The Regiment

  Obviously we’d had a good idea about what was being planned from the training we’d been doing but it wasn’t until that briefing that the full impact of it hit us. There seemed to be so many gaps in it. Someone asked about fighter cover for our flight in. De la Billière said something along the lines of we asked for a couple of Phantoms but we don’t think they would survive against the Argie air defences. Well hang on a minute: if they’re capable of knocking down Phantoms, what about C-130s? There was no real answer to that.

  Someone else asked about arrangements for our reception in Chile if we had to evade after the attack: where should we make for? DLB was nodding his head, but he wasn’t answering so the question was asked again: where’s the pick-up point? He still didn’t answer, and we began to realise that this hadn’t been arranged at all. Either they didn’t expect any of us to make it, or they wanted us to just trust to luck. Fucking hell.

  Major M, the squadron commander, stood up to give his final pep talk:

  ‘The bottom line is that we’re at war and if this is what we have to do to make sure the task force is safe, then it’s what we’re going to do.’

  It was not a happy mood as the briefing broke up and we started loading our gear onto the four-tonners which would transport it to RAF Lyneham for loading onto our flight to Ascension. But then things got even worse. Word began to spread that DLB had sacked Major M as B Squadron’s officer commanding and replaced him with Major C, the regimental second-in-command; even more shocking, Jakey, the 6 Troop staff sergeant, and one of the most experienced guys in the Regiment, had asked to resign because he believed that the operation was a needless suicide mission with little chance of success.

  It was apparent that somewhere around the fringes of the briefing DLB had asked Major M what he thought of the plan and that Major M had given him a straight answer. DLB didn’t like what he heard and had sacked Major M on the spot. That wasn’t really his job but the commanding officer was down south and DLB was the man on the spot. I liked Major M: I’d worked with him in Northern Ireland and played rugby with him in the SAS and I thought he was treated unfairly. I don’t know anyone in the squadron who thought that Mikado was a viable plan and in pointing this out, I reckon Major M showed more balls than DLB ever did.

  A lot of guys in the squadron agreed with him, and as we waited for the coaches which would take us to Lyneham, there were heated discussions about what to do. To a lot of the guys, it looked like DLB was sacrificing us to enhance his own reputation: if the operation succeeded, it would be a brilliant strike at the heart of the Argie offensive capability and he’d get the credit; if it failed, it would have been a heroic but risky effort, let down by mechanical failure, or whatever. On the other hand, some members of the squadron felt equally strongly that, as soldiers, it was our duty to do what we had to do and if that meant a high-risk mission with the likelihood of serious casualties, then so be it. Some felt that the resistance to mounting the operation wasn’t too far from mutiny, and they didn’t want any part of it.

  Whichever way the dice rolled, it was clear that a good few of us weren’t coming back. But after what had happened to Major M and Jakey, some of the lads were genuinely worried about saying too much: it was definitely ‘look over your shoulder’ time. I suppose I was somewhere in the middle. I didn’t want to do it but I was prepared to play my part if we went. At the end of the day, if it worked it would be fucking awesome.

  At Lyneham we spent some time making sure that all the baggage had been properly checked in and that the vehicles, weapons and other squadron stores were properly loaded onto the C-130s. This had been done over the past few days by a combination of RAF, SAS and civvies, supervised by the B Squadron quartermaster sergeant Fred Marafono, one of the small group of Fijians who’d joined the Regiment in the 1960s, and Pete Scholey, another B Squadron old-stager. Then it was off to the lounge and hurry up and wait. Some of the lads played cards, some smoked, some slept; I chatted with John McAleese, Minky and a few other 8 Troop lads, bumping our gums about how we were going to sort out the Argies. As you do.

  Finally, the time came to board our flight. It was a long journey, well over 4,000 miles and it seemed to take for ever. There was a feeling of ‘There’s no turning back now’ and I spent most of it trying and failing to get some sleep.

