Michael Asher (5 page)

CHAPTER seven AFTER ABBAS HAD RETURNED his bulldozer into the barn, I asked him to explain what had happened on 24 January 1991 after he had spotted the British patrol. In reply, he led me back down towards the site of the LUP, with Hayil and Adil following on. As we walked across the slightly undulating landscape, Abbas hobbling on his crippled ankle, I began to glimpse the desert as they saw it. The area Bravo Two Zero had chosen to lie up in was this family's backyard. Given Bedouin powers of observa�tion and the very proximity of the place, there had really been no more chance of the SAS escaping unseen than if a band of Iraqis had landed on a British council estate. Was McNab right, then, to blame the Head Shed for the compromise because they were dropped in inhabited country, in the middle of more than 3,500 Iraqi troops?. According to McNab's own text, the patrol alone picked the place on the MSR where they would insert their LUP. They also decided to be flown in by Chinook rather than driving or going on foot, and selected the dropping-off place themselves. To choose a point twenty kilometres from the site of the LUP when you are carrying 95 kilos of gear looks like unsound strategy, but McNab explains this by saying that he didn't want the heli to be compromised by locals. At the same time, he says that the house `shouldn't have been there', and that they had been dropped in an area as crowded as Piccadilly Circus: it is difficult to see how he could have been afraid of being compromised by locals he didn't know were there, especially when he adds that the object was to reach the LUP as quickly as possible." According to the blurb of McNab's book, supported by his sketch-map, the patrol lugged their equipment � Bergens, belt-kit, jerrycans of water and two full sandbags apiece �twenty kilometres, in the dark over unknown, hostile country, in only nine hours. Anyone who has tried to carry 95, or even 80 kilos any distance, even in daylight, will recognize this as no mean feat of endurance. To make things doubly difficult, half of the team had to be protecting the others as they moved, so every few hun�dred metres they had to dump what they had shifted and go back for more � which would presumably have taken twice the time. If it is true that the SAS men patrolled twenty kilometres across flat desert to reach their objec�tive carrying such burdens, as the blurb, of Bravo Two Zero states, then it is rightly celebrated. The question is, did it really happen in the first place? I asked Abbas how he thought the enemy patrol had arrived in the area. 'They came by helicopter,' he told me confidently. 'In fact, we heard it come in, at about eight o'clock on 22 January. I remember the time because I sent someone to the nearest military base to report it. I knew it was a twin-engined helicopter by the sound, but of course at the time I wasn't sure whether it was one of theirs or one of ours. It landed not more than two kilo�metres from the house � I know that for certain because we found the tracks later. It was very muddy then and the tracks were clear � big wheels, you couldn't mistake it. In fact the tracks stayed there for weeks until the rain washed them away, and everybody here saw them.' I asked what the military had done when his messenger had reported the aircraft. `They didn't investigate it,' he said, `because they thought it was one of ours. It was only later we connected it with the foreign commandos and realized it must have brought them in.' He showed me a flat-bottomed wadi where he had found the Chinook's tracks, and I later measured it with the Magellan as about two kilometres south of the LUP. If Abbas was telling the truth, it meant the feat made so much of in the blurb of McNab's book was incorrect. Moreover, if the patrol had really reached their objective at 0445 hours on 23 January, as McNab said, it had taken them just under nine hours to ferry their kit two kilometres � a feat of a far more mundane, but also more reasonable order. I tried carrying four twenty-litre jerrycans � a total weight of 80 kilos � a distance of one kilometre, and with pauses for rest it took an agonizing hour. Of course, the SAS patrol were much younger and fitter than me, but even if they managed to do it in half the time, it would still have taken ten hours to cover twenty kilometres, assuming each man was carrying his own kit. But we know this was not so, because McNab points out that they used a shuttle system, and in fact only half the patrol was carrying at any one time � bringing the time to twenty hours: more than double what McNab says. Two kilometres, though, would be a comfortable distance to carry such weights in nine hours, silently and tactically, with appropriate rests and time to scout the country ahead as well. The fact that Abbas said the heli came in only two kilometres away is doubly interesting, because it not only coincides with what Ryan wrote, but would also explain why McNab had seen a settlement with a water-tower at both the helicopter drop-off point and the LUP � Abbas's house could be seen from both. Incidentally, the fact that the helicopter was heard is inadvertently revealed in McNab's book when one of his interrogators tells him so, and as for his assertion that according to the intelligence officer's briefing, the house 'should not have been there', Ryan clearly states that the satellite images they had been shown revealed crops and habitation. We halted on the flat ground opposite the overhanging rock shelf of the LUP and Abbas pointed down into the cul-de-sac. 