Operation Mayhem

by Steve Heaney MC

  The corpses were dressed in a mishmash of fluorescent shell-suits, plus combat fatigues. One had been armed with an RPG-launcher, plus there were AK47s, and a belt-fed RPK light machine gun. There was no movement from any of them and they looked very, very dead.

  I gave H my SA80, and took charge of the GPMG, so I could give cover while he and Bucks pepper-potted forward to the bodies. With Bucks’s SA80 aimed at the nearest rebel’s head, H moved the fighter’s weapon out of reach. He searched the body, spending twenty seconds doing so, before moving onto the next one.

  H and Bucks returned, confirming four dead: the rebels were riddled with 7.62 mm and lying in huge pools of their own claret. The lads brought back one RPG, complete with two rockets, plus a couple of AK47s, each with a few mags of ammo. But best of all they had the RPK – a Soviet-era 7.62 mm machine gun, equivalent to the GPMG – with a full belt of ammo. We are trained to use just about any weapon money can buy. H grabbed the RPK and placed it by his side. The Death Dealer had just added significantly to his firepower.

  I returned to the HQ ATAP and put out word to scavenge weapons and ammo off any dead rebels in the vicinity. With no QRF and no ammo resupply, it was time to get our hands on whatever we could retrieve off the enemy. At the same time I ordered the lads to keep scanning their arcs, and to be prepared to unleash hell if the rebels showed themselves.

  We got a bit of a morale boost from the extra rebel weaponry. Every little helps. As the sun crept above the ragged tree line the village started to come to life. There was this weird, eerie calm about the place. After the chaotic insanity of the firefight, it was like a bizarre and unreal comedown.

  Whenever a villager passed us by, they threw us this look like they could not believe we had given it to the rebels. But we knew the enemy were still out there somewhere. It was just a question of where and when they’d hit us next.

  Time passed.

  We cleaned our weapons. I took the opportunity to recharge any empty magazines, using the spare ammo from my bandolier. I was back up to six full mags now, and I was good to fight. We resupplied the patrols that had taken the heaviest fire with what ammo we could spare, and the lads settled down to watch and wait.

  I did a short walkabout with Wag, checking on the village wounded. Bryan Budd was on the edge of the square, and one of the girls he had treated was cradled in her grateful mother’s arms.

  Bryan gave a smile. ‘I’ve treated the girl. Took a through-and-through. She’s fine now. She’ll live.’

  The girl was a teenager, and she’d taken a round in her left shoulder, but luckily it had passed clean through. Bri had managed to stop the bleeding and get her stabilised, and needless to say her mother was overjoyed. She wanted Bryan as her son-in-law.

  As Wag and me walked around the place I could feel the villagers staring at us. They watched us pass, eyes glued to our every move. It was almost as if they were desperate just to get sight of us and believe we were for real – their great protectors. Their expressions said it all: You fought the rebels; no one fights the rebels; you fought them and won; we’re alive; we’re alive.

  There was this feeling of total euphoria about the place. I didn’t want to burst anyone’s bubble. For now at least we were all still here and breathing – Pathfinders and the villagers of Lungi Lol. Operation Kill British hadn’t quite succeeded as the rebel commanders had planned it. Not yet, anyway.

  And right now, that was about as good as it got.

  21

  At 0830 hours Tricky took a call on the Thuraya. Apparently, finally, the QRF were inbound. Better late than never was our attitude. I headed out once more to guide the helo in, taking Grant with me for company. This time we made our way to the regular resupply LZ, to the south of the village. This was where the radio message had told us the Chinook would put down.

  We grabbed a few lads, secured the LZ and settled into all-around defence. The wait went on and on. I told myself to have zero expectations, which meant zero disappointments. If the QRF arrived, so be it. If they didn’t we’d scavenged just about enough weaponry and ammo to put up a good, solid fight.

  Twenty-five minutes went by before I heard the Chinook. It was hours since the first rebel shots had been fired and our contact report had gone in to headquarters. They needed to rename this lot the SRF – the Slow Reaction Force. Well no, that wasn’t fair. The 1 PARA lads had nothing to do with the delay. I had every faith they’d have jumped on the helo and ridden to our rescue with gusto. There had been confusion that night; delay and breakdown in the chain of command. Responsibility lay at the highest levels, not with the bayonets.

