Chris Ryan (18 page)

terms I was making a good re�covery, but the psychological damage I had suffered ran deeper than I realised. Bit by bit, we pieced together what had happened to the rest of the patrol. I'd only been home about three days when Stan phoned and came round to our house. He said the worst thing he'd ever done in his life was to ignore my warn�ings in the wadi. He apologised for having been an idiot, and promised that if ever we found ourselves in a tight corner again, he'd do what I told him. After he had left me, he told me now, he walked for about four hours with the goatherd. Towards evening they sighted a small group of buildings, with vehicles outside them. The Arab pointed to them, and Stan went down on his own. As he arrived, an Arab in a fine-looking white dishdash came out of the building, heading for a Toyota land-cruiser. Stan tried to engage him in friendly chat, but the man made a dive for the vehicle. Thinking he might have a gun there, Stan fired a single shot through the window and dropped him. The report brought about eight militiamen, armed with AK 242 The One That Got Away 47s, hurtling out of the building, and a firefight broke out. Stan dropped the first, and the second, but then his ammu�nition ran out, so he leaped into the vehicle. The key was on the floor, under the body of the first Arab, but before he could start the engine the windscreen smashed in on him and a weapon was stuck into his face. Guys dragged him out and were immediately on top of him � so that was him cap�tured. After what he described as 'an incredible display of un�controlled firing into the air', the militiamen bundled him into another car and drove him into the nearest town. At first he was treated well, given tea, and questioned by relatively civilised officers who spoke good English; but later he was kept blindfolded, starved, and beaten so badly that he sus�tained a depressed fracture of the skull. His cover-story, about being a medic on board a chopper on a rescue mission, held longer than anybody else's. In par�ticular, he said he was a dentist � which he was � so that when the Iraqis actually brought patients in to him, he was able to look at their mouths and give a diagnosis that was completely plausible. One of the interrogators then asked him where he had worked in London � and when he gave the number of some orderly room, the Iraqis went so far as to ring it to find out if the details were genuine. Early in February he was moved to a basecamp near Baghdad and reunited in a cell with Andy and Dinger. Of course Stan and I indulged in a lot of speculation: if we'd done this, if we'd done that; if we'd stayed together; if we'd walked down the railway line. In fact, if there'd been two of us, I think we'd both have been captured. Lonely as it was to be on my own, I was probably better off. Psycho�logically it was bad, but physically it was safer. There was only one person to hide, one made less noise than two, and there was no chance that the pair of us would talk ourselves into doing something stupid. On my own, I was more careful than I might have been with a partner. If there'd been two of us, we probably would have broken into a house in search of food, and that might have led to our capture. Being alone Counting The Cost 243 was what saved me. That said, I would have given anything for a companion. Happily, Stan made a full recovery. He'd had a hell of a battering, but his equable character seemed to enable him to bounce quickly back to normal. Thinking over his final fire-fight, he realised it had been Vince's weapon that he was using, and Vince could never have reloaded with a full magazine � which would have held up to thirty rounds �after the initial contact. We assumed that after he had been captured, the goatherd must have come down to the build�ings where the firefight took place, told the militia that there was a second runaway out in the wadi, and directed the party that came in search of me. After our return to the UK, Stan and I remained on close terms. Andy was a different matter. When he got back, he didn't seem to want to make contact. Several times I phoned his house in Hereford, but I always spoke to his girlfriend, and he never returned my calls. That seemed strange to me. I couldn't make out why he was being so stand-offish. It was as if he didn't want to come round and face me. It was inevitable that we would meet sooner or later. Sure enough, on one of our first days back at work, we bumped into each other in the OC's office on the squadron. When I saw him, I went, 'Hey!' and he just looked up and nodded. There was no handshake, no 'Glad to see you back' or any�thing like that. I was disappointed that a mate of mine could behave in that way, and I could only put it down to jealousy and the fact that I'd got away while he was caught. There�after, we'd talk about it if we were thrown together, but we never met for a drink to shoot the shit. To