Behind Iraqi Lines. Shaun Clarke

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СКАЧАТЬ of the Iraqis. Naturally, their presence in Kuwait was unofficial and therefore remained resolutely unacknowledged.

      ‘We’re coming in to land.’ Hailsham observed needlessly as the overloaded Hercules began its shuddering descent. ‘Check your kit and prepare to disembark. I want no delays.’

      ‘Aye, aye, boss,’ Ricketts said, then bawled the same order along the hold of the aircraft.

      Cumbersome at the best of times, though always reliable, the Hercules shuddered even more as it descended, groaning and squealing as if about to fall apart. Eventually it bounced heavily onto the runway, bellowed, shook violently and rattled as it taxied along the tarmac, before finally groaning to a halt.

      Letting out a united cheer, the men unsnapped their safety belts and stood up in a tangle of colliding weapons and bergens. After a lot of noise from outside, the transport’s rear ramp fell down, letting light pour in, and the men clattered down onto the sunlit, sweltering tarmac of Riyadh airport.

      It was not the end of the SAS men’s long journey. Lined up along the runway of the airport were RAF Tornado F-3 air-defence aircraft which had arrived four months ago, shortly after the fall of Kuwait, flying in from the massive Dhahran air-base. There were also a dozen RAF CH-47 Chinook helicopters of 7 Squadron’s Special Forces Flight.

      The Regiment’s recently acquired, state-of-the-art desert warfare weaponry, including Thorn-EMI 5kg hand-held thermal imagers, Magellan satellite navigation aids – SATNAV GPS, or Global Positioning Systems – laser designators and other equipment, was unloaded from the Hercules and transferred to the Chinooks. When the transfer was over, the men, who had been milling about on the tarmac, stretching their legs and breathing in deeply the warm, fresh air, also boarded the helicopters and were flown on to Al Jubail, an immense, modern port on Saudi Arabia’s east coast, some four hundred miles from Riyadh and about five hundred from Kuwait City. They emerged from the Chinooks a couple of hours later, glad to be back on solid ground.

      Though originally built as a centre for oil and light industry, Al Jubail had never been developed properly and was now being used fully for the first time as a receiving port for the Allied equipment and supplies being brought in on more than a hundred ships, mostly from European ports, but also from Cyprus, Liberia and Panama. While some of the British servicemen in transit, mainly those of the Queen’s Royal Irish Hussars and the 7th Armoured Brigade, were billeted in huts and sheds originally intended for the industrial workers, most were housed in the enormous, constantly growing ‘Tent City’ located in the port area and already equipped with camp-beds, showers, chemical toilets and a field kitchen run by the Americans.

      ‘Home sweet home!’ Sergeant Andrew Winston said, dumping his bergen on the floor beside a camp-bed in the sweltering late-afternoon heat of the space allocated to the Regiment for the duration of its stay in Al Jubail.

      ‘Having just come down from the trees,’ Geordie replied, ‘you’d be used to living out in the open. That’s one up to you, Sarge.’

      ‘You don’t like it, Geordie? Too hot for you, is it?’

      ‘You could obviously do with sweating off a few pounds,’ Geordie replied, tugging experimentally at the ropes of his lean-to tent to check that they were tight, ‘but me, I’m as slim as a man can go, so I don’t need melting down in this fucking heat.’

      ‘I’m relieved,’ Taff Burgess said, laying his M16 out carefully on his camp-bed and gazing out over the rows of tents divided by paths that led in one direction to the port and in the other to the airstrip, other accommodations and the guarded compounds containing the armoured transport and tanks. Hundreds of thousands of troops, British, American and French, crowded the spaces between the tents, eating, drinking, writing letters, taking open-air showers and going in and out of chemical latrines. Their constant movement and the ever-present desert wind created drifting clouds of sand and dust that made them look ghostlike in the shimmering light.

      ‘I wouldn’t fancy being in one of those huts in this fucking heat,’ Taff said. ‘It must be like a Turkish bath in there. At least we can breathe out here.’

      ‘All I’m breathin’ is dust,’ replied Jock. ‘That and bloody sand. I’ve got sand in my boots, in my eyes, in my mouth, and even up the eye of my fucking dick. This place is just like Oman.’

      ‘You’re too old to remember Oman,’ Paddy ribbed him, stretched out languidly on his camp-bed, hands folded beneath his head, acting really cool in the sweltering heat. ‘Relax, boys, you’re gonna have a good time here. Compared to what’s to come, it’s probably Paradise.’

      ‘I doubt that,’ Geordie said.

      He was right. Their accommodations were close to the Royal Corps of Transport’s Force Maintenance Area, or FMA, and the constant noise, combined with the heat, made for irritable days and sleepless nights. Since they were there for five days, waiting for the rest of their equipment to be brought in by ship, the lack of sleep was no joke. To make matters worse, they were ordered to take NAP tablets, which were meant to reduce the damaging effects of gas in the event of a chemical attack, but also gave everyone diarrhoea.

      ‘My shit comes out like piss,’ Paddy informed the others. ‘And I hear these tablets also contain a lot of bromide, so say goodbye to your sex life.’

      Already running non-stop to the latrines, they felt even worse after the biological vaccinations against whooping cough, which they received at the same time and which knocked most of them out for twenty-four hours.

      ‘Say goodbye to your fucking sanity,’ Jock said groggily, as the others moaned and groaned on their camp-beds. ‘Christ, I feel dizzy!’

      Scarcely recovered, they were nevertheless made to spend a large part of each day on the Jerboa Range of the training ground at Al Fadhili, inland from Al Jubail, where they shot at targets and markers while being bellowed and spat at by the aggressive camels of passing Bedouin.

      ‘Those bastards on camels are straight out of Lawrence of Arabia,’ Geordie announced to all within earshot. ‘A fucking good film, that was.’

      ‘I never wanted to be in the movies,’ Andrew replied, ‘and those camels stink. What the hell are we doing here?’

      ‘Waiting for the rest of our equipment, coming in with the Navy. Need I say more?’

      ‘Fucking Navy!’ Taff spat.

      Soon sickened by the repetitive, useless training, which they had done many times before, they were all pleased when, on the fifth day, the despised Navy finally arrived at the port with their missing supplies.

      By this time, with over half a million Coalition troops and the greatest air force ever assembled in history clogging Al Jubail, the space being used by the SAS was desperately needed. The Regiment was therefore hurriedly packed up and driven back to the airstrip. From there, Hercules transports flew the relieved men to a forward operating base, or FOB, located at a Saudi airport in the desert, a day’s drive from the border of western Iraq.

      ‘We operate from here,’ Major Hailsham told the men the minute they stepped off the planes into another sea of flapping tents on a flat, barren plain. ‘Welcome to hell.’

      It wasn’t quite hell, but it was certainly no paradise. The FOB was a dense throng of lean-to tents divided by roads filled with brightly painted ‘Pink Panther’ Land Rovers, Honda motorcycles, Challenger tanks, and other armoured vehicles and trucks, many of which were being used to support the tents and their СКАЧАТЬ