The Mess was air-conditioned, which was a huge relief. I was already seriously concerned that if I felt dizzy and disoriented after a few hours in this climate, how would I ever stand up to soldiering in it?
I had read a great deal about Muscat. Back in 1442 the leader of a Persian invasion from across the Gulf recorded that the jewels embedded in the ornate handle of his war-dagger came unstuck as the resin glue melted in the heat. The jewels also fell out of the invaders’ helmets and the feathers from their arrows.
Four centuries later it was the British Navy whose ships were anchored in Muscat harbour, and one James Fraser described a visit there by HMS Liverpool in his book A Narrative of a Journey into Khorasan: ‘In a single day, three Lieutenants died of sunstroke when the ship lay at anchor.’
And again in Muscat Harbour, the log of the Royal Navy anti-pirate ship Eden records a short stay of three days ‘during which two of the crew died and several others were put on the sick list’.
In the Mess I met a newly arrived British officer, David Bayley, whose home town was Hove, where I had stayed as a post-Eton language student. He spoke good Arabic to the Mess waiter, although he had not been with the rest of us on our language course.
He was the first ‘mercenary’ that I met, of a goodly number, in SAF. He had, after some years in the Regular Army, become a civilian, but he had spent three years in the mid sixties fighting for Yemeni royalist guerrillas against Colonel Nasser’s Soviet-supplied forces in the mountains north of Aden. He had then tried to ‘settle down’, but failed to defeat his lust for excitement. Additionally he knew that he was good at guerrilla fighting and the pay for ‘contract officers’ (polite terminology for mercenaries) was not to be sniffed at – and, as I learnt later, considerably better than the rate I received on a British Army posting.
On the other hand, should I be wounded or fall victim to any one of the various lurking diseases of Oman, I would be lovingly cared for by top surgeons and British military hospitals, whereas David and the other mercenary officers would be out on their own when wounded and dependent on their personal insurance arrangements.
Like the main Mess, the bedroom I was assigned was air-conditioned, and carrying my bags there from the car parking area was like moving between a furnace and a fridge.
I was later briefed by the brigadier in charge of SAF, a Brit who reported direct to the Sultan.
‘Have you experienced action?’ he asked me.
‘No, sir. None.’
‘Nor,’ he assured me, ‘have most of our officers. But I am attaching you to the Reconnaissance Patrol of the Muscat Regiment, based on the logic that most of our officers are from the Infantry, whereas you, being Cavalry, are vehicle trained, so you will get six Land Rovers and some forty men.’
I thanked him for this generous concession.
‘You will spend a few months up here in Northern Oman getting to know and to train with your men before you drive down south to the war zone. The drive there is some 500 miles through and beyond the gravel desert of the Wahiba Sands.’
Taking me to a wall map, he brushed his hand across Dhofar where green areas were shown, unlike the rest of Arabia.
‘These are the Qara Mountains.’ He indicated the fertile chain of hills that separate the great northern deserts from a verdant coastal plain on the seaward edge of which the Sultan’s palace, an RAF air station and an SAF Army base were all ‘ringed by high fences’.
‘The mountains are heavily forested in places and the enemy knows every pathway,’ the brigadier explained. ‘They are well-trained guerrillas armed, unlike our men, with fully automatic weapons. Many have been trained in the Soviet Union. We move in the mountains at considerable risk, even on foot. In vehicles great caution is needed and only one track crosses the mountains, so they mine that with anti-tank mines by night.’
One of my predecessors as Recce Patrol leader, a Scottish officer, had been blown up in his Land Rover on a track just north of the enemy-held mountains and died of his wounds. There are no helicopters to provide speedy evacuation of the wounded, the brigadier noted, and gangrene sets in quickly in the heat and with the flies.
My soldiers were to be a mixture of Omanis from either nomadic desert tribes or mountain men plus a contingent of Baluchis from Pakistan. The Sultans of Oman had for many years been titular owners of Baluchistan just across the Gulf until the current Sultan, my new boss, had sold it to Pakistan for £1 million. ‘The same amount,’ the brigadier mused, ‘for which the Russians sold Alaska to the USA.’
He went on, ‘We have three regiments in SAF and we rotate them so that each spends nine months fighting down in Dhofar, then eighteen months up here in various bases around northern Oman where things are mostly peaceful.’
