Eye of the Storm (52 page)

I left D Squadron to themselves that evening, but the following morning went over to where they had arranged their Land Rovers and Unimog. I soon spotted the OC, Major Alan, an extremely competent officer who got on well with just about everybody and was highly respected by all the men. He was talking to base on the satcom as I approached, but on seeing me he beckoned me towards him. I heard him say, ‘He’s just walked up, so I’ll put him on to you,’ then he handed me the radiophone. It was the ops officer at Al Jouf with fresh orders for us.

I was being told to pull my entire patrol out that afternoon, and drive 130 kilometres to the north-west to relieve the other half of D Squadron – Delta Three Zero – who were running short of water and rations. We were not to meet up with them, but were simply to take over their task of keeping watch on one of the MSRs, while they made their way to Wadi Tubal for resupply.

‘Well, what makes you think we’re any better off?’ I found myself saying down the satellite link. ‘We have virtually no rations and we’re down to our last few litres of water. As for fuel, we don’t have enough to get us there and back. The convoy is due in this evening, so if we wait here just a few more hours for our supplies we can replace Delta Three Zero and stay up there pretty well indefinitely.

‘If we do it your way, we’ll need relieving ourselves in a couple of days – or less. And even that depends on our scrounging water and rations from Major Alan’s unit, which, if they’re anything like us, I’m not even sure they’ve got.’

‘You have your orders, and that’s the way it’s got to be,’ came back the deadpan reply. ‘You’re to get under way as soon as possible.’

I couldn’t understand HQ’s reasoning. It didn’t make any sense. Our last resupply had happened at the same time as Delta Three Zero’s, yet someone up the line had calculated that our reserves would miraculously hold out for several days longer than those of our mates in the Delta patrol. There was no escaping our orders, however. Even so, I was quietly seething by the time I’d signed off and given the handset back to Major Alan.

Thank God, D Squadron’s sergeant-major was an old friend. A no-nonsense professional who didn’t suffer fools gladly, he was also a straight-up guy who hated bullshit as much as I did. When I told him what was going on he called his group together and ordered them to dig out all their spare rations and water and hand them over to me. ‘Just leave yourselves the bare minimum,’ he told them. ‘These guys are going to need it a damned sight more where they’re going to than you do here.’

There was a bit of good-natured grumbling, but in twenty minutes D Squadron had piled together enough food and water to last us an extra couple of days. We also got their spare grenades, rifle rounds and machine-gun belts, as well as a few high-explosive charges and other fizz-bangs. After the attack on Victor Two we were dangerously low on ammunition and explosives, and there was no way of knowing whether or not we would find ourselves involved in another major firefight where we were going. It could always happen to us at any moment, so we were doubly grateful for the extra ammo.

At times, though, it was easy enough to forget that we were a 150 kilometres behind enemy lines and about to go much deeper in. Nevertheless, it was important that we did not relax our guard for a single moment. Looking at the number of contacts each patrol had experienced so far, the odds against us running into further trouble were not great.

When I had all the replacement kit I was able to scrounge from the boys in Delta piled before me, I called in our eight 110s and their crews, and the Unimog, and told my guys to dig out all their remaining grub and water and add it to the pile. Then I divided everything equally between each vehicle. Incredibly, while supervising the division of the kit I discovered that one of my crews had concealed a whole jerry can of water in the back of their Land Rover.

Coming on top of the ops officer’s bloody-mindedness, this hoarding of water by some of my own men was the last straw. I gave them the mother of all bollockings, during which I called each of them every kind of selfish bastard imaginable. ‘With friends like you we don’t need Saddam’s lot against us,’ I concluded, before dividing the extra water between the other vehicles.

We finally pulled out just after 1500 hours, and bombed along towards the target area as fast as the terrain would allow. Astonishingly, Major Alan told me later, as our dust settled on the north-west horizon, the dust cloud raised by the incoming resupply convoy, nick-named the ‘Wadi-Bottom Wanderers’ by HQ, was spotted to the south. With great daring they had made the whole trip in daylight, led by the same Major Bill who had nursed Alpha One Zero over the berm and into Iraq, before I joined the patrol.

