I deployed with the second wave on Sunday, 30 December, from an RAF base aboard a United States Air Force C-5 troop carrier, a monstrous aircraft known as the Galaxy. We flew out via a base in Germany, where we refuelled and picked up a group of American servicemen before carrying on to our initial destination in the Middle East, Abu Dhabi, one of the seven emirates that make up the UAE.
I was sitting with the Regiment’s MTO (motor transport officer) and the Quartermaster. The MTO had told us how he had become the first proper casualty of the war by walking into a marble stairway in the officers’ mess at the RAF and cutting his head. As proof, he showed us his bloodstained handkerchief. ‘I want this to go down in the records,’ he insisted. ‘At least I’ll be first in one aspect of this war.’
I knew that on the airbase at which we landed there was one of the legendary American PXs – roughly equivalent to our NAAFIs, but usually larger and much, much better – where drink is sold at rock-bottom prices. I also knew that the MTO had a quantity of US dollars about his person. ‘Why not go for a Mention in Despatches, as well?’ I suggested to him. ‘It’s extremely underhand and strictly against regulations, but there are two of us here who will swear you performed an act of great heroism and saved two suffering companions at considerable risk to yourself.
‘All you have to do is leap off the plane and use some of your US cash to buy wine in the PX.’
So far as the Quartermaster and I were concerned, the MTO earned his MID. He managed to get back on board with a couple of 2-litre cartons of red wine tucked away out of sight. It made the next seven hours much more enjoyable than they would otherwise have been. The three of us were on the upper deck and would be visited every half-hour or so by one of the American load masters handing out soft drinks or coffee. They never noticed that every time we were offered more coffee our paper cups were still always half full. To drink on a military aircraft, British or American, is a serious offence, but we managed to sink all four litres of wine right under their noses before we reached Abu Dhabi.
Three of us may have fooled the load masters with our illicit drinking, but the rest of their SAS passengers hadn’t fooled them over another illegal act, namely the theft of twenty-eight of Uncle Sam’s airline pillows. These pillows, handed out at the beginning of the flight, had proved so comfortable, and were of just the right mini dimensions, as to be irresistible. Their disappearance was not going to wash with the senior load master, however, a giant black USAF sergeant who was refusing to let his Galaxy take off again until he had his pillows back.
Of the men standing on the tarmac – some one hundred and fifty of them – not one of the culprits was prepared to give up his bounty willingly. Having asked the sergeant to step back into his aircraft for a moment, I told my grinning mob, ‘These Yanks are our allies. They give us a nice ride down here and we thank them by robbing them blind.
‘I am going to take a short walk – for five minutes – and when I get back I want to see twenty-eight pillows. If not, I am going to search every man’s kit and if I find a pillow in anyone’s gear, then that person will immediately be RTU-ed.’ With that I turned and walked off.
When I returned after having smoked a cigarette there were twenty-eight pillows neatly stacked on the tarmac. They may have been comfortable and a handy size, but that was nothing compared with the threat of being RTU-ed.
What we had not expected to find in Abu Dhabi in winter was that it was extremely cold there in the early mornings. By the time we had appeased the sergeant and unloaded our personal equipment from the Galaxy the sun had edged a little higher and the temperature had begun to rise, but we were still freezing. While we waited for our RAF transport to arrive we must have looked a sorry sight. Here was the whole of the headquarters staff and the support team from 22 SAS standing on the edge of a windswept runway on New Year’s Eve 1990, shivering like a bunch of vagrants abandoned in the Arctic.
At the designated time an RAF C-130 came in to land and thundered across to where we were waiting. Once we had loaded ourselves and our gear aboard it flew us the short hop to the main British holding base in the area codenamed Victor. Lying near to Abu Dhabi city, Victor was a newly built parachute-training establishment which was still unoccupied. It had a runway system large enough to accommodate big jets and, surrounding this, a vast, twenty-square-mile secured area where paratroops could be housed and trained. Within the Victor perimeter were numerous camps, up to a mile apart, and one of these, close to one of the perimeter fences, was ours. The buildings were all brand new and, though basic, were adequate.