  The Chinook came thundering in over the jungle. I wandered out so they could see me on the ground and know it wasn’t a hot LZ. The helo came in low and fast, went down with the rear ramp open – and bam!

  Almost before it touched the ground figures bomb-burst out to left and right. My feeling was one of massive relief and euphoria: Great; at last they’re here. We don’t have to fight alone any more. The Chinook was on the ground for maybe sixty seconds before all thirty blokes were out and it was gone.

  We now had a circle of guys from C Company, 1 PARA, ringing the LZ. The bayonets were decked out in webbing and daysacks with helmets on and ammo hanging off them everywhere. They’d come for a fight and they didn’t care who they were up against. It was a great sight to see. Nothing beats thirty heavily armed PARAs spoiling for a punch-up – fire-pissers the lot of ’em.

  To every side of the LZ guys were darting all over the place, hard targeting it from tree to tree, ready for the rounds to come from anywhere. In the midst of the melee was the distinctive figure of Major Bob Bryant, a guy I knew from Kosovo ops. Bob had his radio operator knelt beside him, plus his company sergeant major and platoon sergeant. Grant and me made our way over towards them.

  Bob opened with this. ‘Right, right! What’s fucking happening? Where are we at?’

  Grant held out a hand in greeting. ‘Captain Grant Harris …’

  Bob waved him into silence. ‘What’s the sit on the ground and where are the enemy?’

  Grant started to brief him, but Bob seemed to be only half-listening. The rest of him was itching to get on his way into the heart of the action, wherever it might be.

  ‘Sir, this is it: during hours of darkness we were engaged by a large force of RUF. After a long and intense firefight we think the rebels are regrouping. We have no friendly force casualties; rebel deaths and casualties are unconfirmed at the moment, but there are four dead in the centre of the village.’

  ‘Right, okay, take me to the village,’ Bob announced.

  With that he set off in the direction of the square at Olympic pace, leaving Grant and me floundering. We exchanged glances. The young PARAs were moving through the bush to either side of the major, darting from tree to tree and poised to unleash pure vengeance.

  I broke into a half-jog as I tried to keep pace with the major, Grant doing likewise. We needed to brief him on the terrain and the positions, for the last thing we needed was a bunch of young PARAs charging about and stumbling into our punji fields.

  ‘Sir, if you’ll just look to your right we have two positions there, and the thrust of the attack came from the centre …’

  Bob cut us off with a yell. ‘Sergeant major, get the men spread out into cover! Get them digging shell-scrapes! I want the men in cover! Get them sparking! Get them going!’

  ‘Yes, sir!’ The sergeant major relayed the orders down the chain. ‘Get the guys spread out. Take up arcs. Two-man shell-scrapes, and get the blokes down into the ground.’

  Bob had come to a halt in the middle of the village track, his radio operator kneeling beside him. For a good five minutes he stayed where he was, barking orders. It reminded me of the scene from Apocalypse Now, when the American Marine Corps commander orders one of his men: ‘See the way the waves break … Surf this beach!’ The grunt replies: ‘What about Charlie, sir?’ – Charlie being the Vietcong enemy. ‘Charlie don’t s
urf!’ the commander barks in reply.

  Eventually, Grant managed to steer Bob towards the HQ ATAP. ‘If you want to come this way, sir, this is the HQ. I can brief you fully in here.’

  We got Bob in, whereupon Grant reached for the map, so he could properly talk him around our positions. Bob took up a stance in the centre of the depression, SA80 in one hand and the other jammed in his webbing.

  ‘Right, tell me! What the fuck is going on? What happened?’

  Grant gestured at the map. ‘If you’ll just close in I’ll show you, plus talk you around …’

  Bob gave a dismissive flick of the wrist. ‘Never mind that! What’s going on?’

  Wag, Tricky and me inched away from the two of them. I got the strong impression that sparks were going to fly.

  Grant stood up and put the map away. ‘Well, sir, if you tell me how many men you’ve got we can start to look at bolstering our defences.’

  Bob fixed Grant with a look. ‘Right, Grant, let’s be clear about one thing: I am the senior man on the ground here, so you now fall under my command.’

