by Roger Cole
But that morning, all he could see was a swirl of mist rising in the half light of dawn and all he could hear were disconnected noises and voices, somewhere out there.
10
82.82. This is Zero Alpha. Radio Check. Over.
At the time, all the SAS men in Oman wore a simple uniform of desert boots, olive green (OG) shorts/trousers and shirt. The regiment bought the boots by the truck load directly from the Clarks factory at Street in Somerset. SAS men round Hereford could easily be spotted by their light tan coloured shoes, simple, light, with four lace holes, durable but soft enough so the wearer did not need to wear socks as well.
Unlike Iraq or Afghanistan, the SAS soldiers had no helmets, no boots, no wraparound sunglasses, no goggles, no individual communication sets strapped to their heads, no bullet- and blast-proof Kevlar body armour. This day was like every other day. All they had were flip flops or standard-issue army or desert boots, olive green cotton trousers and shirts. This was soldiering at its most basic. The men had less body protection than any army in written history. The irony was that they were defending a country locked in a biblical past of 2,000 years before – yet the Roman troops fighting at the time of Christ had significantly more body armour than the men did, now standing on the roof of the BATT house, two millennia and one industrial revolution later.
It was still pre-dawn, that weird quarter light where nothing is quite as it seems. Somewhere east of Mirbat, the sun was clawing its way up over the distant horizon, but it was not nearly strong enough yet to cut through the mist. Somewhere to the north-west was a line of mortars, concealed deep in the wadis so there was no sight of a distinctive flash when they were fired. All the SAS men could do was try and guess where the mortars were coming from. They could only do that after the mortars had landed, but that meant they were always behind the game.
The early morning mist was lying thick on the ground. Visibility was less than thirty yards, as another mortar suddenly fell out of the gloom and landed nearby, the fifth or sixth so far.
Maybe Fuzz was right. Maybe this morning was different. Now they were up, the men were in no mood to take chances.
On the roof, Roger Cole was joined by Bob Bennett and Pete Warne.
Just then, two shells exploded near the BATT house and dust filled the room where Captain Kealy was sleeping. As he juddered awake, Bob Bennett crashed through the door, come to fetch him.
Kealy grabbed his rifle, belt kit, slipped on his flip-flops and went to join his men.
Nothing at Staff College, no training course, no previous experience, can prepare a young officer for this moment. Now it was all about bottle. Soldiers either have it or they don’t. This is a moment when a soldier looks deep into his heart and hopes that he will not freeze. The worst thing he can do now is lose it and let his mates down.
When young officers join the SAS, they usually stay for a couple of years. The smart ones spend their time listening and learning. If the men like them – and that is relatively rare – then they are invited back. Every officer knows if, and when, the men rate him. They all remember that glorious moment, etched in the memory. It is the moment when the men stop calling them ‘Sir’ and call them ‘Boss’ instead.
Captain Mike Kealy was just twenty-three years old. His previous experience was commanding a troop of young fusiliers in West Germany. Now here he was, the officer in charge of an eight-man squad of battle-hardened SAS soldiers. Every new commander of an SAS troop is always full of apprehension and fear, wondering how they will acquit themselves in front of the men. A young man, ambitious and driven with a huge desire to be respected and successful, Captain Kealy was no exception. His father was a Brigadier, and the son was as proud of his father as the father was of his son. There was a bloodline here of pride, patriotism and performance, and the young Captain wanted to make sure the tradition was secure.
As Kealy climbed the rickety wooden ladder to the roof, the sound of incoming mortars was already punctuating the morning atmosphere. The mortar booms landed in synch with his heart, which was now beating so hard it was trying to smash its way through his chest wall.
For the officers stuck back at Um-el-Ghawarif it was really hard. They knew that soon they would have to make life-changing calls – tough, when all the intelligence they had was a single message from a policeman they did not know, stuck some forty miles away. If the call had come from the BATT house, it would have been different, but the gendarmes had a track record of crying wolf.
