Bravo Two Zero

The Red Cross went round asking if we had any special requests, which they would then go into the town and buy on our behalf.

“Why don’t you just give us the money, and we’ll | buy our own kit?” I said to a distinguished-looking I lady in her late fifties.

“You can fuck off,” she smiled. “Do you think I was | born yesterday?”

However, she eventually relented. I bought jeans,.: T-shirts and videos, and a suitcase to put it all in. Everybody had a good old shopping frenzy. After an | hour we started ru

The Belgians had a medical team there as part of their contribution to the war. They had a big going away barbecue, and Mugger got us all invited. The night passed in a blissful haze.

The following day it was confirmed that I had hepatitis. Being made to eat our own shit just might have had something to do with it. Other medical checks showed that my shoulder had been dislocated, I had ruptured muscles in my back, scar tissue on my kidneys, burns on my thighs, and loss of dexterity in both hands, but I was keen to get back to the UK.

We packed our kit on March 10 and jumped aboard a VC10. Unfortunately it wasn’t going straight to Brize Norton; we’d caught the military equivalent of a number 22 bus.

We flew to Laarbruch first to drop off a lot of the R.A.F perso

We flew into Brize Norton, and as the aircraft closed down its engines, we could hear the familiar sound of our own 5Agusta 109 helicopters coming in to land. They came down right alongside the aircraft. My squadron OC was on board, and Mark’s sister, who lived and worked in London. After a brief reunion we boarded the helicopters and lifted off for Hereford.

The camp was deserted. Two of the squadrons were still in the Gulf, and other teams were scattered as ever on various jobs.

The adjutant came out to the helipad.

“Welcome back,” he said. “Come into the office.”

He popped a bottle of champagne. As he poured it, he said to Mugger, “Right, you need to be back here for half six tomorrow, because we’re taking you straight back out. You’re needed in Saudi.”

“Fucking hell!” said Mugger, completely crestfallen. He had been looking forward to a few nights at home with Mrs. Mugger.

To the rest of us the adjutant very generously said: “There’s no big rush at the moment. Take a couple of days off.”

The families officer offered me a lift home. As my house came into view, I asked him to stop.

“I’ll walk from here,” I said. “I need the exercise.”

14

We had the luxury of two days off. On Monday Jilly and I went for a walk around the town. I was dressed in familiar old clothes that were a lot looser-fitting than the last time I’d worn them. We wanted just to bum around, doing nothing in particular, but ended up bumping into loads of blokes with suntans and swapping horror stories.

On Tuesday Katie came to stay and we spent our time watching the Robin Hood video and practicing our high kicks. On Wednesday it was back to work.

The Regiment wanted to find out what had happened and why, and whether there were any lessons to be learned for future operations. The five of us sat down with maps and aerial photography and pieced together every detail of our movements from the time we got the warning order to the moment of our release.

We visited widows and families. Stan and Chris spent time with Vince’s wife and his brothers, giving them details of what had happened and trying to console them. I visited Legs’s wife and found her very switched on and down to earth. Meeting her was a help to me. I could talk things through without having to do the “never mind” bit.

On March 16 we got away for a couple of days to Aberdovey, a place Jilly and I had gone to when we first met. The first time we went there she told me it was the most wonderful holiday ever. She expected the same again, but we both sensed that this time things were different. We couldn’t put our finger on anything specific, but things were a bit strained. We cut short the trip and went to see Bob’s mother and sister in Bognor. The loss of their son and brother had hit them hard. They hadn’t even known he was in the Regiment-nor had his divorced father, who’d had to stop working in the restaurant he managed in London. He was physically sick with grief.

The debrief took about three weeks. We then had a visit from Gordon Turnbull again and a two-hour session in the officers’ mess, chatting away. He and one of his colleagues got us to do a simple tick test to evaluate our levels of stress. The higher you scored above 10, the worse your emotional turmoil. We all scored 11. Gordon got 13.

We decided that the wives and girlfriends had been more -traumatized by the events than we had. They’d had a lot to go through: the pain of uncertainty, which they hadn’t been allowed to share with anybody, and then the sadness of being told that we were almost certainly dead-only to see some of our faces on TV a -few days later. Gordon Turnbull held a session specially for them, explaining in particular the symptoms of posttraumatic stress disorder.

Once the debrief was consolidated, it was a

We spoke for two hours. I gave the initial brief of the pla

When Start went off with the old goat herder in search of a vehicle, the plan had been that if he didn’t return by 1830, Chris would move out, leaving behind Stan’s belt kit and some ammunition. This he duly did, heading due north on a bearing, aiming for the Euphrates. It was 36 hours since their water had run out.

Chris had only been going for a quarter of an hour when he saw vehicle lights behind him in the area of the LUP. He started to run back, thinking that Stan had managed to get a vehicle and was coming to RV with him. Then he saw a second set of lights. His heart sank.

Chris walked for the rest of that night. It was a clear sky-good ambient light for the night sight-but still very cold. At about 0430, looking through the sight, he saw the river below him. There were bits and pieces of habitation dotted amongst the irrigated land, and the sound of dogs barking. He was desperate for water, however, and started to move down towards the river. Without warning, he found himself up to his waist in mud. He floundered around, and it was a long time before he managed to drag himself clear. Exhausted and cautious, he crawled the rest of the way to the water’s edge. He filled his bottles, drank, and then filled them again. The water was thick with mud.

By now it was nearly first light. He found a small wadi to hide in but realized only when it was too late that he was also just 1,600 feet away from a small village, and the top of the wadi was in full view. He was stuck. He tried to sleep but was so cold and wet that every time he dozed off he woke up again minutes later, shivering uncontrollably. Inspecting his feet, he found that he’d lost all his toenails, and that the blisters along the sides of his feet had co