Belt kit consists of ammunition and basic survival requisites-water, food, and trauma-care equipment, plus personal goodies. For this op we would also take TACBEs in our belt kit, plus cam netting to provide cover if we couldn’t find any natural, and digging tools to unearth the cables if necessary. Your belt kit should never come off you, but if it does it must never be more than an arm’s length away. At night you must always have physical contact with it. If it’s off, you sleep on top of it. The same goes for your weapon.
The best method of moving the equipment proved to be a shuttle service in two groups of four, with four giving the protection, four doing the humping, and then changing around. It was hard work, and I didn’t look forward to the 12 mile tab that first night-or maybe two-from the heli drop-off to the MSR. We certainly wouldn’t practice carrying it now: that would be a bit like practicing being wet, cold, and hungry, which wouldn’t achieve anything.
We did practice getting off the aircraft, and the actions we would carry out if there was a compromise as it was happening or the heli was leaving.
Everything now was task-oriented. If you weren’t physically doing something to prepare for it, you were thinking about it. As we “walked through, talked through,” I could see the concentration etched on everybody’s face.
We were getting centrally fed, and the cooks were sweating their butts off for us. Most of the Regiment had already disappeared on tasks, but there were enough blokes left to pack the cook house and slag each other off. The boys in A Squadron had given themselves the most outrageous crew cuts right down to the bone. They had suntanned faces in front and sparkly white domes behind. Some of them were the real Mr. Guccis, the lounge lizards downtown of a Friday, and there they were with the world’s worst haircuts, no doubt desperately praying the war was going to last long enough for it to grow again.
Because a lot of Regiment administration was also being run centrally, I kept bumping into people that I hadn’t seen for a long time. You’d give them a good slagging, see what reading material they had, then nick it. It was a really nice time. People were more sociable than usual, probably because we were out of the way, there were no distractions, just the job at hand. Everybody was euphoric. Not since the Second World War and the days of David Stirling had there been so much of the Regiment together at any one time in one theater.
We had some very nasty injections at one stage against one of the biological warfare agents it was thought Saddam Hussein might use. The theory was that you got one injection, then waited a couple of days and went back for another, but the majority of us were out of the game after the first jab. It was horrendous: our arms came up like balloons, so we didn’t go back.
We were told on the 18th that we were going to move forward to another location, an airfield, from where we would mount our operations. We sorted out our personal kit so that if it had to be sent to our next of kin anything upsetting or pornographic had been removed. This would be done by the blokes in the squadron as well, to make sure your rubber fetish was never made public. To make less drama for your family you usually put military kit in one bag and personal effects in another. We labeled it and handed it in to the squadron quartermaster sergeant.
We flew out from the operating base on a C130 that was packed with pinkies and mountains of kit. It was tactical, low-level flying, even though we were still in Saudi airspace. There was too much noise for talking. I put on a pair of ear defenders and got my head down. It was pitch-dark when we landed at the large Coalition airbase and started to unload the kit. Noise was constant and earsplitting. Aircraft of all types took off and landed on the brightly lit runway-everything from spotter aircraft to A10 Thunderbolts.
We were much closer to the Iraqi border here, and I noticed that it was much chillier than we had been used to. You definitely needed a jumper or smock to keep yourself warm, even with the work of unloading. We laid out our sleeping bags on the grass under the palm trees and got a brew going from our belt kit. I was lying on my back looking up at the stars when I heard a noise that started as low, distant thunder and then grew until it filled the sky. Wave after wave of what looked like B52s were passing overhead enroute to Iraq. Everywhere you looked there were bombers. It could have been a scene from a Second World War recruitment poster. Tankers brought out their lines and jets moved in to fill up. The sky roared for five or six minutes. Such mighty, heart-stirring air power dominating the heavens-and down below on the grass, a bunch of dickheads brewing up. We had been self contained and self-obsessed, seeing nothing of the war but our own preparations. Now it hit home: the Gulf War was not just a small number of men on a task; this was something fucking outrageously major. And bar one more refuel, we were within striking distance of adding to the mayhem.
Just before first light Klaxons started wailing, and people ran in all directions. None of us had a clue what was going on, and we stayed put in our sleeping bags.
“Get in the shelter!” somebody yelled, but it was too warm where we were. Nobody budged, and quite rightly so. If somebody wanted us to know what was going on, they’d come and tell us. Eventually somebody shouted, “Scud!” and we jumped. We’d just about got to our feet when the order came to stand down.
Every hour on the hour during the day, somebody would tune in to the BBC World Service. At certain times you’d hear the signature tune of the Archers as well. When you’re away there’s always somebody who’s listening to the everyday tale of country folk, even if they will not admit it.
We were told we were going in that night. It was quite a relief. We’d got to the airfield with only what we stood up in.
In the afternoon I gave a formal set of orders. Everybody who was involved in the task was present-all members of the patrol; the squadron OC; the OPS officer who oversees all the squadron’s operations.
After I had delivered them verbally, the orders would be handed over to the operations center. They would stay there until the mission was completed, so that if anything went wrong, everybody would know what I wanted to happen. If we ought to have been at point A by day 4, for example, and we weren’t, they’d know that I wanted a fast jet flying over so I could make contact by TACBE.
The top of each orders sheet is overprinted with the words Remember Need to Know to remind you of OP SEC It’s critically important that nobody should know anything that does not concern him directly. The pilots, for example, would not attend the orders.
I started by describing the ground we were going to cover. You have to explain your orders as if nobody’s got a clue what’s going on-so in this case I started by pointing out where Iraq was and which countries bordered it. Then you go into the area in detail, which for us was the bend in the MSR. I described the lie of the ground and the little topographical information I had. Everything that I knew, they had to know.
Next I gave times of first and last light, the moon states, and the weather forecast. I had been confidently informed by the met blokes that the weather should be cool and dry. Weather information is important because if, for example, you have been briefed in the orders that the prevailing wind is from the northeast, you can use that information to help you with your navigation. Since the weather was still forecast as fairly clement for the duration of our mission, we had again elected to leave our sleeping bags behind. Not that there would have been any room to take them anyway.
I now gave the Situation phase of the orders. I would normally tell at this point everything I knew about the enemy that concerned us-weapons, morale, composition, and strengths, and so on-but the intelligence was very scanty. I would also normally mention the location of any friendly forces and how they could help us, but for our op there was nothing to tell.