Michael Asher (12 page)

want to take the risk. He had already opened up the 66mm rocket-launcher he had carried with him since the first contact on 24 January, and when the two four-wheel-drive vehicles got within twenty metres he let the first vehicle have it with a rocket head-on. There was a whoosh and a resounding thump as the missile struck home, and the vehicle stopped. Ryan dropped the useless 66mm tube, grabbed his M16 and smacked a 40mm grenade into the bonnet of the second vehicle. He then charged the vehicles, sprayed the men in dishdashas who were sitting in the back with bullets and then, realizing he was out of ammunition, ran away. He picked up the rest of his magazines and hared off into the desert until he could run no further, then slowed down to a walk, carrying on without a break for a further two hours. Although this must easily have been the most dramatic action Ryan had ever been involved in in his life, he devotes only eleven lines of text to his close-quarter assault on the vehicles. He does not mention details of the drivers or passengers, saying in passing only that there were 'men in dishdashas' in the back. No images, sounds, smells or sensations are evoked whatsoever, and there is no mention of any reaction from the enemy force � not so much as a scream, even. The Arabs � who Ryan says were obviously looking for him � seem to have sat there passively like statues, without even trying to jump out, run away or fight back, while the man they had been on the lookout for had mowed them down single-handedly. Not everyone has brilliant powers of description, of course, but Ryan's do not seem to be lacking in the other parts of the book. It is not every day one knocks out two vehicles and kills a score of enemies, not even in the SAS. Coburn, in his testimony at the Auckland trial, singled out this incident as fictitious. Coburn was not, of course, there at the time, but he certainly was present at the offi-cial debriefs afterwards, in which, according to former RSM Peter Ratcliffe, Ryan did not mention having had contacts with any Iraqi personnel during his walk to freedom. Ryan continued alone, coming to the Euphrates that night, where he filled his water-bottles, then he turned due west towards Syria. Moving by night, lying up by day, boxing round any obstacles, he managed to continue without food for another five days until he finally climbed across the border fence near al-Qaim in the early hours of 30 January. Earlier that night, though, he says he faced the final test of his will to survive when he was obliged to kill two Iraqis, one with a knife and the other with his bare hands. Ryan says that in the course of that night he had inadvertently walked into the middle of an Iraqi army motor-transport park surrounded by houses and full of soldiers. As he crouched in the shadows, trying to work out how to get back to the road, two men approached, and when they passed, Ryan says, his sur vival instinct took over and, whipping out his knife, he struck the first man in the neck and 'ripped his throat out'.31 The other man ran off, but Ryan rushed after him, brought him down and, getting one arm round his throat in a judo hold, wrung his neck. The man died instantly. Once again, though this is apparently the first time in his life that' yan has ever killed men with his hands, he devotes only a paragraph to the whole incident. McNab himself has explained in his book just how difficult it is to kill a man with a knife- 'You have to get hold of his head,' he says, 'hoik it back as you would with a sheep, and just keep on cutting until you've gone right through the windpipe and the head has just about come away in your hands!" Yet what impelled Ryan to go out of his way to attack these men in the first place? 