Bravo Two Zero
Immediate Action
Seven Troop
Spoken from the Front (ed.)
| Remote Control | Aggressor |
| Crisis Four | Recoil |
| Firewall | Crossfire |
| Last Light | Brute Force |
| Liberation Day | Exit Wound |
| Dark Winter | Zero Hour |
| Deep Black | Dead Centre |
War Torn
Battle Lines
Red Notice
The Grey Man
Last Night Another Soldier
Today Everything Changes
TRANSWORLD PUBLISHERS
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www.penguin.co.uk
Transworld is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com
First published in Great Britain in 1993 by Bantam Press
an imprint of Transworld Publishers
Corgi edition published 1994
This 20th anniversary Corgi edition published 2013
Copyright © Andy McNab 1993
Maps by Tom Coulson at Encompass Graphics
Andy McNab has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.
The publishers have made every effort to trace the owners of photographs used in the book. In cases where they have been unsuccessful they invite copyright holders to contact them direct.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Version 1.0 Epub ISBN 9781448170982
ISBN 9780552168823
This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorized distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.
2 4 6 8 10 9 7 5 3 1
To the three who didn’t come back
Iraq and neighbouring countries
Route of Bravo Two Zero
Andy McNab’s sketches
Commando camp
Barrack room at Commando centre
Hallway of hand-over location
Toilet and courtyard
Interrogation area
Interrogation cell
Prison
Contents
Cover
About the Book
Title Page
Dedication
List of Maps
Iraq-Syria border, September 2003
Bravo Two Zero
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Epilogue
Iraq-Syria border, September 2003
Picture Section
Questions and Answers
Maps
Glossary
Picture Acknowledgements
About the Author
Also by Andy McNab
Copyright
It wasn’t much to look at in the dying rays of the sun: a shoulder-high cairn, fashioned out of stones and cement, with a hastily scrawled inscription in Arabic and English.
High above the banks of the river Euphrates, a few kilometres from the border with Syria, this was a place I’d thought I would never see again. Luck had brought me here. Luck – and an old, grey-haired man, who wondered if I’d be interested in seeing a monument built by British soldiers just a few months earlier as they’d swept through the desert during the Second Gulf War – which would become known as the Iraq War.
He told me the locals believed it was booby-trapped; that it contained an explosive device that would kill anyone who tried to fuck around with it.
My driver and interpreter weren’t happy. They urged me not to linger. ‘It is too dangerous to stay here. The devils are coming.’ The Saddam loyalists still had ‘eyes everywhere’. If you stood still for more than ten minutes anywhere in this country the militants would track you down. And anyway, they said, I’d already found what we’d driven out of Baghdad and across the desert for: the intelligence camp where I’d been taken soon after my capture twelve years ago. What did a little heap of stones matter?
They had a point. But I’d still needed to see the little heap of stones for myself. It commemorated two of my friends who had died nearby.
The locals hadn’t yet destroyed it, but they had done their best to scratch out the words: ‘This cairn was built in April 2003 by the men of B SQN 22 SAS …’ And as I tried to make out the names of the men ‘who gave their lives on the banks of the Euphrates River, January 1991’, I knew it could very easily have been my memorial too.
Within hours of Iraqi troops and armour rolling across the border with Kuwait at 0200 local time on 2 August 1990 the Regiment was preparing itself for desert operations.
As members of the Counter Terrorist team based in Hereford, my gang and I unfortunately were not involved. We watched jealously as the first batch of blokes drew their desert kit and departed. Our nine-month tour of duty was coming to an end and we were looking forward to a handover, but as the weeks went by rumours began to circulate of either a postponement or cancellation altogether. I ate my Christmas turkey in a dark mood. I didn’t want to miss out.
Then, on 10 January 1991, half of the squadron was given three days’ notice of movement to Saudi. To huge sighs of relief, my lot were included. We ran around organizing kit, test-firing weapons and screaming into town to buy ourselves new pairs of desert wellies and plenty of Factor 20 for the nose.
We were leaving in the early hours of Sunday morning. I had a night on the town with my girlfriend Jilly, but she was too upset to enjoy herself. It was an evening of false niceness, both of us on edge.
‘Shall we go for a walk?’ I suggested when we got home, hoping to raise the tone.
We did a few laps of the block and when we got back I turned on the telly. It was Apocalypse Now. We weren’t in the mood for talking so we just sat there and watched. Two hours of carnage and maiming wasn’t the cleverest thing for me to have let Jilly look at. She burst into tears. She was always all right if she wasn’t aware of the dramas. She knew very little of what I did, and had never asked questions – because, she told me, she didn’t want the answers.
‘Oh, you’re off, when are you coming back?’ was the most she would ever ask. But this time it was different. For once, she knew where I was going.
As she drove me through the darkness towards camp, I said, ‘Why don’t you get yourself that dog you were on about? It would be company for you.’
