by Pete Scholey
You needed a cool head and nerves of steel to tackle HALO jumping in full kit. So many things could so easily go wrong. John shifted his legs forward slightly and felt the weight of the Bergen on the back of his thighs. The rucksack was slung upside down below his parachute and was carefully packed with all the kit he would need for a normal patrol. Altogether he was carrying kit that tipped the scales at well over 100lb (45kg). Once his canopy opened, he would unclip the Bergen to let it dangle below him on a length of line. It would hit the ground before he did, leaving him free of its encumbrance when he landed. For the time being, it was secure and felt well balanced. If it wasn’t, it would spell disaster. John knew full well that the Bergen was probably what did for poor old Rip Reddy.
When G Squadron was sent into northern Oman in 1970 looking for terrorists, who very sensibly then made it their business to be elsewhere, one of the places where the SAS was charged with attempting to track down the elusive foe was in the Wadi Rawdah. The wadi was an enormous bowl or crater scooped out of the mountains. Its ragged cliff walls soared a thousand feet high and the only way in or out was through a narrow cleft in the rock wall facing the sea. Approaching the area on foot, you had to pass through this narrow rock corridor before it opened out onto the vast expanse of the valley floor. This place was home to an isolated tribe called the Bani Shihoo. They lived in houses built with carved blocks of solid stone and constructed great rock cisterns to catch and store water. They were rumoured to be a bloodthirsty lot who had few firearms but made up for that through their prowess with their traditional battle axes. They were also rumoured to be harbouring a heavily armed bunch of terrorist guerrillas. As with so many rumours, both would turn out to be nonsense. The Bani Shihoo were not deadly cut-throats, but perfectly friendly and there were no terrorists in the wadi.
The men of G Squadron, however, were not to know that. The intelligence was that the insurgents were there and the SAS was tasked with going in after them. The plan was for a pathfinder group, including Paul ‘Rip’ Reddy, to free-fall into the wadi at night to secure a landing area for the helicopters that would bring in the rest of the squadron. They would also secure the exit from the wadi to make sure that none of the terrorists escaped. The free-fall group jumped from 11,000ft (3,352m), plummeting down past mountain peaks 4,000ft (1,219m) high before their parachutes deployed above the Wadi Rawdah. No one will ever really know what went wrong as Rip fell through the darkness. The best guess was that the Bergen moved and he had lost stability in the air. When his parachute deployed it may have become tangled on some other part of his kit. What is certain is that it did not fully deploy until it was too late. The rest of the pathfinder force located each other using their Surface to Air Rescue Beacon (SARBE) radios, but Rip never checked in. They found his body the next day on a low rocky slope at the edge of the wadi.
It didn’t do to dwell on memories like that. Sure, these jumps were dangerous, but John accepted that they still had a part to play in the way the Regiment operated. The advantages of HALO insertion were that a team could be delivered quickly, accurately and covertly to its destination. A man falling through the air at free-fall speeds would be almost undetectable on enemy radar, whereas a chopper would have to fly in low and drop off its passengers some distance from the intended target in order to avoid being picked up on radar and alerting the enemy to the team’s presence. In some situations, a HALO team could be dropped in to secure landing and drop zones ahead of the main force.
HALO was dangerous and there had been accidents, but since that very first free-fall operational jump in Oman, the Regiment had trained dozens of free-fall artists and John had done scores of these jumps. He’d completed two RAF HALO courses and jumped in training exercises at home in England, at the French parachute school at Pau in the Pyrenees, and in the mountains of Norway, too. During one troop training jaunt to Cyprus they had jumped from 30,000ft (9,144m), close to the service ceiling of the C-130.
The RAF loadmaster signalled for John to move forward. He was first in the stick, with no one to shield him from the blackness of the night, no one to follow blindly out of the tailgate. The loadmaster straightened the strap of the harness that secured him to a safety point on the aircraft’s inner fuselage, all the while looking up at the red light that glowed above him. The instant it turned to green, he yelled ‘Go!’ and waved John out. Even if John could have heard him above the howling windroar from the gaping tailgate, he would not have waited for the sound of the command. He wouldn’t hold up the rest of the stick. He stepped forward off the end of the tailgate and dropped out into the night.
