Soldier J: Counter Insurgency in Aden

by Shaun Clarke

  ‘It’s not that bad,’ he said eventually, raising his steady grey eyes to look directly at them. ‘From here, it’s all downhill to the DZ, which means we’ll move quicker than we’ve been doing so far – even if we’re held up again by Trooper Malkin. I estimate that we can cover the remaining ground at dusk tomorrow and still get to the DZ in time for the Paras’ drop.’

  Ellsworth nodded his agreement, then glanced around the sangar. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘why not? If these sangars were built by tribesmen, the locals won’t be suspicious if they see movement up here – they’ll think we’re Yemeni guerrillas. So, yes, Sergeant, let’s basha down here until tomorrow night. That might also buy enough time for Trooper Malkin to recover.’

  ‘This sangar’s bigger than the other one,’ Dead-eye observed, glancing over the wall at the sangar opposite, ‘so we’ll divide into two groups, one of four men, the other of five, and put the largest group in here.’

  ‘That sounds sensible,’ Ellsworth said. ‘I’ll stay here with the radio operator. You divide the rest up as you think best.’

  ‘Corporal Brooke and Lance-Corporal Moody work well together, and since Moody’s now got the radio, we’ll put Brooke in here with you. As your second in command, I’ll stay here as well. I don’t think the smaller group should include someone as sick as Trooper Malkin, so we’ll have him in here as our fifth man. Sergeant Ashman here …’ – Dead-eye nodded at Jimbo – ‘will be in charge of the other sangar, with Lance-Corporal Johnson and Troopers Riley and Thomas. The latter two will man the Bren gun.’

  ‘Don’t you think Johnson should be in with Trooper Malkin, to look after him?’

  ‘No, boss. Johnson’s already given Malkin his medicine and says it’ll be a couple of hours before it takes effect – if it does. If it doesn’t, on the other hand, the sangars are only a few feet apart, so we can get Johnson in here in seconds if the need arises. I think it’s more important that the smaller group, being in charge of our sole machine-gun, is composed of healthy, alert men. So Malkin should stay here with us.’

  ‘Fine,’ Ellsworth said. ‘Please attend to it, Sergeant.’

  Dead-eye and Jimbo sorted the men into their two separate groups, each of which took over its own sangar: Captain Ellsworth, Dead-eye, Ken, Les and Terry in the larger one; Jimbo, Larry, Ben and Taff in the smaller.

  ‘We always get the second-rate accommodation,’ Ben groaned. ‘That’s ‘cause we‘re the virgins.’

  ‘They don’t respect our finer qualities,’ Taff agreed. ‘They think we’re second-class citizens.’

  ‘You have a complaint, Troopers?’ Jimbo asked, appearing out of nowhere and glaring at them.

  ‘What’s that, Sarge?’ Ben asked, startled.

  ‘Are you complaining about the sangar you’ve been placed in?’

  ‘No, Sarge!’

  ‘Absolutely not, Sarge!’ Taff Thomas added.

  ‘Good. I wouldn’t like to think you were unhappy. I like to feel that my men are well pleased with the decisions I make. Otherwise, I’d be forced to put my boot halfway up your arseholes.’

  ‘We’re both fine,’ Taff said quickly.

  ‘Then get your lucky arseholes into that sangar and start setting things up.’

  Once in their respective sangars, the men set them up like regular OPs, with rubber groundsheets rolled out for sleeping on, ponchos raised over the sangars and covered with loose gravel and vegetation, and a well for weapons dug out in the middle between the groundsheets. The men then tossed for who took the first watch and who the first nap. When this was decided, most of them settled in for the night, either sleeping or on sentry duty.

  However, just before he lay down for his own three hours of sleep, Captain Ellsworth asked Les to contact Lieutenant-Colonel Callaghan in the Thumier HQ. When Les had done so, Ellsworth explained what had happened and what they planned to do. Callaghan, who had been in worse situations, swept Ellsworth’s apologies aside and agreed that there was no alternative. He then told him to have a good sleep and wished him luck for the morrow.

  The communication over, a more relaxed Captain Ellsworth sighed and settled down for the night. Though the air beneath the camouflaged ponchos was hot and stifling, he, like most of the men, slept well.

