Bravo Two Zero

7

Night would be our cover, and it would be dark soon. The APC had backed off but was moving forwards again. Infantry followed in its tracks, firing wildly. We heaved the berg ens onto our shoulders. There was no point going south because they would have guessed that was our direction of travel. The object of the exercise was to put as much distance between them and us as we could. The only way to go was west, which meant running the risk of coming into line of sight with the S60s.

We wouldn’t be patrolling now. We would be moving as fast as we physically could with berg ens on to get out of the contact area. It was an infantry maneuver known as getting the fuck out.

Two trucks with infantry turned up from our east, came over the brow, and spotted us. They braked, and soldiers spilled out of the back and started firing. There were maybe forty of them, which was a colossal amount of fire bearing down on us.

They started coming forward. We turned to the east, got rounds down at them, and moved backwards to the west, firing like maniacs. Fire and maneuver, fire and maneuver, but this time away from them: two men turned round and ran, then turned to give covering fire for the other two.

We were going up a gradual slope. As we hit the brow we came into line of sight of the AA guns on the northwest position. They started firing with a deep, booming bass sound. The 57mm rounds screamed past us, all of them trace red The shells thundered into the ground, blasting rubble all around us.

Chris and I turned round together to fall back. He was running 6 to 10 feet to my right when I heard what sounded like a massive punch. I looked across just as Chris went down. He’d been hit by an antiaircraft shell. I ran over to his body, ready to jab a Syrette of morphine into what was left of him-if he wasn’t already dead.

He was wriggling, and for a split second I thought it was death throes. But he was very much alive and struggling with his bergen straps. He released himself and staggered to his feet.

“Fuck that!” he said. His bergen smoldered where the round had smashed into it.

We ran on a few strides and he stopped. “Forgot something,” he said.

He ran back to the shattered bergen and rummaged in the top. He came back with a silver hip flask in his hand.

“Christmas present from the wife,” he grinned as he caught up. “Couldn’t leave it behind: she’d kill me.”

The rest of the blokes were also binning their berg ens I hoped that Legs had managed to retrieve the patrol radio from his.

The APC was moving up quite aggressively, firing sustained and accurate bursts. Two Land Cruisers full of infantry had also joined the fray.

We stopped and got some fire down with the 203s. The vehicles braked sharply as the 40mm bombs exploded in front of them. Jundies spilled out, firing in a frenzy.

Mark and Dinger got severely pinned down by the S60s. They threw out their white phos and thick dirty white smoke billowed around them. The trouble with isolated smokescreens is that they immediately draw the enemy fire, but there was nothing else they could do. The Iraqis knew the blokes were covering their withdrawal, and they emptied their magazines into the cloud. A couple of 203 rounds into the Iraqi positions slowed their rate of fire. Mark and Dinger jumped to their feet and ran.

“Cor, good here, ain’t it?” Dinger said in a pissed off tone of voice as he rushed past me.

We kept moving back and back. It was getting to last light, and they finally lost contact with us in the gloom. We were well spread out, and as darkness fell there was a danger of the patrol getting split. As we ran, we scanned the ground for a suitable rally point. Anybody in the patrol could make the choice.

There was a loud shout 150 feet to my half-right. “Rally, rally, rally!”

Whoever it was, he’d found some cover where we could get down and consolidate ourselves. This was good news, because at the moment we were fragmented, all fighting our own little dramas to get back. A rally point is much the same as an ERV except that it’s given there and then and not prearranged. Its purpose is to get everybody together as quickly as possible before moving off. If anybody didn’t make it, we would have to confirm that he was dead, if we hadn’t done so already. Otherwise we would have to get back the “man down.”

I ran over and found Chris and Bob waiting in a dip in the ground. I immediately put on a fresh mag and prepared my weapon to carry on firing. The three of us waited in all-round defense, covering all the arcs, waiting for the others to come in on us.

I counted heads as they rushed past and took up a firing position. It was five or six minutes before the last man appeared. If anybody had been missing, I’d have had to ask: Who was the last one to see him? Where did you see him? Was he just down or dead? If not, we’d have had to go forward and try to find him.

The headlights of tracked vehicles were frantically crisscrossing in front of us, no more than 1000 feet away. Now and then in the distance there was a burst of gunfire and shouting. They must have been firing at rocks, and probably at themselves. There was total confusion, which chuffed us no end.

The eight of us were closed up in a small area of a couple of square feet. People quickly sorted themselves out, taking off their sweaters and tucking them into their belt kit or inside their smocks. Nobody had to be told what was required. They knew we were either going for the helicopter or we were going for Syria. Either way, we would be doing a fearsome amount of tabbing.

“Got the radio?” I asked Legs.

“There was no way I could get to it,” he said. “The fire coming in was outrageous. I think it was wrecked anyway because my bergen got shot to fuck.”

I knew he would have got it if he could. But it didn’t really matter anyway. We had four TACBEs between us and could get in touch with AWACS within fifteen seconds.

I was still out of breath and thirsty, and took a few gulps of water from my bottle. I dug a couple of boiled sweets out of my pocket and shoved them in my mouth.

“I’d only just lit that fag,” Dinger said ruefully. “If one of them bastards has picked it up, I hope he chokes.”

Bob giggled, and suddenly we were all laughing like drains. It wasn’t particularly what Dinger had said. We were all just so relieved to be unscathed and back together after such a major drama. We couldn’t give a damn about anything else at this stage. It was great to be all in one piece.

We had used a quarter of our ammunition. We amalgamated it and put fresh mags on. I still had my 66-the only one left, because like a dickhead I had left it with my bergen.

I adjusted my clothes, pulling my trousers right up to prevent leg sores and doing up my belt again to make sure I was comfortable. It was starting to get cold. I’d been doing a fearsome amount of sweating and started to shiver in my wet shirt. We had to get moving.

“Let’s get on the net now,” Legs said. “They know we’re here. We might as well use the TACBE.”

“Yeah,” said Vince, “let’s get some fucking shit down.”

He was right. I got out my TACBE, pulled the tab, and heard the hish. I pressed the transmit button and talked.

“Hello AWACS, this is Bravo Two Zero: we are a ground call sign and we’re in the shit, over.”

There was no reply.

I repeated the message.

Nothing.

“Hello any call sign,” I said, “this is Bravo Two Zero.”

Nothing.

I kept trying for thirty seconds without success.

Our only hope now was to get a fast jet overfly so we could contact them by TACBE on the emergency frequency. It was very unlikely, however, that jets would be going over, unless one of Legs’s signals had got through during the compromise phase and the FOB had scrambled some support aircraft. There certainly hadn’t been an auto acknowledgment Maybe they knew we were in the shit, maybe they didn’t. There wasn’t a lot we could do about it.

I did a quick appreciation. We could either tab 200 miles south to Saudi, head north towards Turkey, which meant crossing the Euphrates, or go just 100 miles west to Syria. There were infantry and armor in the immediate area. We were compromised and they were looking for us. They would naturally think that we were heading south towards Saudi. Even if we could make the heli RV, there was a chance of us being followed-and that could mean enemy activity in the area while the Chinook came in.

I decided that we had no choice but to head for Syria. We would initially move south as part of the deception plan, because that was the presumed way to go; then we’d head west to box around the area, and finally turn generally northwest. We would try to be on the other side of the MSR before first light because this would probably be the psychological perimeter of their search south. Then we could start heading for the border.

“Is everybody ready?” I said.

We started south in a single file. Vehicles were zooming backwards and forwards around us about a quarter of a mile away. We’d only gone a few hundred meters when one of them, a Land Cruiser, headed straight at us, its headlights blazing. We hit the ground, but we were out in the open. We turned our faces away to prevent the reflection and to save our night vision. The vehicle was 650 feet away and closing. If it came any nearer, we would be seen. I braced myself for another major drama. There was a shout. I flicked my head up and saw another vehicle flashing its lights about 1000 feet to our left. The Land Cruiser changed direction and sped off towards it.

We carried on at a brisk pace. Several times we had to stop and get down as vehicles came near. It was annoying: not only did we want to get out of the area quickly, but we also needed to keep going to keep warm. We only had smocks on over our shirts because we didn’t want to sweat too much, and the temperature seemed to be dropping all the time now.

I was severely pissed off about AWACS not responding to our signal, and the thought of having to cover more than 100 miles to get to Syria didn’t do much to lift my spirits.

After what seemed like a lifetime of tabbing, we looked back and saw that the headlight activity was focused in the distance. We were out of the immediate danger area, with a bit of cover from a dip in the ground. If we wanted to try TACBE again, it would have to be on this southern leg. Bob and Dinger immediately moved back onto the lip of the depression with their Minimis to cover the rear in case we had been followed. Everybody else was down in all-round defense. I got on my TACBE again, to no avail.

Everybody with a TACBE had a go. It was unbelievable that all four radios were playing up, but that seemed to be what was happening.

Mark made a nav check with the Magellan and worked out that we’d tabbed 15 miles. We’d covered it so quickly that with luck the Iraqis wouldn’t believe it possible and would have been thrown off the scent.

“We’ll head west now to get well clear of the area,” I said. “Then we’ll start heading north to get over the MSR before first light.”

All I heard was abuse directed at the manufacturers of TACBE. We would not use it again now unless we got a fast jet flying over. We didn’t know whether the Iraqis had aircraft up or not, but we’d just have to take the chance. We were in the shit, and freezing cold shit it was, too.

We got Dinger and Bob back in, gave them the good news, and off we tabbed. We’d only stopped for a minute or two, but it was good to get moving again. It was bitterly cold, and a strong wind blasted the chill deep into our bones. There was dense cloud cover, and we were in pitch darkness. We couldn’t see our footing correctly. The only plus was that at least it made it a lot harder for them to find us. There was still the odd vehicle, but in the far distance. We had left them well behind. I was almost feeling confident.

We pushed west for 10 miles, moving fast on a bearing. The ground was so flat that we’d be warned well in advance of any Iraqi presence. It was a balance between speed and observation.

We stopped every hour to rest for five minutes, which is the patrolling SOP. If you go on and on, all you do is run yourself down, and you’ll end up not being able to achieve what you set out to do. So you stop, get down, get some rest, drink some water, sort yourself out, get yourself comfy again, and off you go. It was freezing cold, and I shivered uncontrollably when we stopped.

We had one of our five-minute rests at the 10 miles mark and did a Magellan check. I made the decision that because of the time factor, we’d have to turn north now to get over the MSR before first light.

“Let’s just get over that road,” I said, “then we can go northwest to Syria.”

We’d gone about another 6 miles when I noticed gaps appearing in the line. We were definitely moving more slowly than we had in the beginning. There was a problem. I stopped the patrol, and everybody closed up.

Vince was limping.

“You all right, mate?” I said.

“Yeah, I hurt my leg on the way out in that contact, and it’s really fucking starting to give me gyp.”