'Ryan's . claimed actions during his E and E run,' wrote SAS vet�eran Ken Connor, 'were directly contrary to the standard operating procedures taught to every SAS man in combat survival training . . . Chris Ryan knew that his prime task was to protect the rest of his patrol by evading capture, yet he claims to have invited contact with the enemy by launching attacks on Iraqi sentries. Either he was badly trained, or he deliberately broke SOPs, or we must seek another reason for his version of events!" Ex-RSM Peter Ratcliffe says in his book Eye of the Storm: 'In the official debriefing ... which was recorded on video,' he writes, 'Ryan" made no mention of encountering any enemy troops during his epic trek to freedom. Yet in his book there are several accounts of contacts, and even a description of an incident when he was forced to kill an Iraqi sentry with a knife. If these incidents happened, then I find it difficult to believe that they could have slipped his mind during the debriefing.' 34 THAT NIGHT I SLEPT AT THE COTTAGE where Stan had been captured and in the morning I continued my progress towards the Euphrates, crossing undulating ground that was dotted with what looked like semi�permanent Bedouin camps. I crossed beneath the pylons under which Ryan had sat down, and the road beneath which he had lain up in a culvert. It was the early hours of the morning by the time I came to the great system of dry wadis Ryan mentions, and as I made my way through the muddy fields down by the Euphrates, the first light of dawn was already gleaming on the water. When I reached the bank I knelt down and filled my water-bottles, just as Ryan had done somewhere near here ten years earlier, and sat back to watch the sunrise. I had accounted for the death or capture of seven mem�bers of the Bravo Two Zero patrol, all of them under different circumstances from the ones described in the books. Ryan's fate was known. He was 'the one that got away', who had personally made SAS history by completing the longest escape march ever made by a member of the Regiment. It was a feat of human endurance and deter�mination which has rarely been equalled � a riveting story in itself. This always had been, I thought, a story that was much more about the desert than about the Iraqis: Chris Ryan might not have killed all the Iraqi soldiers he says, but he had survived against the greater enemy, against all the odds. I had intended to complete Ryan's march to the Syrian border � easy enough in daylight, with time and logistics on my side � but suddenly I no longer had the stomach for it. There would always be the ghost of Vince Phillips. I took a long, cool drink of the ancient water of the Euphrates, just as the sun burst in all its royal fiery plumage over the distant hills. CHAPTER twenty-three THE DAY BEFORE I LEFT BAGHDAD I was taken to see some relics of the Bravo Two Zero patrol that had been arranged for a private viewing in a house in the sub-urbs. There were no M16s, but all four of the patrol's Minimis were there, painted camouflage colours, one of them with its top-cover smashed. This, I imagined was Stan's Minimi � the one McNab had carried until after the split, and had dismantled. There was a mass of web-bing, impossible to identify � although one of the pouches contained brown waxed-paper wrappings that might have held the plastic explosive McNab had appar-ently been carrying when he was captured. I was also shown three of the eight Bergens the patrol had ditched when Abbas and Hayil had bumped them. The other five packs were missing, purloined by Bedouin or soldiers somewhere along the line, Abu Omar said. The three remaining packs were of the SAS type I was familiar with, one marked 'Bob' � obviously Bob Consiglio � and another 'Lane'. This latter had been the patrol signaller's Bergen, I thought ironically, and the one that McNab said Legs had told him was 'shot to fuck', though it was perfectly intact. The third pack had a name scrawled on it that I didn't recognize, but may have been a Bergen drawn from the stores at random before the campaign. I was disappointed not to have found Ryan's own Bergen so I could confirm that it had been struck by an S60 shell as McNab says. This was the crowning touch on a journey that had become much more than an attempt to find out the truth about Vince Phillips: a journey that had turned into a fascinating historical detective story. If what I had dis-covered was correct then Vince Phillips had not compromised Bravo Two Zero. The patrol hadn't even been spotted by the herdsboy as they had surmised, but by the man on the bulldozer who had wandered into their LUP quite innocently. He had seen two men, not one, and even if one of those was