because my mind was going at a hundred miles an hour. It was people's lives I was playing with here, my own included. The squadron OC had given the plan his approval, but that didn't stop me wondering if there was a better way of going about it. Were other people just nodding and agreeing with what I said? Probably not, since they all had a vested interest in our success and they were outspoken individuals. Was there anything I'd left out or forgotten? But you reach the point where you have to press on regardless. You could spend the rest of your life thinking about the different options. I got up and made a brew. Legs had just finished sorting out the signals kit, and he came over and joined me. There was no sign of Stan or Dinger. Those two could sleep on a chicken's lip. "The signals Head Shed have just given me our call sign," Legs said. "It's Bravo Two Zero. Sounds good to me." We had a bit of a chat about possible shortages. As I watched him head back to his bed, I wondered if he was thinking about home. He was a strong family man, with a second child that was just five months old. My mind drifted to Jilly. I hoped she wasn't getting upset by anything she was reading in the media. There was the constant noise of kit being lugged and blokes mooching around sorting themselves out. I put my Walkman on and listened to Madness. I wasn't really listening because my mind was screaming in so many directions, but I must have nodded off at about three, because at six, when I woke, the lead singer had dropped two octaves and they were just about grinding to a halt. It was quite a frenzy that morning. We checked that we still knew how to activate the distress signals on the small TACBE radios and use them one-to-one so we could actually talk line of sight on them. Vince had collected the 5.56 ammunition for the Armalites and as many 40mm bombs for the grenade launchers as he could get his hands on. We had a lot of shortages on these bombs because the grenade launcher is such a formidable, excellent weapon. The bombs are quite a commodity; when you've got them, you hoard them. I explained the problem to a mate in A Squadron, and he poached about and got us some more. All the 5.56 had to be put into magazines, and the magazines checked to make sure they were working. The magazines are as important as the weapon itself, because if the springs don't push the round into position, the working parts can't push the round into the breech. So you check and recheck all your mags, and then recheck them a third time. The Armalite magazine normally takes 30 rounds, but many of us choose to put in just 29, which gives a little bit of extra push in the spring. It's easier and quicker to put on a new mag than to clear a stoppage. We checked the 203 bombs and explosives. PE4 doesn't smell and feels very much like plasticine. It's surprisingly inert. You can even light a stick of it and watch it burn like a frenzied candle. The only trouble with PE4 is that when it's cold, it's quite brittle and hard to mold into shapes. You have to make it pliable by working it in your hands. We checked and rechecked all the detonators. The nonelectric ones that we'd be using for the compromise device are initiated by the safety fuse burning into them, and cannot be tested. Electric dets can be put on a circuit tester. If the electric circuit is going through the det, we can be sure that the electric pulse will set off the explosive inside and, in turn, detonate the charge. Fortunately, misfires are very rare. It takes quite a while to test the timers. You have to set the time delay and check that it's working. If it works for one hour, it will work for forty-eight hours. Then you time the device and see if it is working correctly. In theory, if it is more than five seconds early or late, you exchange it for another. In practice, I bin any timer that I have doubts about. The last item for testing was the wiring for the claymore antipersonnel mines, which was also done on a circuit tester. We then ran through the rigging and de rigging of the little Elsie antipersonnel mines. For many of us it had been a while since we'd had our hands on this sort of kit. We made sure we could remember how to arm them and, more importantly, how to disarm them. There might be a situation where we'd lay the explosive and Elsie mines on target, but for some reason have to go in and extract them. This makes life more difficult when you're placing them, because not only do you have to keep a record of where they are on the ground, but also the person who sets the anti handling device should be the one to lift it. There was a severe shortage of claymores, which was a problem because they are excellent for defense and . The solution was to go round to the cook house get a pile of ice-cream containers, and make our own. You make a hole in the center of the carton, run a det cord tail into it, and tie a knot inside the container. You make a shaped charge with PE4 and put it in the bottom of the tub, making sure that the knot is embedded. You then fill the carton with nuts and bolts, little lumps of metal, and anything else nasty you can find lying around, put on the lid, and wrap lots of masking tape around to seal it. Once the claymore is in position, all you have to do is put a det onto the det cord and Bob used to be your uncle. Next, we sorted out the weapons, starring with a trip down to the range to "zero" the sights. You lie down in the prone position, aim at the same place on a target 300 feet away, and fire five rounds. This is then called a group. You look where the group has landed on the target and then adjust the sights so that the next group will land where you want it to--which is where you are aiming. If you do not zero and the group is, say, 4 inches to the right of where you are aiming at 300 feet, then at 600 feet it will be 8 inches to the right, and so on. At 1200 feet you could easily miss a target altogether. One individual's zero will be different from another's because of many factors. Some are physical size and "eye relief"--the distance between the eye of the firer and the rear sight. If you used another person's weapon the zero could be off for you. This is not a problem at short ranges of up to 900 feet, but at greater distances it could be a problem. If this was the case and you could see where the rounds were going, you could "aim off" to adjust. We spent a whole morning down at the range--first to zero the weapons, and second to test all the magazines. I was going to take ten magazines with me on the patrol, a total of 290 rounds, and every magazine had to be tested. I would also be carrying a box of 200 rounds for a Minimi, which takes the same round as the Armalite and can be either belt- or magazine-fed. We also fired some practice 203 bombs, which throw out a chalk puff when they land to help you see if you've got to aim higher or lower--it's a crude form of zero. We rehearsed for many different scenarios. The situation on the ground can change very rapidly, and you have to expect everything to be rather fluid. The more you practice, the more flexible you can be. We call this stage of planning and preparation "walk through, talk through," and operate a Chinese parliament while we're doing it. Everybody, regardless of rank, has the right to contribute his own ideas and rip to shreds those of others. We practiced various kinds of LUP because we weren't sure of the lie of the ground. The terrain might be as flat as a pancake, in which case we'd LUP in two groups of four that gave each other mutual support. We discussed the way we would communicate between the two groups--whether it would be by com ms cord, which is simply a stretch of string that can be pulled in the event of a major drama, or by field telephone, a small handset attached to a piece of two flex D10 wire running along to the next position. In case we decided to go ahead with the landline, we practiced running the D10 out and how we were actually going to speak. Legs went off and came back with a pair of electronic field telephones that even he wasn't familiar with. They had been running from one office to another between Portakabins before he nicked them. We sat with them like children with a new Fisher-Price toy, pressing this, pushing that. "What's this do then? What if I push this?" The priority when filling a bergen is "equipment to task"--in our case, ordnance and equipment that could help us to place or deliver that ordnance. Next came the essentials to enable you to survive--water and food, trauma-management equipment, and, for this op, NBC protection. The equipment in our berg ens was what we would need on the ground to operate. However, radio batteries run down and, along with many other things, would have to be replaced during our two weeks of being self-sufficient. Therefore more equipment had to be taken along and cached, simply to resupply the berg ens This was what was in the jerricans and two sandbags, one containing more NEC kit, the other more food plus any batteries and odds and sods. It added up to an awesome weight of kit. Vince was in charge of distribution. Different types of equipment have to be evenly placed in the patrol. If all the explosives were placed in one bergen and that was lost, for whatever reason, we would then lose our attack capability using explosives. In the Falklands, the task force's entire supply of Mars bars was sent on one ship, and everybody was flapping in case it sank. They should have got Vince to organize it. Besides the tactical considerations behind equal distribution, people want and expect equal loads, whether they're 5'2" or 6'3". We have a scale that weighs up to 200 Lb, and it showed that we were carrying 154 Lb per man in our berg ens and belt kit. On top of that we had a 5gallon jerrican of water each--another 40 Lb. We carried our NEC kit and cache rations, which weighed yet another 15 Lb, in two sandbags that had been tied together to form saddlebags that could go around our necks or over our shoulders. The total weight per man was therefore 209 Lb, the weight of a 15-stone man. Everybody packed their equipment the way they wanted. There's no set way of doing this, as long as you've got it and can use it. The only "must" was the patrol radio, which always goes on top of the signaler's bergen so that it can be retrieved by anybody in a contact. Belt kit consists of ammunition and basic survival requisites--water, food, and trauma-care equipment, plus personal goodies. For this op we would also take TACBEs in our belt kit, plus cam netting to provide cover if we couldn't find any natural, and digging tools to unearth the cables if necessary. Your belt kit should never come off you, but if it does it must never be more than an arm's length away. At night you must always have physical contact with it. If it's off, you sleep on top of it. The same goes for your weapon. The best method of moving the equipment proved to be a shuttle service in two groups of four, with four giving the protection, four doing the humping, and then changing around. It was hard work, and I didn't look forward to the 12 mile tab that first night--or maybe two--from the heli drop-off to the MSR. We certainly wouldn't practice carrying it now: that would be a bit like practicing being wet, cold, and hungry, which wouldn't achieve anything. We did practice getting off the aircraft, and the actions we would carry out if there was a compromise as it was happening or the heli was leaving. Everything now was task-oriented. If you weren't physically doing something to prepare for it, you were thinking about it. As we "walked through, talked through," I could see the concentration etched on everybody's face. We were getting centrally fed, and the cooks were sweating their butts off for us. Most of the Regiment had already disappeared on tasks, but there were enough blokes left to pack the cook house and slag each other off. The boys in A Squadron had given themselves the most outrageous crew cuts right down to the bone. They had suntanned faces in front and sparkly white domes behind. Some of them were the