The whole aim of the game was to get everybody over the border. Vince clearly had an injury. We’d have to do all our planning and considerations around the fact that he was in trouble. None of this “No, it’s Okay, skipper, I can go on” bollocks, because if you try to play the he-man and don’t inform people of your injuries, you’re endangering the whole patrol. If they’re not aware of your problem, they can’t adjust the plan or cater for future eventualities. If you make sure people know that you’re injured, they can plan around it.

“What’s the injury like?” Dinger said.

“It just fucking hurts. I don’t think it’s fractured. It’s not bleeding or anything, but it’s swollen. It’s going to slow me down.”

“Right, we’ll stop here and sort ourselves out,” I said.

I pulled my woolen bobble hat from my smock and put it on my head. I watched Vince massage his leg. He was clearly annoyed with himself for sustaining an injury.

“Stan’s in shit state,” Bob said to me.

Dinger and Mark had been helping him along. They laid him down on the ground. He was in a bad way. He knew it, and he was pissed off about it.

“What the hell’s the matter?” I said, sticking my hat on his head.

“I’m on my chin strap mate. I’m just dying here.”

Chris was the most experienced medic on the patrol. He examined Stan, and it was obvious to him that he was dangerously dehydrated.

“We’ve got to get some rehydrate down him, and quick.”

Chris ripped open two sachets of electrolyte from Stan’s belt kit and tipped them into his water bottle. Stan took several big gulps.

“Look, Stan,” I said, “you realize that we’ve got to go on?”

“Yeah, I know that. Just give us a minute. Let’s get some more of this shit down my neck, and I’ll sort myself out. It’s this fucking Helly Hansen underwear. I was sleeping with it on when we got compromised.”

Dehydration is no respecter of climates. You can become dehydrated in the depths of an Arctic winter just the same as in the middle of the day in the Sahara.

Physical exertion produces sweat, even in the cold. And the vapor clouds we see when we exhale are yet more precious moisture leaking from our bodies. Thirst is an unreliable indicator of dehydration. The problem is that just a few sips of liquid might quench your thirst without improving your internal water deficit. Or you might not even notice your thirst because there is too much else going on that needs your attention. After losing 5 percent of your body weight through dehydration, you will be struck by waves of nausea. If you vomit, you’ll lose even more precious fluid. Your movements will slow down dramatically, your speech will slur, and you’ll become unable to walk. Dehydration to this degree can be fatal. Stan had been wearing his thermals ever since we left the LUP. He must have lost pints of sweat.

I started to shake.

“What do we do-take his kit off?” I asked Chris.

“No, it’s all he’s got on, apart from his trousers, shirt, and smock. If we take it off, he’ll be in a worse state.”

Stan got up and started moving around. We gave him another ten minutes to get himself organized; then it became too cold to stand still any longer and we had to get moving.

We had to do our planning around the two slowest and move at their speed. I changed the order of the march. I put Chris up front, with Stan and Vince behind him. I followed them, with the others behind me.

As scout, Chris moved on the compass bearing and used the night sight to make sure that we weren’t going to walk into anything nasty. We stopped every half hour instead of every hour. Each time, we had to get more water into Stan. The situation was not desperate, but he did seem to be getting worse.

The weather had become diabolical. We weren’t tabbing as hard as we had been because the cold was sapping our strength. The wind was driving into our faces and we were all moving with our heads turned at half cock to try and protect ourselves.

We pushed on, our pace dictated by the two injured men in front. At one stop Vince sat down and gripped his leg.

“It’s getting worse, mate,” he said. It was so out of character for him to complain. The injured leg must have been agony. He apologized for the hassle he was causing us.

We had two enemies now-time and the physical condition of the two slowest men. By now the rest of us were starting to feel the effects of the night’s march as well. My feet and legs were aching, and I had to keep reminding myself that it was what I got paid for.

There was total cloud cover. It was jet-black. I checked the navigation, and the rest of the patrol covered the arcs to the sides and the rear. Chris was having trouble with the NVA because there was no ambient light. This was now slowing us down as much as the two injured men.

The wind bit into every inch of exposed skin. I kept my arms tight against my sides to preserve warmth. My head was down, my shoulders shrugged. If I had to move my head, I’d rum my whole body. I didn’t want the slightest bit of wind down my neck.

We started to hear aircraft coming from the north. I couldn’t see a thing because of the cloud cover, but I had to make a decision. Was I going to get on the TACBE, only to find they were Iraqi?

“Fucking yeah,” Mark said, reading my thoughts. “Let’s do it.”

I put my hand on Vince’s shoulder and said, “We’re going to stop and try TACBE.”

He nodded and said, “Yep, Okay, yep.”

I tried to open my pouch. It was easier said than done. My hands were frozen and so numb that I couldn’t get my fingers to work. Mark started fumbling with my belt kit as well, but he couldn’t unclench his fingers enough to undo the pouch. Finally, somehow, I had the TACBE in my hand. The last couple of jets were still going over.

“Hello any call sign, this is Bravo Two Zero, Bravo Two Zero. We are a ground call sign and we’re in the shit. Over.”

Nothing. I called again. And again.

“Hello any call sign, this is Bravo Two Zero, Bravo Two Zero. We are a ground call sign and we’re in the shit. We have a fix for you. Over.”

If they did nothing else other than inform somebody of our position, we’d be laughing. Mark got out Magellan and pressed the fix button to give us longitude and latitude.

It was then that I heard the wonderful sound of an American voice, and it suddenly registered with me that these would be jets coming from Turkey to do raids around Baghdad.

“Say again, Bravo Two Zero, Bravo Two Zero. You’re very weak. Try again.”

The signal was weak because he was screaming out of range.

“Turn back north,” I said. “Turn back north. Over.”

No reply.

“Hello any call sign, this is Bravo Two Zero. Over.”

Nothing.

They’d gone. They wouldn’t come back. Bastards!

Five minutes later, the horizon was lit by bright flashes and tracer. The jets were obviously hosing something down near Baghdad. Their run-ins are crucial, timed to the split second. They couldn’t have turned back for us even if they’d wanted to. At least he had repeated our call sign. Presumably this would get filtered through the system, and the FOB would know we were still on the ground, but in the shit-or at least, that one of us with a TACBE was.

It was all over within twenty or thirty seconds. I hunched with my back to the wind as I replaced the TACBE in my pouch. I looked at Legs and he shrugged. He was right-so what? We’d made the contact.

“Maybe they’ll fly back this way and things will be good,” I said to Bob.

“Let’s hope.”

I turned into the wind to tell Chris and the other two that we’d better press on.

“For fuck’s sake,” I whispered, “where’s everybody else gone?”

I had told Vince we were going to try TACBE. The correct response is for the message to get passed along the line, but it can’t have registered in his numbed brain. He must have just kept on walking without telling Chris and Stan.

It’s each man’s responsibility in the line to make sure that messages go up or down, and if you stop, you make sure that the bloke in front knows that you’ve stopped. You should know who’s in front of you and who’s behind you. It’s your responsibility to make sure they’re always there. So it was my fault and Vince’s that they didn’t stop. We both failed in our responsibilities-Vince in not passing it on, me in not making sure that he stopped.

We couldn’t do anything about it. We couldn’t do a visual search because Chris was the only person with a night-viewing aid. We couldn’t shout because we didn’t know what was ahead of us or to either side. And we couldn’t use white light-that’s a big no-no. So we’d just have to keep on the bearing and hope that they’d stop at some stage and wait for us. There was a good chance that we’d meet up.

I felt terrible. We had failed, more or less, in our contact with the aircraft. And now, even worse, we’d lost three members of the patrol-two of whom were injured. I was annoyed with myself, and annoyed with the situation. How the hell had I allowed it to happen?

Bob must have guessed what I was thinking because he said, “It’s done now: let’s just carry on. Hopefully we’ll RV.”

That helped me a lot. He was right. At the end of the day they were big boys: they could sort themselves out.

We headed north again on the bearing. The freezing wind pierced our flimsy desert camouflage. After two hours of hard tabbing we came to our MSR and crossed over. The next objective now was a meta led road further to the north.

We encountered a couple of inhabited areas, but boxed around without incident. Soon after midnight we heard noise in the distance. We started our routine to box around whatever it was and came across some armored vehicles, laagered up, then a forest of antennas. The face of a squaddy was briefly illuminated as he lit a cigarette. He probably should have been on stag, but he was dos sing in the cab of a truck. It was either a military installation or a temporary position. Whatever, we had to box around again.

Chris and the others can’t have gone into it, or we would have heard the contact.

We carried on for about twenty minutes. All of us were on our chin straps We’d had eight hours of head down and go for it. The stress on the legs had been immense. My feet hurt. I felt completely knackered. I had been thinking about the aircraft. It was hours ago that we’d heard them, so the pilots would be back in their hotels now enjoying their coffee and doughnuts while the engineers sorted their aircraft out. Such a lovely way to go to war. They climb into their nice, warm cockpits and ride over to their target. Down below, as far as they are concerned, is jet-black nothingness. Then what should they hear but the old Brit voice gob bing off, moaning about being in the shit. It must have been a bit of a surprise. I hoped so much that they were concerned for us and were doing something. I wondered if they would have reported the incident by radio as soon as it had happened, or if they’d wait until they returned to base. Probably the latter. Hours ago, and no other fast jets had come over. I didn’t know what the American system was for initiating a search and rescue package. I just hoped they knew that it was really important.

I blamed myself for the split. I felt a complete knob- her and wondered if everybody else held the same opinion. I remembered a speech I had read by Field Marshal Slim. Talking about leadership, he had said something to the effect of, “When I’m in charge of a battle and everything’s going well and to plan and I’m winning-I’m a great leader, a real good lad. But you find out whether you can really lead or not when everything’s going to rat shit and you are to blame.” I knew exactly how he felt. I could have kicked myself for not confirming that Vince had registered that we were stopping. In my mind, everything was my fault. As we tabbed north I kept thinking, what the hell did I do wrong? The E amp;E must go right from here on. I mustn’t make any more mistakes.

It was time to think about finding somewhere to hide. We’d been going over shale and rock, and had come to an area of solid sand. Our boots were hardly making any imprint. This was fine from the point of view of leaving sign, but the ground was so hard there was no way we could scrape a hiding place. It was nearly first light, and we were still running around. Things were just starting to look a bit wriggly when Legs spotted some sand dunes a half mile to our west. We found ourselves in an area where the constant wind had made ripples and small mounds about 1530 feet high. We looked for the tallest one. We wanted to be above eye level. We did what we should never do by going for isolated cover. But there was only this small knoll on an otherwise flat surface. On top of it was a small cairn of stones. Maybe somebody was buried there.

There was a small stone wall about a foot high around the cairn. We built it up slightly and lay down behind. It was icy cold as the wind whistled through the gaps in the stones, but at least it was a relief to stop tabbing. In the course of the last twelve hours, in total darkness and atrocious weather conditions, we had traveled 50 miles, the length of two marathons. My legs were aching. Lying down and being still was wonderful, but then cramp would start. As you moved, other areas were exposed to the cold. It was incredibly uncomfortable.

