SAS Operation Storm

by Roger Cole

  The third man, who did not speak English, was the Political Commissar. He just watched and did not speak.

  It was now 1230, seven and a half hours since the first Omani government gendarmes had been killed on the picket, high up on the djebel above Mirbat, their throats silently cut as the rebels slid over the stone walls just before dawn.

  The men in the BATT house, exhausted and just glad to be alive, stared out over the carnage of the battlefield. This was Armageddon on earth. The smell of cordite, burnt flesh, blood and sweat seared what was left of their senses, leaving them numb with shock.

  In the distance, a chopper lifted just off the ground and crabbed its way across the battlefield – a sight as surreal as anything else on this extraordinary day. The men stared in amazement as the Huey clung to the ground before landing in front of them.

  With the last embers of battle still hot, Neville Baker had returned to Mirbat to start the grim task of taking away the bodies. He knew that one of the dead was a Fijian and did not want his body mixed up with the dead Dhofaris. He leaned out of the cockpit, as he looked for one of the SAS men. He saw Pete Warne and waved him over. Reluctantly, knowing in his boots what he was going to be asked to do, Pete went over to the chopper, the down draft from the still spinning rotors battering his senses. He stuck his head in the cockpit and strained to hear what the pilot was saying.

  ‘Check the bodies in the rear. I think one of them is a BATT man. Tell the loadmaster which one it is.’

  Pete’s head reeled. Thinking back through five and a half hours of hell, he remembered Laba’s fateful message, ‘I’ve been chinned!’ He also knew that both Tak and Tommy had been shot in the gun-pit, but all that was many hours ago. He knew from his training the chances of survival after all this time were not good.

  His heart already shattered, he looked in the back of the chopper. There was the familiar sight of stretcher racks, usually empty but now full, every one of them with a body covered over with a blanket.

  The first body had the magnificent hook nose of a Dhofari, the familiar, striking features of a local tribesman. But now the rebel’s face was shattered, his head caved in and his ear torn off by shrapnel.

  One down, five to go.

  Pete covered the body again with the blanket and looked at the next body. The face was fresh and young, with blank eyes staring back at him. This boy was just a teenager.

  The SAS man shuddered. So young to die, all those hopes extinguished, a brave young man who would never laugh again, never know marriage or fatherhood.

  He moved to the next body, bigger than the rest. Pete’s heart was now fighting its way up his throat. Instinctively, he knew who it was, but still hoped and prayed that he was wrong. The body was laying face down, the man’s face and forehead nestling in the crook of his arm. He was trapped in the moment. No going back now, but he knew that going forward would only mean a terrible memory that would corrode his soul and never leave him. Grabbing the cold arm, Pete tried to lift the body so he could see the face. The body was stone heavy, gravity pulling it to the earth. With two hands, he managed to lift it up and roll it over. What he saw sucked the breath from his body. It was worse than being shot. A greater pain than he had ever known. Half the chin was shot away, but there, under the grime and dried blood, was Laba’s face, his unmistakeable features.

  Pete’s friend.

  His comrade.

  The man with whom he had shared so much.

  But still there were three more bodies to check. His head banging in agony, he checked the final corpses. Each one was a rebel, their bodies ripped apart by machine-gun bullets and the light cannon from the Strikemasters.

  Pete Warne identified Laba to the loadmaster and walked away from the helicopter. Selection, all those days and nights on the Brecon Beacons, the endless days, weeks and months of training all seemed to be no more than air. Nothing that he had ever read or seen could have given him the emotional equipment he needed to handle this moment. He stared across the battlefield and watched the chopper slowly lift off into what was left of the morning mist. He was empty, destroyed by the experience of the last few hours, so tired that he did not know if he was happy to be alive or not.

  As Pete Warne walked back to the BATT house, surrounded by unexploded ordnance, mortars and rockets, Neville Baker headed back to Salalah. His first stop was the regimental headquarters at Um-el-Ghawarif, where he separated Laba’s body from the others. Then it was on to RAF Salalah, five bodies to be added to the others, laid out in the square.

