Moving in on the city, still out of earshot of most of those sleeping, were a million Iraqi troops, equipped with hundreds of artillery pieces, multiple-rocket launchers, and a wide variety of small arms. Stretched out along a 200-mile front, obscured by clouds of dust created by Saddam Hussein’s five and a half thousand battle tanks, they endured because they were motivated by months of starvation and their growing envy of Kuwaiti wealth.
In air-conditioned hotels, marble-walled boudoirs and lushly carpeted official residences, the citizens of Kuwait were awakened by the sound of aircraft and gunfire from the outskirts of the city. Wondering what was happening, they tuned in to Kuwait Radio and heard emergency broadcasts from the Ministry of Defence, imploring the Iraqi aggressors to cease their irresponsible attack or face the consequences. Those who heard the broadcasts, Kuwaitis and foreigners alike, went to their windows and looked out in disbelief as parachutists glided down against a backdrop of distant, silvery explosions and beautiful webbed lines of crimson tracers. It all seemed like a dream.
Thirty minutes later, as the early dawn broke with the light of a blood-red sun, the grounds of the Dasman Palace were being pounded by the rocket fire of the Iraqis’ Russian-built MiG fighters. Even as the Emir of Kuwait was being lifted off by a helicopter bound for Saudia Arabia, his Royal Guard, pitifully outnumbered, were being cut down by Iraqi tanks and stormtroopers. In addition, the Emir’s half-brother, Sheikh Fahd, who had nobly refused to leave, had been fatally wounded on the steps of the palace.
While Hussein’s tanks surrounded the British and American embassies, his jets were rocket-bombing the city’s airport, illuminating the starlit sky with jagged flashes of silver fire, which soon turned into billowing black smoke. Two guards died as Iraqi troops burst into Kuwait’s Central Bank to begin what would become an orgy of looting.
By dawn the Iraqis were in control of key military installations and government buildings in the capital, Kuwait’s pocket army was fighting a losing battle to protect the invaluable Rumaila oilfields and thousands of wealthy Kuwaitis and expatriate Britons, Americans, Europeans and Russians, trying to flee to Saudi Arabia, were being turned back by the Iraqi tanks and troops encircling the city.
Having returned to their homes, the expatriates heard their embassies advise them on the radio to stock up with food and stay indoors. Those brave enough to venture out to replenish their food stocks saw Iraqi generals riding around in confiscated Mercedes while their troops, long envious of Kuwaiti prosperity, machine-gunned the windows of the stores in Fahd Salem Street, joining the growing numbers of looters. Soon reports of rape were spreading throughout the city.
Before sunset, the invaders had dissolved Kuwait’s National Assembly, shut ports and airports, imposed an indefinite curfew and denounced the absent Emir and his followers as traitorous agents of the Jews and unspecified foreign powers.
No mention was made of the Iraqi tanks burning in the grounds of the fiercely defended Dasman Palace, the sporadic gunfire still heard throughout the city as loyal Kuwaitis sniped at the invaders or the many dead littering the streets.
Even as the sun was sinking, torture chambers were being set up all over the city and summary executions, by shotgun or hanging, were becoming commonplace.
By midnight, Kuwait as the world knew it had ceased to exist; the armoured brigades of the Middle East’s most feared tyrant stood at the doors of Saudi Arabia; and thousands of foreigners, including Britons, were locked in hotels or in their homes, cowering under relentless shellfire or hiding in basements, attics, cupboards and water tanks as Iraqi troops, deliberately deprived of too much for too long, embarked on an orgy of looting, torture, rape, murder and mindless destruction.
On 1 January 1991, almost four months to the day after Saddam Hussein’s bloody take-over of Kuwait City, an RAF C-130 Hercules transport plane secretly took off from RAF Brize Norton, Oxfordshire. It was transporting members of the SAS (Special Air Service) and the SBS (Special Boat Squadron) to a holding area in Riyadh – the joint capital, with Jeddah, of Saudi Arabia – located in the middle of the country and surrounded by desert.
Though the SAS men were pleased to be back in business, the fact that they had been called back to their Hereford base on Boxing Day, when most of them were at home celebrating with family or friends, had caused some of them to voice a few complaints. Now, as they sat in cramped conditions, packed in like sardines with their weapons, bergens, or backpacks, and other equipment in the gloomy, noisy hold of the Hercules, some of them were passing the time by airing the same gripes.
‘My missus was fucking mad,’ Corporal Roy ‘Geordie’ Butler told his friends, in a manner that implied he agreed with her. ‘No question about it. Her whole family was there, all wearing their best clothes, and she was just putting the roast in the oven when the telephone rang. When I told her I’d been called back to Hereford and had to leave right away, she came out with a mouthful of abuse that made her family turn white. They’re all Christian, her side.’
‘Don’t sound so hard done by, Geordie,’ said Corporal ‘Taff’ Burgess. ‘We can do without that bullshit. We all know your heart was broken a few years back when your missus, after leaving you for a month, returned home to make your life misery. You were having a great time without her in the pubs in Newcastle.’
That got a laugh from the others. ‘Hear, hear!’ added Jock McGregor. ‘Geordie probably arranged the phone calls to get away from his missus and her family. Come on, Geordie, admit it.’
‘Go screw yourself, Sarge’. She’s not bad, my missus. Just because she made a mistake in the past, doesn’t mean she’s no good. Forgive and forget, I say. I just think they could have picked another day. Boxing Day, for Christ’s sake!’
But in truth, he’d been relieved. Geordie was a tough nut and he couldn’t stand being at home. He didn’t mind his wife – who had, after all, only left him for a month to go and moan about him to her mother in Gateshead – but he couldn’t stand domesticity, the daily routine in Newcastle – doing the garden, pottering about the house, watching telly, walking the dog, slipping out for the odd pint – it was so bloody boring. No, he needed to be with the Regiment, even if it meant being stuck in Hereford, doing nothing but endless retraining and field exercises. And now, with some real work to do, he felt a lot happier.
‘What about you, Danny?’ Geordie asked Corporal ‘Baby Face’ Porter. ‘What about your missus? How did she take it?’
‘Oh, all right,’ Danny answered. He was a man of few words. ‘She understood, I suppose.’
‘I’ll bet she did,’ Corporal Paddy Clarke said.
Sergeant-Major Phil Ricketts smiled, but kept his mouth shut. He knew Danny’s wife, Darlene, and didn’t think much of her. Danny had married her eight years earlier, just after the Falklands war. Having once spent a weekend leave with Danny and his parents in the Midlands, a few weeks before Danny proposed to his Darlene, Ricketts felt that he knew where Danny was coming from. Always intrigued by the contradiction between Danny’s professional killer’s instincts and his naïvety about personal matters, he had not been surprised to find that Darlene’s father was a drunken loudmouth, her mother a tart and Darlene pretty much like her mother.
Nevertheless, blinded by love, Danny had married Darlene and was now the proud father of two children: a boy and a girl, seven and six respectively. While Danny had never been one for talking much, it was becoming increasingly evident from his unease at the very mention of Darlene’s name that he was troubled by secret doubts which he could not articulate. The marriage, Ricketts suspected, was on the rocks and Danny didn’t want to even think about it.
No such problem, however, with the big black sergeant, Andrew Winston, formerly of Barbados, who was sitting beside Danny, looking twice his size, and crafting poetry in his notebook, as he usually did to pass the time. In fact, since the Falklands campaign, Andrew had become something of a celebrity within the Regiment, having had his first book of