This is a military history, albeit very recent history and albeit one that is told, I hope, more in the style of a thriller than a dry chronicle of events. There is only so much that an operational record or log book can reveal about the truth of a soldier’s experience of combat – these provide only a faint, flat, factual outline of events. For the colour, the noise and the emotion of the drama, you must turn to the recollections and reflections of the men themselves. In that, I have been very fortunate to have been given permission to spend many hundreds of hours talking to over fifty of those men whose experiences make up an enthralling story of a British tank regiment at war in the Gulf. I hope I have managed to repay their generosity with an account that is faithful to their experiences, captures the magnitude of the challenges they faced, and impresses on readers the courage and professionalism that helped them rise to those challenges.
Every detail of the narrative has come from the first-hand accounts, diaries and operational records of the three squadrons of the Royal Scots Dragoon Guards, also known as the SCOTS DG, who deployed as part of the 7th Armoured Brigade ‘Desert Rats’ in early 2003. In Operation TELIC 1, British tank crews had their first experience of sustained combat since the Second World War – and no regiment experienced more drama, more fighting and more variety of operational experiences than the SCOTS DG.
To a man, they recounted their experiences with honesty, graphic vividness and unfailing modesty. Quick to pass on the credit for a success or accept responsibility for a failing, in telling the story of their deployment to the Al Faw, the men of SCOTS DG unwittingly showed all the qualities that make up their reputation as an especially tight and loyal regimental family. It has been a genuine pleasure to have spent time in their company and a true honour to have been given the opportunity to produce a record of their experiences that, I hope, their families will be able to read with pride, now and in generations to come.
Special thanks for overseeing the book project to Major Roger Macmillan – the Ops Officer of the SCOTS DG Battle Group in TELIC 1 – and to the three Squadron leaders in the story: ‘A’ Squadron’s Major Tim Brown (now retired from the Army), ‘B’ Squadron’s Major Chris Brannigan (now Lieutenant Colonel) and ‘C’ Squadron’s Major Johnny Biggart (now Lieutenant Colonel and CO of the regiment at the time of this book going to print). The SCOTS DG worked and fought alongside the Irish Guards, who comprised the infantry element of their battle group, the 1st Battalion Black Watch, to whose battle group ‘A’ Squadron was attached, the Royal Marines of 3 Commando Brigade and the REME, whose fitter sections made an invaluable contribution to the operational efficiency of all the Challenger squadrons. With so many other units involved, it was clear that a line had to be drawn in the editorial sand and the decision was taken early on to keep the story within the SCOTS DG. Based on my interviews with the Challenger crews, I have endeavoured to record the events involving other units accurately and truthfully, but I am very happy to put right in any subsequent editions of the book any errors that may have slipped through in this one.
I owe a very special debt of gratitude to Rowland White, who commissioned me to write the book after many years negotiating with the MOD to get the project off the ground. As ever, his wisdom was gratefully received. I am also indebted to Daniel Bunyard, Rowland’s successor at Michael Joseph, who picked up the project at the production stage and carried it through to publication with such enthusiasm. Thanks too, as always, to my agent Araminta and her highly efficient new sidekick Harry at Lucas Alexander Whitley (LAW).
The thump of the tandem rotor blades filled the air above Adler’s Nest as the Chinook emerged above the tent tops in a cloud of pale dust, banked sharply to the right and disappeared towards the massive copper sun melting over the horizon of the Kuwaiti desert. To the pilots, the scene below was an extraordinary one: a patchwork of khaki and green merging into a single dark vastness, hemmed by white sands, like a giant oil slick on an otherwise unspoilt beach. The higher the helicopter climbed into the late-afternoon sky, the more military camps came into view; dozens of canvas cities, each arranged over a grid of thoroughfares and squares, spilling and seeping into the far distance. The windscreens of tens of thousands of vehicles flashed and sparkled in the last rays of the dying sun. Some of the vehicles were moving through the maze of makeshift streets, leaving trails of dust in their wake, no more than tiny puffs to the airmen above; others were lined up in perfect order, as if for inspection, column after column of them, row after row, block after block: Challenger 2 and Abrams tanks, armoured personnel carriers, self-propelled artillery guns, fuel tankers, ambulances, supply trucks, reconnaissance vehicles, Land Rovers, Pinzgauers, Humvees … The British alone had brought enough vehicles to form an eighty-mile convoy that would stretch from London to Southampton.
In amongst the tents and the vehicles, hundreds of thousands of men and women, their numbers equivalent to the entire population of Edinburgh or Pittsburgh, hurried to and fro, making their final, frantic preparations. Two months earlier there had been nothing to see there but sand, no life but vipers, scorpions and lizards. Natural selection has persuaded only a few creatures to carve out an existence in this empty, unforgiving wilderness. For a few brief weeks after the rain has come in the spring, the desert bursts with flowers but the townsfolk no longer come to enjoy this extraordinary spectacle of nature. Iraqi mines, scattered twelve years earlier by fleeing troops, still litter the landscape, responsible for the bizarre sight, every now and then, of a stray goat spiralling into the air in a plume of sand.
