Eye of the Storm
Page 1
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About the Author
Peter Ratcliffe was born into a working-class family in Salford in 1951, and left home for good when he was sixteen. Disenchanted with the life of an apprentice plasterer in Preston, he joined the 1st Battalion, the Parachute Regiment in 1970, having passed out as top recruit of his intake. He served with 1 Para in Northern Ireland, and in 1972 applied for SAS Selection, which he passed at the first attempt. He served with the Regiment for twenty-five years, on operations in Oman, Northern Ireland, the Falklands, and the Middle East, as well as mainland Britain; he was Mentioned in Despatches for his command of an SAS undercover patrol in the Falklands in 1982, and awarded the Distinguished Conduct Medal for his leadership of an SAS mobile patrol behind enemy lines in Iraq during the Gulf War of 1991. Commissioned in 1992, he left the army in 1997 as a major. Eye of the Storm, his account of his SAS career, was first published in 2000 to wide notice and considerable acclaim.
A celebrated war correspondent during the 1960s, Noel Botham has had a long and distinguished career as an investigative reporter, European editor of the National Enquirer, and author; his fourteen books include his biography of Princess Margaret, Margaret: The Untold Story, which was an international bestseller.
Formerly a foreign correspondent, Brian Hitchen’s career as a journalist covered every major theatre of conflict from Cyprus to Vietnam. He was Editor-in-Chief of the Sunday Express for a number of years, retiring in 1996; he was appointed a CBE in 1990 for services to journalism.
Copyright
First published in Great Britain in 2000 by
Michael O’Mara Books Limited
9 Lion Yard
Tremadoc Road
London SW4 7NQ
This electronic edition published in 2012
ISBN: 978-1-84317-902-3 in ePub format
ISBN: 978-1-84317-901-6 in Mobipocket format
ISBN: 978-1-85479-533-5 in hardback print format
ISBN: 978-1-84317-052-5 in mass market paperback format
Copyright © 2000 Peter Ratcliffe
All rights reserved. You may not copy, store, distribute, transmit, reproduce or otherwise make available this publication (or any part of it) in any form, or by any means (electronic, digital, optical, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.
The right of Peter Ratcliffe to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
Every reasonable effort has been made to acknowledge all copyright holders. Any errors or omissions that may have occurred are inadvertent, and anyone with any copyright queries is invited to write to the publishers, so that a full acknowledgement may be included in subsequent editions of this work.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Designed and typeset by Martin Bristow
Cover design by 875 design
www.mombooks.com
Contents
About the Author
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgements
Prologue
Chapter
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
Fifteen
Sixteen
Seventeen
Eighteen
Nineteen
Twenty
Twenty-One
Twenty-Two
Twenty-Three
Afterword
Glossary
Plate Section
To Susanna,
and
to Kirsty and Katie
Illustrations
The author and fellow candidates after passing SAS Selection
On Operation Storm: the mortar pit on Diana One, Dhofar, 1973
The author and Taff cleaning their SLRs on Diana One
Sangar on Diana One, Dhofar, 1973
Deploying to a new location by helicopter, Dhofar, 1975
Second tour, 1974: the author at Tawi Atair
A mortar pit at the Simba position, Dhofar, 1975
Green Five, the sangar at Simba shared by the author
The author with part of a Katyusha rocket that killed an SAS trooper at Simba
Captured adoo coastal location near the Yemeni border, 1975
SAS members logging captured adoo ammunition and equipment, 1975
First-day cover franked by SAS members during their raid on the Grytviken post office
The author’s Mention in Despatches, awarded for leading a patrol on West Falkland
D Squadron members checking Land Rover 110s prior to deployment, January 1991
SAS trooper and off-road motorcyle beneath the tailplane of a C-130
RAF Special Forces Chinook flying low over the desert during the Gulf campaign (David McMullon)
Half of an SAS half-squadron mobile patrol just prior to moving into Iraq
The Chinook bringing the author into Iraq to take over Alpha One Zero, 29 February 1991
A member of I Corps with the Iraqi officer captured by Alpha One Zero
SAS 110s camouflaged in an LUP in Iraq
A 110 and a member of D Squadron under a cam net in Iraq
An RAF Special Forces C-130 taking off from an earth landing strip
Part of the silk escape map of Iraq issued to the SAS
Sketch map of Victor Two before Alpha One Zero’s attack
A USAF A-10 Thunderbolt close-support aircraft in action over Iraq
A 4-tonner from the SAS column that drove into Iraq to resupply the mobile patrols
The Sergeants’ Mess meeting convened by the author in Iraq, 16 February 1991
A different view of the meeting by the cartoonist JAK (by permission of Mrs Raymond [Claudie] Jackson)
Mess Meeting at Wadi Tubal, Western Iraq by David Rowlands (reproduced by permission of the artist)
The signatures of Generals de la Billière and Schwarzkopf on the minutes
The RQMS and Major Bill during the resupply behind enemy lines, February 1991
The author with the Prince of Wales at Stirling Lines after the Gulf War, April 1991
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to a number of people for their help and encouragement in the preparation of this book, among them:
My good friends Mike McMahon, Hugh Leman and Duncan Bullivant, for their loyalty, friendship and support over the years.
