Читать книгу Counter-insurgency in Aden - Shaun Clarke, Shaun Clarke - Страница 6

The Hercules C-130 transport plane bounced heavily onto the runway of Khormaksar, the RAF base in Aden. Roaring even louder than ever, with its flaps down, it threw the men in the cramped hold together as it trundled shakily along the runway. Having been flown all the way from their base at Bradbury Lines, Hereford, via RAF Lyneham, Wiltshire, the men of D Squadron SAS were glad to have finally arrived. Nevertheless they cursed a good deal as they sorted out their weapons, water bottles, bergen rucksacks, ammunition belts and other kit, which had been thrown together and become entangled during the rough landing.

‘This pilot couldn’t ride a bike,’ Corporal Ken Brooke complained, ‘let alone fly an aeroplane.’

‘They’re pilots because they’re too thick to do anything else,’ Lance-Corporal Les Moody replied.

‘Stop moaning and get ready to disembark,’ Sergeant Jimmy ‘Jimbo’ Ashman told them. ‘That RAF Loadmaster’s already preparing to open the door, so we’ll be on the ground in a minute or two and you can all breathe fresh air again.’

‘Hallelujah!’ Ken exclaimed softly.

In charge of the squadron was the relatively inexperienced, twenty-four-year-old Captain Robert Ellsworth. A recent recruit from the Somerset and Cornwall Light Infantry, the young officer had a healthy respect for the superior experience of the troops who had already served the Regiment well in Malaya and Borneo, particularly his two sergeants, Jimmy Ashman and Richard Parker. The former was an old hand who had started as a youngster with the Regiment when it was first formed in North Africa way back in 1941 under the legendary David Stirling. Jimbo was a tough, fair, generally good-natured NCO who understood his men and knew how to get things done.

Parker, known as Dead-eye Dick, or simply Dead-eye, because of his outstanding marksmanship, was more of a loner, forged like steel in the hell of the Telok Anson swamp in Malaya and, more recently, in what had been an equally nightmarish campaign in Borneo. Apart from being the best shot and probably the most feared and admired soldier in the Regiment, Parker was also valuable in that he had spent his time since Borneo at the Hereford and Army School of Languages, adding a good command of Arabic to his other skills.

Another Borneo hand, Trooper Terry Malkin, who had gone there as a ‘virgin’ but received a Mention in Dispatches for his bravery, was in Aden already, working under cover with one of the renowned ‘Keeni-Meeni’ squads. As a superior signaller Terry would be sorely missed for the first few weeks, though luckily he would be returning to the squadron in a few weeks’ time, when his three-month stint in Aden was over.

Three NCOs who had also been ‘broken in’ in Borneo, though not with the men already mentioned, were among those preparing to disembark from the Hercules: the impetuous Corporal Ken Brooke, the aptly named Lance-Corporal Les Moody and the medical specialist, Lance-Corporal Laurence ‘Larry’ Johnson. All were good, experienced soldiers.

Two recently badged troopers, Ben Riley and Dennis ‘Taff’ Thomas, had been included to make up the required numbers and be trained under the more experienced men. All in all, Captain Ellsworth felt that he was in good company and hoped to prove himself worthy of them when the campaign began.

The moment the Hercules came to a halt, the doors were pushed open and sunlight poured into the gloomy hold. Standing up with a noisy rattling of weapons, the men fell instinctively into two lines and inched forward, past the stacked, strapped-down supply crates, to march in pairs down the ramp to the ground. Once out of the aircraft, they were forced to blink against the fierce sunlight before they could look about them to see, parked neatly along the runway, RAF Hawker Hunter ground-support aircraft, Shackleton bombers, Twin Pioneer transports, and various helicopters, including the Sikorski S-55 Whirlwind, which the squadron had used extensively in Malaya and Borneo, and the ever-reliable Wessex S-58 Mark 1. Bedford three-ton lorries, Saladin armoured cars and jeeps with rear-mounted Bren light machine-guns were either parked near the runway or cruising along the tarmac roads between the corrugated tin hangars and concrete buildings. Beyond the latter could be seen the sun-scorched, volcanic rock mountains that encircled and dominated the distant port of Aden.

The fresh air the men had hoped to breathe after hours in the Hercules was in fact filled with dust. Their throats dried out within seconds, making them choke on the dust when they tried to breathe, and they all broke out in sweat the instant they stepped into the suffocating heat.