I’d meant well, but it set off the tears again. I got her to drop me off a little way from the main gates.
‘I’ll walk from here, mate,’ I said with a strained smile. ‘I need the exercise.’
‘See you when I see you,’ she said as she pecked me on the cheek.
Neither of us went a bundle on long goodbyes.
The first thing that hits you when you enter squadron lines (the camp accommodation area) is the noise: vehicles revving, men hollering for the return of bits of kit, and from every bedroom in the unmarried quarters a different kind of music – on maximum watts. This time it was all so much louder because so many of us were being sent out together.
I met up with Dinger, Mark the Kiwi, and Stan, the other three members of my gang. A few of the unfortunates who weren’t going to the Gulf still came in anyway and joined in the slagging and blaggarding.
We loaded our kit into cars and drove up to the top end of the camp where transports were waiting to take us to Brize Norton. As usual, I took my sleeping bag on to the aircraft with me, together with my Walkman, washing and shaving kit, and brew kit. Dinger took 200 Benson & Hedges. If we found ourselves dumped in the middle of nowhere or hanging around a deserted airfield for days on end, it wouldn’t be the first time.
We flew out by RAF VC10. I passively smoked the twenty or so cigarettes that Dinger got through in the course of the seven-hour flight, honking at him all the while. As usual my complaints had no effect whatsoever. He was excellent company, however, despite his filthy habit. Originally with Para Reg, Dinger was a veteran of the Falklands. He looked the part as well – rough and tough, with a voice that was scary and eyes that were scarier still. But behind the football hooligan face lay a sharp, analytical brain. Dinger could polish off the Daily Telegraph crossword in no time, much to my annoyance. Out of uniform, he was also an excellent cricket and rugby player, and an absolutely lousy dancer. Dinger danced the way Virgil Tracy walked. When it came to the crunch though, he was solid and unflappable.
We landed at Riyadh to find the weather typically pleasant for the time of year in the Middle East, but there was no time to soak up the rays. Covered transports were waiting on the tarmac and we were whisked away to a camp in isolation from other Coalition troops.
The advance party had got things squared away sufficiently to answer the first three questions you always ask when you arrive at a new location: where do I sleep, where do I eat, and where’s the bog?
Home for our half squadron, we discovered, was a hangar about 100 metres long and 50 metres wide. Into it were crammed forty blokes and all manner of stores and equipment, including vehicles, weapons and ammunition. There were piles of gear everywhere – everything from insect repellent and rations to laser target-markers and boxes of high-explosive. It was a matter of just getting in amongst it and trying to make your own little world as best you could. Mine was made out of several large crates containing outboard engines, arranged to give me a sectioned-off space that I covered with a tarpaulin to shelter me from the powerful arc-lights overhead.
There were many separate hives of activity, each with its own noise – radios tuned in to the BBC World Service, Walkmans with plug-in speakers that thundered out folk, rap and heavy metal. There was a strong smell of diesel, petrol and exhaust fumes. Vehicles were driving in and out all the time as blokes went off to explore other parts of the camp and see what they could pinch. And of course while they were away, their kit in turn was being explored by other blokes. ‘You snooze, you lose,’ is the way it goes. Possession is ten-tenths of the law. Leave your space unguarded for too long and you’d come back to find a chair missing – and sometimes even your bed.
Brews were on the go all over the hangar. Stan had brought a packet of orange tea with him and Dinger and I wandered over and sat on his bed with empty mugs.
‘Tea, boys,’ Dinger demanded, holding his out.
‘Yes, bwana,’ Stan replied.
Born in South Africa to a Swedish mother and Scottish father, Stan had moved to Rhodesia shortly before the declaration of UDI. He was involved at first hand in the terrorist war that followed, and when his family subsequently moved to Australia he joined the TA. He passed his medical exams but hankered too much for the active, outdoor life and quit in his first year as a junior doctor. He wanted to come to the UK and join the Regiment, and spent a year in Wales training hard for Selection. By all accounts he cruised it.
Anything physical was a breeze for Stan, including pulling women. Six foot three, big-framed and good-looking, he got them all sweating. Jilly told me that his nickname around Hereford was Doctor Sex, and the name cropped up quite frequently on the walls of local ladies’ toilets. On his own admission, Stan’s ideal woman was somebody who didn’t eat much and was therefore cheap to entertain, and who had her own car and house and was therefore independent and unlikely to cling. No matter where he was in the world women looked at Stan and drooled. In female company he was as charming and suave as Roger Moore playing James Bond.
Apart from his success with women, the most noticeable and surprising thing about Stan was his dress sense: he didn’t have any. Until the squadron got hold of him, he used to go everywhere in Crimplene safari jackets and trousers that stopped just short of his ankles. He once turned up to a smart party in a badly-fitted check suit with drainpipe trousers. He had travelled a lot, and had obviously made a lot of female friends. They wrote marriage proposals to him from all over the world, but the letters went unanswered. Stan never emptied his mailbox. All in all a very approachable, friendly character in his thirties, there was nothing that Stan couldn’t take smoothly in his stride. If he hadn’t been in the Regiment, he would have been a yuppie or a spy – albeit in a Crimplene suit.