In Camp Adler’s Nest, a stream of soldiers in an assortment of T-shirts, green combats and heavy black boots, gas masks swinging from their necks and belts, jogged towards a small crowd forming inside the supplies distribution area, where the SQMS (Squadron Quartermaster Sergeant) packets were unloading large boxes from the back of a Bedford truck. The rumour had spread like a brushfire among the men of the Royal Scots Dragoon Guards – ‘SCOTS DG’ as they were known for short – that the desert combats and boots had finally arrived. Staff Sergeant Tam McVey whipped out his Stanley knife and sliced through the cardboard. The men pressed a little closer as McVey bent back the flaps of the box and lifted out a pair of blue-and-white chequered chef’s trousers from the top of the pile, triggering an uproar of laughter and cursing.
‘You’re kidding! … Great, well that’s going to frighten the life out of the Iraqis isn’t it? Six hundred men in white tunics and checked trooz … They’ll be giving us spatulas to fight with next … How the hell do you lose a whole battle group’s worth of clothes, rations and ammo? …’ The men muttered and joked as they melted back into the surrounding tents. It was not the first time they had left the SQMS area hiding their disappointment behind the banter.
It had been a frenetic, sometimes frustrating, time for the whole battle group. From the moment they had stepped off the planes from Hannover straight into a violent hailstorm, nothing was quite working out as they had imagined. A whole squadron of tanks and dozens of other vehicles had yet to arrive in dock, meaning they were unable to practise live firing at the Udairi ranges up by the Iraqi border or run through dry field-training exercises. What’s more, the tanks still had to be up-armoured with extra protection panels, spray-painted in desert colours and, as a precaution against blue-on-blue (friendly-fire) incidents, fitted with the Identification Friend or Foe (IFF) and Blue Force Tracker systems. After the experiences of the last Gulf War, nobody wanted to be crossing that border in an unmarked tank below a sky screeching with jets and attack helicopters. Since their arrival, the only rations the troops had been issued were the dreaded American MRE rations (‘Meal Ready to Eat’) while the ‘loggies’ of the Royal Logistics Corps tried to track down the consignment of British rations which were still in their sea containers on a ship floating around somewhere in the Gulf, or somewhere in the docks, or the desert … along with the desert combats, the ammunition for the tanks and the small arms, the spare parts, the new NBC filters to protect the crews in the event of an anthrax or nerve agent attack … the list ran and ran.
For the men of the SQMS packets tasked with supplying all the equipment for the men and the machines of the battle group, it had been an especially trying period, driving back and forth to the other side of the concentration area all day long to join in the scrum of other sergeants and their men from the rest of Brigade, all doing their utmost to bring back the kit their boys so desperately needed. No one knew when the war was to begin, but the flurry of orders from above and the sudden acceleration in preparations suggested it was to be days rather than weeks. Every day, the SQMS packets begged, borrowed and stole for their battle groups, but often they returned empty-handed with no news when the consignments of essential equipment were going to arrive. It was just pot luck what turned up at the docks that day, or as the SQMS boys put it to the increasingly frustrated troops they turned away: ‘Sorry, lads, it’s a bit like making chicken soup out of chicken shit right now.’
But it was a similar story for the whole of 7th Armoured Brigade, the ‘Desert Rats’, and the air of anticipation and the flow of banter among the SCOTS DG told the officers and NCOs that morale was still solid as H-hour approached. Lieutenant Colonel Hugh Blackman, Commanding Officer of the battle group, had been writing up his plans based on the nod from Brigade that the SCOTS DG were to form one of the three attack battle groups, behind the 1st Battalion Black Watch and the 1st Royal Regiment of Fusiliers. The 2nd Royal Tank Regiment, who made up the fourth battle group of the Desert Rats Brigade, was to be held back in reserve, the last to cross the border. This had been the hope and expectation of everyone in the SCOTS DG since their deployment had been announced, two months earlier. No soldier wants to work round the clock for two months to get combat-ready, only to sit on his helmet in the rear and watch his brothers-in-arms disappear to the frontline.
The four battle groups of the Desert Rats were all structured and organized in the same way. ‘B’ and ‘C’ Squadrons formed the armoured element of the SCOTS DG Battle Group, with each of them comprised of fourteen tanks and a hundred men, including non-combat personnel. Two companies of Irish Guards made up the infantry element of the 1,200-strong unit, which also included the men and vehicles of Command troop, the nexus of the regiment centred round the Commanding Officer. Completing the itinerant military community were the Reconnaissance troop, the medics of the Regimental Aid Post, the Quartermaster’s Department responsible for supplying the armoured units, and the technicians from the Light Aid Detachment of the Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers (REME).
Briefings and drills of all kinds were underway across the concentration area as ‘B’ Squadron leader, Major Chris Brannigan, and ‘C’ Squadron leader, Major Johnny Biggart, strode at a brisk pace through the streets of tents, taking the salutes of the men they would soon be leading into battle, as they headed towards the Battle Group HQ. It was not difficult for approaching troopers to distinguish the two men, with Biggart tall and rangy, and Brannigan stocky and bustling.
The Battle Group Operations Officer, Captain Roger Macmillan, had been on the radio to summon them to a meeting with Lieutenant Colonel Blackman, and there had been a hint of urgency or uneasiness in his voice.
