by Roger Cole
Meanwhile, Brigadier J. J. H. Simpson, CBE, the newly appointed director of SAS Group, was tasked by the fearless Hush Puppy warriors at the MOD to investigate a complaint that the SAS had failed to use minimum force at Mirbat. Before he left for Oman, he was briefed by three generals at Wilton, in Wiltshire, the headquarters of UK Land Forces. The crimson-faced generals ordered him to change the most basic SAS tradition. As of now, he was instructed, officers must stop calling soldiers by their first name or their nickname and soldiers must stop calling officers ‘Boss’. Wisely, Brigadier Simpson said nothing and ignored them. He wrote later of the joy when an SAS soldier called him ‘Boss’ for the first time. It was his proudest moment. ‘My cup was full,’ he wrote. He sensibly filed the complaint under T, as in ‘Too Silly to Even Think About’.
Nearly twenty years after the Battle of Mirbat, sixty former and some still serving SAS soldiers returned to Oman, as guests of the Sultan.
Roger Cole met an old woman who grabbed his hand and would not let go. She kept calling him ‘Tabeeb, Tabeeb!’ – meaning ‘doctor’ in Arabic. She then waved over a giant of a man, a six foot four Dhofari. It soon became clear through a series of gestures, exaggerated hip thrusts and wild eye-rolling that this young man was one of several babies safely delivered by Roger eighteen years earlier. It was a touching experience for both of them, united by some moments of joy many years before.
Escorted by the Sultan’s current forces, the former SAS men were shocked when hundreds of former firqat came to meet them, bringing along their wives, children and animals. Boys they had played football with were now young men, just as they themselves had been when they last met nearly two decades before. The young men they had fought with were now middle-aged like themselves, but still thin and rangy. Life on the djebel had changed little in 2,000 years, and pot bellies were something that belonged in another country.
The fighting spirit was still there as the Omanis grabbed and hugged the SAS men. As always there was a lot of good-natured humour, underpinned by an iconoclastic attitude to anyone in authority. They looked down on Salalah and said, with huge conspiratorial grins splitting their craggy granite faces, ‘Well let’s get the guns. We could still take the place!’ The joke failed to amuse the current members of the Sultan’s Armed Forces, who were escorting the SAS and the tribesmen. These young soldiers had been children when the middle-aged men they were escorting had fought to secure the freedom they now enjoyed.
Later Roger Cole and Valdez, one of the many Fijians in the SAS, walked the battlefield. Valdez was a legend in the regiment, a giant of a man who all the others looked up to, regardless of the formal rank structure. Valdez was a big thinker, with a giant sense of humour and a presence you could lean on from twenty yards away.
He loved to tell them all that his life changed one night in 1971 in a dark cinema in Hereford when he watched the Burt Lancaster vengeance cowboy movie, Valdez is Coming, shortly before going to Dhofar.
Keeping a straight face, Valdez would tell the lads he was the real-life incarnation of Valdez. In the movie, Valdez tried to get justice for a widow but was mocked and virtually crucified in the desert. In the words of the trailer, Valdez ‘carries enough equipment to stop an army – because sometimes he has to’. Valdez is ‘a methodical machine of destruction’ who carried a Colt 45 for close up work, a shot gun to give himself wide range, a Winchester .30-30, for rapid fire-power and a Sharps buffalo gun for killing men at 1,500 yards.
The film was a huge regiment favourite and every SAS soldier had been to the Odeon at High Town in the centre of Hereford to see it. Even today, many are word perfect on parts of the script and they all remember the key line from the film, delivered with a shovelful of gravel in the throat: ‘Valdez is coming!’
Forget Hollywood. The SAS were in Dhofar and Valdez was Valdez, the invincible killing machine, the man who could take on an army and beat them all on his own. And once they had fought with him, the men kind of believed it too.
Like the other Fijians, he seemed indestructible and invincible; he won the Military Medal at Shershitti Caves, a battle at which dozens of firqat had been killed, after an act of such asinine stupidity that the SAF Colonel in charge had been fired on the spot.