Vince, Abbas had been so close to them that eluding his view would have been impossible. They had not been attacked by masses of Iraqi infantry and armour, but by three civilians. They had not charged, and they had not been shot up by S60s. They had carried 95 kilos per man not twenty kilometres over flat desert, but only two kilometres. They had not been pursued by the enemy. They had not covered the distances they claimed on the first night of the escape and evasion plan. They had not hijacked a New York Yellow Cab, had not had a shoot-out at the vehicle checkpoint, but had left the car before reaching it, and had had an Iraqi with them in the vehicle. McNab and Coburn had not shot up a large convoy. They had not been mistreated by their captors, at least not initially, but had been shown acts of kindness. Vince Phillips had not been responsible for the split, nor could the cowardly behaviour ascribed to him by Ryan possibly have occurred. Vince had probably died on 25 January, not the following day. Ryan did not destroy two vehicles nor gun down their occupants. Neither did he kill any sen�tries with his bare hands. Finally, far from clocking up 250 Iraqis killed and injured, Bravo Two Zero did not inflict anything like the massive casualties McNab and Ryan claim in their book. BACK IN SWINDON, I PRESENTED Vince's binoc�ulars to the Phillips family and showed them film clips of the Iraqi Bedouin helping me to build the memorial cairn. They were delighted with the binos and moved by the fact that I had buried the can of Guinness, but greeted the participation of the Bedouin with some surprise. I understood why. The Iraqis were the enemy � why should they be helping to commemorate the death of a man who had gone out there to kill them? I was familiar with the Arabs and spoke their language, but for most British peo�ple, I realized, it was difficult to see past the prejudices created by years of what amounted essentially to propa�ganda. In the end � to people back home � my witnesses were `ragheads', and why should anyone believe them? I was reminded of Saint Exupery's story in The Little Prince of the Turkish astronomer who discovered a new planet: the other astronomers would not accept his discovery because he wore Turkish dress. Of course, the Iraqis might have penned the names 'Bob' and 'Lane' on the Bergens I had seen in Baghdad. In fact, the entire operation � everyone I'd interviewed and everywhere I'd visited � could have been part of a massive sting. One scenario ran like this: while I had been delayed in Baghdad on the pretext of awaiting permission from the military, Iraqi intelligence officers had read McNab's and Ryan's books, digested the story right down to the most insignificant details, and rushed up to Anbar to brief Abbas and his brother and all his family as to what they should say. Adil, the shepherd-boy, had been instructed to say that he had not seen the patrol in the wadi. McNab says the patrol was attacked by armoured personnel carriers and large numbers of enemy troops; Abbas was to say there had been only three men. McNab says they were pursued by vehicles for many kilometres; Abbas was to tell me there had been no pursuers. McNab wrote that they hiked twenty kilometres carrying 95 kilos � fifteen stone � per man; Abbas was to say that he had heard the helicopter, come in two kilometres away. Ryan asserts he was the first man in the patrol when it moved out, but Abbas was to say it was the last but one man who waved to them. Abbas was then to introduce me to Mohammed, who was also briefed to say he had found Vince's body in a certain place on the plateau, kilometres short of where it had actually been found, and give all the details of what had been in Vince's pockets � even a photo of his wife and two daughters, which the Iraqi intelligence had somehow found out, even though that was not mentioned in either of the books. Mohammed had also been told to convince me he had Vince's pistol by a cunning double bluff, and had been given a pair of binoculars that had once belonged to Vince to emphasize his veracity. Mohammed had been obliged to show me a pit which he claimed was Ryan's 'tank berm', which hap-pened to coincide with the point marked on Ryan's map. He and