by Damien Lewis
The pair of British warplanes banked around in a burning turn, then tore back across the enemy positions like streaks of lightning blazing through the night. They dipped low over the Fedayeen positions, their pounding slipstream ripping the branches from the scattered palm trees as they practically set the desert ablaze with their afterburners.
For the first time in what felt like a lifetime, the terrain behind the three battle-weary wagons had gone dark. It was totally devoid of enemy headlights, muzzle flashes or any sign of movement. Presumably, the enemy commander figured the jets would soon be gone, in which case he could finish off the British force at his leisure.
The one thing he couldn’t know was that in the wake of those warplanes a heavy-lift Chinook was in-bound, and the twenty-six blokes on the three crippled vehicles were just a few thousand yards away from getting plucked out of the cauldron of death. If they could make it out of there, rarely would a force have snatched such a victory – or at least survival – from the jaws of defeat.
That’s if the blokes could make it to that grid, get the Chinook in safely, and get pulled out alive.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
The vehicles hammered onwards, although Moth felt able to ease off the gas just a little, with those warplanes doing their stuff above them. It was just as well, for the wagon was spitting and popping as the engine gasped its last.
Barely minutes later they pulled to a halt on a featureless patch of ground. Moth killed the motor, and just moments before it seemed destined to burst into flames. Raggy dived off the hot, smoking bonnet, as blokes piled off the rear into all-around defence.
Grey’s first priority now was to blow the wagon. He started to throw out kit from the rear, so he could get to the charge and prepare to set the fuse system. He dug down to it, and his frozen fingers began feverishly to rip off the black gaffer tape that protected the trigger mechanism. In the back of his mind he knew he had to check it over first – for one or more of the wagons’ fuses in the wadi of death had failed to blow.
Ed was on the radio calling for an update on the helo extraction. He came off the air following a terse exchange, balling his fists into his temples with tension.
‘Change of fucking plan!’ he yelled over the radios. ‘We’re not going to blow the wagons. If the Chinook’s delayed it’ll come down as the wagons blow and get caught in the blast. Rip everything out that you can salvage, and we’ll leave ’em to the fast air. Chinook in-bound in five minutes.’
In spite of their utter exhaustion the blokes started sparking now. So began a fevered rush of activity, as they tried to tear all the sensitive kit out of the wagons in the short time they had remaining. In theory they were leaving them to get hit by the warplanes and denied to the enemy that way, but there were never any guarantees.
Working fast and trying not to show any lights, they started stripping sensitive kit from the Pinkies, as the Tornadoes flew close and very noisy orbits above them. Grey set about ripping the radio from its mounting, while Moth did the same with the other comms systems and their Blue Force Tracker unit.
That done, Grey grabbed the GPMG, unbolted it from its pivot mount and slung it over his shoulder. He clicked together the four hundred rounds of link, and wrapped the entire lot around his neck and torso. He hauled his Bergen and the Diemaco assault rifle out of the back of the wagon, and dumped them on the ground beside him.
To his rear the Dude moved off from the wagon staggering under the weight of the .50-cal plus a tin of ammo.
Grey stepped away from their Pinkie with the GPMG on his shoulder, Bergen on his back, ammo wrapped around him and his Diemaco in hand. In spite of his total and utter exhaustion, he was now carrying some eighty-plus kilos of weight slung around his person and somehow managing to stay on his feet.
He glanced at Moth and Raggy, plus some of the others from their wagon. Every man was plastered with mud and dust, mixed with a slick of cold, icy sweat; plus they were weighed down with all the kit that they could carry.
‘You blokes ready?’ Grey grunted.
He got a series of terse nods all around.
For an instant he paused, eyeing the trusted Pinkie that they were abadoning. He leaned in, checked the milometer, and did a quick mental calculation. From the reading, he figured they’d covered 1,019 kilometres since setting out from the LZ north of the Euphrates, and for a good part of that they’d been taking murderous fire. But he’d never have the chance to count the unbelievable number of hits their wagon had taken, for this was the last goodbye.
