The One That Got Away - Junior edition

CHAPTER 10 Echoes of Africa

There was something spooky about my surroundings. The wind blowing through the rocks of that huge wilderness took my mind back to another desert, another time. Africa… the Kalahari. My thoughts floated away to the time when ‘B’ Squadron was deployed on a three-month training exercise, my troop staff sergeant was killed, and we all became caught up in what felt like voodoo or black magic.

For the various parts of the exercise, the squadron had spread out over a wide area. The Air Troop went free-falling; the Boat Troop splashed around in the swamps; the Mobility Troop drove around the Kalahari desert; and the rest of us went climbing in the Tsodilo Hills. That was my first trip abroad with the squadron, and it brought home to me how dangerous our training was.

On our first evening in the country, before the troops split up, we had a lesson on snakes from an African called Lazarus. He started releasing snakes from a sack to show us the various kinds which we might come across.

He brought out a spitting cobra, holding it by the throat, and said that if you gripped it like that, it couldn’t spit. ‘Watch that thing,’ growled the SQMS, ‘because if it does spit, and the stuff gets in your eyes, you’ll have problems.’ Sure enough, as Lazarus came past me the cobra spat, and although I closed my eyes, some spit landed on my arm and the side of my face. I wiped it off immediately, but wherever a drop had touched me, it took the pigment out of my skin. I was left with pale dots all over my cheek, and a patch the shape of the British Isles on one arm.

As a grand finale Lazarus produced an Egyptian cobra — a massive creature about four metres long — which he set down on the ground. We were gathered round in a circle, and he said, ‘Stand still, and let it go through your legs.’ Everything was fine until one guy moved and the cobra chased him. The man ran up onto a water bowser, and the snake wrapped itself round one of the axles, baring its enormous fangs as Lazarus heaved on its tail, trying to drag it off. In the end he got it back into his sack, but it was amazing that none of us had been bitten.

After that little introduction, our troop moved up to the Tsodilo Hills. Our camp was maybe half an hour’s walk from the base of the biggest hill — an outcrop of bare, blue-grey rock which rose in tiers from a dead-flat plain. Some of the tiers, which went up in vertical rock faces, were anywhere between thirty and sixty metres high. It looked like an enormous, sharp staircase.

In the evening, as we sat round the fire, one of the guys said, ‘I’m going out shooting — does anyone fancy coming?’ Nobody could be bothered. So he went out on his own, and presently he came back with a small, furry animal about the size of a hare.

A few Botswanan soldiers had been attached to us for training, and when he offered the animal to them, there was a big commotion. The Botswanans were with some Bushmen, who became very agitated. The little men raised a hubbub, rushed about and began lighting more fires. Via the Botswanans, the message came back to us strongly that we shouldn’t kill any more animals. It was dangerous, they said, and would provoke the spirits who lived on the mountain.

Next morning we had a brief on the climb. Ian, our mountain guide, had worked out that rain was probably going to come in during the afternoon, so he told everybody to be off the rock by midday. Then he split us into climbing pairs, and sent us off. I was with Ian himself, and when we reached the first of the rock faces, he showed me how to use devices called ‘friends’. These expand and lock themselves in position when you hammer them into crevices.

Joe Farragher — a staff sergeant and a big, heavy man of about 110 kg, strong as an ox — went off climbing with a guy called Trev, who soon stepped off a rock. Although Trev only fell about a metre, he put his back out and had to be carried all the way back to camp. As a replacement, Joe got a young officer to go climbing with him. By the time he left for his second attempt, it was already 11 a.m. and he shouldn’t really have returned to the mountain, because everyone had been told to be off it by twelve.

Ian and I were climbing away when suddenly we heard yells from round the corner. It was the officer, shouting down that there’d been an accident. Ian got both of us down onto a ledge, and we hurried round. We found Joe lying on the rock. He had fallen about twenty-five metres. We ran up to him, and I tried breathing into his mouth to give him CPR. But there was frothy red blood coming out of his mouth, and when I touched the back of his head under his climbing helmet, it felt like a broken eggshell.

He was obviously dead.

We shouted down to some others to send for the Alouette helicopter, which was on stand-by.

Soon the chopper came in, but the ledge was too narrow for it to land, and the face of the mountain was so steep that the pilot had difficulty hovering close enough for a doctor to abseil down. The heli began rocking, so that the doctor was swinging in and out. If he’d missed the ledge, he’d have fallen over fifty metres. In the end, though, he got down safely.

After he’d pronounced Joe dead, we tied his body into an old stretcher and prepared to lower it down the face. The drop was so long that we had to tie two ropes together. Ian asked me to abseil down first, to make sure that we could get our figure-of-eight linking device past the knot. I was feeling quite shocked, but also excited to be involved in a real body retrieval. As I went over the edge, I wasn’t sure where I was going to end up, but luckily it turned out that the knot was level with another flat ledge, so passing it was easy.

It should have taken no more than half an hour to get Joe down, but everything seemed to go wrong. Ropes kept getting snagged or broken, and several times the body nearly fell out of the stretcher. We had to keep tying him back in, and it was awful to see a person we had known and liked trussed up like a stuffed chicken. Like the rest of us he was wearing shorts and a T-shirt, and by the time we got him down he was in a mess, with his skin all scraped. Altogether we struggled for eight hours, and darkness was falling when we reached the plain.

That evening we were all pretty subdued, and we didn’t feel any better the next day when the Alouette which flew the body out broke down. Then we heard that while the guys from the Air Troop had been free-falling, the engines of their C-130 had caught fire, and the aircraft was forced to land.

We were starting to wonder whether there was some jinx on the exercise when one of the Air Troop produced a paperback copy of the South African explorer Laurens van der Post’s book about the Bushmen: The Lost World of the Kalahari.

