It took three minutes to drive through the camp but the Commander gave no instruction to increase the speed of the vehicles until they were some 800 metres past the last Iraqi troops. Then he ordered the drivers to go like hell. There was just twenty more miles to the forward British position – and safety.
But it was ‘Scud busting’, of course, that was the most important element of the Special Forces operations throughout the war. Tracing and destroying the Iraqi missiles in the desert was a tailor-made task for Special Forces. The area where the missiles were based was known as the ‘Scud Box’ and the SAS and the US Green Berets divided this into two areas, the British concentrating on what was called ‘Scud Alley’ to the south of the road between Baghdad and Amman, the capital of Jordan, and the Americans took care of the north, known as ‘Scud Boulevard’.
Roaming around the Iraqi desert in four-wheel-drive vehicles behind enemy lines, both the SAS and the Green Berets began to come across mobile Scuds in their respective areas. At the beginning of the war the Special Force teams would find a Scud on a transporter and would, through communications systems, alert an airbase in Saudi Arabia with the necessary map co-ordinates. A strike plane would be scrambled and directed towards the site. However, the delay between the sighting of the missile on the ground and the arrival of the USAF strike plane would sometimes be from thirty minutes to an hour. Too often the Special Force units on the ground would spot a Scud, transmit the intelligence to base and then wait. By the time the warplane appeared overhead the transporter would have moved on. There had to be another way.
After spotting six mobile Scuds in Scud Alley the SAS men decided that it was a total waste of time risking their skins to track down these missiles and then to see them disappear over the horizon before a USAF A-10 Thunderbolt 11, affectionately called a ‘Warthog’ or simply ‘Hog’, arrived on the scene to take them out. They became increasingly annoyed and disillusioned that one mobile Scud after another was parking by the side of a main road for perhaps an hour or two and then moving away before the Warthogs could be scrambled to the designated position. So they decided to take more direct action instead.
From then on, whenever the SAS crews in their Land Rovers came across a mobile Scud, they would prepare a battle plan and go ahead before it moved off. They would usually wait until dark, sometimes attacking just before dawn, when they could safely approach close to the target without being seen.
But the new, improvised battle plans required the SAS teams to adopt a far more dangerous approach. The original plan was for the British and US Special Forces to simply discover the whereabouts of the mobile Scuds and then to call for air strikes to take them out. The new plan, devised on the ground by the SAS units, called for far greater courage and daring in challenging the Iraqi forces guarding the secret weapons with which Saddam Hussein hoped to ignite an all-out Arab–Israeli conflict.
Before reaching the decision to attack mobile Scuds the senior commanders studied the protection the Iraqis were providing for their Scud operators as they moved around the desert. The mobile Scuds were mounted on eight-wheel TEL (transporter-erector-launcher) vehicles and these were accompanied by two Russian ZIL-157V tractors hauling the tarpaulin-covered missiles. Each Scud was accompanied by a petrol tanker and two or three jeeps carrying troops as guards for the Scud and its team of operators.
Small SAS teams of nine men were sent into the desert in groups of three Land Rovers, two with heavy machine guns and a third vehicle with a Milan anti-tank missile launcher fixed in the back of the Land Rover. Their job was to keep out of trouble, search for the mobile Scud transporters and destroy them. The task seemed more like searching for a pub in the Iraqi desert but the teams were in radio contact with base and intelligence was being provided by the pilots of coalition warplanes searching the desert for the mobile missile launchers. Searching for the elusive mobile transporters was, however, made somewhat easier by the fact that the transporters were so heavy they had more or less to keep to the asphalt roads because if they moved off the hard road there was a real possibility of them becoming stuck in the desert sand.
One of the first sightings of an Iraqi transporter and its guards was made by an SAS ‘Scud-busting’ team after receiving intelligence from a US warplane which had sighted the moving target five hundred miles inside enemy territory. The SAS arrived at the map-reference in the early evening as the sun was setting and discovered the Iraqi troops preparing what appeared to be an evening meal for the guards, missile operators and crew. The SAS took up a position behind a small hillock and watched and waited.