Our journey was almost completely uneventful. For the first couple of hours we travelled in bright sunlight, and were able to make fast progress over the gravel plain. But we slowed after sunset. The complete absence of moonlight meant that we were back to relying on the night sights and thermal imager. To make matters worse, we were also driving into a thin sleet which the wind hurled at us almost horizontally. In open vehicles without even a windscreen, we were soon chilled to the bone.

The only significant episode in that drive was a curious, if not a sinister, one. After some hours we came upon a deserted farmhouse. Lying scattered everywhere around it were the remains of a large number of goats’ carcasses. The animal skeletons lay among various bits and pieces of shattered wreckage surrounding the farm, which might have come from an aircraft or missile. There were also what appeared to be large fragments from numerous heavy shells in among the other debris. When someone suggested that the place might have been a test site for chemical-warfare weapons a few of the guys began to look a bit nervous, and started to search out their gas masks and NBC suits. I told them not to bother. If any of the toxic gas had still been hanging about, we would all have been on our backs, either dying or dead. Looking back now, I believe that what we had actually stumbled across was just an old artillery and missile range. From the look of it, I doubt whether it had been used in years.

We reached the main supply route from Amman to Baghdad just after 2100 hours, and I established an LUP about a kilometre south of MSR3, although well to the west of where we had last seen the road at Victor 2. There were a lot of tall mounds of what appeared to be sandstone scattered about the site, which on closer examination turned out to be anthills. They provided excellent cover.

While the rest of the patrol set up the usual protective ring of vehicles, and sentries were posted, I took my Land Rover forward and established an OP overlooking the highway. From there we were able to observe the traffic – a surprising amount of it – making its way along the MSR. Most of the movement was from the west to the east – supplies coming in from Jordan, Saddam’s only ally. There was every kind of truck imaginable, from cattle wagons to huge articulated lorries.

Shortly before dawn we drove back to the LUP, and I allowed the men, apart from the sentries, a few hours’ sleep before moving the whole patrol further along the highway to the north-west. The weather had cleared, and as the afternoon was one of bright sunshine we had to drive slowly to keep down the amount of dust we threw up, which could have acted as a giant indicator to the enemy, pinpointing us exactly. Again I set up a base about a kilometre short of the highway, then established night and day OPs closer in. The movement of traffic was very much as it had been the day before, which meant that we saw nothing to excite comment, much less a mobile Scud convoy. Why on earth we had been sent all that way, at that juncture, to relieve Delta Three Zero in such a mundane and routine assignment I will never know. Somehow we managed to yawn our way through the day, doing what we could to relieve the boredom. Mercifully, that evening we received orders to pull out and return to Wadi Tubal. Had HQ delayed even another twenty-four hours we would have been in fairly serious trouble. Our water was exhausted and so were our rations, and by the time our convoy snaked its way through the zigzag entrance into the mini-wadi I had picked out for our resupply zone, our protesting stomachs were making almost as much noise as our wagons’ engines.

The sentries who waved us through were from the supply-convoy escort unit, which was made up of guys from B Squadron and some members of HQ Squadron, who had been flown out from Britain as support backup. This meant that apart from the dead and wounded and those missing in action, virtually the whole SAS fighting force in the Gulf was present at the one location – probably the largest ever concentration of the Regiment’s active units in one place at the same time. I almost hoped the Iraqis might find us. They would have received a very nasty surprise when they realized what they were up against.

Yet if we couldn’t go down in regimental records as having fought a great battle in Wadi Tubal, we could at least make our mark in some other way – in addition, that is, to the already remarkable, if not crazy, feat of bringing supplies in overland into enemy territory. The presence of so many of the Regiment’s fighting men, and of the supply convoy and its escort, in a wadi in Iraq set me thinking.

I decided to hold a Sergeants’ Mess meeting. In our home barracks these are normally held every month, and as Regimental Sergeant-Major I was automatically Chairman of the Mess Committee. However, as I had been RSM only since the first week in December, and as we had been tied up, first with preparations to move to the Gulf, and then with our actual deployment subsequently, I had found no time to call my first mess meeting.