A small SAS advance party had been sent out before Christmas to establish our camp within Victor. The main operations room, the offices and a major part of the accommodation were all in a giant hangar, originally designed to allow paratroops to practise their descents from high up near the roof. I say offices, but in reality they were desks set a few feet apart from one another. The desks, six-foot wooden jobs with metal legs, were all identical, as were the plastic chairs. They were grouped in a wide, roughly semi-circular, arrangement – the CO, the adjutant, the intelligence officer, the signals officer, me, and the other department heads. It was lucky that they were close together, because the telephone system was very basic, and most of the time we communicated by shouting to one another. If anyone wanted to speak to Hereford, where the second-in-command and G Squadron were holding the fort, he went to the satellite communications desk from where there was a direct link.
On the hangar walls behind the desks were huge maps of Iraq and Kuwait, and on the floor were piles of cardboard cartons containing hundreds of smaller copies printed on paper or silk. These were to be issued to the troops. The silk maps were for evasion or escape purposes. They wouldn’t tear if they became wet, as paper would, and they remained readable even after being stuffed damp into a pocket.
Everybody slept on camp beds – even the CO, though he had yet to arrive. Rather than sleep in the hangar with the rest of the HQ staff, however, I requisitioned a very cramped extension on the side of the camp barber shop, about the size of a fifth-rate broom cupboard, where I was able to keep my kit. At night I moved my camp bed into the barber shop to sleep. It had mosquito netting on the windows – though this was rarely needed because of the cold – and a sink and a mirror which were ideal for my morning ablutions. I could even shave while sitting in the leather-covered barber’s chair.
The CO had been allocated a small room in one of the buildings outside the hangar, but the rest of the HQ party slept in the huge construction. Our three squadrons of fighting personnel, A, B and D, were either billeted in neighbouring hangars or under canvas. When we first arrived, however, A Squadron was still at the Regiment’s training camp in the United Arab Emirates, being the last of the four squadrons to undergo the special desert refresher course.
G Squadron remained at Hereford on counter-terrorist duty. Combating terrorism was still the Regiment’s first priority so far as the British government was concerned, and had become more so because of fears of terrorist attacks in the UK by Iraqi or pro-Iraqi agents. Even though Britain was at war we had to leave an adequate special-projects team or anti-terrorist squad in Hereford to deal with any threat that might arise. As has been said, it fell to each squadron, on six months’ rotation, to form the SP team; it was G Squadron’s bad luck that it happened to be their turn during this period.
Also camped in Victor were sixteen members of the Regiment’s R (reserve) Squadron, who were civilian volunteers also based in Hereford. In addition, there was a squadron from our Royal Marines sister service, the SBS, as well as the Special Forces flights from 7 and 47 Squadrons, Royal Air Force. Apart from three C-130s, the RAF had brought in four Chinook helicopters with extra pilots, navigators, flight engineers and load masters as part of their contingent.
We also had a small group based in the Saudi Arabian capital, Riyadh, led by the Deputy Director, Special Forces. He and his team came from Duke of York’s Headquarters in Chelsea, Lo
ndon, which among other functions is the regimental headquarters of Special Forces. They were in Riyadh to work closely with General de la Billière, and to pass on the latter’s directives to the rest of us in Victor.
Unfortunately, the Deputy Director was as different from DLB, who was worshipped throughout the SAS, as chalk is from cheese. He had commanded the Regiment some years earlier, during which time he had sacked all four squadron sergeant-majors and his adjutant. He was not a man to be messed with; indeed, I can remember only one other squadron sergeant-major being sacked during the rest of my twenty-five years with the Regiment.
