Heat

by Ranulph Fiennes

  Dropped off near the western end of the plain by a Bedford lorry, we patrolled silently in single file through thick mist and constant drizzle. Monsoon midges in their swarms bit any exposed skin, raising red spots that itched maddeningly. The rain turned the soil to slimy mud so that the simple rubber-soled gym shoes of the soldiers (and the Clarks desert shoes, aka ‘brothel creepers’, of the officers) gained very little traction on the slightest of slopes.

  During night ambushes the monsoon midges disappeared and their place was taken by the incessant and orchestral attendance of countless mosquitoes. I prayed that my Daraprim anti-malarial tablets would cope as well with Dhofari malaria as they had to date with the northern version.

  The jebel was, at least in some of the deep and forested wadis, an Alice in Wonderland of sudden nooks of great beauty. Spending our ambush days motionless, hidden and often enough overlooking a water source, we were privileged to see rare birds and animals and to listen to the screams of wild cats and the hypnotic calls of larks against a background choir of frogs and crickets. We looked down on sparkling pools with banks of flowering convolvulus where fish broke the surface to catch water spiders and great dragonflies of many colours darted by.

  Trees with weird names and strangely shaped leaves, like the ash’r, the sam’r and the nath’b, scattered the sunlight into magical shafts as the long hours passed and tiny hummingbirds hovered by purple flowers.

  Chameleons, some as small as my index finger, others as long as iguanas, were everywhere in these verdant wadis where flying insects and spiders provided great hunting zones for their deadly tongues.

  In 1893 the first Europeans, the Ingrams and the Bents, two separate British couples interested in botany and unusual fauna, visited the Qara, and their subsequent reports included data on chameleons. They change colour, as do many lizards, not for camouflage purposes but by way of reacting to being too hot, or too cold, sick or frightened. Their great hunting tools, their tongues, are longer than their bodies and shoot out from special launching pads on their lower jaw, and they can, in a fraction of a second, trap their targets on the sticky end-pads.

  Silence was key to any chance of success during nocturnal marches to lay ambushes on known camel trails, and occasional bursts of racking coughs would sound like gunshots in the dark. If a soldier on a long approach march nodded off, unnoticed by the man behind, he would be left. If you strayed from the narrow camel path, the needle-sharp camel thorn bushes grabbed at your shirt and shemagh.

  Oddjob’s policy was to suspect all able-bodied adult tribesmen on the plain of giving support to the adoo. So we searched every hovel, tent and cave for fugitives and weapons. Old men kept their families from starvation during the monsoon by loading their family camels with brushwood from the foothills to sell in Salalah. While they were away the women cared for their goats and children, and gave special attention to their younger camels who were vulnerable at this season, for their eyes were eaten out by flies. Many hobbled camels had ragged cloth hoods over their heads.

  On a Friday, the SAF day of rest instead of Sunday, and after an especially tiring week of tick-bitten ambushes, I went on a local tour with a Dhofari bedu who hated the adoo, or the Popular Front for the Liberation of the Occupied Arabian Gulf as they now called themselves, and often acted as a guide for SAF patrols north of the Qara jebel.

  Sultan bin Nashran was the adopted son of the paramount sheikh of the Bait Shaasha bedu and, being a patient man, he put up with my still stilted Arabic.

  We drove first over the mist-shrouded Jarbaib, the flat coastal plain of Salalah, to the mouth of a mountain wadi which Sultan knew well. At any point, with only our personal weapons, the adoo might have found us an obvious target. Or a mine could have blown up our Land Rover. But I trusted Sultan’s fox-like instincts of survival.

  In the foothills we hid the vehicle by a rocky cleft, removed the distributor cap and walked to a chain of flowing pools. I saw snakes and a fat heron and, in one clear pool, a shoal of tiny fish.

  Nashran knelt to say his prayers. There was silence all about us. The very first Europeans to visit the Qara were the British botanist explorers Theodore and Mabel Bent in the 1890s, followed forty years later by the explorer Bertram Thomas, then later still by a few men from the RAF outpost, and in the 1960s by ourselves.

  During the monsoon months there was no vehicular access to the Salalah Plain, nor could any ship land anywhere along the Dhofar coast. Even back in the first century AD the author of Periplus of the Erythraean Sea had written Dhofar off as ‘a mountainous country, hard to cross, and wrapped in thick clouds and fog’.

