Eye of the Storm (13 page)

At this point Adam said, ‘Oh, Ditch. The North Star doesn’t move. I use it myself.’ But The Ditch wasn’t having any of it. ‘Listen here, Boss,’ he said, ‘I’m astronav-trained, and I’m telling you the North Star moves.’ We couldn’t convince him, and the argument ended when we moved out a few minutes later. It is a fact, however, that although the earth rotates, the North Star does not move – which is why it’s so useful for navigation.

The Ditch was only one of the somewhat larger-than-life characters in D Squadron’s Mobility Troop, but such people could be found throughout the SAS. In G Squadron, for instance, there was a sergeant-major from Southern Ireland called Mick whose ways were famous throughout the Regiment. One day, as he sat at his desk, a young signaller came in and asked if he could have a word. The squadron was about to depart for an exercise in Norway and Mick was up to his tonsils in paperwork. ‘What do you want?’ he asked, his shortness not much mitigated by his rich Irish brogue. Whereupon the signaller nervously told him that he couldn’t go to Norway because his wife had left him.

Mick simply stared at the poor man, and then said, ‘Listen. I’ve got sixty guys in that room who would give their right arm to be in your position. Now fuck off and consider yourself lucky.’

Before the squadron left for Norway, Mick went ahead of them, as a sergeant-major does, to get things ready and running smoothly for the main body on arrival. A few days later the C-130 transporting the rest of G Squadron landed at Bergen on the Norwegian coast and the lads all got off and climbed into the coach that was to take them to the exercise location. As they settled down, Mick climbed aboard and addressed the men. ‘Listen up, youse spunkbags’ – he always called everybody spunkbags, though he didn’t mean any harm by it – ‘the drive will take us three hours and we are going to stop halfway for a cup of coffee and a piss. Any questions?’ At which the young – and very naive – signaller whose wife had left him put up his hand.

‘What do you want now?’ growled Mick.

‘I haven’t got any Norwegian money, sir.’

‘Well,’ said Mick, ‘you’ll just have a piss then.’ The rest of the squadron dissolved into laughter.

Warrant officers and NCOs were not immune themselves from becoming the butt of others’ humour, however, sometimes as a result of their own ineptitude. In the 1970s, my former troop sergeant, also called Taff, was doing FAC training. FAC stands for forward air control, and requires the deployment of men on the ground to guide in by radio the fighter-bomber pilots and direct them on to any target the ground force wants destroyed. On this occasion, Taff was required to bring in an RAF Hawker Hunter and guide it on to the simulated target. So he got on the radio and said, ‘Hello, Hunter. This is Delta One Zero. I have you on visual and I can also see you. Over.’

It was clear that the pilot almost wet himself laughing, for we could see the aircraft wandering all over the sky as he rocked with mirth.

It has to be said that Taff had a gift for making people laugh. Once, during a refresher course in astro-navigation, I remember Arthur, our very enthusiastic and long-suffering instructor, rubbing his hands in anticipation of all the wonderful problems we were going to solve that day.

‘OK lads,’ he said ‘let’s get ourselves thinking. Taff: how many degrees are there in a circle?’

Taff thought hard for a moment, before replying, ‘You can’t catch me out on that one. It depends on the size of the circle.’ The classroom walls reverberated with our laughter.

Given The Ditch’s eccentric belief in a wandering North Star, and Taff’s notion of measurement, it is not, perhaps, any wonder that members of the SAS – myself included – sometimes get lost. But then, so does the rest of the army.

So much has been published about the SAS in the last quarter-century, and particularly since the Princes Gate hostage rescue in 1980, that public interest seems at times to amount almost to an obsession. And of the various aspects of the Regiment that have come to notice, nothing seems to fascinate people more than weaponry. Over the years, I have read a great deal about the weapons the SAS are supposed to have. How men get saddlers to make fast-draw holsters for their automatics, have private armourers tailor their weapons to their own needs, and send off to gunsmiths for silencers. These and countless other similar claims are all nonsense, however, part of the body of myths that has grown up around the SAS.

