The Regiment

  So the Falkland Islands weren’t really on my radar. I don’t think I’d ever heard of them before the invasion happened and some of the lads, who had heard the name, had a vague idea that they were somewhere near Scotland. Invaded by Argentina? What the fuck was that about?

  Like everybody else in the country, we’d had virtually no notice of anything happening: there’d been a few stories in the media about some scrap metal dealers turning up on South Georgia but none of us had joined the dots at all. Suddenly, everyone was running around like headless chickens, as the Regiment prepared itself for operations. To be fair, it was a process that worked reasonably well.

  As the next few days passed and the task force to go south was rapidly assembled, D Squadron and then G Squadron were called in and mobilised to sail down south with the navy. It was known as a ‘Free Beer’, a password they’d used back in the 1960s for a fast call-out.

  In theory, we were next in line – A Squadron were the ‘special projects team’ and they weren’t going anywhere, they were the ‘stay behind squadron’, always the bridesmaids and never the bride – and we were designated as the ‘strategic reserve’ for operations in the South Atlantic. Even so, at this stage nobody thought we’d be getting involved in a hurry. Whoever heard of three SAS squadrons being sent on the same operation? Never going to happen, mate.

  But fuck me backwards it did.

  The invasion had taken place on 2 April. Details were hazy at first; early photographs from the Argentine media showed Argentine Navy ships in Port Stanley harbour, and Argentine Special Forces taking the Royal Marines’ garrison as prisoners of war but not much else filtered down to us and, with D and G Squadrons out of the way, we knuckled down with our own training. If I’m honest, I suspected it was all going to fizzle out and there would be some kind of diplomatic fudge which would leave the Falklands in Argentine hands. That’s what would have happened in the past. Of course, we now had Maggie Thatcher in charge. The Iranian Embassy had shown that she wasn’t the kind of leader who was going to back down.

  Apart from all the diplomacy, with people like Alexander Haig shuttling between Washington, London and Buenos Aires trying to sort things out, the next piece of serious news which filtered down was the recapture of South Georgia in the last week of April.

  The story around Hereford was that D Squadron had played a key role in the operation and it wasn’t until much later we found out what a cock-up it had all been. The boys from 19 Troop had been landed on a glacier on the island to do a recce of the Argie positions but the weather had been so shit – freezing temperatures, blizzards and high winds – that they’d soon realised that they were in serious trouble and called for a helicopter evacuation. This went tits up when the pilot lost his horizon on the glacier thanks to a white-out and piled his helicopter in, and a second chopper, which was called in to evacuate the SAS team and the crew of the first helicopter, did more or less the same thing. This left the South Georgia task force with just one transport helicopter remaining but this one did manage to evacuate the SAS lads and both crews from the crashed choppers.

  In the end, South Georgia was taken without much of a fight. A submarine had come from Argentina bringing reinforcements and supplies but one of our navy helicopters caught it on the surface when it tried to leave South Georgia, and nailed it with rockets and depth charges. The submarine struggled back into harbour and the task force commander quickly landed a mixed company’s worth of Marines and SAS to take advantage of the situation. The Argies saw them coming, shit their pants and surrendered.

  So that was round one to the Brits. South Georgia recaptured with no serious casualties. Although it wasn’t obvious at the time, the war was now beginning to really hot up. Around this time we were quietly taken off our other training and given a warning order for a mysterious operation in the South Atlantic.

  The purpose of the warning was to give us a heads-up so we could get on with preparation and training. The outline we were given was to prepare for a tactical airlanding from C-130s followed by a target attack and the idea being put about was that the landing would take place at Port Stanley followed by an attack against a nearby target. What would this be? Argentine headquarters on the Falklands perhaps, or maybe their air defence control centre. If we took that out, I suppose there was a chance that we could have dropped an airborne battlegroup onto Stanley, though, chatting about it with the lads, it seemed highly unlikely.