The slipstream from the Hercules buffeted him for a moment, flinging his body out behind the aircraft as he twisted himself into the face-down, starfish position for free-fall, balancing his body with his solar plexus as his centre of gravity. This part was the real thrill, the part any speed freak would sell his granny for. This was when he accelerated towards the ground, Mother Earth dragging him back to her bosom, gravity snatching him out of the sky. From leaving the C-130 it took him just 12 seconds to drop 1,500ft (457m) as he accelerated to his terminal velocity of just over 120mph (293km/h). The windrush tore at his clothing and kit, setting up a whistling that sounded like an express train hurtling past his ears. He could see the shape of the night far better now that he was out there and part of it. He could see a layer of cloud rushing up towards him. If he adjusted his posture slightly, he could track across the sky towards a gap in cloud and drop through the clear air. On the other hand, he knew that the cloudbank was not very thick and attempting any kind of manoeuvre when overloaded with kit was not advisable.
People who jump free-fall for sport can pull off all sorts of acrobatic tricks in the air – ‘fly’ across the sky, ‘surf’, somersault or spin like an aerial gymnast. They don’t have all that combat kit to contend with. Weighed down by that load, you have to think twice about any kind of movement. The sport parachutists will pull their own ripcords to deploy their chutes. They can move one arm to the pull ring and reach forward with the other to maintain stability. That is not to be tried except in an emergency when you are jumping laden with SAS gear. To avoid having to make that move, SAS free-fall teams use a device that opens the parachute pack automatically when the jumper has descended to a predetermined altitude.
John’s goggles started to ice over. He knew that it must be cold but he wasn’t feeling it at all. The adrenalin rush, as much as his jump suit, was keeping out the frosty air. He didn’t want to be falling blind with his goggles iced up, but he’d let it go for a few seconds more. If he was going to clear them, he only wanted to have to do it once. He couldn’t just drag the back of his hand across the goggles to banish the ice. He had to keep his outline symmetrical to maintain stability. He couldn’t afford to start tumbling through the sky. Once he reached the altitude where the parachute would deploy, he had to be in perfect control otherwise he would end up with his canopy wrapped around him. Then it would cease to function as a parachute and serve only as his shroud. Carefully, the movements simultaneous, confident and deliberate, he brought both gloved hands in to rub the ice from his goggles. This pitched him into a ‘head-down’ attitude where he was diving through the air, picking up even more speed, but as he extended his arms again he brought himself back into the perfect posture.
The night disappeared in a soup of mist as John hurtled down through the thin cloud, then, around 2 minutes and 30 seconds after exiting the Hercules, John felt the tug of the small pilot chute as it cleared the pack and caught in his slipstream, popping open the parachute bag and dragging his canopy out behind it. Then came the reassuring snap of the canopy filling with air and the jolt as it pulled him into an upright position and began to slow his descent. He looked up and checked the chute as best he could in the dark. It all seemed fine. Another free-fall jump was all over bar the landing. It was one of more than 100 HALO free-fall parachute descents John was to undertake in training during a career with the SAS that spanned
over 20 years.
From his first taste of SAS active service as a teenager in Malaya, where he participated in deep-penetration patrols that lasted up to three months with air drops for re-supply only every 14 days, John proved that he had what it takes to make an outstanding SAS soldier. After Malaya, he went to Oman, where he and his comrades faced entirely different, but equally harsh, conditions. They spent months probing with reconnaissance patrols to find a way to seize the 12,000ft (3,658m) high plateau on the Jebel Akhdar from communist-backed insurgents. They eventually made it to the top on Christmas Day. They had routed the enemy by March of 1959, but John had not seen the last of Oman. He was back there in 1970 during Operation Storm.