'It was from here that I saw them for the sec�ond time,' he said. But that time I was armed. When I got back to the house with the bulldozer I went straight in and got my AK47. While I was loading it, my father, Fadhil � who is dead now, may God have mercy upon him � asked me what I was doing. "I've seen some strangers in the wadi," I told him. "I don't know who they are � whether they are Iraqi army or foreigners or bandits � but I'm going to find out what they're doing." I wasn't really concerned with the war at that stage � it didn't enter my mind. .I was only worried because there were these armed strangers near my home, where there were women and children. I was afraid some harm would come to my family. My father was over seventy then, but he insisted on coming with me. He got out his old rifle. It was a Brno five-shot, one of the old type with the bolt action that you have to cock shot by shot. It was almost as old as he was. Then, as he was getting his rifle out, my brother Hayil arrived and asked what was up. We told him and he said, "I'm coming too," and got out his AK47. So we were three � me, my brother and my father.' Abbas pointed again to the watershed, about five metres below us. 'When we got to this point, I saw eight men down there. I suspected they were foreigners, but I still couldn't tell for certain. They saw me, but I was holding my AK47 down by my side so they couldn't see it.' (In fact, Ryan notes that he saw the Arabs holding their rifles by their sides.) `Why didn't you attack them then and there?' I asked. `They would have been- sitting ducks.' `There were two reasons. First we only had rifles, and there were rocks to hide behind in that wadi. They could have got behind the rocks and we would never have been able to kill them. There 'were eight of them and only three of us � my father was an old man, and I have a crippled ankle and can't run, so we wanted to be sure of our ground before we did anything. The second thing was we still did- n't know who they were, and if we'd shot them and they turned out to be Iraqis we could have got into big trouble. Remember, they'd seen us but hadn't done anything, and it's very hard to just shoot someone down in cold blood, whoever they are. So for now we just watched. `Soon � it was late afternoon, about five-thirty or so �they started moving south down the wadi in single file. They were carrying packs that looked very heavy, and were spaced about ten metres apart. We didn't do any-thing, but just walked parallel with them along the wadi to see where they would go.' He led me along the edge of the wadi on the same route, where the hooves of thousands of sheep and goats had cut grooves in the surface over generations. As we went, I tried to imagine how it must have felt for both par�ties � British and Arab � one above, one below, both knowing the other was there, but not yet certain they were hostile. For the SAS, I guessed, the strain must have been almost unbearable. Although some of the men in Bravo Two Zero, like Vince Phillips, were veterans, this was their first operation in a 'real war'. Several of the team � perhaps most � had been involved in operations in Northern Ireland, but those were security operations rather than genuine combat. This was the Big One they had all been waiting for. They might have fought terrorists, but none of the team � not even McNab � had been involved in a real firefight against superior numbers of troops, and they were asking them�selves, perhaps, how they and their comrades would react. `This was what we were there for,' Peter Ratcliffe wrote, 'what all the years of training were about. However useful we had proved ourselves in dealing with terrorists, only in a war could we ever put our training to full use and only in a war would we get the chance to prove conclusively that we were worth our pay.' 14 They were selected SAS soldiers � the finest Special Forces men in the world � but as Ratcliffe has pointed out, 'Selection doesn't tell you everything you need to know about a man. Only what he does in battle will ever show you what he's really like.15 They were a tiny unit inn hostile environment, without transport and without communica�tions. The infiltration with so much equipment must have been incredibly tense, and on top of the revelation that