  Thanks to the monsoon, Salalah Plain, some thirty miles long and up to five miles wide, is all very fertile with luxuriant groves of coconut palms and miles of pristine white beaches. Many types of fruit grow along this fertile coastline.

  On the outskirts of Salalah town we sipped coffee at the market stall of a merchant friend of Nashran’s. Cows and camels, the latter heavily laden with firewood from the jebel, grunted as they passed by. An ugly dog tried to lift a leg against my low seat. I asked Nashran why somebody had neatly sliced off both its ears. ‘To make it hear better,’ he replied.

  Many of the market folk, I noticed, both adults and children, had glazed or puffy eyes. Less so with the women, perhaps due to their face veils. In the open fish market I had to keep swatting my face for flies, large and small, which settled non-stop on my eyelids and lips. Great heaps of fish, mostly sardine-sized, littered tarpaulins spread on the dirt in the market square beneath the shade of swaying palm trees.

  The stench of fish was heavy on the morning air and mingled with Nashran’s personal perfume, which on patrol he thankfully refrained from applying as the adoo have a keen sense of smell. All Salalah cattle and camels were fed on a diet of little fish, sometimes called manchus, but their milk was tasty nonetheless. Calves, Nashran told me, often die by choking on manchu bones that become stuck in their tongues and throats.

  Wandering down to the beach to the east of the Sultan’s palace, we passed a mix of Qara jebali men with indigo-stained faces, many with short camel sticks and small shields. Others, squatting beside fat black women selling fruit from small mats, haggled noisily with strange falsetto voices.

  I took a few photographs, but only when unobserved as John Cooper had previously advised.

  During the first week of August I took my platoon to search the Wadi Sahilnawt, well to the east of Salalah. At dawn we came to a long double-decker cave, the lower floor of which sheltered upwards of a hundred skeletal-looking cows. Flies ate at their many open sores, despite the acrid smoke from smouldering fires.

  The upper ledge of the cave formed the living quarters of some forty bedu, mostly women and children. Babies screamed and mothers crooned the words Ish kish and Ooskoot (Hush now and Shut up) as an endless refrain.

  There was a seeasee (local guide) with us who said that these folk were starving because their cows and goats had very little milk this year.

  When Seramad asked why the cattle were not let out to graze on the plentiful new monsoon grass so that their milk yield would improve, the seeasee, Hamed al Khalas, replied that they had already lost five cows when their bellies swelled and burst due to the fresh grass.

  As we left the stench of the cave dwelling, I felt helpless and ashamed. Surely we should be doing something to alleviate the obvious suffering of these people?

  Instead we were supporting a repressive regime. To the Sultan, even though his only son and heir, Qaboos, was born to a Dhofari woman, all Dhofaris were disloyal and no better than animals. Two years earlier a group of Dhofaris had tried to assassinate him, since when he had distrusted them all.

  Listening to talk in the Salalah Officers’ Mess, it was clear that a Dhofari’s lot was not a happy one due to the Sultan’s edicts and restrictions. They could not legally leave for work abroad and if they were caught having done so, they were banished from their homeland forever. They were also forbidden to
own vehicles, play music, wear sunglasses or use electric water pumps. There were no schools or hospitals nor, indeed, any state welfare at all.

  I found it difficult to sleep in my Umm al Ghawarif room on non-ambush nights, for my conscience accused me of double standards. I resolved that I would resign from the Sultan’s Armed Forces without delay. I had joined up unaware of the situation, but now that it was clear that I was part of a repressive regime, I felt that I had no course open to me other than resignation.

  In the Mess I then heard talk of other officers who had suddenly terminated their service in Dhofar, and they were referred to with ridicule as cowards. Such gossip quickly spread back to their parent regiments in Germany. I could picture the faces of my fellow Scots Greys officers were I to slink back to their Mess after my first taste of active service. I would dishonour my father’s memory.

  So I decided to wait until my brief detachment to the Northern Frontier Regiment was over, and then I would resign from the peaceful environment of the north, which would smell less of desertion.

