Bravo Two Zero

6

We’d been listening to vehicles bumbling up and down the MSR all day. They posed no threat. Around mid-afternoon, however, we heard a young voice shout from no more than 150 feet away. The child hollered and yelled again; then we heard the clatter of goats and the tinkle of a bell.

It wasn’t a problem. We couldn’t be compromised unless we could see the person on the other side of the lip. There was no other way that we could be seen. I felt confident.

The goats came closer. We were on hard routine, and everybody had their belt kit on and their weapons in their hands. It wasn’t as if we’d been startled in our sleeping bags or caught sunbathing. Just the same, I felt my thumb creep towards the safety catch of my 203.

The bell tinkled right above us. I looked up just as the head of a goat appeared on the other side. I felt my jaw tighten with apprehension. Everybody was rock still. Only our eyes were moving.

More goats wandered onto the lip. Was the herder going to follow them?

The top of a young human head bobbed into view. It stopped and swiveled. Then it came forward. I saw the profile of a small brown face. The boy seemed preoccupied with something behind him. He was half looking over his shoulder as he shuffled forwards. His neck and shoulders came into view, then his chest. He can’t have been more than a 3 feet from the edge of the lip. He swung his head from side to side, shouting at the goats and hitting them with a long stick.

I silently shouted at him not to look down.

We still had a chance, as long as he kept looking the other way.

Please, no eye-to-eye, just look at what you’re doing…

He turned his head and surveyed the scene.

I slowly mouthed the words: Fuck… off!

He looked down.

Bastard! Shit!

Our eyes met and held. I’d never seen such a look of astonishment in a child’s eyes.

Now what? He was rooted to the spot. The options raced through my mind.

Do we top him? Too much noise. Anyway, what was the point? I wouldn’t want that on my conscience for the rest of my life. Shit, I could have been an Iraqi behind the lines in Britain, and that could have been Katie up there.

The boy started to run. My eyes followed him, and I made my move. Mark and Vince, too, were scrambling like men possessed in an attempt to cut him off. Just to get him, that had to be the first priority. We could decide later what to do with him-to tie him up and stuff his gob with chocolate, or whatever. But we could only go so far without exposing ourselves to the S60 sites, and the child had too much of a head start. He was gone, fucking gone, hollering like a lunatic, running towards the guns.

He could do a number of things. He might not tell anybody because it would get him into trouble-maybe he shouldn’t have been in the area. He might tell his family or friends, but only when he got home later. Or he might keep running and shouting all the way to the guns. I had to assume the worst. So what? They might not believe him. They might come and see for themselves. Or they might wait for reinforcements. I had to take it that they would inform others and then come after us. So what? If they discovered us, there would be a contact before dark. If they didn’t discover us, there would be a chance to evade under cover of darkness.

We had picked our LUP because it provided concealment from view-apart from the one place where the boy had gone and stood. We certainly hadn’t picked it as a place to defend. It was an enclosed environment, at the top of a watershed, with nowhere to go There was no need to say anything: everybody knew we’d have to take it as a compromise. Everything happened in quick time. However, that wasn’t to say we just got our kit on and ran, because that would have been totally counterproductive. It’s worth taking those extra few minutes to get yourself squared away.

Everybody rammed chocolate down as well as water. We didn’t know when we would next be able to eat. We checked that our pouches were done up, that the buttons were fastened on our map pockets so the map didn’t fall out, that our magazines were on correctly. Check, check, check.

Vince put Stan and Bob out with the Minimis. As soon as two other men were ready, they’d swap places and let the two stags get themselves sorted out. Everybody else automatically carried out tasks that needed to be done. Vince went through the cached kit. He pulled out a jerrican of water and helped everybody fill their bottles. If we got into a contact, we were going to lose our berg ens and all that they contained. People took great gulps to get as much water on board as they could, draining their bottles, then refilling. Even if there was no contact, we all knew we were in for a fearsome tab.