I was a corporal with D Squadron by the time the unit went to Borneo in 1963, and it was on operations in the jungle that I first came to know John. He often found himself acting as a patrol commander and regularly deputized for the troop commander during the exhausting operations against the Indonesian border raiders. Between tours in Borneo, John was also active during the campaign in Aden. John threw himself wholeheartedly into every job he was asked to undertake, whether it was the classroom training with which some of us struggled so hard, or setting out in the middle of winter with a shovel to clear the snow off the local railway line. He would join the lads in the pub for a drink, but would sit quietly by if things ever started to get a bit out of hand. He was never one to lose control. John’s normally even temper and good nature made him an excellent instructor, too. He had a spell with the Training Wing as a demolitions instructor, ran a course to train Malay Police and Special Branch officers in Ipoh, Malaysia, and even became a ‘spook’ when he was seconded as an instructor to MI6 for two years.
Having completed 22 years’ service in the army, John left the Regiment in 1978 with the rank of staff sergeant. He then spent some time in Florida providing close protection for a VIP before moving back to Europe to work as a bodyguard to a Dutch industrialist. He stayed in that job for 12 years before finally hanging up his shoulder holster to enjoy a well-deserved retirement.
John was one of the most professional soldiers I ever met and his incredibly positive attitude under in any circumstances, under any amount of pressure, was matched only by his unstinting courage. I remain proud to have served with him.
WO2 SQUADRON SERGEANT-MAJOR ALFIE TASKER
The Hawker Hunter was one of the most beautiful jet aircraft ever conceived. With its swept wings and graceful lines it looked incredibly elegant in flight and was swift enough to go supersonic in a shallow dive, yet it was also a purposeful and deadly machine. The Hunter did not officially enter service with the RAF until 1954, but Squadron Leader Neville Duke piloted one to a new world air speed record of 727.63mph (1,170.97km/h) in 1953, proving that in those days the Hunter was one of the finest fighter aircraft around. Faster planes quickly came along, such was the pace at which technology was advancing in the 1950s and 1960s, and the Hunter was soon to find itself outperformed as a pure fighter. But the Hunter was such a stable weapons platform that it readily switched to the ground-attack role, and by the mid-1960s, when the SAS was embroiled in Aden, it was a more than welcome sight in the sky over the mountains. Today, every SAS soldier is trained to call in air strikes, but then it was a less common skill and some were far better at communicating with aircraft than others. One of the best was Alfie Tasker.
In 1966 I was part of a D Squadron patrol, led by Alfie, in the Radfan Mountains of Aden, heading towards suspected enemy positions. The only way to get anywhere on foot in the mountains of the Aden Protectorate was to use the wadis. The mountains themselves are steep, rocky and barren, except when they level out onto plateaus which are equally flat, rocky and barren. Trying to make progress on the high ground is a slow and exhausting business, constantly scrabbling for grip on the loose, sun-baked rocks that litter the ground. Needless to say, you are also fairly exposed up there, allowing the enemy to spot your approach from miles away. In low visibility at night, traversing the mountain tops is so dangerous that it is virtually impossible.
The dry river beds of the wadis, on the other hand, provide excellent cover for night movement and climb far more gently into the mountains than the scree-strewn slopes of the peaks themselves. The wadis can be anything from a few feet wide to a couple of miles across. Some have undulating floors of scree, sand and giant boulders. Some are carpeted with camel thorn bushes, or bordered by walls that are sheer cliff faces. Turn a corner in some wadis and you could come across a flat area of open ground that stretched for hundreds of yards – an ideal killing ground for anyone lying in ambush. There is generally plenty of cover in a wadi, good if you are under attack, better if you have laid an ambush. Many of the wadis are linked by small gulleys or hill paths, making them the mountain motorway system – as long as you are slogging through them on foot, of course.
The tactics we used when patrolling in the desert mountains in Aden were broadly similar to those we used in the jungle mountains of Borneo, except that we could usually travel more effectively at night and the lead scout could generally forage farther ahead of the rest of the patrol. On the patrol that was led by Alfie, we were out in the mountains in broad daylight and as we approached the enemy positions, the mountain tribesmen, who knew every bush and boulder of their territory, easily spotted us coming and couldn’t resist taking a few pot shots at us. Over long distance in the desert, the rounds from a machine-gun or a rifle will be with you an instant before you actually hear them being fired, so the first indication that you are under fire might be the sound of a ricochet sending boulder splinters flying, or the snap of a camel thorn stalk as a bullet rips through it. Any soldier who aspires one day to collect his army pension will then take cover, fast.