  When we eventually landed at Ascension, the first thing that struck us was the heat and humidity of the place. It’s only a little way south of the Equator and my first thought was ‘well, this is nice’ – there’s nothing like a bit of tropical weather to perk you up. We were taken to accommodation close to the airfield to get ourselves sorted out.

  The outline for the next couple of days was more preparation for the operation. The essential thing we were waiting for was the establishment of eyes on Rio Grande, courtesy of the 9 Troop lads. When they were in place, we should be able to get information in more or less real time. In the meantime, we carried on rehearsals through the heat of the days, landing the C-130s on Wideawake Airfield on Ascension, and then fanning out for the attack.

  Apart from rehearsing the de-planing drill, we spent a lot of time on the ranges, getting weapons zeroed and just getting comfortable with them. I had an Armalite AR-15 assault rifle, an M-203 over-and-under 40mm grenade launcher and a 9mm Browning pistol, which would give me plenty of personal firepower, and most of the rest of the lads were carrying a similar load.

  As well as shooting, we practised cross-country movement in the vehicles. If we did need to evade across country into Chile, we were going to need to move fast and if any of the vehicles had survived the assault, they would be the obvious choice. Ascension is a volcanic island and a lot of the terrain consists of fossilised volcanic lava flows, and we practised getting around them. Reputedly the golf course there is the worst in the world: the ‘greens’ consist of volcanic dust and are known as ‘browns’ and I’ve got to say they weren’t improved at all by us driving our Landrovers and motorbikes over them.

  The highest point on Ascension is ‘Green Mountain’, an extinct volcano nearly 3,000 feet high, and this formed the focal point for our fitness training. A run up and down there was certainly something you knew all about but it was worth doing: once again, if we were evading we were going to have to move fast and I definitely didn’t fancy being last in the daisy-chain in an Argie military prison if I got caught.

  We’d all deployed to Ascension in our normal work/combat gear, which consisted of the camouflaged ‘tropical’ trousers and shirt we got issued for the jungle and the standard SAS-issue ‘windproof’ smock which is a great bit of kit but which is definitely only windproof rather than waterproof. That was fine on a tropical island but Tierra del Fuego, heading into the southern winter, was going to be rather different. The army-issue camouflage waterproofs at the time were made of nylon and PVC which was OK if you were standing still but meant you became overheated and soaked in sweat very quickly if you did anything strenuous whilst wearing them, so they were no good for our purposes. The quartermaster back in Hereford decided to sort this out and went and bought all of the Gore-tex jackets and trousers he could get hold of at the local camping shops, and these were duly dispatched to us. Normally when new and expensive kit is issued you have to sign for it, but Fred Marafono just dished it out: we were on a suicide mission, if anyone made it back were they really going to pursue him for a waterproof jacket? The only minor problem was that they weren’t in military colours, but we soon worked out that we could wear them under our camouflage gear.

  A similar attitude prevailed with money. The SAS is a pretty grown up organisation and usually takes the attitude that you work hard and you play hard, then you rest. There were a few bars at Ascension and we weren’t restricted from going into them for a few beers after work. John Mac and I would go to one called the ‘Volcano Club’, which had two snooker tables, where we could wind down after a long day with a couple of frames. Generally speaking, we took it easy on the beer. The operation was still on and w
e needed to be sharp.

  On 16 May, word went round that Operation Plum Duff was going in. I wasn’t there, so I’m not an eyewitness but we picked up a description of what happened afterwards from the lads who were. The aircraft had landed and three of the men were already on the ground when the commander made the decision to abort over concerns that the mission had been compromised.

  The boss made his decision and shouted down to Gwyn D, who was already on the ground, ‘Sorry lads, it’s Chile after all.’

  Gwyn didn’t understand him: ‘Chilly? It’s fucking freezing!’

  They got back on board the Sea King and the pilot flew onwards to Chilean territory. He dropped our lads off out in the cuds and then flew as close as he could get towards the Chilean town of Punta Arenas before he ran out of fuel. The crew ditched the helicopter on the edge of a forest about ten miles from Punta Arenas, torched it and hid up until morning, before handing themselves in the next day to the Chilean authorities, who arranged for them to be flown back to the UK.