  Even so, it gave us a framework for training. As our training package started, we moved the squadron to RAF Brize Norton, near Oxford, and started to practise the drills for loading the squadron plus vehicles, weapons, explosives and equipment onto two C-130s, and then for a rapid tactical de-bus at the far end. This training was for everyone involved, not just us. So once we’d got the aircraft loaded, we then got several hours of low-level tactical flying to get us to our destination which was usually the RAF base at Lossiemouth in Scotland.

  Once on the deck, the rear ramps of the C-130s were lowered and when the aircraft was taxi-ing at the right speed, we drove down in the pinkies and headed for our targets. That’s easier written than done. Several times during this initial training package we had seriously bumpy landings and it was clear to us that trying to do the same thing under anti-aircraft fire on a landing strip which had been bombed was a non-starter. ‘This is going to be a fucking Wild West Show’, was the general opinion, and it was fair to say that morale in B Squadron – for some of us – was in our boots. I’d been in the Regiment five years by now, so I was still relatively junior, but there were senior guys in the squadron, who’d been there since the 1960s in some cases, who thought this was a suicide mission and weren’t afraid to say so.

  Meanwhile there was a real war going on. Five days after South Georgia was retaken, the first of the Vulcan raids on Port Stanley airfield took place and, at roughly the same time and with much less publicity of course, the first Special Forces recces were going ashore from G Squadron and the Shaky Boats.* All very interesting for those in the know but both were dwarfed the next day by the news that the Argie cruiser Belgrano had been torpedoed and sunk with, it was assumed, hundreds of casualties. You didn’t need to be Mystic Meg to know that the shit had just hit the fan.

  *Shaky Boats = The Special Boat Service (SBS).

  Up until then it had pretty much been a phoney war. Both sides had been posturing at each other, making scary noises but not actually doing very much except building up forces whilst diplomacy supposedly took its course and now, suddenly, Britain had given Argentina a massive kick in the nuts and they were going to have to fold or fight. They decided to fight.

  Two days after the Belgrano went down, the Argies hit back. In 1978 the US government had finally introduced an arms embargo as a response to the Argentine military government’s campaign of murder against its own citizens. This meant that the Argentine Navy could no longer get spares for its old American-made Skyhawk fighter bombers. As a result, the Argies decided to shop around and eventually fixed on the modern French-made ‘Super Etendard’ as a replacement. This was a small, agile jet aircraft capable of operating either from Argentina’s aircraft carrier, the 25 de Mayo, or from the naval airbases along Argentina’s Atlantic coast. The key thing about the Super Etendard was that it could launch the Exocet missile.

  Now the Exocet was the real bugger. It’s an anti-shipping missile with a range of around 40 miles and a warhead of about 350lb of high explosives, enough to blow a great big hole in a relatively flimsy modern warship. The clever thing about it was that it was designed to skim along just above the wave tops – no more than three to six feet up – for most of its flight, before switching on its active radar for the last few thousand yards, thus ensuring pinpoint accuracy but very little warning for the ship on the receiving end. Modern defensive weapons could take out an incoming Exocet, even back in 1982, but very few of the ships we had out there were equipped with them. By the time that the Falklands War broke out, the Argentine Navy had
taken delivery of five Super Etendards and five of the air-launched AM39 Exocet missiles.

  A little before 8am local time on 4 May, an Argentine Lockheed Neptune maritime recce aircraft spotted HMS Sheffield on its radar and reported its position back to the Argentine mainland. The Sheffield was by then in position to the west of the Falkland Islands, acting as an anti-aircraft early warning ship. Soon after, two Super Etendards were launched from the Rio Grande naval airbase on Tierra del Fuego as part of an attack package, along with a tanker aircraft and two escort fighters. The Super Etendards refuelled and then moved into attack profile.

  The Argentine aircraft were picked up on the radars of some ships in the task force but, for some reason, the warning wasn’t passed round the fleet. When the Super Etendards were about 20 or 30 miles from the Sheffield, they launched their Exocets and turned for home. The Exocets had been programmed with the coordinates of the Sheffield and headed straight for it at more than 700 miles per hour. A few miles out, they automatically switched on their active homing radar. It was at this point that the Sheffield detected them but there was very little time to act. Lookouts spotted the smoke trails left by the missiles and, with no more than five seconds warning, one of the Exocets ploughed into the British warship, whilst the second missed and hit the sea half a mile away.