We checked our belt kit, making sure all pouches were done up so that we didn’t lose anything as we ran. Mags on tight? Check them again. Safety catch on and weapon made ready? Of course they were but we checked them anyway. We closed down the two tubes of our 66s and slotted them together to make them easy to carry. We didn’t bother to replace the end-caps or sling, just slipped the weapon between our webbing straps, ready for quick use.

We checked that spare magazines were ready to pull out. Pick them up the wrong way, and you waste a precious second or two turning them around. Put them in your belt kit with the curve the right way up, and they’re ready to slap into place. A lot of people put a tab of masking tape on the mag to make it easier to pull out. When my mags were empty, I’d throw them down the front of my smock for refilling later. We could use the rounds from the belts of the Minimi.

All this took a couple of minutes, but it was time better spent than just getting up and running. They knew we were there, so why rush? The stags would tell us if they were coming.

Legs had got straight onto the radio. He went outrageous, running out all the antennas, trying different combinations that he hadn’t been able to try while we were concealed. Now we were compromised, he could do anything he wanted. If the message got through, they could send some fast jets over. We could talk to the pilots on TACBE and get some fire down, which would all be rather pleasant.

Legs’s water was done for him. While he was bent over, the radio blokes opened his belt kit, took the water bottles out, and let him drink before they filled them up again, and threw more food into his belt kit. When he sensed that we’d run out of time, he dismantled the kit and packed it at the top of his bergen.

“Instructions are in my right-hand map pocket in my trousers,” he told everybody. “Radio’s on top of my bergen.” All of it was a well-established SOP so that if he went down we’d be able to retrieve the equipment quickly, but he was going by the book to ensure that everybody knew.

When he was ready, Legs replaced Bob on stag. There was an air of acceptance by everybody, the calm of well-practiced drills being followed to the letter. Bob, who’d done nothing but sleep since we’d arrived, was worried about having to move again so soon.

“We ought to have a union,” he said. “These hours are scandalous.”

“Food’s fucking crap and all,” said Mark.

The jokes were good to hear because they relaxed the situation.

Dinger got his fags out. “Fuck it, they know we’re here. I might as well have a smoke. I could be dead in a minute.”

“I’ll put you on a fizzer!” Vince shouted as he went out and took over from Stan on the Minimi. It was a standard piss-taking joke, referring to a piece of army slang that people think is said but which in fact is never heard.

Everybody was ready to move if necessary. It had taken us a total of three minutes. There was about an hour and a half of daylight left. Our best weapon had been concealment, but the boy had disarmed us. Where we were, we couldn’t fight. It was such a closed environment that it would take just one or two HE rounds to hose us down. The only option was to get out into the open and fight, or maybe get away. We were in the shit if we stayed where we were, and we were in the shit if we were out in the open because there was no cover. It was out of the frying pan into the fire, but at least in the fire we had a slim chance.

The rumble of the tracked vehicle came from the south. We couldn’t get out of the wadi now; it was too late. Our only exit was blocked by this armored vehicle. We would just have to stand there and fight.

I couldn’t understand why they were bringing an APC down in this small, confined space. Surely they would take it for granted that we’d have anti armor weapons?

We snapped open our 66s and ran around to find a decent firing position. Chris pranced around with his old German Afrika Corps hat on, pointing at our 66s and talking to us like the world’s most patient instructor. “Now boys, remember the backblast! Do, please, remember the backblast! This face has got to go downtown on a Saturday night. The last thing it needs is a peppering!”

Stan stared down the sights of his cocked Minimi at the line of the watershed, towards the sound of the tracked vehicle. It trundled closer. There was a glint of metal as it came into view. What in hell’s name was it? It didn’t look like the APC I had been expecting.

Stan shouted: “Bulldozer!”

Unbelievable. A major drama was about to erupt and this idiot was pottering about with a digger. It came to within 500 feet of our position, but the driver never saw us. He was dressed in civilian clothes. He must have been there quite innocently.