Abbas and the other Bedouin had been induced to pretend they thought the patrol were 'heroes' to prove that they had no axe to grind. The Iraqi intelligence agents would also have had to concoct a newspaper inter�view with Adnan Badawi and get Abbas �. whom they had got me to employ as a guide without suggesting it by making sure I got separated from the vehicles on my first day out � to tell a cock-and-bull story that Adnan had been with McNab in the car and that there had been no shoot-out at the VCP. They had also somehow found out McNab's real name, which was a closely guarded secret even from the British public. Ahmad, the police sergeant major, had been told to corroborate Adnan's story, and he and all the witnesses in Krabilah been got at in advance to present a sugar-coated version of the arrest or deaths of members of the patrol and, with the inhabitants of Rummani, had been admonished to tell me, if asked, that no Iraqis had been killed or injured. The more I mulled over it, the more I realized that it just wouldn't wash. So many of the facts I had been presented with were totally irrelevant to Iraqi propaganda �whether Adil had or had not seen the patrol, for instance, which man had waved, or the exact location of Vince's corpse. So many other facets of the books were question�able completely independently of my Iraqi witnesses: the fact that Ryan reported that the heli drop-off was only two kilometres from the LUP, for example, or that an Iraqi had been present with McNab in the taxi; the fact that Coburn had pointed out that many of McNab's and Ryan's claims were false. The effort to assimilate all the detailed material and to concoct an alternative scenario would have just been too great a task for an intelligence service in a country exhausted by war, with a return of lit�tle value. Our film was not, after all, going to get sanctions lifted. If there were inaccuracies in what I had been told, it was much more likely that they were indi�vidual, rather than part of a conspiracy � a failure of memory here, a small prejudice there, an individual inter�pretation or an attempt to show oneself in a
favourable light. But most of all, I didn't believe there had been a conspiracy because over the weeks in Iraq I had come to trust Abbas � this 'idiot on the bulldozer' � as one of the wisest and most honest men I had met. Nevertheless, I knew that many would question the statements of my witnesses, which is why my final objec�tive was to talk to the man who had been at the very heart of SAS organization during the Gulf War: ex-RSM Peter Ratcliffe. As everyone in the army knows, the rank of Regimental Sergeant Major holds almost mystical conno�tations. The RSM is a unique figure: the highest ranking non-commissioned officer in a regiment or battalion, he generally has more experience than anyone else in the unit, including most of the officers. As there can only be one RSM at any one time, he is the symbol and embodi�ment of the Regiment itself. I met Peter Ratcliffe on neutral but mutually familiar ground, in the Brecon Beacons, where both of us had trained with the Parachute Regiment more than twenty years earlier, and where both of us had passed selection for our different SAS units. Ratcliffe was a man in his early fifties: a very fit, alert-looking individual, whose jeans were immaculate and whose walking boots were highly polished. Ratcliffe had been awarded the DCM for his role in commanding an SAS unit behind enemy lines in Iraq during the Gulf War, where he had become the only NCO in British military history to have relieved an officer of his post. He had also had the gall to hold an official meeting of the sergeants' mess in the field � the subject of the painting Mess Meeting at Wadi Tubal by war artist David Rowlands. Ratcliffe had remained in the army for several years after the war, and had eventually been commissioned, leaving with the rank of major. He described the transition from RSM to major as 'changing from a cockerel to a feather duster overnight'. He had done stints with both 21 and 23 SAS and an armoured regiment before retiring. According to his own story, when Ratcliffe was being presented with his DCM by the Queen, Her Majesty commented that 'it must have been terrible in the Gulf War'. 