Soldier C: Secret War in Arabia

by Shaun Clarke

  When the men had assembled in front of Greenaway, the major said, ‘It’s going to take all day for the Skyvans and choppers to bring in the remainder of the assault force. We’ll therefore be spending the rest of the afternoon and all night here, then move out at first light. In the meantime, you can basha down on that strip of waste ground near the SAF barracks’ – he pointed to the dusty old huts – ‘and boil up a brew. Don’t plan on a rest, as you’ll be needed to help with the unloading, which should take half the night. All right, men, that’s it.’

  When Greenaway and Worthington walked off with the SAF commander, the troopers scattered to find a place on the waste ground to the right of the SAF barracks.

  ‘Fucking typical,’ Tom said. ‘The A-rabs get the barracks and we get the bloody desert floor.’

  ‘It should be the other way around,’ Bill complained. ‘I mean, those bastards come from the bloody desert.’

  ‘And we don’t even get a rest,’ Jock added. ‘We’ve been up since dawn and now he says we’re gonna work half the night. Bloody cheek, if you ask me.’

  ‘Who’s asking?’ Andrew asked.

  ‘I mean, unloading!’ Jock burst out. ‘Why the fuck can’t the loadmasters do that and let us get a sleep?’

  ‘It would take too long,’ Ricketts said. ‘We’d never get it done by dawn. We have to be on our way by first light, so we have to help them unload.’

  ‘Then let the SAF do it instead of hanging around like ponces. I’m amazed they didn’t ask us to guard duty as well, to give those SAF sods a rest.’

  ‘On the ground again,’ Gumboot said. ‘We’ll get bitten to death. Every creepy-crawlie known to man and beast is gonna be creeping and crawling over us, after our sweat and blood. Filthy fucking bastards.’

  ‘Poetry and alliteration!’ Andrew exclaimed with a wide, mocking smile. ‘Hey, Gumboot, you’re a real original – pure genius. I’m burning up here with envy.’

  ‘The day you can speak better than me I’ll put on a monkey suit. Who fancies a cuppa?’

  ‘Me!’ they all cried at once.

  Having checked the area for scorpions, centipedes and the like, they put their sleeping bags down and brewed up by boiling water in their mess tins heated on lightweight hexamine stoves.

  ‘Bloody beautiful!’ Gumboot said, swiping flies, mosquitoes and hornets from his face and sipping his steaming tea.

  The first of the Skyvans arrived back within the hour, when the grey evening light was turning to darkness and the boiling heat was starting to chill. That Skyvan was soon followed by another, then another, all disgorging more supplies and SAF soldiers and firqats, the latter looking as fierce as they had done when Ricketts and the other new arrivals had first seen them. Luckily, they were marched off to bed down for the night in another strip of waste ground at the far side of the runway, while the SAF soldiers, of whom the firqats did not approve, were given beds or floor space in the SAF barracks. The extra supplies, of which there were many, kept coming in on plane after plane to be unloaded by the already weary SAS troopers and transported directly to the Bedfords lined up by the runway and guarded by other SAS troops.

  ‘Can’t trust those fucking SAF bastards to do it,’ Gumboot observed, ‘so they lumber us with it. Some fucking deal!’

  ‘What’s that, Trooper?’ The RSM had appeared from nowhere. He was standing there, large as life, in front of Gumboot and glaring at him. ‘Did I hear a complaint?’

  ‘Complaint, boss? No! No complaints. I think you must have misheard me.’

  ‘If that word’s in the English language,’ Andrew said, ‘I’ll give up writing for good.’

  ‘You couldn’t write your name on a cheque, so get back to work,’ the RSM said, marching away again.

  ‘Yes, boss!’ Andrew bawled.

  And work he did. As did most of the others. Not through the whole night, but certainly until well after midnight, by when the last of the Skyvans had been and gone, letting silence descend at last with the settling dust.

  Reprieved at last, the more fortunate men left the airstrip, leaving the unlucky few to stand guard on the loaded-up Bedfords. The former made their way back to the waste ground, where they shook everything out, then, still wearing their OGs, wriggled gratefully into their sleeping bags.

  Ricketts closed his eyes, but could not sleep. There were too many whining mosquitoes, too many itchy places on his skin. Also, every time he drifted off, the image of his wife floated before him, jerking him awake. He tried to shut her out, to make his mind a blank, but the silence, which in fact was filled with rustling and shifting sounds, only drew him back to tormenting visions of her body and face.

