The One That Got Away - Junior edition

CHAPTER 3 Insertion

As soon as we landed back, the guys started stripping their kit to try to save weight. Out went luxuries like sleeping bags and most of our warm clothes. We realized that the weather was much colder than at Victor, but our bergens were so heavy that the only way we could get them on was to sit down, settle the straps over our shoulders, and have a couple of the other guys pull us to our feet, as if they were lifting knights in armour onto their chargers.

I became obsessed with the need for ammunition. Pressured by the thought that we were going to be on our own behind enemy lines, I left food out of my belt-kit in favour of more rounds. Normally I carried twenty-four hours’ worth of rations in a belt-pouch — enough to spread over four days — but I reckoned that if we did get compromised, I could reach the Syrian border in two nights. All I would need on me in that case would be two packets of AB (army issue biscuits). So I put the bulk of the food into my bergen — resisting the temptation to overload on food — and filled my belt-kit with extra ammunition. Altogether I had twelve magazines of twenty-eight rounds each, and also about ninety loose rounds, including a few armour-piercing, which I’d brought from Hereford.

One of the items I threw out was my brew-kit: tea bags, sachets of coffee, orange powder, sugar and the fuel — inflammable hexi-blocks. We were going in on hard routine, which meant no cooking and no fires, so I thought I would have no chance to use anything like that. Another serious omission was puritabs, for sterilizing water. If we’d been going into the jungle, where you use local water all the time, I’d certainly have taken some. But I thought that in the desert we’d be drinking out of jerry cans; it never occurred to me that I might have to rely on the River Euphrates. Certainly we wouldn’t risk drinking from wells: there seemed a good chance that wells might have been poisoned.

The atmosphere in the patrol remained tense but cheerful. We kept asking for satellite pictures of the area where we were heading, and in the end some did arrive. They were of poor quality, but they suggested we were right to leave our vehicles behind, since they showed that the desert was extremely flat and open. What we didn’t realize, because we weren’t properly instructed about these particular images, was that we were reading the imagery upside-down, mistaking low ground for high ground, wadis for ridges and so on.

Our second departure was set for the evening of Tuesday 22 January 1991. Before we left, we had a big meal of fresh food. Then came last-minute checks as we went through all our pockets to make sure that we were carrying no scrap of paper that would give away who we were or where we came from. The only identification I had on me was a pair of metal discs slung on a chain round my neck. These bore my name, army number, blood group and religion (Church of England). To stop them clinking, I’d covered them in black masking tape. I’d taped a good-luck talisman on each disc. One was a new five-pence piece given to me by my mother-in-law, to accompany her Christmas present of a Samurai sword (the Japanese reckon it’s bad luck to give a sword without a coin). The other was a big old British penny which I’d found lying head-up in the sand of the training area near the camp at Victor. It must have been dropped there by a Brit many years earlier. I remembered the old saying: See a penny, pick it up, all the day you’ll have good luck. I’m not really superstitious, but thought I might as well give myself any advantage I could.

This time all three Bravo patrols were deploying at the same time, in two Chinooks. Because we were sharing our air transport with half of Bravo Three Zero, and they were due to drop off first, we hauled our own gear to the front of the fuselage, leaving room for four guys, their kit and two Land Rovers at the back. The chopper was so full that the pilot had to taxi it like a fixed-wing aircraft in order to get it off the ground. Then, as he had it rolling, the tail came up a bit and we lifted away.

The noise in the back was horrendous: the roar of the engines, backed by the thudding of the rotor, made normal conversation impossible. But a few headsets, plugged into the intercom system, made it possible to listen to the pilots talking. When we landed to refuel at Arar, the pilot shut down his engines, and I sat there thinking, I hope this thing doesn’t start up again! But when the refuelling was complete, the Chinook’s engines re-started and off we went.

By then darkness had fallen, and we’d flown for only a few minutes when the pilot came on the intercom. ‘Congratulations, guys,’ he said. ‘We’ve just crossed the border. You’re now in Iraq.’

Great! I thought. This is cool, flying three hundred kilometres into enemy territory. Nobody else is doing this. Nobody else knows we’re going in. But at the same time I was thinking, This is real. This is dangerous. During my time in the SAS I’d been in some hairy situations on missions in various parts of the world, and on military operations in Northern Ireland, but nothing as dramatic as this. This was the first time I’d been to war.

To keep under the radar, we were flying only ten or twenty metres off the ground. I took my hat off to the pilots, who were prepared to go into hostile airspace so lightly armed. Apart from our own weapons, the only armaments on board were two SA80 automatic rifles which the loadies could fire through the portholes. SA80s are poor-quality, unreliable weapons at the best of times. We’d told the pilots that if we were attacked when we landed, we would handle the firefight.