Looking to our south, we saw pylons running east west. We used them to fix our position on the map. If we followed them, we would eventually hit the border. But if we used the pylons for navigation, who was to say that other people wouldn’t as well?

We lay there for about half an hour, getting more and more uncomfortable. To our east about a mile away was a corrugated iron building which was probably a water-boring station. It looked very inviting, but it was even worse isolated cover. There was nothing to the north. There was no alternative but to stay where we were.

We had to keep really low. We cuddled up and tried to share body warmth. Dark clouds raced across the sky. The wind howled through the stones; I could feel it bite into me. I had known cold before, in the Arctic, but nothing like this. This was lying in a freezer cabinet, feeling your body heat slowly slip away. And we would have to stay there for the rest of the day, restricting our movement to what was possible below the height of the wall. When we got cramp, a common problem after a major tab, we had to help each other.

Legs got out the signals info from his map pocket and destroyed all the sensitive codes and other odds and bods. We lit the code sheets and burnt them one at a time to ensure that everything was destroyed, then crushed the ashes and spread them into the ground.

“I’ll have a fag on while you’ve got your bonfire going,” said Dinger.

“Got to have a gasper before the fun starts.”

We resterilized ourselves, going through all our pockets to make doubly sure we had nothing left on us that would compromise the mission, ourselves, or anybody else. You might have something on you that would mean nothing to them unless you told them, but it could be something they could use as a starting point for the interrogation. “What is this? What does it do?” You can go through a lot of pain for something that’s totally irrelevant.

There were vehicle sounds in the distance. Two APCs were about a half mile to the south, too far away to be an immediate danger. I hoped they didn’t take it into their heads to start looking in places of obvious cover.

At about 0700 it started to rain. We couldn’t believe it. We were in the middle of the desert. The last time I saw rain in the desert was in 1985 in Oman. We were drenched, and within ten minutes the rain had turned to sleet. We looked at one another in total amazement. Then it started to snow.

Bob sang, “I’m dreaming of a white Christmas.”

We might as well have been on an exposed mountainside in winter. This could get serious. We cuddled up more. Not a single therm of body heat could be wasted now. We got out our map covers and tried to improvise little shelters. Our main concern was to conserve heat at the core of our bodies, the trunk.

Man is a “homeotherm”-that is, our bodies try to maintain a constant body temperature irrespective of the temperature of their surroundings. The body consists of an inner hot core, surrounded by a cooler outer shell. The core consists of the brain and other vital organs contained within the skull, chest, and abdomen. The shell is what is left: the skin, fat, muscle, and limbs. It is in effect a buffer zone between the core and the outside world, protecting the organs from any catastrophic change in temperature.

The maintenance of proper internal body temperature is the most important factor in determining your survival. Even in extreme cold or heat, your core temperature will seldom vary more than two degrees either side of 98.4 F (36.8 C), with the shell just a few degrees cooler. If your core temperature rises above 109 F (42.7 C) or falls below 84 F (28.8 C), you will die. Your body generates both energy and heat as it burns fuel. When you start to shiver, your body is telling you that it is losing heat faster than it is being replaced. The shivering reflex exercises many muscles, increasing heat production by burning more fuel. If the temperature at the core of your body drops even a few degrees, you’re in trouble. Shivering will not be enough to warm you again.

The body has a thermostat, located in a small piece of nerve tissue at the base of the brain, which controls the production or dissipation of heat and monitors all parts of the body in order to maintain a constant temperature. When the body starts to go into hypothermia, the body thermostat responds by ordering heat to be drawn from the extremities into the core. Your hands and feet will start to stiffen. As the core temperature drops, the body also draws heat from the -head. When this happens, circulation slows down, and the victim doesn’t get the oxygen or sugar the brain needs: the sugar the brain ordinarily feeds on is being burned to produce heat. As the brain begins to slow down, the body stops shivering, and irrational behavior begins. That is a sure danger sign, but one it is hard to recognize in yourself because one of the first things hypothermia does is take away your will to help yourself. You stop shivering and you stop worrying. You are dying, in fact, and you couldn’t care less. At this point, your body loses its ability to reheat itself. Even if you have a sleeping bag to crawl into, you will continue to cool off. Your pulse will get irregular; drowsiness will become semiconsciousness, which will become unconsciousness. Your only hope is to add heat from an external source-a fire, hot drinks, another body. Indeed, one of the most effective ways of rewarming a hypothermia victim is to put them in a sleeping bag with another person whose body temperature is still normal.

I was feeling quite secure, which was silly because our situation was far from secure. We were on a barren landscape and occupying one of the two pieces of obvious cover for miles around. I was happy that we’d stopped because we could rest, but unhappy because our bodies wanted to keep on moving to keep warm. But there was nothing we could do except lie there and exchange body heat and wait for dark.

The compacted sand was like hard mud. It had looked alien before; now that it was covered in snow it looked like the moon. The snowfall turned into a blizzard. I tried to look on the bright side: at least it cut visibility down to about 150 feet.

Vehicles moved up and down all day, moving east and west as they followed the line of the pylons-civilian trucks, water bowsers, Land Cruisers, and armored, wheeled vehicles. The last two vehicles got us flapping because they came to within 600 feet of our position. Were they coming for us? Not that we could do much about it; we could hardly get up and run because there was nowhere to run to.

There were more vehicles than we were expecting, much more military activity, but that was not the major consideration now. Lying in the snow, lashed by a wicked wind, we were more concerned about keeping warm and keeping alive. We were physically exhausted and exposed to the wind. All the potential was here for a major drama. An already cold air temperature, combined with a strong wind, can produce an equivalent wind chill temperature that can kill. In a 30 mph wind, exposed flesh freezes in sixty seconds or less at just9 C. It was only much later that we learned that these were the worst weather conditions the region had experienced for thirty years. Diesel was freezing in vehicles.

From feeling secure I started to become seriously concerned. I’d seen people die in this sort of stuff. What a way to go, I thought, for the patrol to die of exposure rather than getting shot. I didn’t think I’d be able to bear the slagging.

We couldn’t sit up, because we would be silhouetted against the skyline. We were depending for concealment on the level of view: because they would have to look up, our hope was that the small wall would afford us cover as long as we kept still and kept down.

By 1100 the situation was getting out of control. We were huddled up, cuddling one another, shivering convulsively, muttering words of encouragement, making stupid irrelevant jokes. My hands were numb, frozen, and very painful. We had a mound of snow over us. It was a case now of sod the tactics, let’s try to survive. The balance was between breaking SOPs and therefore being compromised, and getting into such a bad condition that we would just die anyway. I decided that we’d have to break SOPs and get a brew on. I scraped a small hole and lit a hexy block. I filled a mug with water and held it over the flame. The heat on my hands and face was wonderful. I waved my hand to disperse the steam. I added coffee granules, sugar, and milk to the hot water and passed it around.

I immediately put on another brew of hot chocolate.

“Look at all that bloody steam,” said Dinger. “I might as well have a smoke.”

It was pathetic to watch him trying to light the cigarette. His hands were shaking so badly that he couldn’t get it in his mouth, and when he did it was soggy because his hands had been wet. He persisted, and five minutes later was inhaling contentedly, blowing the smoke into his smock to hide it.

By the time the hot chocolate came around everybody was shaking and gibbering again. The hot drink didn’t move us too many notches up the temperature chart, but it was better than a kick in the tits. Without a doubt, it had made the difference between life and death.

Come midday, vehicles were still passing. We couldn’t always see them but that didn’t matter. We’d hear them if they stopped. We tried to change around so that people on the outside who were exposed to the wind and snow had the chance to be surrounded by the others and get some body warmth. As our body core temperatures continued to drop, I realized that my speech was slurring and I was feeling very lightheaded. I was suffering from the first stages of hypothermia.

At about 1400 Mark realized that he was in deep trouble. “We’ll have to get going in a minute,” he blurted. “I’m starting to go down here.”

He was wearing less than the rest of us. All he had on his chest was his smock, shirt, and jumper, and those were soaking wet. We got around him and tried to give him our body heat. A decision had to be made, and we all had to be in on it because it affected us all: did we move in daylight to help Mark survive but risk a compromise? There were hours of daylight and we didn’t know what was out there. Or did we wait until the very last moment, when he thought he simply couldn’t take any more?

I tried to encourage him to hold on. “If we’ve got to move in half an hour, fine, but let’s try and stay here as long as we can.”

If he had shaken his head and said he needed to move, I would have got up without a murmur, but he nodded his assent.

By the time another two hours had elapsed it wasn’t just Mark who needed help. All of us were in a desperate state. If we stayed static, we’d be dead by the evening.

I peered over the wall. There was only about an hour and a half of daylight left; the cloud cover and snow would make it dark earlier. It was still snowing hard. I couldn’t see or hear anything, apart from the sight of a typically arid desert scene, covered in a blanket of thick snow.

“Let’s go,” I said.

We put in a deception plan because we would be leaving a lot of sign in the snow, though hopefully it would snow or rain during the night and destroy our trail. We headed east, then did a loop to end up going towards the northwest. The deception plan proved to be a good move because we were no more than a half mile off the position when we heard hooting and hollering behind us. We turned and saw lights. Vehicles were in and around our position.

“Shit!” Legs said. “All they’ve got to do now is follow the sign.”

But it was starting to get dark, and the tracks and footprints of the Iraqis must have got mixed up with ours and confused them.

The plan had been to head northwest after crossing the meta led road, then take the shortest route to the Syrian border. If we’d started to head northwest this side of the road, the chances were that we’d be compromised because of the movement we had seen during the day. But now the plan had to change. Water was going to be a problem soon. We’d filled up our bottles with snow, but even in the best of circumstances it takes a long time to melt and produces little water anyway. In our case, the weather was so cold that it stayed as snow and ice. You can’t eat snow. Not only does it waste crucial body heat melting in your mouth, but it cools the body from the inside, chilling the vital organs in the body core. We didn’t know where and when we’d be able to get water again. We had to get to the border as soon as possible.

The second, and more important, consideration behind our change of plan was the weather. We were on high ground, about 900 feet above sea level, and to the northwest it got higher still. The wind chill factor in these conditions was horrendous. The temperature was low anyway, but the wind took it bitterly, freezingly lower. We needed to get out of the wind, and we needed to get off the snowline. However, the chances of getting out of the wind were slim because the ground afforded no cover.

Like all water systems the Euphrates follows the low ground. The river was 400 or 500 feet lower than we were, so if we headed north towards it we would not only come off the snowline but hopefully also find protection from the wind.

We headed north. We could worry about the west a bit later; it was just imperative that we got off this high ground or we’d die.

