Soldier A: Behind Iraqi Lines

by Shaun Clarke

  Ricketts went under and stayed down as long as possible, though the total darkness, fiercely tugging current and lack of feeling in his chilled limbs was disorienting and filled him with the fear that he was making no progress at all, or might even be swimming towards the bottom rather than across to the far side.

  Though normally possessing nerves of steel, he experienced a fleeting panic of the kind he had not known since childhood. It made him burst through the surface, where he soon saw that he was in another area, well away from the palm trees where the Iraqis had been firing, and out in the middle of the river.

  Geordie, he noticed when his eyes had cleared of water, was still swimming as well, though much slower, now slightly behind, and a good way upstream.

  Ricketts kept swimming, fighting against the fierce current, making headway, but with agonizing slowness, being swept along even as he managed to inch forward, closer to the far bank. Now he felt numb all over, except for darting pains in his feet, and was scarcely able to move his hands when he dipped them in the water.

  His lungs were on fire. He was breathing in spasms. The river roared and splashed, pummelled him and froze him, but he fought vigorously against it, swimming, always swimming, and at last reached the far bank.

  Scrambling halfway out, Ricketts was swept sideways and almost fell, but hurled himself forward again, hitting the bank with a soft thud and sinking into the mud. Rolling over and kicking himself backwards, he kept going until all of him was free of the rushing water. Relieved, he rolled over onto his belly, retching and gasping for breath for some time.

  When eventually he looked up, he saw Geordie a lot further along the bank, also lying face down, but barely moving. Though dripping wet and shivering with cold, Ricketts clambered to his feet, almost toppled over with dizziness, recovered and made his way carefully along the muddy, slippery bank to where Geordie was lying, wet and covered with mud. Ricketts shook him gently by the shoulder, calling his name.

  Geordie rolled over. He was breathing with shocking harshness and stared up with dazed eyes.

  ‘Did we make it?’

  ‘Yes, Geordie, we made it.’

  ‘I’m not sure that I did.’ He tried to sit up but failed, hardly getting his shoulders off the ground, so Ricketts knelt beside him and helped him into a sitting position. ‘Fuck,’ Geordie gasped, ‘I feel awful. I can hardly breathe. My heart’s racing. I can’t feel a thing.’

  ‘You’ll be OK in a minute or two, Geordie. Just take your time.’

  Geordie just nodded, trying to control his raucous breathing, shivering even more than Ricketts had done, as if out of control. Looking along the bank, Ricketts saw a ruined mud hut just beyond it, surrounded by a few scraggy palm trees, illuminated by moonlight.

  ‘That house looks uninhabited,’ Ricketts said. ‘Let me help you over there. At least we’ll be out of this wind and can stay there until we dry out. Do you think you can make it?’

  ‘With your help,’ Geordie gasped.

  Ricketts slipped an arm around Geordie’s back, sliding it up under his armpits to give him leverage. Even with such assistance, Geordie could hardly stand and Ricketts had to practically carry him all the way, from the rushing river and fierce, freezing wind to the relative shelter of the palm trees around the mud hut. The hut was falling down and had only half a roof, but the walls would offer protection from the wind. Ricketts helped Geordie inside. The floor was covered with rubble and rubbish, but at least it was dry. Ricketts managed to clear a space of sharp-edged debris and laid Geordie down.

  ‘OK?’

  Geordie nodded, though he looked and sounded awful. His face was a ghastly, deathly white and his breathing was anguished. His lips and hands had turned blue.

  ‘We’re only a mile or two from the border,’ Ricketts told him. ‘I think we’ve made it, Geordie.’

  Geordie closed his eyes and tried to catch his breath. ‘Cold,’ he managed to croak eventually. ‘Can’t feel anything … Hurting, too … where it’s not cold … Need to be warm.’

  ‘I know,’ Ricketts said, ‘but we can’t light a fire. If we do, the smoke will give us away. We’ll just have to dry out.’