I was to get a first-hand view of the Deputy Director’s setup when our commanding officer arrived and sent me to Riyadh. He was planning to get us to our forward operating base (FOB) at Al Jouf in north-western Saudi Arabia, 200 kilometres south of the border with Iraq. I was asked to meet up with two RAF staff officers and work out with them just how long it would take us to move 600 men with equipment and vehicles from Victor to Al Jouf, a distance of some 1,700 kilometres as the crow flies. A and D Squadrons were to be broken up into half-squadron units of about thirty men apiece. Each unit would have eight long-wheelbase Land Rover 110s, a Unimog (roughly equivalent to a Bedford 3-ton truck) and whatever motorcycles they required. B Squadron would be split into one half-squadron subdivided into four eightman units, with sufficient Land Rovers, trucks and motorcycles for their needs. The other half of B Squadron would remain in Victor as an anti-terrorist unit, there being considerable, and justified, fears of terrorist attacks on British targets, notably embassies, in other Gulf states that had joined the Coalition. All this, together with weapons, stores, personal equipment and backup staff, had to be shifted just over a thousand miles north-westwards.
On the way to Riyadh the aircraft I was flying in stopped off at Dhahran on Saudi Arabia’s Gulf coast, the principal base for the Coalition air forces. There, for the first time, I realized the sheer power of the forces ranged against Saddam. If I had needed any evidence to convince me that the Americans were taking this war seriously, it was to be found at Dhahran. On that vast airfield there were rows of helicopters and military aircraft stretching literally for miles. Many of the helicopters were still coated in grease beneath a protective layer of brown paper.
Meanwhile, there we were at Victor with four RAF Chinook twin-rotor helicopters, one Army Air Corps Gazelle light helicopter, and the use of three RAF C-130 transports. By contrast, the firepower the Coalition had at Dhahran was unbelievable, and there were waves of fresh aircraft coming in all the time. Schwarzkopf had said he saw this as an air war. He clearly meant what he said.
In Riyadh, the British and US headquarters had been established in an office tower block cleared by the Saudi Arabians for the Allies’ exclusive use. Adequate for its purpose, though certainly not luxurious, it stood in the bustling centre of the city. At the entrance US Marines and British military police checked everyone in and out. I was cleared through and located the people I needed to see on one of the upper floors. That place became my home for the next two days while we worked out the best way to split up the loads. In the end it was decided that each flight would carry three vehicles and the men who would use them, with all their kit, and that we would try to keep the three C-130s operating in a continuous rollover movement. This, of course, had to fit in with the RAF pilots flying within their time frame, for I discovered that they were not permitted to fly for more than eight hours without taking the required rest period in between – even in wartime.
I told the air force planners that I thought this was completely unreasonable; after all, our guys had to go without any sleep, sometimes for days on end, while harassing the enemy deep behind his lines. That, I was told by one RAF wit, was our problem. ‘Next time round work a bit harder at school and pass your exams, and then you can join the RAF instead,’ was his only advice.
‘If that’s the level of humour that goes with the job, I’ll stay where I am,’ I replied. ‘At least we get to laugh, even if it’s only at you glorified taxi drivers.’ But it was all good natured, and I found the two staff officers very helpful and extremely professional.
With less than a week to go before our jump-off date to our forward operating base, the CO asked me to fly down to the Regiment’s desert-training camp and run an eye over A Squadron. They had been the duty SP team during the three-month run-up to our move to the Gulf, and as a result had not had an opportunity, unlike the other three squadrons, to undergo special desert training. They had been among the first to leave Hereford on 27 December, however, and on arrival in Abu Dhabi had been transferred directly to the training camp.
The camp was a forty-minute helicopter ride from Victor. The Gazelle has little more seating capacity than a sports car. Besides its pilot, it can take four people without kit, or just two men kitted out. None of which mattered to me that particular day, since I was the only passenger, and therefore riding in rare comfort.
