A doctor was brought in. He dressed Chris’s feet and bandaged them up. As he was finishing, the boy came back with the trousers. This time they were a perfect fit.
The chief asked Chris if he’d care for a little food and led him to his dining room. The table was groaning under the weight of steaks, kebabs, vegetables, fruit, freshly baked bread. Chris knocked back a liter of water and then got stuck into a steak. He could manage only a few mouthfuls.
The chief was really getting into it now and offered him a night on the town.
“I’m sorry,” Chris said, “but I think I should go to the British Embassy as soon as possible.”
The chief looked really disappointed as he telephoned the embassy and arranged for somebody to come and collect Chris. He’d probably been looking forward to a night out on expenses.
When the driver from the British Embassy arrived, he, too, bowed to the chief. Then he picked up Chris’s dirty kit and carried it to the car while Chris shook hands with his new bosom buddy.
The embassy sent messages at once to Joint Headquarters at High Wycombe and to Riyadh, and made arrangements for Chris to fly out the next evening. It was the first news anybody had had of Bravo Two Zero since the night of the infil.
Chris had walked more than 180 miles in the eight nights of his E amp;E. In all that time he’d had nothing to eat except the two small packets of biscuits that he had shared with Vince and Stan, and he’d had virtually nothing to drink. He had lost an enormous amount of body weight, and his survival was attributed to his system feeding on its own meat.
It was two weeks before Chris could walk again properly, and six weeks before he got any sensation back in his toes and fingers. The location where he reported finding the water that burnt his mouth turned out to be a uranium-processing plant. He had a severe blood disorder and problems with his liver from drinking dirty river water, but he was back on operations very soon afterwards. It was one of the most remarkable E amp;Es ever recorded by the Regiment, as far as I am concerned, ranking above even the legendary trek through the desert of North Africa by Jack Sillitoe, one of David Stirling’s originals, in 1942.
There had been many more troops than we’d expected in the area. In fact, we now learnt that what we had gone into was one large military holding area: two Iraqi armored divisions were positioned between the border and our first LUP. As if that wasn’t bad enough, every man, woman, and child in the area had been told to be on the lookout for us. Children were given the day off school to join in the hunt. All the same, we gave a good account of ourselves: it was established by intelligence sources that we had left 250 Iraqi dead and wounded in our wake.
The FOB received our Sit Rep of January 23, but in a very corrupt mode, which must have confused the hell out of them. On the 24th, at 1600 local time-the time of the compromise-another unintelligible signal was received. Later they picked up a faint TACBE signal and realized then that we were in trouble. And that was all they heard until Chris turned up in Syria on January 31.
Two rescue missions were mounted as a result of our lost com ms procedure and the corrupt signals. The first, on January 26, had to turn back soon after crossing the border as the Chinook pilot was violently ill. It was just as well after all that we hadn’t hung around for it. A second attempt was made on the 27th, and this time it was a joint US and British effort. Misled by the location of the weak TACBE signal, they flew up the southern corridor, but of course with no result. American intelligence reports were also coming in of an Israeli attack on the Syrian border, but because it was assumed that we were heading south a connection with Bravo Two Zero was not made.
What had gone wrong with the patrol radio? Nothing. In any area of the world only certain frequencies will work, and even then they have to be changed during the day to take account of changes in the ionosphere. The frequencies we were given were wrong, which was most unfortunate. It was a human error that you have to hope will never happen again.
And what of AWACS and the much-vaunted 15second response time? For whatever reason, we were almost 200 miles out of range. There was a little hiccup in communication somewhere along the line, and it was just another thing that it was hoped would not happen again. The American pilot that we made contact with on TACBE reported the incident, but the report did not reach our people at the FOB until three days later.
One thing we got right was my decision to head for Syria rather than go back to the heli RV. The word “compromise” came through intact. However, with out any other information what did it mean? Were they to read it as a possible compromise or a definite compromise? And whichever, should they take it to mean a compromise in contact or out of contact? There was simply not enough information for the colonel to act on, but he had to sit and decide whether or not to send a helicopter out to the RV, and he decided not to, even though the boys in the squadron were queuing up to go and giving him a hard time. But he was right. Why risk eleven men-the aircrew and the boys in the back-plus an aircraft, going into they knew not what? I was glad I hadn’t had to make the decision. As we discovered from our interrogators, the infil Chinook had been compromised when it landed, so it was just as well another wasn’t sent for the RV. The only thing we could have done with at the time of the compromise was a fast jet fly over We could have spoken to them on TACBE and guided them onto the S60s, and then arranged an orderly exfil.
For the next few weeks we did debriefs to all and sundry. We gave a one-hour, edited-highlights version to Lord Bramall, colonel in chief of the Regiment, who entertained us to lunch afterwards. He struck me as a very switched-on man-deaf as a doorpost, but very switched on.
Schwarzkopf came down with his gang, and we spent two hours with him.
“I’m sorry for what happened,” he said. “If I’d known what was up there at the time, you wouldn’t have gone; it’s as simple as that.”
We had a great dinner with him, and he very kindly signed the silk escape maps we had half-inched from the briefing room in Riyadh.
The very last debrief was for B Squadron. Within days of their return to the UK most of the blokes had started to prepare for other jobs or had already left, but in August we managed to get together for the first time that year and hold our own internal postmortem. The SAS’s achievements behind enemy lines were substantial. By January 26, only nine days into the war, no more Scuds were launched from the sector of western Iraq the Regiment had been assigned to-an area of land covering hundreds of square miles.
Mugger had taken part in one such mission. His half squadron group had been operating behind enemy lines since January 20. On February 6 he was tasked to attack a communications facility which was of vital importance to the operation of Scud.
The plan was to move at last light on the 7th to within 1 mile of the target, carry out a close target recce, giving confirmatory orders, and attack. The target, it was discovered, was protected by an 8-it. concrete wall with a 6-it. inner fence, and manned enemy bunkers to the left and right. Four men were detailed to destroy the two bunkers with antitank missiles and additional fire support from the vehicles. Eight men moved to the target across 600 feet of flat, open ground to carry out their demolition task. They couldn’t locate the switching gear because of damage done by Allied bombing. Mugger was therefore tasked to blow up the steel mast. He and his gang managed to place charges with timers set on two minutes, but as they withdrew they came under fire.
The demolition party took cover on target, aware that they had very little time before the charges detonated. According to Mugger, as the seconds ticked away one of the blokes screamed out, “The timers! We need cover! We need cover!”