  The effect on the British ship was massive. The missile didn’t actually explode, for some reason, but the impact of a 1,500lb missile at 700 miles per hour tore a huge hole in the side of the ship and the unburned rocket propellant started a series of fires which the crew couldn’t fight because the impact had severed the water main on the ship. Twenty sailors were killed, many more injured, and the ship was abandoned.

  Suddenly, it was a real war for the British as well. If we were going to have any hope of retaking the Falkland Islands, we needed to have a strong and secure naval presence, including naval aviation provided by the aircraft carriers. The Argentines had just demonstrated that they could take out our ships with relatively little difficulty. If they could nail the Sheffield, there was no reason why they couldn’t also hit the Hermes, the Illustrious or the Invincible; or even one of the landing ships, Fearless or Intrepid. The powers that be suddenly realised that this was a war we could lose much more easily than we could win.

  Those calculations were well above my pay grade of course, but it suddenly became apparent that somebody, somewhere was having a good hard think about making the odds a bit more even, because all of a sudden, B Squadron’s training got really serious and new kit was being thrown at us like it was Christmas.

  We’d been told that the next phase of preparation would be a move down to a forward mounting base at Ascension Island which is stuck out in the middle of the South Atlantic Ocean, roughly mid-way between Liberia and Brazil, and a little bit to the south of the Equator. This is one of those old colonial oddities: an island in the middle of nowhere which still belonged to Britain and which, because we’d allowed the Americans to build a base there during World War II, had a great big fuck-off runway.

  We got a preliminary brief as a squadron, giving us an idea about what to expect in Ascension and telling us to get our kit together and packed for a short notice move; but, at this stage, there was still no confirmation of what our mission or target was or any idea how long the operation was going to last. This was routine: anytime there was any kind of crisis going on, Hereford was swamped with journalists trying to find out if and when we were deploying. There was a bus shelter on the main road, not far from the camp gates, which was pretty much a permanent observation post for the journalists and all the bars and pubs we used in town were full of people listening for any snippets they could pick up. From our point of view, it was good operational security for us not to know in any kind of detail where we were going or when so we weren’t in a position to accidentally compromise it.

  In an infantry battalion, your webbing and kit are normally packed according to a Standard Operating Procedure, so that everyone is normally carrying the same gear in pretty much the same place but those rules don’t apply in the Regiment. The main reason is that each member of an SAS patrol has at least one specialised role – commander, signaller, medic, demolitionist and so on – and will be carrying the equipment needed for it, together with their share of the patrol equipment. So in my bergan I would normally carry the patrol medical kit plus a selection of night viewing gear, explosives and dems kit, a camera, radio batteries etcetera. You do also need your personal gear: a poncho for shelter, a sleeping bag and a spare set of dry clothes and warm kit in a waterproof bag, to ensure that you can survive. From what we knew of the climate of the Falklands and the South Atlantic in general, it was going to be cold and wet, and we were all experienced enough to know that hypothermia and exposure can fuck up an operation just as badly as someone getting shot.

  On my belt were the basics I would need to live and fight: ammunition, water and some food, together with a few other bits and pieces. Back then, the army issued ’58 pattern canvas webbing in a standard format which included a good belt, two big ammunition pouches which would take Bren gun magazines, a water bottle pouch, a gas-mask pouch, two big rear ‘kidney’ pouches and a canvas roll to wrap your poncho. This wasn’t really suitable for our needs so the Regiment had come up with their own system of pouches, all designed to hang below the bergan rucksack we usually patrolled with. In reality, most of the lads mixed and matched and I was no different. I had a belt made from a heavy-drop cargo strop with a couple of twin Armalite pouches, a water bottle pouch and a couple of pouches to carry a basic survival kit and some food: dry rations like tinned cheese, biscuits, chocolate and boiled sweets, and some brew kit. Between them, without the addition of ammunition and explosives, my belt and bergan weighed more than 90lb.