‘Listen to this,’ he said, and he read out some passages describing how the author had come to this very area, maybe forty years before, in search of Bushmen. When members of his party killed an antelope and a warthog, everything went belly-up: wild bees attacked the camp at sunrise — not once, but every morning — even though it was highly unusual for them to fly at that time of day; when the expedition’s cameraman tried to film some ancient cave paintings, the movie camera repeatedly broke down; their tape-recorder also ceased to function. In the end van der Post became so scared that he decided to leave the area immediately.

First, though, he got his guide, Samutchoso, to communicate with the spirits. After the man had gone into a trance, the answer came back: ‘The spirits of the hills are very angry with you, so angry that if they had not known your intention in coming here was pure, they would long since have killed you. They are angry because you have come here with blood on your hands…’

To win forgiveness, van der Post wrote a letter addressed to ‘The Spirits, The Tsodilo Hills’, in which he humbly begged pardon. He promised to bury the note at the base of the great cave painting which he had found. He then got all his companions to sign the letter, sealed it in an envelope, and placed it in a lime juice bottle, which he duly buried in the cave. After that he had no more trouble: his Land Rovers started without difficulty, and the expedition moved on.

His experience sounded like our own, and the death of that one animal seemed to have put us under the same spell. We decided to go and look for the cave, and I walked around the mountain with one other guy, Merv. We found the cave easily enough. I thought it looked a bit creepy, and didn’t fancy walking in; but Merv decided it was all right — so we went in, and at the back we found a green bottle, corked up, with a piece of paper inside.

Back at the camp, we reported on what we’d found. People made a few jokes, but Harry (an Everest climber, who had spent a lot of time in mountains, and felt sympathy for the people who lived in them) suggested that we should write a note of our own, apologizing for the death of the animal, put it in another bottle, and leave it in the cave.

When our message was ready, Merv and I went back to the cave with it. The old bottle was still there — but something very strange had happened. Although the cork was still in place, the paper inside had been shredded, as if by a hamster. Of course, we were spooked. Then we thought that some of our own guys must have been messing around. We left our bottle beside the first one, and went back to the camp — only to find that nobody else had been near the cave.

Whatever had happened, the atmosphere was becoming tense. Next morning we went up the mountain again and studied the place where Joe had fallen. Things somehow didn’t look right. All three of Joe’s ‘friends’ had come loose at once, but there seemed to be no reason for it. We sent for Ian, the expert. He agreed that the friends should never have come out.

By now everyone was becoming nervous. The place had an unpleasant atmosphere; we felt as though we were being watched. Even off the mountain, mishaps kept occurring. A herd of goats came through the camp and wrecked the tents, knocking everything over and chewing up our clothes. One of the Mobility Troop fell off his motorbike and broke his collarbone. The Boat Troop was attacked by a hippo, which bit off one of the twin tails of an inflatable boat. The bang scared the animal off, but the boat was finished. When the RAF flew a Hercules over the top of the mountain and tried to throw out a wreath for Joe, it blew back into the aircraft. So they flew over again, and twice more it came back in. You could, at a stretch, say it was because of air turbulence, but it seemed weird. Only when they were three or four miles from the mountain did the wreath finally stay out and float away.

All this could have been coincidence — but there was no doubt that the Bushmen believe in the power of the mountain spirits. By the end of the exercise I was well on the way to doing the same. I began to feel that there were forces at work which we simply didn’t understand.

One of the guys came with me to consult a witch doctor in the nearby village and find out what fate had in store for us. After we’d dropped a few boxes of rations in payment, a skinny, middle-aged man wearing nothing but a loincloth came out of his mud hut carrying a small leather bag. He swept a patch of earth clear with one hand and tipped six or eight bones onto it. He sat staring at them for thirty seconds, muttering to himself. Through the Botswanan who was with us, the message came back that we had nothing more to worry about, and we started to feel happier.

With our squadron exercise finished, we drove away, and as I looked out of the back of the Land Rover at the mountain, I still had the feeling that there was something there, watching us, glad to see us go. We were told not to mention the story back in Hereford, for the sake of Joe’s family. But that was the first incident for me in which I’d seen someone killed, and it stuck in my mind for ever.

Remembering Africa helped pass the day. But cold, hunger, thirst and the pain of lying on rock continually reminded me I was in Iraq. Somehow the hours dragged by. At about five in the afternoon I moved up to the top edge of the mound and lay there gazing into the distance. Ahead of me, in the direction I needed to go, ridges of bare rock rose one behind the other, greyer and greyer as they stretched to the horizon. Nearby the ground was rolling, and on my left hills climbed steeply towards a high plateau. Looking west, I could see an old stone fort perched on one of the ridges running up from the river valley; it was very high up, with excellent views all around. I worried slightly that it might be a manned border post, but somehow the sight of that man-made structure gave me a lift. At least it was different to the barren wastes of the desert.

I realized that as I grew weaker I was covering the ground more slowly, not making the progress I expected. All the same, after studying the map on and off during the day, I reckoned that one good night’s march would take me across the border.

Then a simple event gave my morale a tremendous boost. Once again the goats came into view below me, and I held my breath as they grazed nearby. Then I saw their herder. Keeping well down behind a rock, I watched him. The goats wandered down the lower side of the mound, away from me, but the man whipped round my side of it, out of sight of the road. As I looked down, from about a hundred metres away, he whipped up his dishdash, squatted down and went to the toilet. Then, quick as a flash, he ran back to catch up with his flock.

Back with the squadron in Saudi Arabia, the SSM had said something to me. ‘You’ll never see an Iraqi go to the toilet. They’re very shy about it.’ But here it was, happening right in front of me, and I lay there doubled up with silent laughter. Wait till I get out of here! I thought. I’m going straight to the SSM to tell him what I’ve seen!