Authors: Peter Ratcliffe
It was a wonderful, almost romantic, dream of an idea, but it didn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of succeeding. Those of us who had the facts recognized this from the start. I felt extremely sorry for all those hostages, and for their worried relatives, but I can now admit that, however desperate their situation, the plan to rescue them was never realistically considered by any of us as being even a remotely feasible option. As a plan it gave the troops something definite to train for, and that was about all that could be said for it. It also caused Schwarzkopf to think about us – if only briefly – as participants in his war. Among the US Special Forces, Delta Force – roughly the American equivalent of the SAS – were also going crazy trying to carve out a role for themselves in the Gulf. Most of them were still back in the States and, like us, rehearsing the liberation of the human shields, while being just as certain as we were that it was an absolute non-starter.
Luckily, on 6 December Saddam released most of the hostages and we were able to drop the ridiculous rescue charade which, had it been attempted, could only have ended in bloody nightmare, and many of us being shipped home in bodybags. The only trouble was, with the operation now cancelled, we were once more left without a meaningful role in the coming conflict.
We had good cause, though, to bless our luck in having General de la Billière as the British commander. He was not to leave us kicking our heels for long. On 12 December new orders came through from Coalition HQ in Saudi Arabia. We were to start planning deep-penetration raids into Iraq, the type of operation on which the fledgeling Regiment had cut its teeth after its formation in the Western Desert in 1941. Saddam had been given a deadline of 15 January to get out of Kuwait. DLB gave us the same deadline, by which time we were to be ready to go in to Iraq. What we didn’t know at the time, however, was that DLB had not cleared these plans with General Schwarzkopf. So far as we were concerned he was the man in charge of the British forces in the Gulf, and we were a British regiment – so we would do whatever he ordered. At least preparing for operations behind enemy lines would get us up to full battle readiness.
Within a week of my taking over as RSM the Regiment was officially committed to going to war in the Gulf, or at least believed itself to be, which in the end came to the same thing. The announcement to move came in a special meeting convened by the CO in Stirling Lines. The entire staff of regimental head-quarters was present. This included the regimental 2IC, the ops officer, adjutant, intelligence officer, quarter-master and myself, as well as the squadron commanders and sergeant-majors and all heads of department. In addition, the motor transport and signals officers and the masterchef were also present. There was an air of expectancy, even excitement, although, typically, every thing was understated. The CO’s message was equally brief. With the exception of G Squadron, who were to man the SP team, the whole Regiment would deploy to the Gulf between 27 December and 3 January. It was to be the biggest gathering of SAS personnel in a battle zone anywhere in the world since the end of the Second World War.
There was a quite mind-boggling amount of planning and preparation to get through before we could move out, and I spent virtually every waking hour – including Christmas Day – until our departure in my office at the camp. For myself, I couldn’t wait to get to the Middle East, although the last formality for everyone in the Regiment – to make out a will – tended to focus the minds of us all on the fact that we weren’t shipping out for a vacation. Indeed, there was a very good chance that some of us would not be coming back, something the Intel guys drummed into us at every available moment – just to keep us on our toes, of course, they explained gleefully. Wills could either be drafted by the documents office on base, by a private solicitor in the town or by simply filling out a suitable will form. It had also become compulsory for each of us to take out an army insurance policy, which pays on death only. There is no limit as to how much one can insure oneself for, but there is a minimum, which is the estimated cost of supporting a soldier’s family until his children come of age. For SAS men without families, the policy pays out a lump sum to his next of kin or some other named beneficiary.
