Andy McNab - Bravo Two Zero

We were put on a bus and taken straight to a segregated secure ward at the military hospital.

The massive, hulking frame of Stan loomed out of the darkness, closely followed by Dinger, fag in hand. Stan had hepatitis and wasn’t feeling too good, but Dinger was firing on all cylinders.

“I’ve phoned Jilly,” he said. “I’ve got it all squared away; don’t worry about the phone cards. Our blokes have rigged up a link through to the UK.”

Mugger went down to the town to organize a few videos for our entertainment, and the B Squadron sergeant major turned up with a hospital trolley loaded with booze for a piss-up. We were smuggled out of the ward and down to the library, where we set about getting blitzed.

Gordon Turnbull, the R.A.F psychologist and counselor, had arrived in Cyprus to oversee the recuperative phase.

“What have you got there?” he asked Mugger as he spotted him heading for the library.

“Videos for the lads.”

“Mind if I have a look?”

Turnbull nearly had a heart attack. Mugger had bought us Terminator, Driller Killer, and Nightmare on Elm Street. “You can’t do this!” he shrieked. “Those blokes are all traumatized!”

“Traumatized?” said Mugger. “They’re pissed out of their brains. Come and have a look.”

Turnbull saw us and blew a gasket.

“Don’t worry about it,” Mugger said. “They were all fucking barking to start with.”

I helped Mark into the bath, and a big lump of skin the size of a bath plug fell out of the hole in his foot. I then went in search of our special phone.

The armed guard sneaked me down to the cellar and took me to where a couple of scaleys were guarding the phone to keep away freeloaders.

The link worked perfectly, and I got through to Jilly straightaway.

I staggered to bed after lots of “I love you.” As my head hit the pillow, I worked out that this was the first proper bed I had slept in for eight weeks, three days.

For the next couple of days we had X rays and tests, and the dentists had a provisional go at my teeth. We had posttraumatic shock sessions with Gordon Turnbull, which lasted only a few minutes each. Poor Gordon, he’d thought it was Christmas with all these traumatized blokes coming back from captivity. He was good at his job, but the mentality of the blokes made them far more interested in taking advantage of everything else that was on offer. Our blokes had organized for us to get down to the town, and the Red Cross had given us a float of money. We wanted to buy our duty frees before it all disappeared.

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 running out of money, and Kenny f was flapping because we put a 600 pounds dent in his plastic. He knew he’d have a long wait before we paid him back.

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 personnel. We stayed at the back with the blinds down while whoever was in charge of the air force in Germany greeted his boys off the plane. Without a doubt it was a big homecoming. After the ceremony the top brass got into his car. His next port of call, and also our next destination, was an hour or so’s drive away, so we now had to wait on the pan at Laarbruch to give him time to get to Bruggen. When we landed, he was at the other end to greet the second batch of R.A.F prisoners. The whole ceremony was repeated. We sorted out some crates of Grolsch and slowly got pissed.

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.”

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.