‘What’s your guess?’
‘Could be anything. Perhaps there’s been a political breakthrough … new Intelligence about the WMD threat … who knows? The flow of information from on high has hardly been overwhelming … The BBC reporters seem to know more than we do!’
‘There’s talk of reported sightings by air of 170 Iraqi T-72 tanks massing near the border.’
‘Now, that would be interesting.’
To pass through Adler’s Nest in early March 2003 was to witness a world stuck in fast-forward mode. Soldiers rushed between tents, Land Rovers and trucks jammed the roads and the air was filled with the shouts and orders of men and the occasional roar of an aircraft overhead. Even without the tanks to work on, there were still dozens of tasks and exercises to be completed – not all of them rewarding experiences for those ordered to carry them out. In one of the tents, a dozen SCOTS DG were kneeling on the floor embroiled in the tedious task of cutting up thousands of small maps, arranging them into larger ones and taping them together so that all members of the battle group had identical maps that covered the entire area of operation in which they were to be fighting over the coming months. They had been there for days, working late into the night, and any soldier putting his ear to the canvas side of that tent was treated to a stream of expletives and cries of frustration from his colleagues inside. The floor was littered with piles of similar-looking pieces of map and the men were walking and crawling amongst them to find the relevant parts to put together their Ordnance Survey jigsaws – 500 of them in total. ‘Has anyone seen the pile of Az Zubayr sections? … Who’s got the border areas? … Damn, I’ve put Basra in upside down … I’m not sure what’s going to pop first: my head or my kneecaps … They’ll be signing the peace treaty by the time we finish this lot …’
In a neighbouring tent, a junior medic stood before a seated audience running through the procedure in the event of casevac being needed to take casualties from the frontline: ‘Give the location of the Landing Zone … the number of casualties by precedence. “Urgent” means less than two hours, “priority” more than two hours … you need to assess the security of the LZ and give details of the marking … give name, rank, number, age and unit of the casualty …’
Next door, a staff officer from Brigade HQ addressed a small group on the threats the Coalition forces were expected to face. ‘The enemy is likely to exploit the country’s oil infrastructure to discredit and disrupt the Coalition. He will try and do this by pumping oil into the Gulf, by igniting oil wells to create confusion and by damaging installations to prevent exploitation of the oilfields and resources for the rebuilding of the country … The enemy’s critical capabilities facing the Brigade are WMD, as you know only too well by now, Corps level artillery, deception operations, the tanks of 6th Armoured Division, mainly T-55s but possibly augmented by the far more competitive T-72s. The Challenger 2 may be a superior tank but the enemy has the upper hand in terms of numbers … The enemy has many weaknesses however: lack of air defence, lack of logistic lift, low morale amongst its regular army, poor Intelligence and a fractious population unhappy with the current regime …’
Towards the centre of the concentration area, soldiers were starting to queue up for the last meal of the day at the largest field kitchen constructed in modern military history. The chefs’ troops of all the regiments within the battle group had combined forces and equipment to create a giant cooking and dining area catering for the 6,000 men of the Brigade. In adjoining tents to the side, the temperature had started to drop a little, to the relief of the scores of chefs, who had the hottest jobs in the Brigade, going about their work under canvas in the heat of the desert alongside banks of ovens and refrigeration equipment. The upside of the system was a more efficient use of resources and a less complicated logistic chain but the risk with centralized cooking was a food poisoning outbreak that laid low half the army on the eve of war. Napoleon once said that an army marches to war on its belly, but as the planners for Operation ‘TELIC’ knew only too well it can also crawl on its hands and knees to the Portaloo. To the relief of the Brigade command and the troops themselves, as yet there had been no hint of the debilitating ‘soldier’s bug’, D&V – or diarrhoea and vomiting to the man in the street.
If there was a hygiene problem brewing it was in the small amount of Portaloos that had arrived so far. There were far too few of them for the men, and although the engineers were working hard to solve the problem, ‘where to crap?’ was becoming a pressing and irritating issue. A trooper walked in and burst straight back out of one of the plastic kiosks, gagging and exclaiming in a great guffaw of disgust: ‘I’m nae sitting doon in there. It’s heaped tae the brim with bangers ’n’ mash. I’m away to the desert for mine.’ Collecting his spade, he strode out into the sands bordering the camp and joined the group of other soldiers spread over an area the size of a football pitch, crouching on their haunches with their combat trousers round their boots. This was what the troops called the ‘scattered mine’ approach because it was just plain bad luck if they stood in another man’s waste.
‘Later symptoms of nerve agent poisoning include headache and dizziness …’ – the loud voice of the medic, trying to make herself heard at the back of the tent, reached outside as Brannigan and Biggart walked by – ‘… increased saliva, drooling at the mouth, excessive sweating, involuntary urination and defecation …’
Two NCOs saluted as they approached the officers from the other direction. ‘I think she must be talking about the 2nd Royal Tank Regiment, don’t you, sir?’ one of them said as the two officers took the salute and acknowledged the wit with a smile.
‘Steady, boys. Just because they’re reserve battle group, doesn’t mean they’re not a valuable element of the Brigade!’
