By the middle of October we had experienced our first mortar attack. The Adoo gunner craftily fired a few rounds and then moved position before his mortar barrel got too hot to dismantle – and before we could get a fix on his position.
To keep the Adoo from closing in on the perimeters and to make our presence felt, the Duke initiated an intensive aggressive-patrol programme. Each day we would sweep out from White City and look for trouble. It was on one such aggressive patrol that I had my first brush with death. We were having a duel with a switched-on Adoo machinegunner.
This guy was good. No wild, inaccurate bursts of fire, just wellaimed, controlled double taps. He had us pinned down behind a small hillock of broken rocks. The slightest movement would draw fire. Two or three rounds would crack savagely overhead, just high enough to let us know that if we moved position or tried to skirmish forward he would nail us.
Sean and Lou were detached from the team that day, so Jimmy had taken over as gunner. He was losing his patience. The cold calculating bastard with the machine gun was getting to him. To compound the problem, his fieldcraft had been so good that we hadn’t even been able to identify his firing position. As the minutes slipped by, Jimmy grew more and more impatient. He badly wanted this cool customer, who was getting dangerously close to malleting us. Jimmy decided we would first identify the firing position. He would fire a burst on the SF, and I would scan the area to our front to see if I could spot the location of the return fire. This is shit or bust, I thought, I’ll have to be fucking quick.
Crack-crack-crack. The switched-on machine gunner was quicker. As Jimmy squeezed the trigger and I began feeding the belt into the gun with my right hand, a 7.62mm short ricocheted off the ammunition belt, went through my little finger and finally embedded itself in Jimmy’s trigger arm. The ploy had worked, however. One of our snipers over on the left got an indication, squeezed off a shot from his L42 and gave the machine-gunner a third eye.
I rolled into cover, a stab of pain shooting up my lower right arm. I glanced down at my hand – there was a small amount of blood around the wound. I had been lucky. The round had only penetrated the fleshy outer edge of the finger near the base, close to the knuckle, missing the bone completely. The second bit of luck was having one of the best medics on the Jebel pinned down behind the same cover. Nick Dawson was the son of a Harley Street surgeon and had been a fourth-year medical student before quitting to join the SAS, fired by a compulsive desire to become an explosives expert. He now worked quickly to apply the shell dressing to my wound, saying quietly that I probably wouldn’t even need stitches, it was only a graze. As Nick crawled over to attend to Jimmy, the adrenaline began to drain from my bloodstream. My body relaxed and I lay back, my face breaking into a broad grin as I reflected on how fortunate it was that the machine-gunner had reacted so quickly. A few more seconds and my head would have been out of cover and directly in the line of his sight!
Dawn next day. I awoke from a restless sleep. The sangar was cold and silent. The steady throb in my right hand had kept me awake most of the night; I had only just managed to doze off in the last couple of hours. Now, with first light streaking in from the east, I dragged myself out of my sleeping bag and sat on an empty ammo box. My eyes felt gritty, my mouth felt dry and my hand ached uncomfortably. It was a well-known fact that there was gas gangrene in the air and wounds tended to rot very quickly. So I decided there and then that I would go down to the FST in RAF Salalah and get my hand checked out. I didn’t want to miss any of the action just because of an infected flesh wound. As my eyes wandered idly over the empty ration-box in the corner, a thought suddenly occurred to me. It was resupply day. That was it then. I would cadge a lift on the resupply chopper.
Resupply day was always a relaxed day, a day we all looked forward to. The big bird in the sky brought such luxuries as mail from home, cigarettes, water, ammunition and possibly, if we were lucky, fresh rations. Jimmy was already down at the FST, having been casevac’d after the contact. So I cleared it with Lou, picked up my SLR and belt kit and headed towards the airstrip.
I had reached the area of call sign 24 when I suddenly heard the raucous shout, ‘Incoming’. Shit, not now, I thought. Next moment the throaty swishing roar of an incoming mortar rang in my ears, followed by the high-explosive crump of detonation. I needed a sangar – fast! I crouched and quickly looked to my left. There was a small ridge in the ground, running north to south. Built into this ridge was a sandbagged sangar with a heavily reinforced roof for defence against mortar and rocket attack. As I heard the distant thump of the next incoming mortar, I moved rapidly towards the sangar, brushed aside the blanket door and went in.
