The Regiment

by Michael Asher

  Bravo Two Zero was an eight-man patrol – six B squadron men and two from A Squadron. One of the A Squadron boys was the patrol 2IC, Sgt. Vince Phillips, an ex-Royal Army Ordnance Corps specialist who’d done time in both the Parachute and the Commando Brigades. A long-legged marathon-runner, thirty-six years of age, Phillips was nearing the end of his service and was married with two young girls. The other A Squadron man had been with the Regiment only a few weeks. This was ‘Mike Coburn’ – a twenty-six-year-old New Zealander from Auckland who’d served previously in the New Zealand SAS. Two of the patrol were ex-Paras. L.Cpl. ‘Dinger’ was a vet of 22 SAS who’d served in the Falklands, a married man with two daughters, and a big smoker and drinker with a reputation for wildness. Tpr. Steven ‘Legs’ Lane was a more recent arrival – a tall, wiry, reserved man, his role was patrol signaller. The patrol medic, twenty-nine-year-old Geordie ‘Ryan’, came from Tyneside. Married with one child, he had joined the Regiment from 23 SAS. The two remaining men were physical opposites: twenty-four-year-old Tpr. Bob Consiglio, an ex-Marine from an Anglo-Sicilian family, was small but powerful – the others joked that when carrying his pack he looked from behind like a Bergen with legs. ‘Mal’ was a giant who’d lived in Australia, but had served with the Rhodesian army.

  The patrol commander, Andy McNab, was a thirty-four-year-old Cockney of part-Greek descent, brought up by foster-parents. He’d joined the army as a boy soldier to escape a life of petty crime. An ex-Royal Green Jacket, he’d been awarded the MM in Northern Ireland for taking out one terrorist and wounding another.

  The Chinook carrying Bravo Two Zero went in at an altitude of only thirty metres to dodge the radar shield. There was one drama on the way when she was painted by enemy radar probes. She went into evasion mode, blowing chaff, losing altitude, banking and yawing. Inside, there was chaos. The loadmasters bawled at each other over the din of the rotors, and trod on the feet of the SAS team in the cabin. The heli finally put them down after a two-hour flight, at a point around three hundred kilometres north of the border. The patrol ramped out into the desert night.

  Lying on the side of a wadi under a full moon and a sky ponderous with stars, Mike Coburn checked his Magellan GPS unit and realized that the RAF ‘crabs’ must have landed them in the wrong place. They were only two kilometres short of the site they’d chosen to put in their OP, when they should have been twelve kilometres south of it. According to Ryan, though, it wasn’t a mistake. He said that the team had talked the RAF pilot into putting them down nearer the target. McNab was aware that with their vast loads they wouldn’t make it from the original drop-off point to the lying-up place before first light. Moving tactically with packs weighing eighty kilos or more, they couldn’t cover more than five hundred metres an hour: twelve kilometres would have taken them twenty-four hours. The bad news was that there was what appeared to be a small village on a knoll no more than six hundred metres away. It shouldn’t have been there: it wasn’t marked on the map.

  The ‘village’ was a temporary settlement – a nest of rambling wood houses and tents standing among stone-pines and mesquite bush, with a rusted water-tower full of holes. It was the home of Abbas bin Fadhil, head of an extended family of the Buhayat – a shepherd tribe of the Iraq desert. Abbas heard the Chinook come in, and recognized the thump and swish of a twin-engined heli. He was familiar with the sound, because he’d done a dozen years in the Iraqi special forces, including eight years in the Iran–Iraq war, reaching the rank of sergeant-major. He’d been wounded several times, and still had two bullets in his body. He had finally been invalided out with multiple wounds in the ankle that had left him crippled. Now he was a sheep-farmer with a gammy foot, but ironically, he’d had more combat experience than all the members of Bravo Two Zero put together.

  There was no electricity in the settlement, and no TV, but Abbas was aware that the country was at war. He had no way of knowing whether the chopper he’d heard belonged to enemy or friendly forces, but he sent his ten-year-old nephew, Adil, off to the nearest military post to inform them anyway.