Close to the sleeping quarter tents, a dozen bare-topped men were bent over buckets of water on wooden tables, shaving and washing themselves and their clothes. Behind them, two men with their top halves visible above the poncho screen, stood beneath solar shower bags with their heads tilted backwards to let the water run over their faces and wash away the sand and grimy sweat of another day. Sergeant ‘Larry’ Lamb was holding a small mirror in one hand and running an electric razor over the stubble on his head with his other – to the great amusement of the others around him. ‘Are you going to cover yourself in tattoos as well, Larry? … I don’t know what the Iraqis will make of you, but you sure frighten me …’ Many of the men had decided to shave their heads so that they would be that little bit cooler out in the field when the real heat arrived. It was warm enough already during the day, but in a couple of weeks the temperature was expected to rocket to 35 degrees Celsius and beyond. Cropped hair and shaven heads were also more hygienic and they made it easier to maintain the high grooming standards demanded in the SCOTS DG. Smart appearance, even holed up in a battle zone, was essential for strong discipline and good morale and it was strictly enforced. Long hair and beards were strictly for Special Forces only.
Men were coming and going from the two giant tents serving as sleeping quarters for ‘B’ and ‘C’ Squadrons. Through the open flaps, they could see a few curled up on top of their sleeping bags, grabbing what rest they could, with their Bergens and rifles stowed at their heads along the edge of the canvas. Some were lying on camp bed-style cots but most slept on the floor using a pullover or their combat jackets as pillows. Others were sitting on the carpet tiles with their backs against the big wooden poles that ran down the length of the tent in two columns. Some were reading letters, others writing them, scribbling away on pale blue aerograms, ‘blueys’, to their loved ones back home. A final few were getting round to writing their wills. This was a disheartening experience for the soldiers and many put it off till the very last moment. Captain Richard Le Sueur (pronounced Swer) was kneeling on one leg, helping two of his men to write theirs. It was up to the troop leaders to make sure that their men had written one, reminding them that they put their families at financial risk if they didn’t, and Le Sueur was keen, just like the other officers, that his men had squared away their personal lives before crossing the border. There was going to be plenty to concentrate the mind in the field as it was and the last thing a commander needed was for his troops to be distracted by private worries.
The two Squadron leaders walked another 200 yards in silence, each running through a mental checklist of the tasks he had to complete before the day was out. As they approached the entrance of the Battle Group HQ tent, a Land Rover slammed to an abrupt halt churning up the dust around the wheels. Captain Macmillan cranked up the handbrake as Lieutenant Colonel Blackman jumped from the passenger door and marched into the tent clutching a dossier under his arm.
The Ops Officer gave the two Squadron leaders a look as if to say: ‘Don’t ask.’ As he disappeared into the tent, Major Peter MacMullen and Major Ben Farrell, the two company commanders of the Irish Guards, were stepping from their own command vehicle and heading towards them. The four men, who had known each other for years, shook hands and walked in. Biggart and Farrell were particularly close friends as were Brannigan and MacMullen. Their close affinities were likely to be an asset on the battlefield. They trusted and understood each other and were able to speak frankly.
There was no natural light in the Operations tent, which had been sealed as tightly as possible to prevent the dust from infiltrating the machinery. This was the temporary nerve centre of the battle group and there were half a dozen soldiers crouched over computer keyboards and radio sets. A hot-water boiler for brews and two cases of bottled water sat amongst mugs and boxes of tea on a general-purpose table in the middle of the tent. Lieutenant Colonel Blackman stood with his back to his senior officers, rubbing clean the whiteboard next to his desk with a sequence of vigorous swipes.
‘I’ve just come back from Brigade HQ,’ he said turning round to face them. If he was angry, he didn’t let his voice betray it. He sounded, to his audience, every bit as composed and gracious as ever. ‘The rest of the tanks are still not here. Their ship was bumped to the back of the queue of traffic heading through the Suez Canal. The other battle groups now have a full fleet of vehicles. Brigade’s line is that the whole war effort can’t wait for us.’
He paused as if summoning the effort to get the words out.
‘I think you know what’s coming … we are now the reserve battle group, the last in the order of march into Iraq. I’m sorry to have give you this news after all the hard work you and your men have put in over the last two months. Break it to your men as gently as possible – and as soon as possible. You know how news like this …’
Silence filled the tent for several moments and the four senior officers of the battle group were absorbing the Commanding Officer’s bombshell announcement when the air was suddenly rent by the sound every man had come to dread since arriving in Kuwait: the blare of Land Rover horns and the cries of ‘Gas! Gas! Gas!’ Mostly the alerts came in the night, a deliberate move to deny the soldiers their sleep and undermine morale, but this was the fourth that day alone. Instinctively, everyone in the tent jumped to their feet and seized their helmets and rubber gas masks with their big bug-eye lenses. Outside, men and women were jogging in all directions, attaching their ‘face wellies’ as they scrambled into the nearest Scud pit. Even the men who had been showering had no choice but to head in the nude for the safety of sandbags. Within a minute, a quarter of a million men, with faces like giant insects, lay in the dust of the Kuwaiti desert and waited.
