by Chris Ryan
Disaster hit us without warning.
We arrived at the main supply route and started to cross the tracks. There were about a dozen of them, running side by side, marked in hard mud, and they seemed to be spread over 200 or 300 metres. Out on that open expanse I felt very exposed, so I turned up the pace even faster. Then, just short of the high ground, I looked through the night-sight yet again and saw a black object that I thought might be a building or vehicle. At the foot of the slope I stopped to confer with Andy.
But Andy wasn’t there.
I saw Stan behind me, with his head hanging down, then Vince . . . but no one else.
‘Where’s the rest of the patrol?’ I demanded.
‘I don’t know,’ said Vince. ‘We’ve lost them.’
‘What d’you mean, lost them?’
‘They split off somewhere.’
Vince didn’t seem too concerned, but I was on the verge of panic. ‘Right,’ I said. ‘Let’s get up on the high ground, fast.’ I took one more look at the black object, decided it was a rock, and hustled forward as fast as I could. Just short of the top of the ridge I stopped again. Stan lay down like he was dead. Vince was completely zonked as well – he just sat there and couldn’t speak.
It had been at least an hour since I’d last spoken to Andy – so it could have been that long since the patrol had split. Looking back across the open gravel plains with the night-sight, I had a clear view for miles. It seemed impossible that the others could have gone far enough to vanish. I kept scanning and thinking that at any second I would see five black figures trudging in single file. I saw nothing.
For a few moments I was dumbfounded. Then I thought, My TACBE and Andy’s are compatible; if both are switched on at the same time, we should be able to talk to each other. The SOP for this situation was that anyone in difficulties would listen out on every hour and half-hour; so I waited five minutes till midnight, pressed the button and called: ‘Andy! Andy!’ No answer. I kept on for five minutes, fully expecting him to shout back, but no call came.
Things were going from bad to worse.
We were down to three men; one of them was out of the game, and the other didn’t want to be in it.
I had my 66 and a few grenades in my belt-kit, but otherwise we had only two main weapons: I had my 203, and Vince a 203 and a pistol. Stan had nothing but a bayonet.
Stan had drunk all my water and we also no longer had the GPS, which was with Mark. From now on we’d have to navigate by map, compass and dead reckoning – and this depended on knowing how fast we were covering the ground. The more tired we became, the less accurate we’d be. I regretted never having done a course in astral navigation: I could recognize the Plough, Orion’s Belt and a few other constellations, but that was all.
I looked around. Stan was asleep on the ground beside me, but Vince had moved off about fifteen metres and was burying his ammunition – a box of 200 rounds and a sleeve of 203 grenades.
‘What are you doing?’ I hissed.
‘I’m not carrying that stuff,’ he said. ‘It’s too heavy. If we get into a big contact, we’ll all be wasted anyway.’
‘You’ve got to carry it,’ I told him.
‘I can’t.’
‘Give us those rounds here, then.’
I was fuming. We only had the two weapons, and might really need the ammunition. But I couldn’t order Vince to carry it. So I slung the 203 bandolier over my shoulder and let him bury the box.
I went back, sat down, and waited until 0030. Then on the half-hour I tried the TACBE again. Still no reply.
We couldn’t just sit where we were, so we cracked on again, with Stan just behind me and Vince at the back. We kept going until 0500, by which time I could feel blisters starting on my feet and we were all at the end of our tether. That was hardly surprising, as we’d covered the best part of seventy kilometres during the night.
Dawn wasn’t far off. We needed somewhere to hole up for the day and we came across an old tank berm. This was a bank of soil about two metres high, built in the shape of a big U with one end open. A tank could drive into it and be hidden from the other three sides. Just short of it, and leading into it, were two tracks about twenty centimetres wide and ten deep, where a tank had sunk into the ground on its way in or out.
There was no point lying up inside the berm itself. The wind was blowing straight into its wide, open end so that its walls gave no shelter and anyone passing could look in. Equally, we couldn’t lie outside the walls in the lee of the wind, because we’d have been in full view from the other direction. The only shelter from the wind, and at the same time cover from view, was in the tank-ruts outside.
