tether. That was hardly surprising, as we’d covered the best part of seventy kilometres during the night.
Dawn wasn’t far off. We needed somewhere to hole up for the day and we came across an old tank berm. This was a bank of soil about two metres high, built in the shape of a big U with one end open. A tank could drive into it and be hidden from the other three sides. Just short of it, and leading into it, were two tracks about twenty centimetres wide and ten deep, where a tank had sunk into the ground on its way in or out.
There was no point lying up inside the berm itself. The wind was blowing straight into its wide, open end so that its walls gave no shelter and anyone passing could look in. Equally, we couldn’t lie outside the walls in the lee of the wind, because we’d have been in full view from the other direction. The only shelter from the wind, and at the same time cover from view, was in the tank-ruts outside.
‘We’re going to have to stay here,’ I said, and we lay down in the deepest part of one of the tracks, head to toe. Vince was at one end, I was in the middle and Stan was beyond me. Down flat, we were more or less hidden, but I only had to raise my head a few centimetres to see out. It wasn’t a great place to hide, because if anyone came to visit the berm for any reason, we would be compromised.
While we’d been on the move, the wind hadn’t seemed too cold; but now that we’d stopped, it cut through our thin clothes. That was bad enough, but when daybreak came, the first thing I saw was heavy clouds piling in from the west.
Then I looked in the other direction and saw something square, about 600 metres off. It was either a little building or a vehicle, with antennae poking up out of it, and at least two men around it. This showed how right we’d been to remain alert during the night: here was some small military outpost, miles from anywhere — exactly the sort of place we might have walked onto.
We were separated from the rest of the unit.
We had barely any cover.
We could be discovered at any time.
The elements were against us.
But we had to spend the hours of daylight in this shallow ditch if we wanted any chance of escaping.
CHAPTER 6
Down to Two
It was so cold. The wind came knifing through my DPMs and smock, so I opened my canvas map case and laid it over my legs. I wrapped one shamag round my head, and pulled the other round my shoulders. Even then I was still freezing. But somehow I must have dozed off, because I woke up shaking violently, with what felt like pins and needles in my face. When I opened my eyes, I couldn’t believe it: it was snowing, and we were covered in white.
‘Look at this!’ I exclaimed bitterly. ‘You’d think we were at the North Pole.’ Nobody answered, so I said, ‘Vince, are you all right?’
He grunted something back.
‘Stan, how are you feeling?’
‘Oh, a lot better.’
That lifted me — just to hear him sounding more like himself.
‘Good,’ I said. ‘Well — get something to eat.’ All I had was my biscuits, so I ate two of them, chewing slowly to produce saliva and work them down. Stan and Vince both ate something too.
The worst result of the night — though I didn’t realize it immediately — was that I’d badly hurt my feet. The problem was my socks. They were made of rough grey-brown wool, and because our build-up had been done in such a rush, I’d worn them for four or five days on end before the deployment. By the time we started walking, they were already stiff with sand, dust and sweat — and now, as a result, they’d chewed the sides of my feet into large blisters.
The normal treatment — which we’d used on selection courses — would have been to push a needle into each blister, extract the fluid and inject tinc benzine, or Friar’s Balsam. The process felt as if a red-hot poker had been laid against your foot, but it toughened the underlying skin enough for you to be able to walk on it. Even washing my feet and putting on plasters would have helped. But there, trapped in the tank-track, I couldn’t even take my boots off to inspect the damage, let alone do anything to repair it.
Now and then during the day we saw military-looking vehicles driving in the distance. The snow turned to rain, then back to snow. Our ditch filled with water. The water dissolved the earth into mud, and soon we were wallowing in an icy quagmire. There was mud all over us, over our weapons. But all we could do was lie there in it.
I’d often been cold before, but never as cold as that. I became so frozen that I didn’t even want to move my arm so that I could see my watch, and I asked Stan what the time was. ‘Twelve o’clock,’ was the answer. Was this day ever going to end?
In the tank-ruts, it was impossible to concentrate on anything for long, the discomfort was so intense. The only plus was that Stan seemed to be back to his normal spirits. He’d brought a proper boil-in the-bag meal in his belt-kit, and once he’d got that down him, he was ready to go. Vince, on the other hand, was feeling the cold the worst of any of us. He wasn’t whingeing, but he kept saying, ‘Chris, I can’t feel my fingers. I’m freezing.’
‘So am I,’ I told him. ‘But we can’t do anything, Vince. We can’t move, so we’ve just got to stick it out.’
‘Can’t we cuddle in together?’ Sharing body heat to stave off hypothermia was a good idea but it wasn’t possible right now.
‘Not yet. It’s too dangerous to move.’
The temptation to get up and go, to start moving again, was colossal: anything would be better than enduring this agony. But one of the Regiment’s most basic SOPs is that during escape and evasion you don’t move in daylight. If we were spotted walking, Iraqis would come at us from all sides. Grim as it was, I knew we should stay where we were.
Then, late in the afternoon, Vince worried me by saying, ‘Look — I’m going down here.’
We had to do something. We had to take the risk.
‘What’s the time, Stan?’
‘Four o’clock.’
‘Let’s cuddle in, then.’
Vince and I wriggled further down to where Stan lay, where the track was a bit wider. At that point we were all coming out into the open, but we accepted the danger and lay together, cuddling in for warmth, with me in the middle and the other two on the outsides.
After what seemed an age, I asked again, ‘What’s the time, Stan?’
‘Five past four.’
This was real torture. It seemed like an eternity, lying there caked in freezing mud, with icy water soaking through our clothes. Whenever the snow stopped, the wind would get up and bring on the rain, and then the snow would start again…
At last, at about five-thirty, darkness began to fall, and we decided to crawl inside the berm so that we could shift around and get some feeling back into our bodies. But until we tried to move, we didn’t realize what a state we were in.
My fingers and toes were numb, but that was to be expected. It was when I went to stand up that I really got it: the pain in my knees and back was outrageous. I felt as if I had acute arthritis in my spine and hips. For a moment I was hit by despair.
We dragged ourselves inside the berm and tried to run around, to start the energy going and get some heat moving inside our bodies. But my feet were still numb, and clay had built up on the soles of my boots so I could hardly make any progress. Our hands were so dead that we couldn’t even pick up our weapons — but luckily they had slings, so we ducked down, put our heads through the slings and stood up.