A mile and a half from our stone-wall LUP we came off the snowline. I was horrendously pissed off. If only we could have made the extra bit of distance that morning, we wouldn’t have spent the entire day lying in snow. We still had a desperate problem with wind chill I had my shamag wrapped around my head and the compass in front of me as we marched on a bearing. My left hand was crooked with my thumb over the luminous part of the compass and my smock pulled over my hand as much as I could to keep out the cold. I cradled my weapon in my right arm. I looked down and saw that my smock had frozen solid. It was iced over like a pond. The shamag, too, was solid around my face. I wanted to adjust it, but it was as stiff as a board.

I daren’t move my hands because that let the cold in. We had to move as fast as we could to generate body warmth. It was desolate, no ambient light, just the sound of the wind. It was as if we were on a different planet, and the only people on it.

We pressed northwards, heads down and faces blue with cold. Vehicle lights moved now and again in the distance, indicating the meta led road. The ground started to change again, from hard sand to bedrock with shale. All round the area there were tank berms where bulldozers had made trenches for tanks to get into the “hull down” position. They were filled with water and ice; they weren’t new.

We’d dropped about 200 feet in elevation. All of us were suffering badly. I looked out from behind my shamag and thought: If the weather doesn’t improve soon, we’re going to die.

We had marched about a mile and a half over the road when I decided we should turn back. Windchill was going to kill us. We were stumbling, shivering violently, starting to switch off, our minds wandering. If we didn’t act now, they were the last symptoms that we would recognize. The next stage was coma. We’d get back across the meta led road and retreat for another mile to a dried-up riverbed I remembered which ran more or less parallel with the road. It was the only place we had found that night that was out of the wind. If we didn’t get back there and sort ourselves out, there’d be no selves to sort out.

We turned back, tactics thrown literally to the wind. Stealth was irrelevant now. All we wanted to do now was save our lives. We stumbled into the ditch and huddled together. Mark was the worst affected, but we all needed help. Bob and I jumped on top of him and gave him body heat. Dinger and Legs did the same together and got a brew on. It’s an outrageous big no-no, making brews at night, but so what? If you’re dead, that’s it. Better to take the chance and live to fight another day. If we didn’t get compromised, we would hopefully start to recover. If we did, we would either get away with it or die. If we didn’t do it, we could die anyway.

They got two brews on, one after the other, and passed them around. We got some hot food down Mark. He was slurring his words good style, definitely on his way out. I seriously thought we were all going to die.

We were there a couple of hours, just trying to get warm in a big huddle. We got a slight improvement. I didn’t really want to make a move because we were still freezing and soaking. But we all knew we had to get going or we were never going to make any headway. After all, the aim was to evade capture.

We had three factors to worry about: the weather, our physical condition, and the enemy. Because of the terrain it was very unlikely that we would avoid the wind that was giving us so much trouble. No matter where we went or what we did it would be there. Our physical condition could have been worse, but not much. The ideal would have been to stay there out of the wind until it stopped or the weather improved. But how long would that be? Water would be of concern sooner or later as well. The longer we went without it, the greater the problem would become.

There were far more enemy in the area than we had been told. Something was wrong somewhere. If we were compromised, action could be taken quicker because the troops were there on the ground. Would they now know that we were in the area after moving onto our LUP?

We had to move, but in which direction? In favor of going north then west was the fact that we would keep off the snowline. Against, that we would be exposed to the wind for longer and closer to the river, closer to habitation, and concealment would be difficult. Heading northwest would take us back on to the snowline, but it would be quicker, and the chances of concealment would be better. The height was approximately 1,100-1,200 feet, but once we were over that we would be down to around 600 feet all the way to the border. We could also do it in one night as long as our physical condition didn’t get any worse.

Whatever direction we went, the wind was going to get us. So it was best not to waste time. If we couldn’t make it, we would just have to come down again and rethink. It got to the stage where, if we didn’t move now, there wouldn’t be enough time. The longer we left it, the less darkness we had to get over this high ground. We would have to cover a good 12-15 miles, so we needed to get our arses into gear and get away.

The riverbed ran northwest, and we decided to make use of it for two reasons. One, it gave us tactical cover; two, it gave us a certain amount of protection from the wind. The only disadvantage was if we were approaching any military installations. The ditch was a good approach route if anybody was going to attack, so the chances were that it would be covered by fire and observation. However, we would take the chance.

It was about midnight, and we’d been moving for about two hours, patrolling tactically because of the amount of vehicles we’d seen coming from this direction. Moving so slowly is bad because you can’t keep as warm as you’d like to; however, it prevents you stumbling into something you may not be able to get out of.

Legs was in front as scout. I was behind him, then Bob, Mark, and Dinger. As we moved along the riverbed, I checked our navigation with the compass to make sure the ditch was leading us in more or less the right direction. The rest of the lads were covering the arcs. It was still freezing, but because we were moving tactically, we had something else to think about.

The ground started to change back to bedrock with shale. That was an added pain in the arse because of the noise, but for once the howling wind worked in our favor. It was a clear sky, with a three-quarter moon set in the west, a plus for navigation but not for concealment. The clouds were now gone, but this only made it colder.

The landscape was starting to change. The area had been generally flat, but from time to time now the ground gently rolled up into a mound which lasted for 1,000-1,250 feet. Undulating ground is good for concealment, and we started to feel better about our predicament. At last this desolate flatness was changing in our favor as the high ground started.

The distance between patrol members was dictated by the light. Ideally you want as much distance as possible so that if you come under fire, not everybody is caught in the same area and hosed down all at once. But it’s a compromise between that and actually seeing what’s going on with the bloke in front. We were patrolling with about four meters between each man.

There was no talking. You communicate by hand signal or by duplicating the scout’s movements. If the scout stops, the bloke behind him does the same, and it reverberates all the way down. If the scout kneels down, you all kneel down. Everything’s done very slowly and very deliberately, or you create movement, you create noise.

Legs suddenly froze.

Everybody behind him froze too. We all covered our arcs, looked around, waiting to see what he had seen. There was a plantation to our right-we could just see the tips of the trees. There were no lights or movement. There was high ground forward to the left, less than 350 feet away. Slowly coming into view as they got to the top of the hill were the silhouettes of two men. Both had “longs”-long weapons.

Legs started to kneel down very slowly, to get into the lip of the riverbed itself. We had the cover of the wind and the cover of them making noise. But spotting two men didn’t mean there weren’t two hundred about. We just didn’t know. Slowly and deliberately we started to get into cover.

Could it be two of our missing patrol members? The wind carried brief bits of chat in our direction, and I tried hard to hear a voice or word I recognized. But surely Vince, Stan, or Chris would never let themselves be sky lined like that, let alone walk around chatting? It was very frustrating. I was hoping so much that it was them and we’d be able to grab hold of them in some way.

They stopped and looked all around. I hoped they didn’t have night-viewing aids. If they did, we’d have to go for it good style if they saw us from such a distance. Then I had the mad thought: Chris has got our set of NVG; if we show ourselves, he’ll be able to see us. No, I really wasn’t going to do that. He’d look and just see bodies: he wouldn’t be able to identify us. In reality, the chances of us making a union were going to be quite slim.

They were still too far away for us to ID them. They started moving again, and I watched as they came down from the high ground and walked across in front of us. We got right down, moving very slowly, very deliberately. Even if one of the blokes at the back of the patrol hadn’t seen the two figures on the skyline, he’d have known there was a drama. It would be tactically imprudent to tell him what was happening because that would involve movement and speech.

We were there for what seemed an eternity, just staring at these characters and looking around to see if there was anybody else. They got to our riverbed and started walking along the edge towards us. This was a severe drama. We were going to get compromised by these dickheads. We would have to keep covert as long as possible, but then go overt the moment they saw us. Everybody had made the same appreciation. I saw Legs rest his 203 very gently on the ground and slowly, slowly reach for the fighting knife in its leather sheath. The weapon is housed this way precisely so that it makes no noise when extracted. They were very slow, very deliberate movements. Bob was right up on my shoulder by this stage, and he was very slowly taking the sling of the Minimi off his shoulder. He didn’t have a fighting knife. He had an Ml 6 bayonet, which is stored in a plastic and metal sheath. The bayonet makes a scraping sound as it is pulled out, so Bob just put his hand on the handle and pulled it out a little way. He’d fully extract it at the last minute.

We couldn’t take the risk of them shouting a warning. We’d have to kill them as soon as they came within range. In films, the attacker puts his hand over his target’s mouth and with one smooth motion runs a knife into his heart or along his neck and the boy just drops. Unfortunately it doesn’t work quite like that. The chances of getting one smooth stab into the heart are very remote and not even worth the effort. He might have a greatcoat on, and there could be webbing underneath. You’d do your neat stab, and he’d just turn around and ask you not to. If you’re 5 feet 10” and he’s 6’5” and weighs seventeen stone, you’re going to be in the shit. Even if you cut the boy’s jugular, you’re going to get a minute or so of screaming and shouting out of him. In reality, you have to get hold of his head, hoik it back as you would with a sheep, and just keep on cutting until you’ve gone right through the windpipe and the head has just about come away in your hands. That way he’s not going to breathe any more or have any means of shouting out.

Legs and Bob were ready. The rest of us would be up also to help with the killing by covering their mouths to stop the screaming. They’d have to get out of the riverbed very swiftly and up and on top of them, check they weren’t two of ours, and do the business. The ideal would have been to ID them before they could see us, but it was all going to happen together. If the two characters were ours, there was a chance of them taking us for Iraqis in the sudden attack, and we’d have a nasty “blue on blue.” It happened in the Falklands, when a Regiment patrol got into a contact with a Special Boat Squadron patrol.

They were within 60 feet of us. I crouched against the bank of the riverbed and looked up. Ten or fifteen more paces, I reckoned, and there would be an explosion of movement from in front of and behind me-and then, either a reunion with our lost blokes or two more statistics.

I held my breath. All thoughts of wind chill and exposure were banished now. My mind was concentrated 100 percent on every single little movement that was going on. And these blokes didn’t have a clue they were about to get their throats done.

They stopped.

Had they seen something? They were close enough for me to see that the longs were AKs. They jumped down into the riverbed no more than 20-25 feet in front of us and ambled across to the other side. They scrambled up the other side and walked off towards the plantation, the two luckiest men in Iraq. I almost laughed. I would have enjoyed seeing Bob leap up and do the business, little midget that he was.

We stayed where we were for about a quarter of an hour, tuning in all over again. We were all right, we were in cover, we weren’t making any noise. All we had to do was take our time and make sure we weren’t going to blunder into anything.

We “closed in.” We didn’t know what was on the other side of the high ground that the two Iraqis had come from. They might just have been two blokes who lived at the plantation, or we might be walking into a major drama. Better to stop, take our time, use concealment.

“We’ll head south and box it,” I said into Bob’s ear, and he passed the message down the line.

We patrolled as before with Legs as scout. We had gone about a mile when we came to a mound of high ground to our front. We chose to go through a saddle, and as we moved towards it, Legs stopped. He got on his knees and lay down. We were right out in the open.