  Our lads meanwhile lay up for the night and then headed for their designated ‘War RV’ where they expected to meet an SAS officer working undercover inside Chile who would arrange for their exfiltration. They were more than a little surprised when he didn’t show up; nor was he at the alternate War RV the next day. In reality, they didn’t have many options now and the only realistic one seemed to be to hand themselves over to the Chilean police and hope for the best. They headed for a one-horse border village to find someone to surrender to and were astonished to see their SAS contact through the window of a café, getting stuck into a meal and a cerveza. I guess it came as a bit of a shock for the Chileans who ran the place when a couple of cammed-up, heavily-armed Brits sauntered through the front door, but probably not as much as it was for their contact, Andy G, who hadn’t been expecting to meet them until the next day due to some communications cock-up.

  But back on Ascension Island we knew none of this and were expecting to get the order to move at any time so we carried on training and rehearsing, polishing our drills as finely as we could in the absence of any hard information about what our target constituted.

  The next piece of news that did filter back to us on Ascension was almost unimaginable. On 19 May, word came back that a Sea King carrying a whole crowd of lads from D and G Squadrons had gone down in the South Atlantic and that many of them had been killed. We didn’t have any details about what had happened or who exactly was dead but the word was that as many as 20 were gone. It was almost unbelievable. My first thought was ‘what a fucking waste of life’.

  I remember sitting with a bunch of the lads on the veranda of the bar we drank at that evening, holding an impromptu wake. We speculated about what could have happened and why, but at that time we had very few details. Sometimes, the drinking sessions that inevitably take place after someone is killed on ops – or even in training – turn into raucous, punchy affairs but this one didn’t, even though it went on long into the tropical night. We were all still expecting to take off on our ‘Death or Glory’ suicide mission at any moment and the news of the helicopter crash had brought it all into sharp perspective.

  In time we learned what had happened. A Sea King helicopter had been cross-decking men and stores from D and G Squadrons on a routine flight and had sucked a large seabird, probably an albatross, into the engine air intake. This led to a catastrophic loss of power and the helicopter fell into the icy sea. There was a war on, the chopper was overcrowded and none of the passengers was wearing an immersion suit, which might have kept some of them alive. A few got out and were rescued but 19 members of the Regiment died.

  There’s a story that one of the lads who did escape found that his foot was trapped in some part of the safety harness. As he struggled, he felt a tap on his ankle, then the motion of someone sawing through the webbing strap that was holding him; then he was loose and he felt a firm double tap on the ankle, and knew to swim free whist his rescuer went to the bottom of the ocean.

  I don’t remember ever being specifically told that Plum Duff had aborted but as the days passed, it was clear that something had gone wrong with the recce because we hadn’t received any of the information we were expecting. Most of us in the squadron assumed that, with no eyes on the target, the operation would be cancelled but bizarrely it wasn’t, and we continued to train for an attack which would be almost bound to fail for one of several reasons.

  The point is that there were readily identifiable problems with every phase of Operation Mikado. The first of these was the entry phase. We were relying on two heavily loaded C-130s getting from Ascension Island to Rio Grande, a distance of around 4,000 miles, which would require air-to-air refuelling on route. However well-maintained the aircraft are, there is always the chance of a mechanical failure of some sort particularly when doing a complex manoeuvre like refuelling. At a certain stage we were going to reach a point of no return to Ascension, and if one of the C-130s had to divert and land in a neutral country, the other one would be on its own: would it press home the attack? The sensible answer would be to abort the op but our orders were to press on.

  Similarly, if one of the C-130s was shot down or severely damaged on the approach – a strong possibility if there was any kind of defence at Rio Grande – the other aircraft would be on its own.