real Mr. Guccis, the lounge lizards downtown of a Friday, and there they were with the world's worst haircuts, no doubt desperately praying the war was going to last long enough for it to grow again. Because a lot of Regiment administration was also being run centrally, I kept bumping into people that I hadn't seen for a long time. You'd give them a good slagging, see what reading material they had, then nick it. It was a really nice time. People were more sociable than usual, probably because we were out of the way, there were no distractions, just the job at hand. Everybody was euphoric. Not since the Second World War and the days of David Stirling had there been so much of the Regiment together at any one time in one theater. We had some very nasty injections at one stage against one of the biological warfare agents it was thought Saddam Hussein might use. The theory was that you got one injection, then waited a couple of days and went back for another, but the majority of us were out of the game after the first jab. It was horrendous: our arms came up like balloons, so we didn't go back. We were told on the 18th that we were going to move forward to another location, an airfield, from where we would mount our operations. We sorted out our personal kit so that if it had to be sent to our next of kin anything upsetting or pornographic had been removed. This would be done by the blokes in the squadron as well, to make sure your rubber fetish was never made public. To make less drama for your family you usually put military kit in one bag and personal effects in another. We labeled it and handed it in to the squadron quartermaster sergeant. We flew out from the operating base on a C130 that was packed with pinkies and mountains of kit. It was tactical, low-level flying, even though we were still in Saudi airspace. There was too much noise for talking. I put on a pair of ear defenders and got my head down. It was pitch-dark when we landed at the large Coalition airbase and started to unload the kit. Noise was constant and earsplitting. Aircraft of all types took off and landed on the brightly lit runway--everything from spotter aircraft to A10 Thunderbolts. We were much closer to the Iraqi border here, and I noticed that it was much chillier than we had been used to. You definitely needed a jumper or smock to keep yourself warm, even with the work of unloading. We laid out our sleeping bags on the grass under the palm trees and got a brew going from our belt kit. I was lying on my back looking up at the stars when I heard a noise that started as low, distant thunder and then grew until it filled the sky. Wave after wave of what looked like B52s were passing overhead enroute to Iraq. Everywhere you looked there were bombers. It could have been a scene from a Second World War recruitment poster. Tankers brought out their lines and jets moved in to fill up. The sky roared for five or six minutes. Such mighty, heart-stirring air power dominating the heavens--and down below on the grass, a bunch of dickheads brewing up. We had been self contained and self-obsessed, seeing nothing of the war but our own preparations. Now it hit home: the Gulf War was not just a small number of men on a task; this was something fucking outrageously major. And bar one more refuel, we were within striking distance of adding to the mayhem. Just before first light Klaxons started wailing, and people ran in all directions. None of us had a clue what was going on, and we stayed put in our sleeping bags. "Get in the shelter!" somebody yelled, but it was too warm where we were. Nobody budged, and quite rightly so. If somebody wanted us to know what was going on, they'd come and tell us. Eventually somebody shouted, "Scud!" and we jumped. We'd just about got to our feet when the order came to stand down. Every hour on the hour during the day, somebody would tune in to the BBC World Service. At certain times you'd hear the signature tune of the Archers as well. When you're away there's always somebody who's listening to the everyday tale of country folk, even if they will not admit it. We were told we were going in that night. It was quite a relief. We'd got to the airfield with only what we stood up in. In the afternoon I gave a formal set of orders. Everybody who was involved in the task was present--all members of the patrol; the squadron OC; the OPS officer who oversees all the squadron's operations. After I had delivered them verbally, the orders would be handed over to the operations center. They would stay there until the mission was completed, so that if anything went wrong, everybody would know what I wanted to happen. If we ought to have been at point A by day 4, for example, and we weren't, they'd know that I wanted a fast jet flying over so I could make contact by TACBE. The top of each orders sheet is overprinted with the words Remember Need to Know to remind you of OP SEC It's critically important that nobody should know anything that does not concern him directly. The pilots, for example, would not attend the orders. I started by describing the ground we were going to cover. You have to explain your orders as if nobody's got a clue what's going on--so in this case I started by pointing out where Iraq was and which countries bordered it. Then you go into the area in detail, which for us was the bend in the MSR. I described the lie of the ground and the little topographical information I had. Everything that I knew, they had to know. Next I gave times of first and last light, the moon states, and the weather forecast. I had been confidently informed by the met blokes that the weather should be cool and dry. Weather information is important because if, for example, you have been briefed in the orders that the prevailing wind is from the northeast, you can use that information to help you with your navigation. Since the weather was still forecast as fairly clement for the duration of our mission, we had again elected to leave our sleeping bags behind. Not that there would have been any room to take them anyway. I now gave the Situation phase of the orders. I would normally tell at this point everything I knew about the enemy that concerned us--weapons, morale, composition, and strengths, and so on--but the intelligence was very scanty. I would also normally mention the location of any friendly forces and how they could help us, but for our op there was nothing to tell. Next was the mission statement, which I repeated twice. It was just as the OC had given it to us in the briefing room: one, to locate and destroy the landline in the area of the northern MSR, and two, to find and destroy Scud. Now came Execution, the real meat of the orders-how we were actually going to carry out the mission. I gave a general outline, broken down into phases, a bit like telling a story. "Phase 1 will be the infiltration, which will be by the Chinook. Phase 2 will be moving up to the LUP-cum cache area. Phase 3 will be LUP routine. Phase 4 will be the recce, then target attack on the landline. Phase 5 will be the actions on Scud location. Phase 6 will be the exfiltration, or resupply and re tasking Then, for each phase, I would go into the detail of how we were going to do it. This has to be as detailed as possible to eliminate gray areas. After every phase I then gave the "actions on"--for instance, actions on compromise during the drop-off, if the patrol came under fire just as the heli.took off again. Then people would know what I wanted to happen when there was no drama, and they'd also know what needed to happen if there was. That was all very fine in theory, of course, but for each of these actions on, you also need to describe every detail of how you want things to be done. All of this had to be talked about and worked out beforehand and then given in the formal orders. Forward planning saves time and energy on the ground because people then know what is required of them. For example, what happens if the heli is required to return to the patrol at some stage to replace a damaged radio? When the heli lands do we go around to the back of the aircraft? Do we take the new radio out of the load master side door? How do we actually call the heli in? What is the authentication code? The answer to this one was that we'd give a phonetic code, the letter Bravo, as recognition. The heli pilot would know that at a certain grid, or in a certain area within that grid, he was going to see us flashing Bravo on infrared. He'd be looking through his PNG (passive night goggles), and because I'd told him so, he'd know he would land 15 feet to the left-hand side of the B when he saw it. Then, because he was landing on my right hand side, all I'd have to do was walk past the cockpit to the load master door, which is behind the cockpit on the left-hand side on the Chinook, throw a radio in, and catch the radio that they threw out. If there were any messages they'd grab my arm and give them to me on a bit of paper. The exchange would be all over in a minute. It took about an hour and a half to go through all the details of each phase. Next were coordinating instructions, the nitty-gritty details like timings, grid references, RVs, locations of interest. These had already been given but would be said again to confirm. This stage also included actions on capture, and details of the E&E plan. I covered service support, which was an inventory of the stores and equipment we were taking with us. And finally I described the chain of command and signals --types of radio, frequencies, schedules, codes and code words and any field signals that were unique to the task. "As I'm sure you all know by now," I said, "our call sign is Bravo Two Zero. The chain of command is myself as patrol commander and Vince as 2 i/c. The rest of you can fight for it." It was now the patrol's chance to ask questions, after which we synchronized watches. The air brief was given by the pilot, since he would be in command during the infil and exfil phases. He showed us a map of the route we were going to take, and talked at some length about the likely difficulty of antiaircraft sites and attack by Roland ground-to-air missiles. He told us what he wanted to happen in the back of the aircraft, and the actions on crashing. I had talked to him about this before and was secretly glad that he wanted us to split up, with the aircrew and the patrol taking their own chances. To be honest, we wouldn't have wanted a bunch of aircrew with us, and for some reason they were not particularly keen to come with us anyway. He spoke, too, about deconfliction, because there were going to be air raids going in on surrounding targets--a number of fixed-launch sites were going to be hosed down within 6 miles of our drop-off point. Our deconfliction was arranged to enable us to slip in under these air strikes and use them for cover. The orders group ended at about 1100. Everybody now knew what they had to do, where they were doing it, and how they were going to do it. At lunchtime, we were told that because of deconfliction we might not be able to get in. However, we were going to attempt it anyway--you don't know until you try. We would refuel just short of the Saudi/ Iraq border, then go over with full tanks. We did a final round of checks, loaded the kit onto wagons, and ate as much fresh food as we could get down us. We were eager to go. The mood was very much one of let's just get in there and do it. We'd leave it to the other blokes to run round stealing tents and kit and generally square everything away. The camp would be sorted out by the time we returned. At 1800 we climbed into the vehicles and drove across to the Chinook. It was all rather casual, with blokes from the squadron coming up and saying, "What size are those new boots of yours--you won't be needing them again, will you?" At our first location four or five of us had nicked some foam mattresses, operating on the usual principle: if it's there and it's shiny, take it. Now some of the other patrols started coming over and saying, "You won't be needing it ever again, will you, so you can leave it for us." They