In spite of the UN inspectors’ failure to find tangible evidence of weapons of mass destruction capable of striking targets in the West, the prospect of conflict with Saddam Hussein’s rogue regime had become increasingly inevitable by the day. With a third of a million troops in theatre, there was a momentum to the military build-up that only the most dramatic political or diplomatic development could stop in its tracks. But such was the determination of the US administration under President George Bush to flex its muscles against undesirable regimes and terrorist organizations in the wake of the 11 September attacks on New York and Washington, there seemed little chance of that – short of Saddam appearing live on television draped in the Stars and Stripes and singing ‘America the Beautiful’. There was no surprise, only a global intake of breath, when the invasion was launched on 20 March 2003.
The protests and public scepticism over the war, back home and across the world, were an unenviable backdrop for an army preparing for combat in a conflict without a clear-cut casus belli and lacking widespread backing. It’s easier for a soldier to spill blood if he knows he’s fighting for a noble cause endorsed by the overwhelming majority of his countrymen. But in the frenetic rush there was little thought let alone talk of politics among the SCOTS DG as they put together the final touches to their preparations. Zeroing the weapons and maintenance of the tanks was the priority.
Their notice to move had been upgraded from twelve hours to one hour following aviation reports of large columns of Iraqi armour on the move, and the pace of preparation, already furious, was now frantic. The 200 vehicles of the SCOTS DG Battle Group had congregated at a location three miles south of the Demilitarized Zone, and crate after crate of ammunition was being unboxed from the back of Bedford trucks and laid out across the sands as fast as the men could shift it. The pristine pale sands of the Kuwaiti desert were covered with row upon row of stubby, yellow-based high-explosive shells (HESH) and anti-armour APFSDS rounds – known as ‘FIN’ to the troops – with their distinctive tungsten darts at the head and orange protective caps at the base. The colours, shapes and symmetry of the ammunition against the spotless white backdrop of the desert gave the arrangement a strange beauty that wouldn’t have looked completely out of place as a modern art installation. There was, however, nothing creative or lovely about the purpose of these sleek-looking tank rounds. Combined, they had the power to reduce an average-sized market town to rubble.
Anticipating traditional armour-versus-armour desert warfare, the planners had allocated considerably more FIN than HESH rounds for each of the 120 tanks of the Desert Rats’ four battle groups. Every Challenger 2 was loaded with 29 FIN, 18 HESH and 3 smoke rounds as well as 20 smoke grenades, 6 regular grenades, 22 boxes of 7.62mm ‘coax’ (a total of 4,400 rounds) for the fixed coaxial chain gun and the anti-aircraft GPMG – general-purpose machine gun – or ‘gimpy’ (pronounced jimpy), mounted on the turret. Each tank also had a hundred rounds of 5.62mm for the SA80 assault rifles issued to the driver and the loader, the only two of the four crew with the room to store the assault rifles near their seating area. The aggregate of this inventory gave the Challenger more firepower than an entire company of infantry. Twelve rounds were also provided for the Browning pistols worn by the commander and gunner. It was a measly amount, but the thinking was that if a tank crew was reduced to using its two pistols, its number was already up. Hand-held guns generally have proved of little use in armoured engagements across the world’s deserts and plains.
The men of the SQMS packets and the crews of each tank had formed small chains and were quickly shifting the rounds into the bowels of the Challengers as sergeants strode between the vehicles barking orders.
‘What’s the bloody rush now that we’re the tail-end Charlies?’ muttered one of the troopers as he handed a HESH round up to his loader in the turret. ‘It’ll all be over by the time we cross the border.’
The Coalition invasion had begun two days earlier and the other three battle groups of 7th Armoured (the Desert Rats) – the Black Watch, the Royal Regiment of Fusiliers and the 2nd Royal Tank Regiment – were already thirty miles into Iraq, pushing up to the southern outskirts of Basra. As part of the 1st (UK) Armoured Division, the Desert Rats, together with the Royal Marines of 3 Commando Brigade and the Paras of 16 Air Assault Brigade, had been tasked with securing Basra and the south of Iraq, while the Americans streamed through their positions to seize Baghdad 300 miles to the north. Immediately the invasion was launched, 3 Commando Brigade, attempting the first full-scale opposed landing since the Second World War, had seized the huge oil complex at the south of the Al Faw peninsula in a brilliantly executed air and amphibious assault from HMS Ocean and HMS Ark Royal floating out in the Gulf. The Paras, meanwhile, were lining up to take the oil fields of Al-Rumaylah twenty miles to the north-west of Basra.
The immediate objective for the British troops as a whole was to secure every key military, civilian and economic asset and location in the south, including the oil wells of the Al Faw and the pumping stations at Az Zubayr, defeat any resistance they might meet in achieving that and then start pouring in the humanitarian aid as quickly as possible. They had also been tasked to seal off Basra by putting in screens to the north-west of the city and to block routes in and out of it by securing the five bridges over the Shatt Al Basra. This former shipping canal, as wide as the Thames in London at Tower Bridge, runs on a south-east to north-west diagonal a couple of miles below Iraq’s sprawling second city, marking a natural boundary for an invading force to seize and secure.
