by Andy McNab
Bravo two-zero
Andy McNab
Also by Andy McNab
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ANDY MCNAB
DCMMM
BRAVO TWO
ISLAND BOOKS
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Copyright 1993 by Andy McNab All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of the Publisher, except where permitted by law. For information address: Bantam Press, a division of Transworld Publishers Lid." London, England.
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ISBN: 0-440-21880-2
Reprinted by arrangement with Bantam Press Printed in the United States of America September 1994
10 9 8
OPM
10 9 8 OPM
To the three who didn't come back
Prison
BRAVO TWO ZERO
1
Within hours of Iraqi troops and armor rolling across the border with Kuwait at 0200 local time on August 2, 1990, the Regiment was preparing itself for desert operations.
As members of the Counter Terrorist team based in Hereford, my gang and I unfortunately were not involved. We watched jealously as the first batch of blokes drew their desert kit and departed. Our nine month tour of duty was coming to an end and we were looking forward to a handover but as the weeks went by rumors began to circulate of either a postponement or cancellation altogether. I ate my Christmas turkey in a dark mood. I didn't want to miss out. Then, on January 10, 1991, half of the squadron was given three days' notice of movement to Saudi. To huge sighs of relief, my lot were included. We ran around organizing kit, test firing weapons, and screaming into town to buy ourselves new pairs of desert wellies and plenty of Factor 20 for the nose.
We were leaving in the early hours of Sunday morning. I had a night on the town with my girlfriend Jilly, but she was too upset to enjoy herself. It was an evening of false niceness, both of us on edge.
"Shall we go for a walk?" I suggested when we got home, hoping to raise the tone.
We did a few laps of the block and when we got back I turned on the telly. It was Apocalypse Now. We weren't in the mood for talking so we just sat there and watched. Two hours of carnage and maiming wasn't the cleverest thing for me to have let Jilly look at. She burst into tears. She was always all right if she wasn't aware of the dramas. She knew very little of what I did, and had never asked questions-because, she told me, she didn't want the answers.
"Oh, you're off. When are you coming back?" was the most she would ever ask. But this time it was different. For once, she knew where I was going.
As she drove me through the darkness towards camp, I said, "Why don't you get yourself that dog you were on about? It would be company for you."
I'd meant well, but it set off the tears again. I got her to drop me off a little way from the main gates.
"I'll walk from here, mate," I said with a strained smile. "I need the exercise."
"See you when I see you," she said as she pecked me on the cheek.
Neither of us went a bundle on long goodbyes.
The first thing that hits you when you enter squadron lines (the camp accommodation area) is the noise: vehicles revving, men hollering for the return of bits of kit, and from every bedroom in the unmarried quarters a different kind of music-on maximum watts. This time it was all so much louder because so many of us were being sent out together.
I met up with Dinger, Mark the Kiwi, and Stan, the other three members of my gang. A few of the unfortunates who weren't going to the Gulf still came in anyway and joined in the slagging and blaggarding.
We loaded our kit into cars and drove up to the top end of the camp where transports were waiting to take us to Brize Norton. As usual, I took my sleeping bag onto the aircraft with me, together with my Walkman, washing and shaving kit, and brew kit. Dinger took 200 Benson & Hedges. If we found ourselves dumped in the middle of nowhere or hanging around a deserted airfield for days on end, it wouldn't be the first time.
We flew out by R.A.F VC10. I passively smoked the twenty or so cigarettes that Dinger got through in the course of the seven-hour flight, honking at him all the while. As usual my complaints had no effect whatsoever. He was excellent company, however, despite his filthy habit. Originally with Para Reg, Dinger was a veteran of the Falklands. He looked the part as well-rough and tough, with a voice that was scary and eyes that were scarier still. But behind the football hooligan face lay a sharp, analytical brain. Dinger could polish off the Daily Telegraph crossword in no time, much to my annoyance. Out of uniform, he was also an excellent cricket and rugby player, and an absolutely lousy dancer. Dinger danced the way Virgil Tracy walked. When it came to the crunch, though, he was solid and unflappable.
We landed at Riyadh to find the weather typically pleasant for the time of year in the Middle East, but there was no time to soak up the rays.
Covered transports were waiting on the tarmac, and we were whisked away to a camp in isolation from other Coalition troops.
The advance party had got things squared away sufficiently to answer the first three questions you always ask when you arrive at a new location:
Where do I sleep, where do I eat, and where's the bog?
Home for our half squadron, we discovered, was a hangar about 300 feet long and 150 feet wide. Into it were crammed forty blokes and all manner of stores and equipment, including vehicles, weapons, and am munition. There were piles of gear everywhere-everything from insect repellent and rations to laser target markers and boxes of high explosive. It was a matter of just getting in amongst it and trying to make your own little world as best you could. Mine was made out of several large crates containing outboard engines, arranged to give me a sectioned-off space that I covered with a tarpaulin to shelter me from the powerful arc lights overhead.