accompanied it with the motion of digging our graves. Even the RSM (Regimental Sergeant Major) appeared. "Get in there, do the business, and come back." That was the extent of his brief. Bob suddenly remembered something. "I've fucked up," he said to a mate. "I haven't completed the will form. My mum's name is down and I've signed it-you'll have to dig in my kit for her address. Can you make sure it's all sorted and handed in?" I had a quick chat with the pilots. They'd been given sets of body armor and were going through big decisions about what to do with it--whether to sit on it so they didn't get their bollocks shot off, or actually wear it so they didn't get shot in the chest. They came to the conclusion that it was better to wear it on the chest, because they could live without their balls. "Not that he has any," said the copilot, "as you will soon find out." It was still light and we could see the downwash of the rotors kicking up a fierce sandstorm as the helicopter took off. When the dust settled, all we could see was blokes looking skywards and waving. We flew low-level across the desert. At first we watched the ground, but there wasn't much to see-just a vast area of sand and a few hills. Dotted across the desert there were peculiar circles that looked like corn circles in reverse--crops growing up rather than pushed down. They were horticultural sites that looked from the air like green sewage-treatment plants, with large watering arms turning constantly to irrigate the crops. They looked so out of place in the barren landscape. It was last light and we were about 12 miles short of the border when the pilot spoke into the headsets. "Get the blokes up to the window and have a look at this." Countless aircraft were in the sky a thousand feet above us. Orchestrated by AWACS, they were flying with split second timing along a complex network of air corridors to avoid collision. Every one of them had its forward lights on. The sky was ablaze with light. It was like Star Wars, all these different colored lights from different sizes of aircraft. We were doing about 100 knots; they must have been flying at 500 or 600. I wondered if they knew about us. I wondered if they were saying to themselves: let's hope we can do a good job so these guys can get in and do their thing. I doubted it. Two fighters screamed down to check us out, then flew back up. "We're 5Ks short of the border," the pilot said. "Watch what happens now." As he spoke, and as if a single fuse controlling the Blackpool illuminations had blown, the sky was suddenly pitch-black. Every aircraft had dowsed its lights at once. We landed in inky blackness for a hot refuel, which meant staying on board with the rotors moving. We were going to receive the final "go" or "no go" here regarding the vital deconfliction, and as the ground crew loomed out of the darkness, I watched anxiously for somebody to give an encouraging signal. One of them looked at the pilot and revolved his hand: Turnaround. Bastard! Another bloke ran up to the pilot with a bit of paper and pushed it through the window. The pilot's voice came over our headsets a moment later: "It's a no go, no go; we've got to go back." Dinger was straight on the intercom. "Well, fuck it, let's get over the border anyway, just to say we've been over there--come on, it's just a couple of Ks away: it won't take long to get there and back. We need to get over, just to stop the slagging when we return." But that wasn't the way the pilot saw it. We stayed on the ground for another twenty minutes while he did his checks and the refueling was completed; then we lifted off and headed south. Wagons were waiting for us. We unloaded all the kit and were taken to the half-squadron location, which by this time had been moved to the other side of the airfield. People had dug shell scrapes and covered them with ponchos and bits of board and cardboard to keep out the wind. It looked like a dossers' camp, bodies in little huddles everywhere, around hexy-block fires. The patrol were in dark moods, not only because of the anticlimax of not getting across the border, but also because we weren't sure what was going to happen next. I was doubly unimpressed because I had given my mattress away. All during the day of the 20th we just hung loose, waiting for something to happen, waiting for a slot. We checked the kit a couple more times and tried to make ourselves a bit of a home in case we had a long wait. We got some camouflage netting up--not from the tactical point of view, because the airfield was in a secure area--but just to keep the wind off and give us some shade during the day. It gives you an illusion of protection to be sheltered under something. Once we had made ourselves comfy, we screamed around the place in LSVs (light strike vehicles) and pinkies seeing what we would nick. The place was a kleptomaniac's dream. We did some good exchanges with the Yanks. Our rations are far superior to the American MREs (meals ready to eat), but theirs do contain some pleasant items --like bags of M&M's and little bottles of Tabasco sauce to add a little je the sais quoi to the beef and dumplings. Another fine bit of Yank kit is the strong plastic spoon that comes with the MRE pack. You can burn a little hole through the back of it, put some string through, and keep it in your pocket: an excellent, almost perfect racing spoon. Because our foam mattresses had been whisked away to a better world during the abortive flight, we tried to get hold of some comfy US issue cots. The Americans had kit coming out of their ears, and bless their cotton socks, they'd happily swap you a cot for a couple of boxes of rations. Little America was on the other side of the airfield. They had everything from microwaves and doughnut machines to Bart Simpson videos screening twenty four hours a day. And why not--the Yanks sure know how to fight a stylish war. Schoolkids in the States were sending big boxes of goodies to the soldiers: pictures from 6-year-olds of a good guy with the US flag, and a bad guy with the Iraqi flag, and the world's supply of soap, toothpaste, writing material, combs, and antiperspirant. They were just left open on tables in the canteen for people to pick what they wanted. The Yanks could not have made us more welcome, and we were straight in there, drinking frothy cappuccino and having a quick root through. Needless to say, we had most of it away. Some of the characters were outrageous and great fun to talk to, especially some of the American pilots who I took to be members of the National Guard. They were all lawyers and sawmill managers in real life, big old boys in their forties and fifties, covered in badges and smoking huge cigars, flying their Thunderbolts and whooping "Yeah boy!" all over the sky. For some of them, this was their third war. They were excellent people, and they had amazing stories to tell. Listening to them was an education. During the next two days we went over the plan again. Now that we had a bit more time, was there anything we could improve on? We talked and talked, but we kept it the same. It was frustration time, just waiting, as if we were in racing blocks and the starter had gone into a trance. I was looking forward to the relief of actually being on the ground. We had a chat with a Jaguar pilot whose aircraft had been stranded at the airfield for several days. On his very first sortie he had had to abort because of problems with a generator. "I want to spend the rest of the war here," he said. "The slagging I'll get when I fly back will be way out of control." We felt quite sorry for him. We knew how he felt. Finally, on the 21st, we got the okay to go in the following night. On the morning of the 22nd we woke at first light. Straightaway Dinger got a fag on. Stan, Dinger, Mark, and I were all under one cam net, surrounded by rations and all sorts of boxes and plastic bags. In the middle was a little hexy-block fire for cooking. Stan got a brew going from the comfort of his sleeping bag. Nobody wanted to rise and shine because it was so bloody cold. We lay there drinking tea, gob bing off, and eating chocolate from the rations. Our beauty sleep had been ruined by another two Scud alerts during the night. We were sleeping with most of our kit on anyway, but it was a major embuggerance to have to pull on your boots, flak jacket, and helmet and leg it down to the slit trenches. Both times We only had to wait ten minutes for the all clear. Dinger opened foil sachets of bangers and beans and got them on the go. Three or four cups of tea and, in Dinger's case, three cigarettes later, we tuned in to the World Service. Wherever you are in the world, you'll learn what's going on from them before any other bugger tells you. We take small shortwave radios with us on all operations and exercises anyway, because if you're stuck in the middle of the jungle, the only link with the outside world you ever get is the World Service. Everywhere you go, people are always bent over their radios tuning in, because the frequencies change depending on the time of day. We were going to take them out on this job as well, because the chances were that it was the first we'd know that the war had ended. Nobody would be able to tell us until we made com ms and that could be the day after Saddam surrendered. We took the piss out of Dinger's radio because it's held together with bits of tape and string. Everybody else had a digital one, and Dinger still had his old steam-powered thing that took an age to tune in. We had heard rumors that there was going to be some mail in that day, our first load since arriving in Saudi. It would be rather nice to hear from home before we went off. I was in the process of buying a house with Jilly, and I had to sign a form giving her power of attorney. I was hoping that was going to come through; otherwise, there would be major dramas for her to sort out if I got topped. The pilot and copilot came over, and we had a final chat about stowing the equipment. I went through the lost com ms routine and actions on contact at the OOP again, to make doubly sure we were both clear in our minds. We spoke to the two loadies, lads in their twenties who were obviously great fans of Apocalypse Now, because the Chinook had guns hanging off it all over the place. The only things missing were the tiger-head emblems on their helmets and Wagner's "Ride of the Valkyries" coming out of their intercom speakers. For them, getting across the border was a once in-a-lifetime opportunity. They were loving it. The pilots knew of some more Roland positions and had worked out a route around them, but from the way the loadies were talking you'd have thought they actually wanted to be attacked. They were gagging to get in amongst it. I imagined it would be a huge anticlimax for them if they dropped us off and came back in one piece. I checked my orders at a table on the other side of the airfield, undistracted. Because the first infil had been aborted, I would have to deliver an orders group all over again that afternoon--not in as much detail, but going over the main points. We waited for the elusive mail. The buzz finally went round that it had arrived and was on the other side of the airfield about half a mile away. It was 1730, just half an hour to go before moving off to the aircraft. Vince and I got into one of the LSVs and screamed round and grabbed hold of the B Squadron bag. One of the blokes received his poll tax demand. Another was the lucky recipient of an invitation to enter a Reader's Digest draw. I was luckier. I got two letters. One was from my mother, the first letter from either of my parents since I was maybe 17. They didn't know I was in the Gulf, but it must have been obvious. I didn't have time to read it. If you're in a rush, what you can do is slit the letters open so that they appear to have been read, so as not to hurt anybody's feelings if you don't return. I recognized an A4 envelope from Jilly. Inside were some toffees, my favorite Pie 'n Mix from Woolies. Oddly enough there were eight of them, one for each of us in the patrol. There was also