The One That Got Away - Junior edition Page 3

  Morning showed that the airfield at Al Jouf was surrounded by security wire and primitive, flat-roofed wooden towers with glass windows, which reminded us of the German concentration camps we’d seen in Second World War films. There was one main terminal, quite small, with a few other buildings attached to it. Our regimental headquarters and all our stores were there, but we were billeted on the other side of the airfield. Here there was a cement building with a single washbasin and a hole in the ground to act as a toilet. It soon became blocked.

  The SSM had been told to bring the squadron tents, but he had decided that, because we were in the desert and the weather would be hot, we wouldn’t need them. Our first impressions had been correct, however: it wasn’t hot at all; it was very cold, and the dust was everywhere. All we could do was sling cam nets from our vehicles for a bit of shelter, and we lived on the ground like pigs, huddled around the Land Rovers. We had no tables or chairs, so we ate our meals sitting on the deck, with the dust blowing around everywhere, covering us, our kit and our food.

  We had no time for detailed planning but our task seemed fairly simple. Looking at our maps we could see that the site we’d chosen for our laying-up position was opposite a slight bend in the main supply route. It looked from the map as though we could dig into the bank of a wadi – a dried-up river bed – and have a view straight up the gully to the big road.

  If we saw a Scud on the move, we were to report it immediately over the Satcom telephone, and follow up with a message on the 319 radio. Then aircraft would be launched or vectored to take the missile out. A brief on the missiles gave us an idea of what big beasts they were. Just over thirteen metres long and one metre in diameter, they would look a bit like fuel tankers when in the horizontal position on their trailers – the TELs. Apparently the Iraqis’ habit was to park them alongside embankments or under road bridges so that they were all but invisible from the air. When on the move, a TEL would always be accompanied by other vehicles in a wide convoy.

  Privately, we agreed that if we did find a convoy we would allow a few minutes to pass before we reported it – otherwise the Iraqis might work out where we were. And we were worried about what the Scud warheads might contain: if they were nuclear, or full of gas or biological agents, we didn’t want to be around when they came apart. We were also nervous of using satellite communications, because a good direction-finding station can locate a transmitter within twenty seconds. We practised getting on the phone and reporting a Scud sighting in as few seconds as possible.

  Bravo One Zero and Bravo Three Zero had decided to take vehicles in with them, but at the last minute we opted to go without. Over the past few days we had talked about it a lot. Obviously vehicles would enable us to drive out of trouble and back over the border if things went wrong, but nobody in the patrol thought that vehicles were essential. Looking back, though, I realize that I had a strong influence on the decision. I had made more OPs than all the rest of the guys in the patrol put together, and I considered myself something of an expert at the job. But I had never operated in the desert, and just couldn’t see a small patrol like ours escaping detection if we were saddled with vehicles.

  I realize now it was a big mistake to go without them. We should have driven in, installed an OP with a couple of men, then pulled off to a safe distance and hidden the vehicles under cam nets in the bottom of some deep wadi. That way, we would have been more mobile and could have loaded the vehicles up with powerful armaments, including heavy machine guns.

  No vehicles also meant we had to carry huge individual loads. The average weight of a bergen was 60 kg. With that lot on, you had to walk with your head down like a donkey, so that you’d be useless in a contact, and if you fell over you’d be knackered. But that wasn’t all. Apart from the bergens, each of us had a belt-kit of pouches weighing 20 kg, and a whole load more gear that wouldn’t fit in anywhere else: seven days’ rations in one sandbag, two NBC suits in another, an extra bandolier of ammunition, extra grenades for the 203 launchers, and a jerry can of water. Altogether we had nearly 120 kg of kit each. To put that into context, that meant I was carrying about my full body weight plus half as much again!

  Talking to the RAF helicopter pilots who were going to fly us in, we heard how they planned their routes into Iraq to avoid known anti-aircraft positions. With their help we identified the precise spot at which we wanted to be dropped. At first we chose a point five kilometres short of our lying-up position, but later, because of the weight of our kit, we changed our minds and asked to be put down only two or three kilometres short.

