by Shaun Clarke
Thoroughly exhausted and, in many cases, bloody and bruised from the rocks, they hiked on in diamond formation (preferred by the SAS in open country and on ‘tabs’ by night) through the boiling heat of the afternoon, from one summit, or trig point, to another: across windswept plains of lava remains, soft sand and silt, along dried-up limestone, sandstone from the relentless heat of day to the numbing cold of night – so cold they were breathing steam – they saw little on the mountains other than the occasional ibex or oryx, the flickering fires, candles or paraffin lamps of lonely stone-tower houses or mud-brick hovels, and the odd walled hamlet by small patches of cultivated land.
Eventually, close to midnight, they arrived at the selected RV, on a high ridge overlooking an Arab village known to be held by Yemeni guerrillas. There, with moonlight glinting off patches of frost and ice, they constructed two temporary OPs, both star-shaped, with four legs shaped like a cross: one for the sentry, another for the observer and the remaining two as rest bays, where the men could stretch out on their waterproof ponchos. Throughout that night, operating in two-hour shifts and aided by PNGs (passive nightvision goggles) that showed the dark landscape in an eerie green glow, Marty and the others observed the Arab village on the lower slopes of the ridge.
By first light, when the sun was rising as an wadis and up sheer slopes of and igneous boulders. Moving enormous crimson ball over the Radfan mountains, they were able to view the village without the aid of the PNGs and saw only a few Arab men going out to till their single, sparse field, veiled women washing clothes around a desert spring, and children running playfully about between barking dogs, squawking chickens and a few braying goats. There was no sign of Yemeni guerrillas or any kind of weapons.
‘That’s just a normal Arab village,’ Tommy Taylor said. ‘There are no guerrillas down there.’
‘Another wild goose chase,’ Taff added. ‘Just like this whole damned war.’
Nevertheless, the patrol remained there throughout the long day, as the rising sun melted the frost on the rocks, the flies and mosquitoes returned, the sun became fierce, and waves of heat rose shimmering from the parched ground.
When not on watch or otherwise engaged, Marty found his mind filling up with thoughts of his past few years – the death of his father by natural causes; the deaths by violence of Bulldog and Pat O’Connor in Borneo; then the brutally accidental deaths of Ann Lim and Ian. Life, as he now realized, was brutal by nature, a series of random events that either broke or renewed those taking part, but could neither be anticipated nor prepared for. Yet people survived the worst and were often strengthened by it. Certainly, the past few years, beginning with his father’s death, had been the worst in his life to date; yet though he still suffered pain, he also glimpsed the light of hope, the flickering flame of renewal, and sensed that he was over the worst of it and starting to mend. Now, in these foreign mountains, a real soldier once more, he felt the steady quickening of his pulse, the building charge of excitement. He was coming alive again.
By nightfall, when it was clear that Tommy Taylor was right and there were no guerrillas in the hamlet, Captain Keating ordered the OPs dismantled, prior to moving out. When the men had completed this task, they covered all traces of their presence in the area, then began the long hike back to the RV. Once there, they found the Bedford trucks still waiting to return them to base.
Nearly three months later, sitting beside Taff Hughes, in the busy square in Crater, the commercial centre of Aden, waiting for his target– a local businessman and double agent – to emerge from the restaurant, Marty thought of his first trip across the Radfan mountains and smiled bitterly behind the veil of his shemagh. It had been a proving trip – a way of learning the terrain and the specialist skills required to master it– and although it had served its purpose well, it had been a relatively uneventful affair. The second patrol, however, as well as being the complete opposite, turned out to be a cruel, lost battle in a war that had already been lost and was being fought only to save face for the politicians.
Marty’s squadron had gone into the Radfan mountains for the second time in order to lend support to a major offensive against the Yemeni guerrillas, launched by two battalions of FRA infantry, 45 Royal Marine Company, the Parachute Regiment, a troop of Royal Engineers, a battery of Royal Horse Artillery armed with 105mm howitzers, and a Royal Tank Regiment supported by Saladin armoured cars. The object was to seize back from the Yemeni rebels two vitally important hills that dominated the camel routes from the Yemen and the only two fertile areas in the region. The 45 Royal Marine Company was to march eleven kilometres from the Dhala Road and then climb and seize the northern hill, known as Rice Bowl. At the same time, the Parachute Regiment was to be dropped by parachute near the foot of the other hill, Cap Badge, then climb the hill and take it by force. It was the job of the SAS to go in first and establish, mark and protect the chosen LZ for the Paras, nicknamed the ‘maroon machine’.