the power of attorney letter. The Last Supper is quite a big thing before you go out on a job. Everybody turns up and takes the piss. "Next time I see you I'll be looking down as I'm filling you in," somebody said, going through the motion of shoveling earth onto your grave. "Nice knowing you, wanker," somebody else said. "What sort of bike you got at home then? Anyone here to witness he's going to give me his bike if he gets topped?" It was a very lighthearted atmosphere, and people were willing to help out if they could in any preparation. At the same time, another lot of "fresh" turned up. The regimental quartermaster sergeant had got his hands on a consignment of chops, sausages, mushrooms, and all the other ingredients of a good fry-up. It was fantastic scoff, but one unfortunate outcome was that after being on rations for so long, it put us all in need of an urgent shit. 5 The ground crew had been up all night re camouflaging the Chinook a splashy desert pattern that drew wolf whistles and applause from the blokes who'd come to see us off. It was time for passing on last minute messages again. I saw my mate Mick and said: "Any dramas, Eno has got the letters. Make sure you look after the escape map because it's signed by the squadron. I don't want that to go missing: it would be nice for Jilly." I overheard Vince saying: "Any drama, it's down to you to make sure Dee's sorted out." Mick had a camera round his neck. "Do you want a picture?" "Madness not to," I said. We posed on the tailgate of the Chinook for the Bravo Two Zero team photo. The blokes were busy taking the piss out of the aircrew, especially the loadies. One of them was a dead ringer for Gary Kemp from Spandau Ballet, even down to the 1980s sideboards. Two or three blokes from the squadron were standing by a wagon doing the old shu-wap, shu-wap routine, singing "You are gold.. .." The poor lad was getting well embarrassed. Some blokes got together and-practiced doing the pallbearer bit, humming the death march. Others did a takeoff of the Madness video "It must be love," where the singer is standing over a grave and the undertaker's jumping up and down and across measuring him. Interspersed with the banter was the odd muttering of "See you soon" and "Hope it all goes well." The aircrew came round for a final quick chat in their body armor, and we climbed aboard. Nobody flies Club Class in a Chinook. The interior was spartan, a bare hull with plastic coating over the frame. There were no seats, just nonslip flooring to sit on. The deck was littered with sand and grease. A large inboard tank had been fitted to allow us to carry extra fuel. The stink of aviation fuel and engines was overpowering, even at the back near the ramp. It was like sitting in an oven. The loadies kept the top half of the tailgate down to circulate air. The engines sparked up, coughing fearsome clouds of fumes to the rear. From our position on the ramp we saw blokes dropping their kecks and mooning in the heat haze, and the Spandau Ballet gang were giving it some again. As the Chinook lifted, its downwash created a major sandstorm. By the time the dust had settled we had reached a hundred feet, and soon all we could see were the flashing headlights of the pinkies. It was hot and I started to sweat and stink. I felt tired, mentally as well as physically. So many things were running through my mind. The infiltration worried me because we had no control over it: we'd just have to sit there and hope for the best. I've never liked it when my life was in somebody else's hands. There were Roland antiaircraft missiles along our route, and the bigger the machine, the bigger the chance of getting shot down. Chinooks are massive. There was also the added risk of getting hosed down by our own aircraft, since we were going in with the cover of three air raids. I looked forward to getting on the ground, however. It felt good to be in command of such a classic SAS task. Everybody hopes for a major war once in his life, and this was mine, accompanied by a gang that the rest of the squadron was already calling the Foreign Legion. The berg ens were strapped down to stop them flying through the air and landing on top of us if the pilot had to take evasive action or crashed. Just before last light, the loadies cracked cyalume sticks and put them around the kit so we could see where it was, mainly to prevent injury. The sticks are like the ones kids buy at fun fairs--a plastic tube that you bend to crack the glass phials inside and bring two chemicals together to make a luminous mixture. I put on a pair of headsets and talked to the pilot while the rest of the blokes rooted through all the R.A.F kit, sorting out the crew's sandwiches, chocolate, and bottles of mineral water. We had a brief recap on the landing scenarios. If we came into a contact as we landed, we should stay on the aircraft. If we were getting off the aircraft, we should jump back on. But if the heli had already taken off and we had a contact, the Simplex radio gave us about a range of a mile to talk to him and summon him back. "I'll just turn the aircraft and come screaming back in," he said, "and you just get on it however you can, fuck all the kit." The R.A.F are sometimes thought of as glorified taxi drivers, taking you from point A to point B, but they're not: they're an integral part of any operation. For a pilot to bring in a Chinook like that would be totally outrageous. It's a big machine and an easy target, but he was willing to do it. Either he had no idea what would be happening on the ground, or he was blase because that was his job. He obviously knew what he was talking about, so he was blase\ And if he was willing to do it, I wouldn't give a damn: I'd jump back in. As we were flying across Saudi, we started to appreciate the lie of the ground. It looked like a brown billiard table. I'd been in the Middle East lots of times, but I'd never seen anything like this. "We're on Zanussi," Chris said into his headset, using the Regiment term for somebody who's so spaced out and weird you can't get in touch with him; he's on another planet. And Zanussi was what this looked like--another world. Our map studies told us the ground was like this all the way up. We were going to have problems, but it was too late to do anything about it. We were committed. Now and again there'd be a bit of chat on the headphones as the pilots talked to AWACS. I loved watching the two lo adie warlords getting ready for the Big One, checking their guns and hoping, no doubt, that they would get shot at soon. All the time, there was the deafening zsh, zsh, zsh of the rotor blades. Not much was said between ourselves because of the noise. Everybody was just pleased that they weren't rushing around any more, that we were just lying around on the kit drinking water or pissing into one of the bottles we'd just emptied. I was wondering if my life might have been different if I'd stayed at school and got my CSEs. I might have been sitting up in the cockpit now, chatting away, looking forward to a pie and a pint later on. The front lo adie door was half open, like a stable door. Wind rushed through it, cool and refreshing. The straps hanging off the insides of the Chinook flapped and slapped in the gale. We got to the same refueling point as before. Again, the pilot kept the rotors turning. An engine failure at this stage would mean canceling the operation. We stayed on the aircraft, but the back lo adie was straight off into the darkness. The Yanks, God bless 'em, have so much kit they just throw it at you. He returned with Hershey bars, doughnuts, and cans of Coke. For some unaccountable reason, the Yanks had also given him handfuls of Biros and combs. We waited and waited. Bob and I jumped down and went for a dump on the side of the tarmac about 100 feet away. When we got back the lo adie motioned for me to put on my headsets. "We have the go," the pilot said, with just the faintest detectable hint of excitement in his voice. We started to lose altitude. "We're over the border," the pilot said matter-of factly I passed the message on. The blokes started putting their webbing on. Now the aircrew really started earning their money. The banter stopped. They were working with night viewing goggles, screaming along at 80 knots just 70 feet off the ground. The rotor blades had a large diameter and we knew from the map that we were flying in amongst a lot of power lines and obstructions. One lo adie looked out the front at the forward blades, and the other did the same at the rear. The copilot continuously monitored the instruments; the pilot flew by visual and instructions received from the rest of the crew. The exchange between pilot, copilot, and loadies was nonstop as they flew low between features. The tone of the voices was reassuring. Everything was well rehearsed and well practiced. It was all so matter-of fact they could have been in a simulator. Copilot: "100 feet ... 80 feet ... 80 feet." Pilot: "Roger that, 80 feet." Copilot: "Power lines one mile." Pilot: "Roger, power lines one mile. Pulling up." Copilot: "120 ... 150 ... 180 ... 200. That's half a mile. 500 feet now." Pilot: "500 feet. I have the lines visual .. . over we go-" Loadie: "Clear." Pilot: "Okay, going lower." Copilot: "150 ... 120 ... 80 feet. 90 knots." Pilot: "Roger, staying at 80 feet, 90 knots." Copilot: "Reentrant left, one mile." Pilot: "Roger that, I have a building to my right." Loadie: "Roger that, building right." Copilot: "80 feet. 90 knots. Power lines five miles." Pilot: "Roger that, five miles. Breaking right." The loadies were looking at the ground below as well. Apart from watching for obstructions, they checked for any "incoming." Copilot: "80 feet. Metal road coming up, two miles." Pilot: "Roger that. Metal road, two miles." Copilot: "One mile to go. That's 100 knots, 80 feet." At anything below 80 feet the blades would hit the ground as the aircraft turned. Meanwhile, the load masters were looking for obstructions and trying to ensure the blades had enough room to rotate as we hugged any feature that would give the heli some protection. Pilot: "Break my right now. That's nice." Copilot: "Right, that's 70 foot, 100 knots. 70 foot, 90 knots." We had to cross a major obstruction that ran east west across this part of the country. Copilot: "Okay, that's the dual carriage way 5 miles." Pilot: "Let's go up. 200 foot." Copilot: "Okay, got it visual." Us passengers were just sitting there eating Hershey bars when all of a sudden the front lo adie manned his guns. We grabbed our rifles and jumped up as well. We didn't have a clue what was going on. There wouldn't be much we could do because if you put the barrel of your gun out into the slipstream, it's like putting your hand out of a car traveling at 100 mph. We could have done jack shit really, but we felt we had to help him. There wasn't actually a drama. It was just that we were getting near the road and the lo adie was hoping that somebody was going to fire at us so he could have a pop back. It was the main carriage way between Baghdad and Jordan. We crossed it at 500 feet. There were a lot of lights from convoys, but we were unlit and they certainly couldn't hear us. It was our first sight of the enemy. Sighting the road gave us a location fix because we knew exactly where it was on the map. I was just trying to work out how much longer we'd be in the air when I heard a Klaxon. Dinger and I both had headsets on, and we looked at one another as we listened to the crew. "Break left! Break right!" All hell was let loose. The helicopter did severe swings to the left and right. The loadies jumped around, torches on, pressing buttons all over the place as chaff was fired off. The pilots knew where most of the Rolands were, but they obviously hadn't known about this one. The ground-to-air missile had "illuminated" us and set off the inboard warnings. To complicate matters, we were going fairly slowly when it locked on. I saw the expression on Dinger's face in the glow of the cyalume sticks. We'd been lulled into a false sense of security listening to all the confident