by Roger Cole
The defence of Mirbat was now focused on a series of spaces, all occupying the same space as a good-sized living room. At Um-el-Ghawarif, there was the SAF Ops room run by Captain David Venn. A short walk away was the BATT Ops room, joined by a small sliding window to the radio shack. In the Ops room were two majors, Duke Pirie and Alistair Morrison, and the SQMS of B Squadron, Lofty Wiseman.
A short drive away was RAF Salalah, where there was another small operations room and the control tower. All these rooms were linked by occasional radio to Mirbat, where the focus was now on four small spaces: the roof of the BATT house, the radio room underneath, the mortar pit and the gun-pit.
From the beginning this had always been a close-up war. Now it had just become significantly more intimate. Everyone was living and dying in each other’s breathing space.
For the SAS, the battle was about to get even more personal.
Tak was hit in the shoulder and with a groan he slumped against the wall. As he spun round, another bullet sliced through his hair, burning a short trail of cordite into his skull.
Tak propped himself against the back of the gun-pit and, despite the pain ripping though him, he grabbed his rifle and started picking off the insurgents as they got ever closer.
Laba knew that with much of his jaw blown away he could no longer fire the gun on his own. There at the front of the gun-pit was a 60mm mortar. He crept out from behind the gun shield, already pockmarked from dozens of rounds, and went to retrieve it. As he crept out, Tak shouted desperately at the man who was his closest friend in the world, ‘Get your head down! Get your head down!’
But it was too late.
One of the insurgent soldiers saw Laba, steadied himself and shot him from just outside the perimeter fence. A single bullet was all it took. Laba was hit for the last time. Apart from Walid Khamis, the Omani gunner who was folded up with a gaping hole where his stomach used to be, a corpse and a gendarme who had gone into shock, Tak was now on his own in the gun-pit, too badly wounded to fire the 25-pounder.
The gun-pit went silent. The insurgent commanders allowed themselves a smile. The battle had suddenly tilted in their favour – and both sides knew it.
Surely, without the gun, they thought, the British were too vulnerable to survive. Once they seized it, the battle would be over in minutes.
In the gendarme’s fort they heard the silence too and called their base at Um-el-Ghawarif to say that the battle had turned critical – they were running out of ammunition.
Back at the BATT house, the SAS had also spotted the lull. All eyes were now on the gun-pit.
It was now around 0640.
Both sides knew that the battle was now all about this small area of desert, no bigger than the average front room. Whoever could now seize control of the gun-pit would take the town.
Neither side knew that the 25-pounder was just about out of ammunition, but this did not matter. If the rebels could have seized the gun and turned it towards the BATT house, two shells would be all that was needed to reduce it to a pile of dried mud, wood and stone.
Over in the BATT house, Mike Kealy gathered everyone together, except for Roger Cole and Fuzz Hussey. Roger was on the roof with the GPMG making sure the rebels stayed down in the wadis. Fuzz was doing what it normally took three men to do. He was firing the mortar on his own. Originally he thought this was just a temporary measure. He didn’t realise that this was now to be the norm for the duration of the battle.
Standing at the bottom of the BATT house stairs, Captain Kealy was now faced with the pivotal moment of his military career. It was one of the toughest decisions any officer will ever face, regardless of how long they serve. There was a major crisis at the gun-pit, but who should go?
He quickly summed up the situation.
‘I don’t like it. It’s gone too quiet. Something’s happened over at the fort. If we lose the gun we’re in deep trouble.’
He had already made up his mind.
‘I need a volunteer to come with me.’
The great tradition in the SAS right from the early days is the ‘Chinese parliament’, a meeting where all voices are equal.
They all knew that Laba was already injured and, judging by the silence, Tak was also down. Immediately, everyone volunteered, with both Pete Warne and Bob Bennett arguing that they should go instead of the young Captain. Tempers were short, but Kealy’s mind was made up.
This was the moment he was about to go from being Captain Kealy to Boss Kealy.
His argument was pure, cool logic.
