Bravo Two Zero

5

The ground crew had been up all night re camouflaging the Chinook a splashy desert pattern that drew wolf whistles and applause from the blokes who’d come to see us off.

It was time for passing on last minute messages again. I saw my mate Mick and said: “Any dramas, Eno has got the letters. Make sure you look after the escape map because it’s signed by the squadron. I don’t want that to go missing: it would be nice for Jilly.”

I overheard Vince saying: “Any drama, it’s down to you to make sure Dee’s sorted out.”

Mick had a camera round his neck. “Do you want a picture?”

“Madness not to,” I said.

We posed on the tailgate of the Chinook for the Bravo Two Zero team photo.

The blokes were busy taking the piss out of the aircrew, especially the loadies. One of them was a dead ringer for Gary Kemp from Spandau Ballet, even down to the 1980s sideboards. Two or three blokes from the squadron were standing by a wagon doing the old shu-wap, shu-wap routine, singing “You are gold……” The poor lad was getting well embarrassed.

Some blokes got together and-practiced doing the pallbearer bit, humming the death march. Others did a takeoff of the Madness video “It must be love,” where the singer is standing over a grave and the undertaker’s jumping up and down and across measuring him.

Interspersed with the banter was the odd muttering of “See you soon” and “Hope it all goes well.”

The aircrew came round for a final quick chat in their body armor, and we climbed aboard.

Nobody flies Club Class in a Chinook. The interior was spartan, a bare hull with plastic coating over the frame. There were no seats, just nonslip flooring to sit on. The deck was littered with sand and grease. A large inboard tank had been fitted to allow us to carry extra fuel. The stink of aviation fuel and engines was overpowering, even at the back near the ramp. It was like sitting in an oven. The loadies kept the top half of the tailgate down to circulate air.

The engines sparked up, coughing fearsome clouds of fumes to the rear. From our position on the ramp we saw blokes dropping their kecks and mooning in the heat haze, and the Spandau Ballet gang were giving it some again. As the Chinook lifted, its downwash created a major sandstorm. By the time the dust had settled we had reached a hundred feet, and soon all we could see were the flashing headlights of the pinkies.

It was hot and I started to sweat and stink. I felt tired, mentally as well as physically. So many things were running through my mind. The infiltration worried me because we had no control over it: we’d just have to sit there and hope for the best. I’ve never liked it when my life was in somebody else’s hands. There were Roland antiaircraft missiles along our route, and the bigger the machine, the bigger the chance of getting shot down. Chinooks are massive. There was also the added risk of getting hosed down by our own aircraft, since we were going in with the cover of three air raids.

I looked forward to getting on the ground, however. It felt good to be in command of such a classic SAS task. Everybody hopes for a major war once in his life, and this was mine, accompanied by a gang that the rest of the squadron was already calling the Foreign Legion.

The berg ens were strapped down to stop them flying through the air and landing on top of us if the pilot had to take evasive action or crashed. Just before last light, the loadies cracked cyalume sticks and put them around the kit so we could see where it was, mainly to prevent injury. The sticks are like the ones kids buy at fun fairs-a plastic tube that you bend to crack the glass phials inside and bring two chemicals together to make a luminous mixture.

I put on a pair of headsets and talked to the pilot while the rest of the blokes rooted through all the R.A.F kit, sorting out the crew’s sandwiches, chocolate, and bottles of mineral water.

We had a brief recap on the landing scenarios. If we came into a contact as we landed, we should stay on the aircraft. If we were getting off the aircraft, we should jump back on. But if the heli had already taken off and we had a contact, the Simplex radio gave us about a range of a mile to talk to him and summon him back.

“I’ll just turn the aircraft and come screaming back in,” he said, “and you just get on it however you can, fuck all the kit.”

The R.A.F are sometimes thought of as glorified taxi drivers, taking you from point A to point B, but they’re not: they’re an integral part of any operation. For a pilot to bring in a Chinook like that would be totally outrageous. It’s a big machine and an easy target, but he was willing to do it. Either he had no idea what would be happening on the ground, or he was blase because that was his job. He obviously knew what he was talking about, so he was blase\ And if he was willing to do it, I wouldn’t give a damn: I’d jump back in.

As we were flying across Saudi, we started to appreciate the lie of the ground. It looked like a brown billiard table. I’d been in the Middle East lots of times, but I’d never seen anything like this.

“We’re on Zanussi,” Chris said into his headset, using the Regiment term for somebody who’s so spaced out and weird you can’t get in touch with him; he’s on another planet.

And Zanussi was what this looked like-another world. Our map studies told us the ground was like this all the way up. We were going to have problems, but it was too late to do anything about it. We were committed.

Now and again there’d be a bit of chat on the headphones as the pilots talked to AWACS. I loved watching the two lo adie warlords getting ready for the Big One, checking their guns and hoping, no doubt, that they would get shot at soon.