  So the ambush patrol work carried on. One morning as we closed in on a village of clay huts in thorn country amid clusters of man-high anthill pyramids, bursts of automatic fire announced the presence of adoo. I felt the crack of bullets over my head and wished that I, too, had an automatic weapon. In such close bush country, even more than in open terrain, we were at a considerable disadvantage in comparison to the adoo, who were armed with the latest fully automatic Russian rifles that could fire twenty bullets in a few seconds. We had to cock our guns after each shot, a deadly disadvantage in any sudden contact. This was bad for our soldiers’ morale.

  I watched Seramad and Bill Prince closely during patrols to learn from their tactics and from their errors how they controlled seventy men in thick bush country at night, and I picked up many small, but important, tricks of the trade.

  Seramad, over coffee in the camp, told me, ‘If you are ambushed by big force in bush at night, tell your men to retreat when you shout “attack”. Or shout “retreat” just before you attack. Is good surprise tactic of Mister Mao in China.’

  Bill summarized the history of the Dhofari adoo which, although the current rebellion had begun only four years before, had its origins way back in the late nineteenth century when the Sultan’s grandfather had been asked to visit Salalah from his Muscat palace in order to arbitrate between two sides in a bitter tribal dispute.

  His decision having then been accepted by both sides, the Sultan, whose judgement visit had coincided with lovely post-monsoon weather on the verdant plain, observed how very much more pleasant Salalah’s climate was when compared with that of Muscat. So he built a palace on the seafront and stayed on. His post-arbitration popularity soon vanished when the locals realized that he intended to have a permanent residence in their heartland, for they hated all foreigners, and especially arrogant Arabs from the north.

  The mountain tribes of Dhofar are not mainline blood Arabs, for they originate from the Yemen and Ethiopia. They speak various strange languages and their interactive communication has been described by rare visitors to Dhofar as ‘twittering like birds’.

  Over the next seventy years various inept attempts to persuade the reigning Sultan or his deputies against residing in Dhofar had all failed, including the 1964 attempt by members of the local Dhofar Defence Force to shoot His Majesty as he inspected their guard of honour. He narrowly escaped with his life due to the bravery of his escort, but serious trouble started later that year when one of his drivers, Musallim bin Nuffl, was sacked for inefficiency. Nursing a huge grudge, bin Nuffl set out to gain independence for Dhofar.

  Gathering three dozen like-minded Dhofari nationalists to form the Dhofar Liberation Front (DLF), bin Nuffl went to Saudi Arabia to enlist support from King Faisal who disliked the Sultan due to past land disputes.

  After military training and weapons support, bin Nuffl’s men managed to cross the sands of the Empty Quarter in seven Dodge power trucks and establish a hidden base in the Dhofar Mountains from which to cause mayhem to the vehicles and staff of the oil company to whom the Sultan had given Dhofar exploration rights.

  Bill Prince told me that the DLF had for a while done extremely well, successfully ambushing oil company heavy vehicles and killing their crews along the so-called Midway Road, the only track crossing the Qara Mountains from the north to reach Salalah. The Sultan had this road hacked out in 1953 for the use of the oil prospecting gangs to carry their heavy equipment between the Salalah Plain and the nej’d wastes north of the Qara. The resulting one-lane track zigzagged over the mountains and from time to time plunged down precipitous ramps, all ideal terrain for the adoo to ambush. When an early SAF group responded to these first DLF attacks, they too were cleverly ambushed.

  SAF began then to send an entire regiment to Dhofar, leaving only two regiments to garrison all northern Oman. But fighting Dhofari guerrillas in mountains without knowledge of the terrain and without accurate maps was asking for trouble.

  Just as the Taliban in Afghanistan would always survive as long as they could slip back and forth over the Pakistani border, so too would be the case for the Dhofari adoo if the British were to leave Aden and the Yemen.

  And that, thanks to the Harold Wilson government in the mid 1960s, is exactly what happened. In their rush to divest themselves of the remaining British overseas responsibilities, aka colonies, they handed the Aden Protectorate over to the communist-backed Aden Nationalists.

  The Soviet Union, adept at pursuing the well-tried domino theory, aimed to control the Straits of Hormuz, the key geographical feature of the narrows of the Persian Gulf through which the West’s vital oil supplies had to pass.