  Arrangements for evacuation seemed straightforward enough. If we had not come on the air within forty-eight hours of being dropped off, a chopper would come back to pick us up. If we needed casevac (casualty evacuation), a heli would come within twenty-four hours of any call. If we had a contact and needed assistance, half the squadron would be on board the helicopter to pull us out.

  The OC tried to reassure us. ‘Don’t worry,’ he said. ‘You’ve got your three-one-nine radio. You’ve got your Satcom. You’ve got your tactical rescue beacons. ‘A’ and ‘D’ Squadrons are going to be in your area. Also, you’ve got the forty-eight-hour Lost Comms procedure, and the twenty-four-hour casevac.’ That all sounded fine – but things didn’t turn out quite as we hoped.

  One detail to which we should have paid more attention was our cover story. We agreed that if we were captured, we would pretend to be members of a medical team, sent in to recover downed aircrew, or possibly members of a team sent to provide security for medics, and that our chopper had been forced down. The general idea was to stick as close to the truth as possible, but to say that we were reservists or ordinary infantrymen, and that we’d been brought into the war because we worked in a medical centre. Yet we never had time to work things out in any depth – to decide, for instance, which fictitious regiment we belonged to.

  We went off in such a rush that when we boarded the Chinook on the evening of 19 January, Andy was still being briefed on the ramp at the back of the helicopter. (Bravo One Zero and Three Zero were to go in the next night.)

  Guys from ‘B’ Squadron threw our kit into vehicles and came with us to the helicopter. I sensed a peculiar atmosphere. Nobody had much to say. As we were going on board, our mates were all around us, but I got the feeling that they thought this was a one-way ticket. Somebody said to me, ‘This is ridiculous – it’s not on, to carry loads like this.’

  But by then it was too late to change things.

  Off we went into the dusk, and after half an hour we landed at Arar, an airfield close to the Iraqi border, to refuel. When the pilot shut down his engines, we stayed where we were, in the back. Then came an incredible letdown. The engines started turning and burning again, we lifted off and were almost over the frontier when the pilot radioed for permission to cross.

  It was denied.

  He came on the intercom to announce, ‘Sorry, guys. Mission aborted.’ The Americans were bombing targets on our route, and we had to keep out of the way.

  Having psyched ourselves up, we somehow had to come down. Although everyone pretended to be disappointed, in fact the guys were relieved. We all looked at each other, and grins spread over our faces as we headed back to Al Jouf.

  As soon as we landed back, the guys started stripping their kit to try to save weight. Out went luxuries like sleeping bags and most of our warm clothes. We realized that the weather was much colder than at Victor, but our bergens were so heavy that the only way we could get them on was to sit down, settle the straps over our shoulders, and have a couple of the other guys pull us to our feet, as if they were lifting knights in armour onto their chargers.

  I became obsessed with the need for ammunition. Pressured by the thought that we were going to be on our own behind enemy lines, I left food out of my belt-kit in favour of more rounds. Normally I carried twenty-four hours’ worth of rations in a belt-pouch – enough to spread over four days – but I reckoned that if we did get c
ompromised, I could reach the Syrian border in two nights. All I would need on me in that case would be two packets of AB (army issue biscuits). So I put the bulk of the food into my bergen – resisting the temptation to overload on food – and filled my belt-kit with extra ammunition. Altogether I had twelve magazines of twenty-eight rounds each, and also about ninety loose rounds, including a few armour-piercing, which I’d brought from Hereford.

  One of the items I threw out was my brew-kit: tea bags, sachets of coffee, orange powder, sugar and the fuel – inflammable hexi-blocks. We were going in on hard routine, which meant no cooking and no fires, so I thought I would have no chance to use anything like that. Another serious omission was puritabs, for sterilizing water. If we’d been going into the jungle, where you use local water all the time, I’d certainly have taken some. But I thought that in the desert we’d be drinking out of jerry cans; it never occurred to me that I might have to rely on the River Euphrates. Certainly we wouldn’t risk drinking from wells: there seemed a good chance that wells might have been poisoned.