I thanked the brigadier and, as the sun had at last disappeared behind the mountains that enclose Muscat, I decided to try walking outside the camp perimeter.
Smart Baluchis with rifles saluted me as I passed their guardroom. I smelt the strong perfume that many of the soldiers apply to their hair and skin. Also a filthy whiff as I passed by a line of bushes. The men, I was told, often defecated outside, but this did not cause disease as the great heat speedily desiccated the excrement.
Dusk settled quickly. Mosquitoes whined and settled on my neck. I smacked at them, momentarily worried, but then remembered that I had been taking malaria pills for a week. From the town all about the barracks came the ululating call to evening prayers in many mosques.
Back in the Mess, supper was (always) curry. I played cards with Patrick Brook, the only other Cavalry officer, or ‘Tanky’ as we were generally known, who I knew from German days and then the language school. He told me that he and David, the mercenary, were also to join the Muscat Regiment.
We left the Mess together and I heard the corpulent major who had met us at the airport mutter to a colleague, ‘Long-haired Cavalry louts. They do us more harm than good. I can’t understand why London doesn’t stick to sending proper Infantry officers.’
Next morning I decided on another brief attempt at acclimatization and climbed slowly up a dusty open hillside to its rim above the camp perimeter. Sweat poured off me. My khaki cotton shirt chafed, so I took it off, but white salt-bumps began to form along my shoulders and arms so I put it back on and headed for the cool of my room.
In the evening David, Patrick and I were driven inland via a gap in the coastal mountains to the headquarters of the Muscat Regiment in the village of Bidbid. Our driver was John Cooper, our regimental second-in-command, an impressive-looking major with a lean, hard body, sun-bleached hair and the features of a Greek bandit. His personal history was also unusual.
As a Trooper in the Second World War, John had served in North Africa under David Stirling, who founded the Special Air Service. As Stirling’s personal driver on many desert raids, he moved on through the years of sabotage raids in occupied France to post-war SAS campaigns in Malaya, Oman, Borneo and the Radfan in Aden. There, like David Bayley and a handful of other ex-SAS men, he had fought with the Yemeni royalist guerrillas. He operated a ham radio set in his room with a couple of impressive antennae masts outside near the parade ground. One of his fellow hams, with whom he enjoyed occasional chats, was King Hussein of Jordan.
Our route to Bidbid, which John drove at great speed, had in the 1950s been littered with mines by anti-Sultanate rebels based in the mountains. John pointed out of the vehicle window to the vertiginous ramparts of the Jebel Akhdar which was, I knew, over 10,000 feet high in places. ‘We sorted them out . . . up there.’
No European had ever climbed the mountain until, in 1835, two British lieutenants from the Indian Army managed it and just escaped with their lives from fierce mountain tribesmen. As late as 1950, Wilfred Thesiger, then the greatest of European travellers in Arabia, was unable to access the mountain.
In 1957, John told us, he had been about to go on leave from fighting in Malaya when his SAS squadron was flown with little warning to Oman to help the Sult
an against rebels holding the heights of the Akhdar.
‘We scaled those cliffs by night, sneaked behind the rebel machine gun posts and took them by surprise. Since then, the Sultan has kept an army outpost up there which is permanently manned. You’ll be climbing it before long yourselves to train for Dhofar.’
My room at Bidbid was tiny, bare-floored with fly-netting windows and, thank God (or Allah), an ancient and extremely noisy air conditioner.
That first evening I was violently sick, and for three days I never strayed far from the Mess lavatory until my stomach got used to the Bidbid water, which was piped from the shallow local wadi (valley).
There were no other modern lavatories in camp since the soldiers were accustomed to using stones rather than paper (as I too found necessary a year later) and no known flushing system could cope with even small pebbles.
Trying out the shower cubicle, I pulled the plastic curtain back, whereupon a spider, some seven inches across from side to side, landed on my neck. I screamed and trampled on it with my bare feet. Its legs and body were black and hairy and its mouth was a curved beak.
I slept badly.
An Arab orderly brought me tea at dawn. He carefully unstuck the spider from the floor and placed it on his tray. Looking stern he muttered, ‘It is no good thing to kill such an insect for there is a chapter in the Holy Book given to its honour.’