All the time, there was the deafening zsh, zsh, zsh of the rotor blades. Not much was said between ourselves because of the noise. Everybody was just pleased that they weren’t rushing around any more, that we were just lying around on the kit drinking water or pissing into one of the bottles we’d just emptied. I was wondering if my life might have been different if I’d stayed at school and got my CSEs. I might have been sitting up in the cockpit now, chatting away, looking forward to a pie and a pint later on.

The front lo adie door was half open, like a stable door. Wind rushed through it, cool and refreshing. The straps hanging off the insides of the Chinook flapped and slapped in the gale.

We got to the same refueling point as before. Again, the pilot kept the rotors turning. An engine failure at this stage would mean canceling the operation. We stayed on the aircraft, but the back lo adie was straight off into the darkness. The Yanks, God bless ‘em, have so much kit they just throw it at you. He returned with Hershey bars, doughnuts, and cans of Coke. For some unaccountable reason, the Yanks had also given him handfuls of Biros and combs.

We waited and waited. Bob and I jumped down and went for a dump on the side of the tarmac about 100 feet away. When we got back the lo adie motioned for me to put on my headsets.

“We have the go,” the pilot said, with just the faintest detectable hint of excitement in his voice.

We started to lose altitude.

“We’re over the border,” the pilot said matter-of factly I passed the message on. The blokes started putting their webbing on.

Now the aircrew really started earning their money. The banter stopped. They were working with night viewing goggles, screaming along at 80 knots just 70 feet off the ground. The rotor blades had a large diameter and we knew from the map that we were flying in amongst a lot of power lines and obstructions. One lo adie looked out the front at the forward blades, and the other did the same at the rear. The copilot continuously monitored the instruments; the pilot flew by visual and instructions received from the rest of the crew.

The exchange between pilot, copilot, and loadies was nonstop as they flew low between features. The tone of the voices was reassuring. Everything was well rehearsed and well practiced. It was all so matter-of fact they could have been in a simulator.

Copilot: “100 feet… 80 feet… 80 feet.” Pilot: “Roger that, 80 feet.” Copilot: “Power lines one mile.” Pilot: “Roger, power lines one mile. Pulling up.” Copilot: “120… 150… 180… 200. That’s half a mile. 500 feet now.” Pilot: “500 feet. I have the lines visual… over we go-“

Loadie: “Clear.” Pilot: “Okay, going lower.” Copilot: “150… 120…

80 feet. 90 knots.” Pilot: “Roger, staying at 80 feet, 90 knots.” Copilot: “Reentrant left, one mile.” Pilot: “Roger that, I have a building to my right.” Loadie: “Roger that, building right.” Copilot:

“80 feet. 90 knots. Power lines five miles.” Pilot: “Roger that, five miles. Breaking right.” The loadies were looking at the ground below as well. Apart from watching for obstructions, they checked for any “incoming.”

Copilot: “80 feet. Metal road coming up, two miles.” Pilot: “Roger that. Metal road, two miles.” Copilot: “One mile to go. That’s 100 knots, 80 feet.” At anything below 80 feet the blades would hit the ground as the aircraft turned. Meanwhile, the load masters were looking for obstructions and trying to ensure the blades had enough room to rotate as we hugged any feature that would give the heli some protection.

Pilot: “Break my right now. That’s nice.” Copilot: “Right, that’s 70 foot, 100 knots. 70 foot, 90 knots.”

We had to cross a major obstruction that ran east west across this part of the country.

Copilot: “Okay, that’s the dual carriage way 5 miles.”

Pilot: “Let’s go up. 200 foot.” Copilot: “Okay, got it visual.”

Us passengers were just sitting there eating Hershey bars when all of a sudden the front lo adie manned his guns. We grabbed our rifles and jumped up as well. We didn’t have a clue what was going on. There wouldn’t be much we could do because if you put the barrel of your gun out into the slipstream, it’s like putting your hand out of a car traveling at 100 mph. We could have done jack shit really, but we felt we had to help him.

There wasn’t actually a drama. It was just that we were getting near the road and the lo adie was hoping that somebody was going to fire at us so he could have a pop back.

It was the main carriage way between Baghdad and Jordan. We crossed it at 500 feet. There were a lot of lights from convoys, but we were unlit and they certainly couldn’t hear us. It was our first sight of the enemy.

Sighting the road gave us a location fix because we knew exactly where it was on the map. I was just trying to work out how much longer we’d be in the air when I heard a Klaxon.

Dinger and I both had headsets on, and we looked at one another as we listened to the crew.

“Break left! Break right!”

All hell was let loose. The helicopter did severe swings to the left and right.

The loadies jumped around, torches on, pressing buttons all over the place as chaff was fired off.

The pilots knew where most of the Rolands were, but they obviously hadn’t known about this one. The ground-to-air missile had “illuminated” us and set off the inboard warnings. To complicate matters, we were going fairly slowly when it locked on.