As the sound of the second mortar bomb exploded in my ears, I don’t know which had more impact: the high-explosive detonation or the interior of the sangar. I couldn’t believe my eyes. I thought for a moment I must have been hit by the mortar and was halfway to heaven. Either that or I was seriously hallucinating. The sanger created the illusion that you had been transported into another world, a world of psychedelic lights, pin-ups and heavy rock music. The sound of Jimi Hendrix reverberated in my ears. Green, red and yellow lights flashed from every corner, flickering and reflecting off bandoliers of GPMG ammo, grenades, freshly oiled weapons and numerous glossy Playboy centrefolds. Along the wall in front of me stood the power supply for this assault on the senses. Dozens of old A41 radio batteries were stacked from floor to ceiling in great piles, linked by a myriad of coloured wires.
After a few moments I became aware of an eerie figure amidst this confusion of sound and light. The figure was reclining on an old Army camp bed and wore only a chequered shamag around his head, an olivegreen towel around his waist and a battered pair of flip-flops on his feet. It was Scotty. His body, deeply suntanned, seemed sculpted in bronze – smooth, round, perfectly formed sinews and muscles linked and rippling into each other with statuesque fluidity; and his face seemed chiselled from granite – forehead solid and square, high cheekbones, and proud, aquiline, hawk-sharp nose, whose fierceness was mellowed by the soft grey-blue of his deep-set eyes. He looked like a demented DJ as he worked the switches to control this fantastic light display. The switches consisted of live .50-calibre Browning rounds, suspended from the beam running along the top of the sangar wall on wires of differing lengths. The electrical contact was completed by the .50-calibre rounds being swung like pendulums across dozens of nails driven at varying angles into the sandbagged walls. The nails were connected to the batteries by an array of wires.
I stared at amazement as Scotty expertly flicked the Browning rounds across the electrical contacts with his fingers and toes to the heavy beat of ‘Purple Haze’. I was intrigued. Where had the disco lights come from, in the middle of a defensive position on a plateau in Dhofar? As I looked more closely at the flashing red light just in front of me, I had the answer. They were all Land Rover headlights. But what about the different colours? I wondered.
‘Vehicle fluid,’ said Scotty above the whine of Jimi Hendrix, answering the question that flickered across my bemused features. ‘I filled the light lenses with brake fluid for red, hydraulic fluid for green, engine oil for yellow.’ He paused and then added rather proudly, ‘A combination of fluids and water gives you special effects.’
The resourcefulness of the soldier is legendary. Fantastic stories of improvised articles created from the most unexpected materials had come out of the Japanese POW camps during the Second World War. But no one would believe this.
Scotty had been famous for many things, including being the first Ansell’s Bitter man on TV. That had come about when, unbeknown to him, his girlfriend had sent in an application on the back of a beer-mat, together with a photograph. He passed the preliminary stages with flying colours – an altogether different kind of selection. When it came to the audition, his good looks were matched by his drinking prowess. Unlike Scotty, some of the most macho-looking men he was up against could not drink a pint down in one before the eagle eye of the camera without giving away some sign of strain – an exaggerated gulp, moisture in the eye, a quick catching of breath. Even those who could were unable to pass the second test – ambling up to a bar in a natural and unselfconscious manner. With his success, Scotty’s picture soon adorned advertising hoardings all around Hereford. To his dismay, trainee graffiti artists embellished his handsome features with moustaches, glasses and sexual organs of record-breaking dimensions. The first two additions really upset him! Yes, Scotty had been at the centre of many renowned escapades; his exploits were fabled. But this sangar took the prize.
The hallucinogenic atmosphere in the sangar had even made me forget the pain in my hand. Having not heard any mortars impacting for some time, I decided to leave Scotty and his bizarre illusion and return to reality to await the chopper. With Jimi Hendrix hitting the last bars of ‘Purple Haze’, I brushed aside the blanket door. As I stepped through it, my mind spun with the contrast between the scene I’d just witnessed and the ordinary world outside. I looked up and narrowed my eyes against the harsh glare of the Arabian sun.