I got on my belly beside him, slowly and deliberately. He pointed up. There was a head on the ridge line about 150 feet away. We watched him as he shuffled around, but I couldn’t see any others. I indicated to the patrol by pointing east that we’d have to box around the position. We circumnavigated the high ground for about 1,200 feet and headed west.

We encountered static interior vehicle lights on the other side of the high ground. We had walked into a laager of vehicles parked up for the night. Again we had to back out, head south, then try again heading west. We came across more troops and tents. We turned south again for a half mile, then west again, and at last were in the clear. These encounters had cost us a good two hours, and we didn’t have time to spare.

We pressed on towards Syria along the higher ground. By now we were at an altitude of over 1,000 feet, and it was colder than we could have imagined. The area looked like a NASA photograph of the moon, bleak and white, with random outcrops of higher ground. The hills funneled the wind towards us. We had to lean hard into it as we pushed into the gaps. We came to an area of scorched earth that was broken by craters and tank berms. It could have been an old launch site or the scene of a battle. The craters were full of water, snow, and ice, and reminded me of photographs of the Somme.

We had agreed that if anybody started to suffer from exposure, they were to say so at once and not play the hard man. At anybody’s request we would come down as fast as we could or find some area out of the wind. If we had to stay up there for the following day, we’d die. We were still soaked and frozen. In the early hours, Mark started going down. “We’ve got to get off the high ground because I’m suffering severely here.”

We stopped and I tried to think. It wasn’t easy to concentrate. Icy rain was now driving horizontally into my face. My mind was a blur of wet and cold, and it was hard to shut out the pain for long enough to think. Did we go forward west and try to get over the high ground and hopefully find some cover? Or did we go back to where we knew we would be out of the wind? I decided we must come off the high ground for Mark to have any chance of survival.

The only place we knew for sure was out of the wind was back at the area of the riverbed near the meta led road. We came down more or less parallel with the road but about 600 feet away from any possible headlights. We couldn’t be arsed with navigating: there was not enough time-we needed to get back and recover, and we didn’t want to be out in the open at first light. It was a really bad two hours as we made our way down. We tabbed as fast as we could, and just before first light we found a position, a depression in the ground, a compromise between concealment and keeping out of the elements. We would try again tomorrow.

It was a dip no more than three feet deep. We got in and cuddled up. It was heartbreaking. We had traveled a horrendous number of kilometers just to make less than 6 miles northwest. But it was better to lose a night’s distance than to lose a man. We could see the meta led road about a mile to the north. The depression ran along the line of the wind, but we were out of the worst of it. We cuddled up and kept our eyes open.

At first light on the 26^th we checked that we weren’t sitting on top of an enemy position. There was only one piece of ground that overlooked us, and as we were huddled up against one edge of the depression, it cut the chances of anybody seeing us.

The weather had changed. There wasn’t a cloud in the sky, and when the sun came out, it was quite comforting, psychologically, though it was still very cold. The wind was still biting and we were soaking wet.

I had a pair of small binoculars, an excellent bit of kit that I’d bought at a jeweler’s in Hereford. I looked north at the road that went up to a pumping station. There was a steady stream of vehicles, one every few minutes: oil convoys, water bowsers, civilian Land Cruisers with the husband driving and the wife all in her black kit sitting in the back. The vehicles normally came in groups of three or four. There were also lots of military convoys, consisting of armored vehicles and trucks.

Looking south I saw pylons a mile or so away that ran southeast-northwest, parallel to the road. Three or four vehicles also headed southeast along the line of the pylons as if following them as a navigational aid. We were sandwiched between the two.

We cuddled each other for warmth, trying to keep our eyes open but frequently dozing off and waking up with a start. We had survived the night, and now I just hoped that we could hold out until last light again.

We sorted our feet out. This is done in such a way that at any one time only one person has one boot off. We were well used to harsh tabbing in tough conditions, but last night’s efforts had taken the biscuit. We had tabbed for twelve hours, covering well over 30 miles, in the worst weather conditions any of us had seen for a very long time. Our feet had taken a fearsome pounding.

Dinger remembered that Chris had been wearing a pair of GoreTex go-fasters that had set him back a hundred quid. “If he’s still running around, I bet his feet are Okay in them Gucci boots,” he said, massaging his sore toes.

We got some cold scoff down us. We wouldn’t cook because the ground was too open. We had enough sachets of food to last a few days yet; water was the more pressing concern.

We rested and plotted. The big plan now was to take the high ground tonight, get over it, then hit the low ground, which according to the map was flat gravel plain that would take us into the border. In theory we could get over the border that night if we really went for it. All it would take was another twelve hours all out tabbing. On the positive side, we weren’t carrying much weight because all we had was our belt kit and our weapons. And we had the incentive, which was to get out of Iraq and into Syria. We had no idea what the border was going to be like; we’d just have to find out when we got there.

We did our map studies again to make sure we all knew where we were, where we were going, and what we were likely to see on the way-which wasn’t a lot because we were working with air maps. The alignment of pylons and so forth is approximate on these maps, but we did know that we’d have a major built up area about three hours north of us to our right. That seemed to be the only fixed obstacle.

We were all recovering quite well now. We whispered bad jokes to each other as the hours passed, trying to keep up morale. Everything was beginning to feel all right again. We were still cold, but we had it under control. At least it wasn’t snowing or raining any more. I was confident that we would be able to do it in one last big effort.

It was at 1530 that we heard it.

Ding ding, baa baaa.

We really don’t need this, I said to myself.

I had a quick scan but couldn’t see anything. We hugged the ground. There was no hollering or shouting as there was before in the last compromise, just the sound of chuntering and a solitary bell. It got closer and closer. I looked up, and there was the head goat with a bell around his neck. Wherever he went, it seemed, the other goats followed, because his entourage came and joined him one by one. Soon there were ten of them standing gawping over the edge of the dip. They looked at us and we looked at them. I lobbed a couple of small pebbles at the head boy to try and shoo him away.

His response was to come forward even more, and the rest of the goats followed. They put their heads down and started chewing, and there were five sighs of relief. They were a bit premature. A few seconds later the old goatherd turned up. He must have been 70 if he was a day. He had a big woolly dish-dash on, with a baggy old cardigan over the top. His head was swathed in a shamag. Over his shoulder was a tatty leather satchel. He had beads in his hands and muttered “Allah” as he pushed them through his fingers.

He looked at us and didn’t miss a beat. No surprise, no fright, no nothing.

I smiled at him, as one does.

Totally nonchalantly, as if it was an everyday occurrence to find five foreigners huddling in a dip in the ground in the middle of nowhere, he squatted down beside us and started gob bing off. I didn’t have a clue what he was saying.

We gave him the greeting, “As salaam alaikum.”

He replied, “Wa alaikum as salaam.”

We shook his hand. This was bizarre. He was so friendly. I wondered if he even knew there was a war on. Within seconds we were all best mates.

I wanted to keep the conversation going, but our Arabic wasn’t quite up to it. Even as I spoke, I couldn’t believe what I heard myself saying next.

“Wayn al souk?” I asked.

Here we were, in the middle of nowhere, and I was asking him the way to the market.

He didn’t bat an eyelid, just pointed south.

“Good one,” Dinger said. “At least next time we’re here we’ll know the way to Sainsbury’s.”

Bob spotted a bottle in the old boy’s satchel. “Halib?” he asked.

The goatherd nodded that yes, it was milk, and passed the bottle around. Then he got out some smelly, minging dates from the bag and a bit of old bread, and we sat down and played the white man.

Mark stayed on his feet, having a casual look around. “He’s on his own,” he said, all smiles.

The goatherd pointed south again and waved his hand. “Jaysh,” he said, “jaysh.”

I raised a quizzical eyebrow at Bob.

“Army,” he translated. “Militia.”

Bob asked: “Wayn? Wayn jaysh?”

The old boy pointed back the way we had come.

We couldn’t understand if he meant: there’s loads of soldiers down there; or there’s loads of soldiers down there, and they’re looking for you; or are you with the soldiers from the jaysh back there? None of us could remember the Arabic for distance. We tried to do signs for far away and close.

All in all it was quite funny. There we were, sitting having a cosy kefuddle in the middle of the desert, in weather that was so bad we had nearly frozen to death.

We carried on with this for about half an hour, but we were getting to the point where a decision had to be made. Did we kill him? Did we tie him up and keep him until we moved out? Or did we just let him go and do his own thing? The only benefit to be gained by killing him was that nobody else would then know what was going on. But if the countryside was littered with the corpses of elderly members of the indigenous population and we got caught-which we had to assume was likely-then we could hardly expect red carpet treatment at the hands of our captors. If we tied him up to keep him out of play, he would be dead by first light anyway because of the cold. There was little doubt his body would be discovered. It looked as though every square foot of this country was patrolled by goats and herders.

If we let him go, who could he tell, what harm could he do? He had no transport, and as far as Mark could make out he was on his own. It was about 1600 hours now, and it would soon be last light. Even if he raised the alarm, by the time there was any reaction it would be dark and we’d be legging it towards the border. We might as well let him go. It was the SAS we were in, not the SS.

We made up our minds that when he decided to go, we’d watch him, wait until he got out of sight, then we’d put in a deception plan south.

Five minutes later he was giving his goodbyes, and off he shuffled with the goats, not a care in the world. We let him go for about a half mile until he disappeared into some dead ground, then we moved off. We went south for a few miles, then turned west.

We came into a small depression and stopped to take stock. There were several factors to discuss. First was our water supply. We had enough food to last us another couple of days, but we were almost out of water. Second, we had to assume that the enemy knew where our last LUP was from the night before, so they knew our direction of travel. Third, we’d had another compromise-I was already thinking that we should have kept him with us until last light before letting him go. We were still in bad physical shape, and the weather would get very bad up on the high ground. We had nearly died the night before, and I didn’t want to take another chance. We had lost a night’s march and didn’t want to lose another. All in all, the situation was not very good, and we probably hadn’t done ourselves any favors by letting the old boy go. But what was done was done.

We went through the options that we had left to us as a patrol. One, to keep west, hoping to find water on the way: the chances were good on the high ground due to the snow and ice. Two, to head north to the river and then head west, but we were a large number and concealment would be a problem because the closer we got to the border, the more habitation there was going to be. Three, to hijack a vehicle and drive for the border that night. It was 1715 and starting to get dark. Given the amount of enemy activity and our physical condition, we decided to go for the vehicle hijack, any time after last light. The sooner the better.

We were going to have some major drama tonight, one way or another. Before moving down towards the road we carried out a weapon check. One man at a time, we pulled the working parts out, slapped on some oil, and made sure everything was ready.

I scanned the road through my binos. We wanted to have an area where we could come out and be more or less straight on top of them, so they couldn’t see us coming. I spotted a small mound on a patch of high ground that would do the trick.

The plan was that Bob would play the cripple, leaning on my shoulder, and I’d wave down a good Samaritan. To make us look even more harmless we’d leave our weapons and webbing with the others. They would come out, do the hijack, and away we’d go. We’d been looking at nothing but lorries and Land Cruisers for six hours. Depending on the type of vehicle, we could go cross-country-heading south until we hit the pylons and then following them west-or take our chances on the road.