me it was pretty sad that anyone could carry on in a way so alien to the spirit of the Regiment, which values companionship and loyalty above everything. A psychiatrist who had us all in for a talk told us that after what we'd been through together, we'd re�main very close to each other � and indeed his words applied to everyone except Andy. As to the reason why the patrol originally broke in two �that was never satisfactorily explained. What happened, un�beknown to me, was that Andy, who was four back down the 244 The One That Got Away column, heard a jet overhead, and immediately went down on one knee in an attempt to contact the pilot on his TACBE, calling out to Vince ahead of him, 'Go to ground!' He was so busy trying to raise the pilot that he didn't realise Vince had never heard his call, and had carried on. The rest of the guys, who had gone down behind Andy, were all watching their arcs, as they should have been, so that they noticed nothing either. Up front, I'd heard nothing. How I missed the sound of an aircraft, I can't imagine � it was the one noise we were all longing to hear. Whatever the reason, I'd gone on walking as hard as I could. Whenever I glanced over my shoulder, I saw Stan behind me, and Vince behind him, and I never had an inkling that anything was amiss. Then again, how we be�came so widely separated we've never managed to work out. Andy told me that after trying to contact the aircraft he'd heard, his party saw movement up ahead. As they went to ground and watched, three figures came walking across their front. His own guys weren't sure if the men were friend or foe, but they assumed they were an Iraqi patrol and didn't challenge them, letting them disappear into the night. In any case, the five picked themselves up and started walking to the north-west, and when dawn came they laid up for the day in the lee of a mound, where they destroyed the encrypting unit for the radio � no easy task, as it was in a soldier-proof metal casing. They also burnt their code book. Because they had no use for Stan's Minimi, they stripped it into pieces and scattered the parts over a wide area of desert. Luckily for them, they had ignored the orders for main�taining hard routine � no cooking or smoking � and they'd all brought brew-kits, so that they were able to make them�selves hot drinks. Even so, because of the snow, rain, wind and bitter cold, Mark began going down with exposure, so the group decided to risk a daylight move. They got up and made good progress until they reached a main road, where they planned to hijack a vehicle. With Bob playing the part of a wounded man, and leaning on Andy's shoulder, they flagged down a car which turned Counting The Cost 245 out to be a taxi. As it stopped, the other three came up out of cover and surrounded it. Evicting the driver and two other passengers, they took one man with them, because he looked so scared that they thought he might help, and set off westwards along the highway. All went well until they reached a VCP. Some way short of it they got out of the car, having � as they thought � arranged with their driver that he would drive through the control and pick them up on the other side. In fact he shopped them, and they had to take to the desert, boxing the VCP on foot. Back on the MSR further west, they tried to pull the same wounded-man dodge again, but all the drivers were going, as Andy put it, 'like madmen', and three successive attempts failed. Leaving the road again, and moving north towards the Euphrates, they found themselves in an area of habi�tation. By then they reckoned they were only ten kilometres from the river; but behind them military vehicles began to pull up on the highway, and troops poured out and opened fire. The rounds went well over them, but then three or four anti-aircraft guns opened up as well. On the whole this was helpful, as it made locals think an air-raid was in progress, and put them into shelter. From a high point the patrol saw that the town of Krabilah was in fact joined up with Abu Kamal, and that the built-up area extended right across the border. Reaching the bank of the Euphrates, they took a fix with their Magellan, and this confirmed that they were only ten kilometres from the frontier. By then it was dark. They considered trying to cross the river, but concluded that the risk of going down with exposure was too high. In the end they decided to keep heading west, with the hope of reaching the border that night. Inevitably, they came on enemy positions; contacts en�sued, and the firing brought all the defenders to a high state of alert. Creeping, crawling, working their way forward through ploughed fields and along hedges, they made slow progress. Andy, Mark and Bob had a contact during which Bob got split off and ended up in a contact of his own, when 246 The One That Got Away he held the Iraqis off for thirty minutes, single handed, before he was shot and killed outright. To