There were many separate hives of activity, each with its own noise-radios tuned in to the BBC World Service, Walkmans with plug-in speakers that thundered out folk, rap, and heavy metal. There was a strong smell of diesel, petrol, and exhaust fumes. Vehicles were driving in and out all the time as blokes went off to explore other parts of the camp and see what they could pinch. And of course while they were away, their kit in turn was being explored by other blokes.
"You snooze, you lose," is the way it goes. Possession is ten tenths of the law. Leave your space unguarded for too long and you'd come back to find a chair missing-and sometimes even your bed.
Brews were on the go all over the hangar. Sta
n had brought a packet of orange tea with him, and Dinger and I wandered over and sat on his bed with empty mugs.
"Tea, boy," Dinger demanded, holding his out.
"Yes, bwana," Stan replied.
Born in South Africa to a Swedish mother and Scottish father, Stan had moved to Rhodesia shortly before the UDI (Unilateral Declaration of Independence). He was involved at first hand in the terrorist war that followed, and when his family subsequently moved to Australia he joined the TA (Territorial Army). He passed his medical exams but hankered too much for the active, outdoor life and quit in his first year as a junior doctor. He wanted to come to the UK and join the Regiment, and spent a year in Wales training hard for Selection. By all accounts he cruised it.
Anything physical was a breeze for Stan, including pulling women. Six foot three, big-framed and good looking, he got them all sweating. Jilly told me that his nickname around Hereford was Doctor Sex, and the name cropped up quite frequently on the walls of local ladies' toilets. On his own admission, Stan's ideal woman was somebody who didn't eat much and was therefore cheap to entertain, and who had her own car and house and was therefore independent and unlikely to cling. No matter where he was in the world women looked at Stan and drooled. In female company he was as charming and suave as Roger Moore playing James Bond.
Apart from his success with women, the most noticeable and surprising thing about Stan was his dress sense: he didn't have any. Until the squadron got hold of him, he used to go everywhere in Crimplene safari jackets and trousers that stopped just short of his ankles. He once turned up to a smart party in a badly fitting check suit with drainpipe trousers. He had traveled a lot and had obviously made a lot of female friends. They wrote marriage proposals to him from all over the world, but the letters went unanswered. Stan never emptied his mailbox. All in all a very approachable, friendly character in his thirties, there was nothing that Stan couldn't take smoothly in his stride. If he hadn't been in the Regiment, he would have been a yuppie or a spy-albeit in a Crimplene suit.
Most people take tubes of mustard or curry paste with them to jazz up the rations, and spicy smells emanated from areas where people were doing supplementary fry-ups. I wandered around and sampled a few.
Everybody carries a "racing spoon" about their person at all times. The unwritten rule is that whoever has the can or is cooking up has first go, and the rest has to be shared. You dip your racing spoon in so that it's vertical, then take a scoop. If it's a big spoon you'll get more out of a mess tin, but if it's too big-say, a wooden spoon with the handle broken off-it won't go into a can at all. The search for the perfect-sized racing spoon goes on.
There was a lot of blaggarding going on. If you didn't like the music somebody was playing, you'd slip in when they weren't there and replace their batteries with duds. Mark opened his bergen to find that he'd lugged a twenty-pound rock with him all the way from Hereford. Wrongly suspecting me of putting it there, he replaced my toothpaste with Uvistat sunblock. When I went to use it I bulked up.
I'd first met Mark in Brisbane in 1989 when some of us were being hosted by the Australian SAS (Special Air Service). He played against us in a rugby match and was very much the man of the moment, his tree trunk legs powering him to score all his side's tries. It was the first time our squadron team had been beaten, and I hated him-all 5'6" of the bastard.
We met again the following year. He was doing Selection, and the day I saw him he had just returned to camp after an eight-mile battle run with full kit.
"Put in a good word for us," he grinned when he recognized me. "You lot could do with a fucking decent sc rum-half."
Mark passed Selection and joined the squadron just before we left for the Gulf.
"Fucking good to be here, mate," he said as he came into my room and shook my hand.
I'd forgotten that there was only one adjective in the Kiwi's vocabulary and that it began with the letter f.
The atmosphere in our hangar was jovial and lively. The Regiment hadn't been massed like this since the Second World War. It was wonderful that so many of us were there together. So often we work in small groups of a covert nature, but here was the chance to be out in the open in large numbers. We hadn't been briefed yet, but we knew in our bones that the war was going to provide an excellent chance for everybody to get down to some "green work"-classic, behind-the-lines SAS soldiering. It was what David Stirling had set the Regiment up for in the first place, and now, nearly fifty years later, here we were back where we'd started. As far as I could see, the biggest restrictions in Iraq were likely to be the enemy and the logistics: running out of bullets or water. I felt like a bricklayer who had spent my entire life knocking up bungalows and now somebody had given me the chance to build a skyscraper. I just hoped that the war didn't finish before I had a chance to lay the first brick.