During a firefight on Operation JAGUAR, Valdez was shot, taking a 7.62 bullet from a Kalashnikov AK-47 just above his knee. This part of the leg is full of nerve endings and he must have been in agony. As he lay on his back, blood pouring from his leg, he asked, ‘Where am I shot?’
‘Just an inch above your knee, Valdez.’
‘Thank Christ for that.’
‘Why’s that?’
His reply was one of the greatest one-liners in the history of the SAS.
‘Another inch higher and it would have taken off my bell end!’
It was true. He was Valdez.
The best part of two decades later he returned to the same spot, his bell end intact and with just a slight limp as a permanent souvenir of his time in Dhofar.
As he walked up the hill with Roger Cole, they joked about past postings together, remembering their time in Brunei when they were on exercise up against the Gurkhas. As they inched through the jungle, Valdez had suddenly turned to Roger and said, ‘I can smell tea, freshly brewed tea!’
‘What? I can’t smell anything.’
‘Well I can and I want a cup.’
He had then set off, slithering through the jungle undergrowth, never making a sound. Roger followed him.
‘Bloody hell,’ thought Roger. ‘This man isn’t just Valdez. He’s a fucking snake as well.’
They got ever closer until they could see the Gurkhas sitting round in a circle. At the edge of the circle, his back to them, was a young soldier, a mug of hot tea on the ground by his side.
A big grin on his face, Valdez looked back at Roger Cole as he inched his way forward until he was within touching distance. As soon as the Gurkha put the mug down, it was taken away by a giant Fijian hand. Crouched just feet from the Gurkhas, Valdez took a mouthful and then gave it to Roger, who also had a drink of the hot, sweet tea. Valdez then slid it back to where it had been and the two SAS men snaked back into the jungle, leaving the young soldier wondering what had happened to his tea.
They were still roaring with laughter and declaring that this was the best cup of tea they had ever tasted, when they reached the place where Valdez had been wounded. They turned back to look down the hill. Below them, they saw a road where previously there had only been desert sand and rock. Coming up the road was a school bus. It stopped and a party of young school girls and school boys, smartly dressed in uniforms, all got out to walk home. The two men stood and listened as the distant chatter of happy innocence drifted up the hill, carried away by the light breeze. After the children disappeared into their homes, to do their homework and tell their parents about their day at school, the two men thought back to the Oman they had left. As they remembered the biblical wasteland that they first encountered back in 1971, a country with few roads, schools, vehicles and no sanitation, a trash cart arrived to take away the town rubbish.
Valdez, one of the regiment’s philosopher kings, looked at Roger and said quietly, ‘Well, it was all worth it.’
25
Conclusions
Inevitably, now that this book has revealed much of the previously untold history of this most clandestine of modern wars, there are two big questions.
The first is how the Omani government, led by a young Sultan with limited military experience and a small cohort of British supporters, managed to succeed when all conventional military analysis suggests they should have lost? And, second, how did the Sultan and his forces, including the SAS get it so right, when their counterparts in Iraq and Afghanistan, only a generation later, got it so badly wrong?
Consider the starting positions of both sides.
Oman is a tiny dot on the south-east corner of the Arabian Peninsula, surrounded by larger and much more powerful neighbours, Saudi Arabia and Yemen – countries t
hat had traditionally been enemies. There was some oil, but not in huge amounts, and in 1970 the country had just been snapped out of a time capsule. Two thousand years of development needed to take place and it had to happen overnight. The vast majority of the population had already gone over to the insurgents and it was going to take major development to bring them back.
The new government of Oman had to build roads, irrigation systems, sewage plants, houses, schools, hospitals, clinics, markets, universities and all the apparatus of a modern state. None of this came cheap – especially when the government had to fight a civil war at the same time, a morale-sapping conflict that soaked up half of all its total revenues.
Oman’s allies, the British, were even more short of money. The country was on a three-day week to conserve electricity, which was then in short supply. After a relentless cascade of strikes the British government finally declared a state of emergency in 1973, the peak year of the Dhofar War. Petrol and fuel deliveries were cut by ten per cent and motorists were asked not to drive at more than fifty miles an hour to preserve petrol.