‘Jesus!’ Ken hissed. ‘This is worse than Borneo.’

‘I feel like I’m burning up,’ Les groaned. ‘Paying for my sins.’

‘Pay for those and you’ll burn for ever,’ Jimbo told him, breaking away from a conversation with Captain Ellsworth and Sergeant Parker. ‘Now pick up your gear and head for those Bedfords lined up on the edge of the runway. We’ve a long way to go yet.’

‘What?’ the newly fledged trooper Ben Riley asked in shock, practically croaking in the dreadful humidity and wiping sweat from his face.

‘We’ve a long way to go yet,’ Jimbo repeated patiently. ‘Sixty miles to our forward base at Thumier, to be exact. And we’re going in those Bedfords parked over there.’

‘Sixty miles?’ Ben asked, as if he hadn’t heard the sergeant correctly. ‘You mean now?

‘That’s right, Trooper. Now.’

‘Without a break?’

‘Naturally, Trooper.’

‘I think what he means, Sergeant,’ the other recently badged trooper, Taff Thomas, put in timidly, aware that the temperature here could sometimes rise to 150 degrees Fahrenheit, ‘is that a two-week period is normally allowed for acclimatization to this kind of heat.’

Ken and Larry laughed simultaneously.

‘That’s for the bleedin’ greens,’ Les explained, referring to the green-uniformed regular Army. ‘Not for the SAS. We don’t expect two weeks’ paid leave. We just get up and go.’

‘Happy, Troopers?’ Jimbo asked. Both men nodded, keen to do the right thing. ‘Right, then, get up in those Bedfords.’

The men did as they were told and soon four three-tonners were leaving the RAF base. They were guarded front and rear by British Army 6×6-drive Saladin armoured cars, each with a 76mm QF (quick-firing) gun and a Browning .30-inch machine-gun. The convoy trundled along a road that was lined with coconut palms and ran as straight as an arrow through a flat desert plain covered with scattered clumps of aloe and cactus-like euphorbia.

As the Bedfords headed towards the heat-hazed, purplish mountains that broke up the horizon, the coconut palms gradually disappeared and the land became more arid, but with a surprisingly wide variety of trees – acacias, tamarisks, jujube and doum palms – breaking up the desert’s monotony.

Once they were well away from Aden, out on the open plain, the heat became even worse and was made bearable only by the wind created by the lorries. This wind, however, churned up dense clouds of dust that made most of the men choke and, in some cases, vomit over the rattling tailgates.

‘Heave it up over the back,’ Jimbo helpfully instructed Ben as he tried to hold his stomach’s contents in with pursed lips and bulging cheeks. ‘If you do it over the side and that wind blows it back in, over us, you’ll have to lick us clean with your furry tongue. So do it over the rear, lad.’

His cheeks deathly white and still bulging, the trooper nodded and threw himself to the back of the vehicle, hanging over the tailgate and vomiting unrestrainedly into the cloud of dust being churned up by the wheels. He was soon followed by his fellow trooper, Taff Thomas, who picked the exact same spot to empty his tortured stomach, while the more experienced men covered their faces with scarves and either practised deep, even breathing or amused themselves with some traditional bullshit.

‘Don’t worry about it,’ Ken said to Taff as the latter wiped his mucky lips clean with a handkerchief and tried to control his heavy breathing. ‘You’ll feel better after you’ve had a good nosh at Thumier. Great grub they do there. Raw liver, tripe, runny eggs, oysters, octopus, snails that look like snot, green pea soup…’

Taff groaned and went to throw up again over the back of the bouncing, rattling Bedford, into boiling, choking clouds of sand.

‘Bet you’ve never eaten a snail in your life,’ Larry said, more loudly than was strictly necessary. ‘That’s nosh for refined folk.’

‘Refined?’ Ken replied, glancing sideways as Taff continued heaving over the tailgate. ‘What’s so refined about pulling a piece of snot out of a shell and letting it slither down your throat? That’s puke-making – not refined.’

‘Ah, God!’ Ben groaned, then covered his mouth with his soiled handkerchief as he shuddered visibly.

‘Throw up in that,’ Jimbo warned him, ‘and I’ll make you wipe your face with it. Go and join your friend there.’