The pay sergeant-major also issued each man with twenty gold sovereigns, and a piece of paper printed with a text in both English and Arabic. The sovereigns were intended to be used to bribe Iraqi citizens or military personnel if the need should arise. Since gold sovereigns are an internationally accepted currency, and since each one is worth, not its nominal £1 face value, but around £80, they are an extremely useful and compact way of carrying a large sum of money. The statement printed on the paper was to the effect that after the war the British Embassy would pay the bearer £50,000 or its equivalent in Iraqi currency if he or she helped the owner of the paper to evade capture. This was supposed to benefit an SAS man if he had been stranded or even captured behind enemy lines, but ignored the fact that many Iraqis, and most of the nomads and bedouin, could not read or write. It also seemed to take for granted that any Iraqi was prepared to sell out his country to a hated enemy just on the dubious promise of riches to come at some unspecified date in the future. The sovereigns had to be handed back after the war unless you could prove to have had a legitimate use for them. No one did use them. We tended to steal or hijack what we needed, rather than barter for it. Better to rely on our own, admittedly rather anti-social, tactics among the indigenous population than on some Iraqi’s possible greed. I might add here that, contrary to what has been said in several accounts of the SAS in the Gulf War, most of the sovereigns were accounted for after the end of the war.
I deployed with the second wave on Sunday, 30 December, from an RAF base aboard a United States Air Force C-5 troop carrier, a monstrous aircraft known as the Galaxy. We flew out via a base in Germany, where we refuelled and picked up a group of American servicemen before carrying on to our initial destination in the Middle East, Abu Dhabi, one of the seven emirates that make up the UAE.
I was sitting with the Regiment’s MTO (motor transport officer) and the Quartermaster. The MTO had told us how he had become the first proper casualty of the war by walking into a marble stairway in the officers’ mess at the RAF and cutting his head. As proof, he showed us his bloodstained handkerchief. ‘I want this to go down in the records,’ he insisted. ‘At least I’ll be first in one aspect of this war.’
I knew that on the airbase at which we landed there was one of the legendary American PXs – roughly equivalent to our NAAFIs, but usually larger and much, much better – where drink is sold at rock-bottom prices. I also knew that the MTO had a quantity of US dollars about his person. ‘Why not go for a Mention in Despatches, as well?’ I suggested to him. ‘It’s extremely underhand and strictly against regulations, but there are two of us here who will swear you performed an act of great heroism and saved two suffering companions at considerable risk to yourself.
‘All you have to do is leap off the plane and use some of your US cash to buy wine in the PX.’
So far as the Quartermaster and I were concerned, the MTO earned his MID. He managed to get back on board with a couple of 2-litre cartons of red wine tucked away out of sight. It made the next seven hours much more enjoyable than they would otherwise have been. The three of us were on the upper deck and would be visited every half-hour or so by one of the American load masters handing out soft drinks or coffee. They never noticed that every time we were offered more coffee our paper cups were still always half full. To drink on a military aircraft, British or American, is a serious offence, but we managed to sink all four litres of wine right under their noses before we reached Abu Dhabi.
Three of us may have fooled the load masters with our illicit drinking, but the rest of their SAS passengers hadn’t fooled them over another illegal act, namely the theft of twenty-eight of Uncle Sam’s airline pillows. These pillows, handed out at the beginning of the flight, had proved so comfortable, and were of just the right mini dimensions, as to be irresistible. Their disappearance was not going to wash with the senior load master, however, a giant black USAF sergeant who was refusing to let his Galaxy take off again until he had his pillows back.
Of the men standing on the tarmac – some one hundred and fifty of them – not one of the culprits was prepared to give up his bounty willingly. Having asked the sergeant to step back into his aircraft for a moment, I told my grinning mob, ‘These Yanks are our allies. They give us a nice ride down here and we thank them by robbing them blind.
‘I am going to take a short walk – for five minutes – and when I get back I want to see twenty-eight pillows. If not, I am going to search every man’s kit and if I find a pillow in anyone’s gear, then that person will immediately be RTU-ed.’ With that I turned and walked off.
When I returned after having smoked a cigarette there were twenty-eight pillows neatly stacked on the tarmac. They may have been comfortable and a handy size, but that was nothing compared with the threat of being RTU-ed.
What we had not expected to find in Abu Dhabi in winter was that it was extremely cold there in the early mornings. By the time we had appeased the sergeant and unloaded our personal equipment from the Galaxy the sun had edged a little higher and the temperature had begun to rise, but we were still freezing. While we waited for our RAF transport to arrive we must have looked a sorry sight. Here was the whole of the headquarters staff and the support team from 22 SAS standing on the edge of a windswept runway on New Year’s Eve 1990, shivering like a bunch of vagrants abandoned in the Arctic.