One last time, they tried to contact the SAS. The signal from Um-el-Ghawarif flew forty miles through the mist, piercing the cloud, before it arrived at Mirbat where the V-shaped aerial on the roof of the BATT house scooped it out of the air and sent it through to the 316 radio in Pete Warne’s room on the first floor.
82.82. This is Zero Alpha. Radio check. Over.
The radio was tuned in ready for the start of the day. There was only one problem.
It was switched off.
Once Kealy was up on top of the roof, Bob Bennett briefed him, speaking in a low whisper. ‘Enemy mortars somewhere over there on the Djebel Ali. As yet, we haven’t seen anyone.’
Mike Kealy pulled the wire frames of his spectacles round his ears but it made no difference. No one had a better idea than anyone else and a pair of spectacles, unless they could see through clouds, was not going to make any difference at all.
Somewhere in the mist was the enemy. They had no idea how many there were or which direction they were coming from. The exact nature of their battle plan was anyone’s guess.
To the south of the BATT house, the townspeople were now awake. The incoming mortars had started to raise a low cloud of mud dust which helped thicken the morning mists already swirling round their houses.
Roger Cole checked his machine-gun. His GPMG was already set to sustained fire. Looking down he did a quick audit of what ammunition he had. Ten boxes, 200 rounds per box, of 7.62 ammunition. The GPMG itself was surrounded by sandbags.
At the time, British Army regulations said it should be two layers of sandbags, but the culture of the SAS, especially the men on the front line, was to subvert the regulations to fit what was needed there and then. The two Fijians, Laba and Tak, were always restless, and over the weeks in Mirbat they had continually added extra layers of protection, including ammunition boxes interweaved with yet more bags, all filled with sand. When a young Major from the Intelligence Corps, David Duncan, visited Mirbat for a couple of days, he was told to make himself useful, and spent a day filling sandbags, which were then hauled by twenty feet of rope up onto the roof.
By the day that the rebels gathered on the djebel, Roger Cole was protected by six layers of sandbags and boxes. It was one of the many small but crucial factors that made the difference between defeat and victory. Had the SAS not built such a strong fortification, the 12.7mm bullets from the Russian Shpagins would have shredded through the regulation-thick two layers of sandbags, taking out Roger Cole and his GPMG. The GPMG was the defining weapon of this conflict. Had it been blown to pieces early on, that would have been enough to have tilted the battle and delivered victory to the Front.
Roger Cole opened the first box and fed the ammunition belt into his gun. On this morning, if there was anything approaching a feeling of security it came from having a belt-loading weapon, tucked in behind six feet of sandbags.
Raw fire-power.
Hot metal.
The reassuring smell of freshly combusted cordite.
Instant death for anyone who came within 500 yards.
At either side of the rows of sandbags, Roger had already jammed two marker posts, upright metal bars normally used to hold trip-wire stakes. These were a safety precaution, as they limited his field of fire so he could not swing too far in either direction. At one end of his range was the British Army 25-pounder and at the other was the Wali’s fort.
British Army regulations said the GMPG barrel should be changed every 200 rounds to stop it jamming. That might be
sound ballistics engineering advice on an army range in controlled conditions, but in a battle like Mirbat it was very high up on the list of the top ten most stupid things to do. If Roger Cole had stood up to take the barrel off, he would have had his head blown off – his huge moustache and sideburns would have been far too tempting a target for the several hundred men firing at him, many of whom were excellent shots.
The defining quality of the SAS from day one has been the ability to improvise, to use what is available and to make two plus two equal seven. In the Battle of Mirbat, the crucial resource that saved Roger Cole’s life was margarine – four tins of it, stored by the base of the GPMG. It was an open secret in the regiment that, if you poured margarine along the belt and into the ammunition box, it would lubricate all the working parts and eliminate stoppages, the worst nightmare for any machine-gunner in any battle. Using margarine was definitely not standard operating procedure. It was not in any official munitions manual, but it worked – and whoever wrote the manual had clearly never been in a sustained firefight.