The enemy tribesmen had good cover on higher ground and their shots were coming close enough to give cause for concern, but Alfie knew that we had to get ourselves into a better position to be able to return accurate fire effectively. He led us forward, each of us scurrying from one cover position to the next as the others gave covering fire. All the time the enemy rounds were spitting up dust from the wadi floor or bouncing off the rocky cliff walls. Once Alfie was in a good enough position to see exactly where the enemy tribesmen were, it became clear that no amount of fire from the light weapons carried by the patrol was going to dislodge them, so he got on the radio and sent a coded message to our base at Thumier to ask for air support.
The codeword sent by Alfie set a chain of events in motion that culminated in two Hawker Hunter jets screaming down the runway on the coast at RAF Khormaksar. The Hunters were over our position within minutes, thundering across the mountains then standing on one wing-tip to wheel round and survey the situation on the ground. Alfie was in direct radio contact with the Hunter pilots. By great good fortune we had trained in the desert in Libya with the same Hunter squadrons, calling in mock attacks from the same pilots with whom we later worked in Aden. Calling in an air strike is the equivalent of directing aerial artillery. Alfie was able to give them exact map coordinates of the enemy position and chat to the pilots to make sure that they knew exactly what they were aiming at – i.e. not us. The little people on the ground all look much the same from a few hundred feet up.
The Hunters then lined up for their first attack run. They would be coming in directly over our positions, blasting the enemy with the four 30mm Aden cannon mounted in the Hunter’s nose. The Aden (named after the Armament Development Establishment at Enfield, not the place where we were making targets of ourselves) had a rate of fire in excess of 1,200 rounds per minute, so the four in the Hunter’s nose could make a real mess of any enemy defences. As the first jet swooped in, we all craned our necks as far out of cover as we dared in order to watch the action. Alfie, on the other hand, crept aside into deeper cover below an overhanging cliff face, advising us to do the same. ‘Get yourselves under cover now,’ he said, ‘or you’ll learn the hard way.’
We quickly found out exactly what he meant. Just below
its ‘shoulders’, where the leading edge of the wings meets the fuselage, the Hunter had two large bulges called Sabrinas. (They were named after a popular actress of the time who also had two large bulges just below her shoulders.) The Sabrinas were there to accommodate the empty links from the 30mm ammunition belts that fed the Aden cannon. Simply letting the link belts shoot out of a slot behind the aircraft’s nose might have allowed the belts to foul the aircraft’s control surfaces. There were no such fears, however, about the spent shell cases. They were ejected from two holes immediately above each Sabrina – and even a quick three-second burst meant that at least 240 30mm brass shell cases came tumbling down. If just one of those caught you on the head it would be enough to lay you out. As soon as the brass rain started, we were under cover with Alfie quicker than you could say ‘concussion’. While he advised us not to ‘learn the hard way’, that’s pretty much how Alfie had learned. He’d needed the help of the Hunter pilots in Aden before, not simply to attack an enemy position, but to keep himself and his mates alive.
Alfie was most definitely ‘old school’ SAS, with almost ten years’ service in the Regiment under his belt before I ever arrived. He was a big man with a shock of undisciplined hair and a way of glowering at you from beneath his brow that let you know he was being serious and you’d better bloody well listen. He gave me that look when he handed me the shear pin for an outboard motor as our troop loaded two assault boats at a beautiful beach on the island of Santubong in Sarawak, Borneo. We had just enjoyed a period of ‘light training’, but the outboard motors’ shear pins were forever breaking. The shear pin is a slim rod that slots into a hole and holds the engine’s propeller in place. It is designed to break if the prop hits something hard, the theory being that the prop will then spin free and avoid damaging itself or any other vital parts of the engine.