Pete Warne had to stay as he was the number one radio operator and their link to the outside world. He was the fixer, the go-to man, who could fill in anywhere. With Laba out of action, Bob Bennett was now his 2i/c and would be the man to run the battle once Kealy was over at the gun-pit. Bob was also the best man to direct the mortar. Of the three specialist medics, two were otherwise occupied. Fuzz was on the mortar and Roger was on the GPMG. Tommy Tobin was the obvious choice.
As Kealy was hurriedly explaining this, Tommy was already waiting and ready, leaning nonchalantly against his SLR, his medical kit packed. He may have been the most junior soldier there, but he had already worked out what Kealy’s decision would be.
Tommy Tobin, the man they teased as being the best-looking man in Dhofar, was there when the Fijians needed him most. This was a time when everyone wore their emotions etched on their faces. Boss Kealy had started the day as a young fresh-faced, slightly naive officer. He was now growing up in front of their eyes. In just a couple of hours he had become grey and hard-edged, a new steely determination in his voice. For the men left behind there were immediate feelings of regret. Pete Warne, the Lancastrian, had grown very close to the two Fijians. The three men came from very different cultures and all shared the same dry sense of humour. He desperately wanted to be there with them, to do what he could.
Why not me? Why Tommy? Am I not good enough?
But the resentment passed instantly. He knew it was the right decision. As soon as Kealy made the call, everyone immediately gave up some of their morphine syrettes, hanging them round Tommy and Kealy’s necks, like battlefield honours. This was a breach of standard operating procedure, as everyone in the British Army is told to keep their morphine for themselves. There is no greater sacrifice than a man giving up his morphine supply, knowing that he is potentially putting himself into a whole world of pain. But still they all did it, without hesitation.
Once Kealy had made his decision, Bob Bennett smiled and told Kealy that, if he insisted on going, he had better put his boots on before he set off. Like Tak, Mike Kealy still had his flip-flops on, but unlike the Fijian, Mike was no rugby player. Pete Warne again grabbed as many syrettes of morphine as he could and put them round his boss’s neck. While Kealy quickly laced on his desert boots, Tommy Tobin grabbed what extra medical supplies he could. As he looked at him, Pete Warne was overcome with pride for his fellow SAS soldiers.
If Tommy had any private fears, he swallowed them somewhere deep inside. He was calm, cool, focused and ready for the task ahead. Before setting off, Tommy eased the breech block of his SLR to make sure he had chambered a round. They all knew that there were two boxes of ammunition, each with 500 rounds, waiting for them at the gun-pit so no extra ammunition was needed. Both men did a final check on their webbing, their shoelaces and the medical kits. Boss Kealy made a quick adjustment to his round John Lennon glasses, making sure they were tight behind his ears.
Before he left Kealy gave one last order to Pete Warne. After years as a radio operator, his fingers were already tapping out the message even before he sat down. He had never sent a message like this before.
Zero Alpha. Zero Alpha. This is 82. This is 82. Under heavy attack. Send casevac. Send reinforcements. Over, Out.
It was around 0650, now nearly two hours since the Front had taken their first victims, and Laba was desperately in need of a casevac – casualty evacuation.
So far no one had arrived from Salalah to help them
.
And then Kealy and Tommy set off for the gun-pit.
By any measure, in any war, this was an act of breathtaking courage.
Against all military odds, one man had successfully run through the valley of death and got to the other side without being shot. The chances of two more making it were somewhere between thin and zero. Tak had had the advantage of surprise. This time the soldiers on the Front were ready for them. The rebels knew from two years’ experience of the Dhofar War that the British would always go to rescue their fallen comrades, whether they were the SAS training with the firqat or officers leading the Sultan’s regiments. The enemy lay in wait, but still Kealy and Tommy went, sneaking out of the door at the back of the BATT house. They peered out, looked both ways and then turned, walking tight to the wall. When they reached the end of the wall, they had a quick look round. Just in front of them was Fuzz Hussey in the mortar pit, preparing rounds. 200–300 yards away the rebel commanders were re-grouping their soldiers, while they planned their final push to seize the 25-pounder.
As the two men set off, they heard the thump of a helicopter way out in the distance.