I saw the expression on Dinger’s face in the glow of the cyalume sticks. We’d been lulled into a false sense of security listening to all the confident banter. Now I had the feeling you get when you’re driving a car and you glance down for a moment and look back up and find that the situation ahead has suddenly changed and you have to jump on the brakes. I didn’t know if the missile had actually fired, or locked on, or what.

“Fuck this!” he said. “If it’s going to happen, I don’t fucking want to hear it!”

Simultaneously, we threw our headsets on the floor. I got down and crunched up into a ball, ready to accept the landing.

The pilot threw the aircraft all over the sky. The engines groaned and strained as it did its gymnastics.

The Chinook leveled out and flew straight ahead. The look on the loadies’ faces told us that we’d got away with it.

I put the headphones back on and said, “What the fuck was that?”

“Probably a Roland, who knows? Not the best of things. It’s all right for you lot: we’ve got to come back this way.”

I wanted to get off this aircraft and be back in control of my own destiny. It’s nice getting chauffeured to a place, but not like this. And it wasn’t over yet. If the Iraqis on the ground reported a lock-on, their aircraft might come looking for us. Nobody knew if the Iraqis were getting aircraft into the sky, or if they had night flying capability, but you have to assume the worst scenario. I was sweating like a rapist.

Half an hour later, the pilot gave us a two-minute warning that we would be landing. I held up two fingers to the blokes, the same warning as for a parachute drop. The rear lo adie started to undo the straps that held down the kit. The red glow from the penlight torch that he held in his mouth made him look like the devil at work.

Four of us had 203s, the American M16 Armalite rifle with a grenade launcher attached that fires a 40mm bomb that looks like a large, stubby bullet; the others had Minimis, a light machine gun. For our purposes, the Armalite is a superior weapon to the Army’s new SA80. It’s lighter and is very easy to clean and maintain. It’s a good, simple weapon that has been around in different variants since Vietnam days. The Regiment tried SASOs in jungle training when they came out, and found it not best suited to its requirements. With the M16 everything’s nice and clean; there are no little bits and pieces sticking out. The safety catch is very simple and can be operated with the thumb-with the SA80 you have to use your trigger finger, which is madness. If you’re in close country with the M16, you can flick the safety catch off easily with your thumb, and your finger is still on the trigger. What’s more, if the safety catch will go to Automatic on your M16, you know it’s made ready: this means it is cocked, with a round in the chamber. You see people patrolling with their thumbs checking the safety catch every few minutes; the last thing they want is a negligent discharge within earshot of the enemy.

The M16 has a quiet safety catch-another plus if you’re patrolling-and there are no parts to go rusty. If rifles were cars, instead of going for a Ford Sierra 4x4 -good, reliable, tested, and enjoyed by the people who drive them-in the SA80 the Army went for a Rolls-Royce. But at the stage when it was first brought into service, it was still a prototype Rolls-Royce, and there were plenty of teething problems. In my opinion the one and only drawback with a 203 is that you can’t put a bayonet on because of the grenade launcher underneath.

We didn’t have slings on the M16s. A sling means a rifle is going over your shoulder: on operations, why would you want to have a weapon over the shoulder rather than in your hands and ready to fire? When you patrol with a weapon you always move with both hands on it and the butt in your shoulder. What’s the point of having it if you can’t bring it to bear quickly?

I’m not interested in how or where a weapon is made, as long as it does the job it needs to do and I know how to use it. As long as it fires ammunition and you’ve got lots of it, that’s all you should be concerned about.

Weapons are only as good as their handlers, of course. There’s a lot of inbred rivalry between the blokes when it comes to live firing drills. All our weapon training is live firing, and it has to be that way because only then do you get a sense of realism and perspective. In a firefight, the awesome noise will impair your ability to act if you’re not well and truly used to it. An Armalite sounds surprisingly tinny when it fires, and there’s not much kick. You tend to hear other people’s weapons rather than your own. When the 40mm bomb fires, you just hear a pop; there’s no explosion or recoil.

We had four Minimis, which are 5.56 light-support machine guns They can take belted ammunition in disintegrating link in boxes of 200, or ordinary magazines. The weapon is so light that it can be used in the attack like a rifle as well as giving support fire, and it has a fearsome rate of fire. It has a bipod to guarantee good, accurate automatic fire if needed. The plastic prepacked boxes of ammo for the weapon are not its best design feature. As you’re patrolling, the box is across your body; it can bang against you and fall off, but you just have to guard against it. Another problem can be that the rounds are not completely packed in the boxes and you get a rhythmic, banging noise, which is bad news at night as noise travels more easily. Each man in the patrol also carried a disposable 66mm rocket. American-made, the 66 is designed for infantry antitank use. It’s just over two foot long and consists of two tubes inside each other. You pull the two apart and the inner tube contains the rocket, all ready to go. As you pull it apart, the sights pop up.

You just fire the weapon and throw it away. It’s good because it’s simple. The simpler something is, the more chance there is that it’ll work. The round has a shaped charge on the end, which is designed to punch through armor. The fuse arms itself after about 30 feet; even if you just graze the target, it blows up. The 66 doesn’t explode in a big ball of fire as in the movies. HE never does that unless there is a secondary explosion.

