Authors: Peter Ratcliffe
In order to cover the area I’d designated for each recce I adopted a leap-frog technique. From each starting point four Land Rovers would advance along one side of the wadi for a kilometre, and then halt. The other four, with the Unimog, would then advance two kilometres on the other side before halting, when it would be the turn of the first group to go forward another two kilometres, and so on. In the narrower wadis we advanced as usual in single file. It was tedious, repetitive work, but it had to be done. Nor was I much worried about being discovered by the enemy. We had no indication from Intel of substantial bodies of Iraqi troops in the area, and we would have warning of any approaching by the dust kicked up by their vehicles. I was also confident that, if we did meet with a body of the enemy which we could not drive off, then we would be able to escape relatively easily in the broken terrain, if necessary scattering to meet up again later at one of the prearranged RVs we selected each morning.
That afternoon we were plodding along an old riverbed, almost too shallow to be recognized as one, heading on to the plain to the north-west with the sun high over a distant mountain range ahead of us, when the leading vehicle – Pat’s – stopped. Through the binoculars I had already spotted a place some fifteen or twenty kilometres ahead, which had masts or aerials sprouting from it and which might turn out to be a missile site. I jumped out, glad in some ways to be able to stretch my legs, and walked forward to Pat’s wagon.
‘What’s the problem?’ I asked.
‘Enemy location,’ came the reply.
‘Where?’
Pat pointed towards the distant site. ‘Over there.’
‘You mean that thing in the distance? I saw that ages ago. Just keep going. That isn’t a problem.’
This seemed to be too much for his driver, Yorky, who suddenly started babbling, ‘You’re going to get us all killed! That’s the
enemy
over there. You’re going to get us killed!’ I was already irritated enough by the sudden, purposeless halt. Seeing him gibbering away like that snapped my temper.
‘Shut it, you,’ I ordered, and then motioned every-body out of their vehicles. As the crews of the lead Land Rovers started to comply, I sent back word with the duty motorcyclist for everyone to come forward.
I waited until all of them had gathered around me in a loose semi-circle. Then, fixing them with a glare as the last of them shuffled into place, I pitched in: ‘I am sick to death of people questioning my decisions. Especially you’ – and I pointed at Yorky. ‘We are here to do a job, and we are at war. The task is to clear this wadi system. We are not going to do it slowly because that would take weeks. But we are going to do it, and it will be done my way.’ I paused, before adding, ‘Are there any questions?’
I looked around at the strange collection of curiously dressed scarecrows with their beards and shemaghs and rifles. Not one of them made a murmur.
‘All right. Get in your vehicles and let’s get the job done.’
Perhaps it was wrong of me to bawl out the entire patrol for the behaviour of one individual, especially as the men had proved themselves, in action and out of it, to be as tough, enduring, self-reliant and brave as the SAS demanded. Nevertheless, Alpha One Zero had made a very bad start to its time in Iraq, and I was determined, as much for the men’s sake as for mine or the Regiment’s, to wipe out the memory of that hesitant beginning. I meant us to become – and to be seen as – the best fighting patrol the SAS had.
This was only the second time I had had close dealings with Yorky, and it was the last. He had proved himself an extremely reluctant participant in the recce before Victor Two, when I had to send him back while the rest of us carried on. After the incident in the Iron Triangle I had no further truck with the man. Even such short acquaintance left a very bad taste in the mouth, however – though not as bad as the taste left by the fictions in his book.
Clearing the Iron Triangle took us less than three days, and we were therefore ordered further south to clear a similar wadi system near ‘Ar Rutbah, an Iraqi town on the MSR that ran past Victor Two eastwards to Baghdad, and which lay just south of the new motorway. To reach our new area of operations we would head east of the LUP we had used for the last three nights, then swing south to cross the motorway at the same bridge before travelling on to establish a new LUP. From there we would be able to recce the wadi system to the west of us, as far as ‘Ar Rutbah to the north-west.