“Don’t fire,” I said. “We’ve got to take it as a compromise, but what sort of compromise we don’t know yet.”

The driver’s attention seemed focused on finding a way out of the wadi.

He maneuvred this way and that for what seemed an eternity.

“Fuck it,” I said to Vince, “we need to go. We just can’t sit here.”

The ideal would have been to wait for last light, but I sensed that the situation was going to get out of hand.

The bulldozer disappeared suddenly, and the engine noise faded. The driver must have found the gap he was looking for.

It was time to go. I told Stan to bring in the blokes on the Minimis so everybody could hear what I was going to say. We huddled around with our belt kit on and our berg ens at our feet. It was a vulnerable time because everybody was so close together, but it had to be done: everybody had to know what was going on.

I started by staring the obvious. “We’re going to move from here,” I said. “We’re going to go west, try to avoid the AA guns, and then head south and go for the RV with the helicopter. The helicopter RV will be at 0400 tomorrow.”

“See you in the Pudding Club,” Chris said.

“Fuck that,” Dinger said in his terrible W. C. Fields voice. “Go west, young man, go west.”

We shouldered our berg ens and rechecked our belt kit. The rest of it was left behind. Even the claymores remained because we didn’t have time to pick them up.

Because of the S60 sites, there was only one way out. West, then south, using dips in the ground as much as we could. But we wouldn’t rush it. We didn’t want to make mistakes. We had loads of time to make the heli RV, if we could only get out of this shit and get under cover of darkness.

I was feeling apprehensive but comfortable. We deserved better after all the hard work of planning, tabbing in, locating and confirming the MSR, and just the bad luck of lost com ms I’d thought we’d cracked it: we only had to wait until 0400 the next morning and we’d be back in business. But at the end of the day, we were an 8-man fighting patrol, we had guns, we had bullets, we had 66s. What more could a man ask for?

“Come on,” said Mark, “let’s make like rag heads.”

We pulled our shamags over our faces. The sun was in our eyes as I led us out in single file. We patrolled properly, taking our time, observing the ground.

The wadi petered out and became flat plain. We came out west, using the lie of the ground, then turned left, heading south.

I kept checking to the north because I didn’t want us to get in line with the antiaircraft guns. With every step I expected to hear a 57mm round zinging past my head. What was keeping them? Didn’t they believe the boy? Were they waiting for reinforcements? Or just waiting to get up the bottle to attack?

We patrolled further west for another five minutes, keeping distance between each man to minimize casualties in the event of a major drama. It was the correct thing to do, but if a contact happened up front, the man at the rear would have to run maybe 200 feet to catch up if required, depending on the action taken.

As we turned south there was a touch of high ground on the left-hand side that went up to the MSR. We were still in dead ground from the guns, which were further up the other side. As we started heading south, we couldn’t believe our luck. Nothing happened. Then from the east, our left-hand side, we heard the sound of tracked vehicles.

Adrenaline rushed, blood pumped. We stopped. We couldn’t go forwards, we couldn’t go back. Where else was there to go? We knew it was going to happen.

I could see everybody preparing. They knew what to do. Bergens came off, and men checked that all pouches were closed. It’s no good running to attack and finding out when you get there that you have no magazines because they’ve all fallen out. They checked their weapons and carried out the drills that were second nature. We were probably no more than seconds away from contact. I looked around for a deeper depression in the ground than the shallow scrape I was in.

The darkest minute is just before the firefight starts.

You can’t see a thing. All you can do is listen, and think. How many of these things are going to come? Are they going to trundle straight up onto you-which is what they’ll do if they’ve got any sense-and just turn the machine guns on you like a hose? There was nowhere to run. We’d just have to fight. The screech of armored tracks and the scream of the engines’ high revs rolled around us. We still didn’t know where they were.

“Fucking let’s do it! Let’s do it!” Chris screamed.

