CHAPTER 3
Insertion
As soon as we landed back, the guys started stripping their kit to try to save weight. Out went luxuries like sleeping bags and most of our warm clothes. We realized that the weather was much colder than at Victor, but our bergens were so heavy that the only way we could get them on was to sit down, settle the straps over our shoulders, and have a couple of the other guys pull us to our feet, as if they were lifting knights in armour onto their chargers.
I became obsessed with the need for ammunition. Pressured by the thought that we were going to be on our own behind enemy lines, I left food out of my belt-kit in favour of more rounds. Normally I carried twenty-four hours’ worth of rations in a belt-pouch — enough to spread over four days — but I reckoned that if we did get compromised, I could reach the Syrian border in two nights. All I would need on me in that case would be two packets of AB (army issue biscuits). So I put the bulk of the food into my bergen — resisting the temptation to overload on food — and filled my belt-kit with extra ammunition. Altogether I had twelve magazines of twenty-eight rounds each, and also about ninety loose rounds, including a few armour-piercing, which I’d brought from Hereford.
One of the items I threw out was my brew-kit: tea bags, sachets of coffee, orange powder, sugar and the fuel — inflammable hexi-blocks. We were going in on hard routine, which meant no cooking and no fires, so I thought I would have no chance to use anything like that. Another serious omission was puritabs, for sterilizing water. If we’d been going into the jungle, where you use local water all the time, I’d certainly have taken some. But I thought that in the desert we’d be drinking out of jerry cans; it never occurred to me that I might have to rely on the River Euphrates. Certainly we wouldn’t risk drinking from wells: there seemed a good chance that wells might have been poisoned.
The atmosphere in the patrol remained tense but cheerful. We kept asking for satellite pictures of the area where we were heading, and in the end some did arrive. They were of poor quality, but they suggested we were right to leave our vehicles behind, since they showed that the desert was extremely flat and open. What we didn’t realize, because we weren’t properly instructed about these particular images, was that we were reading the imagery upside-down, mistaking low ground for high ground, wadis for ridges and so on.
Our second departure was set for the evening of Tuesday 22 January 1991. Before we left, we had a big meal of fresh food. Then came last-minute checks as we went through all our pockets to make sure that we were carrying no scrap of paper that would give away who we were or where we came from. The only identification I had on me was a pair of metal discs slung on a chain round my neck. These bore my name, army number, blood group and religion (Church of England). To stop them clinking, I’d covered them in black masking tape. I’d taped a good- luck talisman on each disc. One was a new five-pence piece given to me by my mother-in-law, to accompany her Christmas present of a Samurai sword (the Japanese reckon it’s bad luck to give a sword without a coin). The other was a big old British penny which I’d found lying head-up in the sand of the training area near the camp at Victor. It must have been dropped there by a Brit many years earlier. I remembered the old saying:
This time all three Bravo patrols were deploying at the same time, in two Chinooks. Because we were sharing our air transport with half of Bravo Three Zero, and they were due to drop off first, we hauled our own gear to the front of the fuselage, leaving room for four guys, their kit and two Land Rovers at the back. The chopper was so full that the pilot had to taxi it like a fixed-wing aircraft in order to get it off the ground. Then, as he had it rolling, the tail came up a bit and we lifted away.
The noise in the back was horrendous: the roar of the engines, backed by the thudding of the rotor, made normal conversation impossible. But a few headsets, plugged into the intercom system, made it possible to listen to the pilots talking. When we landed to refuel at Arar, the pilot shut down his engines, and I sat there thinking,
By then darkness had fallen, and we’d flown for only a few minutes when the pilot came on the intercom. ‘Congratulations, guys,’ he said. ‘We’ve just crossed the border. You’re now in Iraq.’
To keep under the radar, we were flying only ten or twenty metres off the ground. I took my hat off to the pilots, who were prepared to go into hostile airspace so lightly armed. Apart from our own weapons, the only armaments on board were two SA80 automatic rifles which the loadies could fire through the portholes. SA80s are poor-quality, unreliable weapons at the best of times. We’d told the pilots that if we were attacked when we landed, we would handle the firefight.
In my headphones I suddenly heard the pilot start shouting. A surface-to-air missile site had locked onto us. With such a heavy load, no violent evasive tactics were possible; he lowered the chopper and with great skill hovered less than a metre above the desert. He had chaff, which he could fire off if necessary to confuse incoming missiles, but I felt quite scared knowing that I wasn’t in charge of my own destiny.
We seemed to hover for ever. I looked out through one of the portholes and was appalled to see how bright the moonlight was. The desert looked totally flat, without cover anywhere. Then after a minute or two we lifted again and carried on.
In my head I ran over the rations that I’d chosen and stowed in my bergen. I knew from experience that when you’re sitting around in an OP, boredom makes you want to eat. But I’d restricted myself to a daily ration of one main meal, two packets of biscuits, and some fruit like pineapple or pears in syrup. The main meals were boil- in-the-bag — things like beef stew, chicken and pasta, pasta and meatballs, bacon and beans. They were pre- cooked and sealed in tough silver-foil sachets, which you could roll up and squash down.
As for personal kit, I was dressed, like the rest of the guys, in regular DPMs (disruptive pattern material combat fatigues). We’d also been issued with lightweight, sand-coloured desert smocks, which unbelievably dated from the Second World War. I had worked my silk escape map into the waistband that held the drawstring of my trousers, and taped the twenty gold sovereigns onto the inside of my belt. On my head I was wearing a German Army cap, and on my feet a pair of brown Raichle Gore-Tex-lined walking boots, with well-insulated uppers and soles. On my hands I had a pair of green aviator’s gloves, made of fine leather. As useful extras I had two shamags. One was very light-coloured, like a biscuit. The other was thicker and altogether more suitable, being oatmeal and purple, with the design favoured by the special forces of Oman.
In my right arm I was cradling my chosen weapon, a 203, which I’d fitted with a makeshift sling made of nylon paracord. Four of the patrol had 203s, and the rest Minimis, depending on how much other weight they were carrying. Since the 203 weighs 10 lb and the Minimi 16 lb, those with less to carry had the machine guns. I, being the patrol medic and saddled with the 12 lb medical pack, had a 203, as did Legs Lane, who had the 30 lb radio. Stan, on the other hand, who was exceptionally strong, had a Minimi. On board the Chinook we kept the rifles loaded, with bullets up the spout and safety catches on, in case of sudden action.
Each of us also had a 66 rocket launcher — a simple, disposable American device that you throw away after firing. In its folded state it looks like a tube, with the rocket pre-packed inside it; you can carry it either slung over your shoulder on a strap or, as I had mine, laid across the top of my bergen, under the flap. When the time comes to fire, all you have to do is pull out the second half of the tube to make a longer barrel, flip up the sight and pull the trigger.
As the chopper clattered on through the night, I was trying to think ahead, mainly about escape and evasion. The Regiment’s official line was that if the patrol was compromised, we should head back towards Saudi Arabia. But since Saudi would be nearly 300 kilometres off, and the Syrian border was only 130 kilometres to the west, we had already decided that if things went wrong, we’d leg it for Syria. That would make obvious sense. The Syrians had announced that if they picked up downed aircrew from any of the Allied nations, they would hand them back to