16
'Has Time Slipped a Gear?'
The chopper they heard was Neville Baker. For a moment, everyone was confused. It was here way too early. It was only a few minutes since Laba had first been injured, yet here was the casevac chopper for him. How could that be? Even on a good day, RAF Salalah was well over thirty minutes away. But in the massive chaos that was now the Battle of Mirbat, it was a thought which went in, flickered round the synapses and then shot out again. Maybe they had slipped a gear in time? After all there was still no sun and they had been trapped in a bizarre half-light for the last two hours and no one was clock-watching.
This was all the confusion of conflict crushed in to a few moments.
No one at Mirbat – or even at the BATT radio shack at Um-el-Ghawarif – knew that independently of their radio messages, the SAF Operations Officer, Captain David Venn, was well ahead of the game. Now arriving was the chopper that David Venn had tasked around 0615, when he sent Neville Baker off to find out what was going on.
As he approached, Baker did not know that there were casualties. He thought he was on a fact-finding mission. The men in the BATT house thought he was a casevac helicopter. Either way, it didn’t matter. He was the first physical link with the outside world.
As the sound of the rotors got louder, Bob Bennett gave his first order as second in command. He shouted over to Roger Cole, ‘The heli is coming in. Go down and sort it!’
Roger shouted down to Jeff Taylor to come up and take over on the GPMG. For the previous ninety minutes, Jeff had leapt up and down the rickety, deathtrap ladder bringing boxes of ammunition for the GPMG. He made his last trip up the ladder, bringing yet more boxes. Then he took up his new position on the front line.
A minute after Boss Kealy and Tommy Tobin had left, Roger Cole sneaked out of the back door. It was still very quiet, spookily silent, but there are moments like this in all battles. He set off west to the beach, which was less than 300 yards away.
All Neville Baker knew was that there was heavy firing at Mirbat. Having been here many times before he knew the lie of the town. Once he was about a mile away, he took his helicopter well out to sea so he could come in to the town, flying almost due south to north. He also figured that as the Front did not have any navy to speak of, he was safe coming in over the waves.
What the pilot didn’t know was that the Front had moved one of their Shpagin machine-guns round to the hill overlooking the beach.
As he peered out over the waves, Roger Cole suddenly saw the helicopter emerge from the mist. At the same time, as he came in low over the waves, Neville Baker spotted the SAS man waving him in. As per all standard procedures, he waited for the SAS man to throw a green smoke flare to indicate that all was clear. So too did the rebels. Many of them had been in the Trucial Oman Scouts, where they had been trained by the British, so they too knew the drill.
Baker brought his helicopter in at ninety degrees to the beach, aiming for the big letter ‘H’ painted on the side of the Wali’s fort, a familiar marker point for every pilot who had ever flown in to Mirbat.
From the cockpit, it all looked good.
From the beach, it all looked good.
For the rebel soldiers behind the Shpagin machine-gun, it all looked good as well. In their sights were two very juicy targets, an SAS soldier and a fat-bodied helicopter, moving slowly, and very vulnerable to attack.
Roger Cole stopped. After the brutal cacophony of battle it was still and quiet. Instead of the insistent crashing of automatic fire, his ears were now caressed by the gentle lulling of the morning waves. Instead of the heavy factory smells of cordite and burning margarine fat, suddenly his nostrils were attacked by something new and much sharper – the fresh smell of ozone, sea salt and clean morning air. He stopped and, for the first time that morning, relaxed, just momentarily.
Satisfied that it was safe, he threw the green smoke flare to indicate that the helicopter should come in and land. Looking over his right shoulder he was surprised to be able to see the Djebel Ali. The mist had been momentarily blown away by some gusts of wind. The monsoon cloud was now rising and he could hear the distinctive thump of a Huey helicopter. It was the soundtrack of the Vietnam War, instantly recognisable to every American soldier who ever served in South-East Asia.
The enemy gunman waited until the big metal bird was well within his range and then he opened up.
From the beach, Roger Cole saw the helicopter veer to the right, as if it was doing some sort of acrobatic square dance. Then he watched, entranced, as the sea below it started to ripple, sharp edges of bright water catching the morning light and leaping up like a shoal of mackerel at feeding time.