We carried white phos grenades as well as the ordinary L2 explosive grenade. Phosphorus burns fiercely and lays down a rather good smokescreen if you need time to get away.

Grenades no longer have the old pineapple shape that people tend to think of. White phos is cylindrical, with the letters WP written across it. The L2 is more egg shaped and consists of tightly wound wire around an explosive charge. We splay the pins even more than they already are so that it takes more pressure to extract them. We also put masking tape around the grenade to hold the handle down as an extra precaution in case there’s a drama with the pin. White phos is not much used in training because it’s so dangerous. If you get it on you, you have to pour water very slowly from your water bottle to stop it getting oxygen, then pick it off. If you’re not successful, it’s not a nice way to die.

We had at least 10 magazines each, 12 40mm bombs, L2 and phos grenades, and a 66. The four Minimi gunners had more than 600 rounds each, plus 6 loaded mags. For an 8-man patrol it was a fearsome amount of firepower.

Those of us with 203s checked there was a bomb loaded. Bob was checking that the belts of ammunition for his Minimi weren’t kinked-the secret of belt-fed ammunition is that it goes into the weapon smoothly. If it’s twisted, you’ll get a stoppage. I saw Vince checking the box of ammunition that clips on to the side of the weapon to make sure it was not going to fall off. His gang were going to provide all-round cover by moving straight out to points just beyond the wash of the aircraft. As they were running out, the rest of us would be throwing the kit off the tailgate as fast as we could.

Stan checked his white phos to make sure it was easy to get at. Everybody was mentally adjusting himself ready to go. Blokes jumped up and down to check that everything was comfy. You do simple things like undo your trousers, pull them up, ruck everything in, redo them, tighten your belt, make sure your belt kit is comfortable, make sure your pouches and buttons are done up. Then you check and recheck that you’ve got everything and haven’t left anything on the floor.

I could tell by the grind of the blades that the heli was maneuvering close to the ground. The tailgate started to lower. I peered out. You’re incredibly vulnerable during the landing. The enemy could be firing at the aircraft, but because of the engine noise you wouldn’t know until you were on the ground. The ramp came down more. The landscape was a black-and-white negative under the quarter moon. We were in a small wadi with a 13-foot rise either side. Clouds of dust flew up, and Vince and his gang moved onto the tailgate, weapons at the ready. There was a strong smell of fuel. The noise was deafening.

The aircraft was still a few feet off the ground when they jumped. If there was a contact, we wouldn’t know about it until we saw them jumping straight back on.

The pilot collapsed the Chinook the last couple of feet onto the ground. We hurled the kit, and Stan, Dinger, and Mark jumped after it. I stayed on board while the lo adie went across the floor with a cyalume stick in his hand in a last-minute sweep. The noise of the rotors increased, and I felt the heli lift its weight off the undercarriage. I waited. It’s always worth the extra ten seconds it takes to make sure, rather than discover when the heli has gone that you’ve only picked up half the equipment. The balance, as ever, is between speed and doing the job correctly.

The lo adie gave the thumbs up and said something into his headset. The aircraft started to lift and I jumped. I hit the ground and looked up. The heli was climbing fast with the ramp still closing. Within seconds it was gone. It was 2100 and we were on our own.

We were on a dried-up riverbed. To the east was flatness and dark. To the west, the same.

The night sky was crystal clear, and all the stars were out. It was absolutely beautiful. I could see my breath. It was colder than we had been used to. There was a definite chill in the air. Sweat ran down the side of my face, and I started to shiver.

Eyes take a long time to adjust in darkness. The cones in your eyes enable you to see in the daytime, giving color and perception. But they’re no good at night. What takes over then are the rods on the edge of your irises. They are angled at 45 degrees because of the convex shape of the eye, so if you look straight at something at night you don’t really see it: it’s a haze. You have to look above it or around it so you can line up these rods, which then will give you a picture. It takes forty minutes or so for them to become fully effective, but you start to see better after five. And what you see when you land and what you see those five minutes later are two very different things.

Vince with his hoods was still out giving cover. They had gone out about 30 meters to the edge of the rise of the wadi and were looking over. We moved off to the side to make a more secure area. It took each of us two trips to ferry the berg ens jerricans, and sandbags.

Mark got out Magellan and took a fix. He squinted at it with one eye. Even small amounts of light can wreck your night vision, and the process must start all over again. If you have to look at something, you close the eye that you aim with, the “master eye,” and look with the other. Therefore you can still have 50 percent night vision, and it’s in the eye that does the business.

We lay in all-round defense, covering the whole 360degree arc. We did nothing, absolutely nothing, for the next ten minutes. You’ve come off a noisy, smelly aircraft, and there’s been a frenzy of activity. You have to give your body a chance to tune in to your new environment. You have to adjust to the sounds and smells and sights, and changes in climate and terrain. When you’re tracking people in the jungle you do the same: you stop every so often and look and listen. It happens in ordinary life, too. You feel more at ease in a strange house after you’ve been in it a little while. People indigenous to an area can sense instinctively if the mood is ugly and there’s going to be trouble; a tourist will bumble straight into it.