  Then Ricketts heard a ghostly moaning. At first he thought he was imagining it. Startled, then a little frightened, he opened his eyes. The moaning was growing louder; it gradually turned into a groaning. When Ricketts turned his head to the side, the sound had become almost anguished. It was coming from Andrew.

  ‘What the fuck’s the matter with you?’ Ricketts heard Gumboot ask.

  ‘Oh, man,’ Andrew groaned, ‘this is the worst time of all. I’ve got a hard-on that’s as big as the Jebel and I can’t stop thinking of tits and ass. It’s a monster and it just won’t go down and I’m trapped in this sleeping bag. Oh, man, this is awful.’

  ‘Jesus Christ!’ Gumboot said.

  When Andrew moaned yet again, Ricketts smiled and at last dropped off to sleep.

  Chapter 9

  At first light the following morning, the 250 men, including SAS, SAF and firqats, were driven out of the staging post in Bedfords, following a Saladin armoured car which had taken the lead position to give them some protection from mines. For added insurance against mines, the lengthy convoy drove cross-country, though parallel to the road.

  The journey was hell, taking them across the Negd plain, a sun-scorched moonscape interlaced with dried-up stream beds, each of which caused the trucks to lurch wildly, as if about to topple over. In the rear of their Bedford, Ricketts and the other probationers, all in Sergeant Lampton’s charge, were repeatedly thrown into each other, their weapons and water bottles colliding noisily. The Bedfords were open-topped, which at least meant they had air, but as the sun rose in the sky, casting a silvery light on the desert, they began to feel the heat and knew, with a feeling of unease, that it was going to get much worse. Surprisingly, even in the wind created by the truck’s movement, the flies and mosquitoes were still present in abundance, buzzing and diving, growing more frantic the more the men sweated and attracted them.

  ‘As long as I live I’m going to remember these little bastards,’ Ricketts said, swiping another mosquito from his face. ‘I’ve never seen so many of them in my life. They bloody torment me.’

  ‘And me!’ Andrew said.

  ‘I thought you’d be used to them,’ Gumboot said, ducking and weaving. ‘What with where you come from and all.’

  ‘Brixton,’ Andrew said.

  ‘I thought you said Barbados.’

  ‘My mother comes from Barbados,’ Andrew explained, slapping his own cheek, ‘but I was born in Brixton.’

  ‘You’re going down in my estimation every minute. You’re not even exotic!’

  ‘Sorry, Gumboot.’

  ‘I come from Smethwick,’ Tom Purvis said helpfully, ‘but the family then moved to Wolverhampton. I hope you think that’s exotic.’

  ‘Not as exotic as Pensett,’ Bill Raglan said, ‘which has a grammar school, a glassworks, a Miners’ Welfare Club, and, of course, Wolverhampton Wanderers. How does that grab you?’

  ‘I pity you,’ Gumboot told him. ‘But now at last I know why you’re both halfwits – no stimulation.’

  ‘There’s lots of that in Devon, then? Lots of moo-moos and dung. Incest in the barns every Friday, followed by home-brewed cider. I feel deprived just thinking of it.’

  ‘Christ,’ Gumboot said, ignoring the dumb twat and slapping frantically at the mosquitoes and flies swarming around his face, ‘these thi
ngs are driving me crazy.’

  ‘Your natural state,’ Andrew said.

  As usual, they relied on banter of this kind to keep the blues at bay, but as the morning wore on and the heat increased dramatically, making them sweat even more, thus attracting more flies and mosquitoes, they felt less inclined to crack jokes. Also, as the journey progressed, the gravel plain became rougher, filling up with patches of sand, and the bucking of the trucks became much worse.

  By noon, the convoy was still on the move, with the Arabian sun blazing relentlessly on the desert and turning it into a featureless white haze. Heat waves rose from the desert floor, making the land beyond shimmer, and the trucks front and rear, when visible through the swirling sand, appeared to contract and expand, as if made from black jelly.

  The men seemed just as unreal – or at least, they felt so – assailed by flies and mosquitoes, sometimes by stinging hornets, while being forced repeatedly to wipe grimy sweat from their faces or sand from their parched lips, bloodshot eyes, sweat-soaked clothing and hot-barrelled weapons – With the sand came the dust – floating everywhere, rising up through the floorboards, and blown in from the billowing clouds being churned up by the wheels of the Bedfords.

