Eye of the Storm

by Peter Ratcliffe

  There were certainly plenty of characters among the Mobility Troop members on Diana One, and in a normal environment, such as Hereford, we would have revelled in one another’s company. But Dhofar was far from being ‘normal’, and there everything, including people’s personalities, came over differently. But although some of these guys could easily get on your nerves when things were normal, when we were under fire they were the greatest men to have alongside you in the world.

  On Diana One we would occasionally carve out a new sangar, something that had to be done using explosives because the ground was so hard. And it had to be done at night, and above all quickly, because until we had sunk a decent-sized hole we were sitting targets for the adoo snipers.

  On one particular occasion, I had been working all night alongside Nick, an amusing character and a good mate (sadly he was later killed in a car accident). You could only work for so long at a stretch before you needed a rest, and just before dawn Nick and I decided to call it a night and slipped into our sleeping bags. It was very cold. I welcomed snuggling into the warmth of my ‘green maggot’ and was asleep within minutes. I was awoken by an urgent shout of ‘Stand to!’ to find tracer rounds and lead streaming through the air above and around us. The enemy had launched a pre-dawn raid, and we were the target of the moment.

  All hell had broken loose, with tracers zipping by only inches above our heads as we lay in the shallow sangar. It’s hard to get out of a sleeping bag without sitting up, and to have done so would have meant almost certain death from an adoo bullet. So I yelled to Nick, ‘Roll along the ground your way and we can get a bit more cover where the hole is deeper.’

  Even rolling isn’t the easiest thing to do when you’re wrapped inside a sleeping bag, but somehow we managed. Once behind a few inches of cover we tried to peep over and see where the shots were coming from, but we were up against the usual problem: we couldn’t properly identify where the adoo were hiding. It was pointless exposing ourselves more than we had to, just to fire off a few ineffective rounds.

  ‘What would be preferable is for us to fire effective rounds,’ Nick suddenly remarked in an accentuated, affected officer’s accent, and we both suddenly convulsed with laughter. It’s often the way, for when tension is high laughter seems to come more easily. If our enemy could have seen us, hugging our sides and crying with laughter, they would have been convinced we were stark raving mad. Perhaps for those few minutes we were indeed a little mad, but it helped us get through until the adoo ceased firing and the bullets stopped singing by just above our heads. Silence descended once more. We sat with our sleeping bags wrapped round us, keeping warm while we waited for first light. After a reasonable period of quiet I said to Nick, ‘I’m going to try and get a little more sleep.’ But I think he must have already dozed off, for there was no answer.

  What seemed like only seconds later I was stunned by the most godawful bang close by. Now the adoo were mortaring us. We worked out the general direction from where we thought their fire was coming and retaliated with our own mortars, but I doubt we got close enough even to scratch them. Eventually they tired of trying to land a direct hit on our new site, and Nick and I shrugged off our sleeping bags and got on with the excavation work. I wouldn’t say that we learned to be blasé, exactly, about the attacks, but when they came virtually every day, and sometimes twice a day, they somehow became less intimidating.

  One morning, not long after this rather one-sided firefight, an SEP (surrendered enemy personnel) arrived at the approaches to the main base on Diana One and gave himself up. It was still the Sultan’s rule that any surrendering rebel was to be given the chance of signing on with the firqat. If he agreed, he would be given an automatic pardon, and would then be debriefed and sent on to join the local forces.

  The man who handled his surrender was a staff sergeant named Jerry, on loan from Mountain Troop. And according to Jerry, when he gathered us round, the young adoo had an interesting tale to tell. He knew of a cave in a wadi quite close by that was used as a store by the rebels, and was full of ammunition and weapons. If we could seize these arms it would be a tremendous bonus to our friends in the firqat attached to us, because they received a bounty on all weapons and ammunition they captured from the enemy.

  ‘If this little SEP is right,’ Jerry continued, ‘it should be a worthwhile outing. We’ll leave here at twenty-one hundred – the firqat, the geysh and ourselves. The surrendered adoo will act as guide. Carry whatever weapons you want. Any questions?’

