by Chris Ryan
‘OK, then,’ said Stan. ‘Fair enough.’
It was a terrible decision to have to take, but I saw no alternative. We had nowhere to take refuge, nowhere to escape from the wind and snow, nowhere to dry our kit and warm up, nowhere to find food. I felt certain that if conditions were the same in the morning, Stan and I would die as well. There was no way we would resuscitate ourselves with no shelter and absolutely nothing to light a fire with.
So with heavy hearts we turned round and cracked on again, and left Vince on his own.
Our only hope was to get down off the high ground into warmer air, and gradually, as we tabbed on, we did seem to be descending. Not steeply, but it felt as if we were losing height. I hoped to God that Vince was doing the same – that he would reach low ground somewhere, get his head down in a hollow, and wake up in the morning.
Our map showed a line of pylons running across our front, and another line that stopped in the middle of nowhere. We thought that if we hit the first set of masts, and then the second, we’d know exactly where we were. But it didn’t turn out like that. We only hit the one line of masts, and couldn’t find any more. Later we discovered that the second line didn’t exist except on the map.
But at least we seemed to be coming down. The snow flurries died out, and the wind became less bitter. Through the night-sight I saw another main road. We approached it, then lay in a hollow to observe it. The hollow turned out to be full of mud: somehow, in the middle of the arid desert, we’d chosen a place like a miniature peat bog.
Ten metres beyond the road we saw a chain-link fence running parallel with it. The fence shone faintly in the moonlight. Beyond it was something pale. It looked like a strip of concrete, and we thought we’d come across some form of installation. It looked like it went on for ever. Then, at the last minute, we realized what it was: a railway line, fenced to keep animals off the track.
The fence was only about two metres high. Any other time, we’d have scaled it in seconds. But we were so cold and helpless we just couldn’t climb it. Stan brought out his set of folding Leatherman pliers and, with an all-out effort to make his hands work, cut a vertical slit in the mesh. We knew we were going against the SOP, because anyone who came along and saw the gap would realize that somebody had been through there. But it was the only way we were going to cross the track.
We squeezed through the gap and found ourselves on the railway line. Should we walk along it? It would have been easy going, tabbing on the concrete sleepers. A check on the map showed that it ran straight to a town on the Syrian border. But then we reckoned that the line would probably be patrolled, or that someone on a train would be bound to see us. There was nowhere to hide near the track, and if a train came along, we’d be caught in the open.
We decided to continue northwards. At the fence on the far side of the line Stan gave me the pliers and said, ‘Your turn.’ My fingers were so numb that I could hardly grip the handles, and putting pressure on them really hurt. But wire by wire I cut a slit, and we wormed through, pulling the chain-link back into place behind us so that the gap wasn’t too obvious. With any luck it would be days before anyone noticed the damage.
Leaving the railway, we found a big, rounded hill ahead of us and started up it. A few metres short of the summit we suddenly stopped. In that split second we’d spotted anti-aircraft gun barrels pointing into the sky no more than four or five metres in front of us. Standing still and staring at them, we realized we could see the top of a wall of sandbags, almost under our noses. Obviously there were Iraqis inside the sangar but, thank God, they seemed to be asleep.
Without a word, without turning, we backtracked down the slope, mere centimetres at a time, watching for any movement to our front. Nothing stirred. Once we were clear, we pulled away eastwards in a big loop, leaving the mound on our left, and then came back onto our northerly heading. But the incident gave us a fright, because we’d been walking carelessly, not worrying about the scrunching noise our boots were making on the loose rock and gravel.
Saturday 26 January: Escape – Day Three
By the early hours of the morning we were back into a system of shallow wadis and dry channels maybe ten metres wide, but less than a metre deep. These river beds were full of little bushes which threw thick, black shadows in the moonlight, so that every hollow seemed to be full of quite dense vegetation. I thought, Great – we’ll be able to get our heads down in here. It should be warmer too.