banter. Now I had the feeling you get when you're driving a car and you glance down for a moment and look back up and find that the situation ahead has suddenly changed and you have to jump on the brakes. I didn't know if the missile had actually fired, or locked on, or what. "Fuck this!" he said. "If it's going to happen, I don't fucking want to hear it!" Simultaneously, we threw our headsets on the floor. I got down and crunched up into a ball, ready to accept the landing. The pilot threw the aircraft all over the sky. The engines groaned and strained as it did its gymnastics. The Chinook leveled out and flew straight ahead. The look on the loadies' faces told us that we'd got away with it. I put the headphones back on and said, "What the fuck was that?" "Probably a Roland, who knows? Not the best of things. It's all right for you lot: we've got to come back this way." I wanted to get off this aircraft and be back in control of my own destiny. It's nice getting chauffeured to a place, but not like this. And it wasn't over yet. If the Iraqis on the ground reported a lock-on, their aircraft might come looking for us. Nobody knew if the Iraqis were getting aircraft into the sky, or if they had night flying capability, but you have to assume the worst scenario. I was sweating like a rapist. Half an hour later, the pilot gave us a two-minute warning that we would be landing. I held up two fingers to the blokes, the same warning as for a parachute drop. The rear lo adie started to undo the straps that held down the kit. The red glow from the penlight torch that he held in his mouth made him look like the devil at work. Four of us had 203s, the American M16 Armalite rifle with a grenade launcher attached that fires a 40mm bomb that looks like a large, stubby bullet; the others had Minimis, a light machine gun. For our purposes, the Armalite is a superior weapon to the Army's new SA80. It's lighter and is very easy to clean and maintain. It's a good, simple weapon that has been around in different variants since Vietnam days. The Regiment tried SASOs in jungle training when they came out, and found it not best suited to its requirements. With the M16 everything's nice and clean; there are no little bits and pieces sticking out. The safety catch is very simple and can be operated with the thumb--with the SA80 you have to use your trigger finger, which is madness. If you're in close country with the M16, you can flick the safety catch off easily with your thumb, and your finger is still on the trigger. What's more, if the safety catch will go to Automatic on your M16, you know it's made ready: this means it is cocked, with a round in the chamber. You see people patrolling with their thumbs checking the safety catch every few minutes; the last thing they want is a negligent discharge within earshot of the enemy. The M16 has a quiet safety catch--another plus if you're patrolling--and there are no parts to go rusty. If rifles were cars, instead of going for a Ford Sierra 4x4 --good, reliable, tested, and enjoyed by the people who drive them--in the SA80 the Army went for a Rolls-Royce. But at the stage when it was first brought into service, it was still a prototype Rolls-Royce, and there were plenty of teething problems. In my opinion the one and only drawback with a 203 is that you can't put a bayonet on because of the grenade launcher underneath. We didn't have slings on the M16s. A sling means a rifle is going over your shoulder: on operations, why would you want to have a weapon over the shoulder rather than in your hands and ready to fire? When you patrol with a weapon you always move with both hands on it and the butt in your shoulder. What's the point of having it if you can't bring it to bear quickly? I'm not interested in how or where a weapon is made, as long as it does the job it needs to do and I know how to use it. As long as it fires ammunition and you've got lots of it, that's all you should be concerned about. Weapons are only as good as their handlers, of course. There's a lot of inbred rivalry between the blokes when it comes to live firing drills. All our weapon training is live firing, and it has to be that way because only then do you get a sense of realism and perspective. In a firefight, the awesome noise will impair your ability to act if you're not well and truly used to it. An Armalite sounds surprisingly tinny when it fires, and there's not much kick. You tend to hear other people's weapons rather than your own. When the 40mm bomb fires, you just hear a pop; there's no explosion or recoil. We had four Minimis, which are 5.56 light-support machine guns They can take belted ammunition in disintegrating link in boxes of 200, or ordinary magazines. The weapon is so light that it can be used in the attack like a rifle as well as giving support fire, and it has a fearsome rate of fire. It has a bipod to guarantee good, accurate automatic fire if needed. The plastic prepacked boxes of ammo for the weapon are not its best design feature. As you're patrolling, the box is across your body; it can bang against you and fall off, but you just have to guard against it. Another problem can be that the rounds are not completely packed in the boxes and you get a rhythmic, banging noise, which is bad news at night as noise travels more easily. Each man in the patrol also carried a disposable 66mm rocket. American-made, the 66 is designed for infantry antitank use. It's just over two foot long and consists of two tubes inside each other. You pull the two apart and the inner tube contains the rocket, all ready to go. As you pull it apart, the sights pop up. You just fire the weapon and throw it away. It's good because it's simple. The simpler something is, the more chance there is that it'll work. The round has a shaped charge on the end, which is designed to punch through armor. The fuse arms itself after about 30 feet; even if you just graze the target, it blows up. The 66 doesn't explode in a big ball of fire as in the movies. HE never does that unless there is a secondary explosion. We carried white phos grenades as well as the ordinary L2 explosive grenade. Phosphorus burns fiercely and lays down a rather good smokescreen if you need time to get away. Grenades no longer have the old pineapple shape that people tend to think of. White phos is cylindrical, with the letters WP written across it. The L2 is more egg shaped and consists of tightly wound wire around an explosive charge. We splay the pins even more than they already are so that it takes more pressure to extract them. We also put masking tape around the grenade to hold the handle down as an extra precaution in case there's a drama with the pin. White phos is not much used in training because it's so dangerous. If you get it on you, you have to pour water very slowly from your water bottle to stop it getting oxygen, then pick it off. If you're not successful, it's not a nice way to die. We had at least 10 magazines each, 12 40mm bombs, L2 and phos grenades, and a 66. The four Minimi gunners had more than 600 rounds each, plus 6 loaded mags. For an 8-man patrol it was a fearsome amount of firepower. Those of us with 203s checked there was a bomb loaded. Bob was checking that the belts of ammunition for his Minimi weren't kinked--the secret of belt-fed ammunition is that it goes into the weapon smoothly. If it's twisted, you'll get a stoppage. I saw Vince checking the box of ammunition that clips on to the side of the weapon to make sure it was not going to fall off. His gang were going to provide all-round cover by moving straight out to points just beyond the wash of the aircraft. As they were running out, the rest of us would be throwing the kit off the tailgate as fast as we could. Stan checked his white phos to make sure it was easy to get at. Everybody was mentally adjusting himself ready to go. Blokes jumped up and down to check that everything was comfy. You do simple things like undo your trousers, pull them up, ruck everything in, redo them, tighten your belt, make sure your belt kit is comfortable, make sure your pouches and buttons are done up. Then you check and recheck that you've got everything and haven't left anything on the floor. I could tell by the grind of the blades that the heli was maneuvering close to the ground. The tailgate started to lower. I peered out. You're incredibly vulnerable during the landing. The enemy could be firing at the aircraft, but because of the engine noise you wouldn't know until you were on the ground. The ramp came down more. The landscape was a black-and-white negative under the quarter moon. We were in a small wadi with a 13-foot rise either side. Clouds of dust flew up, and Vince and his gang moved onto the tailgate, weapons at the ready. There was a strong smell of fuel. The noise was deafening. The aircraft was still a few feet off the ground when they jumped. If there was a contact, we wouldn't know about it until we saw them jumping straight back on. The pilot collapsed the Chinook the last couple of feet onto the ground. We hurled the kit, and Stan, Dinger, and Mark jumped after it. I stayed on board while the lo adie went across the floor with a cyalume stick in his hand in a last-minute sweep. The noise of the rotors increased, and I felt the heli lift its weight off the undercarriage. I waited. It's always worth the extra ten seconds it takes to make sure, rather than discover when the heli has gone that you've only picked up half the equipment. The balance, as ever, is between speed and doing the job correctly. The lo adie gave the thumbs up and said something into his headset. The aircraft started to lift and I jumped. I hit the ground and looked up. The heli was climbing fast with the ramp still closing. Within seconds it was gone. It was 2100 and we were on our own. We were on a dried-up riverbed. To the east was flatness and dark. To the west, the same. The night sky was crystal clear, and all the stars were out. It was absolutely beautiful. I could see my breath. It was colder than we had been used to. There was a definite chill in the air. Sweat ran down the side of my face, and I started to shiver. Eyes take a long time to adjust in darkness. The cones in your eyes enable you to see in the daytime, giving color and perception. But they're no good at night. What takes over then are the rods on the edge of your irises. They are angled at 45 degrees because of the convex shape of the eye, so if you look straight at something at night you don't really see it: it's a haze. You have to look above it or around it so you can line up these rods, which then will give you a picture. It takes forty minutes or so for them to become fully effective, but you start to see better after five. And what you see when you land and what you see those five minutes later are two very different things. Vince with his hoods was still out giving cover. They had gone out about 30 meters to the edge of the rise of the wadi and were looking over. We moved off to the side to make a more secure area. It took each of us two trips to ferry the berg ens jerricans, and sandbags. Mark got out Magellan and took a fix. He squinted at it with one eye. Even small amounts of light can wreck your night vision, and the process must start all over again. If you have to look at something, you close the eye that you aim with, the "master eye," and look with the other. Therefore you can still have 50 percent night vision, and it's in the eye that does the business. We lay in all-round defense, covering the whole 360degree arc. We did nothing, absolutely nothing, for the next ten minutes. You've come off a noisy, smelly aircraft, and there's been a frenzy of activity. You have to give your body a chance to tune in to your new environment. You have to adjust to the sounds and smells and sights, and changes in climate and terrain. When you're tracking people in the jungle you do the same: you stop every so often and look and listen. It happens in ordinary life, too. You feel more at ease in a strange house after you've been in it a little while. People indigenous to an area can sense