  10

  The sun rose at 0530 hours as an immense fiery ball that poured what looked like lava along the mountain peaks, increasing the temperature and bringing with it the tormenting flies and mosquitoes. In the morning’s crimson-hued light, the men awoke, yawned, rubbed their eyes and joined the sentries at the wall, looking down the hill to see an Arab hamlet a mere 1000 yards below them. The hamlet was little more than a random collection of mud-and-stone houses, with goats tethered to posts, chickens cooped up in wire-mesh cages, mangy, scavenging dogs, and Arab men and women going about their morning chores.

  ‘No guerrillas down there,’ Captain Ellsworth said.

  ‘Yes, there are,’ Dead-eye corrected him, pointing to the ridge directly above the hamlet, about 50 yards from the sangars, where armed men were tramping uphill to begin what would be a long day’s watch.

  ‘Damn!’ Ellsworth whispered, as much embarrassed as surprised.

  Annoyed to find that they were so close to a village held by the guerrillas, Dead-eye checked his map, then said: ‘That must be Shi’b Taym.’ Even as he looked up from the map, more guerrillas emerged from some of the primitive houses to eat breakfast around a communal table in the middle of the settlement, near what looked like a well. ‘They’re holding the village, all right.’

  ‘Damn!’ Ellsworth repeated, this time louder.

  ‘Well,’ Dead-eye said. ‘Not much we can do except take notes, enjoy the scenery and wait for darkness to come. When it does, we can move out unseen.’

  Ellsworth sighed. ‘I suppose so.’ Turning away from the wall to look at the other three men in the sangar, he saw that Terry still looked white and drawn. Ken and Les were making a brew-up with a hexamine stove and unwrapping their cold rations of dried biscuits and cheese. Terry was staring at the ground and licking his dry lips. ‘How do you feel, Trooper?’ Ellsworth asked.

  ‘Not too good, boss.’

  ‘Should we call Lance-Corporal Johnson over again?’

  ‘I don’t think he can do anything, boss. I haven’t got diarrhoea and I’m not throwing up any more. It’s these pains in my stomach, and I still feel pretty weak.’

  Ellsworth glanced at the impassive Dead-eye, then turned back to Terry. ‘Have you tried eating?’

  The trooper nodded. ‘I’ve tried, but I just can’t stomach it. I’m all right until I think about food, then I feel nauseous.’

  ‘He might be better off not eating,’ Dead-eye said. ‘Eating might start the runs or even make his pains worse. Whatever’s wrong with him, no matter how bad it is, he’ll just have to bear it until this is over and we’re back at base camp. We can’t call in a CasEvac.’

  ‘No, I’m afraid not.’ Ellsworth turned to Terry. ‘But I think you should lie down, Trooper. Rest as much as possible.’

  ‘Right, boss,’ Terry replied, obviously relieved, before stretching out on the groundsheet in his shallow ‘scrape’ and rolling onto his side. He was still breathing harshly.

  Turning away from Terry, Ellsworth and Dead-eye looked over the sangar wall. The guerrillas had taken up their lookout positions on the hills above the village and almost certainly could see the SAS men’s sangars from where they were. Luckily, though, they were looking at their own rebel army’s sangars and would not give them much thought so long as the SAS patrol stayed out of sight.

  ‘Nice touch,’ Ken said. ‘We could stay here until the Millennium and they wouldn’t know we were here. Perhaps we should pay them rent!’

  The morning passed uneventfully. Down in the hamlet, the Arabs got on with their business, which consisted largely of feeding their goats and chickens, tending a small area of cultivated land, drawing water from the well and, judging from the smoke coming from various chi
mneys, lighting fires and cooking. Later some of the veiled women emerged to wash clothes in tubs placed in the middle of the village. The older men sat outside their houses, talking to each other, smoking from hookahs or surveying the empty desert and mountains.

  ‘It’s almost biblical,’ Les said, taking a break from his radio to glance down over the wall. ‘You’ll see the parting of the waters any minute. Moses clutching the tablets.’

  ‘I can’t believe you’ve read the Bible,’ Ken replied.

  ‘I didn’t,’ Les replied. ‘I saw the film. Cecil B. de Mille’s The Ten Commandments. Fucking great, it was.’

  ‘All that took place in Egypt,’ Ken informed him. ‘Not in this hell-hole.’

  ‘Stick a pyramid down there and you’d swear it was Egypt,’ Les said. ‘Either that or a film set.’