  ‘Not dry,’ Geordie murmured. ‘Wet and cold … Feeling sick and …’ He choked and then coughed up more water and what looked like blood. ‘Fuck you, Andrew, I’m OK.’

  ‘I’m not Andrew,’ Ricketts informed him, suddenly realizing that Geordie was very ill. ‘I’m Ricketts – Sergeant-Major Ricketts. Try to stay awake, Geordie.’

  ‘Sleep … Good idea … Need sleep to wake up … You keep watch, Baby Face …’ He coughed again and spat more blood. ‘Mum? Is that you, Dad? Why’s it so dark in here? I won’t do it. I won’t!’

  He soon started rambling, becoming incoherent, the words spilling out in a torrent of recollection and hallucination. He was icy to the touch, obviously dying from hypothermia, and eventually, as Ricketts had feared, he sank into a coma.

  Ricketts didn’t have a thing to cover him up with when he went to find help. The man he left lying in that rubble was a shivering wreck.

  Across the rocky field, looking away from the river, Ricketts saw the lights of another dwelling. After hurrying across to it, through the striations of dawn’s pale light, he peered through the window and saw that it was inhabited by an Arab family. The children were still sleeping, while their parents were squatting on woven mats on the floor and eating what looked like boiled rice or couscous from an earthenware bowl. An older man, wearing traditional dress, was seated in a chair near the wall, reading a book by the light of a flickering oil lamp. Forced to take a chance, Ricketts hurried back to the front of the house and knocked on the door. It was opened by the older man, who looked at him with dull curiosity, but no sign of fear.

  Speaking crude Arabic, Ricketts explained who he was and that he had a sick man in the nearby mud hut. ‘We just want to cross the border,’ he said, ‘but we need some kind of transport, for which we can pay well. Will you help us?’

  The old man glanced over his shoulder, obviously focusing on the mud hut, then nodded and said, as best Ricketts could understand: ‘My neighbour has a truck you can hire. He lives a few hundred metres away. You go back and look after your friend while I fetch the truck.’

  ‘My friend is very cold,’ Ricketts told him. ‘Can you lend me a blanket?’

  The old man nodded, disappeared inside, then stepped out again, holding a thick blanket. ‘Here,’ he said. ‘Now go. I will soon return with the truck.’

  When Ricketts thanked him, he turned away and hurried along the mud track that led to the next house, visible through the early-morning mist, about 500 yards further on. Ricketts stepped off the track and hurried back across the field, towards the river, until he came to the broken-down hut.

  When Ricketts hurried inside with the blanket, he found that Geordie had died. Shocked and grieving, he knelt beside his friend. After closing his eyes, he covered him up with the blanket. He then sat in the rubble, drained by an awful numbness, staring blindly at a patch of cloudy-grey sky that was framed by the hole of broken bricks in the opposite wall.

  Ricketts sat there for a long time, exhausted, almost broken, until the sound of the approaching truck jerked him out of his reverie. After glancing down at the blanket, as if expecting to find Geordie alive, he stood up and went to the broken wall and looked across the rocky field.

  It was not a farmer’s truck that he saw.

  It was a truck filled with heavily armed Iraqi troops.

  ‘Bastard!’ he exploded, then turned away, hurried across the room, glanced one last time at his dead friend, and clambered over the broken wall at the back, out of the hut.

  Ricketts ran for it, bullets whistled past his head. Reaching a hill, he dropped low and rolled down it as more bullets whipped through the air above him and whined into the empty sky.

  He picked himself up and kept running, heading for Syria.

  Chapter 14

  Danny Porter struck out o
n his own, determined not to be captured. When he heard the sounds of shooting from a long way beyond the wadi, shortly after Andrew had left with the Arab goatherd, he knew that Andrew had been betrayed and was now either dead or in captivity. He also knew that the Iraqis would suspect the presence of other British troopers and intensify the search for them. Since those British troopers came down to one man, himself, he had no doubts that he was in for a hard time.