the ground was too hard to dig an OP had come the real�ization that the radio wouldn't work, and finally, that there were anti-aircraft guns almost on top of the LUP. As they moved out that afternoon, watching the Arabs for the first move in a drama that must inevitably come, the tension among the patrol members must have been like a taut bowstring waiting for release. I saw that the wadi was flattening out into a basin five or six hundred metres wide, rimmed by stony shale out�crops on both sides. The basin was grassy, with a few stunted thorn bushes, and to the west the desert stretched away in galleries of serrated humpbacks as far as the eye could see. Abbas led me over to the eastern side of the basin, nearest to his house, which was still in full view. The place where he claimed to have found the Chinook tracks lay less than a kilometre to the south. 'This is where we were when they came out of the wadi,' he said. `We waited for them to come one by one. There were eight of them and I remember the last but one � the sev�enth � actually waved at us.' I was intensely interested in this point because I remembered that Ryan wrote that he had waved at the Arabs, though he also said that he had been first in the file, not seventh. Hayil, Abbas's brother, confirmed that it was the seventh man who had waved, but neither could remember if the man had used his left or right hand. This was significant also, because Ryan said that by waving with his left hand he inadvertently revealed to the watch-ing Arabs that the patrol were Christians. An Arab, he writes, will never wave with his left hand, which is con-sidered unclean. While it is true that Bedouin use their left hands to clean themselves after defecating, a left-hand wave has no particular significance, and evidently it meant nothing to Abbas and Hayil. Nevertheless, the detail was important, for if these Bedouin had somehow been got at and briefed by the Iraqi government, why would they be so insistent that it was the seventh man who waved, when Ryan is adamant in his book that he was in the lead? Since no spin could be put in the waver's position, wouldn't they have left this insig�nificant detail intact in order to convince me of their veracity? The question was, who was right: these Bedouin or Ryan? Turning to McNab's book, I thought I might have the solution. McNab writes clearly that Ryan was placed in the lead only after the patrol had been ambushed, when he changed the order of march. This suggests that wher�ever Ryan might have been in the line-up as they moved out of the LUP, he was not the first man, as he says. `They were moving fast,' Abbas said, 'and we knew we had to do something before they got away, but we still didn't know who they were. We decided to fire two warn- ing shots over their heads to find out who they were.' At first I wondered what he meant. Then I remembered that, in the past, when Bedouin tribes used to raid each other for camels, they were often faced with the same problem of identifying friends or enemies before it was too late. When a party of unknown camel-riders approached a camp, the men there would fire a few shots over their heads. If the strangers were friends they would wave their headcloths and shout "Afya! Afya!" (It's all right) in reply, or sometimes throw handfuls of sand in the air. 'I fired two quick shots over the strangers' heads with my AK47' Abbas said, 'and immediately they went down. By God, they were fast. They started shooting back straight away, so of course we knew they were enemies. We were lying flat out on the ground about three hundred metres from them, and had taken off our red shamaghs so as not to present good targets. It must have been quite diffi�� cult for them to see exactly where we were. Hayil and I were putting down fire on automatic and my father was strug�gling with his old rifle. Suddenly they fired rockets in our direction � two rounds, which just exploded harmlessly in the desert. At the time I thought they were mortar shells, but later we found the used rocket-launchers.' `What happened then?' `A smoke grenade went up, or maybe more than one, and under the cover of the smoke they pulled out: From what we could see they seemed to do it in a very disci�plined way, working in pairs with one firing and the other retreating. We were still firing, but couldn't see them prop-erly until they went over the rim of that ridge, heading south-west. Actually, we only saw five of them going over the hill, and we thought maybe we'd hit the other three.' I listened to Abbas's tale with growing incredulity, wait�ing in vain for the point when the hordes of Iraqi troops and vehicles mentioned by McNab and Ryan would turn up. In McNab's book, the patrol is attacked by two armoured personnel carriers with 7.62mm machine-guns, and at least three lorry-loads of Iraqi troops and two Land-Cruisers. Coming under fire from the APCs and hordes of infantry, and amidst a great deal of