We needed to confirm our position because there’s often a difference between where you want to be and where the R.A.F put you. Once you know where you are, you make sure that everybody else in the patrol knows. Passage of information is vital; it’s no good just the leader having it. We were in fact where we wanted to be, which was a shame, because now we couldn’t slag the R.A.F when we got back.

The ground was featureless. It was hard bedrock with about two inches of rubbly shale over the top. It looked alien and desolate, like the set of Dr. Who. We could have been on the moon. I’d been in the Middle East many times on different tasks, and I thought I was familiar with the ground, but this was new to me. My ears strained as a dog barked in the distance.

We were very isolated, but we were a big gang, we had more weapons and ammunition than you could shake a stick at, and we were doing what we were paid to do.

Bombing raids were going on about 10-20 miles to our east and our northeast. I saw tracer going up and flashes on the horizon, and seconds later I heard the muffled sound of explosions.

Silhouetted in one of the flashes I saw a plantation about a mile to our east. It shouldn’t have been there, but it was-trees, a water tower, a building. Now I knew where the barking had come from. More dogs sparked up. They would have heard the Chinook, but as far as any population were concerned a helicopter’s a helicopter. Problems would only come if there were troops stationed there.

I worried about how good the rest of our information was. But at the end of the day we were there now: there wasn’t a lot we could do about it. We lay waiting for signs of cars starting up but nothing happened. I looked beyond the plantation. I seemed to be staring into infinity.

I watched the tracer going up. I couldn’t see any aircraft, but it was a wonderful, comforting feeling all the same. I had the feeling they were doing it just for us.

“Fuck it, let’s get on with it,” Mark said quietly.

I got to my feet, and suddenly, to the west, the earth erupted with noise and there was a blinding light in the sky.

“Fucking hell, what’s that?” Mark whispered.

“Helicopter!”

Where it had sprung from I didn’t have a clue. All I knew was that we’d just been on the ground ten minutes and were about to have a major drama. There was no way the heli could be one of ours. For a start, it wouldn’t have had its searchlight on like that. Whoever it belonged to, it looked as if it was coming straight towards us.

Jesus, how could the Iraqis be on to us so quickly?

Could they have been tracking the Chinook ever since we entered their airspace?

The light seemed to keep coming and coming. Then I realized it wasn’t coming towards us but going upwards. The bright light wasn’t a searchlight; it was a fireball.

“Scud!” I whispered.

I could hear the sighs of relief.

It was the first one any of us had seen being launched, and now that we knew what it was, it looked just like an Apollo moon shot, a big ball of exhaust flames about 6 miles away, burning straight up into the air until it finally disappeared into the darkness.

“Scud alley,” “Scud triangle,” both these terms had been used by the media, and now here we were, right in the middle of it.

Once everything had settled down, I went up and whispered in Vince’s ear for him to call the rest of the guns in. There was no running or rushing. Shape, shine, shadow, silhouette, movement, and noise are some of the things that will always give you away. Slow movement doesn’t generate noise or catch the eye so easily, which is why we patrol so slowly. Plus, if you run and fall over and injure yourself, you’ll screw everybody up.

I told them exactly where we were, and confirmed which way we would be going, and confirmed the RV that was forward of us. So if there was any major drama between where we were now and our proposed cache area and we got split up, everybody knew that for the next twenty-four hours there was a meeting place already set up. They would go north, eventually hit a half buried petroleum pipeline and follow that till they hit a major ridgeline, and we’d meet there. It had to be that vague because anything more precise would mean nothing to a bloke in the middle of the desert with just a map and compass: all the map shows is rock. After that, and for the next twenty-four hours, the next RV would be back at the point of the landing site.

Now we had to patrol up to the proposed cache area. We did it in a shuttle, as we had practiced, four blokes ferrying the kit, the other four giving protection, then swapping over. Because we were patrolling, everything had to be done tactically: we’d stop, check the ground ahead, and every couple of miles, when we stopped for a rest, the 4-man protection would go out; then we’d check the kit to make sure that we hadn’t dropped anything, that all pouches were still done up, and none of the sandbags had split.

The water was the worst because it was like carrying the world’s heaviest suitcase in one hand. I tried mine on the top of my bergen until the strain on my back got too outrageous. But then, nobody said it would be easy.

Moving as quickly but as tactically as we could, we had to get to the MSR well before first light to give us time to find somewhere to cache the kit and hide up. In my orders I’d put a cutoff time of 0400 the next morning; even if we hadn’t reached the proposed cache area by then, we’d have to start finding an LUP. That would give us an hour and a half of darkness to work in. The ground worried me. If it carried on like this it was going to be too flat and too hard to hide up in. If we had to lie in open ground in broad daylight we’d stick out like the balls on a bulldog.

