Eye of the Storm

by Peter Ratcliffe

  The second seemed to be shooting at the SAS.

  From the airport at Salalah we were transported directly to our temporary camp at Um al-Gwarif, known to us as UAG, which was about four miles away. The idea was for us to stay there for three or four days in order to acclimatize ourselves, sort out our equipment and receive our final briefings, before being helicoptered to the jebel, the mountain area of the province, where much of the trouble was to be found. In the event, however, a small group of six of us, including myself and Jimmy, one of my friends from Mobility Troop, were sent to the coastal town of Mirbat, about fifty miles to the east, and the scene of a famous battle between the SAS and rebels in 1972. Our role there was to keep a presence on the ground, deliver medical aid to the local people, and to carry out patrols and gather information. It was a beautiful place, like a remote holiday destination with its ancient fort and sea and miles of sand, but we found life there extremely boring. After three weeks, however, we were summoned back to UAG and told that we would be deploying to the jebel in a few days’ time.

  Our exact location was to be one of a pair of positions the Regiment had established and which we intended to fortify. About three miles apart, ‘Diana One’ and ‘Diana Two’ were in the range of foothills overlooking a wadi from where the adoo would launch their frequent attacks on Salalah. Some of their rockets had hit civilian repairmen working on the jets and helicopters for the military, and they had even destroyed aircraft on the ground. Without protection the men had threatened to go on strike, something that would have brought the war on the Omani side to a halt in that region, since it was from Salalah’s airport that the Sultan’s air force operated against the adoo in Dhofar.

  Before we deployed to Diana One, Jimmy decided that it would be a great wheeze if he and I were to hitch a ride in a military plane or helicopter and visit some of the members of Mountain Troop, who were in a base known as ‘White City’. This lay to the east on the edge of the Darbat Plateau, and overlooked the coastal strip between Salalah and Rakhyut, on the border with Yemen. Since the adoo were primarily based in Yemen, it was an important position, for groups of insurgents were constantly crossing the border in both directions. Jimmy had managed to con us a ride in a Skyvan, a small, twin-piston-engined transport aircraft that looked like a bumblebee in flight and sounded worse, but which would, we hoped, carry us in one piece up to White City. The squadron OC had no objections to our going when we approached him, but warned, ‘Get back here in forty-eight hours.’ We needed no second bidding and, grabbing our bergens and rifles, we were away.

  From the air the Dhofari landscape looked every bit as alien and hostile as it did close to, rather like the pictures from Armstrong’s moon walk – mysterious, uninviting and threatening.

  The guys in Mountain Troop seemed happy enough to see Jimmy and we spent most of the time drinking strong tea and chatting. Left to myself, however, I think I would have preferred to have stayed put in the bar at UAG, looking at the pictures of girls printed on the Tennant’s lager cans. Since the Skyvan made the run most days, we expected to be riding out on the next one within twenty-four hours, so I’d be back in the bar before too long.

  That was until intelligence came in that an adoo patrol was using a nearby bait, or native hut, as a breakfast stop-off point each morning, and Mountain Troop were immediately tasked with laying an ambush for them. At Jimmy’s suggestion, the White City troop commander agreed to take us along, Jimmy promising me, ‘I’ll get you blooded.’ This did not seem at all unlikely, as we were both assigned to the main killing group, which consisted of six men; the remainder were placed in two cut-off groups whose task was to prevent any enemy escaping.

  I had long anticipated the moment when I would come under fire for the first time, and perhaps be forced to shoot to kill in retaliation. I hadn’t quite imagined, however, that it would be in circumstances such as these, or that it would be sprung on me so suddenly. I could feel the sudden tension that had invaded my body, and experienced a rush of adrenalin.

  ‘Right,’ I replied. There wasn’t much else I could have said.

