Authors: Peter Ratcliffe
M
Y
final posting to Dhofar came late in the summer of 1975, and from the moment we stepped off the aircraft at Salalah I knew we were in for a scorcher. We were greeted by a cloud of flies and dust, and from the look of the billowing dark clouds to the south, the certain prospect of a monsoon downpour before nightfall. To add to our discomfort, dusk would also bring out the mosquitoes in their thousands.
Home sweet home it was not, but at least we were to be spared another soul-destroying stint at Diana One, or in the only slightly less monotonous but still wearisome Tawi Atair. This time the Sultan wanted us to shut off, once and for all, the main rebel supply route from Yemen into Dhofar. This in turn meant that we would be carrying the battle to the enemy, rather than sitting impotently in a holding location, providing daily target practice for the adoo.
One of the first things I noticed was that the quality of our air-transfer service had improved. Instead of the weirdly shaped Skyvan transport aircraft, which required some sort of landing strip in order to get in or out of a location, we were more and more using the US-built Huey helicopter, famous for the part it played in the Vietnam War; there had only been a few Hueys in-country on my first tour, and we had hardly ever gone in them.
The rugged, dramatic and, in its way, starkly beautiful terrain was unchanged, however. Our destination was a major border position called Simba, on the western edge of Dhofar’s great southern plateau, from where we could look down on the Yemeni coastal town of Hauf. I say ‘Yemeni’, but in fact the Sultan, having studied various hundred-year-old maps of the area, had decided Hauf was part of Oman’s Dhofar province, and was intent on reclaiming it. What further strengthened his determination was the fact that Hauf was the city from which the camel trains set out on the rebel supply route into Dhofar.
Our main job, apart from helping with the taking of Hauf, was to block this supply route. The Sultan meant to mount his major ground offensive at the end of the monsoon season, deploying his Baluchistani mercenary army and the firqats to seize Hauf. Meanwhile he was all in favour of a little softening up of the city by air and artillery bombardments, as a taste of things to come. We had a grandstand view of the first big attack, which came in October and started when a squadron of Hawker Hunters, ground-attack aircraft of the Sultan of Oman’s Air Force operating from their base at Midway in central Oman, came out of the rising sun to blast Hauf from the sea.
It was hardly a textbook operation, however. The pilots had either been dragged from their beds too early and were still half asleep, or they were nervous of getting in too close to the anti-aircraft guns ringing the city, because the end result was only of real concern to the fish cruising innocently below the surface of the Arabian Sea – which is where all the first wave of bombs and rockets ended up.
We had watched this débâcle from a distance, and found it frustrating. ‘Wouldn’t it be a good idea,’ suggested one of our troop, ‘if we patched in to their wavelength and talked the pilots in from here?’ From high on the plateau, two miles to the north, we were in a perfect position to act as forward air control. The Boss gave his OK, with the result that for the Hunters’ second run we had a direct radio link through to the pilots in their cockpits.
Bingo. It was a case of every one a winner. Not a single bomb or rocket of the second batch fell short of its target. Furthermore, that was only the start. As soon as the Hunters had had their turn the geysh set to with their big 5.5 inch artillery pieces from a position to the south of us, and kept up a constant barrage of the city for ten straight hours. I think it was probably this that made the adoo really angry, for that is what they certainly became. On the following morning they launched a massive bombardment of Simba, using mortars and Katyushas – Soviet-built multi-barrelled rocket launchers.
The position at Simba was, roughly, a square of ground bordering the edge of the plateau, each of its sides measuring about two kilometres. There were a couple of major bunkers there, with twelve-foot thick rock and sand-bagged walls and corrugated-iron roofs, and dotted around these strongpoints were a dozen or more smaller machine-gun or mortar positions. The location was little more than a mile from where the rebel supply route snaked around a sharply pointed hill, known to us as ‘Capstan’, which overlooked the ancient camel-caravan trail and gave us a commanding view of what was coming in. It was from Simba that we would eventually move forward to cut off the supply route. The date for that operation had already been set for several weeks ahead, and we were still preparing the ground. What we could not see from our positions, however, was where the adoo mortar teams were located. That morning they began to shell us.