They noticed that no guards had been placed around the Scud transporter and the troops seemed remarkably relaxed, most walking about without carrying any arms and, apparently, no one even patrolling the road. When it seemed the Iraqis had eaten, relaxed and taken to their sleeping bags for an hour or more the SAS prepared for an attack. In darkness, they drove slowly and as silently as possible across the rough desert towards the road and then proceeded at a leisurely pace towards the transporter.
The three SAS vehicles took up their positions some fifty metres from the sleeping Iraqis and then opened fire, filling the air with a crescendo of noise from the heavy machine guns. The Milan fired four missiles, taking out the Scud and the transporter with direct hits while the machine-gunners kept up a bombardment of automatic fire at the Jeeps and anyone one they saw moving. For six long minutes the Iraqis were hit by everything the SAS could throw at them, the machine guns never silent for more than a few seconds at a time. Then, the command ‘ceasefire’ was yelled and the SAS men surveyed the scene, checking if anyone or anything was moving. The Scud missile and the transporters were a total mess and the Jeeps were smouldering pieces of metal. There was no point in checking out the condition of the Scud and the transporter for they could tell they were now useless. And there was no point in checking if anyone was alive; it didn’t matter. It was more important to get out of the place and leave the mess to some shocked Iraqi force to discover. It was time to go.
As well as attacking the mobile Scuds, the SAS units would also take the same aggressive action against any communication or radar installations they came across as they moved remarkably freely across the desert area of Scud Alley. The great majority of these attacks proved highly effective, enraging the Iraqi high command.
In Scud Boulevard, where the US Special Forces were active on the ground, it was a similar story of courage and professionalism. Delta Force squads made up of six-man teams operated independently and were given specific areas of Scud Boulevard to cover in their search for the mobile Scuds.
The US Special Forces were nearly always parachuted into the designated areas, dropped by MC-130 Combat Talon aircraft, which are fitted with infrared imagers enabling aircrews to visually identify targets and checkpoints at night. These imagers could pick out any Iraqi deployments on the ground at potential DZs, or dropping zones, which meant that no US Special Forces would be ambushed as they parachuted into the desert. They were also fitted with terrain avoidance radar and an inertial navigation system providing accurate navigation to unmarked DZs.
The Delta teams were taking no chances. Their black balaclavas were replaced by desert flop hats and they painted their faces yellow and brown rather than black. They wore pale, ‘no sweat’ bandanas and camouflage scarves and chocolate-chip-patterned camouflage jackets and trousers. Most Delta soldiers carried a Colt M16A2 assault rifle or a Heckler & Koch MP5 sub-machine gun. They also carried Beretta handguns fitted with the latest silencers, which are so efficient that only the sound of the hammer striking the firing pin can be heard when a shot is fired. In case Iraq resorted to chemical or biological warfare, each soldier carried a gas mask strapped to his left leg and a complete NBC suit in his rucksack. He was also equipped with decontamination gear, extra water, food and medical supplies. In addition, every member of the team had a pair of AN/PVS-7 night-vision goggles, which turn the desert darkness into a greenish but very visible d
ay-like scene. By amplifying the available light they enable man-sized targets to be recognised at a distance of one hundred yards without moonlight. When there is some moonlight the range is increased to about one hundred and fifty yards.
The communications expert in each six-man team had fitted a burst-transmission capability to his radio so that with a touch of a finger a pre-coded message could be flashed instantly back to base. This allowed hostile direction finders no time to get a fix on the team’s position.
The United States Special Forces used more sophisticated gadgetry in their quest to find and destroy Saddam’s mobile Scuds. As the Delta teams in their Jeeps criss-crossed the desert they would stop frequently to check their hand-held satellite systems, taking intelligence from the small screen’s luminous digital readout which arrived as coded signals from the Global Positioning System in orbit above the Iraqi desert. As new intelligence arrived the Delta teams would move position, sometimes by just a mile or so, sometimes fifty or a hundred miles away.
