehicle operations behind enemy lines.
Delta Jim talked about what it was like to deploy and to fight behind enemy lines when facing a far superior enemy force that was hell-bent on hunting you down. He described the means via which vehicle-mounted SF troops could evade enemy tracking and tracing techniques, and the kind of escape options that were available. The golden rule of such operations was always to try to avoid a fight against a far larger enemy force, but if you had to stand and fight, then to do so at a time and place of your choosing.
As Grey listened to the briefing and chipped in the odd remark, he figured this would all be very new to Moth, Dude and the Squadron’s other youngsters. This was the hard reality of what it meant to play hide-and-seek with a far superior enemy force in terrain that more often than not offered little or no cover. This was what they would be heading into in Iraq, and he was keen to see how the new guys on his team would face up to the coming challenge.
Their unit-specific call-sign for Iraq was Zero Six Bravo, which Moth would use when calling in the warplanes. Grey couldn’t help noticing how much their call-sign echoed that of Bravo Two Zero.
And although he wasn’t the superstitious kind, he couldn’t shake off the feeling that all hell awaited them in the deserts of Iraq.
CHAPTER THREE
The vehicle mobility training was as rigorous as they could make it – but getting slick at such ops was still going to be a massive challenge in the time available. A few years back Grey had spent six weeks traversing the Omani desert with the SAS, living and breathing the reality of a simulated patrol deep behind enemy lines, and before that he’d spent months learning the standard operating procedures of desert mobility work.
Here in Kenya, all of that had to be telescoped into a fraction of the time. The Squadron would spend fourteen days learning the basics of vehicle-borne mobility work, after which they’d run a makeshift ‘test week’. The eight blokes from the SAS and US Special Forces would act as informal ‘examiners’, as they put the men through an extended desert exercise. The training programme was designed to squeeze as much rigour into the time available, and to extract as much as possible from the expertise on hand.
Those first two weeks covered the A–Z of vehicle mobility ops: how to live from a wagon over extended periods; how to manage all the food, water, fuel, ammo, weaponry and personal kit, and to maximize ease of access in a cramped, open-topped vehicle; how to refuel from jerry-cans in a burning-hot and dust-ridden environment; how to free a vehicle bogged to its axles in sand, using shovels, sand-ladders and winches; how to keep the vehicle-mounted weapons clean during endless days spent driving through a dust cloud thrown up by the wagon in front.
Moving as a squadron meant orchestrating close to thirty Pinkies plus quad bikes on the move. It meant operating in a strict formation within which each vehicle commander understood his place in relation to the others, while keeping a good distance between Pinkies so as to avoid making an easy target. It meant doing so in conditions akin to a massive sandstorm, and while keeping complete radio silence so that the Squadron’s movements couldn’t be traced by an enemy using electronic tracking.
It meant learning to do so under the permanent threat of attack, and always being ready to use vehicle fire-and-manoeuvre drills to extract from an enemy ambush. It meant learning what amount of fuel the wagons burned over what type of ground, how much water a man needed in what conditions, and what type of driving techniques various terrains required. But most challenging of all was learning how to do all of this at night, when driving with no lights – on ‘black light’ – and using night-vision aids to render the desert into a fluorescent green videogame daylight.
Jim Smith and his fellow American operators had been given a Pinkie and a quad between them, so they could muck in with the Squadron’s training. They’d deployed to Kenya complete with rakes of top-notch Gucci kit, including state-of-the-art weaponry, body armour and GPS. They were used to driving hulking great Humvees, which like everything else American were built extra-large. Now they had to squeeze themselves, plus all of their gleaming kit, into the cramped confines of a jeep that was completely open to the elements.
For an ex-Para like Delta Jim, being in a Land Rover again was like coming home. But the rest of Jim’s team were seriously nonplussed. They were used to their Humvees. A 4WD on steroids, a Humvee is ‘up-armoured’ – encased in an armoured shell which provides substantial protection for the vehicle’s occupants from enemy fire or mine strikes. By comparison, M Squadron’s Pinkies were open to sun, rain and bullets alike – like throwbacks to the Second World War.
Yet over the days in Kenya the rest of Jim’s team warmed to the Pinkies. They weren’t low, claustrophobic or cramped, which was how the interior of a Humvee felt. They had better all-round vision, and vastly superior arcs of fire. There was a real sense of freedom when working from an open-topped vehicle, one that imbued the operators with something of a Lawrence of Arabia devil-may-care attitude. And on a practical level the Land Rovers were far more frugal with the diesel, which gave them a much greater range.
There was one other serious advantage to operating from an open vehicle: it made for easier navigation. On top of everything else, the lads of M Squadron had to learn how to find their way across hundreds of miles of trackless bush, more often than not at night. Under such conditions the stars provided an invaluable ‘map’ from which to keep track of progress, and a wagon open to the elements offered all-round vision of the moon and stars.
The final week of mobility training was a blur of desert-driving exercises, ones that were scrutinized by Jim and his team, some of the best at vehicle-borne mobility operations that the Americans have, plus the SAS team. By now the men of M Squadron had acclimatized well, growing seriously unshaven and sporting a thick film of dust and dirt over any exposed skin. As their bodies adjusted to the searing heat, they were sweating and drinking less than they had been during the first few days.
This last week wasn’t so much about being tested as about getting the men to work as a team in such conditions. The Squadron headed out one evening at last light. The men were tasked with spending the entire night pushing through the dry bush and scrub. They had a distant objective to reach by first light, and they had to navigate their way using the stars and compass alone. Grey’s wagon took the lead, for he was a shrewd and skilful navigator when moving during the hours of darkness.
When doing s
uch a night drive the Squadron moved in such a fashion that vehicles had to basically play follow-my-leader. It was the best way to ensure they didn’t lose each other in the dark. Grey was using night-vision goggles that flipped down over the eyes on twin leather cups. They looked like a small pair of binoculars, weighed about the same and worked by amplifying the ambient light given off by the moon and stars.
There was little cloud cover and the wide expanse of the African sky was star-bright. The NVG functioned exceptionally well under such conditions. Every way Grey looked the desert was illuminated in a weird, foggy-green glow, which was almost as good as driving in daylight. In an effort not to lose his natural night vision he kept flicking the NVG up and down as their wagon pushed ahead. Every now and then he’d catch the twin glow of a big cat’s eyes staring out from the darkened bush.
They had been making good progress when, almost without warning, the sandstorm hit. They heard it before they saw it, a strange hollow roaring sound whipping through the night. As the storm bore down upon them Grey flipped up his NVG and pulled on his sand goggles – plastic eyewear a bit like a welder’s glasses – to keep the cloud of driving grit out of his eyes. Above the deafening snarl of the storm he yelled for Moth and Dude to do likewise.
The sandstorm was a monster, piling up like a thundercloud on the horizon and dumping half the desert on their heads. The standard operating procedure was to go firm when hit by such a storm. You’d wrap a shemagh – an Arab headscarf – tightly around your face to shield it from the stinging sand, and wait for it to pass. But tonight’s mission was a time-specific tasking, and if they held still for too long they’d fail to reach their objective.
The thick, howling storm blanked everything out, cutting off the Pinkies from the heavens – which meant that Grey couldn’t use the stars to navigate any more. But there was one upside. The storm having reduced visibility to a matter of tens of metres, no watching ‘enemy’ would be able to see them, and that in turn meant that Grey could risk using a GPS. The faint glow thrown off by the gizmo’s screen was invisible in such conditions.