I was overwhelmed by a sudden feeling of togetherness, of all being in this shit together. I had no thought of dying. Just of: Let’s get through this.

People have survived ambushes through pure aggression. This was going to be the same. I pulled apart the tubes of my 66 and made sure the sights had popped up. I put it beside me. I checked that my mag was on tight, checked that my 203 had a bomb in it. I knew it was there, but I couldn’t help checking. It made me feel that bit more secure.

Basic instinct makes you want to keep as low as possible, but you have to look up and around. I raised myself into a semi squat Each bloke was bobbing and moving around within his own 30-feet square trying to get a better vantage point and see what was coming. The earlier you can see it the better: then the awful dread of the unknown evaporates. This can work against you. You might see it’s much worse than you anticipated, but it’s got to be done.

I heard myself shouting: “Shit! Shit! Shit!”

There were shouts all along the line.

“See anything your end yet?”

“No, can’t see jack shit.”

“Fuck it! Fuck it!”

“Come on, come on, let’s get this done!”

“Are they here yet?”

“No, fuck it.”

“Fucking rag heads.”

Everyone was concentrating, listening hard to locate the vehicles.

Whoof!

Everyone at my end ducked.

“For fuck’s sake, what was that?”

In answer, right at the other end of the patrol, Legs or Vince fired off another 66.

Whoof!

Even if the Iraqis hadn’t known we were there, they did now. But the boys wouldn’t have fired without good reason. I strained my neck and saw that on the far left-hand side an APC with a 7.62 machine gun had come down a small depression that was out of sight of our end. Vince and Legs had the vehicle coming at them head-on.

“Fucking let’s do it! Let’s do it! Let’s do it!” I screamed at the top of my voice.

It felt good all of a sudden to have got off the first round. I didn’t know if I was shouting at them or at myself. A bit of both, most likely.

“Come on! Come on!”

A second APC with a turret-mounted gun opened fire all along the area. It’s not nice to know you’re up against armor and vehicles with infantry on board. All you are is a foot patrol, and these anonymous things are crushing relentlessly towards you. You know they carry infantry, you know all the details about them. You know the driver’s in front and the gunner’s up top, and he’s trying to look through his prism, and it’s difficult for him and he’s sweating away up there, getting thrown about trying to aim. But all you can see is this thing coming screaming towards you, and it looks so anonymous and monster like magnified ten times suddenly because you realize it’s aiming at you. They look so impersonal. They leave destruction in their wake. It’s you against them. You’re an ant and you’re scared.

The APC nearest me cracked off more rounds, firing wildly. One burst stitched the ground about 30 feet in front of me.

In the British army you are taught how to react when the enemy opens fire: you dash to make yourself a hard target, you get down, you crawl into a fire position, find the enemy, set your sights at the range, and fire. “Reaction to Effective Enemy Fire,” it’s called. That all goes to rat shit when you’re actually under fire. It always has done for me. As soon as the rounds come down, you’re on the floor, and you want to make the biggest hole possible to hide in. You’d get your spoon out and start digging if it would help. It’s a natural physical reaction. Your instincts compel you to get down and make yourself as small as possible and wait for it all to end. The rational side of your brain is telling you what you should be doing, which is getting up and looking to see what’s going on so you can start fighting-there’s no point just lying there because you’re going to die anyway. The emotional side is saying, Sod that, stay there, maybe it’ll all go away. But you know it’s not going to and that something has to be done.

There was another sustained burst from the machine gun. Rounds thumped into the ground, getting closer and closer to where I lay. I had to react. I took a deep breath and stuck my head up. A truck had stopped 300 feet away, and infantry were spilling out of the back in total confusion. They must have known we were there because they’d heard the 66s and the turret-mounted guns were in action, but the small-arms fire they put down was only in our general direction.

