Eye of the Storm (17 page)

The base at Tawi Atair was fairly large and, besides an airfield, even boasted a field hospital and a permanent doctor, since it was not always possible to fly aircraft in or out during the monsoon if anyone needed emergency treatment. Our supplies came in on a purely haphazard basis, and our mail and newspapers were always a few weeks old.

The troop staff sergeant, also called Taff, was second-in-command of our particular group and, as an antidote to our just sitting there and getting shot at – which seemed to be standard procedure in Dhofar – he would lead us on occasional sorties against the enemy. Sometimes we would be accompanied by the troop commander, Tim, and sometimes Taff alone would lead us, for Tim had absolute, and justified, faith in his troop staff sergeant.

Short, stocky and as hard as nails, if Taff said it was Monday then it was Monday, regardless of what day of the week it actually was. He was not someone you would ever want to mess with. He was, however, a genuine original, and he could be extremely funny. On occasion he would put on a strangled, affected, upper-class-officer’s accent and treat us to the most hilarious briefings – even though what he was actually saying was deadly serious.

‘We are going out on patrol,’ he would announce in his strained, funnel-throated voice (it came out as ‘Weah gaying ite on p’troal’). ‘Now remember, there are two types of fire. There is effective fire, and there is ineffective fire.

‘Ineffective fire is when it goes over your head or hits the ground in front of you. That’s when we keep going. You understand that, chaps? We keep going.

‘Effective fire is when it’s knocking your belt kit off. Then it is right and proper to go to ground. OK? Let’s go, then.’

Our first sortie with Taff came a few days after we had settled in, and on this occasion Tim also came along. Our task was to recce some baits about six or seven kilometres west of our location, which intelligence reports stated were being used by the adoo as places from which to replenish their food and water. Our party consisted of half a dozen of us from the Regiment, one firqat unit and a company of geysh. Because of low cloud and constant drizzle we would have to move to within 300 metres of the suspected enemy’s location if we were to be able to make out anything at all.

That seemed fine in theory, until, having arrived at the enemy position, we were spotted by the adoo, who opened fire. It was only then, as we moved to take cover, that we discovered that our company of geysh had stayed put while we leapfrogged forward – right past the enemy position – and that as a result we had the rebels bottled up between us. We at once began to return their fire, whereupon the adoo took cover in a bait and behind rocks, not yet realizing they were trapped. It was at this point that Taff was seized by an idea.

‘Listen in, lads,’ he said. ‘Billy, you have the machine-gun. Put down covering fire and keep their tiny heads down while Tommy Palmer and I go right flanking.’ Tim seemed happy with the plans, and I set up the GPMG and began to fire short bursts at the adoo position to make sure they didn’t try to break out. Taff, meanwhile, summoned over our Arabic interpreter.

‘Tell the firqat that we are going right flanking,’ he said. ‘Down there to the right. Now.’ The interpreter repeated in Arabic what he had said, whereupon the firqat, almost to a man, replied with some vehemence, ‘Mushtaman, mushtaman,’ which means ‘bad,’ but clearly also meant, ‘no way’.

The firqat’s reaction didn’t seem to faze Taff, however. ‘Right,’ he said, ‘we’ll do this a different way. Tell them Palmer and I will do this alone. Billy, when we get down there I’m going to wave my white handkerchief, which is the signal that I want you to check firing, because it means that we’ll be right on top of the nearest enemy position and we don’t want you bastards shooting us.

‘I’ll judge just how close when I get down there. But I’ll take it to the limit. So don’t carry on firing after I wave my handkerchief. All right?’ I nodded, acknowledging that I had understood him.

‘Now come with me, Tommy,’ Taff ordered, and headed off downhill, the pair of them keeping low as they darted between whatever bits of cover they could find.

By now the firqat had realized Taff was being serious, whereupon the ten of them decided to follow him down, darting between boulders and bushes as they set out for the enemy position. As for me, I just concentrated on pouring 7.62mm rounds into the enemy’s main position. I was lying down, using a bipod, and had a stack of 200-round belts next to me.