  Meanwhile, the patrol had located a lying-up place in a wadi about half a klick from Abbas’s settlement. It was a cul-de-sac only a few hundred metres south of the road, a steep-sided ravine, not large, but with a slight overhang and a seven-foot boulder on one side, behind which they could all hide if necessary. Though the LUP was less than a mile and a half from the place they’d been landed, it took over two hours to get there with their Bergens. While four men prepared the place, setting up Claymore and Elsie mines, or stood sentry, the other four went back for the gunnysacks. Once they’d been brought in, one man kept watch while the others tried to get some shut-eye. It was harder than they’d expected: most had only bivvy-bags, and the night air was freezing.

  The original idea had been to dig a hide, line it with sandbags, and cover it with thermal sheeting, to prevent imaging-devices locating them by body-heat. The problem was that the ground was rocky – there was no sand at all. Not only could they not dig a hide, they couldn’t fill the sandbags either. This meant that half of the kit they’d lugged with them was useless. They’d practised digging the OP in the Empty Quarter of the United Arab Emirates – the world’s largest sand-desert. The ‘Green Slime’ hadn’t told them that the desert of Iraq is predominantly stony, covered with a shallow skin of heavy clay in places, but with hardly any sand.

  The second problem became apparent the next morning at first light, when McNab and Ryan clocked an Iraqi S60 anti-aircraft battery on the top of the escarpment overlooking the road. It was less than a kilometre away, and was manned by at least a dozen Iraqi soldiers. That shouldn’t have been there, either.

  The morning was so cold that Coburn crept off to do a few exercises to get the circulation going. On his way down the wadi, McNab stopped him and asked him if he could help Lane on the radio. Coburn thought this odd, since Lane was a first-class signaller, but it quickly transpired that he’d failed to get comms with the forward base. The radio was a PRC 319 set with a burst capacity. This meant that the signaller tapped in an encoded message, which was recorded and transmitted in a micro-second burst, too fast for enemy direction-finding gear. The 319 worked through a wire dipole antenna that bounced signals off the ionosphere via a relay station in Cyprus, to the forward operating base at al-Jauf.

  Lane told Coburn he’d checked the set carefully. There seemed to be nothing wrong with it. He was picking up static, which suggested it was working, but there should have been homing transmissions in Morse-code coming in on the frequencies he’d been given, and there weren’t any. Coburn worked methodically through a mental troubleshooting manual. He gave up half an hour later, confused. The radio had a self-testing mechanism, and if the set was faulty, it would have shown up on the electronic message screen. The only other possibilities were that the transmitting station had been taken out, or that they’d been given the wrong frequencies.

  In the course of the morning, every man in the patrol had a go at fixing the set. No one succeeded. About noon, McNab called them together for a conflab: the loss of comms was a serious business. Phillips reminded him that they had SATCOM, but McNab countered that they’d been instructed to use it only for Scud sightings or life-and-death emergencies. SATCOM left a massive signals ‘footprint’ and multiplied their chances of being compromised.

  There was a lost-comms drill. If nothing was heard from the patrol by noon next day, the chopper would return to the drop-off point to deliver a new radio, or to extract them. The dilemma here was that they didn’t know which drop-off point the heli would use – the ‘official’ one, or the one where they’d actually been landed.

  If they hadn’t got through to base by midday, they would move out at last light. They’d shift everything to the ‘official’ drop-off point, then two of them would come back to the actual landing-place, so they could cover both. McNab wasn’t giving up. After they’d sorted out the signals glitch, they’d get relocated somewhere else. The patrol spe
nt the day watching the road. There was hardly any movement – only the occasional Bedouin pick-up greasing along in a dust-tail.

  Adil, the boy Abbas bin Fadhil had sent to the military post, had come back hours later saying that the army thought the helicopter they’d heard was one of theirs. That afternoon, Adil took the family’s sheep out to graze near the settlement. One of his animals wandered over the lip of the ravine in which the patrol was hiding.

  The SAS-men had been alerted to the approach of Adil and his flock by the sound of sheep-bells tinkling. They saw one of the sheep as it came over the lip of the wadi – not being accustomed to lean Arab sheep, most of them thought it was a goat, although Abbas’s people had no goats. They also heard Adil’s voice as he called to the flock, and reckoned they were about to be made. They hurled pebbles at the animal until it retreated. To their great relief the herdsboy didn’t come any closer.