One of these myths concerns the so-called ‘fighting knife’. In actual fact, there is no such weapon issued in the British Army, despite what other accounts may say, although individuals within the SAS may choose to carry a knife they have acquired themselves. Nor is there much use for them: wielding a knife in combat, rather than a firearm, is likely to get you killed sooner rather than later, and for clandestine operations, or those requiring a high degree of stealth, members of the Regiment are issued with silenced weapons. Where a knife could be useful, though, is in situations in which a soldier is forced to live by his wits in a hostile environment, and without the usual support in the way of weapons, rations, transport, and so on.

Make no mistake, though, the Special Air Service is the best-equipped regiment in the British Army. No other unit has better kit than we have. The system is brilliant; in effect, the Regiment has carte blanche on weapons purchase, and on all sorts of other equipment besides. Thus whatever the SAS wants, the SAS gets. If they want to try out a new weapon, the Ministry of Defence (MoD) makes sure that they have the opportunity. And if they like it, then it is purchased for them.

But there is absolutely no need for anyone ever to have a personalized weapon. In fact, it would be a hindrance in battle because we have to have standardized ammunition that everyone can use. A soldier using a 7.62mm-calibre rifle when his comrades are all using weapons of 5.56mm calibre will be left with a useless piece of junk when he runs out of ammunition, quite apart from the problems of resupplying ammunition in several different calibres.

Each weapon used by a man in the field is issued by the Quartermaster. Its serial number is logged, and no weapon or ammunition is ever issued without the man signing for it. It is true that there was a time when men were allowed to keep personal weapons in the camp armoury, because there was then an SAS pistol club and people liked to do combat shooting as a sport. That has long gone, however. Today there is simply not the remotest likelihood that any member would be allowed to use his own weapons in the field. A man gets to use the same weapon from the armoury, until such time as another is issued to him for whatever reason.

The weapons bought by the SAS are mainly American, British or German. There are some weapons from manufacturers in other foreign countries, notably the Belgian-built Minimi 5.56mm machine-gun and the Swiss-built Sig Sauer automatic pistols, but nobody uses Beretta automatics, as numbers of secret agents do in movies, because these and similar weapons are regarded as ‘ladies’ pistols’ with little stopping power.

Our main weapons remain the American-built 5.56mm M16 rifle, the standard-issue US service rifle, and the Browning High Power 9mm pistol, built by the giant Belgian FN concern, which owns Browning. The German company Heckler & Koch also produce good weapons which include the 9mm MP5 range of subma-chine-guns. The handguns used by the SAS are always automatics because revolvers, although far less likely to jam, are both less powerful and less accurate. The police use.38 Special revolvers, but the magazine capacity of such a weapon is simply not great enough, the most telling point against their use by the SAS. An automatic pistol can take magazines loaded with twelve or twenty rounds, compared with six for most revolvers, and the rate of fire is higher, factors which make automatics
^*
far more useful in a firefight.

The selection of weapons on offer to the SAS is vast, and it has been said that each man in the Regiment has eight weapons. Naturally he doesn’t carry them all with him at any one time, but they are available to him according to circumstances. Generally, though, he will have his M16, or otherwise a machine-gun, and a pistol, and there is then a whole range of other weaponry on which he can draw. Even in an anti-terrorist operation, however, it is the patrol commander, not the individual soldier, who chooses what weapons will be needed for a given situation, and these will then be issued according to his directions.