Taff crept to within about five metres of the adoo before waving his handkerchief – at which point the troop commander shouted, ‘Check firing! Check firing! They are surrendering.’

‘No they’re not, it’s Taff,’ I yelled back at him. By then, however, Taff and Tommy had opened fire on the adoo with their automatic weapons. The heavy fire at almost point-blank range caught the rebels by surprise – several were just mowed down where they stood.

It was all over after that. Those of the adoo who hadn’t been killed or badly wounded ran for it, simply vanishing into the misty drizzle.

Taff should have been decorated for what he did that day. As it was, he got nothing save a pat on the back from Tim and another from the squadron commander. That was always the way in Dhofar, not least because the presence of the SAS there was still more or less deniable. In May 1980 Tommy Palmer would be one of the stars of the Regiment’s brilliant operation to release the hostages held in the Iranian Embassy in Princes Gate, London, an operation which, more than any other, brought the SAS to wide public notice, and initiated the media’s obsessive interest in the Regiment. Tragically, he was later killed in a car accident.

We took one prisoner, who had been shot in the leg, and carried him on a stretcher back to Tawi Atair. He was only a teenager, and very scared. The adoo used to kill their prisoners, usually by beheading, and this boy must have thought that he was about to suffer the same fate at our hands. His wound was a nasty one, but we got him safely back to base where the regimental doctor, a legendary character renowned for his ability to enjoy himself when off duty, managed to save his leg. When he was well enough and the weather had cleared slightly he was airlifted out and put in prison. Had he surrendered, of course, he would have received the Sultan’s pardon. But this young rebel was too committed to the Marxist cause – or too frightened of reprisals by the adoo.

As if the adoo were not enough, there were also plenty of venomous snakes where we were, although if you kept your hands away from crevices in the sandy walls they tended not to bother you. Nevertheless, it was always a good idea to check inside your sleeping bag before climbing in, and to shake your boots out in the morning before sliding your feet in, in case a scorpion or two had taken a liking to your footwear.

Playing games was one of our chief ways of combating boredom, and we played a lot of scrabble and chess and ludo. Nick and I made a ludo board out of cornflake packets, and we derived more enjoyment from playing that than anything else. Taff, though, was a scrabble enthusiast. It has to be said, however, that he wasn’t a very good player, and he had some peculiar rules which were all his own. Still, playing with our troop staff sergeant was never dull.

During a game one day he put down ‘head’, so when it came to my turn I added ‘round’, forming the word ‘roundhead’.

‘What the hell is that?’ said Taff.

‘“Roundhead,” of course,’ I said.

‘What does it mean?’

‘They were soldiers in the Civil War,’ I told him.

‘
Roundhead
,’ he roared. ‘You’ll be putting down black-head, squarehead and bloody Birkenhead next … Never heard of it,’ he added. ‘Get it off!’ And off it had to go.

On another occasion I put down the word ‘heaven’, whereupon Taff asked, without any irony, ‘What the hell is that?’

‘Heaven. You know, like up in the sky.’

This was clearly more than he could stand, for he looked at us and asked, ‘Have you been there? Have you been there?’ Then he got out his map and demanded, ‘Show me where this heaven is,’ before yelling, ‘Get it off!’

With the end of the monsoon came the real heat. There was no shade and no wind, and our drinking water, which was supplied in 45-gallon metal drums brought in by helicopter, actually bubbled in the sun. The water was warm and, as I have said, tasted of the oil the drums had once contained. Drinking our obligatory eight pints a day was sheer purgatory.

With that heat, combined with an endless diet of tinned food, tainted water and myriad flies, we frequently got the runs. But at least in Tawi Atair we had a makeshift toilet, whereas on other locations, like Diana One the previous year, we’d had to crap on the jebel and bury the results.