  ‘What time is the brief, Jerry?’ I asked.

  ‘Don’t you listen to anything?’ he shot back. ‘That was the brief. Those were your orders. All right?’

  And that was me well and truly put in my place. In fairness, I ought to point out that in those days notes for a full briefing were frequently written on half a cigarette packet.

  The cave was about ten kilometres away, and most of the route was along mountain-hugging tracks, with a thousand-foot drop on one side. Just the thing to keep you alert on a dark night, stumbling along the edge of a precipice. After what seemed like hours of slow and careful walking we finally came to a wadi running along the foot of a cliff, which had several deep caves gouged out of its walls. The young adoo who had surrendered – he was not a day over seventeen – stopped in front of one and told Jerry that this was the place where the weapons were.

  By this time, every one of us was wondering if we were being led into some kind of death trap. At least, I certainly was – and so too, thank God, was Lance, who just happened to be an expert demolitionist. In the light of what we discovered, he can be forgiven the eccentricities of his character. Because while the rest of us were shuffling around wondering what the hell to do next he was down on his hands and knees with a torch, minutely examining the floor and sides of the cave by its dim light.

  Almost at once he discovered that the place really was booby-trapped. Had we gone blundering in, the whole lot of us would have been blown to Kingdom Come and beyond. Within minutes, however, Lance had defused the device and we were able to enter the cave. Inside there were arms and ammunition a-plenty, a major find whose loss would be a severe blow to the adoo. The geysh and the firqat staggered away laden down, although since I didn’t stand to make anything out of it, I decided that they could do their own carrying. Walking back along that precipice in the dark was going to be bad enough just carrying my own rifle. If they wanted the bounty, then they could carry the booty.

  Eventually we staggered into Diana One at first light, absolutely exhausted. Tired as I was, something nagged at my mind, for I still wasn’t sure if our SEP was a genuine deserter or had deliberately tried to walk us into a trap. Neither, admitted Jerry, was he. ‘I’ll hand him over to the firqat and let them work out the answer,’ he said. ‘If we still see him hanging around here tomorrow then I guess we’ll know he was genuine.’ With that he wandered off to grab a well-earned kip.

  By this time we had turned our new sangar into a real home from home. Since the mortar attack we had added dozens more sandbags and boulders to the walls, and had also erected a roof of corrugated iron supported by several large steel pickets. This was covered with stones to weight it down in high winds, and then the whole lot was spread with branches of trees and bushes and other foliage. From a distance it looked like a clump of undergrowth that had been there for years.

  It was finally finished the day after the capture of the arms in the cave, and we decided to celebrate by inviting an old friend round for tea. Taff and I had signed on together in the Paras, and had later suffered, and passed, Selection together. The three of us occupying the sangar had put down a ‘floor’ of flattened empty ration boxes to stop the sharp rock chips digging into our knees when we knelt down to fire the machine-gun through its slit. Given our cardboard carpet and the well-built roof, the whole place was really quite cosy and snug. For a seat we used a lump of rock which we had dug out of the earth, and we were all sitting on this, congratulating ourselves on bei
ng nicely hidden away from the enemy, when there was an almighty great crash just outside. It was a mortar round exploding, and within seconds there was enemy fire coming in on all sides, small-arms rounds as well as mortar bombs.

  Gradually I was able to pick out a pattern. You could hear the ‘plop’ as the distant mortar was fired, and would then start counting. Thirty seconds later you would hear the explosion as the bomb completed its journey.

  Then the unthinkable happened. Suddenly there was a flash above our heads and something smashed through the roof. Smoke and dust filled the sangar, and for a stunned moment or two we could hardly see anything. Initially I thought the blast had been safely absorbed when the round had burst through our roof, its main effort expended in breaking through the layers of branches and stones and corrugated iron. Then I looked down to the cardboard mat at my feet and saw a pool of blood forming there. I shouted at the others to look as well, and suddenly we all began feeling ourselves to see if we had been hit.