  The plan was simple. We would leave our base at 2200 hours that night in order to ensure that we would be established in a good ambush position when the adoo arrived in the morning – if they did arrive. Our back-up was a firqat, Arabic for ‘company’, made up of former rebel jebalis (Dhofaris from the jebel region) who had switched sides, and a troop of geysh, mercenary soldiers from the province of Baluchistan in Pakistan who were employed by the Sultan’s armed forces, and some of whom I quickly discovered were little better than useless. The firqats were a different matter, however. Organized, trained and paid by the SAS with money provided by the Sultan, they were a merciless, bloodthirsty lot who, when a firefight started, would hitch up their sarongs and rush like wild dervishes into battle. Good fighters, I learned to appreciate having them on our side.

  It took us about two hours to reach the target and another half-hour for us all to get into position around the bait, which had been built on a rocky hillside. After that there was nothing for it but to wait, and wait we did. It began to look as though the intelligence about the adoo patrol was wrong – a common enough occurrence throughout the campaign – and the patrol commander said he would give it a further half-hour and then we would leave.

  The half-moon that had lit our way to the target dipped over the horizon and 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 from our concealed positions, every man keyed up for a sight or sound that would let us know the adoo were approaching, unaware of our presence.

  This time the wait was a short one. Well before the deadline we spotted four figures making their way in single file up a long slope towards the hut. I estimated that at their speed it would probably take them thirty minutes to reach it.

  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, about 30 inches long and weighing just over 24 pounds, and with a nominal rate of fire approaching 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 the adoo couldn’t see 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?’ Jimmy queried. 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 Russian-designed weapon which can fire 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 saw his eyes narrow as he recognized his predicament. He started to go into a crouch as he swung the rifle, which he was carrying in his right hand, forwards and upwards, at the same time grabbing the barrel with 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 then 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, however, 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 and sent 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. The firqat and the geysh were still in their original positions, and didn’t appear to have taken any part in the ambush.

  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. I knew, however, 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, too.

  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 us 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.

  We spent the rest of that day in the White City base, and on the following morning hitched a ride back to Salalah in the Skyvan. Next day, Jimmy and I were deployed to the spot in the foothills known as Diana One. Though God alone knows what had inspired some deranged officer to name such a bleak and unfriendly position, with no attractive or in any other way redeeming features whatsoever, after a Roman goddess. Furthermore, as though sensing our disapproval, the gods decided to give us another enemy contact within our very first hour there.

  Diana One’s main position was a man-made sangar, a roofless observation post (OP) consisting of a pit dug out of the ground surrounded by a stone enclosing wall reinforced with sandbags. On the hillside scattered behind it were three other smaller dugouts, the centre one of which was the mortar pit. Most days the adoo would send out snipers whose job was simply to hamper our activities by forcing us to keep our heads down. In the sangars themselves you were reasonably safe, but leaving the position even at night was always a nervous outing. It’s very hard to crouch and try to wipe your backside, and then struggle back into your trousers and bury the results, while there’s an unseen sniper with a night sight out there somewhere, trying to part your hair.

  They were at it the day we arrived to begin our four months of occupancy. We soon learned that it was pointless trying to spot their positions, for the terrain was a sniper’s paradise, with limitless cover provided by a never-ending range of gullies and hillocks and occasional loose boulders. Daytime attacks, we learned, usually came at about 1100 hours, when the sun was in our eyes. This was the softening-up period, however. The more serious stuff happened just before last light, although in semi-darkness the muzzle flashes at least gave us something to aim at. On that first day we seemed to be catching it from three different positions.

  There was one Spargan machine-gun nest on the side of the hill which sprayed us with 12.7mm armour-piercing rounds, and a couple of other pockets from where the adoo were firing AK-47s, good communist weapons supplied through the Yemenis.

  Our standard rifle at that time was the 7.62mm L1A1, invariably known as the SLR (self-loading rifle), which was adapted to fire single shots only, unlike the FN rifle from which it was derived, which was fully, rather than semi-automatic. But we also had the single-shot M79 grenade launcher, which could chuck a 40mm high-explosive grenade up to 400 metres. On top of that, we were capable of delivering a whole assortment of bombs from the 81mm mortar – high-explosive, white phosphorus and parachute-suspended illumination rounds. After detonation, anything the phosphorus touched started burning, including metal and flesh.