In my headphones I suddenly heard the pilot start shouting. A surface-to-air missile site had locked onto us. With such a heavy load, no violent evasive tactics were possible; he lowered the chopper and with great skill hovered less than a metre above the desert. He had chaff, which he could fire off if necessary to confuse incoming missiles, but I felt quite scared knowing that I wasn’t in charge of my own destiny.

We seemed to hover for ever. I looked out through one of the portholes and was appalled to see how bright the moonlight was. The desert looked totally flat, without cover anywhere. Then after a minute or two we lifted again and carried on.

In my head I ran over the rations that I’d chosen and stowed in my bergen. I knew from experience that when you’re sitting around in an OP, boredom makes you want to eat. But I’d restricted myself to a daily ration of one main meal, two packets of biscuits, and some fruit like pineapple or pears in syrup. The main meals were boil-in-the-bag — things like beef stew, chicken and pasta, pasta and meatballs, bacon and beans. They were pre-cooked and sealed in tough silver-foil sachets, which you could roll up and squash down.

As for personal kit, I was dressed, like the rest of the guys, in regular DPMs (disruptive pattern material combat fatigues). We’d also been issued with lightweight, sand-coloured desert smocks, which unbelievably dated from the Second World War. I had worked my silk escape map into the waistband that held the drawstring of my trousers, and taped the twenty gold sovereigns onto the inside of my belt. On my head I was wearing a German Army cap, and on my feet a pair of brown Raichle Gore-Tex-lined walking boots, with well-insulated uppers and soles. On my hands I had a pair of green aviator’s gloves, made of fine leather. As useful extras I had two shamags. One was very light-coloured, like a biscuit. The other was thicker and altogether more suitable, being oatmeal and purple, with the design favoured by the special forces of Oman.

In my right arm I was cradling my chosen weapon, a 203, which I’d fitted with a makeshift sling made of nylon paracord. Four of the patrol had 203s, and the rest Minimis, depending on how much other weight they were carrying. Since the 203 weighs 10 lb and the Minimi 16 lb, those with less to carry had the machine guns. I, being the patrol medic and saddled with the 12 lb medical pack, had a 203, as did Legs Lane, who had the 30 lb radio. Stan, on the other hand, who was exceptionally strong, had a Minimi. On board the Chinook we kept the rifles loaded, with bullets up the spout and safety catches on, in case of sudden action.

Each of us also had a 66 rocket launcher — a simple, disposable American device that you throw away after firing. In its folded state it looks like a tube, with the rocket pre-packed inside it; you can carry it either slung over your shoulder on a strap or, as I had mine, laid across the top of my bergen, under the flap. When the time comes to fire, all you have to do is pull out the second half of the tube to make a longer barrel, flip up the sight and pull the trigger.

As the chopper clattered on through the night, I was trying to think ahead, mainly about escape and evasion. The Regiment’s official line was that if the patrol was compromised, we should head back towards Saudi Arabia. But since Saudi would be nearly 300 kilometres off, and the Syrian border was only 130 kilometres to the west, we had already decided that if things went wrong, we’d leg it for Syria. That would make obvious sense. The Syrians had announced that if they picked up downed aircrew from any of the Allied nations, they would hand them back to the Coalition forces.

Talking it over at Al Jouf, we reckoned that we could jog and run to the border in two nights. But we’d forgotten about water: you can’t jog carrying full jerry cans, and there was no other source around. Nor had we bargained for the cold.

Five minutes out from Bravo Three Zero’s location, the loadie gave a thumbs-up signal. I smelled rather than heard the Land Rover engines start up. The back of the Chinook filled with choking diesel fumes.

Then two fingers from the loadie indicated ‘Two minutes to landing’.

Then one minute.

With a bump, we were on the ground. The tailgate went down, the vehicles rolled, and the guys hurried out into the night. That was a tense moment, because it was perfectly possible that enemy were waiting to receive us. The rest of us were at the ready: we had our webbing on and weapons in hand. If the chopper had come under fire, we’d have burst out and gone to ground. But nothing happened. The tailgate came up. With some of the weight gone, the heli made a normal take-off, and we were away again.

Twenty minutes later it was our turn.

We grabbed our own kit and dragged it to the edge of the tailgate. Soon the loadie gave us five fingers, then two. We pulled on goggles to keep flying sand and grit out of our eyes. As the chopper hit the deck, the tailgate went down. Cold air and dust came screaming in, but thanks to the goggles I could still see.

We tumbled out, dragging our kit.