Like the SAS, the Delta squads would stay some distance away from the main roads, remaining in positions hidden from sight by the Iraqi vehicles travelling back and forth. But they would seek outcrops from where they could see through their binoculars – Steiner 7 x 40s – whether any of the convoys travelling along the asphalt roads included Russian missile transporters with their precious cargo of Scuds.
On one occasion, after days and nights of fruitless tracking of hundreds of Iraqi convoys driving up and down the highways, one Delta team spotted a slow-moving transporter some half mile distant. Ten miles further on, the Scud transporter and its small accompanying Jeeps came to a halt and the operators began preparing the Scud for launching.
This intelligence and the exact location was immediately passed on by the troop’s Satellite Communications System through central communications to the United States Air Force command at the Royal Saudi Air Force headquarters near Riyadh. Some twenty minutes later five US A-10 Thunderbolts – or Warthogs – arrived above the Scud transporter and circled some distance from the Iraqis.
Those guarding the Scud also went into action, turning their guns to face the approaching threat, getting a fix on the Warthogs before opening fire. The Warthogs approached at twelve thousand feet and levelled off eight thousand feet above the road, firstly firing their missiles and then dropping their bombs as they came closer to the Scud. Once they had dropped the bombs they immediately swooped back up into the sky to escape the Iraqi air-defence missiles.
For ten minutes this life-and-death game was repeated by the USAF Warthogs, diving, levelling off, firing and then climbing to escape being shot down by an anti-aircraft heat-seeking missile. For their part, the Iraqis seemed incapable of organising the defence, running all over the place desperately trying, usually without success, to blast off their missiles. Their anti-aircraft gunners did carry out heroic work sitting at their posts while the Warthogs’ missiles and bombs rained down on them, but, they were having no luck because the aircraft never came within their range of fire. Instead, the convoy took a pasting and by the end of the onslaught the Scud, the transporter and all the Iraqi vehicles were simply wrecks. And there was no sign of life. Once again, the Delta team saw nothing to gain by going to inspect the wreckage or check for any survivors so they quietly disappeared again in the desert to search for another Scud.
This Delta team had a number of other opportunities to locate mobile Scuds, and each time they were able to bring up the USAF Warthogs to the scene and repeat their Scud-bashing exercise. Sometimes the USAF sent in Tornado aircraft to carry out these deadly attacks. And nearly every time a mobile Scud was located, the attack that followed ended in the destruction of the missile, the transporter and most of the remaining vehicles.
Sometimes, however, things did go wrong.
On one occasion a Delta team were making their way on foot by moonlight in search of the origin of some noisy engines. The team had been awoken during the night and identified the sound of both jet engines and other diesel engines which couldn’t have been that far distant. They went to investigate.
But as they walked silently in file the lead Delta man suddenly shouted ‘Shit’, and seconds later they heard the sound of automatic gunfire from the ridge to which they were heading. Unable to see the enemy, the Delta squad hurled some half-dozen grenades over the ridge in the hope that this Iraqi unit was just a few men at the far reaches of the area they were guarding.
The Iraqis replied by hurling half-a-dozen grenades back over the ridge, right into the midst of the Delta squad. Two exploded, one injuring one of the squad, two more were picked up by the Delta boys and hurled back, and two more sailed harmlessly overhead, exploding some distance away, causing no harm. While the wounded man was taken back some twenty yards and placed behind a rock, the other Delta boys threw some more grenades over the ridge. They were seriously worried that if the Iraqis came over that ridge firing machine guns from the hip then there would be one hell of a close combat struggle.
The lead man reported that he believed there to be some twenty to thirty Iraqi guards against the five fit soldiers and their one injured comrade.
The Delta boys were ready, their magazines full and their weapons cocked; they were waiting for action. They didn’t have to wait long. Suddenly, on top of the ridge some twenty yards from their position, six Iraqis stood for a split second before opening fire on the US troops. But the US troops were in the better position, difficult for the Iraqis to pinpoint their positions in the dark. The Iraqis, on top of the ridge, were an easy target, silhouetted against the night sky. Three fell almost immediately. The rest turned and jumped back from the ridge.