The road was half an hour’s tab away. We got to the highish ground just on last light. Legs found a purpose-made ditch in the area to the right of the road, and we all piled in. We had a good view to the southeast because the road was long and straight for a number of miles and we were on high ground looking down. To the northwest, however, there was a small crest about 900 feet down the road. We wouldn’t have much time in which to react if the vehicle came from that direction. Bob and I would try to stop it right opposite the ditch so the lads could just jump up and give them the good news.

We sat there with the binos out, looking to the east. Two trucks moved along the road and then went off in the general direction of our last LUP. Because of the low light I couldn’t see whether people were getting out, but there appeared to be general activity on both sides of the road. They were obviously looking for something, and I took it to be us. After a while the vehicles came back onto the road and started to move towards us.

Fuck! Was this the follow-up from the night before? Either we were lucky that we had moved, or unlucky that we hadn’t held the old boy and had let him go and bubble. But he had gone in totally the opposite direction to the one these troops were coming from. It didn’t make sense.

We watched the lights coming nearer, and then we could hear the engine grinding up the hill. We got our heads down, just hoping that the elevation of the trucks would not give any blokes in the back the chance to see down into the dip.

We waited. As soon as we heard the trucks stop opposite us, we’d be up and firing. We had nothing to lose.

They drove straight past. Big grins all round.

Bob and I moved up onto the road and sat watching in both directions. After about twenty minutes, vehicle lights came over the small crest and drove towards us. Satisfied that it was not a troop truck, we stood up. The vehicle caught us in its headlights and slowed down to a halt about 10 feet down the road. I kept my head down to protect my eyes and to hide my face from the driver. Bob and I hobbled towards it.

“Oh shit,” I muttered into Bob’s ear.

Of all the vehicles in Iraq that could have come our way that night, the one we had chosen to hijack and speed us to our freedom was a 1950s New York yellow cab. I couldn’t believe it. Chrome bumpers, whitewall tires, the lot.

We were committed. Bob was in my arms giving it the wounded soldier.

The blokes were straight up from the ditch.

“What the fuck have we got here?” Mark shouted in disbelief. “This is the story of our lives, this is! Why can’t it be a fucking Land Cruiser?”

The driver panicked and stalled the engine. He and the two passengers in the back sat staring openmouthed at the muzzles of Minimis and 203s.

The cab was an old rust bucket with typical Arab decoration-tassels and gaudy religious emblems dangling from every available point. A couple of old blankets were thrown over as seat covers. The driver was beside himself with hysteria. The two men on the backseat were a picture, both dressed in neatly pressed green militia fatigues and berets, with little weekend bags on their laps. As the younger of the two explained that they were father and son, we had a quick rummage through their effects to see if there was anything worth having.

We had to move quickly because we couldn’t guarantee that there wouldn’t be other vehicles coming over. We tried to shepherd them to the side of the road, but the father was on his knees. He thought he was going to get slotted.

“Christian! Christian!” he screamed as he scrabbled in his pocket and pulled out a keyring with the Madonna dangling from it. “Muslim!” he said, pointing at the taxi driver and trying to drop him in it.

Now the driver sank to his knees, bowing and praying. We had to prod him with rifle barrels to get him to move.

“Cigarettes?” Dinger enquired.

The son obliged with a couple of packs.

The father got up and started kissing Mark, apparently thanking him for not killing him. The driver kept praying and hollering. It was a farce.

“What’s his problem?” I said.

“This car is his occupation,” the son said in good English. “He has to feed his children.”

Bob came storming over and said, “I’ve fucking had enough of this.” Sticking the end of his bayonet up one of the driver’s nostrils, he walked him over to the ditch.

We left them all there. We had no time to tie them up; we just wanted to get going. We needed to put in some miles.

“I’ll drive,” I said. “I saw Robert De Niro in Taxi Driver.”

It was an old column gearshift, and I couldn’t work it. To the accompaniment of jeers and much slagging, I did a six-point turn to get us facing west, and off we lurched. Legs was in the front to do the compass bearings; the other three were crammed into the back. The way our luck had been going I fully expected the compass to pack in and the next sign we saw to be “Baghdad Welcomes Safe Drivers.”

We had no shorts (pistols); they were all longs, and it was going to be almost impossible to bear them if we were compromised. Nevertheless we were happy as Larry. This was make-or-break time. We’d either make it tonight or we’d be dead.

It was unfortunate that we were committed to going on roads but we’d just have to make the most of it. We had just over half a tank of fuel, which was plenty for the distance we had to cover. We were going at quite a fuel-efficient pace anyway because we didn’t want to look conspicuous or get involved in the slightest accident. We’d just drive as far as we could, dump the vehicle, and go over the border on foot.

We tried to make up game plans for what we would do if we got caught in a VCP (Vehicle Checkpoint). We didn’t know what we’d do. We couldn’t try to barge through a checkpoint barrier on the road. That might happen in films but it’s fantasy stuff; permanent VCPs are made to stop that sort of thing. The vehicle draws fire every time, and we’d end up as perforated as Tetley tea bags I’d probably just have to brake as fast as I could, and we’d pile out and do a runner.

Unfortunately, we were reading air charts, not an AA road atlas. The roads were very confusing. Legs directed me to take junctions that went generally west, and I constantly checked the mileometer to see how far we’d gone.

The first major location we came to was the pumping station area. There were military vehicles and blokes milling around, but no checkpoint. Nobody took a blind bit of notice of us as the cab chugged past.

We had to look as though we knew where we were -going. If we looked lost it would arouse suspicion, and people might even come over and offer to help.

We came to yet another set of junctions. There was nothing going west and the best we could do was to turn north. It was a normal two-way road instead of the single-track ones we had been moving on. It was busy with convoys of oil tankers. We pulled out to overtake, but military vehicles were coming the other way. Nobody else was doing it so we had to play the game to blend in. At least we were moving, and the heater was going full blast. It was blissfully warm.

The convoy stopped.

We couldn’t see why. Traffic lights? A broken-down vehicle? A VCP?

Legs jumped out and had a quick look but could see nothing in the darkness. We started inching forward. We stopped again and Legs got out.

“Military vehicles at the front of the convoy,” he muttered. “One of them has crashed or broken down.”

Squaddies were hanging around on foot and in Land Cruisers, and cars and trucks were maneuvering around them. We started to drive past, and I held my breath. One of the blokes directing the traffic spotted us and started to wave us on. Mark, Bob, and Dinger pretended to be asleep on the back seat; Legs and I grinned like idiots inside our shamags and waved back. As they disappeared in the rearview mirror, we laughed ourselves silly.

We hit a built-up area. Statues of Saddam stood outside public buildings and pictures of him were plastered on every available space. We drove past cafe bars with people milling around outside. We passed civilian cars, armored cars, and APCs. Nobody turned a hair.

Sometimes the roads and junctions funneled us in totally the wrong direction. We did a touch of north, then east, then south, then west, but ensured we were generally keeping west. Mark had the Magellan on his lap in the back and was making attempts to get a fix so that if the shit hit the fan, we would each have the information we needed to get us over the border.

Dinger was smoking like a condemned man enjoying his last request. I was considering whether to join him. I’d never had a cigarette in my life, and I thought: By tonight I could be dead, so why not try one while I have the chance?

“What’s the score on these fags?” I asked Dinger.

“Do you drag all the smoke down, or what do you do?”

“You’ve had one before, have you?”

“No, mate-never smoked in my life.”

“Well, you ain’t going to start now, you wanker. You’ll flake out and crash the car. Anyway, do you have any idea how many people die of lung cancer each year? I can’t possibly expose you to that sort of risk. Tell you what, though-you can have a bit of passive.”

He blew a lungful of smoke in my direction. I hated it, as he knew I would. When we were on the Counter Terrorist team together, Dinger used to drive one of the Range Rovers. He knew I loathed cigarettes so he’d be at it all the time, keeping the windows wound up. I’d go berserk and open them all, and he’d be laughing his cock off. Then the windows would go up and he’d do it again. He had a tape called something like “Elvis-The First Twenty Years.” He knew I hated it so he’d put it on at every opportunity. We were driving along the M4 one time, and I’d wound down the window because he was smoking. Dinger put the cassette on and grinned. I pressed Eject, grabbed the cassette, and chucked it out of the window. War was declared.

I had my own tapes which I took with us on long drives, but the difference was that it was good music-Madness, usually, or The Jam. One night, many weeks later, I put one of them on and closed my eyes as I complained about his smoking and farting. Before I realized what he was doing, he ejected the tape and sent it the way of Elvis.

I waved away the cloud of Iraqi cigarette smoke.

“I hate it when you do that,” I said. “Do you know, for every nine cigarettes you smoke, I’m smoking three of them?”

“You shouldn’t honk,” he said. “It’s cheap. You’re not paying, I am.”

The road signs were in English as well as Arabic, and the blokes in the back had a map spread out on their laps, trying to work out where we were. Nothing actually registered. The built-up area stretched all along the Euphrates, and there were no place-names.

All things considered, we were doing rather well. The mood was quietly confident but apprehensive. They must have found the people at the hijack site by now and would be on the lookout for the yellow cab. Compared with what we’d been through in the last few days, it was quite a funny time, and at least it was warm. The car fugged up, and our clothes started to dry.

There were more convoys, consisting of about twenty vehicles at a time. We tagged on behind. There were civilian cars everywhere. There was no street lighting, which was rather good. We tried our best to hide our weapons, but there had to be a compromise between concealment and being able to get the weapons up to bear in the event of a drama.

We rounded a corner on the open road and got into another slowly moving jam. Vehicles had come up behind us, and we were stuck. This time Legs couldn’t get out or he’d be seen by the people behind. We’d just have to bluff it out.

A soldier with his weapon slung over his shoulder was coming down the queue on the driver’s side, the left-hand side as we were looking. People were talking to him from their cars and trucks. There were two more squad dies on the right-hand side. They were mooching along more slowly than their mate, weapons over their shoulders, smoking and chatting.

We knew we were going to get compromised. The moment the jundie stuck his head inside and had a look at us, he’d see we were white eyes. There was no more than a 1 percent chance of us getting away with it.

Big decision: What did we do now? Did we get out straightaway and go for it, or did we wait?

“Wait,” I said. “You never know.”

Very slowly we tried to get our weapons up to bear. If we had a drama, we would have to get out of the car. Every handle had a hand on it, ready for the off.

Mark quietly said, “See you in Syria.”

We’d try to keep together as much as possible, but there was a strong chance we’d get split. It would be every man for himself.

We waited and waited, watching these people slowly working their way down the line. They didn’t look particularly switched on: they were just killing time. Mark tried to get a fix on the Magellan to find out how far we were from the border, but he ran out of time.

“Let’s just go south, and then west,” I said.