  ‘Get back to your radio,’ Dead-eye barked, ‘and stop distracting Corporal Brooke with your chit-chat. Corporal Brooke, you’re supposed to be the sentry, so keep your eyes on that hamlet.’

  ‘Yes, Sarge!’

  ‘Daft fuckers,’ Dead-eye muttered to himself.

  In the early hours of the morning, the Arab children ran amok, playing in the dirt or chasing the dogs and goats; but later armed guerrillas emerged from one of the houses, organized them into a small group of three short lines, then marched them around the village clearing. Marching, the children chanted in unison: ‘Allah yansir Nasir!’ (‘God makes Nasser victorious!’), their voices shrill and pure, rising up clearly to the men hiding in the sangars. Dead-eye suddenly noticed that even the village elders had rifles beside them.

  ‘That’s a guerrilla village,’ he said. ‘They won’t be on our side.’

  ‘Let’s remember that,’ Ellsworth said.

  Nevertheless, undetected as they were, they were able to relax, though Les explored the frequencies on his radio, trying to pick up enemy communications, Ken kept his eyes on the guerrillas on the hill opposite, and Dead-eye carefully entered in his logbook everything that was taking place down in the village. He even noted the exact time when the marching, chanting children were disbanded by their guerrilla trainers and allowed to return to their playing. When they did so, the silence returned, broken only by the odd shout of a guerrilla, a burst of laughter from one of the women around the wash tubs, or the barking of the dogs.

  The morning passed slowly. By 1100 hours the sun was high in the sky, making the air beneath the camouflaged ponchos hot and stifling. Sweating profusely, the men were attacked by increasing numbers of buzzing, blue-bodied flies and whining mosquitoes. Drifting in and out of sleep, Terry dripped sweat and often groaned and slapped weakly at the insects. The other men cursed and swatted repeatedly at the same, though this merely agitated the insects and made them attack all the more frantically.

  By noon the men could smell themselves and the air was even hotter and claustrophobic. Half an hour later the silence below the sangar was broken by the tinkling of small bells. Glancing down, Captain Ellsworth, Dead-eye and Ken, who were peering through the space between the ponchos and the top of the sangar wall, saw a herd of goats approaching along a small wadi only a few feet from the two sangars. The animals were being guided by a herdsman who shouted to a woman coming up the hill, telling her to watch out for the strays. The herdsman, however, apart from his walking stick, also had a .303 Lee-Enfield bolt-action sniper rifle slung over his shoulder.

  ‘Not just your average villager,’ Ken whispered as he studied the herdsman. ‘That bastard’s a Yemeni guerrilla.’

  ‘Correct,’ Dead-eye said.

  They were joined at the wall by Les. As if communicating telepathically, the four of them cocked and raised their SLRs at the same time, covering the herdsman as he continued advancing up the hill. Thankfully, the woman to whom he was calling out was a good distance behind him, still practically at the bottom of the hill, at the hamlet’s unfenced edge.

  ‘He’s getting close,’ Ellsworth whispered to Dead-eye.

  ‘Yes, boss.’

  ‘We could do with a prisoner for interrogation. Could we grab him without causing a fuss?’

  ‘Hardly, boss. His girlfriend down below would see everything.’

  Ellsworth sighed. He then signalled by hand for the others to be silent, as the herdsman was now very close to the other sangar. Though he saw no movement from there, he knew that Jimbo would be on the alert and that Ben and Taff were probably already keeping the man covered with the Bren gun.

  There was nothing for it but to wait and pray that the herdsman would not come close enough to spot them.

  ‘If that bastard …’ Ken was saying when suddenly the herdsman stopped, studied the two sangars, then bawled a warning to the woman below. Even as he turned to run back down the hill, unslinging his Lee Enfield on the move, the woman let out a demented falsetto wail that cut the silence like a knife and was clearly a warning to the guerrillas down in the village.

  ‘Fuck!’ Dead-eye whispered. ‘The game’s up.’

  Foolishly, the running herdsman stopped briefly to turn back and take aim with his rifle. A single, high-velocity shot exploded in Ellsworth’s right ear. Startled, he glanced sideways and saw Dead-eye squinting along the sight of his SLR, which now had smoke drifting out of its barrel. Ellsworth glanced down again as the herdsman, slammed backwards by Dead-eye’s bullet, dropped his rifle and then fell and rolled further down the hill in a shower of gravel and sand.