  The assault itself, once we’d hit the ground, relied on surprise, speed and slick drills, but as we didn’t actually know where we had to go because we didn’t know the detailed layout of the base, that wasn’t going to happen. Even semi-competent defenders would be able to get their act together in time to respond, and remember, we would be very lightly armed: our heaviest weapons would be the .50 Browning machine guns on the pinkies but we had nothing else apart from small arms to suppress an Argie counter-attack. In short, it was a disaster waiting to happen and definitely squeaky bottom time. Why wasn’t it cancelled? We didn’t know but the suspicion in B Squadron was that DLB was desperate for it to go ahead for his own reasons. As we waited in Ascension, there was a lot of speculation about what these could be. DLB was back in the UK, presumably telling everyone how he was about to win the war. The operation had started badly back in the Blue Room: if DLB had been able to answer the basic, sensible questions he was asked, we might have had more confidence in the plan but he hadn’t, and we didn’t. The ‘Chinese Parliaments’* were running at a high-octane level at this point and it’s probably a good thing that DLB couldn’t hear what we were saying about him: I bet his ears were burning. One theory was that B Squadron also needed to be seen to be taking casualties but what on earth would be the point of that?

  *A ‘Chinese Parliament’ is the informal SAS practice of allowing every member of a patrol or operational sub-unit the chance to give their opinion on a proposed plan or course of action, and suggest alterations.

  This state of affairs continued for several days, by which time part of the squadron had been loaded on to HMS Onyx, a diesel electric submarine capable of getting close in to the Argentine shore. The plan was for them to paddle ashore in rubber boats and infiltrate overland to support the attack. It was getting farcical.

  On 23 May we finally heard that Operation Mikado was binned. Thank fuck for that. Morale in the squadron had been up and down like a yoyo as we basically planned and rehearsed our own deaths. As you can imagine, we had a few beers after we heard that news as well. We weren’t toasting DLB’s health.

  Even so, the war was still going on and we were halfway to the Falklands already. Some of the D and G Squadron lads had been ashore for the best part of a month and, with the best will in the world, those operations take it out of you. The time wasn’t far off when they would need to be relieved and B Squadron were well placed to do it, so it wasn’t time to go home just yet.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  WATER JUMP

  While we had been preparing for our suicide mission, the war in the Falklands had, of course, been continuing. As I mentioned earlier, D Squadron had got
themselves hairily involved in the recapture of South Georgia which had started on 21 April with a failed helicopter insertion on a glacier, followed a couple of days later by a partially successful boat insertion. Meanwhile, the rest of the naval task force had continued to sail towards the Falkland Islands themselves, where they began to arrive on 30 April.

  1 May was the first day that the two sides started seriously clashing. The Argentine Air Force began to attack the task force, without success at this point, and during the night, the RAF had launched their first Vulcan attack from Ascension Island, aimed at taking out the runway at Port Stanley airfield. This was followed by attacks during the day by Harriers from the task force.

  But what nobody noticed during these early exchanges was that recce patrols from G Squadron were going ashore. Over three nights, G Squadron inserted eight four-man patrols to cover and report back from a series of key locations. In a sense this observation and intelligence gathering was a classic SAS role going back to World War II but it wasn’t one we practised much in those days.

  Long-term covert OPs were quite common in Northern Ireland but conditions were entirely different there. For a start, the weather in Ireland, while it could be pretty grim at times, was rarely as unrelentingly cold and miserable as it routinely was in the Falklands and most OPs, particularly in urban and semi-urban areas, could be inserted into buildings or other structures, while those in rural parts could often be concealed in woodland, which was non-existent in the Falkands. Secondly, we had developed sophisticated methods of covertly resupplying our observation posts to ensure that their occupants weren’t short of food and water, and could be changed over as necessary to make sure that they got adequate rest. Thirdly, if an OP was compromised, we were almost always in position to bring in a Quick Reaction Force to save the day and although that didn’t always work out, anyone manning a covert OP had a reasonable expectation that they should have enough firepower to keep an enemy at bay until the cavalry arrived; that certainly wasn’t going to be the case for the G Squadron guys who, for three long weeks, were essentially the only British troops ashore apart from a few teams from the Shaky Boats. If the shit hit the fan, they were going to be in trouble. In fact, even if they avoided detection, they were certain to be cold, wet, hungry and exhausted, living on cold food on hard routine.