That meant jumping out on the left-hand side of the road, firing off some rounds to get their heads down, and running like mad. As far as I was concerned, this was our most dangerous moment since leaving Saudi.

The blokes at the back had got their weapons up. Legs had his 203 across him with the barrel resting on my lap.

“If he comes up and puts his head through, as soon as he ID’s us, I’ll slot him,” he said.

All I needed to do was keep my head out of the way. Legs would just bring the barrel up and do the business. – “We’ll take the other two,” Bob said.

I leaned forward to hide Legs’s weapon.

The jundie got to the vehicle in front of us. He leaned down to speak to the driver, laughing and gob bing off, not a care in the world. He waved his hands as he spoke, probably moaning about the weather. With our Arabic we wouldn’t have much to talk about when he got to our car. I could ask him the way to the market, but that was about it.

He said his goodbyes to the vehicle in front and sauntered towards our cab. I leant forward and fiddled with the dashboard controls.

He did one tap on the window. I put my head right back and in the same motion pushed my legs out and pressed my body against the seat. The squaddy’s face was pressed expectantly against the window. Legs lifted the barrel of the 203. One round was all it took. There was an explosion of shattered glass, and the car doors flew open. We were out and running before the body had even hit the ground.

The two other squad dies started running for cover, but the Minimis took them down before they’d taken half a dozen paces. The civvies were straight down into the foot wells of their vehicles and quite rightly so.

We ran at right angles to the column of cars until we came into line of sight of the VCP and were illuminated by the spill from headlights. They opened up, and we returned a massive amount of rounds. They must have been wondering what the hell was going on. All they would have heard was one round, then a couple of short bursts, followed by the sight of five dickheads in shamags legging it into the desert.

The first people over the road put covering fire down on the VCP until the others got across. Once there, we all moved. The whole contact lasted no more than thirty seconds.

We ran south for several more minutes. I stopped and shouted, “On me!

On me! On me!”

Heads dashed past me, and I put my hand on them and counted one, two, three, four.

“Everybody’s here. Okay, let’s go!”

We ran and ran, making the best of the confusion we’d created behind us. To my right, I heard the sound of Dinger laughing as he ran, and before long we’d all joined in. It was sheer bloody relief. None of us could believe we’d got out of it.

We headed west. From Mark’s last fix on the Magel lan we estimated we had maybe 8 miles to the border. Eight miles in over nine hours of darkness-a piece of cake. All we had to do was take our time and make sure we got there tonight. There was no way a group this big could lie up the next day.

We came to an inhabited area. There were pylons, old cars, rubbish tips, dogs howling, the lights of a house. Sometimes we had to get over fences. There were vehicle headlights on roads. Behind us in the area of the VCP there was still an incredible amount of noise. People were still hollering, and there were sporadic bursts of small-arms fire. Tracked vehicles screamed up and down the road. It was just a race now, a matter of the hares keeping in front of the hounds.

The moon started to come out. A full moon, in the west. It couldn’t have been worse. The only good thing was that we, too, could see more and move faster.

We landed up paralleling another road. We couldn’t avoid it. We had a built-up area to our left and the road to our right. We didn’t have time to fart-arse around. We were going for it big style. We had to hit the border before their initial confusion died down and reinforcements arrived.

Every time a car came from either direction we had to take cover. We were climbing fences, avoiding dogs, avoiding buildings. There were houses everywhere now, lights on, generators going. We picked our way through without incident.

Vehicles started to move along the road without their lights, presumably hoping to catch us out. There was still shooting way off in the distance. In our desert camouflage, against an almost European background of plantations and lush arable land, we glowed like ghosts in the moonlight.

We were spotted from the road. Three or four vehicles came screaming along, and blokes jumped out firing. We were down to a few mags each by now, and there was bound to be lots more drama before the night was over. All we could do was run. There was no cover. They kept on firing and we kept on running, the rounds zinging past us and into the built-up area.

We sprinted for 1,200 feet. We passed through little clusters of houses, expecting at any moment to be slotted by people coming out, but the local population kept themselves to themselves, bless their cotton socks. I was sweating buckets, panting for breath. Adrenaline gets hold of you and you clock Olympic times, but you can’t sustain it. Then the firing sparks up again and you find a bit more.

We started to move over a crest. We looked down on the lights of Abu Kamal and Krabilah, the two built-up areas that straddled the border. It was just a sea of light, as if we’d run on to the film set of Close Encounters. And there were the masts, the taller one on the Iraqi side. The boys in pursuit kept firing.

“Fucking hell,” Bob shouted, “look at this, this is good news! We’re nearly there!”

Like a prat, I said “Shut the fuck up!” as if he was a naughty schoolboy. I regretted it as soon as I said it. I was thinking exactly the same thing myself. Those lights, Abu Kamal, that tower-they weren’t in Iraq, they were in Syria. I could almost taste the place. I was as sparked up as Bob was.

We ran over the crest. But the moment we came down from the higher ground we were sky lined to some boys stationed below. They turned out to be antiaircraft battery. They greeted us with small-arms fire, and then opened up with triple A. We ducked north to get across the road, committing ourselves to going through the built-up area that lay between us and the river. Vehicles were revving up near the AAA battery, and to top it all some jets screamed over. They must have been ours because the S60s diverted their fire. In the chaos we slipped away.

There was firing left, right, and behind us, but we just kept going, heads down. Heavy tracer went up vertical, then horizontal where the Iraqis were just firing at anything that was moving. It was outrageous of them because there were civilian buildings all about. We were deafened by AAA gunfire. We had to scream our instructions and warnings to each other.

We got up to a road, made a quick check, and were straight over. We stopped on the other side and took a deep breath to sort ourselves out. Going into a built up area is a totally different ballgame; it’s something you always try to avoid, but we had no choice. There was a plantation to the right, but it was protected by a high fence.

There was about 900-1,200 feet meters of habitation to get through, a big amalgamation of houses with perimeter walls. Two-inch plastic irrigation pipes ran along the ground from the houses to the plantation. We moved down, trying to use the shadows as much as possible, walking with our weapons facing out, safety catches off, fingers on the trigger. We were moving north, and the moon was in the west. I was in front. If anybody appeared I’d give it to him with my 203, and Mark would come out two or three steps and give it a burst with his Minimi. Then we’d withdraw around the first corner and reorganize ourselves, or move forward, depending on what we had been firing at.

People were shouting their heads off in the houses, lights were going off, doors being slammed. We walked: we couldn’t be arsed to run. If it was going to happen there was nothing we were going to achieve by running.

From the end of the buildings there were pathways and large pipes running down to the Euphrates about 450 feet away. Diesel pumps chugged. There was mud and shit all over the place which had iced over. We got into the corner of a plantation for a bit of cover and stopped.

The first priority was to fill up our water bottles. Two of the lads went down to the river’s edge while Mark got a fix on the Magellan. “Exactly lOKs from the border’ he whispered.

All the chaos was over the other side of the road. Tracked vehicles were maneuvering and firing, and the AAA guns were still pumping away. In the middle and far distance there were bursts of small-arms fire. They must have been shooting at dogs and anything else that moved-including each other. We were almost past caring. There were six miles to go, and we would have to fight for every mile.

We sat with our backs against the trees, watching the two lads filling the bottles.

“Ten Ks,” Dinger said. “Fucking hell, we could run that in thirty minutes.”

“Pity about the full moon,” Bob said.

“And the desert camouflage,” Dinger said. “And the fact that every man and his dog is out looking for us.”

When Mark and Legs came back with our bottles we considered the options. There seemed to be four. We could cross the river; move east to avoid the border and attempt to cross on the following night; keep going west; or split up and try any of the three as individuals.

The river was a fearsome sight. It must have been about 1,600 feet across, and after the torrential rainfall it was in full flood, flowing fast and furious. The water would be freezing. We were weakened by the long tab and lack of sleep, food, and water. We couldn’t see any boats, but if we found one it would become an option. That left swimming, and I doubted we’d last more than ten minutes. And who was to say there wouldn’t be troops waiting on the other side?

We ruled out moving east because there was too much habitation for us to conceal ourselves in daylight. Moving west seemed the best option: they knew we were in the area, so why not just keep going? But should we do it as a patrol or as individuals? Going it alone would certainly create five lots of chaos for our pursuers, but at the end of the day we were a patrol.

“We’ll go west as a patrol and cross the border tonight,” I said. “There must be some follow-up in the morning.”

It was about 2200 and bitterly cold. Everybody was shivering. We had been sweating and the adrenaline had been flowing. In these conditions your body starts to seize up as soon as you take a rest.

Looking west along the Euphrates, we saw headlights crossing a bridge a mile or so down. There wasn’t a lot we could do. We couldn’t waste time boxing around it. It was too late for anything fancy like that. We would have to take our chances.

“Let’s just take our time and patrol,” Bob said. “We’ve got enough time.”

The natural water courses ran into the Euphrates. Normally we would have kept to the high ground. It’s easier to travel along, which saves time and makes less noise and movement. We were cross-graining them to stay parallel to the river, but not so close to the water that we left sign in the mud.

The ground was frozen mud and slush. Barbed wire fences cordoned off bits of land. We encountered small, rickety outbuildings, knolls of high ground, trees, old bottles that we tripped over, bits of frozen plastic that crushed noisily underfoot. It could have been wasteland in Northern Ireland.

The wind had stopped. The slightest sound traveled hundreds of feet. We were patrolling into the moon, our breath forming clouds in the freezing air. We took our time, stopping and starting every five minutes. Dogs barked. When we came to a building, somebody would go up and check; then we’d skirt around. When we came to a fence, the first man would test to see if it was going to make a noise; then he’d put his weapon on it to force the wire down and make it good and tense, and he’d keep it there while everybody stepped over.

We had to go round a three-sided hut. The owner was snoring by the embers of a fire but didn’t stir as we tiptoed past. Forward of us was a road. If we looked to the left there was the road that ran into the frontier town of Krabilah. Lights were going on and off in buildings. Tracked vehicles trundled backwards and forwards, but far enough away not to worry us. There was still the odd shot or burst behind us. We’d been patrolling for about 2 miles. Four to go. It wasn’t even midnight yet. Hours of darkness lay ahead. I was feeling quite good.

We followed the line of a hedgerow, then cut across left into a natural drainage ditch. It ran into a steep wadi, which in turn seemed to run into the Euphrates. The wadi was about 150-160 feet wide and 80 feet deep. Both sides were more or less sheer. The bottom was virtually flat, with a trickle of a stream. We couldn’t box around it because we didn’t know how far it went. It might have headed south, and there were roads to our south that we wanted to avoid. I then noticed that it went round to the west, which would be great. We could use the shadow that it created for as long as we could.

As I got to the edge of the wadi, I crawled over the lip to have a look inside. Mark was behind me. I started to move down, and as I did so, the horizon on the opposite side of the wadi was a lot easier to see. The first thing I saw on the skyline was the silhouette of a sentry.