About 0530 we started looking for a place to lie up, and settled in a hollow. As I lay down next to Stan, he took off his webbing and laid it down in the middle of some bushes. We cuddled down together on top of it. It was really embarrassing, because we were front to front, with our arms round each other, and we had to take turns on whose head was at the bottom.
So we lay there, shuddering, drifting off into sleep, waking with a start, shaking all over, until dawn broke. By then I was bitterly regretting some of the mistakes I’d made in choosing and packing my kit. Apart from the brew-kit, which would have been a great morale-booster, I should have had a Gore-Tex bivvy bag or at least a space blanket in one of my pouches.
When daylight came, we found that some of the mud had dried on us, helped by our body heat, and our clothes were all stiff and covered with ice crystals, as if they’d been left out on a frosty night. Looking up, I saw that the sky was clear and blue, and thought, Thank God, it’s going to be a fine day.
Light revealed that the bushes, which had looked promising at night, were nothing but thorny skeletons, eaten down by goats. There wasn’t a leaf on them, and they weren’t going to hide us from anyone. So we crawled across and tucked ourselves into the wall of a wadi that ran north to south.
At ten o’clock the sun came up and shone on us. I’m sure that saved our lives. One more wet, windy day and we would have drifted off into unconsciousness and never come round. The sun never felt very warm, but it definitely made the air less cold, and we began to sort ourselves out a bit. We took off our webbing, and I spread out my map case to dry. We also cleaned the mud off our weapons and reloaded magazines. I found I’d fired about 70 rounds during the contact. Stan produced a sachet of American corned-beef hash from his belt-kit, and as I watched him eat it, I was thinking, Why didn’t I bring my own rations with me? All I had was two biscuits, my last.
At one point I said, ‘Stan – can you tell me, what are you doing sitting in the middle of Iraq?’
‘You know, Chris,’ he replied, ‘I’m asking myself that, right this very minute.’ He burst out laughing. ‘I bet we look a total state now.’
‘Too right we do.’
‘What about you, then? What are you doing here?’
It was a good question. When I thought about it, I saw that my involvement in the SAS was down to my love of being in open country. It was that, more than anything else, which had made me join the army.
I grew up in Rowlands Gill, a small village in the country just outside Newcastle, and went to the junior school there. From our house, I could walk straight out across the fields and into the forest, and I was always playing in the woods, making camps and sleeping out. My father worked on building sites, but he generally got laid off during the winter. That suited him fine, because all his life he’d been keen on shooting.
Dad would take me shooting in the country around Rowlands Gill. We used to build hides, in which we’d wait for pigeons, or ferret rabbits out of burrows in the hedges. On winter evenings we’d stand in the woods and shoot pigeons as they came into roost.
My dad had a five-shot Browning automatic 12-bore. Once, as we came round a corner, we saw five rabbits on the edge of a field. He got them all, one after another. With feats like that he soon became my hero, and I loved every minute of our expeditions.
But then came a great change. Some time in his thirties, my dad decided it was wrong to shoot birds and animals, and stopped altogether. By then I was mad keen, and kept suggesting we should go out. ‘No,’ Dad would say, ‘you’re be
tter off just watching them or taking pictures, capturing them on film. If you want to go, shoot with a camera.’
At an early age I started asking if I could have an air rifle, and my parents kept saying no. At one point my dad bought me a .410, but I was only allowed to take it out with him, under close supervision. Later, when I was thirteen or fourteen, I saved up my pocket money and asked again if I could buy an air rifle. Still the answer was no, so my younger brother Keith and I went out with some older boys and bought one, a BSA .22. I kept the precious weapon hidden in the loft.
Again I asked my mum, ‘Can I buy an air rifle?’
‘No,’ came the reply.
‘What if I just get one?’
‘You wouldn’t be able to keep one in this house without your dad and me knowing.’
Keith and I were looking at each other, thinking, ‘Yeah – right!’ We used to smuggle the air gun out of the house. Keith would wait on the ground, while I climbed out of my bedroom window and handed the gun down to him. Then we’d run off into the woods and go shooting.