Once these immediate assignments had been completed, the planners were to assess the strategic situation and hand out the tasks and missions accordingly. From the outset – as they could only be as they headed into a realm of infinite possibilities – the plans were fluid and flexible and relied heavily on the resourcefulness and adaptability of the British troops to react quickly to events unfolding on the ground. In effect, this meant no British soldier crossing the border had more than the vaguest idea of what he was going to be doing in the coming days and weeks. Or months.
The hope, at the heart of general strategy, was that by sitting on the outskirts of Basra for a few days and showing the locals that they were there to help and not harm, drawing out and defeating any resistance as they did so, the troops would be able to walk into Basra without bloodshed. That was the theory at least. With just 28,000 combat troops to secure the whole of the south, what the British wanted to avoid at all costs was to get drawn into a Stalingrad or Grozny-style siege, fighting through a dense maze of streets and alleys in a city the size of Birmingham with a population of 2 million.
From the little that the SCOTS DG had been able to glean from their embedded journalists and their own channels of information, none of the Coalition forces had experienced anything other than light sparring since the invasion had begun thirty-six hours earlier. There had been a few potshots with small arms and the odd RPG – rocket-propelled grenade – but no significant weaponry or co-ordinated resistance had been encountered. There was, it seemed, no sign of the 200 T-72s and the hundred or so BM-21 truck-mounted multiple rocket launchers said to be roaming the south in search of British forces. If there had been, that was the kind of major news that didn’t need a grapevine to travel along. Shocking news has its own way of finding its target audience and the SCOTS DG would have known about that back in Kuwait almost immediately. The fact that the Americans were already well north of Basra, massing on the south side of the Euphrates at Al-Nasiriyah, suggested the Iraqis weren’t prepared to put up much of a fight. Either that, or Saddam had other plans.
In the first Gulf War the ground offensive was over within a hundred hours and there was a widespread suspicion amongst the SCOTS DG Battle Group that, after two months of whirlwind preparations to get ready to fight, there would be little for them to do once they finally arrived in theatre. Or, as one of the troopers, put it: ‘Six months of handing out fucking Rothmans to POWs and Fruit Pastilles to kids in fifty-degree heat! Newsagents in the desert, that’s all we are – only sweatier and not as well paid.’
The men of the SCOTS DG Battle Group may have represented less than 5 per cent of the total 28,000 troops – and 15 per cent of its combat fighting power – from over ninety British Army units committed to Operation TELIC, but they still cut an impressive sight as their 150 vehicles filed out in a column stretching over five miles and swung north onto Highway 80. It was difficult for the men to picture the carnage that had been visited along this tidy stretch of motorway – now renovated and resurfaced – in 1991, when most of them were still in the first years of primary school learning to read and write. Known ever since as the ‘Highway of Death’, the road was the scene of the devastating assault by US aircraft that laid waste to the Iraqi troops as they made an armed retreat out of Kuwait laden with local hostages and booty. The images of 2,000 burnt-out vehicles littering the sides of the road were so powerful that President Bush was forced to call an end to the fighting, allowing Saddam Hussein to remain in power. And those images were the very reason why, over a decade on, Scotland’s only cavalry regiment and the infantrymen of the Irish Guards were now lining up, Challenger after Challenger, Warrior after Warrior, leading a convoy of trucks and other support vehicles, on that very same section of road, engines revving, tracks grinding and clattering as they slowly began to move northwards towards the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ). Same war, new generation. The last entry in Major Brannigan’s field notebook from the first Gulf War read: ‘Prepare to head North to secure Basra.’ The first entry in his field notebook twelve years later read: ‘Prepare to head North to secure Basra.’
Captain Will Leek, the Recce troop leader, was the first through the breach, an insignificant opening in a ten-foot-high earth berm that led into the DMZ. The buffer between the two countries was empty but for three long rolls of barbed wire stretching way into the distance in both directions. Those expecting a dramatic entry into enemy territory were disappointed. The only signs of life were a few stray dogs sniffing and scratching at the sand. Staff Sergeant Jamie ‘Dodger’ Gardiner, 3rd troop leader of ‘B’ Squadron was given the honour of taking the first tank of the battle group into Iraq. He was one of the few men of the regiment still serving to have fought in the First Gulf War, as a gunner fresh out of basic training. The weather was cooler than the previous few days and a brisk wind whipped from west to east, bending the few shrubs dotted across the landscape and stirring up mists of fine sand that gave the blue sky above them a slightly unreal quality. The 200 UN observers were long gone.
As the column passed through the second berm and into Iraq, they were greeted by a sign at the side of the road reading: ‘First Fusiliers Welcome You To Iraq,’ triggering equal measures of laughter and abuse from each vehicle that passed it. The SCOTS DG shared a garrison with the Fusiliers in Germany and, though they had enjoyed their fair share of bar-room punch-ups over the years, there was a great deal of affection and respect between two of Britain’s most celebrated regiments. It was galling, though, to be reminded that theirs was the last major British combat unit to cross the border and they all felt the sting of the joke.
