Eye of the Storm

by Peter Ratcliffe

  There was no point in our trying to fire back. The adoo mortar team might have been anything up to 4 kilometres away, the effective range of an 82mm mortar, which is what we later discovered they had been firing at us. If a mortar attack went on for any length of time you might guess the range by computing the time between the initial bang of the weapon firing and the moment of impact, and working out the range by multiplying the known speed of the projectile in feet or yards per second by the time of flight in seconds. It is a complicated and imprecise method, however, and in addition it won’t tell you the direction from which the fire is coming. At night you can sometimes spot the flashes as a mortar fires, but this attack came in broad daylight.

  All we could do was wait until the adoo had finished their bombardment for the day, and then whistle up a helicopter to take away the two wounded and what was left of Chris in a bodybag. It was a grim business, for parts of his body had been thrown more than twenty yards by the explosion.

  You never get over the speed with which things can change during warfare. Half an hour earlier I had been sitting with Chris on the ground outside the bunker, smoking a fag and idly chit-chatting. We were looking down on Capstan, and I had asked him, ‘Is it what you expected?’

  ‘Yes, I think so,’ he’d replied, but the truth is that he never had time to find out, really. He was quite new to the Regiment and had only been assigned to our squadron about a month earlier. Certainly, neither of us expected that he would be dead inside half an hour.

  Despite the blood and the number of his wounds, the signaller was not as badly injured as we’d feared, and later made a full recovery. ‘Killer’ Denis spent a couple of weeks in the hospital at Salalah, where the regimental doctor picked a load of tiny shrapnel pieces out of his arse with tweezers. He later rejoined us on Simba, though he was pretty sore for at least a month – I hardly remember him sitting down during all that time.

  Denis came from the south of England originally, but had moved to live in Hereford after he joined the Regiment. He had picked up his nickname during his early days with us, while taking part in a nuclear, biological and chemical (NBC) warfare course. At some point the instructor asked him to identify a powder commonly used in chemical warfare, only to receive the answer, ‘I don’t know. I’m only here to kill.’ From then on he was known as ‘Killer’.

  After he and the wounded signaller had been evacuated we began clearing up the sangar, and it was then that I came across the tailfin of the mortar bomb that had killed Chris. It had come from Britain. The adoo were actually using British ammunition against us. Naturally enough the whole squadron was furious to learn this, although the irony of it did not escape them. We theorized later that the ammunition had got into South Yemen via Libya, but no one would ever have been able to prove it. What any member of the SAS will tell you, though, is that there are some people in Britain willing to sell anything to anybody in return for a fast buck. Yet it goes without saying that there’s no point in making a fuss. The sale of British-made arms to hostile or enemy states is far too hot a political potato, and there are far too many influential figures with their fingers in the till, for there to be any chance of mere soldiers getting the trade investigated and stopped.

  I was angry, however. In theory, if you could spot the enemy firing a mortar on a nearby hill, then by using a plotter board you could drop a mortar round on them. And of course they could do the same to you – especially if they used British ammunition. The adoo were equipped with Russian mortar tubes which the British 81mm ammunition fitted, and they were very accurate weapons. Yet sometimes we ourselves were forced to use mortar ammunition manufactured in India, which we found to be substandard and inaccurate, as well as dangerous in that the rounds would sweat and become unstable. To know that you are fighting with substandard equipment against the best of British would have made any British soldier angry. Yet all we could do, other than moan, was sit and take it, and try to make the sangar walls thicker with every chance we got in an attempt to defend ourselves against the mortars, rockets and machine-gun fire.

  Two days after Chris was killed and the signaller wounded, a couple of replacements were sent in from Salalah. One was a fresh-faced guy called Ginge; the other, Ian, a stocky Northerner originally from the Paras, had been in the Regiment about as long as I had. We were still strengthening the walls of our sangar or bunker, which by this time had been given an official name – ‘Green Five’. The aim was to make the sides at least ten feet thick, interspersing sandbags with boulders, with here and there a slit from which to fire the GPMG. Jimmy and I and a couple of other guys were filling sand-bags when the chopper brought in the replacements. We greeted them briefly, and suggested they stick their bergens inside the partly built sangar and sort their kit out before setting to work with the rest of us.

  I wish, now, that they had been set straight to work, for just ten minutes after they arrived we were hit by a rocket attack. The first rocket went way off to the left and exploded harmlessly against some rocks a couple of hundred metres away, but the second was already homing in. The Russian-built Katyusha rockets don’t travel all that fast and they make a loud whooshing sound, which gives you about two seconds in which to decide what to do, and then do it. You can either drop behind cover, or run in one direction or another.

  The four of us on the work detail were about five metres from the sangar, with no cover near enough that we would be able to reach in time. But in those few seconds of warning time I realized that the rocket was heading towards the sangar. The pair inside were in most danger.

  I screamed ‘Incoming!’ but I think they had already sensed their danger. Ian ran towards the side of the sangar nearest us and Ginge ran the opposite way, further into the bunker – and, as it happened, right into the rocket’s path. He just chose the wrong way to go. It was pure bad luck.