Brian Hitchen and Noel Botham, for all their research and endeavour in the writing of this book.
Michael O’Mara, my publisher, for giving me the opportunity to tell my story, and also my editor, Toby Buchan, for his professionalism and attention to detail during the editing of the book.
A special word of thanks to Laurie Milner of the Imperial War Museum.
David Rowlands for permission to reproduce his painting of the Sergeants’ Mess meeting in the Wadi Tubal, Western Iraq, which I commissioned from him after the Gulf campaign, and which later hung in the Sergeants’ Mess at Stirling Lines, Hereford. David was the only professional artist who was in the theatre of war in the Gulf at the invitation of the British Army, and was attached to the crew of a Warrior infantry fighting vehicle of 4 Armoured Brigade.
In particular, to my good friend
JAK – the cartoonist Raymond Jackson – who sadly died in 1997 and so didn’t have the chance to read the book. I am grateful, too, to his wife, Claudie, for permission to reproduce JAK’s version of the Sergeants’ Mess meeting in Iraq, and to their son Patrick for his photograph of me on the jacket. My thanks, too, to Doug London for supplying the negative of JAK’s cartoon.
To my godson, George, and his brother Charles, for all the enjoyment we have playing football together.
Lastly, to all those other ex-members of the Regiment who are my friends, but whom I cannot name.
We are the Pilgrims, master; we shall go
Always a little further: it may be
Beyond that last blue mountain barred with snow,
Beyond that angry or that glimmering sea.
from The Golden Journey to Samarkand by James Elroy Flecker
(These lines are engraved on the memorial clock tower at the headquarters of 22 Special Air Service Regiment in Hereford. Also engraved on the tower are the names of all members of the Regiment killed in training or in action.)
Prologue
THE half-moon that had lit our way to the target dipped over the horizon. A little later came the dawn – thin streaks of light that gradually unrolled the darkness across the valley to reveal a scene of raw beauty and unexpected tranquillity. We continued to keep watch on the target – a bait (native hut) on a rocky hillside – from our concealed ambush positions, every man keyed up for a sight or sound that would let us know the adoo were approaching, unaware of our presence.
The patrol commander gestured for Jimmy and me to move forward to a dry-stone wall, which formed one side of an open pen where the goats were kept, though it was now empty. I was carrying a 7.62mm GPMG, a belt-fed weapon, some 4 feet long and weighing just over 24 pounds, and with a nominal rate of fire of 1,000 rounds a minute. It’s a ferocious weapon with a killing range of up to a mile in the right circumstances.
I flicked down the bipod beneath the barrel and rested its feet on top of the wall, keeping my head down as I sighted along the weapon, even though any adoo in the hut couldn’t have seen me in my new position. Then I heard a low murmur to my right, ‘They’re in the back of the bait. Stand by.’ Now I could really feel the adrenalin pumping.
Just then a man in a green shirt came out of a side entrance in the bait. He was very dark-skinned and was carrying a rifle.
‘Is that an adoo?’ I whispered to Jimmy, not wanting it to turn out that the first person I ever shot was a civilian. But before he could answer the man had gone back inside and another, even darker-skinned Arab came out, wearing only a sarong.
‘No, he’s a jebali,’ muttered Jimmy.
‘No. Not him, the other one,’ I hissed.
‘What other one?’ Our whispered conversation was starting to sound like a comedy turn.
Almost immediately another man appeared from the back of the hut. He was lighter-skinned than the other two, and was carrying what looked like an AK-47 light automatic rifle – the famous Soviet-designed weapon which is capable of firing off a thirty-round magazine in less than three seconds. He walked right round to our side of the hut before he spotted us. By now he was perhaps thirty feet away and I could see him clearly.
I watched his eyes narrow as he recognized his predicament. He started to go into a crouch as he swung the rifle in his right hand forwards and upwards, at the same time grabbing the barrel in the palm of his left hand as he tried to bring the weapon up to a firing position. It was then that I squeezed the GPMG’s trigger.
The adoo never had a chance. My first two-second burst – more than thirty rounds – took him right in the body. I could see fragments of flesh being torn out of his back by the exiting bullets, and he was slammed backwards against the bait wall by the sheer weight of the fire hitting him. I fired again, and one of my rounds must have struck the magazine on his rifle, for it suddenly blew up. The upper part of his body was simply torn to shreds.
Just as this gruesome sight was registering with me, I heard Jimmy shout, ‘There are two more getting away at the back.’ I couldn’t see them from my position, so I yanked the machine-gun off the top of the wall and, holding it up to my shoulder like a rifle, crabbed along sideways until I could see the adoo backing down the hill, all the time firing short bursts towards them. Above my head and somewhere off to my left I heard the zing-like crack of high-velocity rounds going past as the men behind me opened up.