  So in Moscow the master plan was simple. Marxist-trained guerrillas would throw out bin Nuffl’s nationalist DLF, take over Dhofar and Oman from the weak forces of the Sultan, and thence the feudal Gulf States, and so to the oil-rich prize of Kuwait. The only potential barrier to this plan was the Sultan’s Army.

  The leader of the Marxist-trained Dhofaris, Ahmad al Ghassani, based himself in Hauf in 1966 as soon as the British left Aden. He allied himself to leaders of tribes traditionally hostile to bin Nuffl’s tribe, and when bin Nuffl was badly wounded in 1966 and languished in a Saudi hospital, the al Ghassani faction, later to become the People’s Front for the Occupation of the Arabian Gulf (PFLOAG), set out to annihilate the anti-communist Nationalists of the DLF.

  By the time of his recovery in 1968, the Marxist takeover of the DLF was complete and bin Nuffl could not return to Dhofar for fear of assassination.

  Hauf became infamous for its ‘Cage’, a great wired-off cave wherein all suspected Nationalists, radical Muslims, or anyone at all whose motives were not at one with those of the Marxist struggle, were imprisoned.

  Sophisticated weapons arrived by ship from the Soviet Union. These included long-barrelled artillery pieces which were capable of splitting into four camel loads.

  Al Ghassani’s force of 400 Soviet-trained and politicized Dhofaris set out from Hauf the week I arrived in Salalah. Al Ghassani divided his force into two, half to attack RAF Salalah and half to carry on towards the east to raze the Sultan’s fort at Mirbat.

  The NFR Intelligence Officer, a South African major, was fascinated by the unique flora of Dhofar where no botanist had been for a century. He had a strange plant officially named after him in Latin, but his ability to learn anything at all of use about the adoo was nil.

  However, when a wave of rumours reached Salalah market, from the wood collectors arriving off the jebel, that a great force from the west was about to attack Taqah, our botanist intelligence officer suggested that it would be a good idea to send a strong army presence to that coastal village.

  Both Taqah and Mirbat were fishing-based villages about thirty and forty miles respectively along the coast to the east of Salalah, and each was guarded by a mud and brick fort manned by Sultanate askars (civilian soldiers) with a bolt-action rifle each, no uniform
and no military training. Mirbat possessed an ancient radio transmitter for emergencies, but this had never yet been used.

  Sending four soldiers pushing mine detectors like vacuum cleaners out ahead of our lorries, we progressed slowly along the coastal track to Taqah and conducted a fruitless search of the village. Then, three days later, we returned to Umm al Ghawarif. No sooner were we back in the Mess for breakfast, when an SOS call came from Mirbat that the fort and the town were under attack. Then the radio went dead.

  Colonel Oddjob sent the entire air force, two old Provost fighters, to circle over Mirbat and to strafe any suspicious movement in the surrounding hills. The Beaver joined them, saw that the Sultan’s red flag still flew from the walls of the fort and so dropped ammunition boxes out of the door onto the beach behind the fort.

  Weary from our recent Taqah sortie, we set out once again along the eastern track and, halfway to Mirbat, an ammunition lorry overturned in a narrow rocky defile. It was then decided to advance for the last four miles in the dark without vehicles, and Bill Prince bade me go ahead along the beach with two machine gunners. We trudged for eight hours by night over the wind blown sand of the dunes. The crash of the monsoon surf drowned all sound, and we lost contact with the rest of the company, but dawn found us at the edge of Mirbat beach.

  I scanned the village with my father’s old telescope and saw movement around the foot of the fort. We were not to know it, but as we watched and waited for the others to catch up, the last of the adoo attackers, having narrowly failed to take the fort, were even then dragging away their wounded back to the foothills of the Samhan jebel.

  As soon as the company arrived, we spread out and advanced across the clearing on the inland side of the fort.

  A dozen turbaned heads appeared along the battlements, cheering and waving their rifles. Then the double gates opened and the defenders rushed out to fling their arms around us with open emotion.

  An askar in his early teens, his dirty dishdash torn, led me by the hand to a uniformed adoo corpse. On the first night of their attack, the lad said, the adoo had used ladders to scale the walls of the fort, but the askars had just managed to shoot enough of them to stave off this initial assault. But had it not been for the speedy response and accurate fire of the two fighter aircraft, the fort would soon have been overwhelmed. And without the ammunition drop, they would have run out of bullets in minutes.