Chris Ryan - The One That Got Away - Junior edition

For a minute or two I couldn’t really speak. One of the guys was so shattered by my appearance that he burst into tears. In place of the fit, bouncing young fellow he’d seen off a couple of weeks earlier, here was a prematurely aged cripple, broken, bent and shuffling. He said I looked like a bag of bones.

Geordie thinned the guys out and took me to one side. ‘Right,’ he said. ‘We’ve got to go into headquarters for the debriefing.’

The HQ was housed in tents next to the permanent control-tower buildings. Before we went in, Geordie asked if there was anything I wanted to tell him first. I said, ‘Yeah, there’s quite a bit. I’ll tell you what actually happened, but I’m not going to mention it all in the debrief.’ So I told him about Vince losing heart. ‘If Andy or any of the others come out, they’ll confirm it,’ I said. ‘Until then, we’ll just leave it.’

‘Fine,’ Geordie said, and we went in.

The debrief lasted two hours. Once it was over, Geordie drove me round the airfield to the squadron location. On the way he asked, ‘First things first: d’you want to go home?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘I want to stay here and find out what’s happened.’ The last thing I wanted to do was desert the team.

It was then that Geordie told me what had happened to the other two Bravo patrols: they’d both come straight back.

When Bravo Three Zero took stock of their location, the commander immediately decided that the area was impossibly dangerous. There wasn’t enough cover to conceal the vehicles, so they immediately began to drive back towards the Saudi border — a journey which took them two nights. Afterwards the commander was fiercely criticized, not least because he ignored an instruction to RV with ‘D’ Squadron — who were already in Iraq and needing reinforcement — not far off his route.

Bravo One Zero stayed an even shorter time. When the Chinook landed at their drop-off point, the pilot said to the leader, ‘Pete — d’you want to have a look around while I hang on a minute? I can’t see any depressions or wadis for miles. It’s like a billiard table.’ To prove his point, the pilot flew twenty kilometres up and down, trying to find some broken ground into which he could drop the patrol, but the desert remained horribly bare.

Pete took a decision which struck me as very brave. ‘Right,’ he said. ‘We’re not staying here. We’re flying out.’

Back at Al Jouf people said he was a coward. But I and many others reckoned that of all the decisions taken by the three patrol commanders, his needed the most courage. A year later people would start to say: ‘Well, maybe he did the right thing after all’ — but at the time he suffered.

It was a big surprise for me to hear that none of the three planned OPs (observation posts) had therefore been set up.

Bravo Two Zero’s comms failure had been due mainly to the fact that we’d been given the wrong radio frequencies. This was not the fault of anyone in the Regiment, but of the signals unit attached to us. The result was that although three of Legs’ messages got through in garbled form, no reply ever reached us.

I also found that our TACBEs didn’t perform the way we’d been told. Their effective range was only about 120 kilometres, and there were no Coalition aircraft within 500 kilometres to the east. During the night of 24 January — our first on the run — one American F-15 pilot had picked up a call from Andy, and he passed it on. But because the call came from a location our HQ was not expecting, it only caused confusion.

When the patrol went missing, the guys in the squadron wanted to mount a rescue mission. When the CO refused to commit one of his few precious helicopters immediately to the task, some of the guys were on the verge of mutiny. But in the circumstances middle and senior management agreed that the CO was right to delay a search until the patrol’s situation became clearer.

The main problem was that HQ was expecting us to strike back for the Saudi border if in trouble.

But we had set off in exactly the opposite direction.

By 26 January it was clear that something had gone seriously wrong so action was taken. At 1745 that evening a Chinook took off from Arar, with five members of the squadron on board, in an attempt to pull us out. That mission was aborted when the weather got bad.

The next day, a team went in on board an MH-53 helicopter. It flew within five or six kilometres of our original emergency rendezvous point before flying down the most likely escape-and-evasion route to the Saudi border, and almost running out of fuel in the process.

A third search-and-rescue mission was mounted on 30 January, but this was also aborted when the pilot fell ill. The CO continued trying to arrange further searches until, in the early hours of 1 February, he heard that I had turned up in Damascus. It was obvious then that none of the patrol could still be trying to return to Saudi.

More cheerful news was that ‘A’ and ‘D’ Squadrons had crossed the border in force just one night after our insertion, and were creating havoc among mobile Scud launchers and communications towers. Their key weapon was the M19 — in effect, a machine gun firing bombs at the rate of three or four per second. The ammunition was the same as in our 203s, except that the rounds contained more high-explosive. When volleys of those things began bursting all around them, the Iraqis turned and ran.

At 2300 the CO said he wanted to see me. I went to one of the control rooms, and was there until two in the morning, being debriefed for a second time. At the end he asked, ‘Is there anything you think you should have done?’

That nearly cracked me up. I almost burst into tears as I said, ‘I should have tied Vince to me.’

‘Listen,’ said the CO. ‘It wasn’t your fault.’

Then he asked if I’d mind going up to Arar, to talk to ‘A’ Squadron of Delta Force, the American Special Forces unit, which was about to deploy behind the lines. It meant leaving at 0530 — in about three hours’ time — so I went straight back to my tent and got my head down. As I climbed into my sleeping bag, the CO draped a big goatherd’s coat over me. I felt like a little kid.

Apart from my night in Cyprus, that was the first time since the contact that I slept soundly. I don’t know whether it was because I felt secure at last, but the next thing I knew, Geordie was shaking my shoulder. He’d already cooked a fried breakfast with the light on, but I’d been out for the count and hadn’t noticed a thing. So we had sausages and bacon and a cup of tea, and set out at 0530 in a Land Rover, accompanied by Gus, an American liaison officer.

All the way up, as it got lighter, Gus was picking information out of me. We’d met before, in Hereford when he’d come to the UK to command one of the squadrons. (At that time I was Sniper Team Commander, in charge of all the high-rise options — climbing and abseiling on the outsides of buildings, inside lift-wells, or ascending glass buildings on suckers.) Delta’s target was the area around the nuclear refinery, and whenever we came to a new kind of terrain during our drive, he asked if the ground where they were heading resembled what we could see. I found I was able to describe the different areas well.

The journey took nearly three hours. Then, in the control room at Arar, I met Major General Wayne Downing, Commander of US Special Forces, who’d recently flown in to supervise operations. Slim, fit-looking, with a crew-cut, he looked just like you’d imagine a successful American soldier to look. He shook my hand and introduced me to four or five other officers. We sat down on sofas round a coffee table, Downing thanked me for coming up, and I told them what had happened. When I finished, there was silence.