I opened fire again, sending the rest of the rounds in the ammunition belt streaming towards the two men in one long burst. There were others firing alongside me so I’m not sure who killed the second man, but he suddenly spun round and dropped his weapon. Great gouts of blood spurted from multiple wounds in his chest as he went down.
Less than five minutes after it had started the shooting was all over. Silence once more returned to the hillside. Cautiously we moved forward, and three members of Mountain Troop went in and cleared the hut, which Jimmy and I skirted as we headed down the hill. One of the two men who had fled from the back of the hut was dead, although it was impossible to know if I had had a hand in his killing. He had been hit by at least half a dozen rounds. His companion appeared to have got away, though he may have been wounded. The fourth man had been shot dead on the far side of the building by other members of the patrol. I hadn’t even seen him until we came across his body.
I was feeling strangely high – the kind of high you get after a few drinks, but before actually becoming drunk – although I knew that this reaction was caused by the adrenalin still chasing about inside my system. I had come through my first contact with an enemy. My first firefight. And I had killed a man for the first time.
It was a strange feeling. Later, as we made our way back to White City, I thought, ‘This is really good. I’ve just seen my first action, and I’ve done all right.’ I had no regrets at all. A little sadness for the man I’d killed, perhaps, that he might have had a wife and a family as some of our guys had wives and families. Yet in the end he had courted his own fate by becoming a terrorist.
Jimmy was pleased with the way I’d performed, but cautioned restraint. Patting me on the back, he told me, ‘It’s easy to dish it out, but it’s a different story when you’ve got to take it. So don’t go thinking you’re a vet. You’re still just a young pup.’ In truth, I didn’t feel very different, and certainly not like a hero. But what I did know was that I felt genuinely proud to have done my job, and to have taken down an enemy who, given a few more seconds, might well have finished me off instead.
I had been with D Squadron of the SAS for about three months when, in January 1973, my squadron was first posted to the Sultanate of Oman. Strategically placed at the southern end of the Arabian Gulf, this tiny independent state controlled the right of free passage over the richest oil tanker sea lanes in the world. In the wrong hands, Oman could pose a huge threat to the West – and that was where we came in. The SAS were discreetly there on loan to the Sultan, to stop communist-backed terrorists, known locally as adoo (Arabic: enemy), from seizing power and turning the country into a Marxist state – with catastrophic results for the flow of Gulf oil to the West.
Whatever their ideology, the adoo were brutal, cold-blooded and uncompromising killers, and on most days I and my fellow SAS soldiers found ourselves on the receiving end of rifle and machine-gun fire, under grenade and mortar attack, or targets for Soviet-built high-explosive rockets.
And I was loving every moment of it. At the age of twenty-two I had reached a position which I would not willingly have exchanged with any other living soul. I was a highly trained professional in the uniform of the world’s toughest and most admired regiment, doing what we did best. I felt complete. A contented man.
A far cry indeed from the snotty-nosed kid who had grown up in abject poverty in the northern slums of Lancashire with a more than even chance of ending up in jail.
* * *
In June 1991, eighteen years after I had been blooded in Oman and four
months after my return from the Gulf War, I found myself aboard an RAF VC10, flying to the United States with the adjutant for a meeting with the US Rangers. After a couple of hours my companion looked at his watch, checked that it was past midnight in the UK, and hoisted his briefcase on to his knees. Having fished around inside it for a while he suddenly gave a satisfied cluck and took out an envelope, which he handed to me with the words, ‘I have been asked to give you this.’ It was addressed to me, but when I opened the envelope and read the letter it contained I could hardly believe what it said – in fact, I had to read it twice before its content sank in. Signed by the CO of 22 Special Air Service Regiment, it told me that I had been awarded the Distinguished Conduct Medal for my services during the Gulf War.
To me, there was something slightly unreal about the situation as the two of us clinked glasses of gin and tonic at 30,000 feet over the North Atlantic. The adjutant simply said, ‘Well done. Cheers!’ going on to explain that the reason he had not given me the letter earlier was because the Honours List was strictly embargoed until one minute past midnight in Britain.
So it came about that, one beautiful late-summer’s day a few weeks later, I went to Buckingham Palace with the other members of the Regiment who were to be decorated for their actions during the Gulf campaign. There was nothing in the newspapers about the investiture, since it was held in secret to protect the identities of soldiers serving in the SAS, but it was reported afterwards with the usual mixture of half fact and whole fantasy. What really happened was this:
On the day of the investiture I travelled to Duke of York’s HQ in the King’s Road, Chelsea, the headquarters of UK Special Forces, and there changed into my very best uniform. Then, with the rest of the guys from the Regiment who were being honoured that day, I climbed into a coach that was waiting well away from where anyone could get a picture of us. We travelled the short distance to the Palace with the curtains deliberately drawn, so that no one could photograph our arrival or our departure – it would not do for our pictures to get into the files of hostile individuals or organizations.