‘We’re going to have to stay here,’ I said, and we lay down in the deepest part of one of the tracks, head to toe. Vince was at one end, I was in the middle and Stan was beyond me. Down flat, we were more or less hidden, but I only had to raise my head a few centimetres to see out. It wasn’t a great place to hide, because if anyone came to visit the berm for any reason, we would be compromised.
While we’d been on the move, the wind hadn’t seemed too cold; but now that we’d stopped, it cut through our thin clothes. That was bad enough, but when daybreak came, the first thing I saw was heavy clouds piling in from the west.
Then I looked in the other direction and saw something square, about 600 metres off. It was either a little building or a vehicle, with antennae poking up out of it, and at least two men around it. This showed how right we’d been to remain alert during the night: here was some small military outpost, miles from anywhere – exactly the sort of place we might have walked onto.
We were separated from the rest of the unit.
We had barely any cover.
We could be discovered at any time.
The elements were against us.
But we had to spend the hours of daylight in this shallow ditch if we wanted any chance of escaping.
Friday 25 January: Escape – Day Two
It was so cold. The wind came knifing through my DPMs and smock, so I opened my canvas map case and laid it over my legs. I wrapped one shamag round my head, and pulled the other round my shoulders. Even then I was still freezing. But somehow I must have dozed off, because I woke up shaking violently, with what felt like pins and needles in my face. When I opened my eyes, I couldn’t believe it: it was snowing, and we were covered in white.
‘Look at this!’ I exclaimed bitterly. ‘You’d think we were at the North Pole.’ Nobody answered, so I said, ‘Vince, are you all right?’
He grunted something back.
‘Stan, how are you feeling?’
‘Oh, a lot better.’
That lifted me – just to hear him sounding more like himself.
‘Good,’ I said. ‘Well – get something to eat.’ All I had was my biscuits, so I ate two of them, chewing slowly to produce saliva and work them down. Stan and Vince both ate something too.
The worst result of the night – though I didn’t realize it immediately – was that I’d badly hurt my feet. The problem was my socks. They were made of rough grey-brown wool, and because our build-up had been done in such a rush, I’d worn them for four or five days on end before the deployment. By the time we started walking, they were already stiff with sand, dust and sweat – and now, as a result, they’d chewed the sides of my feet into large blisters.
The normal treatment – which we’d used on selection courses – would have been to push a needle into each blister, extract the fluid and inject tinc benzine, or Friar’s Balsam. The process felt as if a red-hot poker had been laid against your foot, but it toughened the underlying skin enough for you to be able to walk on it. Even washing my feet and putting on plasters would have helped. But there, trapped in the tank-track, I couldn’t even take my boots off to inspect the damage, let alone do anything to repair it.
Now and then during the day we saw military-looking vehicles driving in the distance. The snow turned to rain, then back to snow. Our ditch filled w
ith water. The water dissolved the earth into mud, and soon we were wallowing in an icy quagmire. There was mud all over us, over our weapons. But all we could do was lie there in it.
I’d often been cold before, but never as cold as that. I became so frozen that I didn’t even want to move my arm so that I could see my watch, and I asked Stan what the time was. ‘Twelve o’clock,’ was the answer. Was this day ever going to end?
In the tank-ruts, it was impossible to concentrate on anything for long, the discomfort was so intense. The only plus was that Stan seemed to be back to his normal spirits. He’d brought a proper boil-in the-bag meal in his belt-kit, and once he’d got that down him, he was ready to go. Vince, on the other hand, was feeling the cold the worst of any of us. He wasn’t whingeing, but he kept saying, ‘Chris, I can’t feel my fingers. I’m freezing.’
‘So am I,’ I told him. ‘But we can’t do anything, Vince. We can’t move, so we’ve just got to stick it out.’
‘Can’t we cuddle in together?’ Sharing body heat to stave off hypothermia was a good idea but it wasn’t possible right now.