Peter Southward-Heyton, who had been in the regiment for two years, introduced me to my Recce Platoon. I went around shaking their hands. Afterwards Peter explained, ‘You should have five Long Wheel Base Land Rovers, each with a driver, a signaller and five soldiers, but it seems that there are actually only fifteen soldiers, five drivers and only one driveable Land Rover due to no spare parts for the others.’
A handsome Arab with a paunch introduced himself as Salim Abdullah, my platoon sergeant. He explained that Recce had for months had no officer and so nobody with clout to ensure that personnel and equipment levels were kept up to acceptable levels.
My driver, Murad, was a cocky lad who called me ‘John’. He was half-Baluchi and half-Omani, so he had a full-time job trying to be acceptable to both groups. I noticed that there were tensions between the two, and also between two dark-skinned bedu-types who kept to themselves. These latter were openly arrogant and rude, even to Sergeant Abdullah.
Peter noticed my sombre manner after leaving the Recce rooms. In the Mess I felt unusually thirsty, despite having taken no exercise. I drank three pints of cool loomee juice, limes boiled with sugar. Oman was the world’s greatest exporter of limes, although in the Arab world the country is more famous for racing camels and dates.
After lunch Peter explained that, except in the war zone, the custom in summer was to avoid the noon sun at all costs. All dogs, Arabs and Englishmen, he said, are thought of as magnoon (mad) if they fail to observe the hour of the siesta.
So I spent an hour lying naked under a cotton sheet. The air conditioner did not work, due to a power cut.
I joined Peter for a swim. We walked down a dust track to the Sumail Valley where reeds rimmed a deep, clear pool. In the glades around us were date palms, shaded vines and fields of lucerne. The water was wonderfully cool. Peter led us back by another path which passed through a deserted village, dark with shadows of empty mud houses. This, Peter explained, had not long since been the village of Bidbid, but a smallpox epidemic had wiped out the villagers. ‘Only lepers now sleep here,’ Peter said. ‘Never come by yourself without a gun.’ His was holstered on his belt. ‘The Sheikh of the Sharqiyah region hates the Sultan and has agents waiting to start trouble. And, Ranulph, take care with your own men. You can throw a stone in jest to hurry up a British soldier. Throw one at the wrong Arab and you’ll be shot in the back, maybe two years later.’
I resolved to check and purge my platoon for oddballs before the time came for us to go south.
John Cooper gave me orders to take the platoon into the Sharqiyah, which was ruled by Sheikh Ahmed Mohammed Al Harthi of the powerful Hirth tribe who hated the Sultan and sought independent rule. He must be kept in his place and, by way of asserting the Sultan’s rights to recruit volunteers from all Oman, I was to enter the Sharqiyah by way of the remote Wadi Tayyin and interview the Head Man of every village I came to. I was also to list the number of camels, cattle, goats, fertile date palms and adult inhabitants, and hand out recruiting pamphlets for SAF.
John gave me an official document from the Minister of the Interior, which Abdullah assured me, since I could not read Arabic, ordered the reader to allow me safe passage anywhere within the Sharqiyah and beyond into the Wahiba district.
‘Do not,’ John wagged a finger at me, ‘go too far. There are Bani bu Ali up there. They’ve always been big trouble. Your predecessor patrolling this route was badly wounded in an ambush, so be careful.’
I studied my Oman fact sheet from Beaconsfield days. The Hirth tribe, the principal clan of the Sharqiyah, had long been the bane of the Muscat Sultans. Sheikh Ahmed’s immediate ancestors Salih and his son Isa, who died in 1896, had been constantly hostile to Sultan Said and his father Taimur. Salih had led numerous tribal revolts and Isa became chief negotiator on behalf of ‘the people of Oman’ at the Treaty of Sib in 1920, which at the time settled the divisions of authority between the Sultan and the Imam. No wonder ‘my’ Sultan wanted an eye kept on Sheikh Ahmed.
All my attempts to turn Recce into a semblance of military order, or even to parade at a given time, were frustrated through my failure to understand the threads of constant and bitter arguments between the three ethnic groups: the two aggressive bedu, the sensitive and defensive Baluchi under their moolah, a big man with a mass of hair and beard, and the others (who I favoured) from Omani villages and towns, two of whom were Zanzibari-born Omanis.