Grey turned to walk the short distance to the LZ. Not a moment too soon he detected a distant, eerie blue glow moving across the desert towards them. It was the unmistakable signature of a Chinook coming in low and fast at night. At that height, and with the way the twin rotors whipped up the air, the static electricity formed a flickering dust halo, like some kind of an alien light show.
Right now, it was the most welcome sight that any of the men had ever seen.
The lone Chinook circled in from the southeast, its twin rotors silhouetted against the glow of first light. It flared above the LZ, which Ed had marked with a distinctive symbol formed from IR cyalumes – chemical light-sticks. The helo came down in a thick, choking dust cloud, the door gunners sweeping the terrain with their miniguns as it descended, but there seemed to be nothing moving out there that was remotely close to the LZ.
The helo’s ramp was down before the wheels touched the desert, and the blokes staggered aboard. Grey took one last look around him before the Chinook spooled up to speed. He tried to check that Moth, Dude, Raggy and the others were all on board, but with the choking cloud of dust kicked up by the rotors he could barely see his hand in front of his face.
The indistinct forms crouched all around him were pretty much unrecognizable, and the last thing they ever wanted to do here was to leave a man behind.
From the open ramp there came a yell: ‘Twenty-six aboard!’
The helo’s loadmaster had done a body count, so presumably that should be everyone. Though they were a fragmented group culled from across M Squadron, presumably all the blokes from their makeshift force were present and correct.
Let’s go.
The turbines reached a screaming fever pitch, and the helo hauled itself into the air. With the twin-rotors powering the Chinook skywards, half the men of M Squadron were now pulling away from the desert that had so nearly been the death of them.
Through the porthole-like window Grey could see scores of burning vehicles scattered over the terrain to the north, south and the east, indicating the magnitude of the terrain over which they had done battle, plus the true the extent of the forces they had been up against.
Sixty against a hundred thousand indeed.
It was an overwhelming sight, and it reinforced in his mind just what a miracle it was that they were getting the hell out of there. They’d penetrated a thousand kilometres behind enemy lines, yet somehow they’d escaped from the trap that had been set for them in the cauldron that was northern Iraq. They’d done so by the very skin of their teeth, and with the gods on their side. Somehow, they were returning home from Operation No Return – as long as no one put a surface-to-air missile, or a long burst of 12.7mm fire, up their arses.
The helo banked hard, turned southwards and accelerated to its 250 kph cruising speed. As it sped low and fast across the formless desert, Grey slumped down on the cold steel floor, letting the GPMG fall from his hands. He felt his head drop to his knees. He was suddenly aware of how totally and utterly burned out he was.
He had one thought at the forefront of his mind now: there were a load of blokes from the Squadron who were still on the ground out there somewhere, desperately trying to evade and escape from the enemy. Presumably, the OC and his HQ Troop must have been plucked out of their hide by now and be on a flight out of there. Presumably Sebastian was with them, and wondering how on earth he’d survived it all.
But what about the third force, plus Gunner and h
is passenger? Grey wondered how many they’d lost already, and how many more they might lose in the coming hours, as the fierce Iraqi sun cast its harsh, burning light across the battlefield. Come sun-up, there would be nowhere left to hide. The only option would be to fight and die, or surrender.
This was a long way from over yet.
Where the hell was Mucker, he wondered, the fourth member of his team? He’d got two of his team out and, some might argue, the entire twenty-six-man unit, but still he’d left a man behind. He glanced at Moth and Dude. He could see a mixture of shock and relief written across their features, plus a growing sense of what almost looked like failure.
He leaned across to them. ‘Lads, don’t fucking worry about it!’ he yelled. ‘As a team we did more than okay out there.’
Moth forced a smile: ‘Yeah, maybe we did all right.’
‘Moth, you were mega with the wagon, not to mention the air. You drove like a fucking maniac and you smashed out the rounds from the M203. And Dude, you did a great job on the gun, mate. Plus you didn’t get your head blown off, which is a bloody miracle!’