A Squadron was nearing the end of its training period and the guys were prepping their vehicles in anticipation of pulling out – possibly for immediate insertion into Iraq. Morale seemed high and the men were in peak condition. It was clear that the squadron was now a highly trained and highly motivated desert fighting force. In anticipation of coming operations, it had already been split into two half-squadrons, each divided into two sub-units: Alpha One Zero and Two Zero, and Alpha Three Zero and Four Zero. The squadron’s four troops, Mountain, Boat, Mobility and Air, had been split between the two main units. Two Zero had half of Mobility and Air Troops and all of Mountain Troop, while Four Zero had the other halves of Mobility and Air and all of Boat Troop.
That afternoon the CO flew in to the training camp with the Deputy Director from Riyadh. When he asked if I had unearthed any problems I was able to tell him, ‘No. Everybody seems fine. There are no problems at all that I can see.’ It was true – I couldn’t see any problems. At least, not then; not until we met the men who were to command the two half-squadrons in the field and arranged a private briefing with them later that day.
Alpha Three Zero and Four Zero – codenamed Alpha Three Zero – were commanded by the squadron sergeant-major, because the two troop commanders were fairly new officers and didn’t have the experience to be given overall command. To a certain extent, therefore, they were going along in a learning capacity. It is a unique feature of the SAS that units will often be commanded on operations by an NCO, even though there may be an officer present. It is a system that has been proved time and again, partly because the man in command will discuss matters with, and take advice from, other members of his patrol.
The setup for Alpha Three Zero and Four Zero was excellent. It was the command of Alpha One and Two Zero – codenamed Alpha One Zero – which caused immediate misgivings. The squadron commander was a Royal Marine major who had come to us on a two-year secondment from the Special Boat Service. He had already served with the Regiment for a year, but this was the first time he had been charged with anything more difficult than a routine exercise. He didn’t seem to relish the prospect of leading his unit into the dangers lurking in Saddam Hussein’s unwelcoming back yard. During the briefing, in which the two commanders explained in turn their concepts of the operations to come, it soon became apparent that the OC of A Squadron was not at all happy. He seemed hesitant, apologetic, even timid, and appeared to lack any confidence in what he was supposed to be doing.
When we arrived back at Victor that evening, the CO asked me to join him for a cup of tea and a chat. He seemed very ill at ease, and I didn’t need to be a clairvoyant to work out what he wanted to talk about. As always, he came straight to the point.
‘OK Billy,’ he said, ‘the Deputy Director has severe misgivings about OC A Squadron, and to a certain extent so do I. What do you think we can do about it? The balance is all wrong. Alpha Three Zero and Four Zero have most of the senior ranks with the experience and the strength of character to cope. Looking at the other half-squadron, there�
��s a serious imbalance.’
I had already come to a similar conclusion, but I had also come up with a possible solution. I explained to the CO that while in Riyadh I had met up with an officer, an ex-Guardsman named Jeremy who was a member of the Regiment’s headquarters staff, who not only appeared to have the right stuff, but had asked me if I could try to get him into the field in the coming fight. A captain in his late twenties, he was due to take over as officer commanding G Squadron in December.
‘Perhaps he’s the answer,’ I said. ‘We could put him in as second-in-command of Alpha One Zero, which would give the squadron OC some really positive support.’ The CO agreed that this was not a bad idea.
‘Well, there’s your chance,’ I said. ‘Put Jeremy in and say it’s because you want him to have experience of active service before he takes over his command.’
‘Mmmmm,’ the CO mused, staring into his half-empty mug of tea, ‘I like that. But I’m going to sleep on it.’
When we met again the following morning, however, he told me, ‘I’ve thought about it and I’m going to let them run. We’ll make no changes.’
‘Okay, Boss, that’s fine by me,’ I said. He was the CO. He knew the facts and he’d taken his decision, based on those facts. For me personally, that decision was to mean that eventually I would be catapulted from the sidelines into the sharp end of the war against Iraq. At the time, however, there were a hundred other things to occupy me. Matters that required more urgent attention and involved countless instant decisions, and most of them to do with our move to Saudi Arabia.
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