Ranged against these two paupers were several thousand insurgents, warrior clans fighting for control of their own backyard. Standing behind them were two mighty and affluent superpowers, Russia and China, both of which had global ambitions. As well as rich and indulgent parents, the Front also had a safe haven in the People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen, Oman’s noisy and belligerent neighbour to the west. Yemen was a country full of fire and ambition after kicking the British out of Aden in November 1967, ending well over 100 years of colonial rule.
Yemen was also backed by China, Russia, Cuba and radical elements among the Palestinians, making the opposition a resourceful and well-financed coalition of the world’s most powerful and expansionist states. Yemen and all her communist allies were on the rise, Britain was in decline and Oman was trapped somewhere in a pre-feudal past.
When the war started in the mid 1960s, the Sultan of Oman was without a friend on the planet, an old man so hated that even his closest allies in Britain loathed him. The British had left him in power for far too long, allowing the insurgents to seize the initiative and take control of ninety-nine per cent of the country. By the time they installed his son in 1970, it looked like much too little and far too late. The communist juggernaut was ready to roll through the last part of the country they did not already control and Dhofar was just weeks from falling.
All over the developing world, former colonies were throwing off their colonial shackles. In the 1960s, the decade before the Dhofar War, over thirty countries in Africa declared independence. By the early 1970s, Vietnam was on the brink, despite the USA spending billions of dollars and sacrificing tens of thousands of young Americans. Oman looked like the next country to fall.
As the American comic writer Damon Runyon, himself something of an expert on gambling, put it, ‘The race is not always to the swift nor the battle to the strong, but that’s the way to bet.’ The PFLOAG should have won, especially up to Mirbat. So if you were a gambler in early 1970 and you fancied a stone cold certain, one-way bet, then backing the insurgents in Oman looked like the safest investment you would ever make.
But five years later it was all over and you would have lost your money.
The victory was all the more extraordinary, given that just over three years before, at the Battle of Mirbat, the SAS were just minutes from a defeat which would have turned the tables and delivered victory to the People’s Front.
This three-year period, from 1972 to 1975, when the Omani/British forces turned defeat into victory, must have been galling for the Americans, who had the opposite experience in Vietnam.
Shortly after the Battle of Mirbat, the last American troops were getting ready to leave Vietnam, handing over the land war to the government they had propped up for nearly two decades. Three years later, in 1975, as the British-led forces in Dhofar were closing in on victory, the final Americans were being airlifted out of Vietnam by helicopter, while the Communists, rampant and all powerful, drove through the streets of Saigon and seized the country. In Oman, the opposite happened. Here, the Communists retreated back over the border into Yemen, comprehensively thrashed. They had been out manoeuvred, out thought and out fought, which is exactly what had happened to the Americans.
Here was a template for how to win a war against insurgents in the Middle East, yet when it came to Iraq and Afghanistan, many of these lessons were forgotten. For a while the British Army Staff College taught the Dhofar War as part of its advanced officer training but then it was taken off the course. The US military also studied it. In 1984, Major Stephen Cheney wrote an excellent analysis of the war for the US Marine Corps Command and Staff College. This was a colossal blunder. By the time the coalition tanks rolled into Iraq, many of the key lessons learnt in Oman were long forgotten.
Had the conduct of the Dhofar War still been taught at West Point or Sandhurst, then the outcome in Iraq and Afghanistan might now be very different, with far fewer deaths and a realistic hope of a sustainable peace and security for everyone. The British and Americans had a wealth of insights from Dhofar – but ignored them all.
If the great philosophers of war and nation-building, Machiavelli, von Clausewitz and Sun Tzu, were writing today, the Dhofar War would be their textbook case history of how to fight and win a war in a distant country.