For this particular job the SAS added to their usually heavy load more detailed maps, navigational equipment, a spare short-range tactical radio, SARBEs (surface-to-air rescue beacons) for emergency communication with support or extraction aircraft, special equipment for dealing with landmines and booby traps, two hundred rounds each of .303-inch for the patrol’s Bren guns, wire-cutters and hessian for clearing barbed-wire entanglements, various explosives, including RDX and PETN, and M23 grenade-launchers that could be fixed to the barrels of the L42A1 boltaction sniper rifles. They also darkened the exposed parts of their skin with stick camouflage and the shinier parts of their weapons with ‘cam’ cream.
Moving out at dusk, they travelled in specially reinforced, heavily armed Saladin armoured cars north along the Dhala Road. Turning off the road at Wadi Rabwa, the Saladins descended into the eerily moonlit wadi and then began making their cumbersome way along it, gears grinding noisily and engines shrieking in protest as they skidded in loose gravel and bounced over large, sharp rocks. Just as they reached a point where the moonlight was cut off completely by the high banks on both sides, forcing them to advance through almost total darkness, some of the armoured cars became stuck in deep sand and had to be rescued with the aid of woven sand mats and steel sand channels, reminding Marty of his early days in North Africa with the LRDG.
Unfortunately, they were forced to do this job with the aid of hand-held torches that exposed their position to the enemy. As they were attempting to roll one Saladin out of deep sand, gunfire erupted from the hills beyond the wadi, green tracers laced the night, and a hail of bullets kicked up dust from the wadi floor and ricocheted off nearby rocks, causing pieces of stone to fly in every direction in dazzling showers of sparks. As the green tracers looped down languidly from the dark hills, gaining speed as they approached, then exploded in phosphorescent streams around the Saladins, Marty and the others, who had just trapped vehicle, jumped back continued its advance along the wadi without the benefit of headlights.
Luckily, it moved out just in time to avoid a series of mortar explosions that erupted in mushrooms of boiling smoke and soil seared by jagged, silvery flashes. Within a few metres, however, the lead Saladin became trapped in another bed of soft sand, forcing the whole column to grind to a halt again, with the mortar explosions, though obviously fired blind, making the ground erupt in spiralling, soaring columns that were gradually coming towards them.
Knowing that they could not rescue the trapped Saladin with the aid of hand torches– which again would have given away their position to the enemy– Captain Keating sent Marty back along the line to order the men out of the Saladins and up into the dark hills, heading away from the enemy gunfire. As the men moved out, the 76mm QF guns and Browning machine guns of the Saladins opened fire, raking the dark hills in the general direction of the enemy gunfire, hoping to keep the rebel gunners pinned down until the SAS men managed to free the
in and the column were safely away. They must have succeeded, because Marty and his friends made it unharmed up the
moonlit slopes and were soon out of the wadi and heading east, away from the flickering lights of the guerrilla gunfire. Falling into the diamond formation more suitable to open country, with Marty out front on point, Keating second in line as PC and Taff Hughes as Tail-end Charlie, they marched through the night in silence, until, just before first light, they saw the 1200-metre Jebel Ashqab soaring up before them.
Their objective lay on the other side of the mountain and they would have to climb the mountain to reach it. Even on the lower slopes, they found the climb to be brutally hard, with loose gravel sliding underfoot, patches of smooth, slippery lava rock giving way abruptly to sinking sand that could not be seen in the darkness, and sharp rocks constantly tripping them and threatening to sprain or break ankles.
To make the climb even more difficult, one of the men, Trooper Albert ‘Al’ Reid, in charge of the company’s tactical radio, developed fever, started vomiting repeatedly, and was soon falling regularly behind the others. As the medical specialist, Tommy Taylor diagnosed food poisoning and gave Reid a brew of tea, powdered charcoal and milk of magnesia, plus a couple of aspirins. The radio was then passed on to another soldier, Trooper Les Smythe, and Reid was ordered back into the middle of the column where he could be watched.