  It was the first time Bob had addressed Grant by name.

  Grant stiffened. ‘I don’t see it that way, sir. I am the commander of the ground force and until the CO of 1 PARA tells me otherwise, that’s the way it stays.’

  Bob turned to his signaller and barked. ‘Get Zero Alpha on the net!’

  Zero Alpha was the call-sign for Colonel Gibson.

  Wag, Tricky and me were sat there thinking: Well done, Grant, mate. But I wondered what on earth Marine Captain Cantrill was making of it all. He’d just survived getting dragged into the teeth of a rebel onslaught only to be embroiled in this … a scrap between the PARAs and the Pathfinders.

  Bob was on the move again. ‘Right, in the meantime, Grant – walk me around the positions.’

  Grant and Bob disappeared in the direction of Dolly’s trenches. Just then a message came in from headquarters. Our ‘attached arm’ – which had to mean Captain Richard Cantrill RM – was scheduled to get picked up by a helo at 1100 hours.

  ‘Guess what, Rich, you’re going home,’ I told him.

  Cantrill’s face lit up like Christmas.

  For a while we sat around chewing the fat and needling Cantrill about his getting out of here with the fight only half done. That got me thinking. Even now the rebels would be regrouping and trying to outflank us, so why not go out and hit them when they least expected it?

  ‘What you thinking?’ Wag prompted.

  ‘I’m thinking we should take out a fighting patrol. They’ve been shot up, they’ve got injured, and they won’t be moving very quickly, if at all. We have a chance to catch them on the hop, and that’s the last thing they’ll ever be expecting.’

  Wag smiled. ‘Yeah. Good one. Let’s get after them.’

  Grant was back some thirty minutes later, shaking his head in bemusement. I could still hear Bob’s voice echoing through the trees, as he yelled out his orders. All around us PARAs were taking proper cover, using foldable spades to dig in. No doubt about it, as front line fighting troops these were about as good as it got.

  Wag and me explained the idea to Grant – that we’d send out hunter patrols to track, follow and harass the rebels. ‘We take everybody, push after them and try to pick up their trail.’

  ‘Sounds like a plan,’ Grant agreed. He smiled. ‘Yeah, we’ll all go.’

  Wag shook his head. ‘No, mate, not all all: you need to stay here and manage Bryant.’

  Grant looked broken. ‘But he’s well and truly landed now, and the PARAs have a footprint on the ground …’

  ‘No, mate,’ Wag cut in, ‘you need to stay here and manage this thing.’

  ‘Well what about me?’ Tricky piped up.

  Wag shook his head again. ‘No, mate, you need to stay here too.’

  ‘You’re fucking joking,’ Tricky objected. ‘What do I need to be here for? They’ve got a fucking signaller.’

  ‘No, mate, you got to stay here and do our comms, relaying signals to HQ.’

  Strictly speaking Wag was right. Our Clansman 349 radio only had about a 1.5-kilometre range. We’d need to be able to radio Tricky, so he could relay any urgent messages to Lungi Airport. Still, Tricky looked totally gutted and I couldn’t say I blamed him.

  Wag and I got the maps out and began to put flesh on the plan. We decided to push out two fighting patrols, one to the northern and one to the southern side of the main highway. The road would be each patrol’s handrail – so helping lessen the risk of any blue on blue – friendly fire – incidents.

  The ground from the village out to the fringe of the jungle was ankle- or chest-high grass and bush. We’d change from open ground patrol mechanics to closed-forest drills once we entered the canopy. Each patrol would consist of twelve men, and we’d push out 1.2 kilometres from the village. That would be our agreed limit of exploitation (LOE). We’d follow the blood trails, track the enemy through the bush and hopefully put some rounds up their backsides.

  With 1 PARA digging in all around our positions we were able to pull all the blokes back in, to brief them. Meanwhile, Grant was briefing Bob Bryant on what we were up to.

  ‘We’ll do it,’ was Bob’s reaction. ‘We’re the QRF. We’re better suited to this. We’re fresh on the ground …’

  ‘That’s the reason you can’t go,’ Grant argued, with infinite patience. ‘We’re tuned in to the environment. Your guys aren’t. We’ve had blokes out doing clearance patrols for days on end. We know the ground intimately; we understand the terrain; and this is what we’re trained to do …’

  The argy-bargy went back and forth a bit, before Grant finished it.