In the cockpit, Neville Baker was bringing the chopper into hover, desperately trying to hold it steady as 12.7mm bullets ripped open holes in the fuselage. As he was trying to make sense of it all, two bullets crashed through the window just behind his shoulder, neatly dissecting the narrow gap between his seat and where his crew sat, missing all three men by a matter of feet. Despite the danger, he kept the chopper steady and still tried to get in to shore.
On the beach, Roger Cole watched the sand and gravel dance around his feet, first in front of him and then, when he turned to the left, behind him as well.
‘This is just like a movie,’ he thought.
Then reality hit him like a rifle butt in the face.
‘Fuck me. They’re shooting at both of us!’
From the helicopter, all Baker saw was the SAS man doing ‘a mad dance’, waving his arms about, before throwing up a red flare and then falling over backwards.
Though the mist was clearing a bit over the sea, it was still thick over the town so Neville Baker couldn’t see the battle going on inland. Knowing that if he tried to land on the beach he would be breakfast for the Shpagin, he veered off at speed and headed back over the waves. Bullets from the Russian machine-gun pursued him but eventually fell short into the sea as the chopper disappeared over the horizon. As he flew away, he saw that eight long needles of light, like laser beams, pierced the cabin. Neville Baker had already used up several of his lives in this war and he had just called in another.
As he flew away, Baker was thankful that when he bought the helicopters in Italy, he had been given an open budget by the Sultan and told to buy the best. A keen student of helicopter history and a master tactician of small wars, he knew that having that extra little bit of oomph could make all the difference in a tight corner. He had therefore bought the 205 helicopters with the most powerful engines, rather than the bog-standard ones used in Vietnam. It was a wise consumer choice. If he had hung round a few seconds longer, the Front gunner would have got him.
Once again, a small decision had made a big difference in this battle.
Half a mile away, Mike Kealy and Tommy Tobin were ducking and diving across the open
ground towards the gun-pit. They were running along a shallow wadi. Bits of scrub bush and the odd boulder gave them minimal cover. As well as medical supplies, both men carried a rifle. They managed the first 300 yards without being spotted.
Both knew their luck couldn’t hold.
Back on the beach, his years of British Army training kicked in and, without thinking, Roger Cole was on his front, doing the leopard crawl across the sand. Like every other squaddie, he had spent many hours ripping the skin off his elbows and his knees crawling at speed under barbed wire, with an instructor bellowing at him to go faster. Now all those hours paid off as his elbows and knees pumped and pushed as he crawled, lizard-like, across the beach. The SAS never used rifle slings, but always carried their weapons in front of them ready to fire, so Cole’s gun moved backwards and forwards, like a kayak paddle, with each push of the elbow. As he crawled, sand kicked up all around him.
‘Fuck me,’ he thought, ‘the bastards are still shooting at me.’
Each moment he expected the searing pain of a bullet hitting the back of his leg, knowing that he would then have to drag himself to safety. Worse still would be a bullet in the back, coming in at a shallow angle. This would finish him off. Still clutching on to his SLR, Roger pushed on, his knees and elbows becoming a blur.
Just ahead was safety: a Burmoil, one of those forty-gallon oil drums that are scattered on beaches all over the developing world. He lay under it, took a deep breath and had a look round. There was no blood oozing from anywhere. He was still alive.
Result.
But just then he heard a huge roar of distant gunfire, harsh and heavily concentrated.
Not a good omen.
On the other side of the town, the battle had started up again, ignited when the Front soldiers suddenly spotted two lone figures working their way across the desert towards the gun-pit. Every gunman who was prepared to show his head above the wadi took aim and fired, concentrating all their fire-power on the two SAS men. From the roof of the BATT house, Jeff Taylor, the liaison soldier from G Squadron who had taken over the GPMG, and Pete Warne tried to give their mates as much cover as they could. Once the rebels stood up to shoot at Boss Kealy and Tommy Tobin, they gave the BATT men a target to aim at. For a frantic few minutes, both sides gave it their all.