  The atmosphere in the patrol remained tense but cheerful. We kept asking for satellite pictures of the area where we were heading, and in the end some did arrive. They were of poor quality, but they suggested we were right to leave our vehicles behind, since they showed that the desert was extremely flat and open. What we didn’t realize, because we weren’t properly instructed about these particular images, was that we were reading the imagery upside-down, mistaking low ground for high ground, wadis for ridges and so on.

  Our second departure was set for the evening of Tuesday 22 January 1991. Before we left, we had a big meal of fresh food. Then came last-minute checks as we went through all our pockets to make sure that we were carrying no scrap of paper that would give away who we were or where we came from. The only identification I had on me was a pair of metal discs slung on a chain round my neck. These bore my name, army number, blood group and religion (Church of England). To stop them clinking, I’d covered them in black masking tape. I’d taped a good-luck talisman on each disc. One was a new five-pence piece given to me by my mother-in-law, to accompany her Christmas present of a Samurai sword (the Japanese reckon it’s bad luck to give a sword without a coin). The other was a big old British penny which I’d found lying head-up in the sand of the training area near the camp at Victor. It must have been dropped there by a Brit many years earlier. I remembered the old saying: See a penny, pick it up, all the day you’ll have good luck. I’m not really superstitious, but thought I might as well give myself any advantage I could.

  This time all three Bravo patrols were deploying at the same time, in two Chinooks. Because we were sharing our air transport with half of Bravo Three Zero, and they were due to drop off first, we hauled our own gear to the front of the fuselage, leaving room for four guys, their kit and two Land Rovers at the back. The chopper was so full that the pilot had to taxi it like a fixed-wing aircraft in order to get it off the ground. Then, as he had it rolling, the tail came up a bit and we lifted away.

  The noise in the back was horrendous: the roar of the engines, backed by the thudding of the rotor, made normal conversation impossible. But a few headsets, plugged into the intercom system, made it possible to listen to the pilots talking. When we landed to refuel at Arar, the pilot shut down his engines, and I sat there thinking, I hope this thing doesn’t start up again! But when the refuelling was complete, the Chinook’s engines re-started and off we went.

  By then darkness had fallen, and we’d flown for only a few minutes when the pilot came on the intercom. ‘Congratulations, guys,’ he said. ‘We’ve just crossed the border. You’re now in Iraq.’

  Great! I thought. This is cool, flying three hundred kilometres into enemy territory. Nobody else is doing this. Nobody else knows we’re going in. But at the same time I was thinking, This is real. This is dangerous. During my time in the SAS I’d been in some hairy situations on missions in various parts of the world, and on military operations in Northern Ireland, but nothing as dramatic as this. This was the first time I’d been to war.

  To keep under the radar, we were flying only ten or twenty metres off the ground. I took my hat off to the pilots, who were prepared to go into hostile airspace so lightly armed. Apart from our own weapons, the only armaments on board were two SA80 automatic rifles which the loadies could fire through the portholes. SA80s are poor-quality, unreliable weapons at the best of times. We’d told the pilots that if we were attacked when we landed, we would handle the firefight.

  In my headphones I suddenly heard the pilot start shouting. A surface-to-air missile site had locked onto us. With such a heavy load, no violent evasive tactics were possible; he lowered the chopper and with great skill hovered less than a metre above the desert. He had chaff, which he could fire off if necessary to confuse incoming missiles, but I felt quite scared knowing that I wasn’t in charge of my own destiny.

  We seemed to hover for ever. I looked out through one of the portholes and was appalled to see how bright the moonlight was. The desert looked totally flat, without cover anywhere. Then after a minute or two we lifted again and carried on.

  In my head I ran over the rations that I’d chosen and stowed in my bergen. I knew from experience that when you’re sitting around in an OP, boredom makes you want to eat. But I’d restricted myself to a daily ration of one main meal, two packets of biscuits, and some fruit like pineapple or pears in syrup. The main meals were boil-in-the-bag – things like beef stew, chicken and pasta, pasta and meatballs, bacon and beans. They were pre-cooked and sealed in tough silver-foil sachets, which you could roll up and squash down.