We navigated by bearings, time, and distance. We had Magellan, but it was only an aid. Patrolling as we were was not a good time to use it. Apart from the fact that it could not be depended upon, the machine emitted telltale light, and it would not be tactical anyway for the operator to be looking at a machine rather than the ground.

Every half hour or so we fixed a new ERV emergency rendezvous), a point on the ground where we could regroup if we had a contact and had to withdraw swiftly. If we came to a prominent feature like a pile of old burial ruins, the lead man would indicate it as the new ERV by a circular motion of the hand and this would be passed down the patrol.

All the time, you keep making appreciations. You’ve got to say to yourself: What if? What happens if we get an attack from the front? Or from the left? Where will I go for cover? Is this a good ambush point? Where was the last emergency RV? Who have I got in front of me? Who have I got behind me? You have to check all the time that you’re not losing anyone. And you always have to cover your arcs and be conscious of the noise you’re making.

As you patrol you start to get hot. When you stop you get cold again. You’re sitting there with all the coldness down your back and under your armpits, and your face starts to feel it. The back of your hair starts to get that horrible, uncomfortable, sticky feeling, and the clothing around your belt is soaked. Then you move off again because you want to be warm. You don’t want to stop for too long because you don’t want to freeze. You’ve been like this plenty of times before, and you know that you’ll dry out eventually, but that doesn’t make it any less of a pain in the arse.

We finally got into the area of the bend of the MSR at about 0445. We couldn’t see any lights or vehicles in the pitch-black. We cached the equipment, and Vince’s gang stayed to protect it. The rest of us were going to go forward for a recce to find a place to hide.

“My cutoff time to be back here will be 0545,” I whispered to Vince, my mouth right against his ear so that the sound didn’t carry.

If we failed to return but they knew there hadn’t been a contact because they hadn’t heard any noise, we would meet at the patrol RV near the oil pipeline. If we weren’t at the patrol RV by the twenty-four-hour cutoff time, Vince was then to move back to the RV at the heli-landing site, then wait a further twenty-four hours before requesting an exfil. If we weren’t there, he’d just have to get on the helicopter and go. They should also move back to the helicopter RV if they heard a contact but it wasn’t close enough for them to give support.

I went through the actions on return. “I will come in the same direction as I leave,” I whispered to Vince, “and as I come in I’ll approach just on my own with my weapon in my right arm and walk in as a crucifix.”

I would then come forward and confirm with the stag and go back and bring the other three in. I would do all this on my own because as well as confirming that it was me, I would want to confirm that it was safe to come in-they might have been bumped, and the enemy could be waiting in ambush. The other three would be out supporting, so if there was any drama, they would lay down fire and I could withdraw to them.

We set out on our recce patrol, and after about half an hour we found a good site for the LUP-a watershed where flash floods over thousands of years had carved a small reentrant about 15 feet high into the rock so that there was an overhang. We would be in dead ground, covered from view and with limited cover from fire. I couldn’t believe our luck. We patrolled straight back to fetch the others.

We moved all the equipment into the LUP. The cave was divided by a large rock, so we centralized the equipment and had the two gangs either side. At last I felt secure, even though the problem with finding an LUP at night is that in the morning everything can look different. You can find that what you thought was the perfect LUP is smack in the middle of a housing estate.

Now was another period of stop, settle down, be quiet, listen to what’s going on, tune in to the new environment. The ground did not look so alien now, and we were feeling more confident.

It was time to get some sleep. There’s an army saying, “Whenever there’s a lull in the battle, get your head down,” and it’s true. You’ve got to sleep whenever you can, because you never know when you’re going to get the opportunity again.

There were two men on stag, changing every two hours. They had to look and listen. If anything came towards us, it was their job to warn us and get us stood to. The rest of us slept covering our arcs, so we’d just have to roll over and start firing.

More jets went over that night. We saw flak going up and Baghdad erupting to our half right about 100 miles away. There were no incidents on the ground.

Just as it was coming up to first light, two of us moved out of the LUP position and checked that we hadn’t left footprints on our way in to the LUP, dropped any kit, disturbed anything, or left any other “sign” to betray us. You must assume that everybody is better at everything than you-including tracking-and make your plans accordingly.

We arranged our claymores so that both men on stag could see them and their field of view, and be ready to detonate them with hand-held “clackers.” If the stag saw or heard movement, he’d wake everybody else. There wouldn’t be hectic running around, we’d just stand to. Everything is always done at a slow pace. You’d know if it had to be rushed because you’d hear the stag firing. If somebody was in a position to be hit with a claymore, we were in a position to be compromised, so it was down to the sentry whether or not he pushed the clackers. If they came as close as the kill zone of the claymores, which were positioned as a protection of last resort, we’d just have to initiate the contact. But still the best weapon we had was concealment.