By now they were halfway up the mountain. When the climb began again, the slopes became even steeper and more treacherous, with the men repeatedly tripping or slipping, then rolling back downhill in a noisy tide of gravel, stopped only by the helping hand of a comrade or, less gently, by a large boulder or dusty rock outcropping. Even those not so frustrated were, despite the night’s numbing cold, soaked in their own sweat and fighting for breath.
Forced to halt because of Al Reid’s illness, the men rested by two stone sangars that had obviously been constructed as firing positions by local tribesmen and were located just below the summit of the mountain. Though aware that they were only about five kilometres from their objective and that the rest of the hike would be downhill, Captain Keating did not want to expose the patrol to enemy snipers by completing the hike during the day; instead, he ordered the men to basha down in the two sangars. Having been there a long time, they would not draw the attention of the locals.
Divided into two groups, with Marty, Taff and Tommy Taylor looking after the sick Trooper Reid, the men set up their respective sangars like regular OPs: rubber groundsheets rolled out in shallow scrapes for sleeping, ponchos raised over the sangars and covered with loose gravel and weapons dug out in groundsheets. Then, while some slept, the others kept watch until, when dawn broke, they saw that the sangars were overlooking an Arab hamlet filled with guerrillas and, directly above it, hardly more than fifty metres from the SAS positions, a guerrilla OP and machine-gun post.
By now Trooper Reid had stopped sweating and vomiting, but was suffering from severe stomach pains. Though sympathetic, Marty realized that the unfortunate trooper could not be casevacked or even carried on a stretcher back down the mountainside, so he had to let him suffer, breathing harshly, in a shallow scrape in the small sangar that was, in the rising heat of vegetation, and a well for
the middle between the the day, becoming hot, suffocatingly humid, and filled with buzzing flies and whining mosquitoes. In fact, Tommy Taylor was sick from the heat alone and threw up into a paper bag while Marty and Taff, seated right beside him, had their cold rations of dried biscuits and cheese.
‘You’re sick because you’re not eating,’ Marty told Tommy even as he was heaving noisily into his paper bag. ‘It’s empty stomachs that the heat always gets to. You should know that, Tommy.’
‘Ah, God!’ Tommy groaned in response, which was all he could manage.
‘Nothing like cheese and biscuits,’ Taff said, ‘to keep the stomach in order. Why not try some, Tommy?’
‘Ah, God!’ Tommy groaned again.
By noon, when the sun was high in the sky and the heat was truly ferocious, more armed guerrillas had climbed the hills to take up positions above the hamlet where the Arabs were getting on with their daily business: feeding the goats and chickens, tending their pitifully small area of cultivated ground, drawing water from a well, and, judging from the smoke coming from the chimneys, lighting fires and cooking. Veiled women emerged from the mud-and-stone huts to wash clothes in large tubs placed in the middle of the hamlet, children played noisily in the dirt, and the older men, sitting outside their houses, talked to each other, smoked hookahs, or just gazed distractedly at the mountains and the desert beyond them.
Captain Keating was hoping that because these were old guerrilla sangars, attention would not be drawn to them. However, in the late afternoon, a goatherd from the hamlet, feeding his animals on the lower slope below the sangars, caught a glimpse of movement and bawled a warning to the guerrillas. Even as he was shouting his warning, he was cut down by a fusillade of gunfire from the SAS’s combination of bolt-action sniper rifles, SLRs and M16 assault rifles.
Instantly, the guerrillas opened fire from the OP and machine-gun post located on the hills directly opposite, adding to the bedlam. Within seconds, the battle was fully engaged, with guerrillas bursting out of the huts in the hamlet, their djellabas and shemaghs fluttering in the breeze, and advancing up the lower slopes of the hill, firing their Lee-Enfield rifles while on the move. The SAS’s single Bren gun and light machine gun roared into action simultaneously, adding their roarings to the general clamour, the bullets tearing up sand and soil in a line that zigzagged across the ranks of advancing guerrillas, making many of them shudder, jerk sideways and collapse.