  Leaving the wadi, Danny walked on a prearranged bearing, due north, aiming for the Euphrates. It was thirty-six hours since he had drunk and he badly needed water, but only fifteen minutes after leaving the wadi, he saw an Iraqi troop truck behind him, heading for the spot where he had lain up. Realizing that the Arab goatherd had informed the Iraqis of his presence, he started walking even faster, trying to forget his hunger and thirst, forcing himself to keep moving.

  Alone now and feeling it, he walked for the rest of that day and night, his third on the run. Iraqi search helicopters often flew overhead, repeatedly forcing him to lie low. He had to do the same to avoid passing army trucks, all filled with troops and bristling with weapons.

  Next day the sky was clear and the snow had stopped falling, which made Danny’s march a little easier. But Iraqi helicopters were still searching the area and many bands of heavily armed militiamen were assiduously combing the windswept hills and valleys for him. Put off by the sight of them, he constructed a simple lying-up position and laid up for the rest of that day, only breaking the LUP down, erasing all traces of his presence, and moving on again, when last light had come.

  After another nine-hour march, in the early hours of the morning, he saw the Euphrates through his night-sight. It was in a flat plain below him, a winding strip of muddy water, with palms trees and houses scattered along its banks. He also saw a small village surrounded by irrigated fields and more scattered palm trees.

  As dogs were barking from the houses, he made his way down to the river’s edge with great caution. Stepping into the water, he sank to his waist in soft mud and had to drag himself out. After lying belly-down to get his breath back, he sat up again and filled his water bottles.

  Soaked and muddy, he laid up for the day in a dry wadi system close to the village. His morale was at a low ebb, but he remembered the disciplines of Continuation Training and managed to perk himself up a little. Though filthy, the water was drinkable and helped to quench his thirst. He finished the last of the biscuits taken from his escape belt, then tried to prepare himself for what he knew would be severe hunger pangs.

  However, Danny’s feet were in a bad way. He had lost most of his toenails and his blisters were suppurating. As the blisters were on the soles of his feet, they made walking an agonizing endurance test. With his adrenalin still running strongly, he did not feel particularly tired. In any case, when he tried to sleep, the air was so cold that every ten minutes or so he woke up shuddering violently.

  Still in darkness, he moved off again, following the murky Euphrates, from which he was able to obtain enough water to survive. Also, by staying in the valley he avoided exposure to the pitiless windchill that had killed Taff Burgess and threatened him and Andrew with hypothermia. He was, however, in a populated area, thus running a greater risk of discovery. He minimized this by avoiding all human habitation.

  Again, Danny tried to summon assistance with his SARBE rescue beacon, but without success. Probably, he reasoned, it was not precise enough to enable the SAS search helicopters to locate him. As he also knew full well, the intense Iraqi activity in the area and the widespread AA gun batteries raised the odds against a successful pick-up.

  In fact, throughout his lengthy, arduous march Danny was constantly seeing Iraqi troops on the move or civilians walking about in large groups, obviously as organized search parties. To make matters worse, they were out mostly during the night when, as the Iraqis knew, he would be travelling. Because of this, he advanced at a snail’s pace, being forced to repeatedly stop, scan the area through his night-sight, stop again, backtrack, watch, wait, and eventually move on, treading with care.

  It made demands on his patience. He endured it either by focusing intently on his SAS training or by thinking about other things, notably home. Though taking confidence and pride from being an SAS soldier, and from his capacity for survival, Danny had always lacked such virtues in his personal life and now knew that he had been more than naïve in falling for the first girl who had showed an interest in him and letting vanity blind him to the fact that they lived in separate worlds. His wife Darlene was attractive, but she liked a good time, and now, even though they had two children, she was fooling around a lot. Danny knew this was true because his mates had told him so and his father and mother, always keen to support him, had confirmed the depressing fact.

  While able to make a soldier’s ‘kill’ as casually as slicing bread, Danny, who sliced throats instead of loaves, was otherwise too sentimental for his own good. He could not, therefore, bear the thought that his children – like him, born and bred in Kingswinford, in the West Midlands – were being brought up by a mother who liked a lively night life and spent more time away from home than in it. He knew this because his parents had told him so and were, reportedly, spending more nights with the children than Darlene could count or even remember.