One day, as I came home from school, I found that Keith had got there before me; he grabbed me, his face all fearful. ‘Dad’s just bought a new TV,’ he said, ‘and the man’s in the loft, putting up the aerial. You’d better get up there quick.’
The hatchway going up into the loft was in my bedroom. I stood there with Keith, waiting anxiously, when my dad called cheerily up to the fitter from downstairs, ‘I don’t suppose there are any secrets hidden up there?’
Keith and I stared at each other in horror. ‘No,’ the aerial guy called. ‘There’s nothing up here.’
The rifle was never discovered – but when I was sixteen or so I owned up, and by then it was too late for anyone to worry.
At school I was quite soft, and used to get bullied. If a girl started making up to me, I’d get beaten up by someone else who fancied her. If there was going to be a fight, it took place when school finished. There’d always be a big crowd gathering at the gate, waiting for the action. Sometimes, if my brother Keith got the worst of an argument, he would say, ‘Right – my big brother Chris will see to you.’ Then he’d find me at playtime and say, ‘By the way, you’re to have a fight tonight.’ Sometimes I’d go over the back fence and do a runner across the fields to avoid facing the music.
When I was sixteen I decided that this sort of thing had to stop, and I began fighting back. I realized that if you have a fight, you probably get hurt, but it doesn’t last for ever. Listening to my dad, and taking a grip of myself, I put a stop to the bullying.
I also started judo lessons, and couldn’t get enough of them. At first, for a couple of months, I was taught by a Japanese man who practised a pure form of the ancient martial art. Then I moved to an instructor in Newcastle, an ex-Olympic champion, who taught me to fight dirty. I became so keen that I’d go into town almost every night, and I started winning competitions. But I gave up judo when, in a fight with a bigger boy, my clavicle became detached from my rib cage. Although I finished the fight, I lost on points – and afterwards the injury caused me so many problems that I thought I’d better stop. But I found judo good for getting rid of aggression.
As I lay there in the Iraqi desert, I remembered the sick fear I once felt when I was a kid of about thirteen. We were playing Knocking Nine Doors, and a big guy rushed out and chased us down the street. He was known as a really hard man, and when we belted on his door, he was waiting behind it. He flew out, and we went hurtling down the road. He chased us for a couple of hours, and the terror I’d felt then was exactly the same as that I experienced during the contact in the wadi.
That wasn’t the only time I’d been on the run. Once, Keith and I had been playing football with some other boys. I must have hurt one of them in a tackle, and he went off in a rage. Later, Keith and I set out with our cousin to get conkers. I’d just climbed the tree and started hitting the conkers down, when Keith gave a hoarse cry: ‘Chris, look!’ Peering down through the leaves, I saw a gang of ten or twelve kids from the village, all armed with sticks, heading for us at a run.
‘There they are!’ the raiders shouted as they spotted us. ‘There they are!’
I jumped down from the tree. ‘You run back up home that way,’ I told Keith, and I took off in the other direction. The pack came after me – and it was like hare and hounds for the rest of the day, four hours at least. I ran until I thought I was going to die. I ran through the forest, waded the river, ran up onto the moors – and still they were after me. In the end I spotted a neighbour of my aunt’s, a man who worked as a gamekeeper. I came tearing down the road with the hunters close behind and threw myself into his arms, unable to speak.
I hated school work. I was all right at maths and technical drawing, but never much good at basics like reading and writing, and I took little interest in most of my lessons. Afterwards, I bitterly regretted not trying harder at school, especially when I found, as an adult, that I had a perfectly good brain. As a boy, though, I was more interested in making a camp in the woods or racing about with the other kids on the estate than in going to school.
By the time I was sixteen, all I wanted was to join the army. At the local recruiting office I did the first tests to become a boy soldier, and passed them fine. For the final tests I was due to travel to Sutton Coldfield, but I went down with jaundice and missed the interviews. I was really upset, but I remember lying in bed, feeling lousy, and seeing two men in uniform come to the house. They told my parents I should join up as a man when I was seventeen or eighteen.