I again put Serious in charge of crossing the motor-way, reminding him that if we had been seen going in, the bridge would be the ideal place at which to set an ambush as we made our way out of the Triangle. His recce seemed to take for ever, but when we eventually recrossed the bridge I was certain there wasn’t so much as a single desert rat within five kilometres that Serious hadn’t taken note of.
Once we had safely crossed the motorway I notified Intel about the possible missile site we had spotted at the far end of the Iron Triangle, leaving it to Coalition HQ as to whether the Allied air forces should pay the place a visit. I also threw in my opinion that the bridge we had just crossed was another worthy candidate for the attention of our strike aircraft. My suggestions were, I was told, duly noted.
It was now two full weeks since our attack on the microwave station and I found myself almost wishing for some action. So did most of the men. It was hard to believe that scooting about hundreds of kilometres behind enemy lines could be quite so bloody yawn-making. The boredom was increased by the fact that our new area of operation was almost completely flat, with barely discernible wadis and few other features, natural or man-made. Patrolling for hour after hour in the vehicles, maintaining a constant lookout for enemy locations or movements, took its toll on all of us, and the absence of any excitement simply made the task duller. After our first day, however, we came across a man-made berm, and I therefore decided to test a pet theory I had been carrying around in my head for weeks. Halting the column, I asked the guys to break out their spades, indicated the sandbank rising above us, and set them to work. They probably thought I was mad, choosing to cut through the berm – which was about four metres high – at that point, when we could so easily have followed it to its end and returned back along the other side, to take up the next leg of our clearance pattern. None the less, it made a change from checking wadis out, and they set to with a will.
It took only thirty minutes to dig a gap wide enough and low enough to get the vehicles through. My theory was proved: this was the same patrol that had spent five days trying – and failing – to get over a similar berm.
Over the radio that night, 23 February, I received new orders for the patrol. We were to head south for the Saudi Arabian border and return to Al Jouf for what the army calls ‘rest and recuperation’. When I passed on the news it brought smiles to the faces of everyone, not so much because we were going back to a safe zone, but because the journey would relieve the boredom of the past week. Had we been involved in a full-blown firefight with the enemy during that week, then I think we would all have been a good deal more reluctant to pull out.
From reports on the BBC World Service we knew that the Coalition’s main land offensive had been launched against the Iraqi forces in Kuwait that day. Then, later that night, more up-to-date bulletins seemed to indicate that the war might be over much sooner than had been forecast by Allied HQ or the media. Indeed, some commentators were talking about the war ending in hours or, at worst, no more than days. It was difficult for us, sitting around a radio set at our LUP a hundred miles inside Iraq, to accept that the war could possibly be over before we reached Saudi Arabia.
Our spirits were high, however, and I dug out my rum bottle – still more than half full – and invited the sergeants to join me at my Land Rover to celebrate the war’s imminent end. Harry, my radio operator, tried to sneak into the circle and grab a turn at the bottle, but I told him to fuck off. This was a Sergeants’ Mess do – closed to outsiders.
The following morning, as we were about to pull out for the border, I took my crew’s Union jack, which had been spread out as usual on the ground near my wagon, and tied it to the radio aerial behind the driver. The crews of the other vehicles followed suit, and as we neared the border we must have appeared, to anyone who saw us, like some ancient band of crusaders emerging from the desert with colours flying. There the resemblance would have ended, however, because in all other respects we looked like the most evil band of cut-throats from the filthiest souk in Arabia. Almost all of us were sporting ragged beards and wearing a strange mixture of military and bedouin gear, with shemaghs loosely wrapped around our faces. We were mainly filthy, and every one of us stank to high heaven. Nor can our piratical appearance have been helped by the fact that we were extremely heavily armed.
All of which explained why the Regiment had sent a special reception committee from Al Jouf, under the command of Major Bill, to see that we got back into Saudi Arabia safely. The last thing any of us needed now was a blue-on-blue incident between zealous border guards and our well-tested patrol. (It would turn out later that our caution was justified, for a very high proportion of the casualties among Coalition forces during the Gulf War were due not to enemy action, but – to use a really contradictory euphemism beloved of the media – to ‘friendly fire’.) We came out at the old fort where Alpha One Zero had made its original, if delayed, crossing, and were treated to some pretty strange looks from the garrison of local troops. Had our guys from Al Jouf not been there to vouch for us, the Saudis might well have opened fire, believing us to be enemy brigands. With good reason, too, for in no way did we look like representatives of the elite of the British Army.
