The One That Got Away - Junior edition

CHAPTER 2 Bravo Two Zero!

On the night of the 16–17 January, after the United Nations deadline of 15 January had passed and Saddam Hussein had not withdrawn his troops from Kuwait — coalition aircraft started bombing targets in Iraq. The air war had begun.

Almost immediately, Saddam Hussein started firing Scud missiles into Israel. He had to be stopped.

Saddam’s Scuds were being launched from mobile missile launchers, but neither satellites nor aircraft could find them. Suddenly the Regiment had a vital role to perform: to find the mobile launchers and stop the bombardment of Israel.

The big Special Forces punch was to come from ‘A’ and ‘D’ Squadrons. They would go in as substantial motorized patrols, each heavily armed and half a squadron strong. Their job would be to find the Scud TELs (transporter-erector-launchers), then call in Allied aircraft to blow them up. But first, three eight-man patrols from ‘B’ Squadron, designated Bravo One Zero, Bravo Two Zero and Bravo Three Zero, would infiltrate deep into Iraqi territory. They would lie up in OPs (observation posts) to report enemy movement, especially that of Scuds.

I was to be part of the Bravo Two Zero patrol. We were selected according to our particular skills: besides fighting power, we needed a demolitionist, a signaller and a medic (myself). The main task would be to gather intelligence. Our aim was to find a good lying-up position (LUP) and set up an OP to maintain surveillance on the main supply route, which ran westwards from the town of Al Hadithah to three airfields known as H1, H2 and H3, and along which it was thought the Iraqis were moving Scud launchers. Each patrol’s plan, in fact, was to put in two OPs, one covering the other, fifty or a hundred metres apart and linked by telephone line. One would have an observation opening facing forward onto the main supply route. The other would be in front of it with the opening facing backwards. That way, the guys there could watch the ground behind their colleagues.

We would remain in the OP for up to ten days, reporting enemy movements by radio or Satcom telephone, and calling in fighter-bombers to attack any worthwhile target. We were also told to blow up any fibre-optic communications links we could find. After ten days, we would either get a re-supply by helicopter, or move to a new location, also by chopper.

Besides all our personal equipment, we would take kit for building the OP: 120 empty sandbags per man, vehicle camouflage nets, poles, and thermal sheets to put over the top of our structures, so that if Iraqis flew over with thermal-imaging devices they wouldn’t be able to pick up the heat rising from our bodies.

As we were preparing ourselves, it became clear that the Regiment didn’t have enough equipment to go around. I told the SQMS that we needed some 203 rounds to fire from the grenade-launching part of our weapons.

‘Well,’ he replied, ‘we haven’t got any.’

‘Why not?’

‘There are just none here.’

In fact, there were plenty of 203 rounds, but other people had them. I had to borrow twelve from a mate of mine in ‘A’ Squadron.

It was the same with claymore mines, which we wanted as a deterrent to put the brakes on anyone trying to come after us in the desert. (If you’re being followed, you can put down a mine with a timer, and crack it off after maybe five minutes. Even if it doesn’t do any damage, it slows people down, because they wonder if there are more mines in front of them.) When we asked for claymores, the answer was that there weren’t any, and someone told us to make our own out of ammunition boxes packed with plastic explosives and gympi link — the metal belt that holds machine-gun rounds together.

This was ridiculous: home-made devices like that are crude, large and heavy, and we had no room to carry them. Later, however, we did make a single claymore out of plastic ice-cream cartons, and one of us took it in his bergen.

In the end we were given a mixed load of stuff by the Special Boat Service: five claymores, a box of L2 grenades, a box of white phosphorus grenades and some 66 rockets. We shared out some of this with the other two patrols, and I myself finished up with one L2 grenade and two white phosphorus.

We were also missing pistols. The twenty pistols packed and shipped for our own use simply disappeared, nicked for the other squadrons. The result was that the only man in our unit with a pistol was a guy called Vince, who had brought it with him from ‘A’ Squadron. We also asked for silenced pistols, and in particular for the make invented during the Second World War for Special Operations Executives. Although fairly basic, these have never been surpassed for sheer quietness — no more than a pfft — and at close range the 9 mm slug is deadly. The other two squadrons had such weapons and, as things turned out, there were several moments when I could have done with one.

We were also missing other basic equipment. Take the maps, for instance. The only maps we had were really poor and designed for air crews. Their scale (1:250,000) was so small that they showed few details. They might have helped navigators, but they were no good to people on the ground. To back them up, we badly needed satellite information, but we were told that no satellite imagery was available.

The first escape maps we were given had been printed in 1928, then updated for the Second World War. At the last minute, though, we were issued with newer ones, printed on silk, which we worked into the waistbands of our trousers.

Each of us was given a photocopied note, in Arabic and English, promising £5,000 to anyone who handed over a Coalition serviceman to a friendly power. Deciding the document was rubbish, I threw mine away. Later, however, I changed my mind; because I couldn’t speak Arabic, I thought I’d better have a note after all. So I got another member of the patrol, Bob Consiglio, to photocopy his, and I took that with me. We also signed for twenty gold sovereigns each, in case we had to bribe somebody or buy our way out of trouble. Of course, we were supposed to return these after the conflict, but not everybody did.