  By now the Sultan’s orders were clear. He wanted everyone to know what happened to his enemies. The stated purpose for laying out the bodies was to identify them. The real purpose was to reinforce the very clear message from the early days of this war. The Sultan may have been educated in the West but when it came to vengeance, then the old rules of tribal law would prevail.

  By 1300, G Squadron had cleared away the last rebel stragglers.

  Many had fled before they arrived. Only the hardcore and the slow of thinking had remained to fight.

  The desert floor was black. Gallons of blood were now oxidising in the midday sun. Roger Cole and Captain Kealy walked the battlefield.

  There were blood trails everywhere, many leading all the way back up the djebel. The two men walked up to where the picket had been. There in the sangar were four bodies – all that remained of the gendarmes who, just a few hours before, had been huddled under whatever they could find to try and stay dry. Now they lay where they died, their bodies stuck on a carpet of their own dried blood. Their throats were slit wide open, their heads fallen back as rigor mortis started to set in. It was a grotesque sight. These were young men from the area who had gone up on to the djebel to keep sentry duty for the townspeople below. Young men with their lives ahead of them. Young men who had laughed and joked as they walked up the hill. They were never to return.

  Round the bodies were hundreds of spent shell cases from the Shpagen machine-gun, which the rebels had taken away with them when they fled.

  Outside, some of the soldiers from G Squadron were formed into a graveyard troop, collecting the bodies of the dead and taking them to a central point to be identified, if possible, by the living. They had found the firqat’s Land Rover and were using it to fetch the bodies and lay them out in front of the BATT house.

  The area was now full of people – men, women and children from the town as well as soldiers from the Northern Frontier Regiment. They all took it in turns to inspect the bodies, sometimes recognising young men they knew. Some of the G Squadron soldiers tried to count the bodies but soon gave up. There were too many and new ones were being brought in all the time. They were still finding dead bodies, days and weeks later.

  Bernard Shepherd had helped form G Squadron and now he stood there thinking, ‘This is the day my squadron has at last come of age!’ He also thought – as it turned out, far too optimistically – that this would probably be the last big battle they would ever have to fight, certainly the last big battle of the Dhofar War.

  Looking back now, he just thinks, ‘How wrong could I be?’

  With the end of the battle it was now all about the wounded.

  Colonel Johnny Watts had promised the SAS guys a top-quality cutting shop. The surgeons and the medical staff were extraordinarily skilful but the conditions they now had to work in were a gross betrayal by the MOD back home. Initially the operating room was a tent, with a heavy flysheet over the top. It was more of a sauna than an operating theatre. Especially during the hot weather, the conditions were appalling. The temperatures soared and the humidity sweated into the high nineties. The medics tried to improvise with an aircraft blower, but this just circulated dust round the tent. Ignoring the meanness of the MOD back home, the local engineers helped out and built them some permanent structures, an operating theatre, laboratory and X-ray room.

  Humour is the glue that keeps everyone together in the front line of war. The Robert Altman film, MASH, about army
doctors and nurses in the Korean War, was released in 1970, with the TV series following two years after that. It was, inevitably, a huge hit with British doctors and orderlies. As soon as they got a chance they changed their radio call sign to MASH.

  Back in Mirbat, Roger Cole stopped to think and try and reconcile the silence on the battlefield with the last few hours of noise, mayhem and death.

  So many dead young men.

  Such futility.

  He thought back to when he had first arrived in Dhofar and was reminded that this was a war fought on the thinnest of budgets. From day one, there was a shortage of boots, clothing and equipment. It was all about making do, scrounging and improvisation – from their weapons to their clothes.

  Back in Hereford, the men had scoured the local second-hand military shops, buying clothing to wear in Oman, American Army jackets and their own boots. The guys liked the American Army jackets. They were lightweight, easy to dry and lasted.