Above us was a horrendous sight. Two enormous blue lights seemed to be blazing above the aircraft. For a moment I couldn’t think what was happening. Had we been caught by an Iraqi searchlight? Then I realized that the downdraught from the rotors was raising a storm of grit, and as the grains hit the whirling blades they lit up with a bright blue glow. Somebody’s bound to see this, I thought.

While the noise of the Chinook’s engines still covered us, the guys with machine guns snapped their belted magazines into place. Then in a few more seconds the heli lifted away into the night and was gone.

For the last couple of hours we’d been in deafening noise. Now suddenly we were thrown into silence. The air was still, the night clear. We lay facing outwards in a circle on the desert floor. Dogs barked not far off to the east. They’d heard us, even if nobody else had.

With our goggles off, we had a good view of our surroundings. We’d landed in the middle of a dry wadi maybe 200 metres wide. Scattered clouds were sailing across the moon, and in the clear intervals its light was very bright. Too bright. As our eyes adjusted, we could see that the wadi had walls five or ten metres high, apparently with a level plain above them on either side.

The main supply route was somewhere up ahead of us, to the north, running roughly east to west. The ground beneath us was dead flat, and consisted of hard-baked clay, but we found we were lying right between a set of tracks made by a vehicle whose tyres had sunk into the dry mud. I realized that the mud was only a few centimetres deep, and that under it lay solid rock. There was no loose material with which to fill our sandbags.

I reckoned that if any Iraqis had seen the chopper, they’d already be running or driving across the flats towards the lip of the wadi. I had visions of people coming from all directions and suddenly appearing on the rim, against the stars.

‘Let’s get some guns onto the high ground,’ I whispered to Andy. So we sent out two lads, one on either side, to go up the wadi walls and keep a lookout.

Gradually the barking of dogs died away and left us in total silence. Our most urgent need was to get our kit out of sight. We began dragging it into the shadow of the moonlight cast by the right-hand or eastern wall. From the middle of the wadi that shadow looked solid and deep — a good place in which to hide. But when we reached it, we found it was an illusion. There was no cover of any kind, and in the daylight the whole river bed would be dangerously open.

In heaving and dragging our kit, we were leaving marks in the baked mud of the wadi floor. But we had a much bigger problem than that. There was hardly a grain of sand in the whole area. We were on bedrock. Training in the dunes of the Gulf, we had built beautiful OPs with the greatest of ease, digging into the sand and filling as many bags as we needed. Here, without sand, our bags were useless.

We needed to find out exactly where we were. So Mark got out a GPS unit and plotted our position to within a few metres. Then we pulled in our two flanking guys, who reported that the desert on either side of the wadi ran away level in flat plains, without a stitch of cover.

Andy went forward with Mark to recce the ground ahead. As the rest of us lay waiting for them to return, we began to realize how cold it was. The wind bit through our DPMs and smocks, which were far too light for the job, in both weight and colour. They gave very little protection against the cold, and were such a pale sandy colour that they shone like beacons in the moonlight — my builder had been right! Way down at Victor, several hundred miles further south, the nights had been warm and the days hot enough to make us sweat. Nobody had thought to warn us that things would be different up here.

The dogs started barking again. It was hard to tell what had set them off this time. Could they hear us, or was our scent carrying on the wind? We reckoned they were no more than 400 or 500 metres away. That figured, because the satellite photos had shown irrigated fields and habitations within about that distance of our drop-off point. We just hoped they didn’t come across to suss out what was disturbing them.

In twenty minutes Andy and Mark were back. ‘Right,’ Andy whispered. ‘We’ll head up here. Get forward up the wadi.’

Four of the guys struggled into their bergens and walked forward about 300 metres, then went to ground. As soon as they were settled, the rest of us moved up to join them. Then the first four went back and picked up the rest of their kit, including the jerry cans, which were tied together in pairs with tape. Once they’d joined us, we went back, and so it continued for most of the night: shuttling forward, back, forward, back. It was tiring work.

By 0500 we had moved about two kilometres to the north, and were in the area selected for the OP. The sky in the east was already beginning to lighten. We were still in the wadi, but we couldn’t stay where we were, because the ground was far too open, and the walls were bare rock, so there was no chance of digging. Then Andy went on round a corner with Stan and found that the wadi came to a dead end in a cul-de-sac no bigger than a good-sized room. The walls were fairly steep, but on the left-hand side, as we faced north, one massive slab of rock had fallen off the side of the ravine. The detached lump was about two metres high, and lay a metre or so clear of the wall, with a second, smaller rock near its foot. It made some natural shelter. A little further to the south there was an overhang going back under the wall. The floor was of hard-baked clay, with loose rocks and some stunted thorn bushes scattered about.

It wasn’t a great hiding place, but it was the best we could find.