Most people take tubes of mustard or curry paste with them to jazz up the rations, and spicy smells emanated from areas where people were doing supplementary fry-ups. I wandered around and sampled a few. Everybody carries a ‘racing spoon’ about their person at all times. The unwritten rule is that whoever has the can or is cooking up has first go, and the rest has to be shared. You dip your racing spoon in so that it’s vertical, then take a scoop. If it’s a big spoon you’ll get more out of a mess-tin, but if it’s too big – say, a wooden spoon with the handle broken off – it won’t go into a can at all. The search for the perfect-sized racing spoon goes on.
There was a lot of blaggarding going on. If you didn’t like the music somebody was playing, you’d slip in when they weren’t there and replace their batteries with duds. Mark opened his bergen to find that he’d lugged a twenty-pound rock with him all the way from Hereford. Wrongly suspecting me of putting it there, he replaced my toothpaste with Uvistat sun-block. When I went to use it I bulked up.
I’d first met Mark in Brisbane in 1989 when some of us were being hosted by the Australian SAS. He played against us in a rugby match and was very much the man of the moment, his tree-trunk legs powering him to score all his side’s tries. It was the first time our squadron team had been beaten and I hated him – all 5′6″ of the bastard. We met again the following year. He was doing Selection, and the day I saw him he had just returned to camp after an eight-mile battle run with full kit.
‘Put in a good word for us,’ he grinned when he recognized me. ‘You lot could do with a fucking decent scrum-half.’
Mark passed Selection and joined the squadron just before we left for the Gulf.
‘Fucking good to be here, mate,’ he said as he came into my room and shook my hand.
I’d forgotten that there was only one adjective in the Kiwi’s vocabulary, and that it began with the letter f.
The atmosphere in our hangar was jovial and lively. The Regiment hadn’t been massed like this since the Second World War. It was wonderful that so many of us were there together. So often we work in small groups of a covert nature, but here was the chance to be out in the open in large numbers. We hadn’t been briefed yet but we knew in our bones that the war was going to provide an excellent chance for everybody to get down to some ‘green work’ – classic, behind-the-lines SAS soldiering. It was what David Stirling had set the Regiment up for in the first place, and now, nearly fifty years later, here we were back where we’d started. As far as I could see, the biggest restrictions in Iraq were likely to be the enemy and the logistics: running out of bullets or water. I felt like a bricklayer who had spent my entire life knocking up bungalows and now somebody had given me the chance to build a skyscraper. I just hoped that the war didn’t finish before I had a chance to lay the first brick.
We didn’t have a clue yet what we’d have to do, so we spent the next few days preparing for anything and everything, from target attacks to setting up observation posts. It’s all very well doing all the exciting things – abseiling, fast roping, jumping through buildings – but what being Special Forces is mostly about is thoroughness and precision. The real motto of the SAS is not ‘Who Dares Wins’ but ‘Check and Test, Check and Test’.
Some of us needed to refresh our skills a bit swiftly with explosives, movement with vehicles, and map-reading in desert conditions. We also dragged out the heavy weapons. Some, like the 50mm heavy machine-gun, I hadn’t fired for two years. We had revision periods with whoever knew best about a particular subject – it could be the sergeant-major or the newest member of the squadron. There were Scud alerts, so everybody was rather keen to relearn the NBC (nuclear, biological, chemical) drills they had not practised since being in their old units. The only trouble was that Pete, the instructor from our Mountain Troop, had a Geordie accent as thick as Tyne fog and he spoke with his verbal safety-catch on full automatic. He sounded like Gazza on speed.
We tried hard to understand what he was on about but after a quarter of an hour the strain was too much for us. Somebody asked him an utterly bone question and he got so wound up that he started speaking even faster. More questions were asked and a vicious circle was set in motion. In the end we decided amongst ourselves that if the kit had to go on, it would stay on. We wouldn’t bother carrying out the eating and drinking drills Pete was demonstrating, because then we wouldn’t have to carry out the shitting and pissing drills – and they were far too complicated for the likes of us. All in all, Pete said, as the session disintegrated into chaos, it was not his most constructive day – or words to that effect.
We were equipped with aviator sunglasses and we enjoyed a few Foster Grant moments, waiting outside the hangar for anybody to pass, then slipping on the glasses as in the TV commercial.
We had to take pills as protection against nerve agents, but that soon stopped when the rumour went around that they made you impotent.
‘It’s not true,’ the sergeant-major reassured us a couple of days later. ‘I’ve just had a wank.’
We watched CNN news and talked about different scenarios.