  Then someone yelled, ‘Ahhrrrr!’ – and I immediately thought, ‘Thank fuck. They got him and not me.’ Afterwards, Nick and I were able to laugh together over the fact that he had had the identical reaction, and had silently expressed our relief in exactly the same words.

  It turned out Taff had been hit in the back and was bleeding quite badly. We ripped aside his uniform top and fastened a thick padded field dressing over the wound, then gave him a shot of morphine from the vial which, like the rest of us, he carried around his neck. But until the mortar bombardment and small-arms fire stopped there was little else we could do, except hope that another round didn’t find its way into the sangar.

  After fifteen minutes or so the enemy fire slackened and finally stopped. At once we got on the radio and requested RHQ to send in a helicopter for a casevac. Meanwhile we dragged Taff outside and put a replacement dressing on the wound.

  A proper examination of the inside of the sangar then showed what had happened. A 12.7mm armour-piercing round from a Russian-built ‘Spargan’ heavy machine-gun (see Glossary) had smashed through the roof and broken a steel picket support, and had then flown around inside the sangar, bouncing off the walls. At one point it must have ricocheted off Taff’s back with such force that it stunned any pain he would otherwise have felt immediately. The round had then buried itself under the cardboard on the floor, where I found it. There wasn’t a mark on it. It was only after I had spotted the blood and we started checking ourselves out that the feeling had returned to Taff ‘s back, and with it had come the pain. We had all been pretty lucky, however. If that round had come in straight, then any one among the three of us might have been badly wounded, or even killed. As it was, Taff was back from the hospital inside a week, none the worse for his close encounter with an AP round.

  Had there been any deaths or serious casualties among us it might have been different, but during that four-month tour my section of D Squadron seemed to possess charmed lives. There were a few wounded in other sections operating elsewhere, but no one seriously. Not that I lost any of my respect for the adoo, however – far from it. These rebels had been trained originally by the Chinese and now by the Russians, who were at the time an established presence in Yemen as ‘advisers’. In addition, the adoo were masters of moving about the harsh landscape of the jebel, and of launching sudden stand-off attacks, after which they would melt back to their hide-outs or over the border. They had been supplied with modern weapons and plenty of ammunition, all brought in to them, with other supplies, mainly by camel over the Yemeni border. The combination of these factors made them a formidable enemy, as well as a difficult one to stop.

  As curious as it may seem, and as dangerous, tedious or uncomfortable as it had often been, I enjoyed my time in Oman. True, I was not exactly sorry when our tour of duty there came to an end in May 1973, though I was not likely to forget about it in a hurry either. I had come of age – as a soldier, I mean – and in doing so had learned some valuable lessons. I had found out what it was like to be shot at, and how easy it was to take another’s life. My future as a soldier no longer held any terrors for me. I had discovered what I was able to withstand, and to hand out. I don’t know whether I was a better man as a result of what I had gone through, but I was certainly a good deal more confident.

  Halfway through my stint on Diana One I was given three days’ rest and recuperation, otherwise known as R&R. The time was spent in UAG drinking beer and generally chatting and exchanging war stories with other members of D Squadron, who were also on R&R. One day I visited the NAAFI in Salalah and bought a cassette recorder, which would now be a rather antiquated piece of equipment. On my return to Diana One, I placed the machine on the sangar wall with a view to recording a contact when the adoo next attacked. I didn’t have to wait long and as soon as I heard the sound of an incoming mortar I pressed the record button. I was astonished, years later, to learn from a leading military historian that the resulting six-minute tape – which features heavy automatic and machine-gun fire from the adoo, as well as me returning fire with a GPMG – is one of only a very small number of recordings made during an actual firefight. The tape is now lodged with the Imperial War Museum in London.

  Returning to Oman and Dhofar a year later was not something I had particularly looked forward to, but it didn’t cause me any sleepless nights either. My companions were most of the same guys from D Squadron with whom I had shared the last tour. Only the location was different. In 1974 I was assigned to Tawi Atair. Tawi is Arabic for a well, but I was never to find out what atair stood for, although if it means ‘where one is never dry’ I should not be even slightly surprised.