He was walking up and down, stamping his feet and blowing into his cupped hands to keep warm. I looked around him, and I couldn’t believe what I saw. It was a vast location-tents, buildings, vehicles, radio antennas. As my eyes focused, I started to notice people coming out of the tents. I heard bits of talking.

They had their backs to the moon, looking in our direction. I didn’t move.

It was fifteen minutes before I could make my way back to Mark. I knew he would have seen the same as I had because he hadn’t come to join me. He, too, was lying as still as a stone. This was scary stuff. We were terribly exposed.

I got back level with Mark. “Have you seen it?”

“Yes, this is outrageous,” he said. “We need to get back and sort our shit out.”

“No drama.”

We’d crawl back to the others to regroup. From there we’d make our way back to the hedgerow, sort ourselves out, and find another route round. We had gone 100 feet to get out of the immediate area when we got up to a semi crouch position in the ditch.

Jittery shouting and firing happened at the same time. All hell was let loose. Mark was down with the Minimi and stitched all along the hedgerows, wherever he saw muzzle flashes. The location on the other side of the wadi opened up. I was severely unimpressed because they were on higher ground.

I used the last of my 203 bombs; then it was time to run away gracefully. I wanted to get back to the riverbank because it would give us cover. There was shouting and firing all over the place as we legged it. The rest of the patrol was having contacts. There was major chaos going on all around the hedgerow. I assumed that Bob and the others were in a group of three. The Iraqis on the other side of the wadi were firing in all directions. I heard 203 bombs, which had to be Legs because Dinger and Bob both had Minimis. It was very noisy. Everybody was involved in his own little world. I realized with a sinking heart that there was no chance of us getting together again. We were split now into another two groups, with only miles to go. What a pisser. I really thought we’d cracked it.

Mark and I were on the bank of the Euphrates, trying to make sense of what was happening. The waterline was 30-50 feet below the line of the ploughed land that we’d just come over, and in between lay a system of small plateaus. We were on the first one, in amongst the bushes.

We could hear the follow-ups from the opposite bank, working towards us with torches and shouting to one another. There was intermittent, nervous enemy fire from our side of the wadi, then contacts to our left and half left involving 203s and Minimis. Tracer was going horizontal and then vertical as it hit rocks and buildings.

We stuck our heads up like a couple of ferrets and looked around. It was hard to know what to do and where to go-whether to cross the river or go through the positions and risk getting killed or captured.

“No way the river,” I whispered into Mark’s ear.

I wasn’t brave enough for that, so we decided to go through the positions. But when? There was so much confusion, it was difficult to say what was a good opportunity and what wasn’t.

“Fuck it,” Mark whispered, “we’re in the shit, so what does it matter?”

If we got out, all well and good, but if we didn’t, so what-I just hoped that it would be nice and quick. I was feeling quite dispassionate about the whole business.

We checked our stocks of ammunition. I had about one and a half mags;

Mark had a hundred link for the Minimi. It was such a ridiculous situation we were in, with contacts and shouting and tracer all over the place, and there’s us sitting in a bush trying to organize ourselves and look over the other side of the bank at the same time. My hands were freezing cold. The grass and leaves were brittle with frost. The river was shrouded with mist.

I looked at Mark and nearly laughed. He was wearing a long woolen scarf known as a cap comforter that can be folded into itself to make what looks like a Second World War commando hat. Mark had failed to tuck the top of his hat in, and he looked like Noddy. He was peering through the bushes with a serious expression on his face and he looked so comical.

“If we don’t go now, mate, we never will,” he said.

I nodded.

Still looking out as he spoke, he dug in his pocket for a boiled sweet and popped it into his mouth.

“It’s my last one. I might as well have it now: it might be my last one ever.”

All of mine had gone. I looked at him longingly.

“You ain’t got none left, have you?” he smirked.

“No, fuck all left.”

I looked at him like a puppy dog.

He took the sweet out of his mouth, bit it, and gave me half.

We lay there savoring the moment and psyching ourselves up to go.

In the end the decision was made for us. Four Iraqis came along the bank, and they appeared to be well trained and switched on. There was no shouting, and they were well spread out. They looked nervous though, as you do when you know there are people about who might fire weapons at you. If we moved they would see us. I signaled to Mark: if they don’t see us, let them go on; if they do, they get it. But they got so close there was no way they were going to avoid us,so we dropped them.

Now we had to go, whether it was the right time or not. We legged it up the ploughed field, parallel to the river. Further up to the right we started to come over a gentle rise where the ground went down to the water. There was movement, and we went straight down.

The furrows were running north-south so we were in the dips. We started to belly crawl and worked our way the whole length up to the hedgerow. Orders were being barked, and squads were running around confused. They were no more than 80 feet away. We crawled for twenty minutes. The ground was icy cold, and it hurt to put your hands on the mud and pull yourself along. My clothing was drenched. Tiny puddles of water had frozen, and as we moved the ice cracked. The sound was magnified a thousand times in my head. Even the noise of my breathing sounded frighteningly loud. I just wanted to get through this shit and get to the treeline, and then it would be a totally different, brave new world.

There was still firing, shouting” and all sorts of confusion going on. How we were ever going to get out of it I had no idea. In situations like this you just have to keep on going and see what happens. It was so tempting just to get up and make a bolt for it.

The Iraqis were still down at the bottom of the field. Maybe-I hoped-they thought we’d gone further down the riverbed, heading east to get to the other lot. I didn’t actually care what they were thinking, as long as they did it a good distance away. The one and only thought I had in my mind was that we needed to get over the border that night.

We got to the hedgerow. It was a purpose-built field division, small trees and bushes growing out of a two foot mound of earth. Our initial plan was to cross the hedgerow that was running east-west, purely so that we didn’t have to cross the south-north one as well. We heard noises to our right. Mark had a look. It was more enemy, behind the hedgerow. And beyond that, further south, there was yelling and shouting and a profusion of lights. Mark signaled me to stay this side of the hedgerow and move left.

We crawled along the line to get to the hedge that ran north-south. We tried to find a place where we could get through without making any noise. I started pushing through. My head emerged the other side, and I immediately got challenged.

As the boy shouted, Mark gave him the good news. His body disintegrated in front of my eyes. Mark gave it a severe stitching all the way along-from where we were, all the way along west. I scrambled out of the hedge line and carried on the fire while Mark came through. We moved east, stopped, put down a quick burst, ran, gave it another quick burst, and then just ran and ran.

There was high ground to our front. Below it were buildings with lights on and movement. We didn’t want to cross the open ground, so we had no option but to use the obvious cover of a ditch. I had no idea what we’d got ahead of us.

The fence line was above us. Because the fields were irrigated, the roads and buildings were on built-up land to keep them above the waterline. We got into a little dip below the fence and moved south.

We started to slow down now that we seemed to be out of immediate trouble. We took the 6-foot chain link fence to be the perimeter of a military installation. We got halfway along and stopped. We’d seen a road to our front, running east-west. Vehicles were driving up and down, fully lit. Other vehicles drove with their lights off.

There had to be a definite junction to the east of us. We could see vehicle lights heading up there and changing direction. There was a mass of activity. Every man and his dog seemed to be on alert. They must have thought the Israelis had turned up or the Syrians were invading. All I hoped was that in all this confusion a little gang of two and a little gang of three could work their way through.

We found ourselves opposite a large mosque on the other side of the fence. We stopped and observed the road. Closer now, we could see vehicles parked up along the side of the road as headlights swept past. Trucks, Land Cruisers, APCs. Where there are vehicles there are people. We could hear talking and the mush of radios. I couldn’t tell how far the column extended, east or west. From the initial contact on the edge of the wadi to here had taken three hours. With only two and a half hours of darkness left I was flapping. We’d have to take a chance. There was no time left for boxing around.

We were lying in the dip, wet and freezing, trying to work out where we were going to go through the fence. Both of us were sweating and shivering. We were almost out of ammunition. We waited for lights to pass so we could get an idea of where all the vehicles were sited. We would cross in the biggest gap.

Two of the trucks were about 50 feet apart. If we could get through unchallenged, the border beckoned. We’d just have to brass it out. We started across the field, taking our time. Each time a vehicle passed we hit the ground. It was important to get as near to the parked convoy as we could before we made our dash. All we planned to do was run through them. Neither of us had a clue what was on the other side, but we didn’t care-we’d sort that out when we came to it.

The vehicles were 3 feet above us on the raised road. At the top of the bank, we discovered, was a three strand barbed wire fence, 3 feet high. We’d have to get over it before we could even start to dodge between the vehicles.

The gap was between two canvas-topped trucks. In one of them a radio hissed loudly. We were going to have to climb the mound, and would be committed from the moment we started moving.

I clambered over the fence and got down to give Mark cover. He cleared the fence, but the wire twanged as he removed his weight. A jundie started jabbering and stuck his head out of a truck window. He got it from me straightaway. I ran to the back. The tailboard was up, but there were two slots at floor level which would have served as footholds when it was down. I put my muzzle through and gave it a good burst. Mark went straight across the road and was down on the other side of the mound, firing along what to him was the right-hand side of the convoy. I didn’t know if the other vehicle had characters aboard, so I threw in a grenade and legged it over the road to Mark. We fired until we ran out of ammunition, which was all of five seconds. We dropped our weapons and legged it. They were no use now. The Iraqis used 7.62 short, and we needed 5.56. Now the only weapon we had left was darkness.

We must have put down enough rounds to get them flapping because they didn’t follow immediately. We ran for 900 feet. The sounds of screaming filled the night.

We stopped near a water tower. It wasn’t that long now before first light. Looking straight ahead, we could see the road that we’d just crossed to our right hand side, the mast on the Iraqi side, and another road that we’d have to cross to go west.

We looked at one another and I said, “Right, let’s do it.”

We scuttled on across the fields and stopped short of what we could see was a large depression. On the other side was a built-up area, unlit. The right-hand corner, the end of it, was more or less at a road junction.

The depression must have been used as a rubbish dump. Small fires smoldered in the darkness. We went down into the dip and stumbled over old tins and tires. The stench of rotting garbage was overpowering. We started to come back up the other side. About halfway up the rise we were opened up on by two AKs, from really close range. We hit the ground and I went right.

I ran for what I thought was enough distance to get me level with the junction, then turned left. I wanted to get over the road and carry on running. I ran around the side of a mound and thought I could get up the other side, but what I’d come into was a large water storage area. There were two big pools, oily and greasy. I was flapping, running around like the cornered rat that I was, trying to find a way out. The sides were sheer. I couldn’t get up. I had to retrace my steps. I wasn’t even looking now, I was just running. If they were behind me, knowing about it wasn’t going to change anything.

I got out of the immediate area and stopped at the road. My chest heaved as I fought for breath. Fuck it, I thought, just go for it.

I got past the buildings. I was elated. I felt I’d cracked it. Just the border now. I didn’t worry about Mark. I’d seen him go down. I didn’t hear anything after that, and he didn’t come with me. He was dead. At least it had been quick.