I was with three other blokes putting the finishing touches to the sandbag defences of a substantial new sangar, in fact a sort of mini-bunker, when the mortar attack started. We were filling sandbags in order to strengthen further the walls of the sangar – which was about four metres long by two metres wide – when the first mortar rounds exploded near by. The adoo were using straight high-explosive mortar bombs, which made very little approach sound. If you were very lucky you heard a low swishing noise seconds before the round struck, and just about had time to crouch or throw yourself on the ground. If you were too close to the impact point, however, then crouching or chucking yourself down was not going to help you much anyway.
Which is exactly what happened to Chris Hennessey that day. He, ‘Killer’ Denis and a signaller were filling sandbags when the mortar landed among them. By sheer luck I was working alone about twenty-five metres away, filling another sack with sand and shale. I didn’t even hear the bomb that caused the damage. One moment I was watching three fellow troopers, and the next I was looking at a scene of utter carnage.
The mortar round scored down Chris’s side and exploded at his feet, killing him instantly. Yet although he took most of the blast, the signaller next to him was badly ripped by the shell splinters, and began screaming as though his lungs were going to burst. Denis, blown off his feet, vanished below the level of the sandbag wall, just as the blast hit me and knocked me flying. I was showered with stones and rock chips thrown up by the explosion but, mercifully, not by shrapnel. Shocked and disoriented, I managed to clamber to my feet and stagger the few yards to where the mortar had exploded. And then immediately wished I hadn’t.
Part of the training for the SAS should be for recruits on Selection to go and work in an abattoir for a couple of days, and squelch about in the blood and gore and guts until the sight and smell no longer affect their stomachs or minds. The smell of fresh blood and splashed-about entrails is much stronger than most people could possibly imagine, and it is not only extremely unpleasant but also extremely unsettling. After a while – or, more accurately, after a number of such experiences – the sight of mutilated bodies eventually no longer sends the stomach’s contents erupting mouthwards. But the smell – that’s something you never, ever, get used to.
Chris could not have known what hit him, could not have felt the explosion that so violently took his life. But the signaller had. He couldn’t stop screaming. The shrapnel had caught him everywhere, almost shredding him, and he was bleeding profusely from his legs, body and face.
I vaulted over the wall, snatched up the first-aid kit and started trying to plug some of the injured man’s more obvious wounds with one hand while I scrabbled for a morphine hypodermic with the other. That’s when I caught sight of Denis, who had been hurled backwards off his feet and ended up huddled inside against the base of the wall. What made the sight even odder was that, by some quirky effect of the blast, he was lying on the ground stark naked apart from his boots and socks. His only obvious injury appeared to be where his arse had been peppered by small shell fragments, rather like buck-shot. He was bleeding a bit, but his wounds didn’t seem to be life threatening. Given his near-naked state, I was able to tell this at a glance.
The sight was a pretty ludicrous one, and for some reason – perhaps a combination of reaction and relief – I began to laugh. I just couldn’t help myself. ‘Fuck me, Denis, that’s not a very pretty sight,’ I told him, and that was enough to set him off too. Our roars of laughter mingled with the signaller’s screaming, until the noise must have sounded like the kind of row that would once have been heard only in the most insalubrious Victorian madhouse. Nevertheless, our laughter did us both the world of good. On the whole, the tougher the situation, the greater the need to preserve a sense of humour. Nor was there any disrespect to Chris. We knew he was dead – and later we would find a time to mourn him. Right then it was more important for us to keep our spirits up, and laughter is the greatest pick-me-up of all.
There was no point in our trying to fire back. The adoo mortar team might have been anything up to 4 kilometres away, the effective range of an 82mm mortar, which is what we later discovered they had been firing at us. If a mortar attack went on for any length of time you might guess the range by computing the time between the initial bang of the weapon firing and the moment of impact, and working out the range by multiplying the known speed of the projectile in feet or yards per second by the time of flight in seconds. It is a complicated and imprecise method, however, and in addition it won’t tell you the direction from which the fire is coming. At night you can sometimes spot the flashes as a mortar fires, but this attack came in broad daylight.