have defended himself like that for half an hour, against a force of maybe a dozen Iraqis, was one hell of a feat. At the end, I feel certain, he must have run out of rounds. God knows how many Ira�qis he took out: a lot, I know. After the war he was awarded a posthumous Military Medal. With Bob cut off on his own, Mark got shot in the arm and ankle, and he and Andy split up. In the end Andy was cap�tured only a couple of kilometres from the border � and he must have been somewhere very close to the line of my own route. Legs and Dinger, on their own now, went towards the Euphrates, but soon ran on to another enemy position. Sud�denly they heard a weapon cocked, and something shouted in Iraqi, from only ten metres ahead. They let fly a hail of automatic fire from the 203 and Minimi, and received only half a dozen rounds in return. Pulling back, they retreated to the river bank. By then enemy were closing on them from the east, firing occasional bursts. Finding a canoe moored to the bank, they tried to release its chain but could not manage it, and slipped into the water, planning to swim across. Soon they came to land again, only to find that they were on a spit or island, with the main channel still to cross. Only 200 metres upstream, a big road-bridge spanned the whole Euphrates. They could see several vehicles parked on it, and numerous people, some shining flashlights down on to the water. Elsewhere, intermittent firing kept breaking out. After waiting an hour, during which they became in�creasingly cold, they decided their only option was to swim the second channel. Luckily Legs had found a polystyrene box, and they broke this into pieces, which they stuffed into the fronts of their smocks to increase their buoyancy. Then they waded out and swam. The water was icy, the current strong; they found it hard to make progress, and had to let go their weapons. Legs, who was going down with hypothermia, began to fail. When he fell back, Dinger got hold of him and towed him on. Counting Counting The Cost 247 Reaching the far bank, Dinger dragged him out, only to realise that he had become incoherent, and could not walk. Daylight revealed a small tin pump house some fifteen metres from the shore. Dinger pulled Legs into it, but he was so far gone that he kept trying to crawl back into the river. Inside the shelter Dinger lit his remaining hexi-block and brewed up a cup of hot water, hoping it would revive his companion. Legs, however, was making no sense, and in�stead of drinking the hot water, he hit the mug away. When the sun rose, Dinger dragged him out into it, in the hope that it would warm and dry him, but he was too far gone; his skin remained cold, and his eyes flickered meaninglessly back and forth. When farmers appeared and started to work in the fields, Dinger pulled him back into the hut. Then at mid-morning a man with some children in tow came within ten metres of the pump house. Seeing that he was about to be com�promised, Dinger showed himself to the farmer, whose response was to lock the two fugitives in and run off shout�ing. By that time Legs' smock was dry, but he was slipping into unconsciousness. Clearly he could not move, so Dinger burst his way through the roof of the but and made off towards the north, away from the river, in the hope that he'd pull the enemy away from Legs and give him a chance to re�cover. Almost immediately he was spotted and followed by a posse of locals, who soon swelled into a crowd. He tried to do a runner, but was caught by the mob, one of whom pro�posed to cut off one of his ears. The guy was actually holding his ear when he managed to bring out one of his sovereigns. The people fought over that, but then realised he had more, and he started handing them out, which cooled them down. Then they walked him into a village, where the people went wild and beat him to the ground before he was handed over to the police. While in the police station, Dinger saw Legs being brought in on a stretcher. He was quickly cross-loaded into an ambulance and driven away, but although Dinger watched closely, he saw no movement, and feared that his companion was already dead. So ended a gallant escape attempt. 248 The One That Got Away By the next night, when I had my own contact and made the Euphrates, the survivors were in gaol, and being questioned by officers who'd been through Sandhurst. But the Iraqis had evolved their own kind of interrogation tech�niques. All the survivors were brutally beaten for several days, partly in the course of interrogation, partly by their guards, who hit them casually whenever they saw a chance. Even Mark was beaten between operations on his wounded ankle. The Iraqis were greatly agitated by their belief that the prisoners were Israelis, and when Andy tried to convince them that he was not by showing them his foreskin, they were astonished. Our guys stuck to their story of being a medical team for as long as possible, and then fell back