At the designated time an RAF C-130 came in to land and thundered across to where we were waiting. Once we had loaded ourselves and our gear aboard it flew us the short hop to the main British holding base in the area codenamed Victor. Lying near to Abu Dhabi city, Victor was a newly built parachute-training establishment which was still unoccupied. It had a runway system large enough to accommodate big jets and, surrounding this, a vast, twenty-square-mile secured area where paratroops could be housed and trained. Within the Victor perimeter were numerous camps, up to a mile apart, and one of these, close to one of the perimeter fences, was ours. The buildings were all brand new and, though basic, were adequate.
A small SAS advance party had been sent out before Christmas to establish our camp within Victor. The main operations room, the offices and a major part of the accommodation were all in a giant hangar, originally designed to allow paratroops to practise their descents from high up near the roof. I say offices, but in reality they were desks set a few feet apart from one another. The desks, six-foot wooden jobs with metal legs, were all identical, as were the plastic chairs. They were grouped in a wide, roughly semi-circular, arrangement – the CO, the adjutant, the intelligence officer, the signals officer, me, and the other department heads. It was lucky that they were close together, because the telephone system was very basic, and most of the time we communicated by shouting to one another. If anyone wanted to speak to Hereford, where the second-in-command and G Squadron were holding the fort, he went to the satellite communications desk from where there was a direct link.
On the hangar walls behind the desks were huge maps of Iraq and Kuwait, and on the floor were piles of cardboard cartons containing hundreds of smaller copies printed on paper or silk. These were to be issued to the troops. The silk maps were for evasion or escape purposes. They wouldn’t tear if they became wet, as paper would, and they remained readable even after being stuffed damp into a pocket.
Everybody slept on camp beds – even the CO, though he had yet to arrive. Rather than sleep in the hangar with the rest of the HQ staff, however, I requisitioned a very cramped extension on the side of the camp barber shop, about the size of a fifth-rate broom cupboard, where I was able to keep my kit. At night I moved my camp bed into the barber shop to sleep. It had mosquito netting on the windows – though this was rarely needed because of the cold – and a sink and a mirror which were ideal for my morning ablutions. I could even shave while sitting in the leather-covered barber’s chair.
The CO had been allocated a small room in one of the buildings outside the hangar, but the rest of the HQ party slept in the huge construction. Our three squadrons of fighting personnel, A, B and D, were either billeted in neighbouring hangars or under canvas. When we first arrived, however, A Squadron was still at the Regiment’s training camp in the United Arab Emirates, being the last of the four squadrons to undergo the special desert refresher course.
G Squadron remained at Hereford on counter-terrorist duty. Combating terrorism was still the Regiment’s first priority so far as the British government was concerned, and had become more so because of fears of terrorist attacks in the UK by Iraqi or pro-Iraqi agents. Even though Britain was at war we had to leave an adequate special-projects team or anti-terrorist squad in Hereford to deal with any threat that might arise. As has been said, it fell to each squadron, on six months’ rotation, to form the SP team; it was G Squadron’s bad luck that it happened to be their turn during this period.
Also camped in Victor were sixteen members of the Regiment’s R (reserve) Squadron, who were civilian volunteers also based in Hereford. In addition, there was a squadron from our Royal Marines sister service, the SBS, as well as the Special Forces flights from 7 and 47 Squadrons, Royal Air Force. Apart from three C-130s, the RAF had brought in four Chinook helicopters with extra pilots, navigators, flight engineers and load masters as part of their contingent.
We also had a small group based in the Saudi Arabian capital, Riyadh, led by the Deputy Director, Special Forces. He and his team came from Duke of York’s Headquarters in Chelsea, London, which among other functions is the regimental headquarters of Special Forces. They were in Riyadh to work closely with General de la Billière, and to pass on the latter’s directives to the rest of us in Victor.