‘Home sweet home!’ Sergeant Andrew Winston said, dumping his bergen on the floor beside a camp-bed in the sweltering late-afternoon heat of the space allocated to the Regiment for the duration of its stay in Al Jubail.
‘Having just come down from the trees,’ Geordie replied, ‘you’d be used to living out in the open. That’s one up to you, Sarge.’
‘You don’t like it, Geordie? Too hot for you, is it?’
‘You could obviously do with sweating off a few pounds,’ Geordie replied, tugging experimentally at the ropes of his lean-to tent to check that they were tight, ‘but me, I’m as slim as a man can go, so I don’t need melting down in this fucking heat.’
‘I’m relieved,’ Taff Burgess said, laying his M16 out carefully on his camp-bed and gazing out over the rows of tents divided by paths that led in one direction to the port and in the other to the airstrip, other accommodations and the guarded compounds containing the armoured transport and tanks. Hundreds of thousands of troops, British, American and French, crowded the spaces between the tents, eating, drinking, writing letters, taking open-air showers and going in and out of chemical latrines. Their constant movement and the ever-present desert wind created drifting clouds of sand and dust that made them look ghostlike in the shimmering light.
‘I wouldn’t fancy being in one of those huts in this fucking heat,’ Taff said. ‘It must be like a Turkish bath in there. At least we can breathe out here.’
‘All I’m breathin’ is dust,’ replied Jock. ‘That and bloody sand. I’ve got sand in my boots, in my eyes, in my mouth, and even up the eye of my fucking dick. This place is just like Oman.’
‘You’re too old to remember Oman,’ Paddy ribbed him, stretched out languidly on his camp-bed, hands folded beneath his head, acting really cool in the sweltering heat. ‘Relax, boys, you’re gonna have a good time here. Compared to what’s to come, it’s probably Paradise.’
‘I doubt that,’ Geordie said.
He was right. Their accommodations were close to the Royal Corps of Transport’s Force Maintenance Area, or FMA, and the constant noise, combined with the heat, made for irritable days and sleepless nights. Since they were there for five days, waiting for the rest of their equipment to be brought in by ship, the lack of sleep was no joke. To make matters worse, they were ordered to take NAP tablets, which were meant to reduce the damaging effects of gas in the event of a chemical attack, but also gave everyone diarrhoea.
‘My shit comes out like piss,’ Paddy informed the others. ‘And I hear these tablets also contain a lot of bromide, so say goodbye to your sex life.’
Already running non-stop to the latrines, they felt even worse after the biological vaccinations against whooping cough, which they received at the same time and which knocked most of them out for twenty-four hours.
‘Say goodbye to your fucking sanity,’ Jock said groggily, as the others moaned and groaned on their camp-beds. ‘Christ, I feel dizzy!’
Scarcely recovered, they were nevertheless made to spend a large part of each day on the Jerboa Range of the training ground at Al Fadhili, inland from Al Jubail, where they shot at targets and markers while being bellowed and spat at by the aggressive camels of passing Bedouin.
‘Those bastards on camels are straight out of Lawrence of Arabia,’ Geordie announced to all within earshot. ‘A fucking good film, that was.’
‘I never wanted to be in the movies,’ Andrew replied, ‘and those camels stink. What the hell are we doing here?’
‘Waiting for the rest of our equipment, coming in with the Navy. Need I say more?’
‘Fucking Navy!’ Taff spat.
Soon sickened by the repetitive, useless training, which they had done many times before, they were all pleased when, on the fifth day, the despised Navy finally arrived at the port with their missing supplies.
By this time, with over half a million Coalition troops and the greatest air force ever assembled in history clogging Al Jubail, the space being used by the SAS was desperately needed. The Regiment was therefore hurriedly packed up and driven back to the airstrip. From there, Hercules transports flew the relieved men to a forward operating base, or FOB, located at a Saudi airport in the desert, a day’s drive from the border of western Iraq.
‘We operate from here,’ Major Hailsham told the men the minute they stepped off the planes into another sea of flapping tents on a flat, barren plain. ‘Welcome to hell.’
It wasn’t quite hell, but it was certainly no paradise. The FOB was a dense throng of lean-to tents divided by roads filled with brightly painted ‘Pink Panther’ Land Rovers, Honda motorcycles, Challenger tanks, and other armoured vehicles and trucks, many of which were being used to support the tents and their camouflaged netting. On all sides of the makeshift camp there was nothing but desert, stretching nine hundred miles from the Red Sea to Kuwait and the Gulf, southwards to the Arabian Sea beyond Oman – more than a million square miles in all. It was a very big area to cover. Also, it was surprisingly cold, especially at night.
The first thing the SAS men learnt was that they could not phone home, their mail would be censored and normal radio transmissions were restricted. And, of course, they could not drink alcohol – not even here in the desert, for the Bedouin still often passed the camp on their camels. Similarly, the men had to respect Muslim customs and not flaunt their Western habits or religious preferences, except in the privacy of their tents.
‘Should this make you resent the fact that we’re here to defend the Kuwaitis,’ Hailsham said, ‘I would remind you that we have our own interests at heart. In fact, we’re here to safeguard Arabian oil, which furnishes over two-thirds of the world’s needs, including ours. To lose it to Saddam would have devastating consequences for the West, including Great Britain. I’d also remind you that there are approximately thirty thousand expatriates in Saudi Arabia who need our protection. To give them that, we need the trust of the Bedouin. Please don’t forget it.’
In their view, the men were not compensated for such restrictions by being treated like lords. On the contrary, their living conditions were basic, with portable showers, chemical toilets and meals consisting mainly of sausages and baked beans, sometimes curry with rice, spooned up from mess-tins as quickly as possible to stop sand or dust from getting on it, then washed down with hot tea.
The freezing nights were long – about eleven hours of darkness – and the men, stretched out beside their tanks and armoured vehicles or huddled up in their slit trenches, could do little to pass the time other than listen to the restricted programmes of Forces Broadcasting or study the brilliant stars over the flat, featureless, seemingly endless black desert.
From the BBC they learned that back in England Wing-Commander David Farquhar had lost secret documents and a laptop computer containing an outline version of the American war plan. The fact that this news was conveyed by the BBC even before it was known officially to the Coalition Forces in the Gulf caused much sardonic mirth among the men. They also learnt that the Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, had been replaced by John Major, whom many thought would not be as supportive of them as had been the Iron Lady.
‘Not my cup of tea,’ Major Hailsham said, summing up the general feeling among the men, ‘but at least she always stuck by her guns. She also stuck up for the Special Forces. I don’t know that John Major will. This could be a bad blow to us.’
‘We’ll survive,’ Sergeant-Major