  It was the monsoon season when we arrived, which meant that it drizzled heavily every day. It was always humid, with an endless covering of low cloud, swarms of mosquitoes and other biting bugs, a sea of mud under foot and a landscape that had suddenly become very green. Most of the time it was pointless going out because you could hardly see a thing through the haze of wetness. There was no fresh food, only tinned stuff, because everything went mouldy so quickly. Mould grew on the inside of the tents, on your equipment, and even on your clothes.

  We were in that location for four months, and I never once felt properly dry. We lived in tents, which made a change from sangars, the disadvantage being that they were not as effective in keeping out incoming fire. That was something which certainly hadn’t changed, for our old friends the adoo still paid regular visits, shooting up the camp two or three times a week.

  The base at Tawi Atair was fairly large and, besides an airfield, even boasted a field hospital and a permanent doctor, since it was not always possible to fly aircraft in or out during the monsoon if anyone needed emergency treatment. Our supplies came in on a purely haphazard basis, and our mail and newspapers were always a few weeks old.

  The troop staff sergeant, also called Taff, was second-in-command of our particular group and, as an antidote to our just sitting there and getting shot at – which seemed to be standard procedure in Dhofar – he would lead us on occasional sorties against the enemy. Sometimes we would be accompanied by the troop commander, Tim, and sometimes Taff alone would lead us, for Tim had absolute, and justified, faith in his troop staff sergeant.

  Short, stocky and as hard as nails, if Taff said it was Monday then it was Monday, regardless of what day of the week it actually was. He was not someone you would ever want to mess with. He was, however, a genuine original, and he could be extremely funny. On occasion he would put on a strangled, affected, upper-class-officer’s accent and treat us to the most hilarious briefings – even though what he was actually saying was deadly serious.

  ‘We are going out on patrol,’ he would announce in his strained, funnel-throated voice (it came out as ‘Weah gaying ite on p’troal’). ‘Now remember, there are two types of fire. There is effective fire, and there is ineffective fire.

  ‘Ineffective fire is when it goes over your head or hits the ground in front of you. That’s when we keep going.
You understand that, chaps? We keep going.

  ‘Effective fire is when it’s knocking your belt kit off. Then it is right and proper to go to ground. OK? Let’s go, then.’

  Our first sortie with Taff came a few days after we had settled in, and on this occasion Tim also came along. Our task was to recce some baits about six or seven kilometres west of our location, which intelligence reports stated were being used by the adoo as places from which to replenish their food and water. Our party consisted of half a dozen of us from the Regiment, one firqat unit and a company of geysh. Because of low cloud and constant drizzle we would have to move to within 300 metres of the suspected enemy’s location if we were to be able to make out anything at all.

  That seemed fine in theory, until, having arrived at the enemy position, we were spotted by the adoo, who opened fire. It was only then, as we moved to take cover, that we discovered that our company of geysh had stayed put while we leapfrogged forward – right past the enemy position – and that as a result we had the rebels bottled up between us. We at once began to return their fire, whereupon the adoo took cover in a bait and behind rocks, not yet realizing they were trapped. It was at this point that Taff was seized by an idea.

  ‘Listen in, lads,’ he said. ‘Billy, you have the machine-gun. Put down covering fire and keep their tiny heads down while Tommy Palmer and I go right flanking.’ Tim seemed happy with the plans, and I set up the GPMG and began to fire short bursts at the adoo position to make sure they didn’t try to break out. Taff, meanwhile, summoned over our Arabic interpreter.

  ‘Tell the firqat that we are going right flanking,’ he said. ‘Down there to the right. Now.’ The interpreter repeated in Arabic what he had said, whereupon the firqat, almost to a man, replied with some vehemence, ‘Mushtaman, mushtaman,’ which means ‘bad,’ but clearly also meant, ‘no way’.