There seemed to be no communication between the APCs. Both were doing their own thing. Infantry jumped out of the back, shouting and firing. They weren’t entirely sure where we were. But even so, there was enough incoming from their direction to keep our heads down. If you’re hit, there’s not a lot of difference between a confused round and one that was deliberately aimed.

There was more hollering and shouting, from us and them. The firefight had to be initiated. It’s no good just lying there and hoping that they won’t see you or go away, because they won’t. What they’ll probably do is start coming forward and looking for you, so you’ve got to get on with it. It takes maximum firepower, balanced with ammunition conservation, to win a firefight. It’s a question of you getting more rounds down than them and killing more of them initially, so they either back off or dig their own little holes. But their firepower was far superior to ours.

The APC stopped. I couldn’t believe my eyes. It was using the machine gun as a fire base instead of coming forward with the infantry and overwhelming us, which was wonderful.

Everybody was getting the rounds down. The Minimis were fired in bursts of 3-5 rounds. Ammunition had to be managed. Two 66s were fired at the truck and found their target. There was a massive shudder of high explosive. It must have been very demoralizing for them.

Decisions. After this initial contact, what are you going to do? Are you going to stay there all the time, are you going to move back, are you going to move forward? We’d have to do something, or we’d all just face each other firing-they’d take casualties, we’d take casualties, but we would come off worse simply because we had the least number of men. This might just be the first gang coming forward; there might be another rifle company coming up behind: we didn’t know yet. The only thing to do is go forward, or you’ll be sitting there in a standoff until you run out of ammunition.

I looked over at Chris. “Let’s fucking do it! Are you ready? Are you ready?”

He shouted down the line, “We’re going to do it! We’re going to do it!”

Everybody knew what had to be done. We psyched ourselves up. It’s so unnatural to go forward into something like that. It’s not at all what your vulnerable flesh and bone wants to do. It just wants to close its eyes and open them again much later and find that everything is fine.

“Everything Okay?”

Whether people actually heard further down the line didn’t matter: they knew something was going to happen, and they knew the chances were that we were going to go forward and attack this force that vastly outnumbered us.

Without thinking, I changed my magazine. I had no idea how many rounds I had left in it. It was still fairly heavy: I might have only fired two or three rounds out of it. I threw it down the front of my smock for later on.

Stan gave the thumbs up and stepped up the fire rate on the Minimi to initiate the move.

I was on my hands and knees, looking up. I took deep breaths, and then up I got and ran forward.

“Fuck it! Fuck it!”

People put down a fearsome amount of covering fire. You don’t fire on the move. It slows you up. All you have to do is get forward, get down, and get firing so that the others can move up. As soon as you get down on the ground, your lungs are heaving and your torso is moving up and down, you’re looking around for the enemy, but you’ve got sweat in your eyes. You wipe it away: your rifle is moving up and down in your shoulder. You want to get down in a nice firing position like you do on the range, but it isn’t happening that way. You’re trying to calm yourself down to see what you’re doing, but you want to do everything at once. You want to stop this heavy breathing so you can hold the weapon properly and bring it to bear. You want to get rid of the sweat so you can see your targets, but you don’t want to move your arm to rub your eye because you’ve got it in the fire position and you want to be firing to cover the move of the others as they come forward.

I jumped up and ran forward another 50 feet-a far longer bound than the textbooks say you should. The longer you are up the longer you are a target. However, it is quite hard to hit a fast-moving man, and we were pumped up on adrenaline.

You’re immersed in your own little world. Me and Chris running forward, Stan and Mark backing us up with the Minimi. Fire and maneuver. The others were doing the same, legging it forward. The rag heads must have thought we were crazy, but they had put us in the situation, and this was the only way out.

You could watch the tracer coming at you. You heard the burning, hissing sound as the rounds shot past or hit the ground and spun off into the air. It was scary stuff. There’s nothing you can do but jump up, run, get down; jump up, run, get down. Then lie there panting, sweating, fighting for breath, firing, looking for new targets, trying to save ammo.

