I looked around at Mike Kealy for the order to open fire. Mike had his back to me. He was looking towards the DG fort. With a sudden shock I realized he was oblivious of the movements taking place in the Jebel Ali area. ‘Mike,’ I screamed, my voice rising above the noise and confusion raging around us, ‘look over there!’ My left arm pointed towards the running figures. Mike spun around and stared in the direction I was pointing. He squinted into the acrid fog of fumes and mist and white phosphorous smoke wafting over the undulating ground in the middle distance. His blank stare remained fixed. His face registered no reaction.
I was confused, my concern growing by the second as I waited for a response. After a few moments his right hand slowly came up to the pocket in his OG shirt, undid the button and withdrew a pair of thinrimmed spectacles. He pushed his face forward into the glasses and leaned over the parapet of the sangar as if some invisible force was drawing him towards the hottest part of the action. He carefully removed his glasses, wiped off the dust on his loosely flapping shirtend, unhurriedly replaced them, peered into the distance once more and said slowly, ‘Don’t open fire yet, it could be the Firks returning.’ His voice sounded calm, steady and deliberate amid the tumult of the moment. Still the figures on the plain swept on unhindered. They looked confident, inspired. Then their weapons came up into the fire position. A split second later, a Bren gun rattled out its deadly rhythm from the Wali’s fort. A short pause followed, then the whole of the ramparts suddenly exploded into a frenzy of action.
Lofty went through a last-minute visual check. Completely satisfied that G Squadron were now prepared and fully equipped for battle, he walked swiftly towards the transport waiting to whisk them off to the airfield at RAF Salalah. As he jumped into the driver’s seat of the nearest Land Rover, he could see that over by the armoury the same character was still there doing his boots up. ‘Hey, Scouse,’ shouted Lofty, leaning out of the window as he eased the Land Rover down a gear and drew level with the armoury steps, ‘you can stop doing your boots up now, it looks like we’re going into combat.’
‘Open fire!’ screamed Mike urgently above the chatter of machine-gun fire and the crackle of the old Lee Enfield .303s. The calmness of his voice had given way to ruthless urgency.
The moment that battle is joined. The moment that the days, the weeks, the months of training have all been leading up to. The moment that seems to stand still, but is only as long as the split-second pause at the end of a pendulum’s swing. Only a split second, but one that holds in its brief passing a thousand thoughts, a million feelings. The moment that battle is joined. My first major battle, but my mind is drilled to precision. The steel shutter has crashed to the floor; humanity is locked outside beating its fist on the cold, hard surface. No sound, no cry of compassion can penetrate within. I am now ruthless and single-minded. It’s a kind of insanity. You have to be insane to survive. It’s me or him. At our level, at the sharp end, when the whistle blows, it’s not politics, it’s not heroics or war-games, it’s not the big picture of world affairs. It’s me or him, it’s kill or be killed, it’s the quick and the dead, the law of the jungle. Over the top and into no man’s land. Brutal, efficient killing. We take them out, we root them out, we blow them away, we pick them off, we eliminate them. We don’t really kill them. It’s something we block out of our minds completely. We don’t even talk about it among ourselves. The enemy are not human beings. They are everything else – a threat, an attack, a movement in a rifle sight, a running, lunging, shouting, adrenaline-charged shape. You don’t think of them as real people, as fathers, family men, with a picture of the wife and kids in the back pocket. You can’t afford to. It’s me or him. They are to be eliminated, it’s as simple as that. That is my duty, my role. At this moment, my only concern is to not let my mates down. I am determined to not be a weak link. In the split second that battle is joined, we are together, we are a team, the sum is now greater than the parts. We have fire in our eyes, ice in our veins and metal in our hearts. The highly lubricated precision machine bursts into life. The moment that battle is joined.
We opened fire simultaneously, unleashing a hail of GPMG and .50calibre bullets at the assaulting Adoo troops. The running figures became a focal point where the red tracer and exploding incendiary rounds converged in a frenzied dance. It rained fire and lead. Where moments before there had been an orderly advance, parts of the line now faltered and collapsed. Figures staggered under the impact of the heavy .50-calibre rounds, falling, twisting, screaming. We traversed the machine guns right, a burst of fire scything a lethal harvest among the exposed enemy. But still the Adoo kept coming. Wave upon wave on the plain, dull shapes advancing at speed. They were in groups of ten and well spread out. They were moving steadily, relentlessly, towards the DG fort and the town. A nightmare scene, with bodies appearing to fall and get up again like homicidal zombies, there were so many of them.
Machine guns chattered, rifles cracked, yells, curses and explosions echoed across the plain. But still the Adoo kept coming. They reached the perimeter fence and tore with bare hands and blind zeal at the vicious, razor-sharp barbed wire as if it was tinsel on a Christmas tree. A Carl Gustav rocket-launcher spat death, the rocket impacting against the fort wall and showering the immediate area with shrapnel and flame. In the gun pit, the gleaming figure of Laba applied the gun drills with slick precision, like a sweating stoker feeding a boiler in the smoky bowels of a steamship. Laba worked feverishly to load and blast the big gun at the fanatical enemy struggling through the fence only a few metres away. The twenty-five-pounder was traversed through forty-five degrees and used in the direct-fire role, dealing death at point-blank range. The breech detonations threw up clouds of cordite. A pall of acrid fumes hovered over the firing mechanism, growing bigger by the minute. Dead Adoo were soon hanging over the perimeter wire like ragged crows strung out along a farmer’s fence.
Back at the Batt House, Tak received an ominous message on his walkie-talkie. The strained voice of Laba informed him that a bullet had grazed his chin. He added that otherwise he was all right, but Tak, his fellow-countryman, was not convinced. He knew Laba too well – a huge man with huge courage and huge modesty; a man of few words when the going was tough. The radio then went dead and defied all Tak’s attempts to re-establish communications.
In an instant, Tak had decided he must join his Fijian brother at the twenty-five-pounder. Still wearing his flip-flops, but with a pair of desert boots dangling round his neck, he grabbed his SLR and, with the sharp staccato of the Adoo Spargen MGs ringing in his ears, started his 500metre run towards the DG fort. Even with high-velocity rounds cracking and popping around him, with explosions to the front and rear of him and with shells screeching overhead, all he heard was the roar of the crowd, the shrill scream of the whistle, all he saw was the flash of the cameras. He was back on his favourite rugby field at home in Fiji, and he was going for the greatest try of his life. He had been a top-class flank forward in his time, and long swerving runs were his speciality. Taut lines of hot tracer zipped across in front of him as he surged forward, bobbing and weaving.
Two hundred metres to go. He was still going strong, the breath burning in his throat. One hundred metres to go. Bullets threw sand and dirt all around him as they hit the ground close to his feet. He swerved around the lunging tackles. Fifty metres to go. He could see the try line, nothing could stop him now, his determination was incredible. A mortar bomb burst nearby. The roar of the crowd became louder. A piece of shrapnel made him duck instinctively. He tucked in his head to avoid an out-thrust hand. Ten metres to go. The try line was within reach. In a final lung-bursting sprint he ran up the last incline that led to the DG fort. He launched into the air, his body arching across the line. He was up and over the sangar wall. Miraculously, he had reached the gun pit without so much as a scratch. He had scored the try of a lifetime.