If there was something faintly unreal about our arrival back in Allied territory, reality struck within minutes of our crossing the border, and in the most mundane of ways. After thousands of kilometres of crunching our way over some of the most inhospitable terrain in the Middle East without a single puncture, the Unimog picked one up as it turned on to our first tarmac road in Saudi Arabia. So it was that we, the heroes of Desert Storm – well, in our eyes, at least – were reduced to changing a wheel at the roadside.
I took that opportunity to say my goodbyes. Having rounded the guys up for a last chat, I thanked them all and told them how well I thought they had performed. ‘I want you to head back to Al Jouf under your own steam,’ I concluded.
‘Where are you going, then?’ chirped up one soul.
‘I’m off to ‘Ar Ar,’ I said, and with that I headed for Major Bill’s vehicle.
Bill and I pulled out without further ado, heading for ’Ar Ar, with a hot bath and a cold beer high on my list of priorities. But when I arrived at the headquarters building on the airbase, which was jointly run by US and British forces, it was time for afternoon tea, an apparently immovable ritual in the life of the place. My beer was going to have to wait, and so was the bath.
I was unshaven, smelly and more than a little dishevelled when I walked into headquarters. Luckily I managed to find some guys I knew from the base’s ops and planning office, and had just settled down with a decent brew and a cigarette when an American officer loomed over me. Looking down a nose straighter and longer than my cigarette, he told me, ‘There’s no smoking in here.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because it’s a fire hazard.’
I had to laugh. ‘You want to get out there,’ I said, nodding towards the desert outside. ‘Now that’s what you call a fire hazard.’ His face took on the tight-arsed look assumed by officers the world over when they think their dignity or authority is under threat. Since he plainly hadn’t the remotest idea what I was talking about, however, I simply walked away. I wouldn’t put my cigarette out, though.
Outside, I was buttonholed by a member of Delta Force, the US Special Forces equivalent of the SAS and effectively our sister group in America. Word of my arrival back from a fighting patrol in Iraq must have got around, for he asked me if I would mind giving his boys a briefing, as they were due to go into enemy territory the following night. They were heading for an area south of ‘Ar Rutbah, tasked with taking over where we had left off the previous day. I went along to their tent and he called his guys around and I began answering questions. They wanted to know about enemy activity and locations, time and distance in relation to travel, navigation, concealment, resupply – in fact, the whole shooting match. When the questions eventually dried up I told them, ‘The best way to do it is to go over in the morning and travel through the day.’
There was a shocked silence, during which they looked at me as though I were a Martian. What I had said went against everything they had been taught and had practised. ‘You can make great speed,’ I continued, determined to get the point over to them. ‘You can bomb up the plain just like on a motorway doing about fifty, and you only need to slow down when you’re approaching the target area.’
Soon after that they thanked me very much and ushered me out of their tent. I’m sure they put me down as just another crazy Brit who’d spent too much time in the sun, although they were too polite to say so. I found out later that they had ignored my advice and gone over the following night, as planned. They never saw any action because, as everyone now knows, the war was over by the next day.
I drove back to Al Jouf on the following day. My first action was to seek out the CO and ask for a private word with him. Once in his office, he was full of praise for our patrol’s success, but I cut him off.
‘I want to talk to you about Ken’s RTU,’ I said.
‘What RTU?’
‘I’m told it’s because of a drinking-and-driving offence,’ I explained. ‘He’s a great lad and he performed brilliantly behind enemy lines. Nobody could have been more positive or enthusiastic. He’s a damned good soldier and, irresponsible driving aside, a role model for anyone else joining the Regiment. I don’t think we can afford to lose him. He’ll be an asset to the Paras if he goes back, but it will be our loss.’