Once I had moved forward and started firing, the Minimis stopped and they, too, bounded forward. The sooner they were up ahead the better, because of their superior firepower.

The closer we got the more the Iraqis were flapping. It must have been the last thing they expected us to do. They probably didn’t realize it was the last thing we wanted to do.

You’re supposed to count your rounds as you’re firing, but in practice it’s hard to do. At any moment when you need to fire, you should know how many are left and change mags if you have to. Lose count and you’ll hear a “dead man click.” You pull the trigger, and the firing pin goes forward, but nothing happens. In practice, counting to thirty is unrealistic. What you actually do is wait for your weapon to stop firing, then press the button and let the mag fall, slap another straight on, and off you go. If you are well drilled in this, it’s second nature and requires no mental action. It just happens. The Armalite is designed so that when you’ve stopped firing, the working parts are to the rear, so you can slap another magon and let the working parts go forward so that a round is taken into the breech. Then you fire again, at anything that moves.

We had got up to within 150 feet of them. The APC nearest me started to retreat, gun still firing. Our rate of fire slowed. We had to husband the rounds.

The truck was on fire. I didn’t know if any of us was hit. There wouldn’t have been a lot we could do about it anyway.

I couldn’t believe that the APC was backing off. Obviously it was worried about the anti armor rockets and knew the other one had been hit, but for it to withdraw was absolutely incredible. Some of the infantry ran with it, jumping into the back. They were running, turning, giving it good bursts, but it was a splendid sight. I fancied a cabby myself with my 66, and discovered that in the adrenaline rush I’d left it with my bergen. Wanker!

At the other end, Vince was up with Legs and still going forward. They were shouting to psych each other up. The rest of us put down covering fire.

Mark and Dinger stood up and ran forwards. They were concentrating on the APC ahead of them that they had hit with their 66s. They’d scored a “mobility kill”-its tracks couldn’t move, though it could still use its gun. They were putting in rounds hoping to shatter the gunner’s prism. If I’d been in his boots, I would have got out of the wagon and legged it, but then, he didn’t know who he had pursuing him. They got up to the APC and found the rear doors still open. The jundies hadn’t battened themselves down. An L2 grenade was lobbed in and exploded with its characteristic dull thud. The occupants were killed instantly.

We kept going forwards into the area of the trucks in four groups of two, each involved in its own little drama. Everybody was bobbing and moving with Sebastian Coe legs on. We’d fire a couple of rounds, then dash and get out of the way, then start again. We tried to fire aimed shots. You pick on one body and fire until he drops. Sometimes it can take as many as ten rounds.

There is a set of sights on the 203, but you don’t always have time to set it up and fire. It was a case of just take a quick aim and get it off. The weapon “pops” as it fires. I watched the bomb going through the air. There was a loud bang and showers of dirt. I heard screaming. Good. It meant they were bleeding, not shooting-and they’d become casualties that others now had to attend to.

We found ourselves on top of the position. Everybody who could do so had run away. A truck was blazing furiously ahead of us. A burnt-out APC smoked at the far-left extreme. Bodies were scattered over a wide area. Fifteen dead maybe, many more wounded. We disregarded them and carried on through. I felt an enormous sense of relief at getting the contact over with, but was still scared. There would be more to come. Anybody who says he’s not scared is either a liar or mentally deficient.

“This is fucking outrageous!” Dinger screamed.

I smelled petrol and smoke, and pork-the smell of burning bodies. One Iraqi lolled out of the passenger seat of the truck, his face black and peeling. Bodies writhed on the ground. I could tell the 203s had done their job by the number of fearsome leg injuries. When they go off, slivers of metal are blown in all directions.

All we wanted to do now was get away. We didn’t know what might be in the next wave. As we started moving back to the berg ens rounds kicked into the ground behind us. The surviving APC, a half mile away and surrounded by bodies, was still firing, but ineffectively. There was no time to hang around.