All we could do was wait until the adoo had finished their bombardment for the day, and then whistle up a helicopter to take away the two wounded and what was left of Chris in a bodybag. It was a grim business, for parts of his body had been thrown more than twenty yards by the explosion.
You never get over the speed with which things can change during warfare. Half an hour earlier I had been sitting with Chris on the ground outside the bunker, smoking a fag and idly chit-chatting. We were looking down on Capstan, and I had asked him, ‘Is it what you expected?’
‘Yes, I think so,’ he’d replied, but the truth is that he never had time to find out, really. He was quite new to the Regiment and had only been assigned to our squadron about a month earlier. Certainly, neither of us expected that he would be dead inside half an hour.
Despite the blood and the number of his wounds, the signaller was not as badly injured as we’d feared, and later made a full recovery. ‘Killer’ Denis spent a couple of weeks in the hospital at Salalah, where the regimental doctor picked a load of tiny shrapnel pieces out of his arse with tweezers. He later rejoined us on Simba, though he was pretty sore for at least a month – I hardly remember him sitting down during all that time.
Denis came from the south of England originally, but had moved to live in Hereford after he joined the Regiment. He had picked up his nickname during his early days with us, while taking part in a nuclear, biological and chemical (NBC) warfare course. At some point the instructor asked him to identify a powder commonly used in chemical warfare, only to receive the answer, ‘I don’t know. I’m only here to kill.’ From then on he was known as ‘Killer’.
After he and the wounded signaller had been evacuated we began clearing up the sangar, and it was then that I came across the tailfin of the mortar bomb that had killed Chris. It had come from Britain. The adoo were actually using British ammunition against us. Naturally enough the whole squadron was furious to learn this, although the irony of it did not escape them. We theorized later that the ammunition had got into South Yemen via Libya, but no one would ever have been able to prove it. What any member of the SAS will tell you, though, is that there are some people in Britain willing to sell anything to anybody in return for a fast buck. Yet it goes without saying that there’s no point in making a fuss. The sale of British-made arms to hostile or enemy states is far too hot a political potato, and there are far too many influential figures with their fingers in the till, for there to be any chance of mere soldiers getting the trade investigated and stopped.
I was angry, however. In theory, if you could spot the enemy firing a mortar on a nearby hill, then by using a plotter board you could drop a mortar round on them. And of course they could do the same to you – especially if they used British ammunition. The adoo were equipped with Russian mortar tubes which the British 81mm ammunition fitted, and they were very accurate weapons. Yet sometimes we ourselves were forced to use mortar ammunition manufactured in India, which we found to be substandard and inaccurate, as well as dangerous in that the rounds would sweat and become unstable. To know that you are fighting with substandard equipment against the best of British would have made any British soldier angry. Yet all we could do, other than moan, was sit and take it, and try to make the sangar walls thicker with every chance we got in an attempt to defend ourselves against the mortars, rockets and machine-gun fire.
Two days after Chris was killed and the signaller wounded, a couple of replacements were sent in from Salalah. One was a fresh-faced guy called Ginge; the other, Ian, a stocky Northerner originally from the Paras, had been in the Regiment about as long as I had. We were still strengthening the walls of our sangar or bunker, which by this time had been given an official name – ‘Green Five’. The aim was to make the sides at least ten feet thick, interspersing sandbags with boulders, with here and there a slit from which to fire the GPMG. Jimmy and I and a couple of other guys were filling sand-bags when the chopper brought in the replacements. We greeted them briefly, and suggested they stick their bergens inside the partly built sangar and sort their kit out before setting to work with the rest of us.
I wish, now, that they had been set straight to work, for just ten minutes after they arrived we were hit by a rocket attack. The first rocket went way off to the left and exploded harmlessly against some rocks a couple of hundred metres away, but the second was already homing in. The Russian-built Katyusha rockets don’t travel all that fast and they make a loud whooshing sound, which gives you about two seconds in which to decide what to do, and then do it. You can either drop behind cover, or run in one direction or another.