Looking down, Roger saw the tins of margarine, cold and damp, covered in morning dew and smiled.
‘Well that will keep me going for a bit,’ he thought, as he opened the first tin. He still had no idea what was going to happen, but the B Squadron Staff Quarter Master Sergeant, Lofty Wiseman, had told his men to always go with their gut feelings – and this morning everyone’s guts were churning.
Across the roof, Pete Warne got his Browning machine-gun ready. Bob Bennett was in position behind the sandbags, with his marker board in hand, trying to work out the sites of the enemy mortars. He was the eyes and ears for Fuzz, Tak and Tommy Tobin, all three down in the mortar pit, about ten yards away from the house. Laba was already cutting his way at speed through the mist to get to the 25-pounder gun. On the way, he stopped at the fort to collect Walid Khamis, a gunner from the Sultan’s Army.
Walid and Laba had been inseparable for weeks. Laba was huge and imposing, Walid was smaller, his shemagh always neatly wrapped round his head. The two men had spent the previous month cleaning and maintaining the gun, usually surrounded by small boys from the town. From a distance all anyone saw were the huge grins and the constant glint of teeth from the men. Big brown eyes watched every move they made, the boys of the village fascinated by the heavy artillery.
But now all that seemed like a memory from another lifetime, as the two men grabbed a couple of gendarmes from their fort and ran to the gun-pit, diving in behind the protective wall and under the huge metal shield that went across the front of the gun.
From the roof of the BATT house the scene was straight out of a horror film. At their front, the night chill was coming in off the desert, creeping round the walls and roof of the fort. At their backs, the early morning breeze tumbled in off the cold sea. They were surrounded, wrapped up in the gloom, unable to see the enemy. All they knew was the thick grey candy floss mist swirling around, so dense that the men felt they could slice into it. The eerie silence was punctuated by disjointed voices and strange noises coming from somewhere a long way away, deep in the distance. It was still chilly and plumes of cold air, like smoke, came billowing out of the soldiers’ mouths and noses. On the roof, four pairs of eyes desperately tried to pierce through the gloom and the mist, but there was still nothing to go on.
No movement.
Somewhere out there was the unseen enemy and, at this moment, the SAS still had no idea who they were, how many there were and what weapons they had, aside from a couple of mortars. The only thing they knew was that this day was not like any other and it was still only a few minutes old. It was now all about focus, nerve and doing what came instinctively.
If this kicked off, there would be no time to consider tactics and strategy.
But that was still a big if.
If the enemy was still there? If they were somewhere in the distance? If they were going to attack? Sometime in the near future?
Maybe it would be like all the other mornings and the enemy would dissolve back up on to the djebel as mysteriously as they had arrived.
The cold morning mists of the Otterburn Moors in the north-east of England had prepared the men for these conditions, but all that was now months ago.
This was World War One stuff. This could have been 1916. For Mirbat, read Northern France. For the trenches, now read the wadis, those long dried-out river beds cut deep into the desert rock in front of the SAS compound. And just like Flanders Field, just there in the near distance, there was a comforting hedge of barbed wire to slow down the enemy advance.
The pattern of attack was reminiscent of World War One tactics – a pre-dawn artillery bombardment, with men hidden in trenches ready to rise up and then advance across open ground carrying their guns. This was a throwback to the first rattlings of mechanised warfare: machine-gun fire, followed by close-quarter combat where the men could see the faces of the enemy as they killed them. Even some of the weapons were the same. The Wali’s guards in the fort were armed with .303 Lee-Enfield single shot, bolt-action rifles straight out of World War One.
Many British soldiers in the 1970s could spend an entire career in the army and never shoot a gun in battle, but for the men on top of the BATT house, this was the moment. The real thing, life and death in a microsecond, them or you. Suddenly, the tarmac at RAF Lyneham seemed another life away. The smoke, noise and sweet smells of the beer waiting for them back at The Grapes pub in Hereford were now just a distant dream.