We guessed the parameters of our operations would be loose, but that wouldn’t mean we could just go around blowing up power lines or whatever else we saw. We’re strategic troops, so what we do behind enemy lines can have serious implications. If we saw a petroleum line, for example, and blew it up, just for the fucking badness of it, we might be bringing Jordan into the war: it could be a pipeline from Baghdad to Jordan which the Allies had agreed not to destroy so that Jordan still got its oil. So if we saw an opportunity target like that we’d have to get permission to deal with it. That way we could cause the maximum amount of damage to the Iraqi war machine, but not damage any political or strategic considerations.
If we were caught, we wondered, would the Iraqis kill us? Too bad if they did. As long as they did it swiftly – if not, we’d just have to try and speed things up.
Would they fuck us? Arab men are very affectionate with each other, holding hands and so on. It’s just their culture, of course, it doesn’t necessarily mean they’re shit stabbers, but the question had to be asked. I wasn’t that worried about the prospect, because if it happened to me I wouldn’t tell. The only scenario that did bring me out in a sweat was the possibility of having my bollocks cut off. That would not be a good day out. If the ragheads had me tied down naked and were sharpening their knives, I’d do whatever I could to provoke them into slotting me.
I’d never worried about dying. My attitude to the work I am expected to do in the Regiment has always been that you take the money off them every month and so you’re a tool to be used – and you are. The Regiment does lose people, so you cater for that eventuality. You fill in your insurance policies, although at the time only Equity & Law had the bottle to insure the SAS without loading the premium. You write your letters to be handed to next of kin if you get slotted. I wrote four and entrusted them to a mate called Eno. There was one for my parents that said: ‘Thanks for looking after me, it can’t have been easy for you, but I had a rather nice childhood. Don’t worry about me being dead, it’s one of those things.’ One was for Jilly, saying: ‘Don’t mope around – get the money and have a good time. PS £500 is to go behind the bar at the next squadron piss-up. PPS I love you.’ And there was one for little Kate, to be given to her by Eno when she was older, and it said: ‘I always loved you, and always will love you.’ The letter to Eno himself, who was to be the executor of my will, said: ‘Fuck this one up, wanker, and I’ll come back and haunt you.’
At about 1900 one evening, I and another team commander, Vince, were called over to the squadron OC’s table. He was having a brew with the squadron sergeant-major.
‘We’ve got a task for you,’ he said, handing us a mug each of tea. ‘You’ll be working together. Andy will command. Vince will be 2 i/c. The briefing will be tomorrow morning at 0800 – meet me here. Make sure your people are informed. There will be no move before two days.’
My lot were rather pleased at the news. Quite apart from anything else, it meant an end to the hassle of having to queue for the only two available sinks and bogs. In the field, the smell of clean clothes or bodies can disturb the wildlife and in turn compromise your position, so for the last few days before you go you stop washing and make sure all your clothing is used.
The blokes dispersed and I went to watch the latest news on CNN. Scud missiles had fallen on Tel Aviv, injuring at least twenty-four civilians. Residential areas had taken direct hits, and as I looked at the footage of tower blocks and children in their pyjamas I was suddenly reminded of Peckham and my own childhood. That night, as I tried to get my head down, I found myself remembering all my old haunts, and thinking about my parents and a whole lot of other things that I hadn’t thought about in a long while.
I had never known my real mother, though I always imagined that whoever she was she must have wanted the best for me: the carrier bag I was found in when she left me on the steps of Guy’s Hospital came from Harrods.
I was fostered until I was 2 by a South London couple who in time applied to become my adoptive parents. As they watched me grow up they probably wished they hadn’t bothered. I binned school when I was 15½ to go and work for a haulage company in Brixton. I’d already been bunking off two or three days a week for the last year or so. Instead of studying for CSEs I delivered coal in the winter and drink mixes to off-licences in the summer. By going full-time I pulled in £8 a day, which in 1975 was serious money. With forty quid on the hip of a Friday night you were one of the lads.
My father had done his National Service in the Catering Corps and was now a minicab driver. My older brother had joined the Royal Fusiliers when I was a toddler and had served for about five years until he got married. I had exciting memories of him coming home from faraway places with his holdall full of presents. My own early life, however, was nothing remarkable. There wasn’t anything I was particularly good at and I certainly wasn’t interested in a career in the army. My biggest ambition was to get a flat with my mates and be able to do whatever I wanted.
I spent my early teens running away from home. Sometimes I’d go with a friend to France for the weekend, expeditions that were financed by him doing over his aunty’s gas meter. I was soon getting into trouble with the police myself, mainly for vandalism to trains and vending machines. There were juvenile court cases and fines that caused my poor parents a lot of grief.