  Most of these firefights with the adoo lasted about twenty minutes. For us they were incredibly frustrating. When we returned fire we never knew if we had scored a hit, as the distances were too great even to hear the scream of a wounded man. Furthermore, we knew that any adoo we did kill or wound would be carried away by their comrades, leaving nothing for a patrol to find except, if we were very lucky, a pool of dried blood or blood splashes on a rock.

  As far as we could work it out, the enemy would send an attacking unit of between ten and twenty men, but it was very difficult to tell just how many. The only way to estimate their numbers was to try to judge by the number of rounds coming in or, at night, by counting the muzzle flashes. We did go out on foot patrols in attempts to locate the snipers, but it was actually worse than looking for a needle in a haystack. The terrain of those foothills was a rocky nightmare of broken ground and jumbled boulders.

  The only thing of which we could be certain was that if they didn’t attack us at last light, then they were off attacking Diana Two, three miles away. With only sixty men in-country at any one time, the SAS were spread rather thin on the ground. In each main position there would be some half a dozen of us, a firqat of ex-rebel Dhofaris and a unit of geysh, though the latter were little better than cannon fodder.

  The firqat were different, however. They had come into being between 1970 and 1971 when 200 of the rebels, alienated by the Marxists’ anti-religious fervour and bully-boy tactics, surrendered to the government after the young Sultan offered a general amnesty. They were formed into firqat units by the SAS under the man appointed as their leader, Salim Mubarak. He was a tough fighter and passionate nationalist, and before his conversion had been second-in-command of the rebels’ eastern section. After his surrender under the amnesty he had been invited by Major Tony Jeapes of 22 SAS to take command of the adoo he had brought in with him and turn them into an elite fighting group, called the Firqat Salahadin, after the famous twelfth-century Arab leader who had defeated the Crusaders.

  Backed by the SAS, they won two major victories against the rebels, and this started a general speeding up in the defection rate. Under Sultan Qaboos’s decree, any adoo who gave himself up and agreed to serve the Sultan received an automatic pardon and a well-paid job with the firqats. In addition, his family were looked after and given free medical treatment, again
organized by the SAS. Those who were captured and refused to accept the terms of the amnesty, however, were thrown in gaol, and having visited one of these foul places during my first tour in Oman I can vouch for the fact that the lifestyle enjoyed – if that’s the word – by prisoners was very far from comfortable. The cells were little more than holes in the ground, the stench was overpowering, and the conditions indescribable.

  Living in a very confined space, as we did on the Diana positions, created two major problems. The first was boredom, and this was exacerbated by the second: the fact that the smallest thing anyone did that was even slightly out of the ordinary could get on your nerves to the point where you wanted to yell at the ‘culprit’ to stop. It might be someone slurping his tea, or always making a crunching noise when he ate hardtack biscuits, or perhaps the way a man blew his nose or cleared his throat – or even snored.

  Other factors added yet further to our mental and physical discomfort. On Diana One, we were there to hold a position. Not to take ground or track down the enemy to their lair and wipe them out, but to stay. Our orders were just to sit there and take whatever they threw at us, retaliating when we could. It was a strain on us all, and although we tried to defuse confrontations that arose between us, and above all to keep our sense of humour alive, there were times when you just wanted to scream with the boredom and frustration and monotony of it all.

  Then there was the heat. It cooled slightly when the sun went down, and most nights were cold enough to need a sleeping bag. But the days were stiflingly hot and with very little wind, and by the time the sun was at its hottest the temperature in a sangar would be well over 100 degrees Fahrenheit. Our water was invariably tepid to hot, and as it came in oil drums that hadn’t been washed out properly, it tasted foul.

  The best relief from all this was to try to gain a little space for yourself, and the only way of achieving this was to go and visit one of the other locations on the hill, where a change of face – or at least a change in unbearable personal mannerisms – could bring a little relief.