Eye of the Storm (37 page)

The Boss nodded. ‘I agree, Billy. But thank you for trying.’

I left the CO’s office hoping that my conclusions about Bravo Two Zero were wrong. Because, given the way the patrol was being mounted, I didn’t think it was going to work.

Having heard the official debriefing of the survivors of Bravo Two Zero back in Hereford after the war had ended, I was surprised by several of ‘McNab’s’ anecdotes as he recounted them in his book. What I found most surprising, however, was that, in the book, he made no mention at all of the two meetings he and his men had had with the Colonel and myself, meetings during which we tried our damnedest to persuade him to take a vehicle and to cut down on the amount of kit they would be carrying. His sole reference says that I came over to them, wished them luck, told them to get the job done and to come back safely. Considering what were, I’m convinced, the results of not following our advice, I find it odd that he didn’t feel the meetings worth mentioning. After all, the failure of that mission ultimately cost the lives of three men, and led to four others being captured and tortured. That’s a casualty rate of nearly 90 per cent.

To add to our problems, Alpha One Zero checked in next morning with what was rapidly becoming the ‘usual’ progress report: they were still on our side of the border.

‘This is ridiculous,’ the CO said. ‘I’m going to have to do something pretty damned drastic to get them sorted out.’

First, though, we had to get our three B Squadron units away. Bravo Two Zero and two other eight-man patrols – Bravo Three Zero, which, like Bravo Two Zero, declined to take a vehicle, and Bravo One Nine (which did take a Land Rover), which were to observe the southern and central MSRs from Jordan to Baghdad while ‘McNab’s’ patrol watched the northern one – were going in on separate helicopters.

Bravo Three Zero’s mission was of extremely short duration. When the helicopter landed the patrol commander jumped off, looked at the ground, which was flat and featureless in every direction, and said, ‘It’s not good enough.’ The chopper took them off again and put down a few miles from the original site, where exactly the same scene was re-enacted. The patrol commander inspected the immediate area and decided that it was untenable to set up an observation post on a flat gravel plain, and that to do so was asking to be compromised. He aborted the mission there and then, as was his prerogative, and he and his men returned to Al Jouf in the same helicopter. His report read simply that there had been nowhere to hide.

All credit to ‘McNab’, at least when the helicopter carrying Bravo Two Zero arrived at their landing site he deployed, which was what I would have done myself. I would not have come back and said that my patrol could not deploy because the terrain was unsuitable. Nevertheless, no shame attaches to the patrol commander who pulled Bravo Three Zero out. That was his decision, and he believed that his reasons for making it were perfectly valid. The commander of Bravo One Nine took his team in as planned.

The following morning, I had just showered and shaved and was heading for the ops room with a mug of hot water in one hand and a sachet of hot chocolate in the other when I was almost run down by the CO. His mouth was clenched tight shut, and his eyes were glaring. The Boss was furious. I guessed, even before he spoke, what had got him so het up.

‘I was coming to look for you,’ he said. ‘Alpha One Zero still hasn’t crossed the border.’

I said nothing.

‘I have two options,’ the CO continued. ‘I can bring up Jeremy from Riyadh, which would take two days, or I can send you in.’

The last part of the remark really did grab all my attention. He had not dropped the slightest hint over the previous few days that his mind was working in this direction. To join one of the fighting patrols behind enemy lines was more than I could have hoped for in my wildest dreams, and to say that I was surprised would be a huge understatement. All I could think of as a reply was, ‘What time am I going in?’ meanwhile trying to stop the grin spreading across my face.

‘Ten hundred hours,’ said the Boss. It was then 0830.

Leaving the ops office for my tent, I quickly gathered up my kit, and then took time out to write a letter to a girl I had been seeing. I wanted to explain that I would not be able to write for a while, and that she was not to worry if she didn’t hear from me for a bit. With the letter finished – it’s curious how long letters like that take to write – I handed it in, unsealed, to the censor’s office, where all outgoing mail was read by an officer. Because I was the RSM, however, I was told to seal it myself and place it directly in the mailbox. By then it was time to rendezvous with the CO, who was also flying forward with me in order to talk to the commander of our reluctant patrol. He had a signaller in tow, who would in addition act as his driver for the return journey, which they would make by road and track in the short-wheelbase Land Rover 90 that was also being flown in with us.