I changed jobs when I was 16, going behind the counter at McDonald’s in Catford. Everything went well until round about Christmas time, when I was arrested with two other blokes coming out of a flat that didn’t belong to us in Dulwich village. I got put into a remand hostel for three days while I waited to go in front of the magistrates. I hated being locked up and swore that if I got away with it I’d never let it happen again. I knew deep down that I’d have to do something pretty decisive or I’d end up spending my entire life in Peckham, fucking about and getting fucked up. The army seemed a good way out. My brother had enjoyed it, so why not me?
When the case came up the other two got sent to Borstal. I was let off with a caution, and the following day I took myself down to the army recruiting office. They gave me a simple academic test, which I failed. They told me to come back a calendar month later, and this time, because it was exactly the same test, I managed to scrape through by two points.
I said I wanted to be a helicopter pilot, as you do when you have no qualifications and not a clue what being one involves.
‘There’s no way you are going to become a helicopter pilot,’ the recruiting sergeant told me. ‘However, you can join the Army Air Corps if you want. They might teach you to be a helicopter refueller.’
‘Great,’ I said, ‘that’s me.’
You are sent away for three days to a selection centre where you take more tests, do a bit of running, and go through medicals. If you pass, and they’ve got a vacancy, they’ll let you join the regiment or trade of your choice.
I went for my final interview and the officer said, ‘McNab, you stand more chance of being struck by lightning than you do of becoming a junior leader in the Army Air Corps. I think you’d be best suited to the infantry. I’ll put you down for the Royal Green Jackets. That’s my regiment.’
I didn’t have a clue about who or what the Royal Green Jackets were or did. They could have been an American football team for all I knew.
If I’d waited three months until I was 17 I could have joined the Green Jackets as an adult recruit, but like an idiot I wanted to get stuck straight in. I arrived at the Infantry Junior Leaders battalion in Shorncliffe, Kent, in September 1976 and hated it. The place was run by Guardsmen and the course was nothing but bullshit and regimentation. You couldn’t wear jeans, and had to go around with a bonehead haircut. You weren’t even allowed the whole weekend off, which made visiting my old Peckham haunts a real pain in the arse. I landed in trouble once just for missing the bus in Folkestone and being ten minutes late reporting back. Shorncliffe was a nightmare, but I learned to play the game. I had to – there was nothing else for me. The passing-out parade was in May. I had detested every single minute of my time there, but had learned to use the system, and for some reason had been promoted to junior sergeant and won the Light Division sword for most promising soldier.
I now had a period at the Rifle Depot in Winchester where us junior soldiers joined the last six weeks of a training platoon, learning Light Division drill. This was much more grown-up and relaxed, compared with Shorncliffe.
In July 1977 I was posted to 2nd Battalion, Royal Green Jackets, based for the time being in Gibraltar. To me, this was what the army was all about – warm climates, good mates, exotic women and even more exotic VD. Sadly, the battalion returned to the UK just four months later.
In December 1977 I did my first tour in Northern Ireland. So many young soldiers had been killed in the early years of the Ulster emergency that you had to be 18 before you could serve there. So although the battalion left on 6 December, I couldn’t join them until my birthday at the end of the month.
There must have been something about the IRA and young squaddies because I was soon in my first contact. A Saracen armoured car had got bogged down in the cuds (countryside) near Crossmaglen and my mate and I were put on stag (sentry duty) to guard it. In the early hours of the morning, as I scanned the countryside through the night-sight on my rifle, I saw two characters coming towards us, hugging the hedgerow. They got closer and I could clearly see that one of them was carrying a rifle. We didn’t have a radio so I couldn’t call for assistance. There wasn’t much I could do except issue a challenge. The characters ran for it and we fired off half a dozen rounds. Unfortunately, there was a shortage of nightsights at the time so the same weapon used to get handed on at the end of each stag. The nightsight on the rifle I was using was zeroed in for somebody else’s eye and only one of my rounds found its target. There was a follow-up with dogs, but nothing was found. Two days later, however, a well-known player (member of the Provisional IRA) turned up at a hospital just over the border with a 7.62 round in his leg. It had been the first contact of our company, and everybody was sparked up. My mate and I felt right little heroes and both of us claimed the hit.
The rest of our time in Ireland was less busy but more sad. The battalion took some injuries during a mortar attack on a position at Forkhill, and one of the members of my platoon was killed by a booby-trap bomb in Crossmaglen. Later, our colonel was killed when the Gazelle helicopter he was travelling in was shot down. Then it was back to normal battalion shit at Tidworth, and the only event worth mentioning during the next year was that, aged all of 18, I got married.
The following year we were back in South Armagh. I was now a lance-corporal and in charge of a brick (four-man patrol). One Saturday night in July our company was patrolling in the border town of Keady. As usual for a Saturday night the streets were packed with locals. They used to bus it to Castleblaney over the border for cabaret and bingo, then come back and boogy the night away. My brick was operating at the southern edge of the town near a housing estate. We had been moving over some wasteland and came into a patch of dead ground that hid us from view. As we reappeared over the brow, we saw twenty or so people milling around a cattle truck that was parked in the middle of the road. They didn’t see us until we were almost on top of them.