screaming, `Let's do it!', McNab's patrol fires off its 66mm rocket-launchers, dumps its heavy Bergens and charges the APCs, putting them out of. action and killing or wound�ing dozens of Iraqis with their Minimi machine-guns and M203 grenade-launchers. McNab describes how the ground was littered with writhing bodies, and how Iraqi casualties were spread over a wide area � 'fifteen dead and many more wounded', he recounts. A burned-out APC smoulders and a truck blazes, with a black and peeling Iraqi lolling in the passenger seat. Someone lobs an L2 grenade through the unbattened door of one of the APCs, killing dozens more. 'The troops that withdrew were sort of reorganizing themselves,' he explained later to one newspaper. 'It was very much like a scenario in a school playground where you would get two gangs � they would have a fight, one gang would run away and then sort of poke their fingers out, "We're going to get you." And then they'd sort themselves out and come forward again. Now, we didn't want to get involved in that, so we ran . . According to the book, having reduced the Iraqi ambush to bloody ribbons, McNab's patrol withdraws, picks up its Bergens and makes off over the brow of the hill, where it comes under concentrated fire from the S60 anti-aircraft battery on the ridge nearby and is forced to drop its Bergens once again. As more enemy vehicles roll up, the patrol disappears into the growing dark If there was no trace of McNab's pitched battle against massively superior forces in Abbas's and Hayil's accounts, what about Ryan, I wondered? Initially, in fact, his description bears some resemblance to what they told me. He writes that he saw two (not three) Arabs pacing them down the wadi, but hoped that they would go away. When he waved, though, the Arabs opened fire, and shortly afterwards, a tipper-truck arrived with eight or ten soldiers in it. In Ryan there is no long build-up with tracked vehicles approaching ominously, heard but not seen, nor is there a salvo of rockets as the patrol takes them on. Ryan does declare that Stan had seen an APC, but that somehow he'd failed to notice it, as it was 'prob-ably behind a mound'. In his account there are no writhing bodies, and while McNab states 'fifteen dead and many more wounded', Ryan puts the total number of Iraqis after them as 'about a dozen', three of whom he accounts for himself. Significantly, in Ryan's book, the patrol does not charge, but simply drops its Bergens and makes off over the ridge, where it comes under anti-aircraft fire. A bullet narrowly misses Ryan's arm and knocks his Bergen flat (McNab says it was an anti-aircraft shell), but, undeterred, he goes back for a hip-flask of whisky his wife had given him as a Christmas present � an exploit also repeated by McNab. Again and again I pressed Abbas and Hayil on the sub�ject of armoured personnel carriers, vehicles and Iraqi troops, desperate to find some reference to them, no matter how oblique. 'There were no personnel carriers,' they repeated, 'and no troops. There were only the three of us, no one else at all.' Abbas stated over and over that there had been no pitched battle, and that the action had all been over in five minutes or so. 'I fired four magazines,' he told me. `About one hundred and twenty rounds.' `I fired about eighty,' Hayil added. 'I don't know how many my father fired, but not many because his rifle was old.' If these Bedouin were telling the truth, then McNab's `colossal amount of fire' consisted of a total of about two hundred rounds. Abbas beckoned me towards the humpbacked ridge on the brow of which he had last seen five members of the SAS patrol. 'They ran off south-west,' he said. 'And believe me, they were really moving fast.' The Bedouin showed me where they had found the Bergens dumped by the SAS, in two groups. 'There were eight packs,' Abbas said. 'Really big things, they were. But we didn't open them as I thought they might be booby-trapped. We decided not to try to follow them because it was getting dark, and anyhow, I can't walk far with my bad leg. If we had wanted to, some of our people could have tracked them easily enough, as the ground was quite greasy, but we were defending our home, and the main thing was that they'd gone. When the Iraqi army came later, they did open the packs and they found all sorts of stuff � a radio, medical equipment, food, a flag and a map � every�thing you can think of. But at the time all we found here apart from the packs was a clip of tracer rounds, spent rocket-launcher cases, and a pool of blood.' I pricked my ears up at this. There was no indication in either McNab's or Ryan's accounts that any of the patrol had been injured during the attack. Are you sure it was blood?' I asked. Both Hayil and Abbas assured me that it was, and I put this down as another mystery. Obviously the Bedouin were quite anxious to establish the fact that they had hit someone, and they were a little crestfallen when I said that as far as I knew, none of the patrol had been hurt. They had engaged Bravo Two Zero at 300 metres � the extreme effective range of the AK47, which is anyway a notoriously difficult weapon to fire lying down because the magazine is too long. Had the brothers simply invented the blood to reinforce their reputation as marksmen, I won�dered, or had one of the patrol actually been injured running away and had somehow kept it quiet? As we climbed to the top of the ridge over which the -SAS had fled, I quizzed them about the anti-aircraft guns both Ryan and McNab said had opened up on them as they cleared it. The two Arabs shook their heads emphat-ically. 