In the brief time it took to drive over to the far side of the airfield, where the helicopters were parked, the Boss explained that he had signalled Alpha One Zero’s commander and ordered him to drive to a rendezvous point on the Saudi Arabian side of the border. His signal also read, ‘New 2IC to you.’ This had been worded by the ops officer, dreadfully badly in my opinion, since it would act like a slap in the face to the patrol commander and his 2IC. It should have been worded to read, ‘RSM to your location to act as 2IC,’ or some equally tactful phrase.

While the vehicle was being lashed down inside the Chinook’s big belly the CO, his signaller and I boarded the chopper and took our seats on the deck behind the pilot. The Boss intended that after his meeting with the OC A Squadron his driver would bring him back to Al Jouf before nightfall. He would not, he assured me, be leaving the patrol commander in any doubt about his position. I was being sent in as 2IC to get the show moving, and to crush any signs of negativeness on the part of the patrol commander or anyone else.

‘Anyone else’ included the current 2IC, a staff sergeant named Pat. Based on my very brief acquaintance with him during my visit to the desert-training camp, however, I figured that Pat could be one of the primary causes of any negative thinking in Alpha One Zero.

He was a large guy, about six foot three, extremely fit and very articulate – clearly a well-educated man, and someone, frankly, one would have expected to be an officer rather than a senior NCO. But at that initial meeting – the A Squadron briefing at the desert-training camp, which was also attended by the CO and the Deputy Director – I had noted that it took him a long time to reach a decision, and that, generally, he came across as being very negative. As curious as it may seem, that was the first time I had ever had dealings with him, and I had been in the Regiment, by then, for nearly twenty years. That can easily happen, as in general we tended to socialize with members of our own squadron or even just our own troop, and rarely mixed with others. On top of that, I had only been RSM for a few weeks and, with all the hullabaloo over the Gulf crisis, had not had the time to get to know everyone in the Regiment.

The Deputy Director, however, had been Pat’s squadron commander when he was OC A Squadron in the early 1980s, and during our visit to the training camp had casually asked the tall staff sergeant how things were going. Surprising all of us, Pat had replied, ‘Can I be candid, Boss?’ When the Deputy Director nodded, he immediately launched into a whole list of complaints.

‘What you are expecting us to do is ridiculous,’ he began. ‘Trying, in ten days, to train men for mobile warfare who are not mobility trained is ludicrous. We are also short of the mounts that the Mk19
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sits on, and we are even short of pen-torch batteries.’

Having seen A Squadron at the camp that day, I had formed a good opinion of their morale and mood, as well as their readiness for action. Listening to Pat’s catalogue of moans, however, I had scarcely been able to believe what I was hearing. I looked across at the CO and shrugged my shoulders. But Pat had been in full spate, and I had stood there, feeling increasingly embarrassed, while he’d reeled off a long list of other personal judgements and petty complaints, before simply walking off.

‘Well, he gives a totally different impression to the one I gathered from the rest of the guys today,’ I had told the Deputy Director and the CO. ‘Morale was good. They were full of enthusiasm and in good spirits.’ To which the Deputy Director had casually replied, ‘Well, that’s Pat for you. He’s always been the world’s worst eternal pessimist.’

I couldn’t help thinking back to that remark, and my own opinion of both Pat and the A Squadron commander, as I waited aboard the Chinook that was to take me to join them in the desert. These two together – the one negative and pessimistic, the other hesitant and indecisive – were a bad mix. Perhaps a good shake-up, as was now being put in hand, would sort them out. Within two hours I would be ramrodding this unit, and whether the squadron commander and his 2IC liked it or not, I was simply not going to tolerate any negative comments from either of them.

In addition, I also had a wild card tucked away in the map pocket of the right trouser leg of my DPM (disruptive-pattern material – i.e. camouflage) trousers. Instinctively, perhaps half recalling an occasion during my jungle training when I had lost the code books while crossing a rain-swollen river, I reached to check that the button on the pocket’s flap was secure as the pilot started to wind the engines up to full revs. This ‘failsafe’ was a letter, which the Boss had dictated and ordered to be typed that morning. It authorized me, at my own discretion, to take over full command of the half-squadron whenever I felt it necessary, ‘to ensure that the unit was operating to its maximum efficiency’.