Physically, the men were all at their peak, fit and well trained. Now it was all about mental strength, that moment of Zen when they would be as one with their weapons. For every SAS man that morning, their gun or their mortar was now an extension of themselves, regardless of what calibre projectile it hurled out of its barrel.
Even the very best, even the most professional soldiers can crumble when it comes to the real thing. Now it was all about holding your nerve. Getting into the zone, reacting instinctively, rarely pausing to think.
11
Open Fire!
Still hidden in the gloom, the communist-trained insurgents advanced over the open ground. Purposeful but calm, they marched towards the BATT house, wanting to get as close as they could before they opened fire. This was their time, when they believed they would liberate their homeland from the parasitical family of Sultans who had bled their country dry for generations. They knew from friends and relatives who had worked for the Sultan that he enjoyed a life of pampered luxury while they lived in poverty, clinging by their fingernails to a hard-scrabble existence that had barely changed over the centuries.
Now this was the moment when they would seize their country and become national heroes, to be celebrated in poetry and story for generations to come.
They had not eaten for a day, and that was not unusual for an army which often marched on an empty stomach. But this morning they believed it would be different. Their commanders had promised them all that they would share a glorious, triumphant breakfast in Mirbat.
From somewhere deep in the grey light, up on the Djebel Ali behind them, the rebel soldiers heard the distant pop pop pop of a mortar being fired over their heads. Every one of them said a silent prayer, hoping that the range finders were working properly and that a rogue round would not fall short and land on top of them. A few seconds later, the SAS men heard the distinctive pop pop pop as well. Both sets of warriors listened intently, waiting for the whistle of mortars cutting through the haze. The second of silence seemed like an hour, but then they all heard the boom as the bombs hit the ground just in front of the BATT house.
One, two, three, four, five mortars, in quick succession.
This was no shoot and run. It was suddenly getting up close and very, very personal.
The mist was lifting, and visibility was now a little over 500 yards. From the roof of the BATT house, four pairs of eyes – belonging to Captain Mike Kealy, Bob Bennett, Pete Warne and Roger Cole – were squinting through the thick morning fog, a
ll of them still trying to make some sense of the gloom.
Suddenly, on the very limit of sight, there were some distant shapes. Still in his flip-flops, Captain Kealy once again adjusted his metal-rimmed glances. Like the others, he wanted to get some sort of handle on what was happening. Finally, the distant shapes took on slightly sharper edges. What was once a blur now came slowly into view.
It was fifteen to twenty men carrying weapons.
But that was not enough. It was still not clear what sort of weapons. Nothing to answer the only question that mattered: were they firqat or rebels, friend or foe?
‘Can you see them?’ Roger Cole whispered across the roof to Pete Warne.
‘Yeah. Fifteen to twenty. Five hundred yards.’
The teaching from the Junior Officers Training Course at Sandhurst kicked in.
‘It could be the firqat returning. Hold your fire,’ shouted the young Captain.
Two days before, forty firqat had gone out on patrol. If this was them returning then it would be a disaster if the SAS shot them. Blue on blue incidents, friendly fire – it doesn’t matter what the euphemism is, when allies kill each other by accident, it’s always an international relations disaster.
Everyone on the roof knew that if they wiped out a firqat patrol, the desert telegraph would go into overdrive. It would be a massive propaganda coup for the Communists and the SAS might as well pack up and go home that day. Such incidents are deeply corrosive and trust can never be fully restored afterwards. So far in this war, there had been no reported incidents of friendly fire – an extraordinary feat given the patchwork of soldiers from many different countries and cultures all fighting under the Sultan’s colours. Kealy and the SAS men were determined that they were not going to be the first to cross that line.
Kealy repeated the orders, telling everyone to hold fire – but there was something in the way the distant figures were moving that was making everyone twitchy.