Luckily for me, my cousin Billy was in 23 SAS, the Territorials unit made up of part-time volunteers. One day he said, ‘Why not come up, and we’ll get you out on a couple of weekends? Then you’ll see what it’s like to be in the army.’
So I went up to Prudhoe, in Northumberland, where ‘C’ Squadron of 23 SAS had its base. At that time – the late 1970s, before the famous siege of the Iranian Embassy – the SAS was nothing like as well known as it later became. I was just a naive lad of sixteen, and as I walked through the doors of the drill hall, I saw all these guys who looked really old. No doubt I looked a bit of a twerp to them. But nothing could damp down my excitement; when the SQMS took me into the stores and gave me a camouflage suit, a set of webbing pouches, a poncho and a bergen, I was over the moon.
A bunch of recruits had assembled for a weekend’s training – some were civilians, others from regular army units. Their average age must have been about twenty-five. As I arrived, they were about to have a map-reading lesson, so I sat down with them and did that. Next, we all scrambled onto trucks and drove up to Otterburn, where we walked out onto the moors. ‘Right,’ somebody said. ‘Tonight we’re going to sleep against this wall, under ponchos.’
I thought it was terrific – to spend the night outdoors. I was so excited that I couldn’t go to sleep, and I lay for ages gazing up at the stars.
Next morning, after no more than a couple of hours’ sleep, I was up early, and we spent the day walking. We’d walk for a while, have something to eat, get another lesson in map-reading, then go on again. The exercise ended with a long hike, which left me exhausted.
Back at Prudhoe, I thought, Well – that was great. But that’s it. I imagined that after my introduction to the army, I wouldn’t be asked again. But luckily for me the OC happened to be there. He was a scary-looking guy, with ginger hair and little glasses, and looked a right hard nut. He came over to speak to me and said, ‘You’re Billy’s cousin, aren’t you? Would you like to come back up?’
‘Fine,’ I said. ‘Great.’
‘Good,’ he replied. ‘But you must understand that you won’t be on the books. You shouldn’t be here, really, because we’re breaking the law. If anything happens, you won’t be able to blame the army.’
That didn’t worry me one bit, and from then on I went up to Prudhoe every weekend.
The selection course took place over a period of three months, with the recruits assembling only at w
eekends. At first the group had consisted of sixty people, and every week a few of them decided they’d had enough and gave up. But for me things became more and more exciting, because we went from being in a big group to working in pairs, and in the end I was on my own. It was a big thrill when someone told me to walk alone from Point A to Point B. I had become confident with my map-reading, and between Friday night and Sunday morning we’d cover up to sixty kilometres, carrying a bergen. On the last weekend of the course, there were only four of us left, and I was the only one who finished the march.
Normally, anyone who finished that march would be tested for two weeks on the Brecon Beacons. But I was too young to go, and they told me that I wouldn’t be ready to take selection for 23 SAS until two more Territorials selection courses had gone through. In other words, I was going to have to wait a whole year.
That was disappointing, but I was so keen that I volunteered to keep going on the Territorials weekends when the next course started. By that time I knew all the routes, and I could run from one checkpoint to another without a map. I’d also learned how to cut corners and cheat a bit. At the end of that course only one man passed: he and I were the sole survivors.
By then I’d become a bit of a joke in the squadron, but on the third course I was so fit, and knew the ground so well, that I finished each leg before the other guys were halfway.
Now at last I was old enough to go down to Wales for the Test Week. After two weeks on the hills, based at Sennybridge, I passed out and at last became a member of ‘C’ Squadron.
I was a member of the SAS!
My aim, of course, was to join 22, the regular SAS. Normally, to do that, you have to enrol in another regiment first, as the regular SAS is a specialized regiment within the British army. My best course seemed to be to join the Parachute Regiment, but all the guys said, ‘Don’t bother with that. Once you’ve served here in 23 for a bit, you can go straight on to selection for 22.’ Apart from that, 22 were holding a lot of courses and exercises down at Hereford, and there were often spare places – so I was going south a good deal.