  That night, McNab led a four-man patrol out to recce the area and ascertain the exact position of the road. They boxed round a couple of encampments, but weren’t certain whether they were civilian or military. Forced to retreat by barking dogs, they returned to the ravine.

  94. ‘High possibility compromise’

  At al-Jauf next morning, Peter Ratcliffe was heading to the ops room when the commanding officer came charging out and almost bumped into him. The RSM saw at once that ‘J’ was hopping mad, and thought he could guess why. Alpha One Zero was still hovering around the frontier, unable to cross the berm. ‘J’ had lost patience, and had decided to send in another second-in-command to stiffen up the patrol. As he had no spare officers, he asked the RSM if he’d be prepared to go. Ratcliffe was astonished but delighted to get this unexpected chance to do some real fighting. ‘What time am I going in?’ he asked.

  By noon, Bravo Two Zero had been in the field for about thirty-six hours without making contact, and in the COMCEN, the SAS yeoman of signals asked the ops officer if he wanted to initiate lost-comms procedure. The officer was concerned, but couldn’t send a chopper. All the Chinooks were tasked up for the next forty-eight hours, resupplying the mobile patrols. Half an hour later, the yeoman returned looking sheepish. He told the ops officer that one of his operators had noticed an anomaly on the frequency-prediction charts for the area. They didn’t match the frequencies given to Bravo Two Zero, which were those assigned for Kuwait. When the officer asked what this meant, the yeoman answered that it meant Bravo Two Zero had the wrong frequencies: they hadn’t got a hope of getting comms with the ones they’d been given.

  In the LUP, McNab confirmed the decision to pull out that night to the emergency RV twelve klicks to the south. He was confident that the Chinook would come in on schedule. He told Bob Consiglio and Mike Coburn to rig up the SATCOM equipment in case there was anything for them on the net. As they were assembling the satellite-dish, Steve Lane suddenly whispered that he’d picked up a fractured message on the emergency guard-net. He reckoned that he should be able to transmit back, but it was against SOPs except in emergencies, because of the risk of getting dee-effed. McNab told him to forget SOP and to transmit the patrol’s location statistics, the position of the enemy anti-aircraft battery, and the intel that they were moving to the emergency RV that night. Lane tapped the message off, but received no confirmation. Coburn was just trying a radio-check on the SATCOM when McNab grabbed his arm. Everyone froze. They heard the jingle of sheep-bells coming towards them. Vince Phillips crept down from the sentry-position, hissing that it was the same herdsboy again, but this time he was moving directly towards them.

  What happened next was a replay of the SAS patrol versus herdsboy scenario that had first been acted out just under fifty years ago, when Bill Fraser’s patrol had been lying up on their way to hit Ajadabiyya. Then, it had been Arthur Phillips who was said to have been spotted; this time it was his namesake Vince Phillips. Ryan later claimed that Phillips admitted he’d made eye-contact with the boy. Coburn wrote that the shepherd was singing as he approached the wadi, but stopped abruptly as if he’d noticed something. Within a few seconds, though, the boy had resumed his singing and continued as if nothing had happened. The whole patrol had squeezed behind the standing boulder before the herder came into view, but none of them was certain if he’d clocked them or not.

  McNab had to assume they’d been spotted. He told Lane to get on the guard-net and send the message, ‘High possibility compromise. Request relocation or exfil.’ In fact, questioned a decade later, Abbas’s nephew, Adil, admitted he’d been herding sheep in the area on that day, but had noticed nothing unusual.

  It was icy, with a chilling wind lashing off the desert. Abbas bin Fadhil thought there was snow coming, and was worried about the fuel in his loader freezing up. Fuel was very hard to come by at the time. That afternoon he decided to park the vehicle in the adjacent wadi, out of the wind. It was only a few minutes’ drive from the house, and he knew that at the end of the wadi there was a sheltered place. What he didn’t know was that it was now occupied by Bravo Two Zero.