As the first few vehicles passed through the DMZ, ‘C’ Squadron’s radio net fell silent as the men absorbed the significance of what they were doing – only for it to burst into life again moments later to the sound of Jim Morrison of The Doors, hammering out ‘Break on Through to the Other Side.’ One of the NCOs had linked his MP3 player into the system and played the song for a joke, but it failed to amuse ‘C’ Squadron leader, Major Biggart. ‘This is Zero Alpha. Whoever’s playing that music, turn it off now and show some respect, will you?’ The Major saw the funny side of the prank, but he wanted to keep his men focused.
The mere act of crossing from Kuwaiti to Iraqi sand was enough to send the adrenaline coursing through the veins of the battle group as the vehicles filled with nervous, excitable banter. Thoughts of home and images of loved ones were put to the back of the mind. To a man, they were exhausted after days of frenetic activity, punctuated by endless fixing of gas masks and jumping in and out of shell scrapes at the sound of Scud alarms, but a palpable energy now ran through the column as one vehicle after another rolled into Iraq. In the previous twenty-four hours alone there had been over a dozen alerts as Saddam launched two Al-Samoud missiles and five Scuds towards the Coalition forces in northern Kuwait. All of them had landed harmlessly in the desert or been shot down by US Patriots, but if part of the plan had been to unsettle the invading forces and deprive them of much-needed sleep, then he had certainly succeeded. The latest rumour sweeping the Brigade was that US forces crossing the Euphrates at Al-Nasiriyah were likely to be the trigger for the Iraqis launching a chemical attack. But for the time being, that fear, as well as the deep fatigue from which they were all suffering, was washed away in the excitement of crossing from the relative safety and comfort of a friendly nation and into a war zone. Barely a dozen of the 1,200 men in the convoy had ever fired a shot in anger, and the tanks in which they were riding had never been tested in combat. They were passing into unknown territory in more than a geographical sense.
The convoy passed by the small, ghostly town of Safwan, a quarter of a mile over the border, where General Norman Schwarzkopf, the Coalition Commander, had held ceasefire negotiations with an Iraqi delegation twelve years earlier. A once-prosperous community full of shops and cafés serving day-trippers and tradesmen passing back and forth between the two countries, it looked now as if it had been visited by the Apocalypse. All but a few of its inhabitants who hadn’t already abandoned the town had fled in recent days at the approach of yet another invading army. Its derelict buildings were riddled with bullet and shell holes; rusting cars without wheels slumped forlornly on the roadside. The strong winds picked up debris from rubbish piles and sent it dancing through the air. Graffiti on the ruins of a breeze-block wall read: ‘Yes for Bleer and Bush. No for Sadam.’ Three young children in dirty T-shirts, their thick black hair matted with dust and dirt, stood at the side watching the convoy without expression.
‘Shit, we’ve invaded Airdrie by mistake,’ someone wisecracked.
The head of the convoy reached a network of slip roads and flyovers. This was where Route Tampa and Route Topeka, as the Americans had dubbed the two main supply routes through southern Iraq, merged in an otherwise empty expanse of arid scrub to form a bizarrely urban spectacle. A blue and white road sign, pockmarked with fresh bullet rounds, hanging over the carriageway, pointed the vehicles in the direction of Basra and Az Zubayr.
The ‘B’ Squadron radio crackled into life. ‘Zero Alpha, this is Three Two. Er, just a thought – what side of the road do we drive on?’
‘Three Two, this is Zero Alpha. You’ve just invaded the country in a tank. Drive on whichever side of the road you bloody well like!’
The maps issued to the tank commanders revealed the emptiness and the flatness of the landscape in southern Iraq, but what they didn’t show was the eerie desolation of the place. Route Topeka followed a virtually straight line north from Safwan, bypassing Az Zubayr after twenty-odd miles and continuing a further ten over the Shatt Al Basra waterway, through the sprawling Shia slums and into the heart of old Basra. Closed down in tanks and armoured personnel carriers, only some of the battle group were able to take in the miserable scene outside as the convoy sped north. There were no towns or even villages on the road to Az Zubayr, just the occasional mud and breeze-block smallholding or hovel, installations related to the oil industry, strings of pylons, overground pipelines and the occasional ruin or war cemetery. No trees, no grass, no flowers grew in the baked, salty earth, just the odd hunchbacked shrub, bent over by the strong winds that blast across the flat barren terrain. Whichever way they looked, the land was studded with defensive positions, barbed wire and ditches and littered with the debris of conflicts, past and present. The burnt-out, rusting hulls of tanks, troop carriers and other military vehicles stood as wretched monuments to the dead of the eight-year conflict with Iran in the 1980s and the first Gulf War that followed just three years later. Years of rubbish, tipped and thrown from passing cars, choked the roadside. The air was filled with a fetid stench from the saline mudflats and stretches of lifeless brackish water.