The Dude grinned, exhaustedly. Shrugged. ‘Yeah. Tell you what though, we’ll have some stories for our grandkids, eh? Did I ever tell you guys the one about …’
It was an hour’s flight to the base that M Squadron had forward-mounted from, just south of the Euphrates River, at the G2 airfield. Grey didn’t get to hear the rest of the Dude’s story, for he’d long since fallen into a deep sleep. Waking him from that would have been like trying to waken the dead.
The first he knew of their arrival was the helo’s ramp whining open and the cold inrush of air. He levered himself to his feet, grabbed his GPMG and the rest of his kit, and turned to leave the Chinook’s echoing hold. As he did so he felt a hand on his shoulder.
It was Raggy. ‘Cheers for the lift, mate.’
Grey couldn’t help but laugh. ‘You’re the only one who’s bloody said thank you.’
Together with Moth, Dude and Scruff, they headed down the helo’s open ramp and into the blinding light of the Iraqi dawn.
EPILOGUE
On arrival at the G2 airfield, the remnant force of Six Troop was reunited with M Squadron’s HQ Troop. The Squadron OC and the rest of his Troop – Sebastian the interpreter included – had been pulled out of theatre by a Chinook flying a hot-extraction mission, and only shortly before their force of twenty-six had been rescued.
The HQ Troop was extracted complete with its two Pinkies, and so by then some two-thirds of the Squadron had been pulled out of Iraq, which left only the third group, plus Gunner and his quad, at large.
But that day – 24 March 2003 – news broke on Al Jazeera TV that ‘ten British SAS and Special Forces had been killed in northern Iraq’. Al Jazeera cited Iraqi military sources as the basis for the story. More worrying still, footage was shown of victorious Iraqi forces riding a captured Pinkie and a quad bike – both of which were M Squadron vehicles – in order to substantiate the story.
Those men who had already been pulled out of Iraq had been placed in isolation, pending debriefs on the mission. But in spite of that, news filtered through to them regarding what the Iraqis were claiming had happened to those forces left on the ground – namely, that ten had been killed. Without doubt, this was the darkest moment of the entire mission. British forces had secured satellite images of the battlefield, which proved conclusively that the three Pinkies abandoned at the Six Troop extraction grid had been destroyed by air strikes. This meant that the captured vehicles shown on the Arab media could only come from three possible sources: from the wadi of death, from the third force still unaccounted for, or from Gunner and his passenger.
The Iraqis had also displayed a plethora of captured British kit, including various weaponry, maps and radio systems. Because the two captured Pinkies were only lightly damaged and still drivable, it seemed likely that these had been taken – along with the radio sets – at the wadi of death, and that the demolition charges had failed to blow (as many of the men had suspected). Detonators failing to go off constituted an equipment failure as opposed to human error, but still this loss weighed heavily on the Squadron.
By now day one of the Coalition war effort in Iraq was drawing to an end, and American and British forces were pushing across the border from Kuwait. It was far from welcome news that kit had been captured by the enemy, and particularly when it included such sensitive gear. But above all, it was extremely worrying to have so many elite operators from M Squadron still missing or potentially killed in action, as there were right then.
The day of their extraction, the men of M Squadron were shown photos taken from a series of air recces flown over the LUP where they had first been attacked. These showed that the area was crisscrossed with tank tracks, demonstrating that it had been comprehensively overrun by Iraqi armour. Without any Milans or similar heavy-armour-killing capability, the Squadron would have faced Iraqi T-72s at close range with no way of fighting back, had they not abandoned the LUP when they did.
In an extraordinary turn of events, the third force was finally pulled out of Iraq late that day. With one Pinkie, three surviving quads and twenty-one blokes, their group had been horribly overloaded and lacking in mobility. Fortunately for them, it was the remnant of Six Troop at the southern end of the wadi of death that had drawn the main enemy force.