  The rocket seemed to scoop him up and hurl him into the sangar’s rear wall. Then it exploded, although by then, perhaps mercifully, he was already dead from the impact of the missile. When we ran forward, it looked at first as though Ian had been killed as well. But the blood was all Ginge’s. Ian had been blown off his feet by the explosion, but was only stunned.

  It was almost a replay of the incident with Chris two days before. In just forty-eight hours I had seen two mates meet the most horrific deaths imaginable – although at least they were mercifully quick – and another suffer appalling wounds, and I hadn’t a scratch on me.

  I am neither a superstitious nor a particularly religious man, but as I waited for the helicopter to fly in to pick up Ginge’s remains and take Ian, who was in deep shock, to the field hospital, I reached for the rosary beads in the top left-hand pocket of my uniform top, where they were always kept, and muttered a couple of thankful ‘Hail, Marys’.

  I had been given the beads by an old lady whose father had carried them through the First World War, and whose husband had carried them through the Second. She had given them to me in 1970 with the words, ‘Have these, love. They took my father and my husband safely through two world wars. Let them do the same for you.’ I can’t remember her name, if I ever knew it, but since then I’ve always carried them. They have been with me in every campaign I’ve been in, and I never go anywhere without them. On the day in 1982 when I left for the Falklands I couldn’t find them, and became very anxious as a result. Then I remembered that I’d left them in my bag in the squash club, so I went back to get them. Did they help me? Well, I’m still here – though whether that is superstition or faith I don’t know. I do know, however, that holding them in those moments after Ginge was killed brought me a certain degree of comfort.

  Ginge had been wiped out with such violence that our immediate reaction was a furious desire to grab our weapons and rush down the foothills and try to avenge our pals. But this was the rebels’ terrain. I didn’t know where they were hiding, or even what they looked like. Nor could we send out choppers to locate them, for the adoo would shoot them down with SAMs or small
-arms fire. This was the lesson the Soviets were beginning to learn in the rebellious Radfan area of Yemen, where they lost a number of helicopters, and they would later suffer even heavier losses in Afghanistan. All we could do was wait patiently for the big push. Then, we hoped, it would be time for revenge. Meanwhile, there was work to be done and a sangar to finish.

  We could not escape the reality, however, that our losses on this tour were already starting to mount. Another member of D Squadron had been killed in Defa the previous week, and yet in two previous tours in Oman we had suffered no losses and only a few minor casualties. Now, in the space of a week, three men were dead and lying in the mortuary, waiting to take their last journey home. I wondered briefly what the public reaction would be when the bodybags started arriving at RAF Lyneham. Then I remembered: we were the SAS, and nothing was ever released to the media about us. No one but us would ever know about the bodybags – us and the next of kin of the dead men. Nor was anyone going to tell those relatives where their loved ones had been killed.

  By January of 1976 the rebels’ supply route out of Yemen had finally been cut off and the adoo realized it was time to call it a day. They retreated over the border into South Yemen, leaving most of their equipment behind. In the Wadi Dharbat we found hospitals built inside caves, huge ammunition dumps, and tons of discarded equipment, all of which had originally been brought in on donkeys and camels. Suddenly there was nothing left for us to do in Oman. So far as the Sultanate was concerned, having done the job we had been asked to do, we were redundant.

  Not for long, though. Returning to Hereford, we discovered that the government of the day had found another hotbed of terrorism and nationalism against which to test us. This time, however, D Squadron was not going quite so far away from home. Instead, the Regiment was deployed to Northern Ireland – although that, as they say, is another story …

  Chapter Eight

  LIKE most soldiers, I have never had much time for politicians. The majority of them strike me as shallow, mouthy creatures who are in politics for what they can get out of it, or from an inflated sense of their own importance, or – more likely – from a combination of both. At least in this country they are prevented from abusing too greatly the trappings of power by all sorts of democratic checks and balances, but the same cannot always be said of some of the less democratic countries of the world. Politicians in such places often display a cynicism that would have disgraced an eighteenth-century pirate, and never more so than when they feel themselves threatened. To a foreign dictator who has trouble at home, there is nothing like a war to take the minds of the people off their lack of freedom, their country’s soaring inflation, mass unemployment, or whatever else it is that is beginning to threaten the power base of their self-appointed leader.

  So when, on 2 April 1982, the Argentinian military dictator President Leopoldo Galtieri ordered his forces to invade the Falkland Islands, a British dependency, I too, like a lot of others, reckoned that it was all a ruse to shore up his flagging popularity in Argentina and in its capital, Buenos Aires, in particular.

  The Falklands – a group of two main and more than a hundred small islands – are little more than specks in the South Atlantic, 400 miles off the east coast of Argentina and 8,070 miles from Britain. English sailors first landed on the islands in 1690, and they have been under continuous British occupation and administration since 1833.

  In 1982, there were fewer than 2,000 people living in the Falklands, most of them on East Falkland, which includes the islands’ capital, Port Stanley. Almost all the inhabitants were of British descent. They drove on the left-hand side of the road; they spoke English with a distinct West of England burr to it; and, as far as they were concerned, they were as British as anybody living in Kent or Cumbria. The Argentinians, however, had long had their eyes on the islands, which they called Las Malvinas (from Les Malouines, after the French sailors from St-Malo who had first colonized them), and which they had indeed briefly occupied at one point during the nineteenth century.