instinctively if the mood is ugly and there's going to be trouble; a tourist will bumble straight into it. We needed to confirm our position because there's often a difference between where you want to be and where the R.A.F put you. Once you know where you are, you make sure that everybody else in the patrol knows. Passage of information is vital; it's no good just the leader having it. We were in fact where we wanted to be, which was a shame, because now we couldn't slag the R.A.F when we got back. The ground was featureless. It was hard bedrock with about two inches of rubbly shale over the top. It looked alien and desolate, like the set of Dr. Who. We could have been on the moon. I'd been in the Middle East many times on different tasks, and I thought I was familiar with the ground, but this was new to me. My ears strained as a dog barked in the distance. We were very isolated, but we were a big gang, we had more weapons and ammunition than you could shake a stick at, and we were doing what we were paid to do. Bombing raids were going on about 10-20 miles to our east and our northeast. I saw tracer going up and flashes on the horizon, and seconds later I heard the muffled sound of explosions. Silhouetted in one of the flashes I saw a plantation about a mile to our east. It shouldn't have been there, but it was--trees, a water tower, a building. Now I knew where the barking had come from. More dogs sparked up. They would have heard the Chinook, but as far as any population were concerned a helicopter's a helicopter. Problems would only come if there were troops stationed there. I worried about how good the rest of our information was. But at the end of the day we were there now: there wasn't a lot we could do about it. We lay waiting for signs of cars starting up but nothing happened. I looked beyond the plantation. I seemed to be staring into infinity. I watched the tracer going up. I couldn't see any aircraft, but it was a wonderful, comforting feeling all the same. I had the feeling they were doing it just for us. "Fuck it, let's get on with it," Mark said quietly. I got to my feet, and suddenly, to the west, the earth erupted with noise and there was a blinding light in the sky. "Fucking hell, what's that?" Mark whispered. "Helicopter!" Where it had sprung from I didn't have a clue. All I knew was that we'd just been on the ground ten minutes and were about to have a major drama. There was no way the heli could be one of ours. For a start, it wouldn't have had its searchlight on like that. Whoever it belonged to, it looked as if it was coming straight towards us. Jesus, how could the Iraqis be on to us so quickly? Could they have been tracking the Chinook ever since we entered their airspace? The light seemed to keep coming and coming. Then I realized it wasn't coming towards us but going upwards. The bright light wasn't a searchlight; it was a fireball. "Scud!" I whispered. I could hear the sighs of relief. It was the first one any of us had seen being launched, and now that we knew what it was, it looked just like an Apollo moon shot, a big ball of exhaust flames about 6 miles away, burning straight up into the air until it finally disappeared into the darkness. "Scud alley," "Scud triangle," both these terms had been used by the media, and now here we were, right in the middle of it. Once everything had settled down, I went up and whispered in Vince's ear for him to call the rest of the guns in. There was no running or rushing. Shape, shine, shadow, silhouette, movement, and noise are some of the things that will always give you away. Slow movement doesn't generate noise or catch the eye so easily, which is why we patrol so slowly. Plus, if you run and fall over and injure yourself, you'll screw everybody up. I told them exactly where we were, and confirmed which way we would be going, and confirmed the RV that was forward of us. So if there was any major drama between where we were now and our proposed cache area and we got split up, everybody knew that for the next twenty-four hours there was a meeting place already set up. They would go north, eventually hit a half buried petroleum pipeline and follow that till they hit a major ridgeline, and we'd meet there. It had to be that vague because anything more precise would mean nothing to a bloke in the middle of the desert with just a map and compass: all the map shows is rock. After that, and for the next twenty-four hours, the next RV would be back at the point of the landing site. Now we had to patrol up to the proposed cache area. We did it in a shuttle, as we had practiced, four blokes ferrying the kit, the other four giving protection, then swapping over. Because we were patrolling, everything had to be done tactically: we'd stop, check the ground ahead, and every couple of miles, when we stopped for a rest, the 4-man protection would go out; then we'd check the kit to make sure that we hadn't dropped anything, that all pouches were still done up, and none of the sandbags had split. The water was the worst because it was like carrying the world's heaviest suitcase in one hand. I tried mine on the top of my bergen until the strain on my back got too outrageous. But then, nobody said it would be easy. Moving as quickly but as tactically as we could, we had to get to the MSR well before first light to give us time to find somewhere to cache the kit and hide up. In my orders I'd put a cutoff time of 0400 the next morning; even if we hadn't reached the proposed cache area by then, we'd have to start finding an LUP. That would give us an hour and a half of darkness to work in. The ground worried me. If it carried on like this it was going to be too flat and too hard to hide up in. If we had to lie in open ground in broad daylight we'd stick out like the balls on a bulldog. We navigated by bearings, time, and distance. We had Magellan, but it was only an aid. Patrolling as we were was not a good time to use it. Apart from the fact that it could not be depended upon, the machine emitted telltale light, and it would not be tactical anyway for the operator to be looking at a machine rather than the ground. Every half hour or so we fixed a new ERV emergency rendezvous), a point on the ground where we could regroup if we had a contact and had to withdraw swiftly. If we came to a prominent feature like a pile of old burial ruins, the lead man would indicate it as the new ERV by a circular motion of the hand and this would be passed down the patrol. All the time, you keep making appreciations. You've got to say to yourself: What if? What happens if we get an attack from the front? Or from the left? Where will I go for cover? Is this a good ambush point? Where was the last emergency RV? Who have I got in front of me? Who have I got behind me? You have to check all the time that you're not losing anyone. And you always have to cover your arcs and be conscious of the noise you're making. As you patrol you start to get hot. When you stop you get cold again. You're sitting there with all the coldness down your back and under your armpits, and your face starts to feel it. The back of your hair starts to get that horrible, uncomfortable, sticky feeling, and the clothing around your belt is soaked. Then you move off again because you want to be warm. You don't want to stop for too long because you don't want to freeze. You've been like this plenty of times before, and you know that you'll dry out eventually, but that doesn't make it any less of a pain in the arse. We finally got into the area of the bend of the MSR at about 0445. We couldn't see any lights or vehicles in the pitch-black. We cached the equipment, and Vince's gang stayed to protect it. The rest of us were going to go forward for a recce to find a place to hide. "My cutoff time to be back here will be 0545," I whispered to Vince, my mouth right against his ear so that the sound didn't carry. If we failed to return but they knew there hadn't been a contact because they hadn't heard any noise, we would meet at the patrol RV near the oil pipeline. If we weren't at the patrol RV by the twenty-four-hour cutoff time, Vince was then to move back to the RV at the heli-landing site, then wait a further twenty-four hours before requesting an exfil. If we weren't there, he'd just have to get on the helicopter and go. They should also move back to the helicopter RV if they heard a contact but it wasn't close enough for them to give support. I went through the actions on return. "I will come in the same direction as I leave," I whispered to Vince, "and as I come in I'll approach just on my own with my weapon in my right arm and walk in as a crucifix." I would then come forward and confirm with the stag and go back and bring the other three in. I would do all this on my own because as well as confirming that it was me, I would want to confirm that it was safe to come in--they might have been bumped, and the enemy could be waiting in ambush. The other three would be out supporting, so if there was any drama, they would lay down fire and I could withdraw to them. We set out on our recce patrol, and after about half an hour we found a good site for the LUP--a watershed where flash floods over thousands of years had carved a small reentrant about 15 feet high into the rock so that there was an overhang. We would be in dead ground, covered from view and with limited cover from fire. I couldn't believe our luck. We patrolled straight back to fetch the others. We moved all the equipment into the LUP. The cave was divided by a large rock, so we centralized the equipment and had the two gangs either side. At last I felt secure, even though the problem with finding an LUP at night is that in the morning everything can look different. You can find that what you thought was the perfect LUP is smack in the middle of a housing estate. Now was another period of stop, settle down, be quiet, listen to what's going on, tune in to the new environment. The ground did not look so alien now, and we were feeling more confident. It was time to get some sleep. There's an army saying, "Whenever there's a lull in the battle, get your head down," and it's true. You've got to sleep whenever you can, because you never know when you're going to get the opportunity again. There were two men on stag, changing every two hours. They had to look and listen. If anything came towards us, it was their job to warn us and get us stood to. The rest of us slept covering our arcs, so we'd just have to roll over and start firing. More jets went over that night. We saw flak going up and Baghdad erupting to our half right about 100 miles away. There were no incidents on the ground. Just as it was coming up to first light, two of us moved out of the LUP position and checked that we hadn't left footprints on our way in to the LUP, dropped any kit, disturbed anything, or left any other "sign" to betray us. You must assume that everybody is better at everything than you--including tracking-and make your plans accordingly. We arranged our claymores so that both men on stag could see them and their field of view, and be ready to detonate them with hand-held "clackers." If the stag saw or heard movement, he'd wake everybody else. There wouldn't be hectic running around, we'd just stand to. Everything is always done at a slow pace. You'd know if it had to be rushed because you'd hear the stag firing. If somebody was in a position to be hit with a claymore, we were in a position to be compromised, so it was down to the sentry whether or not he pushed the clackers. If they came as close as the kill zone of the claymores, which were positioned as a protection of last resort, we'd just have to initiate the contact. But still the best weapon we had was concealment. I went up onto the dead ground to double-check. Looking north towards the MSR, I saw a flat area of 2000 feet, then a slight rise of about 15 feet, and then, another 1300 feet away, a plantation. Looking east and west, the ground was flat as far as the horizon. South, to my rear, I saw another plantation about 1500 meters away, with a water tower and buildings. According