  As the woman continued her eerie, high-pitched wailing, meanwhile running back towards the hamlet, armed guerrillas burst from some of the hovels, fanning out as they ran, and started up the lower slopes, firing their rifles as they advanced. The woman threw herself to the ground as her comrades’ bullets whistled over her head and bounced off the two sangars.

  The Bren gun in the smaller sangar roared into action, tearing up sand and soil in a jagged, dancing line that first cut across, then through, the ranks of advancing guerrillas, making some of them shudder violently and fall over. The roar of the combined fire of the SAS small arms was added to that of the light machine-gun, creating even more havoc among the advancing guerrillas. More died, and others were wounded. The screams of the latter cut through the gunfire. The other guerrillas spread out over a wider arc and advanced uphill by darting from one rock to another under the covering fire of their comrades. Eventually, however, pinned down by the fusillade from the SAS guns, they had to content themselves with taking pot-shots from behind the boulders. Though they did not hit any of the patrol, they came close many times.

  ‘We can keep them pinned down from here,’ Ken said. ‘No problem at all. The minute they stick their turbaned heads up, we can take their heads off, turbans and all. They can’t do too much down there.’

  At that moment, however, the guerrillas watching from the opposite ridge also opened fire with their rifles. Given that the ridge was only 50 yards away from the sangars and 20 feet higher, they could survey the whole sweep of the ground and aim with great accuracy. Their bullets ricocheted off the walls of both sangars, fragmenting the rocks and filling the space inside with boiling dust and flying pieces of sharp stone that cut like razors.

  ‘Damn!’ Ellsworth exploded, twisting away from the wall and covering his face with his hands until the first burst of enemy gunfire had subsided. Removing his hands and wiping dust from around his eyes, he said to Les: ‘Get in touch with Thumier and arrange for some air support to deal with that ridge. Once that’s done, we can tackle the men below.’

  ‘Right, boss.’

  ‘Jimbo!’ Dead-eye bawled at the second sangar during a brief lull in the firing.

  ‘Yes, Dead-eye!’ the cry came back.

  ‘You all right over there?’

  ‘No problem. We’re all hale and hearty. Ready, willing and able.’

  ‘Good. We’re calling up air support.’

  ‘Bloody right!’ Jimbo shouted. ‘That fucking ridge is going to do us all in.’

  ‘In the meantime, I want you to keep that rid
ge covered with the Bren and everything else you’ve got. We’ll concentrate on the ones below.’

  ‘Hear you loud and clear, Dead-eye. Over and out!’

  No sooner had Jimbo gone silent than the Bren gun, manned by Ben and Taff, roared into life again, turning the higher slope of the opposite ridge into a convulsion of spitting soil and spiralling dust that obscured the enemy and temporarily made them keep their heads down. While the two troopers kept up a constant fusillade, Jimbo and Larry gave them support with their SLRs, adding to the hellish destruction on the ridge facing them.

  ‘Here they come!’ Dead-eye bawled, lowering the barrel of his SLR and squinting down the Trilux sight and foresight at the Arabs below him. With the Bren gun now concentrating on the ridge, the guerrillas on the slopes below had decided to tackle the hill again and were advancing, as before, by flitting expertly from one rock to another, firing only when safely shielded.

  ‘Conserve your ammo,’ Dead-eye reminded the others. ‘Fire only when you’ve got a specific target. We don’t know how long we’re going to be trapped here, so every bullet counts.’

  A fluttering shemagh was just about all Dead-eye saw of an Arab who suddenly jumped up from behind a rock and dashed in a cloud of dust towards another. But that was enough. With the speed and accuracy he had perfected in South-east Asia, Dead-eye switched to single shot, squeezed the trigger once, and put a bullet into his target’s head. The guerrilla spun away from him, his head jerking violently sideways, his rifle spinning to the ground as his hands clawed at the air, trying desperately to grasp something as the real world dissolved. He fell twisting like a corkscrew, already dead meat and bone, and had barely thudded into the ground when another Arab jumped up and ran.

  Dead-eye and Ken fired at the same time, both on single shot. The guerrilla’s head jerked to the left, his body twisted to the right, and he dropped his rifle to claw frantically, disbelievingly at his wounds – one hand on his bloody chest, the other covering his shattered head – and then went into a St Vitus’s dance and fell face first in the dust.