  ‘We’re too old for this,’ Danny’s father had complained in a phone call to the Paludrine Club in Hereford. ‘So you better come home and sort her out. She’s a right boozy tart, that one.’

  Danny hadn’t sorted her out because he didn’t know how to start. He just wanted to be with the Regiment, sorting out any enemy they cared to give him, which he knew he could do well.

  Now, filling time, fighting isolation and silence, embarked on a long march that could mean life or death, he reflected long and hard on his domestic problems, but decided that such thoughts were negative and possibly dangerous. He would focus, instead, on staying alive and getting home in one piece.

  In the early hours of the fifth day he found another LUP, this time on a cliff face over 600 feet high. From there he could look out over the river to an Arab village located on the far bank, where the people were walking about peacefully and life seemed to be normal. For most of the day he watched men fishing in the river, pains in his stomach, saliva in his throat, constantly, obsessively thinking of how hungry he was. By last light he was practically starving and glad to move on.

  That night he found himself between the river and a motorway, in a corridor which varied in width from one mile to six. As the wadi systems coming down towards the river demanded continual descents and climbs, he tried to save energy by keeping out of them and instead walking parallel with the road, which he knew was dangerous.

  Indeed, shortly after taking to the side of the road, he heard the drone of a vehicle coming up behind him. Dropping immediately to the ground and looking back through his night-sight, he saw a black dot on the motorway, growing bigger each second. When it passed him, he was surprised to see that it was one of the increasingly rare mobile Scuds, its missile on the back of a noisy wheeled platform, its green tarpaulin flapping. Still not forgetting his rigorous training, Danny dutifully made a note of the time and place.

  To his despair, however, he was informed by a nearby motorway sign that he was 50 kilometres further from the border than he had anticipated. This meant that he had at least one more full day and two nights on the march.

  After marching for another hour, when last light was approaching, the only place he could find to ‘basha down’ was a rubbish-strewn culvert passing under the motorway embankment. Six feet high and nearly ten wide, it was relatively safe, reasonably dry and protected him against the night’s cold wind.

  Early the next morning, soon after daybreak, he heard the jingle of bells – a familiar sound by now – as a herd of goats was ushered through the tunnel on its way to pasture.

  ‘Shit!’ he whispered, then hurried out of the culvert to hide in a nearby ditch, where he remained until the m
an and his goats had passed.

  Knowing that the goatherd would eventually return, Danny crawled along a wadi, going to ground each time a car came down the road. Most of the cars were military troop trucks or jeeps, though some were battered old heaps driven by local workers and a few were chauffeur-driven Mercedes filled with wealthy Arabs.

  After crawling along the wadi for about six miles, tearing his army trousers and cutting his hands and knees, which left a trail of blood behind him, Danny found a hole in the ground and lay there for the rest of the day. Yet another miserable day.

  Moving out again that night, he found that the terrain consisted of small hills covered with scrubby thorn bushes and complex wadi systems that made him feel he was scrambling up and down through endless quarries. Exhausting though this was, dehydration was becoming a more serious problem. This was not helped by the fact that he had to keep away from the river, where most of the houses had vicious dogs whose noisy barking would give away his presence.

  Finally reaching the end of the series of wadis, he headed due west and had an easier time until stopped by the barbed-wire fence of a heavily guarded military establishment.

  Suddenly, an air-raid siren wailed. Thinking he had been seen, Danny immediately went to ground and searched the darkness ahead with his night-sight. He saw a number of AA gun positions, with tall towers that looked like radio masts on the high ground behind them. A surprising number of armed patrols were walking about, with a lot of the men scanning the sky as the siren continued its demented wailing.

  Realizing that he had stumbled on a highly sensitive Iraqi signals command post about to be attacked by Allied aircraft, Danny stood up and hurried away, running at the crouch, weaving left and right, and praying to God that the facility was not being protected by minefields.