to the map and Bert's briefing these locations shouldn't have been there, but they were, and they were far too close for comfort. I heard vehicles moving along the as yet unconfirmed MSR, but that was of no concern. The only way anybody could see us was if they were on the opposite lip looking down. No one on our side of the wadi could see us because of the overhang. They could only see us if we could see them. I went down and briefed everybody on what was above us. Only one man was needed on stag because from his vantage point he could look down the wadi as well as up on the lip. He had his back to us as I did the briefing, covering his arcs. I described what I'd seen on the high ground and went through our actions on if we had a contact during the day. It was time to transmit the Sit Rep (situation report) to the FOB. Until we did, nobody knew where we were or what state we were in. On this task we would try to send a Sit Rep every day, telling them where we were, everything we had learned about the enemy in the area or done with them, our future intentions, and any other information. They would come back to us with instructions. As I wrote it out, Legs prepared the radio. He encoded the message and typed it in ready for transmission. The patrol radio would transmit in a single, very short burst that was virtually undetectable by the enemy. The burst would bounce off the ionosphere, and we would wait for some kind of an acknowledgment. We got jack shit. Legs tried again and again, but nothing happened. It was annoying but not desperate, because we had a lost com ms procedure. The following night, we'd simply go back to the landing site and RV with a heli at 0400 to exchange the radios. For the rest of that day we tried different antennas-everything from sloping wire to half-wave dipole. All of us were signals trained and we all had a go, but without success. We each did two hours' stag, and half an hour before last light we stood to. The ideal conditions for an attack are just before last light and just before first light, so it is an SOP that everybody is awake at those times and everything is packed away ready to go. We got into the fire position with our weapons and prepared our 66s, removing the top cover and opening up the tube so it was ready to fire. Once last light had come, we closed everything up again and got ready for our recce patrol. I left with my gang at 2100. Our cutoff time was to be 0500. If we weren't back by then, it would be because we'd had a drama--we'd got lost, got an injury, or had a contact, which Vince's lot should hear. If they didn't hear a contact, they were to wait at the LUP until 2100 the following night. If we weren't back by then, they were to move to the heli RV. If there was a contact, they were to move back to the heli RV that night, and we'd make our way back there as best we could, to get there for the following 0400 pickup. Stan, Dinger, Mark, and I climbed over the lip of the wadi in total blackness. The task was to confirm the position of the Main Supply Route and to locate the landline. It's no good just sitting there on top of what you think is your objective unless you have checked. One mile further on for all we knew, there could be the proper MSR, so it had to be physically checked. We would patrol in an anticlockwise direction, generally heading north, using the lie of the ground, to see if we hit anything else which resembled the MSR. First, we needed to locate a marker that would guide us back to the LUP if we got lost. We would take a bearing due north until we hit the other side of the road, where we'd try to find a rock or some other feature. Then if we did get lost, we'd know that all we'd have to do was go along the high ground, find the marker, and move due south back onto the watershed. It was going to be difficult to map-read because there were no definite features. In most countries there's high ground that you can take reference points off, there are roads, or there are markers, and it's all quite easy. In the jungle, too, it's simple, because you've got lots of rivers and you can use contour lines. But here in the middle of the desert there was absolutely bugger all, so it was all down to bearings and pacing again, backed up by Magellan. We found a suitable marker, a large rock, and started heading west on our anticlockwise loop. Within minutes we spotted our first location of the night and immediately heard a dog. Bedu throw their hand in at night; when the sun's down, they go to bed. So if a dog barks, they know there must be something afoot. Within seconds, this one had been joined by two others. I had been the first to hear the low growling. It reminded me of patrolling in Northern Ireland. You stop and assess what's happening. Nine times out of ten you're intruding on a dog's territory, and if you back off, sit down, and just wait for everything to settle down, it will. Our problem was that we had to recce the location properly. The dogs could be part of a Scud site for all we knew. As we sat down we pulled our fighting knives from their sheaths. They would be called upon to do the business if the dogs came to investigate and either started barking in earnest or decided to attack. Either way, we'd kill them. We'd take the bodies with us, so that in the morning the owners would assume that their animals had run away or wandered off. They would find it strange, but that would be the best we could make of a bad situation. We listened, waiting for lights as people came to see what the dogs were barking at. Nothing happened. We started to box around the position, circumnavigating to see if we could get in another way to confirm what it was. We got around the other side and found it was just some local population. There were tents, mud huts, Land Cruisers, and a hash mash of other vehicles, but no military indication. We got a fix on it with Magellan so that when we returned to the LUP we could inform the others, then headed off northwest using the ground. We wanted to avoid until later the plantation that we knew to be to our north. I was leading when I saw something ahead. I stopped, looked, listened, then slowly moved closer. Four tents and vehicles were parked next to two S60 antiaircraft guns, indicating a setup of about platoon strength. All was quiet, and there didn't seem to be any stags. Mark and I moved slowly forward. Again, we stopped, looked, listened. We didn't want to get right on top of the position, just close enough to learn as much about it as we could. Nobody was sleeping on the guns or in the vehicles. The whole platoon must have been in the tents. We heard men coughing. The location wasn't an immediate danger to us, but what worried me was that antiaircraft guns are sited to guard something. If it was just the MSR that would be no problem. The danger was that it could be part of an armored battle group or whatever. Mark fixed the position with Magellan, and we headed north. We went for 2 miles without encountering anything, and came to the conclusion that what we had crossed earlier must indeed have been the MSR. Magellan gave our LUP position as a half mile north of where the map said the MSR was, which was nothing to worry about. The map stated that roads, pylons, and pipelines were only of approximate alignment. We now knew for sure that we had correctly found the bend in the MSR, but unfortunately we also knew that the area was full of population: we had plantations north and south of us, the civilians further down the road, and an S60 site to the northwest of our LUP. From a tactical point of view, we might as well have sited our LUP in the middle of Piccadilly Circus. Still, nobody said it would be easy. We moved back to look around the buildings at the plantation to the north of the LUPI had planned to look at this last as it was the most dangerous location we knew about prior to the recce. We had a bit of a mince around the plantation and found that it consisted of just a water tower and an unoccupied building that sounded as if it housed an irrigation pump. There were no vehicles, no lights, no signs of life, so we were fairly pleased. It was clearly something that was tended rather than lived around. As we moved back to the LUP, we witnessed another Scud launch to our northwest, about 3 miles away. We seemed to be in the middle of a mega launch area. We were going to have a fluffy old time of it. Again, we got a fix. We patrolled back towards the LUP, found the marker, and walked due south towards the wadi. I approached, arms out in the crucifix position, as I came up to the lip of the watershed. Bob was on stag. I stood there and waited for him to come up. He grinned at me, and I went back and got the rest of the blokes. I checked my watch. The patrol had lasted five hours. It wasn't worth briefing the blokes at this moment because those not on stag had got their heads down, and to brief everybody at night just generates noise. It was important, however, that everybody knew what we had seen. Everything we had done and seen, everybody else had to know about. I decided to wait until first light. The stag stood us to, and we covered our arcs as first light came. After that, and before I did the brief, I wanted to check the dead ground again, even though we'd covered it last night. I knew we were definitely on the MSR, but I wanted to look for any form of identification which would give us the landlines. It was also a personal thing; I wanted to check that there had been no changes above us. Shielded from sound by the walls of the cave, we could have sat there with Genesis giving an open-air concert and we wouldn't have heard a thing. Chris covered me while I scrambled up the rocks and peered over the brim. It was the last time I'd risk doing this in daylight. I looked northeast and there, just on the far edge of the MSR, were another two S60s. They must have arrived during the night. I could see two wagons, tents, blokes stretching and coughing--all just 1000 feet from our position. I couldn't believe it. This was getting unreal. Our recce patrol must have missed them by about 150 feet. I came down and told Chris, then went to brief the rest of the patrol. Mark went up and had a quick squint to confirm that I wasn't hallucinating. I was not really impressed by this development. It was quite scary stuff, because these characters were right on top of us. They were going to inhibit us badly. I spread out the map and showed all the locations we had discovered--including the new S60 sites. We spent the rest of the day trying to transmit our Sit Rep again. The new S60s were obviously there to protect the MSR. There was no reason, however, why they should send out clearing patrols. They were in their own country and they had mutual support. We reassured ourselves that we could only be compromised from the opposite lip, and even then only if someone was literally standing on it, looking down. Again we all had a go with the radio, but to no avail. Our lost com ms contingency would have come into effect by now, and the helicopter would have been briefed to meet us the following morning at 0400. There was no concern. We were in cover, and we were an 8-man fighting patrol. When we met the aircraft we would get a one-for-one exchange, or get on the aircraft and relocate. In my mind I ran through the heli RV procedure again. The pilot would be coming in on NVG (night viewing goggles), watching for a signal from my infrared torch. I would flash the letter Bravo as a recognition signal. He would land 15 feet to my right, using the light as his reference point. The load master door was just behind the pilot, and all I would have to do was walk up to it, put the radio in, and receive the new radio that was handed to me. If there was any message for us, he would grab hold of my arm and hand me the written message. Or, if a longer message was involved, the ramp would come down and the lo adie would come and drag me round to the back. The rest of the patrol would be out in all-round defense. If I had to go and get them in, they knew the drills. If I wanted to get us relocated, I would grab hold of the lo adie and point to the rear of the ramp. The ramp would then come down, and we'd all get on. And that was the plan. No drama. We would move back that night and relocate. 