  Abbas drove the loader right up to the end of the wadi. As he turned the slight bend, he saw two armed men peering at him from among the rocks, one on his left, near the standing boulder, and another on the higher ground to his right. ‘They were wearing camouflage jackets and shamaghs over their faces,’ he recalled, ‘and I had no idea who they were. They could have been Iraqi commandos, or special troops of the intelligence service, or even crashed enemy pilots.’1 Abbas tried to avoid eye-contact, and hastily turned the loader round. He trolled off back to the house.

  The SAS patrol had heard the loader coming and assumed it was a tank or armoured personnel carrier. They extended their LAW 66mm anti-tank weapons ready to take it out. When it came into view, McNab saw that it was just ‘an idiot pottering about on a digger’, and relaxed, thinking – quite rightly – that it was there innocently. Ryan was convinced that the driver had come to look for them after being alerted by the shepherd-boy, but Coburn clearly recalled the look of shock on Abbas’s face.

  At the settlement, Abbas hobbled into the house and unpacked his AK47 rifle. His father, a seventy-year-old named Fadhil, asked what he was doing. Abbas told him he’d seen strangers in the wadi. ‘I don’t know who they are,’ he said, ‘but I’m going to find out.’2 The old man declared that he would come, and got out his rifle – a five-shot, bolt-action Brno. They were joined by Abbas’s younger brother, Hayil, who had also served in Iraqi special forces. He was also armed with a Kalashnikov AK47. Together, the three of them made their way back to the wadi on foot.

  In the lying-up place the team was frantically packing away radio equipment, chugging water, stuffing themselves with Mars bars. Now they were certain they’d been compromised, and the only choice was to clear out pronto. They would ditch all the OP equipment and anything they couldn’t carry. It would soon be dusk, and within the hour they’d have the cover of night. They buried the Claymore mines, and were soon pacing back down the dry-wash with their Bergens on and their weapons at the ready.

  Abbas and his brother stood about five metres above them on the edge of the wadi as they came down. The Arabs held their weapons close by their sides so the strangers wouldn’t see them. They were all masked with shamaghs, and Abbas still didn’t know for sure they were foreigners. Up to now, they hadn’t made any aggressive moves. If it came to a firefight, Abbas knew, he and his family were at a disadvantage. There were only three of them – one an old man, and himself, crippled. He wanted to be sure of his ground before taking any action. As the patrol padded down the water course, the Arabs paralleled them along the wadi side.

  Further down, the walls of the wadi fell away, and flattened out into a basin about six hundred metres wide. The point where the patrol had been dropped lay to the south. To the east lay Abbas’s settlement, clearly visible from here, and to the west the desert stretched away in galleries of serrated humpbacked ridges. The Arabs took up a position on the eastern side of the basin, and waited for the patrol to em
erge.

  The SAS were strung out. Coburn, who was near the back, didn’t remember seeing the Arabs, who were hidden from him by the wadi wall. Ryan did see them. He described them as being clad in ankle-length white dishdashas, dark overcoats and red shamaghs. As he emerged from the wadi he waved to them, hoping the SAS would be taken for Iraqis. Coburn recalled that he saw someone ahead waving, but couldn’t see who he was waving at. Abbas replied by firing two shots over the patrol’s heads – a traditional Arabwarning when encountering an unidentified party in the desert. The ‘friendly’ answer was to refrain from shooting back, and throw sand or dust in the air.

  The SAS didn’t know this. They went into an instinctive contact drill, diving, rolling and bringing their weapons into action. There wasn’t much to shoot at, as Abbas and his two companions were by now lying headlong in the grass. ‘Immediately they went down,’ Abbas recalled, ‘and they started shooting back at us, so of course we knew they were enemies.’

  McNab turned the gun-battle between the Arabs and the eight-man SAS patrol into a ‘Rambo’ style Hollywood epic, with the patrol charging huge numbers of enemy, grenades being flung into armoured cars and Iraqis lolling out of windows dead. In fact it lasted only five minutes. The Woodhouse ‘shoot and scoot’ SOP still obtained, and the patrol’s priority was to get out of the contact like a flash, not take on enemy machine guns. Acording to three members of the patrol, the Iraqi battery on the slope two kilometres away started belting 40mm shells at them. Abbas later denied they opened fire, and claimed that he hadn’t alerted the gunners before returning with his rifle. At that stage he didn’t know if the men in the wadi were friends or foes.