I went up onto the dead ground to double-check. Looking north towards the MSR, I saw a flat area of 2000 feet, then a slight rise of about 15 feet, and then, another 1300 feet away, a plantation. Looking east and west, the ground was flat as far as the horizon. South, to my rear, I saw another plantation about 1500 meters away, with a water tower and buildings. According to the map and Bert’s briefing these locations shouldn’t have been there, but they were, and they were far too close for comfort.

I heard vehicles moving along the as yet unconfirmed MSR, but that was of no concern. The only way anybody could see us was if they were on the opposite lip looking down. No one on our side of the wadi could see us because of the overhang. They could only see us if we could see them.

I went down and briefed everybody on what was above us. Only one man was needed on stag because from his vantage point he could look down the wadi as well as up on the lip. He had his back to us as I did the briefing, covering his arcs. I described what I’d seen on the high ground and went through our actions on if we had a contact during the day.

It was time to transmit the Sit Rep (situation report) to the FOB. Until we did, nobody knew where we were or what state we were in. On this task we would try to send a Sit Rep every day, telling them where we were, everything we had learned about the enemy in the area or done with them, our future intentions, and any other information. They would come back to us with instructions.

As I wrote it out, Legs prepared the radio. He encoded the message and typed it in ready for transmission. The patrol radio would transmit in a single, very short burst that was virtually undetectable by the enemy. The burst would bounce off the ionosphere, and we would wait for some kind of an acknowledgment.

We got jack shit.

Legs tried again and again, but nothing happened. It was annoying but not desperate, because we had a lost com ms procedure. The following night, we’d simply go back to the landing site and RV with a heli at 0400 to exchange the radios.

For the rest of that day we tried different antennas-everything from sloping wire to half-wave dipole. All of us were signals trained and we all had a go, but without success.

We each did two hours’ stag, and half an hour before last light we stood to. The ideal conditions for an attack are just before last light and just before first light, so it is an SOP that everybody is awake at those times and everything is packed away ready to go. We got into the fire position with our weapons and prepared our 66s, removing the top cover and opening up the tube so it was ready to fire. Once last light had come, we closed everything up again and got ready for our recce patrol.

I left with my gang at 2100. Our cutoff time was to be 0500. If we weren’t back by then, it would be because we’d had a drama-we’d got lost, got an injury, or had a contact, which Vince’s lot should hear. If they didn’t hear a contact, they were to wait at the LUP until 2100 the following night. If we weren’t back by then, they were to move to the heli RV. If there was a contact, they were to move back to the heli RV that night, and we’d make our way back there as best we could, to get there for the following 0400 pickup.

Stan, Dinger, Mark, and I climbed over the lip of the wadi in total blackness. The task was to confirm the position of the Main Supply Route and to locate the landline. It’s no good just sitting there on top of what you think is your objective unless you have checked. One mile further on for all we knew, there could be the proper MSR, so it had to be physically checked. We would patrol in an anticlockwise direction, generally heading north, using the lie of the ground, to see if we hit anything else which resembled the MSR.

First, we needed to locate a marker that would guide us back to the LUP if we got lost. We would take a bearing due north until we hit the other side of the road, where we’d try to find a rock or some other feature. Then if we did get lost, we’d know that all we’d have to do was go along the high ground, find the marker, and move due south back onto the watershed.

It was going to be difficult to map-read because there were no definite features. In most countries there’s high ground that you can take reference points off, there are roads, or there are markers, and it’s all quite easy. In the jungle, too, it’s simple, because you’ve got lots of rivers and you can use contour lines. But here in the middle of the desert there was absolutely bugger all, so it was all down to bearings and pacing again, backed up by Magellan.

We found a suitable marker, a large rock, and started heading west on our anticlockwise loop. Within minutes we spotted our first location of the night and immediately heard a dog. Bedu throw their hand in at night; when the sun’s down, they go to bed. So if a dog barks, they know there must be something afoot. Within seconds, this one had been joined by two others.

I had been the first to hear the low growling. It reminded me of patrolling in Northern Ireland. You stop and assess what’s happening. Nine times out of ten you’re intruding on a dog’s territory, and if you back off, sit down, and just wait for everything to settle down, it will. Our problem was that we had to recce the location properly. The dogs could be part of a Scud site for all we knew.

As we sat down we pulled our fighting knives from their sheaths. They would be called upon to do the business if the dogs came to investigate and either started barking in earnest or decided to attack. Either way, we’d kill them. We’d take the bodies with us, so that in the morning the owners would assume that their animals had run away or wandered off. They would find it strange, but that would be the best we could make of a bad situation.

We listened, waiting for lights as people came to see what the dogs were barking at. Nothing happened. We started to box around the position, circumnavigating to see if we could get in another way to confirm what it was. We got around the other side and found it was just some local population. There were tents, mud huts, Land Cruisers, and a hash mash of other vehicles, but no military indication. We got a fix on it with Magellan so that when we returned to the LUP we could inform the others, then headed off northwest using the ground. We wanted to avoid until later the plantation that we knew to be to our north.