'Actually, Your Majesty, I quite enjoyed it,' Ratcliffe replied, which immediately cut short the conversation. Down-to-earth, frank and open, I suspected that Ratcliffe's rather stern, bluff exterior concealed a deep ability to empathize with others and an extremely high intelligence. First, I asked him about the allegations that the Bravo Two Zero patrol had been ill-prepared for the operation. `They turned down the idea of taking vehicles,' he said. `That, in my opinion, was their biggest mistake. Both the Boss (Commanding Officer) and I advised them strongly to do so, but McNab rejected the advice. That was really the cause of everything that went wrong. As for prepara�tion, they had access to the same data that everyone else had at that time � no more nor less. The satellite images they had weren't the best because they didn't show depressions, but with experience McNab should have known they would be there. As far as the weather goes, the met boys predicted that it would be much milder and no one serving in the Regiment had fought in the Iraqi desert before, so we had no experience. As you know, pre-dicting the weather is never easy � the point is that we were all in the same boat.' I realized that, in fact, the patrol had had more detailed information than they had suggested � McNab notes that the intelligence officer who briefed the patrol told them that the desert was rocky with hardly any sand, yet he had persisted in going ahead with the idea of digging an OP anyway. Ryan states clearly that he did not find the presence of barking dogs near the hell drop-off point unexpected because the satellite images they had been shown revealed human habitation. This negates McNab's statement that Abbas's house should not have been there. The allegation that there were more than three thousand troops in the area is unproven, and is irrelevant anyway, if Abbas's account of the firelight is correct. In the end �even if they existed � these troops did not play a part in the capture of the patrol. According to my witnesses, Consiglio was shot by civilians and the rest of the patrol were captured by civilians or police. In addition, McNab might have detected the presence of a military base � and therefore the possibility of troop concentrations and anti�aircraft defences � simply by looking at the map, on which the compound stands out 'like balls on a bulldog', as he would have put it. `What about the fact that they were given the wrong radio frequencies?' I asked Ratcliffe. `When a signaller is given frequencies for an operation, he is supposed to check them, and it is the patrol com-mander's duty to make sure he does. "McNab" wrote in his book that this was a "human error" that shouldn't happen. again, but the question is, whose error? The responsibility was McNab's.' I enquired about the allegation � particularly by Coburn � that the Regimental command had not sent an immedi�ate rescue mission in keeping with tradition: a failure that was tantamount to betrayal. `A helicopter did go out on 24 January,' Ratcliffe said, `but the pilot was taken seriously ill and had to turn back. Subsequently, two rescue missions were launched � one involving both a British Chinook and an American heli-copter and five members of the Regiment. They searched the area where the patrol should have been and followed their probable escape and evasion route back to Saudi, at great risk to their own lives, but did not find them because they had changed their E and E plan and gone for Syria instead. McNab had written very clearly in his plan, which was submitted to Operations before the mission, that in the event of serious compromise, the patrol would head towards the Saudi border. To have changed the plan would have been fine if they had been in radio contact, but they weren't, and by changing it they were putting at risk the lives of all those involved in attempts to rescue them.' Finally, bearing in mind what I had been told by my eyewitnesses in Iraq, I asked Ratcliffe what the patrol had said about their experiences on their return to the UK after the war, in March 1991. `Every member of the Regiment who had been on patrol or in action during the Gulf War was debriefed on return;' he said. The