  ‘Look, it’s a Pathfinder task and it’ll be the Pathfinders that go.’

  That decided, we sorted the orbat (order of battle) of the march. I’d lead one twelve-man stick, consisting of Dolly and Nathe’s patrols. Wag would lead the other, made up of Ginge and Taff’s lot. We’d go out with belt kit, weapons, ammo, medical kits and radios. We’d be light, agile and fast, which was key to the success of any hunter patrol – especially when the enemy was laden down with wounded.

  The route march was simple. We’d move north through Dolly’s position, then sweep east into the jungle, taking in Fern Gully as we went. From there we’d move ahead into the forest, then sweep south clearing as we went. Finally, we’d cross the main highway, sweep onto the railroad, and come back along that due west, which would bring us into Taff’s position on the southern flank of the village.

  When moving through close jungle the only way to navigate is with constant reference to a compass, and by counting footfalls – a process known as ‘bearing and pacing’. You’d know that so many paces amounts to X distance covered, and that combined with a compass bearing meant progress could be plotted on a map. That’s how we’d keep track of our position. If nothing else, this would be a proving patrol: by the end of it we would know where the rebels were located.

  Most of the blokes had completed a Long Range Recce Patrol (LRRP) or a Jungle Tracker Course in the forests of Brunei, plus some of us had trained with the Kiwi SAS in Malaysia. The Kiwis are renowned for being the best bush-trackers in the world. They are even used by the New Zealand Government for tracking escapees from the nation’s prisons, when they head for the mountains to try to evade recapture. The Kiwi SAS have unique skill-sets and are unbeatable.

  Apart from the obvious – blood trails, dead rebels and discarded weaponry – we’d be searching for telltale signs of where the enemy were heading to regroup. We’d look for signs of ground disturbance, ‘discardables’, and ‘transfer’ – so where one piece of foliage might have caught on a rebel’s clothing and been dropped in another location, betraying the direction of travel.

  Before setting off, we agreed a set of verbal challenges and responses, should the 1 PARA lads see movement in the jungle and not know who it was. They would yell out ‘Utrinque!’ We would shout a response: ‘Paratus’. ‘Utrinque Pa
ratus’ is the Parachute Regiment’s motto: it means ‘ready for anything’. That way they’d know if it was us lot coming in, as opposed to the rebels …

  The last thing we needed to do before setting out was to bid farewell to Captain Cantrill. A Sea King was inbound from HMS Ocean, an amphibious assault ship steaming off Freetown, and Cantrill was going to be on it. He’d spent a night with a bunch of renegade lunatics, and been dragged into the rebels’ maw by yours truly. He’d more than earned his stripes out here.

  I shook the bloke’s hand. ‘Good effort last night. Well done. It’s a shame to lose you, but it’s far too grungy out here for the likes of you, eh, mate?’

  He laughed. ‘Yeah, it was good while it lasted.’ He went around shaking everyone’s hand. ‘Fucking hell, guys, outstanding. You’ve done the business.’

  Cantrill had come in on a four-hour recce, and ended up in the battle of his life, fighting shoulder to shoulder with a bunch of hairy, stinking, unwashed Pathfinders, ones that he’d never even met before. Respect.

  ‘Get yourself a nice hot shower and sing a fucking song in it for us,’ Wag told him.

  There was similar banter from the rest of the blokes. Then we formed up in our fighting patrols and set out through the village. We were pushing towards Dolly’s position, when there was a load of yelling and shouting from the direction of the dirt track. We paused to get eyes-on whatever was causing all the commotion.

  From out of nowhere a battered, light blue pick-up had rumbled into the village. The 1 PARA lads sprang out of H’s position and yelled out a challenge: ‘Stop! Halt!’

  They had their weapons very much in the aim and were yelling for those in the cab to dismount. Draped over the vehicle’s bonnet I could see something; a shape; a person maybe. As the pick-up got closer I realised it was a corpse. A guy was hanging out of the passenger window holding onto the dead body, and in the rear were several blokes waving weapons about and grinning foolishly.