'The anti-aircraft guns never opened fire,' Abbas said, nodding towards the ridge on which the battery had stood, now about a kilometre away. 'The soldiers up there wouldn't have known what was happening � even we didn't realize these were enemy troops until we fired the warning shots. How would we have contacted the bat- tery? We had no radio. The anti-aircraft guns were there to protect the base across the plateau from enemy aircraft, not for fighting on the ground. Anyway, it all happened so quickly � there just wouldn't have been time for the gunners to realize what was happening and open fire_' When I explained that McNab said an AA round had passed through Ryan's Bergen, Abbas chortled. 'Are you joking?' he asked. 'You must know that an S60 shell is a huge thing � fifty-seven millimetres � as big around as a Coca-Cola can. It's designed for destroying aeroplanes. If one of them hit your pack, there wouldn't be much of it left.' `What about the Iraqi army?' I asked. 'When did they turn up?' `We didn't send anyone to tell them until after the for-eigners had got away,' Abbas said. 'And the boy I sent had to go on foot, because there was petrol rationing then and we had none for our vehicles. The base was fifteen kilo-metres away, like I said, so it took him a long time to get there, and by the time the army got themselves sorted out and got here it was one o'clock in the morning (25 January) and the commandos had been gone for hours. There were heavy air attacks all over Iraq that day, and the army were worried that the commandos would call down air strikes if they pursued them, so they left them alone. In fact, we did hear some enemy jets going over between midnight and one in the morning.' This was a point, I noted, that was confirmed by McNab, who was a few kilo�metres south-west of Abbas's house at around that time, and who tried to contact the Coalition jets on his TACBE. I thought about it carefully. 'I don't understand,' I said. `I mean, the AA post was only a kilometre away. Even if the soldiers there didn't open fire with their S60s, surely they would have come to help you, or radioed for more troops.' `They couldn't leave their post,' Abbas said. 'What if an enemy aircraft came in on a -bombing run? I don't think they had any radio either, but even if they did report it back, it still took the army hours to get here. Like I said, it was all over within a few minutes � the soldiers would�n't have had time to work out what was going on.' In a roasting wind I scoured the battlefield carefully for remnants of the firelight described in McNab's book. I had been travelling in the Middle East long enough to know that if vehicles are knocked out in the desert, no one will bother to clear them up. Sinai, for instance, is still littered with the hulks of scores of armoured vehicles dating from the 1967 war. If Bravo Two Zero had really put two armoured personnel carriers and several trucks out of action, there would almost certainly be debris, and yet there was nothing at all � not a fragment of twisted metal, not a link of track, not a sliver of tyre rubber, not even a screw. Moreover, the basin was uniformly flat, without a groove, a mound or a fold. If APCs had been there, it would have been impossible not to have seen them, I realized. Later, back at Abbas's house, I brooded over the mys-tery. McNab writes with such authority in his book, that it was difficult not to be convinced. Yet my own training in the SAS had taught me that it would be folly for a foot patrol to charge a brace of armoured vehicles. SAS philosophy has always been that nine times out of ten discretion is the better part of valour. The SOP (standard operational procedure) on coming into contact with armour is simply to run away as fast as possible � much as Ryan describes. McNab admitted this himself later in a newspaper interview: 'The last thing you want to do is to start getting involved in any contact of any type. Number one, that's not our task; we're not there to start fighting people. We're not a big force. We're not armed enough for that, that wasn't our job.' Yet the same man who admitted later to an interviewer, 'The object is not to fight the enemy, it's to get away from them,' says in his book that he led a suicidal charge against enemy armour in defiance not only of SAS principles, but of every rule in the military book. McNab writes that scores of Iraqis were killed or injured in the contact, and even Ryan sug�gests obliquely to have shot three men. The brothers assured me repeatedly that not one of them was hit. 