on controlled release of real information. Back in the UK, I was glad that I had been tortured by weather, thirst and hunger rather than by human beings. But all of us had suffered, and all reacted in different ways. Stan bounced back quickly. So did Andy. The worst affected was Dinger. I believe he felt exactly as I felt � that all he wanted was to be back with the guys, working among them. But because he'd appeared on CNN television news, the head-shed decided that his security was blown, and sent him off to a safe house in the middle of Wales. That was the last thing he wanted. It was as if he'd been transferred from one prison straight to another, and soon he was desperate for company. He phoned me and said, 'Chris � for Christ's sake come up and see me, or get the guys over. I'm cracking up here.' I went into the Squadron and asked if we could go, but they said, 'No visitors. No one's to go up.' So I had some long chats with Dinger on the phone, and got his version of events. It took him a long time to recover. For a year, at least, he remained very emotional, and to me he looked like a lost boy, on the point of panic. Because the press found out where he lived, and took to hanging about outside, he had to move to a less nice house. But eventually he settled down again. As for me � I tried to persuade myself that all was well, Counting The Cost 249 and when the psychiatrist asked if everything was all right, I just said, 'Fine.' `Sleeping all right?' `Fine.' In fact I was still being troubled by the same recurrent nightmare. But if I wanted to talk about it to anyone, I pre�ferred to talk to Jan, to my mother, my father or my brother, rather than to someone who didn't know me. One day I was lying in bed at about eleven in the morning, when I got a telephone call from the guy who had been Vince's next-door neighbour. 'Chris,' he said, 'the family's all here waiting for you to come round. They've asked me to make contact with you. I'll come and pick you up.' `Is the CO and everybody there?' I asked him. `I think so, yes.' `OK,' I said. 'I'll get ready.' A few minutes later I was there, but I found that the only other outsider present was the CO's wife. As soon as I walked into the room, she stood up and legged it. I was left with Vince's Mum, his Dad, his widow and three of his brothers. Everybody was looking at me, and I was looking at them. It was a horrible feeling, to have to sit and tell them the story. The father said, 'You've come round to tell us what hap�pened.' `Yeah, OK. D'you want me to tell you, and then you tell the family � because it's quite distressing?' The man went, 'No � just tell us all together.' Until then the Regiment had said, 'You don't tell anyone anything about what happened on this patrol. There's nothing to come out.' Well � I was there, and I thought, `Bollocks � I'm going to start from the beginning.' So I sat down with them and told the story. I left out some details about Vince not wanting to be there, and just said he had died of exposure during our second night on the run. The family were pretty stunned. I hardly knew what to say, because I was in a difficult position. One of the brothers turned round and said, 'How come you didn't die, then?' 250 The One That Got Away I said, 'Well, I was lucky. Exposure can take you at dif�ferent times.' `But my brother was really strong,' he protested. 'He'd worked in the snow loads of times and survived.' I don't blame them for wanting an explanation. But I legged it as soon as I could. The Iraqis had returned the bodies of all the dead men, and five or six days later we had the funerals. It was a har�rowing occasion for everyone, as we'd all lost close friends or relatives. The survivors of the patrol gathered together�and then Vince's father and brothers came across towards us. When one of the brothers accused me of not telling the truth about Vince, I took a deep breath and walked away. Andy McNab grabbed the man and said, 'Just watch your mouth. That's enough.' I knew why the brother had thought that: some newspaper had reported that Vince had been captured and tortured by Iraqis, so that everything had become confused. I think the family had had this image of a super-hero � someone who could never be taken, who was indestructible. It was difficult for them to believe that two of the patrol had frozen to death in the desert. Then everything died down until about three months later. One evening I was in a bar with my wife and I saw this man come in. I said to Jan, 'Jesus, I know that guy, but I can't think who he is.' The fellow kept staring across at me. I thought he looked like an old-time Regiment guy. Then I realised: it was Vince's father, together with the brother who had challenged me. By then the inquest had taken place. We'd all had to go to Oxford and give evidence from behind a screen. A pathol�ogist had given his report � but the family had never seen Vince's body. So anyway the father came up to us in this bar and said, 'Chris, I need to talk to you.' I thought, 'If the brother says anything, I'm going to drop him.' For a moment I stood there looking � but Jan must have seen my reaction, because she came straight over. The father said, 'Listen � did you tell me the truth about Vince?' Counting The Cost 251 `Yes,' I said. 