The One That Got Away - Junior edition

As Vince did so, he said, ‘Chris — I can’t carry my weapon. I just can’t.’

I heard the note of desperation in his voice, so I just said quietly, ‘Stan, you take it for him.’ Stan took Vince’s 203, leaving him with his pistol.

My memories of the next few hours are hazy, because I was being hit by hypothermia. All three of us were. But even though my mind was becoming clouded, I knew we had to keep moving.

‘Right, fellers,’ I said. ‘We’re going to have to start off again.’ So away we went. I was stumbling with my weapon slung over my shoulder and my hands tucked under my arms, trying to get some feeling back into them. I kept thinking, If we have a contact, we’re done for, because we won’t be able to shoot back. I couldn’t have pulled the trigger or changed magazines to save my life.

Then the clouds thickened up. Another flurry of snow drove into our faces, hurtling in from the north-west, and soon we were tabbing over ground as white as on a Christmas card. The blizzard hid us, but we were blinded too and could easily walk onto an enemy position without spotting it.

When the moon came out again, the desert was light as day, and I could read my map without the torch. Vince, who kept falling behind, called, ‘Hey, you’re going to have to slow down. I need a rest.’ Vince was highly- trained, fit, professional and very tough — but the cold was clearly hitting him harder than either Stan or myself.

‘Vince,’ I reminded him, ‘you can’t rest. We’ve got to keep moving, see if we can warm ourselves up.’

But although we were walking hard, we weren’t getting any less cold. Normally, after you’ve walked for an hour, your circulation’s really going, and you’re warm all over. But because our clothes were soaked through, and this bitter wind was blowing, the chill-factor was keeping our body temperature right down. Also, there was no fuel left in me to re-stoke the fires: I’d burned it all up.

I knew that in our state, without warm clothes or shelter or food, we couldn’t survive much longer. In fact, I thought it was likely we would all die that night. I’d never experienced such pain from the cold. In the course of training I’d had plenty of lectures on hypothermia, and now I recognized some of the symptoms in myself: disorientation, dizziness, sudden mood swings, outbursts of anger, confusion, drowsiness. Normally a man in that state would be put into a sleeping bag or a space blanket and brought round — but there was no chance of that out here.

So we kept walking — until Vince really started going down. ‘Wait for me,’ he called. ‘You’ve got to wait…’

We did wait a few times. But then I decided that shock tactics were necessary. I knew that at home he had two young girls and a little baby, and that he was nuts about his family. So I gripped him by the arm and said, ‘Vince, if you don’t keep going, you’re never going to see your kids again. Think about your home. Think how they’ll want you back. Now — get your finger out and start moving.’

‘Listen,’ he said, ‘I want to go to sleep. I’m too tired. I’ve got to sit down.’

‘Vince, we can’t sit down. If we stop, we’re going to die. Get that? If we lie down and sleep, we’ll freeze to death, and never know anything about it.’

We carried on walking for a bit, and then he shouted at me, ‘Chris!’

‘What?’

‘My hands have gone black.’

My first thought was: frostbite. My own fingers were still numb, and I wondered what state my hands were in under my gloves. I walked back to Vince and found him staring down at his hands. He was wearing black leather gloves.

‘My hands have gone black,’ he repeated. ‘My hands!’

I realized his mind was wandering, so I just said, ‘OK, Vince, put them in your pockets. Get them warm, and the colour will come back to them. Come on now: keep up with me and Stan, mate. Keep going.’

At that point I can’t have been thinking straight. What I should have done was to keep hold of him, or actually tie him to me. But that didn’t occur to me, and I just kept walking. Stan and I would move on for a bit, then wait for Vince to catch up. Then the same again. I tried to be sharp with him one moment, kind the next. One minute I’d shout, ‘Get a grip!’ trying to spark him into action. Then I’d become comforting, tap him on the shoulder, and say, ‘Come on, Vince, keep walking. Everything will be all right. We’re going to get out.’

Vince’s behaviour was now swinging wildly. Several times he started yelling out loud — which of course was bad for our nerves, as anybody could have heard him from hundreds of metres off. Stan hissed, ‘Vince — be quiet!’ and he shut up for a while.

Because hypothermia was setting in, our navigation had become erratic. For some time I’d had the feeling that I was drifting away from reality. The map was saying one thing, and what was happening on the ground seemed to be quite different. We wanted to head north-west, but we kept drifting to the north-east. I saw what was happening, and began to wonder — quite illogically — if I had a tendency to head north-east because I’d been born in the north-east of England. It was just the hypothermia talking.

Every few minutes Stan would say, ‘Eh — we’re coming off. We’re coming off.’ Then the clouds would open, and we’d get a glimpse of the Plough, and we could bring ourselves on course again. Then more snow flurries would come in, the stars would be blotted out, and we’d veer off once more.

Struggling as we were, we cracked on for a while — but then, as we stopped once again, we realized that Vince was no longer with us. When Stan shouted back for him, there was no answer. ‘Chris,’ he said, ‘we’ve lost him.’

‘We can’t have,’ I answered. ‘He must be just behind us.’

We started back on our tracks. Naturally I was worried, but I felt bad-tempered about having to retreat. Where snow was lying, it was easy to follow our footprints; but then there were long stretches of bare rock from which the snow had been blown clear. Whenever we crossed one, we had to cast about on the far side, working forward and back to pick up our trail again. Now we realized how much we’d been zigzagging all over the place.

After twenty minutes there was still no sign of Vince. We called as loud as we dared, and we could see a reasonable distance — but I suddenly realized that our quest was hopeless. It was half an hour, at least, since we’d seen him, and we had no idea what he’d done. He might have walked off to the right; he might have walked off to the left; he might be walking straight backwards; he might have lain down in a hollow and gone to sleep. This last seemed the most likely; that was all he’d been wanting to do for hours. If he had curled up somewhere out of the wind, we could spend all night walking in circles and never find him, probably killing ourselves in the process.

‘Stan,’ I said, ‘I’m making a decision. We’re going to turn round and leave him.’ I could feel my companion’s hesitation, so I added, ‘I’ll take the responsibility. We’ve got to leave him, or we’ll kill the pair of us.’

‘OK, then,’ said Stan. ‘Fair enough.’

It was a terrible decision to have to take, but I saw no alternative. We had nowhere to take refuge, nowhere to escape from the wind and snow, nowhere to dry our kit and warm up, nowhere to find food. I felt certain that if conditions were the same in the morning, Stan and I would die as well. There was no way we would resuscitate ourselves with no shelter and absolutely nothing to light a fire with.

So with heavy hearts we turned round and cracked on again, and left Vince on his own.

CHAPTER 7 Looking Back

Our only hope was to get down off the high ground into warmer air, and gradually, as we tabbed on, we did seem to be descending. Not steeply, but it felt as if we were losing height. I hoped to God that Vince was doing the same — that he would reach low ground somewhere, get his head down in a hollow, and wake up in the morning.

Our map showed a line of pylons running across our front, and another line that stopped in the middle of nowhere. We thought that if we hit the first set of masts, and then the second, we’d know exactly where we were. But it didn’t turn out like that. We only hit the one line of masts, and couldn’t find any more. Later we discovered that the second line didn’t exist except on the map.