I was leading when I saw something ahead. I stopped, looked, listened, then slowly moved closer.

Four tents and vehicles were parked next to two S60 antiaircraft guns, indicating a setup of about platoon strength. All was quiet, and there didn’t seem to be any stags. Mark and I moved slowly forward. Again, we stopped, looked, listened. We didn’t want to get right on top of the position, just close enough to learn as much about it as we could. Nobody was sleeping on the guns or in the vehicles. The whole platoon must have been in the tents. We heard men coughing. The location wasn’t an immediate danger to us, but what worried me was that antiaircraft guns are sited to guard something. If it was just the MSR that would be no problem. The danger was that it could be part of an armored battle group or whatever. Mark fixed the position with Magellan, and we headed north.

We went for 2 miles without encountering anything, and came to the conclusion that what we had crossed earlier must indeed have been the MSR. Magellan gave our LUP position as a half mile north of where the map said the MSR was, which was nothing to worry about. The map stated that roads, pylons, and pipelines were only of approximate alignment.

We now knew for sure that we had correctly found the bend in the MSR, but unfortunately we also knew that the area was full of population: we had plantations north and south of us, the civilians further down the road, and an S60 site to the northwest of our LUP. From a tactical point of view, we might as well have sited our LUP in the middle of Piccadilly Circus. Still, nobody said it would be easy.

We moved back to look around the buildings at the plantation to the north of the LUPI had planned to look at this last as it was the most dangerous location we knew about prior to the recce. We had a bit of a mince around the plantation and found that it consisted of just a water tower and an unoccupied building that sounded as if it housed an irrigation pump. There were no vehicles, no lights, no signs of life, so we were fairly pleased. It was clearly something that was tended rather than lived around.

As we moved back to the LUP, we witnessed another Scud launch to our northwest, about 3 miles away. We seemed to be in the middle of a mega launch area. We were going to have a fluffy old time of it. Again, we got a fix.

We patrolled back towards the LUP, found the marker, and walked due south towards the wadi. I approached, arms out in the crucifix position, as I came up to the lip of the watershed.

Bob was on stag. I stood there and waited for him to come up. He grinned at me, and I went back and got the rest of the blokes. I checked my watch. The patrol had lasted five hours.

It wasn’t worth briefing the blokes at this moment because those not on stag had got their heads down, and to brief everybody at night just generates noise. It was important, however, that everybody knew what we had seen. Everything we had done and seen, everybody else had to know about. I decided to wait until first light.

The stag stood us to, and we covered our arcs as first light came. After that, and before I did the brief, I wanted to check the dead ground again, even though we’d covered it last night. I knew we were definitely on the MSR, but I wanted to look for any form of identification which would give us the landlines. It was also a personal thing; I wanted to check that there had been no changes above us. Shielded from sound by the walls of the cave, we could have sat there with Genesis giving an open-air concert and we wouldn’t have heard a thing.

Chris covered me while I scrambled up the rocks and peered over the brim. It was the last time I’d risk doing this in daylight.

I looked northeast and there, just on the far edge of the MSR, were another two S60s. They must have arrived during the night. I could see two wagons, tents, blokes stretching and coughing-all just 1000 feet from our position. I couldn’t believe it. This was getting unreal. Our recce patrol must have missed them by about 150 feet. I came down and told Chris, then went to brief the rest of the patrol. Mark went up and had a quick squint to confirm that I wasn’t hallucinating.

I was not really impressed by this development. It was quite scary stuff, because these characters were right on top of us. They were going to inhibit us badly.

I spread out the map and showed all the locations we had discovered-including the new S60 sites. We spent the rest of the day trying to transmit our Sit Rep again. The new S60s were obviously there to protect the MSR. There was no reason, however, why they should send out clearing patrols. They were in their own country and they had mutual support. We reassured ourselves that we could only be compromised from the opposite lip, and even then only if someone was literally standing on it, looking down.

Again we all had a go with the radio, but to no avail. Our lost com ms contingency would have come into effect by now, and the helicopter would have been briefed to meet us the following morning at 0400.

There was no concern. We were in cover, and we were an 8-man fighting patrol. When we met the aircraft we would get a one-for-one exchange, or get on the aircraft and relocate.

In my mind I ran through the heli RV procedure again. The pilot would be coming in on NVG (night viewing goggles), watching for a signal from my infrared torch. I would flash the letter Bravo as a recognition signal. He would land 15 feet to my right, using the light as his reference point. The load master door was just behind the pilot, and all I would have to do was walk up to it, put the radio in, and receive the new radio that was handed to me. If there was any message for us, he would grab hold of my arm and hand me the written message. Or, if a longer message was involved, the ramp would come down and the lo adie would come and drag me round to the back. The rest of the patrol would be out in all-round defense. If I had to go and get them in, they knew the drills. If I wanted to get us relocated, I would grab hold of the lo adie and point to the rear of the ramp. The ramp would then come down, and we’d all get on.

And that was the plan. No drama. We would move back that night and relocate.