I calculated that there were at least thirty sergeants among the men now in the wadi, and that was more than enough. My first action, therefore, after we’d parked the Land Rover, was to go in search of the Regimental Quartermaster Sergeant, Gary, who, besides being in charge of logistics, was the President of the Mess Committee. I found him, inevitably, by one of the 4-tonners, engrossed in something connected with his beloved stores. We shook hands formally, and I told him, ‘Gary, we’re going to have a mess meeting.’

His eyes widened. ‘Have you gone barking mad?’ he asked.

‘No, I’m absolutely serious. The meeting will be at noon today, on the side of that hill over there,’ and I pointed to where a shale-covered area of the wadi side sloped less steeply up to the cliff-like brim above.

At 1200 hours that day, 16 February 1991, thirty-five members of the Sergeants’ Mess, including myself as Chairman and Gary as President, met on the rocky slope. The other sergeants and warrant officers sat in a line two deep, and Gary and I stood facing them to conduct our business. Apart from the setting, and the fact that every man had his rifle with him, it ran much like a mess meeting back at Stirling Lines. After the usual votes of thanks we came to the main proposal, which was to spend up to £20,000 on new leather furniture for the mess over the next two years. It was then agreed that the next mess dinner would take place in April, and that there would be a Christmas function which members would attend in mess dress, but without medals, and with no guests present. There were various minor decisions about mess facilities agreed and noted, and minutes were kept of the whole meeting, scribbled in an exercise book to be taken back to Hereford and typed up properly.

To begin with, some of the guys had been brassed off. When they assembled on the slope they believed that they had been called to some kind of war briefing, during which they would be given details of a major offensive involving A and D Squadrons. So when I announced a regular Sergeants’ Mess meeting they had difficulty taking it in. I could see that some of them thought the idea was mad. They could probably hardly wait to get back to their mates and start laughing their heads off. But I hope that, eventually, they all understood the purpose behind what I had done. In the midst of Britain’s biggest military involvement in the Middle East since the Second World War, one hundred and fifty kilometres behind enemy lines – right in Saddam’s own back yard – the SAS were making sure that life went on as normal. In effect, we were proving that no tinpot dictator could disrupt us to the point at which our normal routines might have to be abandoned. Or, to put it another way, we were saying ‘Up yours!’ with a vengeance.

I also believe that holding the meeting showed that the Regiment still had style. So too did Generals de la Billière and Schwarzkopf. ‘Stormin’ Norman’, as he had been nicknamed by the media, declared that we had shown more panache than any troops he had ever heard of, and said he would be proud to be allowed to sign the minutes of our mess meeting. As for DLB, he said that he was honoured to have served with guys who could exhibit such unique style in the middle of a war, and he too asked to sign the minutes. In the end – and in addition to myself and Gary, as was usual – our CO, the Deputy Director of Special Forces, Lieutenant-General Sir Peter de la Billière and General H. Norman Schwarzkopf, US Army, all signed the minutes. It is also a matter of record that every proposal agreed at the meeting was carried out after our return to Hereford.

Nevertheless, the mess meeting, although important for morale, was very much a side issue at the time. Our main purpose in the Wadi Tubal was to take on supplies. The three other half-squadrons – Alpha Three Zero, Delta One Zero and Delta Three Zero – had already taken their pick so we, who had actually prepared this site for the convoy, got to go last. Sod’s Law in action once again.

The 4-ton trucks were lined up along the centre of the wadi and we drove our Land Rovers past, picking up a different commodity from each truck in turn – water, fuel, ammunition, clothes, rations and fresh food. As far as the latter was concerned, there were still a few chickens and steaks left, but our very dear comrades had obviously feasted well during the past three days, and the choicest delicacies were long gone. Still, at least there was some fresh meat for the stewpot as well as fresh vegetables and fruit, instead of the tinned and packaged rations we had been existing on for the past few weeks. Our Regimental Quartermaster had also brought along a few non-issue supplies, including cartons of cigarettes and packets of rolling tobacco, courtesy of MoD. For the brief time it took for him to hand them out he was by far the most popular man in camp.