The crowd went apeshit, shouting and running in all directions, pulling their kids out of the way. Six lads with Armalites had been about to climb on to the truck. We caught them posing in front of the crowd, masked up and ready to go, their rifles and gloved fists in the air. We later discovered they had driven up from the south; their plan was to drive past the patrol and give us a quick burst.
Two were climbing over the tailgate as I issued my warning. Four were still in the road. A lad in the back of the truck brought his rifle up to aim and I dropped him with my first shot. The others returned our fire and there was a severe contact. One of them took seven shots in his body and ended up in a wheelchair. One player who was wounded was in the early stages of an infamous career. His name was Dessie O’Hare.
I was flavour of the month again, and not just with the British army. One of the shop-owners had taken a couple of shots through his window during the firefight and the windscreen of his car had been shattered. About a month later I went past on patrol and there he was, standing behind his new cash register in his refurbished shop, with a shiny new motor parked outside. He was beaming from ear to ear.
By the time we returned to Tidworth in the summer of 1979 I was completely army barmy. It would have taken a pick and shovel to get me out. In September I was placed on an internal NCOs’ cadre. I passed with an A grade and was promoted to corporal the same night. That made me the youngest infantry corporal in the army at the time, aged just 19. A section commanders’ battle course followed in 1980. I passed that with a distinction and my prize was a one-way ticket back to Tidworth.
The Wiltshire garrison town was, and still is, a depressing place to live. It had eight infantry battalions, an armoured regiment, a recce regiment, three pubs, a chip shop and a launderette. No wonder it got on my young wife’s nerves. It was a pain in the arse for the soldiers too. We were nothing more than glorified barrier technicians. I even got called in one Sunday to be in charge of the grouse beaters, who were also squaddies, for a brigadier’s shoot. The incentive was two cans of beer – and they wondered why there was such a turnover of young squaddies. By September my wife had had enough. She issued me with an ultimatum: take her back to London or give her a divorce. I stayed, she went.
In late 1980 I got posted back to the Rifle Depot for two years as a training corporal. It was a truly excellent time. I enjoyed teaching raw recruits, even though with many of them it meant going right back to basics, starting with elementary hygiene and the use of a toothbrush. It was also round about this time that I started to hear stories about the SAS.
I met Debby, a former RAF girl, and we got married in August 1982. I married her because we were getting posted back to the battalion, which was now based at Paderborn in Germany, and we didn’t want to be parted. All my worst fears about life in Germany were confirmed. It was Tidworth without the chip shop. We spent more time looking after vehicles than using them, with men working their fingers to the bone for nothing. We took part in large exercises where no-one really knew what was going on, and after a while no-one even cared.
I felt deprived that the Green Jackets had not been sent to the Falklands. Every time there was some action, it seemed to me, the SAS were involved. I wanted some of that – what was the point of being in the infantry if I didn’t? Hereford sounded such a nice place to live as well, not being a garrison town. At that time, you were made to feel a second-class citizen if you lived in a place like Aldershot or Catterick; as an ordinary soldier you couldn’t even buy a TV set on hire purchase unless an officer had signed the application form for you.
Four of us from the Green Jackets put our names down for Selection in the summer of 1983, and all for the same reason – to get out of the battalion. A couple of our people had passed Selection in the previous couple of years. One of them was a captain, who wangled us on to a lot of exercises in Wales so we could travel back to the UK and train. He personally took us up to the Brecon Beacons and put us through a lot of hill work. More than that, he gave us advice and encouragement. I owe a lot to that man. We were lucky to know him: some regiments, especially the corps, aren’t keen for their men to go because they have skills that are hard to replace. They won’t give them time off, or they’ll put the application in ‘File 13’ – the wastepaper basket. Or they’ll allow the man to go but make him work right up till the Friday before he goes.
None of us passed. Just before the endurance phase, I failed the sketch-map march of 30 kilometres. I was pissed off with myself, but at least it was suggested to me that I try again.
I went back to Germany and suffered all the slaggings about failing. These are normally dished out by the knobbers who wouldn’t dare attempt it themselves. I didn’t care. I was a young thruster and the easy option would have been to stay in the battalion system and be the big fish in a small pond, but I’d lost all enthusiasm for it. I applied for the Winter 1984 Selection and trained in Wales all through Christmas. Debby didn’t care too much for that.
Winter Selection is fearsome. The majority of people drop out within the first week of the four-week endurance phase. These are the Walter Mitty types, or those who haven’t trained enough or have picked up an injury. Some of the people who turned up are complete nuggets. They think that the SAS is all James Bond and storming embassies. They don’t understand that you are still a soldier, and it comes as quite a shock to them to find out what Selection is all about.
The one good thing about Winter Selection is the weather. The racing snakes who can move like men possessed across country in the summer are slowed by the snow and mist. It’s a great leveller for every man to be up to his waist in snow.