  Even worse was the heat, now a veritable furnace, making even the slipstream of the trucks suffocatingly warm.

  ‘I can hardly breathe,’ Gumboot rasped. ‘This air’s thick with dust and sand. It’s so warm, it makes me almost choke. I feel bloody nauseous.’

  ‘So do I,’ Tom said.

  ‘My stomach’s churning,’ Bill added.

  ‘They’ve got to stop and let us out for a bit,’ Andrew insisted, looking out across the vast, sun-scorched plain and its drifting dust clouds. ‘They’ve got to give us a break from this.’

  ‘They won’t,’ Lampton said. ‘We don’t have the time. We’ve got to reach the RV by last light, so they won’t have a break.’

  ‘Oh, fuck!’ Bill groaned, then closed his mouth and choked, his cheeks suddenly bulging, and clawed his way past Gumboot and Tom to hang over the truck’s tailboard and throw up.

  ‘That was decent of him,’ Lampton said as Bill continued vomiting, his body heaving convulsively. ‘If he’d done it where he was sitting, it would have gone all over you lot. Now, at least, he’s put it all behind us.’

  Gumboot laughed uneasily at that, but a few minutes later, when Bill was back in his seat, gasping for breath and cleaning his messy lips with a handkerchief, Gumboot – either smelling Raglan or imagining he could smell him – was likewise suddenly obliged to claw his way to the rear and throw up over the tailboard. He was soon followed by Tom, then, as Ricketts noticed, by some of the men in the other Bedfords, front and rear, now distorted beyond the shimmering heat waves and obscured by the boiling sand.

  ‘If anyone comes after us,’ Lampton said, ‘they won’t have a problem. They’ve only to follow the trail of …’

  ‘Do you mind?’ Andrew interrupted.

  ‘What’s that?’ Lampton asked.

  ‘No offence, boss, but the mere mention of that word will just set them all off again.’

  ‘Got you, Trooper,’ Lampton said with a broad grin, clearly as fit as a fiddle and enjoying himself.

  Though men continued being ill along the whole length of the column, the drivers did, as Lampton had warned, keep going without a break. They reached the wadi by late afternoon, when the fierce white sun had cooled to a more mellow golden light that brought detail back to the landscape.

  Glancing along the wadi, with its sheer granite slopes casting stark black shadows on the sun-bleached gravel of the valley floor – a barren, silent, almost eerie terrain – Ricketts was reminded of the boulders and craters of the moon, which he had seen on TV coverage of the Apollo 15 landing in July, three months earlier. This in turn reminded him that he was a long way from home and in a new, totally alien environment. It made him feel slightly disorientated and remote from himself.

  Entering the wadi, heading straight for the towering Jebel, the lengthy column of trucks soon left the sand-filled Negd behind and drove over a smoother surface of tightly packed gravel and small stones. Mercifully, the shadows cast over the convoy by the high rock faces on either side brought the men further protection from the sun and wind. Eventually the sun went down, cooling the men even more.

  ‘Thank God for the evening,’ Ricketts said. ‘A little relief at last.’

  ‘It’ll soon be so fucking cold you’ll have frost on your nuts,’ Gumboot replied. ‘If it isn’t one thing, it’s another. This place is a pisser.’

  Now out of the wind and dust, the men were removing the magazines from their SLRs and other weapons to clean them again, working the cocking handles to ensure that they were back in good order. Some were hurrying to finish this task when the convoy ground to a halt because the wadi had narrowed so much that they would have to go the rest of the way by foot.

  Ricketts placed a 7.62mm round back in the magazine of his SLR, fixed the magazine to the weapon and cocked the action. He had time to quickly squeeze oil onto the side of the breech before following the other troopers out of the Bedford.

  Standing on the gravel floor of the wadi as the other SAS, SAF and firqats also jumped down, rapidly filling up the formerly empty, silent area, he was surprised to see Sergeant ‘Dead-eye Dick’ Parker with a nearby group, still wearing his jellaba and shemagh, which, with his bandoliers and two knives, made him look as fearsome as the tribesmen. In fact, even as Ricketts saw him, he moved away from the SAS group and went to join the Arabs, talking to them in a low murmur and receiving solemn nods from them by way of reply.

  ‘Fucking Lawrence of Arabia,’ Gumboot said.

  ‘And probably just as mad,’ Andrew added.

