Andy McNab - Bravo Two Zero

The crowds were making the fearsome Red Indian warbling noise. They were jubilant that they’d caught somebody, but I couldn’t tell if the warble was a victory salute or a sign of even worse things to come. As we lurched over the field, I tried to concentrate on identifying the troops from their uniforms. They wore British-pattern DPM (disrupted-pattern material), with chest webbing that held five magazines, and high laced boots. They had Para wings, too, and red lanyards, which marked them out as elite commandos. It was only much later that I learned that the lanyards were to commemorate a victory from the Second World War, when they fought under Montgomery’s command, of which they seemed quite proud.

We hit a meta led road and the bouncing stopped. I wasn’t much concerned with where we were going at this stage-I just wanted to get there and to stop being filled in by these boys’ boots. The soldiers jabbered at me fast and aggressively.

The vehicle stopped. We seemed to be in the town. Noise surged around us. I heard voices, many voices, and I knew from their tone that it was an angry mob. The sound of hatred is ugly and universal. I looked up. I saw a sea of faces, military and civilian, angry, chanting, shouting abuse. I felt like a child in a pram with a gang of adults peering in. It scared me. These people hated me.

An old man dug deep into his TB-riddled lungs and fired a green wad into my face. Other salvoes followed, thick and fast. Then came the physical stuff. It started with a poke in my ribs, a testing prod at the new commodity in town. The poke became a shove, then a slap, then a punch, and the crowd started pulling my hair. I thought it was going to be a case of mob rule. I felt I was going to get lynched, or worse.

They started to climb aboard. There was uncontrolled frenzy. Perhaps it was the first time they’d seen a white-eyed soldier. Perhaps they held me personally responsible for their dead and wounded friends and family members. They closed in and slapped and punched, pulled my mustache and hair. There was a gagging stench of unwashed bodies. It was like a horror film with zombies. All daylight was blocked out, and I thought I was going to suffocate.

More and more shots were fired into the air, and I began to worry that it wouldn’t be long before they got bored with using clouds as targets. The useless thought came to me that they must be taking casualties from firing in built-up areas. Rounds have spent their explosive force when they come down, but they still come down with a deadly momentum. No doubt they’d blame me for those deaths as well.

What were the soldiers going to do, I wondered-just let the civvies have me? Kill me now, I thought. I’d rather have the squad dies do it than the crowd. The soldiers started pushing the people away. It was a wonderful feeling. Just a minute ago they were bearing me up; now these boys were my saviors. Better the devil you know…

I was lying on my stomach at the back of the Land Cruiser, my hands still tied, and they started to drag me out feet first. The hollering of obscenities got louder. I concentrated on looking dejected and badly injured and on working out how I was going to protect my face as I fell two feet or so onto the tarmac. The solution was to spin around on to my back because then I could keep my head up. I managed to do it just in time. I lifted my head, and the base of my spine took the force of the drop, detonating an explosion of pain inside my skull. All the breath was knocked out of me. The soldiers were really playing the macho man, waving at everybody, shaking their AKs in the air Che Guevara style. They looked so butch, I thought, doing this in front of the girls. They were the real local teddies; they’d obviously be scoring tonight.

The vehicle had stopped about 50 feet from a big pair of gates set in a wall 10 feet high. I got the impression we were at the local military camp. They dragged me on my back towards the gates. I had to arch to save my hands from scraping along the road. Still there was mass hysteria. I was scared: the fear of the unknown. These people looked and sounded so very out of control.

At last I was dragged inside and the gates slammed behind us. I took in a large courtyard and a selection of buildings. The macho act ended at once, and the squad dies hoiked me to my feet and pulled me on by my arms. You’ve got to take time to have a look around, to tune in. If you do the hard man routine, stick your chest out and say fuck you, they’ll fill you in again, and that’s counterproductive. If you appear to be subdued and sapped, they’ve got the effect they want. It’s now that you’ve got to start going to town with your injuries. You’ve got to look feeble, as if everything’s on top of you and you’re totally and utterly clueless. Quite apart from anything else, it preserves what energy you’ve got left so that you’re ready for your escape, which is of primary concern, I felt I’d passed a major test. I was in another world; another drama had ended. In a weird way I almost felt safe, now that the local population couldn’t get their hands on me. The prospect of that seemed so much worse than anything fellow soldiers might do to me. I exaggerated the limp, shivering and coughing, and moaned every time someone got hold of me. It must have seemed a wonder I was alive, the way I was going on. I was in a bad way, but my mental state was good, and that’s the one you’ve got to worry about and conceal from the enemy.

For a few minutes I stood there with a ring of guards around me. As I looked straight ahead, there was a meta led road going to a block about 300 feet ahead. Looking around from left to right, I saw barrack blocks to the right, following the line of the wall, and a small clump of trees.

Then I saw some poor bastard lying on the grass, trussed up on his stomach like a chicken, his ankles and wrists tied together. He was trying to lift his legs to take the pressure off his head. He’d obviously been given a good hammering. His head had swollen up to the size of a football, and his kit was torn and covered in blood. I couldn’t even see the color of his hair or whether his clothes were camouflage-pattern. For a moment, as he lifted his head, we had eye-to-eye, and I realized it was Dinger.

The eyes give so much away. They can tell you when a person is drunk, when he’s bluffing, when he’s alert, when he’s happy. They are the window to the mind. EHnger’s eyes said: It’s going to be all right. I even got a small smile out of him. I grinned back. I had a fearsome dread for him because he was in such a bad state, but it was wonderful to see him, to have somebody there to share my predicament. Selfishly, I was chuffed I wasn’t the only one to be caught. The slagging if I got back to Hereford would have been unbearable.

The down side of seeing him was the realization that it was my turn next. He was really in a bad way, yet he was much harder than me. It occurred to me that I could be dead by the end of the afternoon. If so, I just wanted to get it over and done with.

A couple of boys with weapons were lounging against a tree near Dinger, smoking cigarettes. They didn’t stop when two officers and their little entourage came out of their office and walked halfway up the road to meet us. I just stood there, playing on the injuries, working on the principle that you don’t know anything until you try. Mentally I prepared myself for another filling in. As the officers approached, I clenched my teeth and pressed my knees together to protect my balls.

The local military had incurred a lot of casualties, and it was clear that these well-dressed officers, a mixture of commando officers in DPM and ordinary types in olive green with stars on their shoulders, were not impressed. My head was pushed up, and one of them took a swing. I closed my eyes and braced myself for the next punch. It didn’t come.