I passed.
After this first phase you are put through a four-month period of training which includes an arduous spell in the jungle in Asia. The last main test is the Combat Survival course. You are taught survival skills for two weeks, and then sent in to see the doctor. He puts a finger up your arse to check for Mars bars and you’re turned loose on the Black Mountains dressed in Second World War battledress trousers and shirt, a greatcoat with no buttons, and boots with no laces. The hunter force was a company of Guardsmen in helicopters. Each man was given the incentive of two weeks’ leave if he made a capture.
I had been on the run for two days accompanied by three old grannies – two Navy pilots and an RAF loadmaster. You had to stay together as a group, and I couldn’t have been cursed with a worse trio of millstones. It didn’t matter for them, the course was just a three-week embuggerance and then they’d go home for tea and medals. But if SAS candidates didn’t pass Combat Survival they didn’t get badged.
We were waiting for one particular RV when the two on stag fell asleep. In swooped a helicopter full of Guardsmen and we were bumped. After a brief chase we were captured and taken to a holding area.
Some hours later, as I was down on my knees, my blindfold was removed and I found myself looking up at the training sergeant-major.
‘Am I binned?’ I said pitifully.
‘No, you nugget. Get back on the helicopter and don’t fuck up.’
I’d caught him in a good mood. An ex-Household Division man himself, he was delighted to see his old lot doing so well.
For the next phase was on my own, which suited me fine. Our movement between RVs was arranged in such a way that everybody was captured at the end of the E&E (escape and evasion) phase and subjected to tactical questioning. You are taught to be – and you always try to be – the grey man. The last thing you want is to be singled out as worthy of further questioning. I didn’t find this stage particularly hard because despite the verbal threats nobody was actually filling you in, and you knew that nobody was going to. You’re cold and wet and hungry, uncomfortable as hell, but it’s just a matter of holding on, physically rather than mentally. I couldn’t believe that some people threw in their hand during these last few hours.
In the end a bloke came in during one of the interrogations, gave me a cup of soup and announced that it was over. There was a thorough debriefing, because the interrogators can learn from you as well as you from them. The mind does get affected; I was surprised to find that I was six hours out in my estimation of the time.
Next came two weeks of weapon training at Hereford. The instructors looked at who you were and they expected from you accordingly. If you were fresh from the Catering Corps they’d patiently start from scratch; if you were an infantry sergeant they’d demand excellence. Parachute training at Brize Norton was next, and after the rigours of Selection it was more like a month at Butlins.
Back at Hereford after six long, gruelling months, we were taken into the CO’s office one by one. As I was handed the famous sand-coloured beret with its winged dagger he said: ‘Just remember: it’s harder to keep than to get.’
I didn’t really take it in. I was too busy trying not to dance a jig.
The main bulk of the new intake, as usual, was made up of people from the infantry, plus a couple of engineers and signallers. Out of 160 candidates who had started, only eight passed – one officer and seven men.
Officers only serve for a three-year term in the SAS, though they may come back for a second tour. As another rank, I had the full duration of my 22-year army contract to run – in theory, another fifteen years.
We went to join our squadrons. You can say whether you’d like to be in Mountain, Mobility, Boat or Air Troop, and they’ll accommodate you if they can. Otherwise it all depends on manpower shortages and your existing skills. I went to Air.
The four squadrons have very different characters. It was once said that if you went to a nightclub, A Squadron would be the ones along the wall at the back, not saying a word, even to each other, just giving everybody the evil eye. G Squadron would be talking, but only to each other. D Squadron would be on the edge of the dance floor, looking at the women; and B Squadron – my squadron – would be the ones out there on the floor, giving it their all – and making total dickheads of themselves.
Debby came back from Germany to join me in Hereford. She had not seen much of me since I started Selection way back in January, and she wasn’t too impressed that the day after she arrived I was sent back to the jungle for two months of follow-up training. When I returned it was to an empty house. She had packed her bags and gone home to Liverpool.
In December the following year I started going out with Fiona, my next-door neighbour. Our daughter Kate was born in 1987, and in October that year we got married. My wedding present from the Regiment was a two-year job overseas. I came back from that trip in 1990, but in August, just a couple of months after my return, the marriage was dissolved.
In October 1990 I met Jilly. It was love at first sight – or so she told me.
We assembled at 0750 at the OC’s table and headed off together for the briefing area. Everybody was in a jovial mood. We had a stainless-steel flask each and the world’s supply of chocolate. It was going to be a long day, and saving time on refreshment breaks would allow us to get on with more important matters.