debriefings were held in front of the whole Regiment and recorded on video. The idea was that everyone would benefit from hearing about the expe-riences of those who had been at the sharp end. The one jarring note is that what was said at the debrief often dif�fers widely from what has been written in some of the books published later. When Ryan was debriefed we all marvelled at his skill, courage and endurance in walking 186 miles to safety. But he made no mention at all of encountering enemy troops on his trek. I talked to Ryan on many occasions afterwards and he never made any references to knocking out vehicles or killing men with a pocket knife or his bare hands. I personally find it puz�zling that he should have forgotten that. As for McNab, he told us in the debriefing that the patrol had been involved in several minor skirmishes with the Iraqis and had returned fire. There was no mention at all of being involved in firefights with hordes of enemy or extremely heavy contacts with Iraqi armoured vehicles and substan�tial contingents of infantry' Ratcliffe also said that he felt it insensitive on Ryan's and McNab's parts to hide behind pseudonyms when they named their three dead colleagues in their books, in deliberate contravention of the Regiment's traditional silence. Ratcliffe, who writes under his own name, scorns the idea that McNab uses the pseudonym for security rea�sons. 'Neither McNab nor Ryan are serving in the Regiment any longer,' he said. 'So what possible reason could they have for concealing their true identities?' Finally, Ratcliffe solved the mystery of Vince's missing dog-tags. 'He probably wasn't wearing any,' he said. 'I never have. Mine are still sealed in the plastic bag they were issued to me in. A lot of the lads never wear them at all.' WHATEVER MCNAB AND RYAN WROTE, the fact is that they and their comrades survived against incredible odds. They were dropped behind enemy lines without transport in an area where concealment was nigh impos�sible, and yet they persisted with their mission. Once compromised, they displayed a determination and resourcefulness that were almost incredible given the terrible conditions they were obliged to work under. They gave their all, and pushed themselves to the very bounds of death � some of them beyond it. The grit and resilience they displayed in the face of overwhelming odds were in the highest traditions of the 22nd Special Air Service Regiment: the finest fighting unit in the world. As Abbas himself said, 'They were heroes. They were given an impossible job, that's all.' Their true heroism is only marred, Ratcliffe agrees, by the dubious nature of much of what they have subse�quently written. So why was the basic story not enough? The blame must lie not with McNab and Ryan, but with us, the reading public, who demand of our heroes not endurance, but the resolution of all problems by force. In today's morality, when the response to every international threat is to hit out, force itself is viewed as cleaner and more upright than subterfuge, and aggression and violence are the defining characteristics of heroism and power. More than anything, McNab and Ryan exist to hide a truth about war that is to be found at the level of Baghdad's Amiriya Bunker: that it is a filthy business in which thousands of innocent people are mutilated and killed by faceless weapons developed and operated by tens of thousands of faceless men and women. In this age when wars are won by technology, we are more anxious than ever to believe in Rambo. But Rambo does not exist, not even in the SAS. He is a cipher � an acceptable human mask for the incomprehensible monster of mod�ern war. NOTES TOTGA: Chris Ryan The One That Got Away London 1995 BTZ: Andy McNab Bravo Two Zero London 1993 EOTS: Peter Ratcliffe Eye of the Storm London 2000 GF: Ken Connor Ghost Force � The Secret History of the SAS London 1998 SC: Sir Peter de la Billiere Storm Command London 1992 1 McNab in an interview with the BBC 2000 2 McNab BTZ p30 3 McNab BTZ p136 4 De la Billiere SC p192 5 Ratcliffe EOTS p191 6 Ryan TOTGA p31 7 Ratcliffe EOTS p230 8 Ryan TOTGA p57 9 Ryan TOTGA p25 10 Ratcliffe EOTS p202 11 Ratcliffe EOTS p203 12 Ryan TOTGA p53 13 McNab BTZ p41 14 Ratcliffe EOTS p177 15 