'Not even a scratch,' as Abbas said. In the evening they took me back over to the barn, where they showed me some of the artefacts they had retrieved from Bravo Two Zero's cache in the wadi. `There was a huge amount of equipment there,' Abbas said. 'Clothing, sandbags, shovels, food, jerrycans � even explosives, which the Iraqi army destroyed.' He showed me a shovel and a jerrycan marked with the British MOD arrow that were obviously in use by his family and, later, a clip of 5 56mm orange and green tracer rounds, not used by the Iraqi army, a camouflage net, a gas-mask, and pieces of a Claymore anti-personnel mine that matched the one shown in McNab's book. 'They dug this up in the wadi,' Abbas said. 'And smashed it.' This confirmed McNab's statement that they had deployed two Claymores and buried them in the wadi bed when they pulled out. It was exciting to think that I was holding a historical artefact � the remains of one of the Claymores actually used by Bravo Two Zero and mentioned in McNab's book. I was delighted when Abbas told me I could keep them. I also asked what had happened to the eight Bergens they had found, and the brothers said they had been taken by the army and were probably in Baghdad. After sunset, the Bedouin slaughtered two sheep in our honour, inviting in all the family and neighbours. A vast oilskin sheet was rolled out in the guest hall and the food brought in, great brass trays piled with hunks of mutton � on buttered rice. We ate the food in Arab fashion, with our right hands, crouching around the trays, and I felt at home once again, basking in the hospitality of these simple peo�ple. Afterwards, as we sat replete, sipping tea, Abbas told the Bravo Two Zero story once more in front of everyone, while the other Bedouin nodded as if they had heard it many times before. If this was a set-up, I thought, then either everybody here was in on it, or Abbas and Hayil didn't care that they were known as liars to the world at large. Bearing in mind that lying was taboo in Bedouin society, this seemed highly unlikely. Indeed, Abbas and Hayil's courage in taking on eight men armed with machine-guns and rocket-launchers was totally in keeping with the Bedouin ideal. `Didn't it bother you that they were more than you and better armed?' I asked. Abbas shrugged and showed me his crippled ankle, pointing out three or four scars that were obviously bullet entry wounds. 'That was a machine-gun,' he told me. 'In the Iran�Iraq war I was in the Iraqi Special Forces for twelve years, eight years in the war. I saw hundreds of com�rades killed, and was wounded six times. I still have two bullets lodged in my body. They used to use us as snatch-squads, going into the Iranian trenches to bring back Iranians who could be interrogated to give information. We sometimes had to fight with bayonets and � God have mercy on me � I once killed a man with a rock because I had no bullets left. I was promoted to sergeant major, received four citations for bravery, and was once court-martialled because a general ordered my squad to retreat and I refused and called him a donkey and a coward. I got off with it, though. Hayil, my brother, also served in the Special Forces and also received citations for bravery. I got invalided out of the army because of my ankle and could�n't serve in the war of 1991, but anyhow, we are Bedouin and have been handling firearms all our lives. I shot my first wolf when I was twelve. We are used to protecting our flocks and our families, so taking on eight men wasn't such a big deal to my father, my brother and me.' Here, I thought, was another incredible layer to the story. If what Abbas told me was correct, then Bravo Two Zero had certainly picked the wrong neighbourhood for their OP. Not only had they been put to flight by an old man, a cripple and his younger brother, but two of those three men had more combat experience between them than the entire strength of the SAS patrol combined. CHAPTER eight AS THE SUN SET ON 24 JANUARY, Bravo Two Zero melted into the desert, knowing that they were now hunted men. According to both McNab and Ryan, there were vehicle headlights flashing frantically in their wake and they heard occasional bursts of shooting. Quite unaware that there were two extremely cool and seasoned veterans of the Iraqi Special Forces behind them, McNab assumed that the Iraqis were totally confused and shoot�ing haphazardly at rocks and their own shadows. He confessed himself 'chuffed no end'. The team had ditched their Bergens and now had to rely on the escape-belts to which SAS culture attaches great importance. Normally these belts should contain ammunition, a foldable