Instinctively, three of the Delta team knew this was the moment to strike hard and fast. Their task was to seize the initiative and try to drive the Iraqis backwards down the hill. The three men raced to the top of the ridge and threw themselves down before opening fire on the twenty or so Iraqis who were looking up at them. The Iraqis also opened fire but their bullets were screaming over the heads of the prone Delta boys while the Iraqis were taking casualties from the raking machine gun fire of the American MP5s.
The rest turned and fled down the hill as the Americans continued firing until it was obvious the fight had gone out of the enemy. Now, they had to make sure they could get their wounded soldier – hit in the shoulder – back to their Jeeps and away to a safe area where a USAF chopper could cas-evac the wounded man. They made it without any further interference, but it had been a close run thing.
As a result of such raiding parties by the Coalition Special Forces, the Iraqis changed tactics. In an effort to keep the raiding parties at bay, mobile Scuds were provided with APCs and sometimes light tanks for greater protection. It was believed that these armoured vehicles, equipped with heavy machine guns and other weapons, would be able to take on and destroy the Special Forces in their small, light four-wheel-drive vehicles.
The Iraqis also sent a score of strong mobile units in APCs and light tanks, usually led by jeeps with mounted medium machine guns, into the Scud Box to hunt for the Coalition Special Forces. These Iraqi units would patrol the main roads and tarmac tracks along which the Scud transporters had to drive. But they were too late, for the damage had been done. It is believed that some ten Scud transporters were wrecked by the Special Forces and, occasionally by the Warthogs, thus all but putting an end to the menace of the mobile Scud. The great majority of the fixed Scud emplacements had been targeted by satellite photography and taken out by the Warthogs.
Within seven days of the start of the Coalition’s air war, the last of the Scuds had been fired on Israel. The destruction of the Iraqi missiles had been a fast, efficient and brilliantly executed operation by the combined Special Forces of Britain and the United States. It was also a magnificent opportunity for Special Forces to show their true value on the world stage to the planners, military strategists and defence experts from around the globe who were watching this very modern war with the
utmost interest.
CHAPTER 10
AFRICAN INFERNO
‘LUCY, LUCY, LUCY.’ The call sign for the assault sounded calm and clear through the troop commander’s headphones as he sat in the noisy chopper hovering above the roof tops of the hot, dusty African city, waiting for the order to go into battle. Wearing flak jackets and desert fatigues, Staff Sergeant Matt Eversmann and his team were crammed into the Black Hawk with their weapons, each man carrying fifty pounds of ammunition and assault gear.
Below them men, women and children were running around, waving and pointing to the squadron of helicopters – Little Birds and Black Hawks – swooping in from the north. The billowing smoke and acrid smell of tyres burning in the streets were everywhere. That sight worried Eversmann because he knew the tyre-burning was the signal to summon the gunmen when trouble flared. And those tyres had been burning for some time.
He scanned the streets below, wondering what sort of reception committee would be waiting when his men hit the ground and went into action. But as he looked up he took comfort, for circling above were the P3 Orion spy plane, three OH-58 observation choppers and the communication satellites. This was a state-of-the-art United States military operation, equipped with the latest sophisticated weapons, communications systems and highly trained combat troops.
Following Eversmann’s strike-force team were seven elongated troop-carrying Black Hawks: two carrying elite Delta Force assault teams and their ground command, four bringing in US Rangers and one carrying a search-and-rescue team. On the ground waiting in support were nine wide-bodied armoured jeeps – Humvees – with roof-top machine guns, filled with more Special Forces soldiers; and three five-ton US Army trucks to bring out the assault force and any prisoners. A total of one hundred and sixty troops manned this armada of planes, helicopters and land vehicles.
Death Before Dishonour - True Stories of The Special Forces Heroes Who Fight Global Terror Page 19