  In 1971, on Operation JAGUAR, the first SAS mission up on the djebel, one regimental soldier sent a signal to Rooney to ask for a pair of boots to be sent up on to them. Rooney was known to everyone as the Crazy Irishman. He was the SQMS, Staff Quarter Master Sergeant, the non-commissioned officer who fixed stores, logistics and equipment for everyone. He was a genius at getting water out on to the djebel. It looked like he had acquired every plastic jerry can in the Middle East, either legally or illegally, to get water out to the bases. He was concerned with dehydration and survival, not footwear, which he dismissed as an inconsequential fashion item.

  As soon as he got the signal, Rooney replied, ‘Waiting for some to come in,’ which was a polite way of saying, ‘Go off and boil your head. I have more important things to do.’

  From out on the djebel came the response, ‘Hey, Rooney, don’t you know there’s a war going on up here?’

  Quick as a flash, Rooney replied in the finest traditions of the caring, sharing SQMS, ‘Well, rob the dead!’

  This was not an isolated incident. The shortage of boots remained a sore point. One new recruit, working with the Sultan’s Air Force to help them deliver supplies out on to the djebel, was astonished to see the regiment’s SQMS walk out of a helicopter wearing nothing but a pair of shorts. The ground was baking hot, impacted sand, so it was basically like walking across burning coals. His first thought was that these men were even tougher than the legends made out. It was only when the SQMS got inside the hut, incandescent with rage and cursing revenge, that the new recruit discovered what had happened. The SQMS had promised his men new boots and shirts, but these had not arrived from England, so the troop out on the djebel had mugged him, leaving him with his shorts and nothing else.

  It was not just the soldiers who were short of shoes. This was also the case for the medics at the FST at Salalah. There the medical staff had already started one of the longest ever periods of unbroken surgery in the history of the British Army. They only got shoes after a month-long exchange of cables between Dhofar and London – and were then rationed to one pair each.

  22

  The Worst Handover in Regimental History

  Roger Cole and Boss Kealy walked from the battlefield into the courtyard of the gendarme’s fort. It was carnage, the internal walls wrecked by dozens of grenades and bombs. Here was what had once been a functioning Land Rover. The day before it had been a working vehicle, the battery had been switched on, the ignition key turned, sparks from the plugs had exploded in a small cloud of petrol gases and fired life in to the engine. Now it looked like a piece of modern sculpture, a heap of metal shredded by the high-explosive bombs, grenades and mortars that the rebels had lobbed at the fort throughout the morning.

  Both men reached the same conclusion: ‘Thank God they weren’t this accurate when they attacked us. If they had managed to get that amount of ordnance on to the roof of the BATT house, we would all be dead by now. The battle would have been lost many hours ago.’

  Mike Kealy walked over to the Land Rover and pulled the driver’s door, which came off in his hand. Then the vehicle collapsed in pieces, like a clown car in a circus when all the doors fall off.

  Leaving the gendarme’s fort, Roger Cole and Mike Kealy went to join the other SAS soldiers – the men from B Squadron who had fought the battle from the beginning and those from G Squadron who had arrived towards the end. Regardless of their individual experience, they were all shattered by the horror of the day, emotionally dazed and physically exhausted, and were now trying to make some sense of what had just happened.

  Walking round was like stepping up on to the stage after the end of a play. It was still real, but a weird, disconnected kind of reality. After seven hours of the insistent, deafening booms, bangs and crashes of industrialised warfare, the area in front of the BATT house was now quiet. Not silent, but quiet. There were still disconnected voices wandering from a distance across the desert floor, quiet conversations close by, and the distant whoopf, whoopf, whoopf of the helicopters, coming to take away the injured. The doctors and the SAS medics had remembered their triage. The most serious were already on the operating table, the marginally less critical were being prepped, and the ones left behind were those who would survive without further treatment.

  Then an already surreal situation became truly weird.