Tawi Atair was almost civilized in this respect, however. We had dug a deep hole and then cannibalized wooden boxes to build a frame and a regular thunderbox over the pit. Down below there were hordes of shit beetles, a rather unnerving sight if you happened to glance beneath you. They were massive, beginning life about a quarter of an inch long but rapidly growing to the size of crabs.

Even more frightening was finding yourself still enthroned on the thunderbox, and effectively helpless, when we came under adoo attack. Torn between the risk of catching an enemy bullet, or otherwise of falling into that heaving pit, alive with shit beetles, in an attempt to dodge the fire, all of us would have opted for the former as being much the lesser of two evils. I have to admit, however, that not all the fire came from the adoo. The officer commanding the geysh was an Australian captain, a nice chap and a good soldier – he needed to be the latter, given the quality of the geysh as troops – but inclined to be rather over-fastidious, perhaps a hangover from his former civilian occupation as a shirt-seller. One night he was using the thunderbox in, as he thought, splendid isolation, when the darkness was split by bursts of tracer over his head, punctuated by single shots. He dived for cover, thoroughly entangled in his trousers and desperate to avoid the dreadful fate of fetching up in the horrible, beetle-ridden pit; as he did so, the air all but turned blue with his choicest Aussie obscenities. He was not altogether amused later when he discovered that the firing had come, not from the rebels, but from me and three or four others, blazing away over his head with a GPMG and our SLRs. It was, looking back, rather a disgraceful thing to do – I can only plead the sheer tedium of much of our time at Tawi Atair.

Such diversions did at least serve to take our minds off the enemy and our discomforts, but the greatest distraction of that tour was a scandal involving one of our own. Fred was a corporal, and a ringer for the kind of crooked, secondhand-car-and-anything-else-going salesman often portrayed by George Cole. By nature and preference a small-time villain and con man, Fred treated his posting to Dhofar as a personal challenge to his criminal ingenuity. It was a challenge to which he effortlessly rose, albeit with a scam which eventually backfired.

Fred had noticed that when our 4-ton trucks showed signs of wearing out, they were usually handed on to one of the firqat or to the geysh units, having first been put back into more or less good order by a REME unit attached to us. It was almost child’s play for our smooth-talking hero to persuade a naive young REME mechanic that it was virtually his duty to ‘liberate’ a couple of the trucks and point them in the direction of the Dhofari jebalis, who were in desperate need of transport. Especially when Fred offered to slip the mechanic £200 of the £1,000 he was making by selling the trucks to a Dhofari he had chatted up in the local village.

All went well, and in due course two trucks trundled out of the repair depot with Dhofaris driving them. And all would have remained well if one of the trucks hadn’t broken down, even before it reached the buyer’s farm. Unfortunately for Fred, the angry jebali then decided to lodge an official complaint with British Army Headquarters, and duly towed in the broken-down truck behind the other 4-tonner. When he started to demand his money back, a bored officer struggling through another dreary day pricked up his ears and decided to investigate – just to liven things up.

In no time at all Fred and his young pal from REME were arrested, charged and sent back to the UK. After a court martial, Fred was sentenced to six months in the ‘Glasshouse’ – the army gaol at Colchester – and thrown out of the Regiment, though we never found out what happened to the mechanic. But we were all very grateful to Fred, for whatever the trouble he had brought upon himself, the gossip and speculation arising from the scandal did at least help to pass the time.

On the whole, and despite the conditions at Tawi Atair, I found my tour of Oman in 1974 no worse than that in 1973. Furthermore, no one in D Squadron was killed, and there were, on balance, probably a great many more laughs than tears.

It was to be a very different story in 1975, however, when D Squadron was deployed to Oman for the final time. That tour brought tragedy, and for me it would bring about a final metamorphosis. I would leave Dhofar a fully seasoned veteran, having been exposed to the kind of horrors which only modern warfare is capable of dreaming up – and delivering.

Thereafter there would be nothing, ever, that war could throw at me that I would be unable to handle.