The patrol’s main task would be to man the OP, but we knew we might also have to blow up fibre-optic communication lines. Luckily one of our lads knew about fibre-optic cables. He told us that we needed a particular device, like a metal detector, for tracing them. We asked for one immediately. He also knew that if a cable is cut, the operators can tell where the break is. We therefore decided that, if we did blow a line, we would put anti-personnel mines around the break, so that when engineers came to repair it they would be taken out. We would also lay another delayed-action device to blow the line again later. But the main aim of the exercise would be to kill as many skilled personnel as possible. If we managed to kill the first wave coming out to make repairs, it was a good bet that the next lot would say they couldn’t find the break, and the line would remain cut.

Bravo Two Zero was to be commanded by Sergeant Andy McNab. Andy was then about thirty-two, a Cockney Jack-the-Lad with such a gift of the gab that he could talk his way out of any situation. Dark-haired, with a moustache, he’d done a lot of work in the Regiment and was a good demolitionist.

Paired off with Andy — which meant he shared bed-spaces, vehicles, cooking equipment and so on — was Dinger, a lance corporal of twenty-eight who’d been in the Parachute Regiment. A bit of a wild character, he was always game for a fight. If you described anyone as mad, or as a joker, it would be him. Yet he was also a good family man, married with two daughters.

The other sergeant was Vince, an older man, about thirty-five, a medic like myself, who tended to be a bit nervous and twitchy in his movements. He was tall and slim, with an athletic build; he had fuzzy, dark-gingery hair and a drooping, Mexican-type moustache. He came from Swindon, and was married with three children. He was putting a bold front on things, but I knew his heart wasn’t in this operation. Only a few days before, we’d sat on his camp-bed and he’d said to me, ‘I don’t want to be doing this.’

We discussed things a bit, and I said to him, ‘Well, now that we’re here, we’d better just get on with it and hope we’ll come out OK at the end.’ I got the impression that he wanted to finish his time in the army and be done with the whole business.

A closer friend of mine was Trooper Bob Consiglio. Twenty-four years old, the son of a Sicilian father and an English mother, he was very small (only 5 foot 5 inches — or 1.65 metres) but incredibly strong, with a heart like a lion. He was a really nice lad, and would do anything you told him to. He was a hard worker and a cheerful character. When it came to fighting, Bob wasn’t frightened of anything. I said to him one day, ‘Bob, if anything happens when we’re in there, make sure you stick with me.’ It wasn’t that I didn’t trust him to do anything by himself, though I did want to protect him, almost as if he were a brother. Rather, because he was so brave, it would be to my own advantage to have him close.

Twice Bob’s size was Stan — a different character entirely. He was over six foot tall (1.8 metres plus), not that obviously muscular, but very, very strong, well-spoken and a gentleman. Nothing ever seemed to bother him; whatever happened, his voice kept the same tone, and he just got on with things. If he had a fault, it was that he was too nice. He was another good mate of mine, and I wouldn’t have liked to see him get angry, because he could be a formidable fighter.

The other two members of the patrol were Legs Lane — so called because he was tall and thin — and Mark, a keen New Zealander who had joined the squadron only a month before. Both were very quiet, but they were good men, and Mark especially was always game for anything. Legs was a key man in the patrol as he was carrying the 319, the main radio set.

Finally there was myself: a Geordie from near Newcastle, aged twenty-eight, and a corporal. During six years in the regular SAS I’d gained a good deal of useful experience in many countries, and at the beginning of 1991 I was physically the strongest I’d ever been, because during my last tour with the SP team I’d hit the weights and built up a lot of muscle on my upper body. The extra strength had been useful, because in the SP team you’re forever going up ropes or sliding down them, climbing into buildings, carrying guys, jumping off vehicles, pushing people away or restraining them. In all this, you’re handling a lot of weight. In your black kit, you have your body armour, Kevlar helmet, and waistcoat loaded with ammunition, stun grenades and axes, besides your machine gun and pistol. My weight had gone up from 11 to 12½ stone — that’s from about 70 kilos to nearly 80 kilos. Little did I know that the extra muscle was going to save my life.

In our last days at Victor we were busier than ever. Andy was getting the demolition kit sorted. I saw to the medical packs, Legs Lane to the radio. Everyone scrounged ammunition. We were told that when we moved up to Al Jouf — a Regiment Forward Operating Base (FOB), in an airfield in the northwest of Saudi Arabia — we would go more or less straight over the border into Iraq. Everything had to be ready before we left. We were told to leave all our non-essential kit behind.

On the evening of 18 January we flew to Al Jouf in three Hercules transport planes. On board were all the squadron vehicles and stores. The air war was then at its height, raging for the third night, and there was quite a high risk of being shot at en route. The sky was full of armed warplanes, all trying to blow the opposition out of the air.

When we landed at Al Jouf, the first thing we noticed was the wind. It was much colder there. But because we’d been told we were going to deploy into Iraq immediately, we’d left most of our warm kit behind.

We began to unload our equipment and pile it in a grassed area that was like a garden, about thirty metres by twenty, next to one of the hangars. Someone told us we’d be sleeping that night in the grassy area; so we sorted out bivvy bags and sleeping bags, made a brew, and got our heads down in the open.

The night sky was clear, and as we lay there we watched streams of B-52s crossing high above us, with fighters skimming like minnows alongside. The sight sent my mind straight back to the time when, as a boy, I’d watched television pictures of B-52s going over in streams to bomb Vietnam. Now, as the aircraft reached the Iraqi border, their flashing lights were suddenly extinguished, but we heard the roar of massed jet engines rumble away into the distance. It was comforting to know that our aircraft were bombing the enemy. We hoped they would do enough damage to make Saddam capitulate before we were even deployed.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But by then it was too late to change things.

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

It was denied.

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

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