'I've nothing to hide. In my heart of hearts, I know he died that night.' `Well � you said Vince died on 25 January. I've just been up to the Regimental graveyard, and on his plaque they've got him dying a month later.' `That's got to be wrong, then,' I said. 'I can give you my word it was that second night.' I could see that the father was really distressed. As far as he was concerned, things didn't add up. No wonder he thought a cover-up had been staged. I knew 'A' Squadron was having a party up in the camp, and knew there would be someone there who could confirm my story � so I offered to take father and son straight up. Jan came with us. We jumped into a taxi and legged it up towards the camp. On the way I made the driver stop at the regimental plot and wait while I ran in and looked at the stone. Sure enough, the dates were wrong, not just for Vince, but for all three of them, Bob and Legs as well. Someone had made a terrible cock-up. I took Vince's people into the club, got hold of the ser�geant major and told him what had happened. He promised to sort it out, confirmed the real dates, and apologised to Vince's family. Next morning I went in and told the Fami�lies' Officer � and in due course they got new gravestones and changed the plaques. Some aspects of the aftermath were less gloomy. As I was walking through the camp one day, the Quartermaster � who'd been the RSM when I passed Selection � shouted across at me, 'Hey, Chris � come 'ere!' In his office he said, 'What happened to your sovereigns?' `Oh,' I said, 'I lost them during the contact.' `Well � I've got a list of the kit you lost during the contact, and you must have had a bergen the size of a bloody cara�van.' 'Wh' Y- `Look at this.' The list was a mile long, a complete farce. It included things like mountaineering boots and a Lacon box � a big 252 The One That Got Away metal container. What I didn't realise was that the SQMS had written off mountains of stuff without telling me. `This includes everything I took to the Gulf when we went out,' I said. 'Not what I had in my bergen. When I got back to Victor, the Lacon box had gone missing and I'd lost the lot.' `All right,' he said. 'Write me a note saying how you lost your sovereigns, and we'll forget about the rest.' In fact I had distributed the remaining sovereigns to those who I thought most deserved them � the other survivors of the patrol and members of my family. With 'B' Squadron settled back in Hereford, Jan and I threw a party at home. Somehow 110 people crammed themselves into the house, and at one point the OC sighted my escape map, by then framed on the wall, with three sovereigns mounted in the surround. `Chris,' he said. 'I thought you'd lost them all.' `Yes,' I said. `Well � you've got three up there. You shouldn't do that . . `Yeah � right!' And that was the end of it. twelve WASH-UP Only six weeks after the squadrons returned to Hereford, there took place the Regiment's 50th anniversary celebrations. Unfortunately the founder, David Stirling, had recently died, but many veterans of the Second World War took part in the festivities, and everyone said how strange but also satisfactory it was that in Iraq the SAS had reverted to its original role as a long-range desert group, operating heavily-armed, motorised patrols in enemy-held territory. We owed the fact that the patrols were deployed to General de la Billiere's enthusiasm for Special Forces, and to his understanding of their capabilities. But it was largely luck that the SAS played such a crucial role. DLB had been advocating their insertion for general intelligence-gathering purposes, but as it turned out, their arrival in the Western Desert abruptly cut off the stream of Scud missiles which Saddam Hussein was directing at Israel, and so, by a hair's breadth, kept Israel out of the war. If she had come in, the results would almost certainly have been disastrous, because some or all of the Arab nations would have refused to fight alongside Israeli forces, and the coalition would have disintegrated before the ground war began. The role Special Forces played in the war was, therefore, outstanding. All the same, to lose three out of eight men in one patrol was a severe blow to the Regiment, and the disaster led to various internal reforms. Oddly enough, the survivors of Bravo Two Zero were never brought together for a formal debriefing: instead, we were all asked to write reports of what had happened, and these were collated at regimental level. I also had to give a five-minute talk to the Regiment as a whole. In retrospect, it was clear that shortages of