Eye of the Storm (56 page)

I still treasure the letter of thanks he sent me some days after the visit. When the team left in their coach after breakfast the following morning – their manager had had to leave before dinner the previous night, though he had left a tidy sum behind to buy drinks for all – they all said what a terrific time they had had. It really had been a good day, for us as well as for the United players. As for me, born and bred a Salfordian and a Manchester United fan, to have had Alex Ferguson ring me personally was one of the highlights of my army career.

About the rest of that career there is not a great deal left to tell. In 1992 I was commissioned in the rank of captain, and went to Germany on detachment for six months as second-in-command of a Challenger tank squadron in the Queen’s Dragoon Guards. The squadron commander was a great guy called Duncan Bullivant, with the true cavalry officer’s apparently devil-may-care attitude, but a shrewd brain and a soldier’s gift for handling his squadron. We got on extremely well, and I was sorry when my tour expired. I then spent two years as a quartermaster with 21 SAS, based in London, and finally two years with 23 SAS in Birmingham, as training major. I left the army in November 1997 as a major.

It had been a long haul from an apprentice-joiner’s job in the damp north-west.

Afterword

T
HE
Special Air Service has always taken care of its dead, and the Regiment’s dead of the Gulf War were no exception. Back at Stirling Lines in Hereford on the first Monday morning after our return from the desert, the commanding officer walked into my office and said: ‘Funerals. Friday. At St Martin’s, here in Hereford. The arrangements are down to you.’

Four of our men had died in the war with Iraq, while five had been seriously wounded and several captured. The prisoners of war were repatriated through the Red Cross after the fighting had ended, and the Iraqis also handed over the bodies of our dead. Because some time had passed since their deaths, each was returned to the UK in a lead-lined coffin.

The member of Alpha Three Zero who was killed was a guy called David ‘Shug’ Denbury, who had died in a firefight with the enemy just a few days before the war’s end. His family wanted him buried privately in Wales. Since we always respected the wishes of the family in such cases, that left three of our men to be buried by the Regiment. All of them had been members of the ill-fated Bravo Two Zero patrol. Their names were Sergeant Vince Philips, Corporal Steve ‘Legs’ Lane and Trooper Bob Consiglio.

The CO continued, ‘For a number of reasons, I want all three funerals to be held at the same time. It will be quite difficult to carry out, partly because, as I understand it, some of the men’s relatives find their deaths hard to accept. Then there is the press coverage to consider. The media will know, from the families, exactly where and when the funerals are to be held, and while we can exclude them from the ceremony, we can’t prevent them from hanging around outside the church. I don’t have to remind you that we don’t need photos of our guys on every front page and on the television news.’ He turned to go, then paused and added – almost literally – a parting shot, ‘Oh – and I also want a firing party at the graveside.’ And with that he walked out.

The SAS had never before had a firing party at a funeral. A part of the reason was that they attracted too much attention; another was that though we bury our dead with honour, we tend to do so quietly. Now, however, there was no need to worry about drawing attention to the fact that several members of the Regiment had died on active service. Thanks to the press coverage, the whole world and his wife knew.

I had never before been ordered to arrange a single military funeral, let alone three at the same time, and I urgently needed information. So after the CO had left I went to the battered metal four-drawer filing cabinet in the corner of my office and pulled out the drawer marked ‘A-K’. I felt an enormous sense of relief as I lifted out a cardboard file marked ‘Funerals’.

My relief was short-lived. When I opened the file, there was nothing inside. Not so much as a single sheet of paper. There is something peculiar to military bureaucracy that allows people to keep clearly labelled but otherwise empty files around, presumably in order to raise false hopes in unsuspecting warrant officers. One of the great things about the army, however, is that (to use a catch phrase from a famous television advertisement of a few years ago) even if you don’t know how to do something, you probably know a man who does.

Clinging to that belief, I rang the Academy Sergeant-Major at Sandhurst, who is the most senior regimental sergeant-major in the British Army. When he answered, I told him who I was and that we were burying three of our guys with full military honours in four days’ time, with a firing party. ‘To be perfectly honest,’ I admitted, ‘I don’t have a clue. Can you please help?’ He was not a man of many words, but he took my phone number and promised to get back to me.

Within thirty minutes I received another phone call, this time from the RSM at the Guards training depot at Pirbright, near Aldershot in Surrey. He gave his name and asked me what the problem was.

‘I’ve got to hold funerals for three of our men who were killed in the Gulf, two to be buried and one to be cremated. The service for all of them is taking place in the same church at the same time. We are also having a firing party – and I don’t have the first idea how to set about organizing any of this.’

He considered what I’d told him for no more than a moment, and then said, ‘I’ll have two guys down to you in Hereford inside three hours.’ I thanked him, replaced the receiver, and set about detailing the men necessary to provide pall-bearers and a firing party. Since the funerals were for three men of B Squadron, it was obvious that it was from that squadron that the ceremonial parties would be drawn; besides, the men would have insisted that it should be they who attended their friends’ last journey.

That afternoon I was sitting at my desk, studying form in the racing pages of the
Daily Mirror
, when there was a knock on the door. On my shouted ‘Come in!’ two immaculately turned-out Guards drill sergeants stamped in and came to attention, banging and crashing their boots on the floor.

When they burst in, they almost frightened me to death. I swear that their boots had a shine you could shave in, and you could have used the creases in their perfectly fitting uniforms as razors. They were huge men, and they glowered at everything and everyone from under their slashed-peak caps.

The RSM at Pirbright had been as good as his word, and had sent his best ceremonial drill instructors to make sure that we didn’t have any mistakes at the funerals. I asked my visitors their names, then stuck out my hand and told them that I was Billy Ratcliffe, RSM of 22 SAS, and that upstairs, waiting in the briefing room above my office, were the men from B Squadron I’d lined up for pall-bearing and firing-party duties.