6 We'd been listening to vehicles bumbling up and down the MSR all day. They posed no threat. Around mid-afternoon, however, we heard a young voice shout from no more than 150 feet away. The child hollered and yelled again; then we heard the clatter of goats and the tinkle of a bell. It wasn't a problem. We couldn't be compromised unless we could see the person on the other side of the lip. There was no other way that we could be seen. I felt confident. The goats came closer. We were on hard routine, and everybody had their belt kit on and their weapons in their hands. It wasn't as if we'd been startled in our sleeping bags or caught sunbathing. Just the same, I felt my thumb creep towards the safety catch of my 203. The bell tinkled right above us. I looked up just as the head of a goat appeared on the other side. I felt my jaw tighten with apprehension. Everybody was rock still. Only our eyes were moving. More goats wandered onto the lip. Was the herder going to follow them? The top of a young human head bobbed into view. It stopped and swiveled. Then it came forward. I saw the profile of a small brown face. The boy seemed preoccupied with something behind him. He was half looking over his shoulder as he shuffled forwards. His neck and shoulders came into view, then his chest. He can't have been more than a 3 feet from the edge of the lip. He swung his head from side to side, shouting at the goats and hitting them with a long stick. I silently shouted at him not to look down. We still had a chance, as long as he kept looking the other way. Please, no eye-to-eye, just look at what you're doing .. . He turned his head and surveyed the scene. I slowly mouthed the words: Fuck .. . off! He looked down. Bastard! Shit! Our eyes met and held. I'd never seen such a look of astonishment in a child's eyes. Now what? He was rooted to the spot. The options raced through my mind. Do we top him? Too much noise. Anyway, what was the point? I wouldn't want that on my conscience for the rest of my life. Shit, I could have been an Iraqi behind the lines in Britain, and that could have been Katie up there. The boy started to run. My eyes followed him, and I made my move. Mark and Vince, too, were scrambling like men possessed in an attempt to cut him off. Just to get him, that had to be the first priority. We could decide later what to do with him--to tie him up and stuff his gob with chocolate, or whatever. But we could only go so far without exposing ourselves to the S60 sites, and the child had too much of a head start. He was gone, fucking gone, hollering like a lunatic, running towards the guns. He could do a number of things. He might not tell anybody because it would get him into trouble-maybe he shouldn't have been in the area. He might tell his family or friends, but only when he got home later. Or he might keep running and shouting all the way to the guns. I had to assume the worst. So what? They might not believe him. They might come and see for themselves. Or they might wait for reinforcements. I had to take it that they would inform others and then come after us. So what? If they discovered us, there would be a contact before dark. If they didn't discover us, there would be a chance to evade under cover of darkness. We had picked our LUP because it provided concealment from view--apart from the one place where the boy had gone and stood. We certainly hadn't picked it as a place to defend. It was an enclosed environment, at the top of a watershed, with nowhere to go There was no need to say anything: everybody knew we'd have to take it as a compromise. Everything happened in quick time. However, that wasn't to say we just got our kit on and ran, because that would have been totally counterproductive. It's worth taking those extra few minutes to get yourself squared away. Everybody rammed chocolate down as well as water. We didn't know when we would next be able to eat. We checked that our pouches were done up, that the buttons were fastened on our map pockets so the map didn't fall out, that our magazines were on correctly. Check, check, check. Vince put Stan and Bob out with the Minimis. As soon as two other men were ready, they'd swap places and let the two stags get themselves sorted out. Everybody else automatically carried out tasks that needed to be done. Vince went through the cached kit. He pulled out a jerrican of water and helped everybody fill their bottles. If we got into a contact, we were going to lose our berg ens and all that they contained. People took great gulps to get as much water on board as they could, draining their bottles, then refilling. Even if there was no contact, we all knew we were in for a fearsome tab. We checked our belt kit, making sure all pouches were done up so that we didn't lose anything as we ran. Mags on tight? Check them again. Safety catch on and weapon made ready? Of course they were but we checked them anyway. We closed down the two tubes of our 66s and slotted them together to make them easy to carry. We didn't bother to replace the end-caps or sling, just slipped the weapon between our webbing straps, ready for quick use. We checked that spare magazines were ready to pull out. Pick them up the wrong way, and you waste a precious second or two turning them around. Put them in your belt kit with the curve the right way up, and they're ready to slap into place. A lot of people put a tab of masking tape on the mag to make it easier to pull out. When my mags were empty, I'd throw them down the front of my smock for refilling later. We could use the rounds from the belts of the Minimi. All this took a couple of minutes, but it was time better spent than just getting up and running. They knew we were there, so why rush? The stags would tell us if they were coming. Legs had got straight onto the radio. He went outrageous, running out all the antennas, trying different combinations that he hadn't been able to try while we were concealed. Now we were compromised, he could do anything he wanted. If the message got through, they could send some fast jets over. We could talk to the pilots on TACBE and get some fire down, which would all be rather pleasant. Legs's water was done for him. While he was bent over, the radio blokes opened his belt kit, took the water bottles out, and let him drink before they filled them up again, and threw more food into his belt kit. When he sensed that we'd run out of time, he dismantled the kit and packed it at the top of his bergen. "Instructions are in my right-hand map pocket in my trousers," he told everybody. "Radio's on top of my bergen." All of it was a well-established SOP so that if he went down we'd be able to retrieve the equipment quickly, but he was going by the book to ensure that everybody knew. When he was ready, Legs replaced Bob on stag. There was an air of acceptance by everybody, the calm of well-practiced drills being followed to the letter. Bob, who'd done nothing but sleep since we'd arrived, was worried about having to move again so soon. "We ought to have a union," he said. "These hours are scandalous." "Food's fucking crap and all," said Mark. The jokes were good to hear because they relaxed the situation. Dinger got his fags out. "Fuck it, they know we're here. I might as well have a smoke. I could be dead in a minute." "I'll put you on a fizzer!" Vince shouted as he went out and took over from Stan on the Minimi. It was a standard piss-taking joke, referring to a piece of army slang that people think is said but which in fact is never heard. Everybody was ready to move if necessary. It had taken us a total of three minutes. There was about an hour and a half of daylight left. Our best weapon had been concealment, but the boy had disarmed us. Where we were, we couldn't fight. It was such a closed environment that it would take just one or two HE rounds to hose us down. The only option was to get out into the open and fight, or maybe get away. We were in the shit if we stayed where we were, and we were in the shit if we were out in the open because there was no cover. It was out of the frying pan into the fire, but at least in the fire we had a slim chance. The rumble of the tracked vehicle came from the south. We couldn't get out of the wadi now; it was too late. Our only exit was blocked by this armored vehicle. We would just have to stand there and fight. I couldn't understand why they were bringing an APC down in this small, confined space. Surely they would take it for granted that we'd have anti armor weapons? We snapped open our 66s and ran around to find a decent firing position. Chris pranced around with his old German Afrika Corps hat on, pointing at our 66s and talking to us like the world's most patient instructor. "Now boys, remember the backblast! Do, please, remember the backblast! This face has got to go downtown on a Saturday night. The last thing it needs is a peppering!" Stan stared down the sights of his cocked Minimi at the line of the watershed, towards the sound of the tracked vehicle. It trundled closer. There was a glint of metal as it came into view. What in hell's name was it? It didn't look like the APC I had been expecting. Stan shouted: "Bulldozer!" Unbelievable. A major drama was about to erupt and this idiot was pottering about with a digger. It came to within 500 feet of our position, but the driver never saw us. He was dressed in civilian clothes. He must have been there quite innocently. "Don't fire," I said. "We've got to take it as a compromise, but what sort of compromise we don't know yet." The driver's attention seemed focused on finding a way out of the wadi. He maneuvred this way and that for what seemed an eternity. "Fuck it," I said to Vince, "we need to go. We just can't sit here." The ideal would have been to wait for last light, but I sensed that the situation was going to get out of hand. The bulldozer disappeared suddenly, and the engine noise faded. The driver must have found the gap he was looking for. It was time to go. I told Stan to bring in the blokes on the Minimis so everybody could hear what I was going to say. We huddled around with our belt kit on and our berg ens at our feet. It was a vulnerable time because everybody was so close together, but it had to be done: everybody had to know what was going on. I started by staring the obvious. "We're going to move from here," I said. "We're going to go west, try to avoid the AA guns, and then head south and go for the RV with the helicopter. The helicopter RV will be at 0400 tomorrow." "See you in the Pudding Club," Chris said. "Fuck that," Dinger said in his terrible W. C. Fields voice. "Go west, young man, go west." We shouldered our berg ens and rechecked our belt kit. The rest of it was left behind. Even the claymores remained because we didn't have time to pick them up. Because of the S60 sites, there was only one way out. West, then south, using dips in the ground as much as we could. But we wouldn't rush it. We didn't want to make mistakes. We had loads of time to make the heli RV, if we could only get out of this shit and get under cover of darkness. I was feeling apprehensive but comfortable. We deserved better after all the hard work of planning, tabbing in, locating and confirming the MSR, and just the bad luck of lost com ms I'd thought we'd cracked it: we only had to wait until 0400 the next morning and we'd be back in business. But at the end of the day, we were an 8-man fighting patrol, we had guns, we had bullets, we had 66s. What more could a man ask for? "Come on," said Mark, "let's make like rag heads." We pulled our shamags over our faces. The sun was in our eyes as I led us out in single file. We patrolled properly, taking our time, observing the ground. The wadi petered out and became flat plain. We came out west, using the lie of the ground, then turned left, heading south. I kept checking to the north because I didn't want us to get in line with the antiaircraft gu