Ratcliffe EOTS p129 16 Ratcliffe EOTS p243 17 Connor GF p474 18 Ratcliffe EOTS p200 19 Ratcliffe EOTS p200 20 Ratcliffe EOTS p200 21 Ratcliffe EOTS p243 22 Ratcliffe EOTS p243 23 McNab in an interview with the BBC 2000 24 McNab BTZ p199 25 Ryan TOTGA p156 26 McNab BTZ p148 27 De la Billiere SC p237 28 Mike Coburn in a letter to James Phillips 19/2/96 29 Dinger in a letter to James Phillips 19/2/96 30 McNab in a letter to James Phillips 19/2/96 31 Ryan TOTGA p156 32 McNab BTZ p148 33 Connor GF p492 34 Ratcliffe EOTS p260 ABBREVIATIONS AA Anti-aircraft guns AK47 Aktion Kalashnikov (7.62mm assault rifle, originally Russian-made) APC Armoured personnel carrier AWACS Airborne warning and control system CO Commanding Officer (in charge of large formation eg a regiment or battalion) DCM Distinguished Conduct Medal (awarded to non- commissioned ranks for bravery, now replaced by DSO, Distinguished Service Order, for all ranks) FOB Forward operating base (SAS HQ nearest to area of operations) GPMG General-purpose machine-gun (7.62mm machine-gun with sustained fire capability) GPS Global positioning system (satellite navigation device) LRDG Long Range Desert Group (WWII Special Forces group, immediate predecessor of SAS) LUP Lying-up point L2 High-explosive grenade M16 5.56mm Armalite rifle, US-made 251 M203 40mm grenade-launcher affixed to M16 rifle MSR Main Supply Route NBC Nuclear, Biological and Chemical warfare NCO Non-Commissioned Officer OC Officer Commanding (in charge of smaller units, eg a squadron or company) OP Observation Post . RSM Regimental Sergeant Major (highest non- commissioned rank in a regiment or battalion: individual responsible for discipline) SBS Special Boat Service (Royal Marines) TA Territorial Army 2 i/c Second-in-Command INDEX Abbas bin Fadhil, desert march, 93-4, 101-3, 117-19 drives taxi, 133-6, 144, 154 with Duleim tribe, 209 meets Hussein, 103-4, 225-6 LUP wadi, 52, 63-88, 99, 238 on Phillips's firearm, 206 reports bodies found, 189-90 Stan's capture, 225 supposed briefing, 239-40 wartime experience, 226-7 Abdallah, al-Haj, 103, 225, 228-9 Abu Dhabi, 210 Abu Kamal, 146, 148 Adil bin Fadhil, 63-4, 66, 68-9, 71, 240 Ahmad (Ministry of Information), 23-6 Ahmad (policeman), 143-8, 151, 154-7, 172, 181 al-Haqlaniya, 41, 131, 136, 190-1, 201 al-Hitawi, Ahmad, 135-6 al-Jauf, 35, 37, 91, 92 al-Qaim, 131, 233 Ali (minder), 29-30, 41-2, 68, 104-5, 134 Amiriya Bunker, 23-4, 157, 248 Amman, 15 Anbar, 29, 133 Ani, 225, 228 Arab campaign (1916-17), 17 Auckland, trial, 12-13, 183 Azraq, 16 Badawi, Adnan, in article, 25, 103, 143 meets Hussein, 103, 225-6 refusal to talk, 135 reports commandos, 143-4, 181 speculation about, 138-40 taxi passenger, 25, 134-40 Badiyat Ash-Sham, 15 Baghdad, Amiriya Bunker, 23-4, 157, 248 equipment seen, 164, 237-8 holding centre, 183, 224 journey to, 15, 18-19 meetings in, 20-7 253 reason for delay, 240-1 Scud vulnerability, 36 Bedouin, Buhayat tribe, 64, 67 customs, 19, 50-1, 87, 97-8, 101-3, 109-10, 179, 227 Duleim tribe, 209-10 and memorial, 206-7, 239 military reaction to, 98-9 origins, 15 Belfield, Richard, 12 Bell, Gertrude, 166 Bravo One Niner, 37, 108-9 Bravo One Zero, 37 Bravo Three Zero, 108 Bravo Two Zero, ammunition levels, 159-60 background to team, 1-7, 37-9 bulldozer approach, 66, 68 at checkpoint, 132-3, 137-45, 174 compromised, 3, 72, 194, 217-19 crosses road, 123-80 eludes police, 143-9, 151-4 equipment, 55-7, 72 abandoned, 86, 154, 187, 237 escape route, 91-3, 117-25, 127, 145-6, 151-2 evidence lacking of kills, 180 near Euphrates, 151-7 helicopter rendezvous, 90-1, 111, 120 insertion, 39, 71-3 LUP berm, 193-4, 210-13 LUP knoll, 118-122 LUP wadi, 39, 41-8, 52, 54-61, 65, 67-77 firefight, 75-86, 99, 171 marching order, 77-8, 111-12 mission aims, 1, 7, 14, 43-4, 59-60 patrol divided, in desert, 112-16, 118-20, 188-92 near checkpoint, 161 seen by Bedouin, 75 seen by boy, 11, 22, 51, 60-1,66-8 sees farmhouse, 47-51 shepherd offers food, 125 supposed pursuit, 89, 106 taxi hijack, 25, 126, 131-40, 144-5, 149, 174 Bravo Two Zero, 1, 41, 108, 139, 183, 202 buddy-buddy system, 171 Bush, Pres. George, 36 checkpoint, Krabilah, 132-3, 137-45,146,158-9,174 close-quarter battle, 125 Coburn, Mike (or `Mark'), accuses SAS command, 92 ammunition level, 159