‘They are under your jurisdiction and command,’ I continued, ‘until such time as you come to tell me that everything is OK and that rehearsals have gone well.

‘I’ll take you upstairs now and introduce you, and then I’ll leave you. Tomorrow I will arrange for the undertakers to be at St Martin’s Church here in Hereford, where the funerals will be held, with a sample coffin of the right weight so that you can practise. Meanwhile the gymnasium is yours to rehearse the firing party and the pall-bearers.’

As we ran up the stairs, I told the two giants, ‘You can do what you like with these men.’ It seemed to me – though I couldn’t be certain – that they might have smiled. Guards training instructors can do anything with anyone.

We marched into the briefing room and mounted the small stage at one end of it. At once some smartarse shouted ‘Hello, lovely boy!’ a camp phrase from the television sitcom
It Ain’t Half Hot, Mum
. This time the two drill instructors really did smile, though it was undoubtedly the smile on the face of the tiger. I thought, Just you wait, sunshine. You won’t be jeering at these guys for very long.

B Squadron didn’t know what had hit them. It took the two Guards NCOs about three days to knock them into shape and get everything organized to their satisfaction – and that was a very exacting standard indeed. They handled their task brilliantly, and by the time they were pronounced ready, B Squadron had nothing but respect for their temporary drill instructors. The men of the SAS are military professionals and, to a considerable extent, perfectionists, and they know – and admire – professionalism and perfectionism in others.

We arrived at St Martin’s Church on Friday morning to find the press and television crews camped all around. I could understand their interest, but I didn’t want the relatives of the dead men to be upset even further by all this media intrusion. The journalists and cameramen, as well as a good number of interested spectators, were kept away from the church and graveyard by a cordon of policemen from the local force, and it was the police who now came up with a bright idea. An inspector commandeered a huge articulated truck that was driving up the road where St Martin’s is situated. He persuaded the driver to position his vehicle in front of the church, effectively blocking the view of the photographers and television crews so that they could not get sight of the coffins leaving the main door after the service and being carried around to the graveyard at the rear.

As the funeral service ended, the ceremonial party, led by the padre, made their slow way out of the church’s main door. With solemn dignity – and in perfect step – the immaculately uniformed pall-bearers carried the coffins on their shoulders at the slow march, escorted by the firing party with their M16s. Behind each bearer party followed the family of the dead man, headed by a senior member of the Regiment. I walked immediately behind the third coffin, that of Sergeant Vince Philips. Behind me came his widow and their two young daughters. The children were sobbing. It was heartbreaking to hear them saying brokenly, over and over again, ‘I want my Daddy … I want my Daddy.’

How do you explain a father’s death to his children? How can you help them? I wanted to pick them up and comfort them, but I couldn’t. Neither could I let it be seen how enormously moved I was by the sobs of those little girls, and the tears of the families who had lost their men.

At the SAS plot in the graveyard behind the old church of mellowed sandstone, the procession halted beside the open graves. The padre spoke the closing words of the burial service and two of the coffins were lowered into the earth. The firing party discharged its volleys, each one a single, seamless crack of gunfire. And when the final, mournful bugle note of the Last Post had sounded, we buried our dead and said our own private goodbyes to mates some of us had known for years.

Then we went to the ‘Palud-R-Inn Club’, which was our ironic nickname for the NAAFI at the camp, for what turned into a monumental wake. It would be a considerable understatement to say that a lot of strong drink was taken aboard by the SAS on that Friday afternoon. Time heals grief. But alcohol sometimes helps time go a bit faster. Everyone said that it was what the dead men would have wanted. Perhaps they were right, though I couldn’t escape the feeling that what they would most have wanted was to have been there.

As everyone knows, several former SAS soldiers have written pseudonymous accounts of their service with the Regiment, and in particular books about their exploits during the Gulf War. No member of the Regiment can, or will, tell the whole truth about his service, if only for operational reasons, but some of these Gulf War books are so highly fictional in places that they have almost no value at all. As far as I’m concerned the truth is sensational enough without anyone having to embellish it with fictionalized incidents, or heroics involving desperate firefights with hordes of enemies, or wild exploits with mythical ‘fighting knives’. These fantasists may have hidden their real identities from the public by writing under pseudonyms, but the guys in the Regiment know exactly who they are and talk of them either with contempt or ridicule, or both.

Since a number of these accounts affect me directly, I feel that I have some right to comment on a few of the wilder inaccuracies, exaggerations or distortions they contain, some of which amount to actual untruths. Two books, in particular, caught the public imagination, ‘Andy McNab’s’
Bravo Two Zero
, and ‘Chris Ryan’s’
The One That Got Away
, published in 1993 and 1995 respectively. The books sold in enormous quantities, and both authors have gone on to make successful new careers for themselves as writers of both non-fiction and novels. I have no quarrel with their success; what I do question, however, is the public perception of the SAS, and of individuals in the Regiment, that has resulted from these and similar books.

‘Ryan’ was the only surviving member of the eight-man Bravo Two Zero patrol not to be captured by the Iraqis. When he was debriefed in front of the Regiment after the war, we all marvelled at his skill, courage and endurance in surviving seven nights and eight days alone while walking a staggering 186 miles to the Syrian border and, ultimately, safety. In his official debriefing, however, which was recorded on video, ‘Ryan’ made no mention of encountering any enemy troops during his epic trek to freedom. Yet in his book there are several accounts of contacts, and even a description of an incident when he was forced to kill an Iraqi sentry with a knife. If these incidents happened, then I personally find it difficult to believe that they could have slipped his mind during the debriefing.