It’s that boy, I said to myself. He’s tipped them off.
We kept going. But the two Iraqis began to parallel us, moving forward. In case anybody hadn’t seen them, I called back, ‘We’ve got two on the high ground to the left, and they’re walking down. Keep going!’
Afterwards, I realized that the two Iraqis were waiting for reinforcements to come up; also, they were probably a bit confused because they didn’t know who we were. But at the time I was wondering if we could outrun them, or lose them somehow, without starting a firefight.
Then I blew it in a big way. I’m going to try the double bluff here, I thought, and I waved at them.
Unfortunately I did it with my left hand, which to an Arab is the ultimate insult — your left hand being the one you wipe your bum with. Immediately one of them brought up his weapon and opened fire.
Contact!
We swung round and put a couple of short bursts back at them. Both dropped onto one knee to continue firing. As I stood there, I saw Vince take off down the wadi.
‘Stay together!’ I yelled. ‘Slow down!’
We began to run, turning to fire aimed bursts. The secret is to keep them short — no more than two or three rounds at a time. Otherwise the recoil makes the weapon drift up and the rounds go high. We ran and fired, ran and fired.
Within seconds a tipper truck with metal sides screeched to a halt beside the two Iraqis, and eight or ten guys spilled out of it. Stan also saw an armoured car carrying a .50 machine gun pull up. Some of the Iraqis began firing from the back of the truck, others from positions behind it.
It looked as though there were about a dozen men altogether. They had automatic rifles and at least the one heavy machine gun. But their fire was inaccurate, and we could cope with them. In my mind they weren’t the real threat. I was more worried that a bigger force was probably driving round ahead of us — out of sight — to cut off our retreat.
Looking back, I found that the guys were running across the open ground, struggling under the weight of their bergens. At one moment the patrol formed a tight group, then we spread out again, some running, others taking turns to stop, put down rounds, then run again.
If anyone says he’s not frightened in a firefight, I don’t believe him. I was certainly scared, and so was everyone else. But the Regiment’s strength lies in the fact that its members are highly trained to control their fear and respond positively to any threat they face.
In this contact, the flow of adrenalin was fearsome. On we went, legging it up the slope now, shooting at the enemy as they ran back and forth between vehicles. Three times I saw men go down when I fired. One went down behind a mound and never came up. Two others rolled over as they were running. At one point there was a massive explosion from one of the vehicles.
Green tracer started coming across, whizzing past our heads. We were right in the open, and whenever one of us stopped to turn and fire, the enemy seemed to concentrate on him, and we could see the tracer close in on the stationary target.
As the tracer flew, I started screaming into my tactical rescue beacon (TACBE) — a device that sends a distress signal to any nearby friendly aircraft, and which can also be used on voice comms:
‘TURBO! TURBO! This is Bravo Two Zero. CONTACT! CONTACT!’
Andy was doing the same. The TACBEs should have produced an answer within seconds. But nothing happened.
‘My TACBE’s broken!’ I yelled to Andy.
‘Can’t get through on mine, either.’
‘Keep trying.’
Then somebody shouted, ‘I’m ditching my bergen!’
Someone else yelled, ‘I am too!’
Next second, I was doing it myself, fighting to get the straps off my shoulder. Then I was kneeling by the pack, struggling with the clips on the top flap to free my 66. I got one clip undone. Just as I reached my hand towards the other, the clip exploded in pieces, hit by a .50 bullet. If my hand had been three or four centimetres farther forward, I would have lost it. The heavy round put the bergen down flat beside me. I leaped on it, grabbed the 66, whipped it over my shoulder and started off again. Ahead of me to the right I saw big splashes of soil or rock coming up. The anti-aircraft position had opened up on us, and rounds from those things were coming across as well.
By now we were walking. We couldn’t run uphill any more. But as I moved away from my bergen, I was thinking, What is there in there that I should have? Then I realized: it was the medic pack. ‘Left behind the medic pack!’ I shouted to no one in particular.
When I’d gone about twenty metres from the bergen I said to Legs, ‘Have you got the radio?’
‘No,’ he gasped. ‘No time. I had to leave it.’
Suddenly I remembered, My hip flask! It was the one my wife had given me for Christmas, and it was still in my bergen.
I don’t know what happened. The sensible thing would have been to leave it behind. But something clicked, and without hesitation I ran back down the slope. As I reached the bergen, I thought, You idiot, you’re going to get shot now. As I bent down, my back to the Iraqis, I imagined parts of my chest hurtling out in front of me, and wondered what it would look like. Would my clothes tear apart and bits of flesh and bone fly out? But I stuck my hand into the top of the pack, found the flask, brought it out, stuffed it into a trouser pocket and started forward again.
By then I was finding it hard to walk. I felt like I was suffocating. But fear was driving me on.
At last we got over the top, into dead ground, and collapsed onto the deck. ‘I don’t know how we managed that,’ Andy gasped.
‘Nor do I,’ I said. ‘But look at this — at least I got my flask back.’
‘Where was it?’
‘In my bergen,’ I told him. Andy was stunned. ‘I went back for it.’ I unscrewed the top, took a swig of whisky and handed it to him.
For a few seconds we lay there, trying to get our breath. When we stood up again to see where the guys were, we were amazed to find everyone in one piece. I’d thought we must have lost two or three, but they all appeared and came round, just like that, nobody so much as touched.
It took us only a few seconds to reach a group decision. If our Lost Comms procedure worked, the Chinook would come in to the drop-off point at midnight; but now that we’d stirred up such a hornets’ nest, and the Iraqis knew we were in the area, the chances were that they’d ambush the helicopter and shoot it down.
We decided it was safer to make for the Syrian border.
First, though, we’d head south, to throw the Iraqis off our track.
‘Right,’ I called, ‘let’s go.’ Without trying to take command, but wanting out of this place, I led off, with Andy behind me and the rest in line.
By then we thought we were out of range of the Iraqis’ original position, but some of them had worked their way round onto a closer ridge. As we came into view they opened up again. Also, we were back in view of the antiaircraft gunners, who resumed firing. Some rounds were whizzing past us, others landing ten or fifteen metres away. We just kept walking like mad.
Then the vehicle with the .50 machine gun came up onto a crest and started cracking rounds over us again from a range of 400 or 500 metres. Luckily for us, though, the light was dying and the rounds were going far too high.
So we set off, and walked for our lives into the gathering night.
CHAPTER 5
Disaster Strikes
Until we cleared the second long valley, a few anti-aircraft rounds were still falling in. Some burst in the air with a puff of black smoke and a crack, and others hit the ground. Then we were in the clear, out on the barren gravel plains, and we headed due south, marching as fast as we could in single file. Mark guided us with his GPS.