As the Iraqis had pursued the Six Troop remnant east and south, this third group had been able to sneak away into the dark at a slow crawl, which was all their vehicles could manage. Being barely mobile and low on fuel, they had no option but to find a location in which to go to ground. They’d stumbled on a ravine, which made a decent hideaway. By the time the extraction Chinook was able to get in to lift them out, they’d been lying low for many hours, during which time the battle had been moving south and west and away from their location. They were forced to blow their Pinkie, just before being extracted, for there was no room on the Chinook for the vehicle.
The twenty-one men thus rescued included Mucker, the quad driver on Grey’s team. He had been one of the first into the wadi of death, following Gunner as quad leader. He’d made the decision to keep going through the soft ground, and he was nearly through when his quad bike had sunk to its axles. He’d rigged the bike with explosives, set it to blow, and joined the group gathering at the far end of the wadi.
Now that the third force was reunited with the rest of M Squadron, they were all but complete. Miraculously, there had been no loss of life. There were injuries, but nothing life-threatening. The story put out by the Iraqis that ten British Special Forces had been killed had to be a tissue of lies – although the two men on the quad were still missing. Nothing had been heard of Gunner and the officer perched on the rear of his machine. The two men were listed as ‘missing in action’.
*
From the G2 airfield the men of the Squadron were ferried back to their forward mounting base. There, the initial debriefs took place, during which the bigger picture began to emerge.
The major revelation resulting from their mission into northern Iraq was how woefully inaccurate the intelligence had proved to be. At this stage in the conflict, and contrary to what the Squadron had been led to believe, the Iraqi 5th Corps were far from ready to surrender, not to mention the Fedayeen. If nothing else, M Squadron’s epic mission had secured ground truth in northern Iraq, proving that the Coalition were going to have to fight for every last inch of territory.
CSAR (combat search-and-rescue) flights overflew Iraq, plus the Combat RV point in Syria, as they tried to find the elusive two-man quad force. A good week after the rest of the Squadron had been pulled out, these repeated Chinook flights over Syrian territory forced the Syrians finally to admit that they had captured Gunner and his passenger, and were holding them. During all this time the two men had remained listed as missing in action.
It wasn’t until 14 April – the day that the war in Iraq effectively ended, with the fall of Tikrit – that Gunner
and his passenger were finally released. They’d been held for approaching three full weeks by the Syrians.
It turned out that they had made it well into Syrian territory and were a good four hours into ‘safe’ terrain and making for the Combat RV, when the quad had hit a ditch. They’d up-ended it, and were attempting to drag the machine out of the ditch when the Syrian forces had overrun them. Because dress was down to personal choice in the Squadron, Gunner had been wearing US-style combats, which have better rip-stop qualities. As a result, the Syrians had at first mistaken him for an American elite operator.
It had taken personal intervention from the then Prime Minister Tony Blair, who sent the Foreign Office minister Mike O’Brien to Damascus, Syria’s capital, to win the men’s release. He managed to convince the Syrians that the two soldiers were British Special Forces and not Americans, and to persuade them to let the men go.
They’d suffered the usual kind of interrogation at the hands of the Syrian authorities, but they had survived it all remarkably well. Gunner’s biggest gripe seemed to be that the Syrians had dressed him in a cheap black nylon suit to prepare him for release, complete with black winkle-picker shoes. He’d have preferred to look the part of the man who was first in and last out, on what was without doubt the mission of a lifetime.
When Gunner and his pillion passenger were flown out of Syria, they were the last men of the Squadron to be heading home. Incredibly, the entire body of M Squadron had escaped from the fire of that mission without the loss of one single man. Gunner’s escape and evasion to Syria had taken more than a hundred miles to achieve, and it was hailed by the British media as ‘one of the most stirring escape stories yet to emerge from the Iraq War’.
The Times newspaper spoke about their achievement as an epic ‘triumph over adversity’. Charles Heyman, editor of the definitive Jane’s World Armies, commented: ‘There’s no doubt whatsoever that this is the sort of high standard of evasion of the enemy on the ground that we’ve come to expect of our Special Forces. It’s still pretty remarkable.’