I was still feeling chuffed to have been made patrol commander and to be working with Vince. Approaching his last two years of service with the Regiment, Vince was 37 and a big old boy, immensely strong. He was an expert mountaineer, diver and skier, and he walked everywhere – even up hills – as if he had a barrel of beer under each arm. To Vince, everything was ‘fucking shit’, and he’d say it in the strongest of Swindon accents, but he loved the Regiment and would defend it even when another squadron member was having a gripe. The only complaint in his life was that he was approaching the end of his 22 years’ engagement. He had come from the Ordnance Corps, and looked rough in a way that most army people would expect a member of the Regiment to look rough, with coarse, curly hair and sideboards and a big moustache. Because he’d been in the Regiment a bit longer than I had, he was going to be a very useful man to have around when it came to planning.
The briefing area, we discovered, was in another hangar. We were escorted through a door marked NO UNAUTHORIZED PERSONNEL. As a regiment we were in isolation, but the briefing area was isolation within isolation. OPSEC (operational security) is crucial. Nobody in the Regiment would ever ask anybody else what he was doing. As unwritten rules go, that one is in red ink, capital letters, and underlined. Doors either side of us were labelled AIR PLANNING, D SQUADRON, INT CORPS, MAP STORE. There was nothing fancy about the signs; they were A4 sheets of paper pinned to the door.
The atmosphere in this building was markedly different. It was clinical and efficient, with the ambient hiss and mush of radio transmissions in the background. Intelligence Corps personnel, known to us as ‘spooks’ or ‘green slime’, moved from room to room with bundles of maps in their arms, being meticulous about closing doors behind them. Everybody spoke in low voices. It was an impressive hive of professional activity.
We knew many of the spooks by name, having worked with them in the UK.
‘Morning, slime,’ I called out to a familiar face. ‘How’s it going?’
I got a mouthed word and a jerk of the wrist in return.
The place had no windows and felt as though it had been derelict for a long time. There was an underlying smell of mustiness and decay. On top of that were the sort of ordinary office smells you’d get anywhere – paper, coffee, cigarettes. But this being what we called a remf (rear echelon mother-fucker) establishment and early in the morning, there was also a strong smell of soap, shaving foam, toothpaste and aftershave.
‘Morning, remfs!’ Vince greeted them with his Swindon accent and a broad grin. ‘You’re fucking shit, you are.’
‘Fucking shit yourself,’ a spook replied. ‘Could you do our job?’
‘Not really,’ Vince said. ‘But you’re still a remf.’
The B Squadron room was about five metres square. The ceiling was very high, with a slit device at the top that gave the only ventilation. Four tables had been put together in the centre. Silk escape maps and compasses were laid out on top.
‘Freebies, let’s have them,’ Dinger said.
‘Never mind the quality, feel the width,’ said Bob, one of Vince’s gang.
Bob, all 5′2″ of him, was of Swiss–Italian extraction and known as the Mumbling Midget. He’d been in the Royal Marines but wanted to better himself, and had quit and taken a gamble on passing Selection. Despite his size he was immensely strong, both physically and in character. He always insisted on carrying the same load as everybody else, which at times could be very funny – all you could see was a big bergen (back pack) and two little legs going at it like pistons underneath. At home, he was a big fan of old black and white comedies, of which he owned a vast collection. When he was out on the town, his great hobbies were dancing and chatting up women a foot taller than himself. On the day we left for the Gulf, he’d had to be rounded up from the camp club in the early hours of the morning.
We looked at the maps, which dated back to the 1950s. On one side was Baghdad and surroundings, on the other Basra.
‘What do you reckon, boys?’ said Chris, another from Vince’s team, in his broad Geordie accent. ‘Baghdad or Basra?’
A spook came in. I knew Bert as part of our own intelligence organization in Hereford.
‘Got any more of these?’ Mark asked. ‘They’re fucking nice.’
Typical Regiment mentality: if it’s shiny, I want it. You don’t even know what a piece of equipment does sometimes, but if it looks good you take it. You never know when you might need it.
There were no chairs in the room, so we just sat with our backs against the wall. Chris produced his flask and offered it around. Good-looking and softly-spoken, Chris had been involved with the Territorial SAS as a civilian when he decided he wanted to join the Regiment proper. For Chris, if a job was worth doing it was worth doing excellently, so in typical fashion he signed up first with the Paras because he wanted a solid infantry background. He moved to Hereford from Aldershot as soon as he’d reached his intended rank of lance-corporal and had passed Selection.
If Chris had a plan, he’d see it through. He was one of the most determined, purposeful men I’d ever met. As strong physically as he was mentally, he was a fanatical bodybuilder, cyclist and skier. In the field he liked to wear an old Afrika Korps peaked cap. Off duty he was a real victim for the latest bit of biking or skiing technology, and wore all the Gucci kit. He was very quiet when he joined the Regiment, but after about three months his strength of character started to emerge. Chris was the man with the voice of reason. He’d always be the one to intervene and sort out a fight, and what he said always sounded good even when he was bullshitting.
‘Let’s get down to business,’ the OC said. ‘Bert’s going to tell you the situation.’