We didn't have a clue yet what we'd have to do, so we spent the next few days preparing for anything and everything, from target attacks to setting up observation posts. It's all very well doing all the exciting things-abseiling, fast roping, jumping through buildings-but what being Special Forces is mostly about is thoroughness and precision. The real motto of the SAS is not "Who Dares Wins" but "Check and Test, Check and Test."
Some of us needed to refresh our skills a bit swiftly with explosives, movement with vehicles, and map reading in desert conditions. We also dragged out the heavy weapons. Some, like the 50mm heavy machine gun, I hadn't fired for two years. We had revision periods with whoever knew best about a particular subject -it could be the sergeant major or the newest member of the squadron. There were Scud alerts, so everybody was rather keen to relearn the NEC (nuclear, biological, chemical) drills they had not practiced since being in their old units. The only trouble was that Pete, the instructor from our Mountain Troop, had a Geordie accent as thick as Tyne fog and he spoke with his verbal safety catch on full automatic. He sounded like Gazza on speed.
We tried hard to understand what he was on about but after a quarter of an hour the strain was too much for us. Somebody asked him an utterly bone question, and he got so wound up that he started speaking even faster. More questions were asked, and a vicious circle was set in motion. In the end we decided among ourselves that if the kit had to go on, it would stay on. We wouldn't bother carrying out the eating and drinking drills Pete was demonstrating, because then we wouldn't have to carry out the shitting and pissing drills-and they were far too complicated for the likes of us. All in all, Pete said, as the session disintegrated into chaos, it was not his most constructive day-or words to that effect.
We were equipped with aviator sunglasses, and we enjoyed a few Foster Grant moments, waiting outside the hangar for anybody to pass, then slipping on the glasses as in the TV commercial.
We had to take pills as protection against nerve agents, but that soon stopped when the rumor went around that they made you impotent.
"It's not true," the sergeant major reassured us a couple of days later.
"I've just had a wank."
We watched CNN news and talked about different scenarios.
We guessed the parameters of our operations would be loose, but that wouldn't mean we could just go around blowing up power lines or whatever else we saw. We're strategic troops, so what we do behind enemy lines can have serious implications. If we saw a petroleum line, for example, and blew it up just for the fucking badness of it, we might be bringing Jordan into the war: it could be a pipeline from Baghdad to Jordan which the Allies had agreed not to destroy so that Jordan still got its oil.
So if we saw an opportunity target like that, we'd have to get permission to deal with it. That way we could cause the maximum amount of damage to the Iraqi war machine, but not damage any political or strategic considerations.
If we were caught, we wondered, would the Iraqis kill us? Too bad if they did. As long as they did it swiftly-if not, we'd just have to try and speed things up.
Would they fuck us? Arab men are very affectionate with each other,
holding hands and so on. It's just their culture, of course; it doesn't necessarily mean they're shit stabbers, but the question had to be asked. I wasn't that worried about the prospect, because if it happened to me I wouldn't tell. The only scenario that did bring me out in a sweat was the possibility of having my bollocks cut off. That would not be a good day out. If the rag heads had me tied down naked and were sharpening their knives, I'd do whatever I could to provoke them into slotting me.
I'd never worried about dying. My attitude to the work I am expected to do in the Regiment has always been that you take the money off them every month and so you're a tool to be used-and you are. The Regiment does lose people, so you cater for that eventuality. You fill in your insurance policies, although at the time only Equity & Law had the bottle to insure the SAS without loading the premium. You write your letters to be handed to next of kin if you get slotted. I wrote four and entrusted them to a mate called Eno. There was one for my parents that said: "Thanks for looking after me; it can't have been easy for you, but I had a rather nice childhood. Don't worry about me being dead, it's one of those things." One was for Jilly, saying: "Don't mope around-get the money and have a good time. PS 500 pounds is to go behind the bar at the next squadron piss-up. PPSI love you." And there was one for little Kate, to be given to her by Eno when she was older, and it said: "I always loved you, and always will love you." The letter to Eno himself, who was to be the executor of my will, said: "Fuck this one up, wanker, and I'll come back and haunt you."
At about 1900 one evening, I and another team commander, Vince, were called over to the squadron OC's table. He was having a brew with the squadron sergeant major.
"We've got a task for you," he said, handing us a mug each of tea.
"You'll be working together. Andy will command. Vince will be 2 i/c.
The briefing will be tomorrow morning at 0800-meet me here. Make sure your people are informed. There will be no move before two days."