But he had lost a lot of blood. If we didn’t get him to hospital in time he would bleed to death on the mountainside. David was OK. He was treatable. He could come with me in the Range Rover. I directed the ambulance to drive to the nearest British military hospital in Zeneca approximately 15km away. Off they went, hell for leather down the road. I scrambled after them in the other Range Rover. I was lucky to be able to follow them. I hadn’t a clue where we were. I hadn’t been reading the map. I’d left that to Orlando. Fatal mistake, almost literally. It was a mistake I would never repeat again. I could excuse myself. It was early on in my bodyguarding career and I’d learnt my lesson good and proper.
Five years later, another bodyguard made two crucial mistakes. Just like me, he allowed one of his two principals to take control of the journey, and he didn’t insist they wear seatbelts. He became, in effect, merely cosmetic, a baggage-handler. He had no real control of the job he was supposed to be doing. The consequences for him were far more wide-reaching than my mistakes in Bosnia. This incident was on 31 August 1997, and the principals were Diana, Princess of Wales and Dodi al-Fayed.
In Zeneca, we found a hotel and got a good night’s kip. The next morning I went to the British military hospital to find Orlando. He was in a sorry state, all tied up in bandages, tubes and drips. I marched straight up to him and bellowed at the top of my voice, ‘I TOLD YOU! I FUCKING TOLD YOU!’
He just moaned over and over, ‘I’m sorry, Pete. I’m sorry.’ To his credit, he later sent me a letter of apology for making the wrong decision. In spite of everything, I got to like Orlando. Grudging admiration, I suppose you’d call it. More than anything, I admired his balls. Not many people had the bottle to do what he did.
I had the last laugh. After a bit of small talk, I said I had to leave straightaway so I could get back to the UK for Christmas.
‘Going already?’ moaned Orlando.
‘Yep. Got to get back to Split. Can’t hang around here. Got to PUSH ON! Got to PUSH ON!’ I walked out with a grin on my face as broad as Big Zil’s shoulders.
I was on a real high. Job well done! In spite of the injury to Orlando, the trip to Bosnia had been a big success, despite the difficult and dangerous circumstances. I couldn’t believe my luck. After the huge stress and pressure of first leaving the SAS and trying to adjust to civilian life, my career outside the Regiment was now going from strength to strength. There I was, rubbing shoulders with the great and the good on a high-profile humanitarian aid mission, guarding an exhibition of jewellery in the hallowed confines of the St James Club, transporting a massive £80 million shipment of diamonds to the Sultan of Brunei. It couldn’t get any better than this. I was living the champagne lifestyle. The days of the hard tack routine in the Army seemed a lifetime away. The adrenaline was pumping. I couldn’t wait to get back to the UK to see what my next assignment would be.
That’s when it all fell apart.
25
Banned and Blackballed
Banned! I was in shock. No more Regimental reunions. No more invitations to SAS functions and anniversaries. Persona non grata at the Regimental Association. I was devastated. No more socialising of any kind. I wasn’t allowed to set foot anywhere within the perimeter fence of my own camp. My name was on a ‘prohibited’ list pinned to the guardroom wall at Stirling Lines. The ultimate indignity after years of loyal service. A veteran of Aden, the secret war in Oman, the Embassy siege, the Falklands War and Northern Ireland.
But what was the most cutting of all? Banned from the Armistice Day commemorations. The names of all our dead are on the clock tower in the camp. Friends I fought with are commemorated there. That was the cruellest thing of all. No longer would I be able to pay my respects to my fallen comrades during those agonizing two minutes of silence at the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month. I was not even allowed to lay a wreath. And why did all this happen? Because I wrote a series of articles in the Daily Mirror.
The Regiment has traditionally shunned publicity, practising the ‘humility, modesty and the avoidance of boasting’ as laid down by the founder, David Stirling. We were designed to be a troop of men that came in, did the job, then drifted away into the night. But that all changed at 1923 hours on 5 May 1980, when the Regiment stormed into the Iranian
Embassy in Princes Gate, London, to the deafening roar of explosive charges and G60 stun grenades. It changed the profile of the SAS forever, catapulting the most secret of regiments onto the world stage.
Following the siege there were persistent rumblings in the media about the manner in which some of the terrorists had been dealt with. To counter any negative publicity Tak and I were instructed by the Kremlin to talk to the Daily Mirror reporter Alastair McQueen to put the story straight. The resulting article was a huge success. So with my new life as a civilian going so swimmingly I decided to try and replicate the success but without the official backing. I gave Alastair a call. I had been jotting down notes in diaries and on bits of paper for the last seven years of my Army career and I had loads of potential stories for him. But way beyond any thoughts of earning a few quid, I had a much deeper motivation.
I felt that it was necessary to lay down a factual report, an eyewitness testament of what really happened before it became distorted and corrupted by the passage of time and political agendas. I took my lead from my great hero Sir Winston Churchill. As long ago as the battle of Omdurman, on 2 September 1898, he was busy writing about his exploits as a young officer in one of the last cavalry charges carried out by the British Army. When he got home from the battle he immediately wrote down the details while they were fresh in his mind so that no one could plunder the truth in the future for their own political ends. The full account of the battle was published just a year later, in 1899, in a book entitled The River War: An Account of the Reconquest of the Sudan. Kitchener hauled Churchill over the coals, but it didn’t do his career much harm! Churchill even used to submit stories to The Times, despite Kitchener’s orders to stop. He got around the ban by filing the reports in letters to his mother, who was American, and through contacts she got the stories published in the Washington Post.
I was proved right. Before I knew it, the history of the battle of Mirbat was being kicked around by the politicians and the Army’s top brass as a political football. The death of Labalaba, one of the Regiment’s greatest heroes, and one of my greatest friends, was used as a rebuke to the BNP after they were accused of hijacking British military history for racist ends. But Laba was a soldier, plain and simple, and one of the bravest men I ever knew – not someone who deserved to be dragged into the public arena. He was no card-carrying politician. In my book, to use history in this way is one step away from rewriting it.
It goes without saying that I would never do anything, such as revealing tactics or covert operations, that would put my colleagues’ lives at risk. Why would I? Being in the SAS is all about respect and support from your comrades. That respect and support continues well after you retire. That is always my number one priority. There was no way I was going to put that support system in jeopardy. It was too important in helping me keep my head in the right place. Laymen, ordinary people, even close friends and family, cannot possibly begin to understand the life that SAS troopers lead, the experiences they’ve been through. It’s not even worth trying to communicate it. My only measure of reality and sanity is with my own comrades. They know. They’ve been in my world. They were there too. They saw the unimaginable, did the unthinkable and felt the unspeakable.