  At home, the evening before the final brief, I packed some civilian clothes, a tracksuit and trainers and a few bits and pieces of personal gear into a GQ para bag – a kind of big holdall – and left home to walk down to the barracks in the early hours. As is often the case, I felt strongly conflicted: on the one hand, there was no denying I was excited about being part of an operation of this magnitude; on the other, I was wondering whether I would see my young son again or, for that matter, my big black and tan German Shepherd, Sabre. I wasn’t sure whether my wife was too bothered whether I made it back or not, but there we go.

  But the feeling of gloom disappeared when I got onto camp. The rest of the lads from the squadron were turning up from all over the place and we were straight back into the usual routine of banter, piss-taking and back-stabbing. That’s one thing about the SAS: when we’re all together, there isn’t any time for introspection. Then it was into the Blue Room on camp – a big briefing room – for the mission brief.

  It turned out to be a dramatic night. A lot of the regimental head shed were already down south with the task force – certainly that was where the Commanding Officer was – but in his place was Brigadier de la Billière who, as Director SAS, was responsible for all Special Forces units in the UK.

  The background and situation was given by the regimental operations officer. The reason for the operation was clear enough: the Exocets were a serious threat to the task force and had to be eliminated. He talked through a potential timescale and the various components of the op. Then the squadron commander, Major M, had his say, giving out the various tasks; and finally the squadron sergeant major talked through the logistics of it.

  So what was the plan? The idea was that we would move to a forward mounting base at Ascension Island and, from there, the squadron would fly south in two C-130s, refuelling in the air on the way, to the Argentine naval airbase at Rio Grande on Tierra del Fuego in the extreme south of Argentina. Coming in at low level, hopefully below the Argentine radar, these two aircraft would then land on the runway and taxi towards the airbase buildings. Once we were close enough, we would drive out of the C-130s in our pinkies, with some of the lads on foot, and then head for the aircraft hangars, the
missile storage area and the Argentine pilots’ accommodation. The Exocets would then be destroyed with explosives and hopefully the Super Etendards as well. The next element was a little controversial: we would find the Argentine pilots and kill them which would ensure that even if we hadn’t got all the planes and missiles, there would be no one around to launch them.

  Once all this was achieved, the plan was that, if the C-130s were still flyable, we would get back aboard, take off again and fly on to the Chilean airbase at Punta Arenas. If the aircraft had been taken out, we would break clean from the base and then evade across Tierra del Fuego to the Chilean border.

  That was the main operation, given the codename Operation Mikado but there was a second strand as well. It was quite clear from the brief that intelligence about what was going on at Rio Grande was very thin on the ground. Nobody knew where the missiles were stored, or where the aircraft were parked at night; we didn’t know where the pilots slept. Satellite scanning had revealed some radar signatures, but there was no information about how the airbase was defended, and whether they had anti-aircraft guns or Surface-to-Air missiles in place; whether there were infantry dug in on the base or around the perimeter. In fact, the only mapping we had was a black and white map dated 1939, and some photocopies from the current Times Atlas of the World. From any standpoint, that was thoroughly inadequate and as a result, in order to give us the information we needed to actually launch the attack, a second operation, codenamed Plum Duff was being launched.

  The purpose of Plum Duff was to get a recce team down onto the ground in Rio Grande to spy out exactly what the situation was at the airbase and in the town. A team from 9 Troop had already flown out to Ascension Island from where they were flown down to the task force around the Falkland Islands and parachuted into the sea, eventually winding up on the aircraft carrier HMS Invincible. From there, the plan was to fly them to Tierra del Fuego in a stripped-down navy Sea King, operating at extreme range, which would then be flown on into Chile and abandoned. If the recce team didn’t make it, or they got compromised when they were in situ, the operation was going to be in serious shit.