Bullets from the rifles and machine guns of the guerrilla positions on the high ridge ricocheted off the walls of the sangars, fragmenting the rock and filling the space inside with dust and flying pieces of sharp stone that cut the men’s faces and hands like razors. As the ridge was only fifty metres away and much higher than the SAS sangars, that gunfire was devastatingly accurate and becoming even more so by the minute.
Realizing that they were in a bad position and almost certain to be overrun eventually, Captain Keating
Thumier
told Trooper Les Smythe to contact HQ on the radio and call in air support. Meanwhile, the Bren-gun team, leaving the lightmachine-gun team to hold back the guerrillas trying to advance up the hill from the hamlet, was trying to keep the snipers on the ridge pinned down with a relentless fusillade, aided by the SLRs from the other sangar.
Braving the SAS gunfire, the guerrillas on the lower slopes were still advancing by darting boldly from one boulder to another while their comrades covered them with fire from their Lee-Enfield rifles. Ignoring the guerrillas behind the boulders, the SAS concentrated on those advancing uphill from one boulder to another and had the satisfaction of seeing quite a few throw up their arms, drop their weapons and then collapse, often to roll all the way back down the hill in billowing clouds of dust.
Thirty minutes later a pair of RAF Hawker Hunter single-seat fighters from the Khormaksar airstrip appeared over the southern horizon, then roared down with guns snapping savagely, turning the hills opposite into a convulsion of geysering soil, boiling dust, flying gravel and stones, eventually covering the ridge completely in a pall of dark smoke out of which emerged the terrible screaming of wounded and dying guerrillas. By the time the Hunters had flown in low over the sangars, saluting the SAS before flying back to base, the survivors from the devastated guerrilla OP and machine-gun emplacement on the ridge made their way downhill to join their fellow fighters on the lower slopes in front of the hamlet.
Realizing that the greatly increased number of guerrillas were preparing to advance up the hill and take the two sangars – knowing, also, that marking a DZ for the maroon machine was now out of the question – Captain Keating decided to move out under cover of darkness and head back to Thumier, no matter how great the odds seemed to be against the SAS.
In fact, by last light, the odds against the SAS had increased dramatically, with repeated assaults on the sangars leading to the deat
h of Trooper Reid, who was peppered by a hail of rebel machine-gun fire while groaning in delirium in his shallow scrape in the small sangar while Marty, Taff and Tommy Taylor looked on helplessly. Two other men were wounded: Sergeant Barry Chambers, with two bullets in his left thigh, and Corporal Graham Moore, shot in the right leg with a single bullet. Another trooper had bullet marks across his back. Most of the others were bloody from flying pieces of rock and stone; and all of them were choking in the dust that now filled both sangars.
With no choice but to leave the dead behind, Captain Keating ordered the evacuation of the two sangars even as the guerrillas, still darting from one boulder to another, were coming dangerously close. Some of them had even been clambering over the wall of the largest sangar before being cut down by a burst from Marty’s SLR. Now, with the fall of darkness, there would be no air support and they would also be handicapped by the slow progress of their own wounded.
Nevertheless, Keating arranged for Thumier to lay down an artillery barrage on the southern hill, covering the slopes between the sangars and the hamlet below. That barrage would commence at precisely 1932 hours, two minutes after the SAS emerged from the sangars to make their escape. While it was assumed that the guerrillas would pursue them all the way back to Thumier, the barrage might at least give them a head start.
Knowing that they would have to travel light, the men smashed everything that was no longer needed, including the tactical radio and separate Morse code set; then they moved out at 1930 hours precisely, carrying only their personal weapons, water bottle, ammunition pouches and emergency rations. Instantly, the guns of the guerrillas on the lower slopes opened up, filling the air with whipping, ricocheting bullets, spewing stones and erupting dust as the sangar walls were torn to pieces.
While Marty, Taff and Tommy, all in the smaller sangar, gave covering fire, the group in the larger sangar, including Sergeant Chambers and Corporal Moore, both limping from their leg wounds, made their escape under cover of darkness, heading for the northern hill.