I especially took to Abdullah, to Mohammed Rashid of the Beard, and to Ali Nasser who was diminutive and unintentionally funny, even liking to be laughed at.
If only the platoon were all Omanis.
Sergeant Abdullah did his level best to sort out the pandemonium while my driver Murad strove to make at least two vehicles, other than his own, serviceable. But the bedu shouted Abdullah down and went out of their way to rile the Baluchis.
The 2-inch mortar crew discovered that their mortar tube had gone missing from the platoon security store. There were mortar bombs and fuses on racks, but no firing tube. In the British Army this would have incurred a major inquiry, and probably arrests. As it was, Abdullah advised me to say nothing and to cadge one from ‘A’ Company, whose officer, my fellow Scots Grey, had been wounded and was likely to be absent for months, certainly for long enough to cover the period of our patrol.
‘Yes. Yes,’ croaked Ali Nasser in his best English, ‘you do clefty wallah, Sahib, from ‘A’ Company . . . Get morsha [mortar] and maybe machine guns, too.’
So I visited ‘A’ Company stores, was polite to their Pakistani quartermaster and came away with a brand new mortar tube and a .303 Bren machine gun with many metres of bullet belting.
In some semblance of order with three Land Rovers and fifteen men, we drove out of Bidbid Camp. John Cooper and Peter Southward-Heyton waved us off. God knows what they thought, for I’m sure we looked shambolic. At dusk we camped near a village called Naqsi close to the mouth of the Wadi Tayyin. In those days the rough track from Bidbid led, via the wilderness of the Ugg Valley and via Samad, to the Sharqiyah, Ja’alan and eventually to the Wahiba Sands.
I posted guards and fixed up my sleeping bag and mosquito net in a rare unstony spot. In the dark I took my shaving kit to where an inch of water trickled from a leak in the village’s open canal. Two of my Baluchis did not see me as they squatted beside each other to defecate. They were holding hands. Maybe many of my men were homosexuals. I decided against asking Abdullah, or anyone else.
Mohammed Rashid of the Beard (nicknamed Abu Lahya) brought me a mug of tea in my temporary Officers’ Mess. I thanked him warmly.
‘Do you pray, S
ahib?’
I answered him with the truth. ‘I pray when I am in bed, but sometimes when I’m tired, I forget. I pray to the same God as you.’ I pointed up at the stars.
He nodded and smiled. He would tell the others.
The patrol wound ever deeper into the Tayyin. There were little nimble deer, great eagles and places where big rocks from flash floods had to be pushed aside.
I began to look forward to the evening meals around brushwood fires. Murad’s Land Rover held a gaggle of four goats as well as five men. Each evening he would select one goat, lovingly stroke it for a while behind the ears, then slit its throat with a razor blade.
My machine gunner, Said Salim, filled the metal plate for our group, known as HQ Section, from the main fire where the cooking was done by the two bedu.
Soft bluish segments of boiled meat and rice spiced with cloves and Indian tomato juice were eaten, while woodsmoke smarted the eyes but kept a percentage of the mosquitoes away.
The Beard, Said Salim and Ali Nasser frequently picked out the more succulent bits of meat from their side of the communal dish and plonked them down on mine. I assumed it would be polite to return them with a ‘Thanks but no’ smile. This was wrong, so for the next two years on patrol I accepted all mealtime goodies.
‘Listen to those Baluchis,’ the Beard muttered at our evening meal on the third day up the Tayyin. ‘Yak, yak like jackals. Urdu is ugly.’
The bedu had initiated a screaming session. I noticed that they and the Baluchi moolah were thrusting their rifles at each other.
Ali Nasser explained. ‘The Baluchis will not keep sentry. They say it is our turn.’
I went over to the Baluchi fire and held up a silver Maria Theresa coin – the local currency. But it turned out that nobody had heard about the ‘Heads or Tails’ method of settling an argument and all fifteen of my men stared at me as though I had gone mad. So I ordered the moolah’s section to watch the east and the two bedu the west for an hour, after which they would be succeeded by a mixed roster.
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