  As for personal kit, I was dressed, like the rest of the guys, in regular DPMs (disruptive pattern material combat fatigues). We’d also been issued with lightweight, sand-coloured desert smocks, which unbelievably dated from the Second World War. I had worked my silk escape map into the waistband that held the drawstring of my trousers, and taped the twenty gold sovereigns onto the inside of my belt. On my head I was wearing a German Army cap, and on my feet a pair of brown Raichle Gore-Tex-lined walking boots, with well-insulated uppers and soles. On my hands I had a pair of green aviator’s gloves, made of fine leather. As useful extras I had two shamags. One was very light-coloured, like a biscuit. The other was thicker and altogether more suitable, being oatmeal and purple, with the design favoured by the special forces of Oman.

  In my right arm I was cradling my chosen weapon, a 203, which I’d fitted with a makeshift sling made of nylon paracord. Four of the patrol had 203s, and the rest Minimis, depending on how much other weight they were carrying. Since the 203 weighs 10 lb and the Minimi 16 lb, those with less to carry had the machine guns. I, being the patrol medic and saddled with the 12 lb medical pack, had a 203, as did Legs Lane, who had the 30 lb radio. Stan, on the other hand, who was exceptionally strong, had a Minimi. On board the Chinook we kept the rifles loaded, with bullets up the spout and safety catches on, in case of sudden action.

  Each of us also had a 66 rocket launcher – a simple, disposable American device that you throw away after firing. In its folded state it looks like a tube, with the rocket pre-packed inside it; you can carry it either slung over your shoulder on a strap or, as I had mine, laid across the top of my bergen, under the flap. When the time comes to fire, all you have to do is pull out the second half of the tube to make a longer barrel, flip up the sight and pull the trigger.

  As the chopper clattered on through the night, I was trying to think ahead, mainly about escape and evasion. The Regiment’s official line was that if the patrol was compromised, we should head back towards Saudi Arabia. But since Saudi would be nearly 300 kilometres off, and the Syrian border was only 130 kilometres to the west, we had already decided that if things went wrong, we’d leg it for Syria. That would make obvious sense. The Syrians had announced that if they picked up downed aircrew from any of the Allied nations, they would hand them back to the Coalition forces.

  Talking it
over at Al Jouf, we reckoned that we could jog and run to the border in two nights. But we’d forgotten about water: you can’t jog carrying full jerry cans, and there was no other source around. Nor had we bargained for the cold.

  Five minutes out from Bravo Three Zero’s location, the loadie gave a thumbs-up signal. I smelled rather than heard the Land Rover engines start up. The back of the Chinook filled with choking diesel fumes.

  Then two fingers from the loadie indicated ‘Two minutes to landing’.

  Then one minute.

  With a bump, we were on the ground. The tailgate went down, the vehicles rolled, and the guys hurried out into the night. That was a tense moment, because it was perfectly possible that enemy were waiting to receive us. The rest of us were at the ready: we had our webbing on and weapons in hand. If the chopper had come under fire, we’d have burst out and gone to ground. But nothing happened. The tailgate came up. With some of the weight gone, the heli made a normal take-off, and we were away again.

  Twenty minutes later it was our turn.

  We grabbed our own kit and dragged it to the edge of the tailgate. Soon the loadie gave us five fingers, then two. We pulled on goggles to keep flying sand and grit out of our eyes. As the chopper hit the deck, the tailgate went down. Cold air and dust came screaming in, but thanks to the goggles I could still see.

  We tumbled out, dragging our kit.

  Above us was a horrendous sight. Two enormous blue lights seemed to be blazing above the aircraft. For a moment I couldn’t think what was happening. Had we been caught by an Iraqi searchlight? Then I realized that the downdraught from the rotors was raising a storm of grit, and as the grains hit the whirling blades they lit up with a bright blue glow. Somebody’s bound to see this, I thought.