ammunition and F equipment had had little material effect on the outcome of 254 The One That Got Away events. They had worried us, certainly, but they had not con�tributed to the patrol being compromised. The most serious deficiency lay in our maps, which were totally inadequate, and in the lack of accurate intelligence about the physical nature of the area into which we were deployed. If we'd known there was no sand, we would obviously have made some alternative plan. Another fact which became clear was that we should have compiled a formal written E & E plan before we deployed. If we'd done that, and made it clear that in the event of trouble we were going to head for Syria, we'd have had a much better chance of being picked up by the searching helicopters. It was also clear that we seriously over estimated the capabilities of our TACBEs � and the fact that we were given the wrong radio frequencies was simply a mistake, probably due to the speed at which we had to prepare. As to the way the patrol split, I see no point in blaming anyone. It was just something that happened, at a moment when we were all under maximum stress. In Hereford, together with the Int Officer and a decent map, I worked out the exact distances I had walked. On the first night, before and after the split, we covered 70 kilometres. On the second night Stan and I made forty, losing Vince in the middle. On the third I walked another forty to reach the Euphrates. The fourth night was the most frustrating, as I had to cover forty kilometres in zig-zags and boxes to make only ten towards the border. On the fifth night I advanced thirty kilo�metres and then did another five or six during the day, up into the wadis. The sixth night took me into and out of the nuclear refinery � another thirty. The last and most terrible night I did between forty and fifty � most of them unnecessarily. The total came to 290, or just under 200 miles. I found that people were beginning to compare my escape with that of Jack Sillito, who trekked for more than 100 miles through the Western Desert of North Africa in 1942, having been stranded behind German lines. In spite of the fact that all members of the SAS are supposed to know their regimental history, I must confess that I had never heard of Sillito until somebody pointed out his name in a 50th-anniversary account Wash-up 255 of the Regiment by the cartoonist Jak. Without realising it, I had easily beaten Sillito's distance, walking nearly twice as far. But in fact the two escapes were made in widely different cir�cumstances. Whereas my main enemy was cold, his was heat, and he had no river to give him water or guide him. Instead, he navigated by sun and stars, and scrounged liquid from con�densation in abandoned jerricans. At the end of June I heard the good news that in the Gulf War honours list I had been awarded the Military Medal. Many of my SAS colleagues also received decorations, and the tributes to the Regiment which flowed in were enough to make anyone feel proud. In a personal letter to General de la Billiere, General Norman Schwarzkopf described the performance of 22nd SAS as 'courageous and highly profes�sional'. He recorded that the activities of 'A' and 'ID' Squadrons, combined with those of Delta Force 'A' Squad�ron, had convinced the enemy that in Western Iraq they were facing forces more than ten times the size of the units actually on the ground. He also stressed the very high value of the briefings which SAS personnel gave to the US Special Forces before they were deployed, and said that if it had not been for these 'thorough indoctrinations', the Americans would have suffered many more casualties. I myself received several flattering letters from senior officers. 'Your personal bravery, sound judgement and quite outstanding resolve were an example to all SAS soldiers,' wrote Field Marshal Lord Bramall, former Chief of the Defence Staff, and by then Colonel Commandant of the SAS. `Your escape is a classic of its kind, and worthy of national re�cognition.' At the end of the typewritten letter the Field Marshal added in his own hand: 'What a feat of courage and endurance. Well done indeed.' The Director of the SAS wrote in similar terms, saying that my escape 'more than proves that our E & E training is fully justified'. Another stirring tribute came from Colonel J.A. McGregor, who wrote on behalf of the Parachute Regiment to say that 'undoubtedly Airborne Forces are very proud of your dedication and professionalism, and you will certainly inspire 256 The One That Got Away others to follow in your footsteps'. Yet for me the most pleasing of all was a note from General de la Billiere, thanking me for my 'personal support' while under his command, and saying how delighted he was that my operational work had been recognised by the Queen. Later, in a presentation copy of Storm Command, his book about the GulfWar, he wrote, 'You have personally made SAS history.' For us