At the beginning of the war the rebels controlled ninety-nine per cent of the terrain, with the support, or at least the tolerance, of well over ninety-five per cent of the population. They were better trained and better financed than the Sultan’s forces. They had better weapons than the British and Omani forces and outnumbered them many times over. They were fighting in their own backyard, a bizarre, rocky landscape where the wadis were so deep a soldier could sit in his sangar watching the terrain in front of him and never see a thing. While he was sitting there, hundreds of men could move, in total silence, just a few hundred yards away and never be seen.
For any army this is morale-destroying stuff.
The rebels were nearly all Djebalis fighting for the liberation of their country from centuries of despotic rule. There has never been any greater spur to warriors than this.
The old Sultan was a remote figure, a bitter old man trapped in another age, protected by a rag-bag army of mercenaries and advisors whose loyalty was no thicker than their monthly wage slip. The rebels had right on their side. He had a cheque book.
Yet within five years, this situation was turned round.
In the end, the Dhofar War was won not by military prowess or aerial strength, but by intellectual fire-power. The British were smarter and more cunning than the Communists. Sun Tzu would have been proud.
British and Omani thinking was fluid and creative, where the Communists were rigid. They stuck to the formulae dictated from Moscow and Beijing, while the soldiers on the ground, especially the SAS, often ignored the strategy and tactics devised back in England and went with what worked locally.
The British effectively leveraged the power they had, whereas the Communists squandered their huge advantages. Their allies eventually turned against them as the British slowly squeezed the heart out of the insurgency. They lived in a parallel universe of Leninist rhetoric, which did not match the shifting sands of tribe, family, religion and tradition.
The British successfully managed regime change. They changed the whole strategy and conduct of the war and then, working very closely with the young Sultan, they delivered a long-lasting and resilient peace, based on a system underpinned by a sense of fairness and social justice.
The greatest trick of all was turning this conflict from the last spasms of a squalid colonial order into a just war, one where everyone who took part felt proud of what they’d achieved.
Once it was over, the victors recognised that there was a vacuum of talent in the country. Many of the best firqat were young men who had been trained in Russia and China but had then swapped sides. The Sultan was smart and
the best of the remaining rebels, the men they once called the Adoo, came across. There were no recriminations, no vengeance by the victors, but a calm recognition that, regardless of what uniform they had worn, they were all Omanis now and that war should only ever be a prelude to peace.
The first big reason the British-led Omani forces prevailed was that they had clear, dynamic leadership, while the various rebel organisations were often internally conflicted.
Today, many of the survivors of the war, especially the SAS, are full of praise for their commanders, often using the phrase, ‘the best officer I ever served with’. Where British officers were inspirational, the opposite was true in Vietnam. Many of the British troops – and others from all over the world who fought under the Sultan’s colours – respected their officers and would have followed them anywhere. In Vietnam, at least 300 officers were killed by their own men, often by ‘fragging’ – rolling a fragmentation grenade into their tent. Of course, the Americans were a conscript army and their war was fought in the public gaze with a hostile population back home. Dhofar was one of the last wars to be fought in almost total secrecy. The men were told to keep it quiet and many did so. When one of the officers, Major Jeapes, wrote a book about his experiences it caused marital discord all round Hereford; several wives bought it, read it and then asked their husbands why they hadn’t been able to talk about their experiences when their boss could write a book about it. As usual, it was one rule for the officers and another for the men.
Having great commanders was just the start. Knowing how to listen, then make good decisions and provide genuine leadership, was even more important.
From the off, Sultan Qaboos was smart. Where the Ministry of Defence in London sent stupid instructions, he recognised the talents of his commanders and left them to do what they were best at: fighting and winning wars. He provided leadership, frequently visiting soldiers on the front line. From his time at Sandhurst, he understood one key thing about soldiers: they like awards and medals. It matters to soldiers that they are recognised and honoured for their achievements and their commitment. Where the MOD was disgracefully mean, the Sultan was generous. Acts of gallantry were instantly recognised and medals given shortly afterwards. It made a massive difference. Even today, over forty years later, veterans of the Dhofar War talk with pride about their medals – honours that were hard fought for and well deserved by all those who got them.