You simply do not have people saying, ‘Right, I’m going to be using so and so weapon.’ The patrol commander weighs up the task, and will then tell his men, ‘You carry an M203 and take
x
amount of ammunition, you take an M16, you take the Minimi or the GPMG. I’ll take an M16 and a pistol. OK?’ (An M203 is a 40mm grenade launcher fixed beneath the barrel of an M16, thus making two very effective weapons in one; the GPMG – general-purpose machine-gun – is the standard-issue 7.62mm machine-gun of the British Army – a relatively light, powerful and accurate belt-fed weapon capable of being used in a sustained-fire role.) Each man then draws his weapons according to the patrol commander’s orders – a call for a 2-inch mortar, for instance, means each man taking two rounds apiece for it as well as his own weapons and kit – no more and no less. Reports that men are invited to ‘pick your weapon’, like so much else that is written about the SAS, belong to the realms of myth, not reality.

If there are many myths about the Regiment’s weapons and equipment, as well as about which operations it has or has not taken part in, there seem to be even more about who has actually served in the SAS. If you were to add together everyone who claims to have been badged, the total would come to far more than the strength of the entire Royal Artillery, the largest regiment in the British Army, and way, way above the very modest establishment of the SAS. The reasons for this slightly sad habit of making false claims are not difficult to work out, but it does seem to be very widespread. Indeed, in his book
Ghost Force
, Ken Connor, one of the Regiment’s longest-serving members, estimates that the number of people who claim to have been on the balcony of the Iranian Embassy in Princes Gate in May 1980 comes to about 15,000 – and rising.

I have only been twice to the Special Forces Club in London, and I have to say that I will never go again. For obvious reasons, the club has a CCTV camera over the door and an entryphone system for letting members and their guests in, once identified. It doesn’t identify fakes, though. More genuine heroes and heroines have walked through that door than you can shake a stick at – and, sadly, some Walter Mittys, too. The latter hang around the bar, telling tall tales about their exploits and generally bullshitting each other. Meanwhile the real people who have been there and have the scars to prove it listen and don’t say a word. These people are known to each other and don’t need to lie. They also know perfectly well when what they are hearing is a tissue of lies, boasts and half-truths.

There are even a number of elderly women who are members of the club, though sadly fewer each year. These are the courageous female SOE agents who were parachuted into Occupied Europe during the Second World War, and for them I have enormous respect. As for the Walter Mittys, however, they get right up my nose. I was in the Special Forces Club on Burns Night in 1993, and had enjoyed a good evening with a bunch of friends. After dinner I was standing at the bar with the Regimental Sergeant-Major of 21 SAS, one of the Regiment’s two Territorial units, when a guy came over and introduced himself. I shook his hand and told him that my name was Billy Ratcliffe.

He looked at me a moment, and then, to my astonishment, said, ‘You’re not Billy Ratcliffe.’ I assured him I was, whereupon he emphatically repeated that I wasn’t. For a moment he almost convinced me that I was not who I thought I was. He went on to say that he had been talking, only the previous week, to ‘Billy Ratcliffe of the SAS’. By this time I was getting pretty angry. ‘He’s over there, in that picture,’ he said, pointing to a print of the painting, which I had commissioned, of the Sergeants’ Mess meeting we had held behind enemy lines in the desert during the Gulf War, when I had been RSM of 22 SAS.

‘That’s me in the picture,’ I said. ‘No, it isn’t,’ he replied. Clearly I was not going to convince him, so I left him talking to the RSM and walked out into the night before my anger got the better of me, musing on the strange feeling of knowing there’s somebody out there claiming to be you. In my view, the club’s committee needs to take much greater care in approving applicants for membership.

I sometimes meet people in Civvy Street who know of my background. Often they will say that they know somebody else who was in the SAS. I tell them to go back and ask their friend which squadron he served in and the name of his squadron commander. And the odd thing is, they always come back and say that their friend has told them that he can’t give out that kind of information.

There are hundreds, perhaps even thousands, of SAS phoneys around. Between them, they spin enough yarns about the Regiment to knit every badged member – former or still serving – a good-sized sweater apiece. And that is probably the only thing about these people that
is
true.

*
 In fact, semi-automatics, to be strictly accurate, in that they fire a single shot each time the trigger is pressed, rather than firing continuously as true automatic weapons – machine-guns, for instance – do.