  ‘A damned good soldier,’ Lampton informed them. ‘At least the firqats respect him.’

  ‘They respect men as mad as they are.’ Gumboot was checking his M16. ‘They know he’d slit your throat as quick as look at you. That’s what they respect.’

  ‘OK, you men!’ RSM Worthington bawled, standing mere feet away, his barrel chest heaving. ‘Don’t stand there like limp dicks at a wedding. Clean out those Bedfords!’

  The equipment was unloaded and divided among the men. As number two of the GPMG sustained-fire team, Ricketts would be carrying a steel tripod weighing over 30lb, plus a thousand rounds of 7.62mm ammunition belts – half wrapped around his body, the other half in his bergen – and four 20-round SLR magazines on his belt. He also had his Browning handgun, belt kit with smoke and fragmentation grenades, rations, first-aid kit, and three full water bottles. Also in his team were Jock as gun controller, Gumboot as observer and Andrew as number one, or trigger man. Between them, apart from personal gear, they had to hump the tripod, two spare barrels weighing 6lb each, spare return spring, dial sight, marker pegs, two aiming posts, aiming lamp, recoil buffer, tripod sighting bracket, spare-parts wallet, and the gun itself, weighing 24lb. Burdened with all this, they would have to climb out of the wadi, up onto the flat, open area of the Mahazair Pools, which was their night basha spot.

  ‘This is gonna fucking kill us,’ Jock McGregor said.

  Gumboot studied the Arab fighters conversing solemnly with Dead-eye Parker. ‘Those bastards aren’t carrying much,’ he said. ‘Only personal weapons.’

  ‘They don’t need as much as us,’ Lampton explained. ‘They’ll be out front, facing the adoo, while we give them covering fire. Let that console you.’

  ‘Donkey soldiers,’ Andrew said. ‘Isn’t that what they call us? Because we hump all this heavy gear. Donkey soldiers! The bastards must be having a good laugh at us.’

  ‘If I hear any of them calling me that, I’ll give them what for.’

  ‘Since you don’t speak their language, Gumboot, you won’t hear a damned thing,’ Andrew corrected him.

  ‘Prepare to saddle up!’ the RSM bellowed. ‘We haven’t got all night!’

  In preparation for the climb, Ricketts unlocked the front leg-cl
amp levers of the GPMG tripod, swung them forward into the high-mount position and relocked them. Then, with Andrew’s help, he humped the tripod up onto his shoulders with the front legs resting on his chest and the rear one trailing backwards over his bergen. His total burden now weighed a crippling 130lb, and he was carrying his SLR with his free hand.

  All along the wadi, in the dimming afternoon light, the other men were doing the same, making a hell of a racket. There were 250 of them in all, spread out over approximately a quarter of a mile, between and around the parked Bedfords.

  ‘OK, men,’ Worthington bellowed, his voice reverberating eerily around the wadi, as if amplified. ‘Saddle up!’

  The men moved out, falling instinctively into a lengthy, irregular file formation, spreading more and more apart, until the line was a good half mile long, snaking back from the slopes of the wadi to the trucks below.

  Within minutes, the metal of the tripod cradle was digging viciously into the back of Ricketts’s neck, letting him know that it was going to hurt. He turned his head left and right, but this only rubbed the skin of his neck against the steel leg, making it hurt even more. In less than an hour the pain was worse, shooting down through his shoulder blades, and the sweat was starting from his forehead and dripping into his eyes.

  He glanced at his nearest friends and saw that they were suffering the same – if not with a tripod, certainly with other gear – and sweating every bit as much as he was. No one spoke. They were trying to save their breath. To make the hike more tortuous, they were assailed, as usual, by flies, mosquitoes and the occasional hornet, but this time they could not slap them away as they were either carrying weapons or holding onto heavy equipment, just as Ricketts had to do with his tripod. Now it was hurting more than ever, sending darting pains through his shoulders, and those pains, combined with his increasing exhaustion, made him start wondering if he could actually stand the strain.

  Ricketts’s fears were in no way eased when, one after the other, a number of troopers vomited from the strain and were pulled out of the column and ordered by the RSM to ‘rest up, then catch up’. This brought no respite to the others, since the column continued moving. However, it stopped shortly after, the men banging into one another, as voices called down the line for the medics. When those voices faded away, a series of hand signals came down the line, indicating that the men were to rest up until further notice. Gratefully, the men around Ricketts all sank to the ground.