‘Not yet. It’s too dangerous to move.’
The temptation to get up and go, to start moving again, was colossal: anything would be better than enduring this agony. But one of the Regiment’s most basic SOPs is that during escape and evasion you don’t move in daylight. If we were spotted walking, Iraqis would come at us from all sides. Grim as it was, I knew we should stay where we were.
Then, late in the afternoon, Vince worried me by saying, ‘Look – I’m going down here.’
We had to do something. We had to take the risk.
‘What’s the time, Stan?’
‘Four o’clock.’
‘Let’s cuddle in, then.’
Vince and I wriggled further down to where Stan lay, where the track was a bit wider. At that point we were all coming out into the open, but we accepted the danger and lay together, cuddling in for warmth, with me in the middle and the other two on the outsides.
After what seemed an age, I asked again, ‘What’s the time, Stan?’
‘Five past four.’
This was real torture. It seemed like an eternity, lying there caked in freezing mud, with icy water soaking through our clothes. Whenever the snow stopped, the wind would get up and bring on the rain, and then the snow would start again . . .
Friday 25 January: Escape – Night Two
At last, at about five-thirty, darkness began to fall, and we decided to crawl inside the berm so that we could shift around and get some feeling back into our bodies. But until we tried to move, we didn’t realize what a state we were in.
My fingers and toes were numb, but that was to be expected. It was when I went to stand up that I really got it: the pain in my knees and back was outrageous. I felt as if I had acute arthritis in my spine and hips. For a moment I was hit by despair.
We dragged ourselves inside the berm and tried to run around, to start the energy going and get some heat moving inside our bodies. But my feet were still numb, and clay had built up on the soles of my boots so I could hardly make any progress. Our hands were so dead that we couldn’t even pick up our weapons – but luckily they had slings, so we ducked down, put our heads through the slings and stood up.
As Vince did so, he said, ‘Chris – I can’t carry my weapon. I just can’t.’
I heard the note of desperation in his voice, so I just said quietly, ‘Stan, you take it for him.’ Stan took Vince’s 203, leaving him with his pistol.
My memories of the next few hours are hazy, because I was being hit by hypothermia. All three of us were. But even though my mind was becoming clouded, I knew we had to keep moving.
‘Right, fellers,’ I said. ‘We’re going to have to start off again.’ So away we went. I was stumbling with my weapon slung over my shoulder and my hands tucked under my arms, trying to get some feeling back into them. I kept thinking, If we have a contact, we’re done for, because we won’t be able to shoot back. I couldn’t have pulled the trigger or changed magazines to save my life.
Then the clouds thickened up. Another flurry of snow drove into our faces, hurtling in from the north-west, and soon we were tabbing over ground as white as on a Christmas card. The blizzard hid us, but we were blinded too and could easily walk onto an enemy position without spotting it.
When the moon came out again, the desert was light as day, and I could read my map without the torch. Vince, who kept falling behind, called, ‘Hey, you’re going to have to slow down. I need a rest.’ Vince was highly-trained, fit, professional and very tough – but the cold was clearly hitting him harder than either Stan or myself.
‘Vince,’ I reminded him, ‘you can’t rest. We’ve got to keep moving, see if we can warm ourselves up.’
But although we were walking hard, we weren’t getting any less cold. Normally, after you’ve walked for an hour, your circulation’s really going, and you’re warm all over. But because our clothes were soaked through, and this bitter wind was blowing, the chill-factor was keeping our body temperature right down. Also, there was no fuel left in me to re-stoke the fires: I’d burned it all up.
I knew that in our state, without warm clothes or shelter or food, we couldn’t survive much longer. In fact, I thought it was likely we would all die that night. I’d never experienced such pain from the cold. In the course of training I’d had plenty of lectures on hypothermia, and now I recognized some of the symptoms in myself: disorientation, dizziness, sudden mood swings, outbursts of anger, confusion, drowsiness. Normally a man in that state would be put into a sleeping bag or a space blanket and brought round – but there was no chance of that out here.