Unfortunately, one thing that was certainly not operating to maximum efficiency was the Chinook. As the aircraft began to shake preparatory to take-off, the pilot suddenly decided to shut down. The racket and vibration suddenly began to diminish and the rotors began to slow. We looked at each other questioningly, though not for long.

‘We have a problem,’ the pilot announced. ‘It’s either a fuel blockage or it’s the hydraulics. If it’s fuel we’ll be thirty minutes. If it’s the hydraulics we’ll be here for at least another two hours. Probably much longer.’

Since there was not a thing that we could do, the Boss and I climbed down from the chopper and walked off a dozen paces or so to the side of the helipad. He lit up a cigar and I put together a roll-up. We stood there smoking and chatting while the RAF engineers tried to work out what was wrong, peering in remote parts of the machine and muttering technical questions. As we stood there, the CO told me that he, and headquarters, were happy with the progress the two D Squadron units and the other Alpha half-squadron were making. Alpha One Zero we knew about, and we were trying to take steps to get the patrol moving. However, everyone was deeply concerned about the status of Bravo Two Zero, which had failed to make radio contact with RHQ at Al Jouf.

It is always worrying when a patrol behind enemy lines fails to make radio contact – especially when, as Bravo Two Zero did, they have two separate radio sets with them. Additionally, the reservations we had both felt prior to ‘McNab’s’ patrol going in didn’t make their silence any easier to accept. Our frustration was further increased when the Chinook’s pilot strolled over and told us that the trouble was definitely hydraulic. We wouldn’t be going anywhere for a few hours.

‘OK,’ said the CO, ‘we’ll leave it until tomorrow night. Let’s go back to the ops room.’

Back in the terminal, there was still nothing from Bravo Two Zero. There was a new problem in the form of a signal from Alpha One Zero, however. It was an answer to the CO’s earlier signal, and was a double refusal: ‘Not for us. Not for this location.’ What it meant was that the patrol commander was not even going to attempt to make the rendezvous with the CO. And he was also telling his commanding officer, ‘I’m not accepting a new 2IC.’

I looked over at the Boss, waiting for his reaction, and thanking whatever fate had caused our helicopter to malfunction just before take-off. If it had not done so, we would have been waiting at the rendezvous like a couple of idiots for an officer who had no intention of showing up. I could tell that the CO was fuming, but whatever the thoughts inside his head, he kept them to himself.

On the following day, 25 January, the CO was again unable to send me in because of a shortage of helicopters. What he did do, however, was to arrange for Alpha One Zero to rendezvous on the border that night with a certain Major Bill, one of the Regiment’s most experienced officers. In a day when the Iraqis launched eight Scud missiles against Tel Aviv, the CO could no longer tolerate the fact that one of our spearhead units was still swanning about in Saudi Arabia, unable even to cross the border, let alone start knocking out Scud launchers.

In Israel, the US-donated Patriots had brought down all eight Scuds, but debris from the detonating missiles had killed two civilians and injured sixty-nine, and the Israelis were getting more furious, and more belligerent, by the hour. I felt that each Scud attack on their country would be taken by them as evidence that we weren’t doing our job properly. In the case of Alpha One Zero, of course, we weren’t doing it at all.

Then in his fifties, Major Bill had come up from the ranks. Years earlier he had served in A Squadron, and had then done time with B Squadron. A very experienced member of the Regiment, he had seen active service in the Radfan, Aden, Borneo and Dhofar. In short, he was a no-nonsense, get-up-and-go sort of soldier.

I can’t say that we got on particularly well, however. But that would not have caused a problem had we had to work together in the Gulf, although as things turned out we never had to try. This was the man the CO had tasked with the job of getting Alpha One Zero over the border and into the war. It was now Friday, and that patrol had been hanging around on the border since Sunday.

The CO had simply told Major Bill, ‘Pick the right spot and get them over.’ Bill had set out at once, travelling to the border to RV with our stalled patrol. His choice of crossing place was beautifully simple. He picked an old border post watched over by a medieval fort garrisoned by about a dozen Saudi Arabian regulars. On the Iraqi side there were probably half that number of troops holed up in a watchtower-like structure more than a quarter of a mile away across the border. Being Major Bill, he probably assumed, and almost certainly correctly, that the Iraqis would be asleep after midnight – the time at which he would send Alpha One Zero across.