  By rights, or so most Argentinians believed, the Falklands should belong to Argentina. So when Britain announced that her already tiny Royal Naval presence in that part of the world was going to be removed almost entirely with the scrapping of the Antarctic survey ship HMS Endurance, the military junta, headed by Galtieri, which governed Argentina saw it as a good time to ‘liberate’ the Malvinas and score some popularity points at home, where savage inflation and popular disaffection with the often brutal government were threatening to erupt into widespread civil unrest.

  Early on the morning of Friday, 19 March 1982, a gang of some forty Argentinian scrap-metal salvagers landed on the island of South Georgia, another British dependency lying some 800 miles east and slightly south of the Falklands – a wickedly cold, inhospitable island of mountains and glacier, scourged by blizzards and cloaked in ice. During the days of coal-burning ships South Georgia had been used as a bunkering port for the then vast Royal Navy. Moreover, when whaling was still big business, British whalers had regularly used the island as a drop-off point for their catches, which could be processed in the plants there.

  All that remains of these long-defunct activities in the bays at the foot of the ice-capped peaks are a handful of ancient barges and the rusting machinery housed in sheds of corroded corrugated iron that long ago surrendered to the howling wind and the snow. It was this wreckage the scrap-metal workmen had supposedly come to dismantle. However, they had been brought to South Georgia aboard an Argentinian Navy transport vessel, and it seems almost certain that their presence there formed part of the Argentinian military’s plans to take over the British dependencies in the South Atlantic by stealth. Within hours of their arrival at the old whaling station at Leith, they had raised the blue-and-white flag of Argentina on British sovereign territory.

  The island’s only occupants were a small scientific team at the British Antarctic Survey base at Grytviken, and two women naturalists who were making a natural-history documentary for Anglia Television; one of them was the daughter of Anglia’s Chairman. The moment they learned of the Argentinian presence on the island the scientists radioed Rex Hunt, the Governor of the Falklands, who in turn contacted London. The diplomatic scuffle now started. Hunt instructed the scientists to order the Argentinians to strike their flag and seek proper authorization for their presence on South Georgia; he also dispatched HMS Endurance there after she had embarked a detachment of Royal Marines from the small Falklands garrison.

  Apparently in response to British pressure, on 23 March the Argentinian naval transport left Leith with some of the scrap-metal men aboard. On the following day, however, an armed survey ship of the Argentinian Navy arrived and landed a strong detachment of marines, ostensibly to protect the remaining workmen. Endurance also arrived on the same day, but remained at Grytviken with her Royal Marines still aboard, awaiting orders. Then, while the Foreign Office fired useless paper broadsides at the Argentinian junta, on 31 March the twenty-two Royal Marines from Endurance were ordered to provide a show of strength on the island. Their primary task was to protect the survey team and the naturalists, but they were also to keep an eye on the Argentinian invaders at the same time.

  While Endurance stood off at a safe distance, ships of the Argentinian Navy arrived, and on Saturday, 3 April the Argentinians tried to persuade the Royal Marines to surrender, informing their commander by radio that the Falkland Islands had already been taken (which was true). Naturally, the British troops refused. In reply, the enemy landed two parties of their own marines by helicopter on both sides of Grytviken harbour and opened fire on the British position at King Edward Point. By now thoroughly annoyed, the Royal Marines shot down one of the Argentinians’ two heavy transport helicopters and severely damaged another chopper that had been circling and observing them. An Argentinian Navy corvette then sailed round the headland and into the bay, whereupon the Royal Marines holed it beneath the waterline with an anti-tank rocket. They then used anti-tank
rockets to knock out the frigate’s gun turret, and poured heavy machine-gun fire into the ship. In the fighting, four Argentinians were killed at a cost of one Royal Marine badly wounded in the arm.

  Nobody could say that the Marines had not put up a spirited and brave defence, despite being heavily out-numbered and outgunned. But having shown the enemy that they were not pushovers, and knowing that there was no possible hope of escape, they were forced to negotiate a ceasefire and then, wisely, surrendered. They were treated honourably and well, and were swiftly repatriated to Britain.

  The loss of South Georgia, coming as it did the day after the Argentinian takeover of the Falklands, was splashed all over the British papers. From the rhetoric of most British politicians, and the press, you could have been forgiven for thinking that it was the Isle of Wight that had been invaded, rather than an ice-caked fragment of rock and glacier thousands of miles from Westminster, to which most of Her Majesty’s subjects could not have pointed on a map of the world.

  The same was true of the Falkland Islands, for at the time only very few people had any idea where they were. What almost no one in Britain knew, either, was the extent of Argentina’s ambitions and the duration of her claims to British territory in the region: six years earlier, in 1976, the Argentinians had established a fifty-man garrison on the island of Southern Thule, one of the South Sandwich group, another British dependency lying to the south of South Georgia. The Foreign Office had recommended that no action be taken to eject the interlopers.