So we kept walking – until Vince really started going down. ‘Wait for me,’ he called. ‘You’ve got to wait . . .’
We did wait a few times. But then I decided that shock tactics were necessary. I knew that at home he had two young girls and a little baby, and that he was nuts about his family. So I gripped him by the arm and said, ‘Vince, if you don’t keep going, you’re never going to see your kids again. Think about your home. Think how they’ll want you back. Now – get your finger out and start moving.’
‘Listen,’ he said, ‘I want to go to sleep. I’m too tired. I’ve got to sit down.’
‘Vince, we can’t sit down. If we stop, we’re going to die. Get that? If we lie down and sleep, we’ll freeze to death, and never know anything about it.’
We carried on walking for a bit, and then he shouted at me, ‘Chris!’
‘What?’
‘My hands have gone black.’
My first thought was: frostbite. My own fingers were still numb, and I wondered what state my hands were in under my gloves. I walked back to Vince and found him staring down at his hands. He was wearing black leather gloves.
‘My hands have gone black,’ he repeated. ‘My hands!’
I realized his mind was wandering, so I just said, ‘OK, Vince, put them in your pockets. Get them warm, and the colour will come back to them. Come on now: keep up with me and Stan, mate. Keep going.’
At that point I can’t have been thinking straight. What I should have done was to keep hold of him, or actually tie him to me. But that didn’t occur to me, and I just kept walking. Stan and I would move on for a bit, then wait for Vince to catch up. Then the same again. I tried to be sharp with him one moment, kind the next. One minute I’d shout, ‘Get a grip!’ trying to spark him into action. Then I’d become comforting, tap him on the shoulder, and say, ‘Come on, Vince, keep walking. Everything will be all right. We’re going to get out.’
Vince’s behaviour was now swinging wildly. Several times he started yelling out loud – which of course was bad for our nerves, as anybody could have heard him from hundreds of metres off. Stan hissed, ‘Vince – be quiet!’ and he shut up for a while.
Because hypothermia was setting in, our navigation had become erratic. For some time I’d had the feeling that I was drifting away from rea
lity. The map was saying one thing, and what was happening on the ground seemed to be quite different. We wanted to head north-west, but we kept drifting to the north-east. I saw what was happening, and began to wonder – quite illogically – if I had a tendency to head north-east because I’d been born in the north-east of England. It was just the hypothermia talking.
Every few minutes Stan would say, ‘Eh – we’re coming off. We’re coming off.’ Then the clouds would open, and we’d get a glimpse of the Plough, and we could bring ourselves on course again. Then more snow flurries would come in, the stars would be blotted out, and we’d veer off once more.
Struggling as we were, we cracked on for a while – but then, as we stopped once again, we realized that Vince was no longer with us. When Stan shouted back for him, there was no answer. ‘Chris,’ he said, ‘we’ve lost him.’
‘We can’t have,’ I answered. ‘He must be just behind us.’
We started back on our tracks. Naturally I was worried, but I felt bad-tempered about having to retreat. Where snow was lying, it was easy to follow our footprints; but then there were long stretches of bare rock from which the snow had been blown clear. Whenever we crossed one, we had to cast about on the far side, working forward and back to pick up our trail again. Now we realized how much we’d been zigzagging all over the place.
After twenty minutes there was still no sign of Vince. We called as loud as we dared, and we could see a reasonable distance – but I suddenly realized that our quest was hopeless. It was half an hour, at least, since we’d seen him, and we had no idea what he’d done. He might have walked off to the right; he might have walked off to the left; he might be walking straight backwards; he might have lain down in a hollow and gone to sleep. This last seemed the most likely; that was all he’d been wanting to do for hours. If he had curled up somewhere out of the wind, we could spend all night walking in circles and never find him, probably killing ourselves in the process.
‘Stan,’ I said, ‘I’m making a decision. We’re going to turn round and leave him.’ I could feel my companion’s hesitation, so I added, ‘I’ll take the responsibility. We’ve got to leave him, or we’ll kill the pair of us.’