  Above their heads men heard the whoosh and plop of parachutes opening. Six hours earlier, when Laba was injured and the big gun had stopped booming across the battlefield, the gendarmes had called the SAF base at Um-el-Ghawarif to say that they had run out of ammunition. The SAF military machine kick-started and the stores were emptied. Tens of thousands of rounds of ammunition for their SLRs, hundreds of shells for the 25-pounder and dozens of mortars were all loaded onto pallets, which were then hooked up to parachutes, each load having the appropriate chute so it would drift to earth, without being damaged. Once the cloud base had lifted high enough at RAF Salalah, all these many tons of ordnance were loaded on to Skyvans and flown to Mirbat. Roger Cole, who had spent much of his early army career in the 16 Para heavy drop company (RAOC), watched in admiration as the pallets landed right on target, in the area next to the BATT house.

  A perfect drop.

  The only problem was that it was six hours too late.

  Together with Bob Bennett and Pete Warne, he watched as the pallets landed on an area covered with unexploded ordnance. It would be horribly ironic if these pallets of ammunition detonated any of the unexploded mortars – too crazy to think about. The men all flinched slightly as each crate touched down in the desert.

  Happily, the explosions they were braced for never came.

  It was now that Roger Cole’s training in the Ordnance Corps kicked in. With Bob Bennett he walked the battlefield.

  Attacking in the wet, clinging mist was a good idea, strategically, but it had compromised the effectiveness of their munitions. Many of the rebels’ grenades and bombs had not been properly looked after. They were damp and had failed to explode. As Roger counted them, it was clear that at least a third of them had failed to ignite. Had they done so, and the Front mortar men been their usual accurate selves, the battle’s outcome would have been very different.

  Roger Cole collected the batch numbers from the ordnance scattered round the battlefield. What shocked him was just how much of it was British made.

  But that was not all.

  In the wall of the gendarme’s fort there was the instantly familiar butt end of an 84mm rocket from a Carl Gustav anti-tank gun, still unexploded. Roger asked Bob Bennett for some help and, like a pair of schoolboys trying to look over the fence, Bob bent down so Roger could stand on his shoulders. Despite having just fought the battle of his life, Bob still had enough strength in his calves and thighs to push Roger up so he could take a note of the serial number.

  Roger shouted down to Bob, ‘Bloody hell, Bob, it’s more fucking British ordnance!’

  Both men felt sick. Not for the first time, they had fought a battle for their country, only to disco
ver that other parts of the British military machine were conspiring against them. These rounds had almost certainly come from Aden and then been recycled to the Front. When Roger got back to base, he filed a report but then heard nothing more about it. No one ever contacted him, so presumably the report was filed away under T, in the drawer marked ‘Too Difficult to Deal With’.

  Up on Djebel Ali, Captain Kealy went for a lone walk, scrabbling up the wet shale before sitting down against a sangar wall. This high up, he was once again cocooned in wet mist. He sat with his thoughts: elation, grief, pride for his men, and the realisation that his life had changed forever. He would never be the same again. As he looked up, he saw the firqat returning, the men his troop had worked with for the previous four months. They had been ambushed out on the djebel that day and were now returning, carrying their dead and wounded.

  Throughout the morning, information began to slowly seep back to Um-el-Ghawarif, some of which was filtered back to the medics in the FST.

  The first casualties, six in all, arrived about midday, Neville Baker delivering them by helicopter. Groups of soldiers and medics met the helicopter and carried the wounded by stretcher across the base to the Field Surgical Team.

  The SAS soldiers, Tommy Tobin and Tak, were the first ones in. The surgeons did what they could, then stabilised them so they could be shipped to the RAF hospital in Cyprus.

  Then more of the wounded started arriving. The tide of wounded soon became a flood as the helicopters set up a conveyor belt from Mirbat back to Salalah – six bodies in each helicopter trip, each trip there and back done in just under two hours. Those who were not too badly injured were shipped on to an Omani Army base a few miles away. Meanwhile the radio frequencies to Masirah and Cyprus were humming with requests for medics as well as extra supplies.