The motorway was virtually deserted in both directions, but every now and then a civilian car swept by, its occupants craning their necks as they stared at the column of armour heading the other way. Dusty, dazed civilians stood in small groups at the edge of the route, their belongings at their side in an assortment of boxes and bags. The further north the convoy travelled, the busier the road became and after twenty minutes the traffic, both human and vehicular, began to thicken significantly. They passed dozens of pick-up trucks, mostly containing men in civilian clothes waving makeshift white flags or white T-shirts, grinning as hard as they could. To the left of the road, three British soldiers stood guard over a dozen Iraqi POWs, sitting on their haunches in the dirt. The prisoners were wearing white, body-length dishdash robes and grey shemaghs on their heads. Their confiscated AK-47s were leaning up against the side of a Land Rover. A little further up, the remains of a large brown dog lay in the middle of the road, flattened by an earlier tank, no thicker than a doormat now but retaining its basic dog shape despite being pressed into the tarmac by 75 tons of metal.
The traffic on the radio networks became busier as the column began to pick up the frequencies of the other battle groups and Coalition units. As the commanders and radio operators flicked through the channels, they could hear reports of contact and even the rattle of automatic and machine-gun fire in the background. The view in front began to change too. The realization sunk in that what looked like gathering rain clouds on the horizon were in fact a series of giant oil fires that grew taller and taller with every mile they advanced. The orange flares licking the base of the billowing black smoke were just visible through the magnification sights of the tanks. The blackened, twisted wrecks of military vehicles littered the landscape on either side of the road.
‘Welcome to Basra,’ came an unidentifiable voice over the net.
One sight was more arresting than all the other grim spectacles combined – the wreck of an American M1 Abrams, the main battle tank of the US Army. A ripple of muttering passed along the vehicles as the convoy slowed down and rubbernecked the twisted, charred remains. The same uncomfortable question was passing through the mind of every tank crew member that saw it: Blue-on-blue, T-72 or anti-tank weapon? Further down the road, a handful of other US vehicles, Humvees and supply trucks, sat in the dust at the side of the road, riddled with bullet holes. Positioned at crazy angles, the scene suggested that the vehicles had been abandoned in haste. As they approached Az Zubayr, the air filled with the sound of rotor blades, American Apaches and Cobras mainly but also some British Lynx and Gazelle, swooping low and fast over the ground, flicking the convoy with their shadows as they rushed northwards towards the mountains of thick oil smoke dominating the skyline around Basra. The turrets of the Challengers hummed as the commanders scanned the terrain on either side of the road, swinging the barrels of the main armament back and forth.
The battle group turned off Route Topeka and headed west, away from Basra and Az Zubayr, and continued for a further ten miles into an area of open, uninhabited scrubland where the only sign of human activity was the occasional car passing the other way, a collection of flare pipes, some obsolete industrial units and warehouses, and the odd pillbox and watchtower. The sun, enormous and orange, was sinking towards the horizon ahead of them as the convoy ground to a halt, pulled off the road and prepared to ‘go firm’. With a view for miles in all directions, this designated forward assembly area (FAA), known as ‘MORPETH’, was as safe a place as any in the war zone to spend the night. The three tanks of each of the eight troops formed a circular hide with their guns facing outwards while the Irish Guards picketed the route, each platoon dividing into sections as they strung themselves out a mile or so in each direction in amongst the tanks. The wind was still strong and the telegraph wires along the road danced from side to side as the men dismounted, stretching their stiff limbs as they emerged from their hatches and doors and set about organizing themselves for the night as fast as possible while there was still light. Each troop put men on stag while the others bolted bacon and beans from their silver foil ration packs, downed mugs of tea and lay out their sleeping bags on the back decks of the tanks. For the smokers, a cigarette was the first priority. For many, it was nature that exercised a greater call and several dozen men, as one, jogged a short distance out into the desert to relieve themselves after five hours closed down. Almost immediately, the men from the Quartermaster’s departments brought up the UBRE fuel tankers from the rear and began the laborious task of refuelling every single one of the 150 vehicles in the battle group. The three tanks of each troop then took up defensive positions as best they could along the side of the road.
Night fell quickly to reveal a sky streaked with tracer fire and a horizon throbbing with orange and yellow flashes as artillery and jets set about their targets. At some point in the night, when most of the men were asleep, the air filled with the familiar, wretched din of Land Rover horns – for the umpteenth time in a fortnight. Brigade HQ was reporting that the entire Area of Operations (AOR) was on red alert for a chemical attack; it was a Dress State 4 alert demanding that protective suits as well as gas masks were donned. A collective groan greeted the alarm and, wearily and robotically, most of the men stood up and climbed into the ungainly suits and pulled the cumbersome rubber masks over their heads. Many didn’t wait for the all-clear and quickly fell back to sleep in their suits. The guardsmen lay by the side of the road, the troopers on the backs of the tanks, making the most of the heat from the huge 1,200bhp Perkins engines in the cool night air.
An hour later, a column of vehicles from the US Marine Expeditionary Force thundered through the battle group’s position at speed, the wheels of some of the more erratically driven vehicles coming within a foot or two of the sleeping guardsmen, forcing them to take quick evasive action. Dozens of men jumped from the ground, some in rubber suits and masks like zombies back from the dead, gesticulating wildly at the passing convoy, their shouts of protest muffled by the respirators.
The crown of the sun had yet to appear over the eastern horizon but the stars were fading into a dirty grey when the news swept along the battle group lines like a current of electricity: ‘Brigade are sending us north of Basra, deep behind enemy lines!’