Shuddering even more violently, Ben dived for the tailgate, hanging over it beside his heaving friend.

‘A little vomit goes a long way,’ Ken said. ‘Across half of this bloody desert, in fact. I never knew those two had it in ’em. It just goes to show.’

Men in the other Bedfords were suffering in the same way, but the column continued across the desert to where the lower slopes of the mountains, covered in lava, with a mixture of limestone and sand, made for an even rougher, slower ride. Here there were no trees, so no protection from the sun, and when the lorries slowed to practically a crawl – which they had to do repeatedly to navigate the rocky terrain – they filled up immediately with swarms of buzzing flies and whining, biting mosquitoes.

‘Shit!’ Les complained, swiping frantically at the frantic insects. ‘I’m being eaten alive here!’

‘Malaria’s next on the list,’ Ken added. ‘That bloody Paludrine’s useless.’

‘Why the hell doesn’t this driver go faster?’ Larry asked as he too swatted uselessly at the attacking insects. ‘At this rate, we might as well get out and walk.’

‘It’s the mountains,’ Ben explained, feeling better for having emptied his stomach and seemingly oblivious to the insects. ‘This road’s running across their lower slopes, which are rocky and full of holes.’

‘How observant!’ Ken exclaimed.

‘A bright lad!’ Les added.

‘Real officer material,’ Larry chimed in. ‘These bleedin’ insects only go for red blood, so his must be blue.’

‘I’m never bothered by insects,’ Ben confirmed. ‘It’s odd, but it’s true.’

‘How’s your stomach?’ Ken asked the trooper.

‘Feeling sick again?’ queried Les.

‘I can still smell his vomit from an hour ago,’ Larry said, ‘and it’s probably what attracted these bloody insects. They’re after his puke.’

Ben and Taff dived simultaneously for the rear of the lorry and started heaving yet again while the others, feeling superior once more, kept swatting at and cursing the insects. This went on until the Bedford bounced down off the slopes and headed across another relatively flat plain of limestone, sandstone and lava fields. They had now been on the Dhala road for two hours, but it seemed longer than that.

Mercifully, after another hour of hellish heat and dust, with the sun even higher in a silvery-white sky, they arrived at the SAS forward base at Thumier, located near the Habilayn airstrip, sixty miles from Aden and just thirty miles from the hostile Yemeni border.

‘We could have been flown here!’ Ben complained.

‘That would have been too easy,’ Ken explained. ‘For us, nothing’s made easy.’

In reality the camp was little more than an uninviting collection of tents pitched in a sandy area surrounded by high, rocky ridges where half a dozen SAS observation posts, hidden from view and swept constantly by dust, recced the landscape for enemy troop movements. There were no guards at the camp entrance because there were no gates; nor was there a perimeter fence. However, the base was surrounded by sandbagged gun emplacements raised an equal distance apart in a loose circular shape and nicknamed ‘hedgehogs’ because they were bristling with 25-pounder guns, 3-inch mortars, and Browning 0.5-inch heavy machine-guns. Though the landscape precluded the use of aeroplanes, a flattened area of desert near one of the hedgehogs was being used as a helicopter landing pad, on which were now parked the camp’s helicopters, including a Sikorski S-55 Whirlwind and a British-built Wessex S-58 Mark 1. The Bedfords of A Squadron were lined up near the helicopters. A line of men, mostly from that squadron, all with tin plates and eating utensils, was inching into the largest tent of all – the mess tent – for their evening meal. A modified 4×4 Willys jeep, with armoured perspex screens and a Browning 0.5-inch heavy machine-gun mounted on the front, was parked outside the second largest tent, which was being used as a combined HQ and briefing room. Other medium-sized tents were being used as the quartermaster’s store, armoury, NAAFI and surgery. A row of smaller tents located near portable showers and boxed-in, roofless chemical latrines were the make-do ‘bashas’, or sleeping quarters. Beyond those tents lay the desert.

‘Home, sweet fucking home,’ Les said in disgust as he clambered out of the Bedford to stand beside his mate Ken and the still shaky troopers, Ben and Taff, in the unrelenting sunlight. ‘Welcome to Purgatory!’

Ken turned to Ben and Taff, both of whom were white as ghosts and wiping sweat from their faces. ‘Feel better, do you?’ he asked.

‘Yes, Corporal,’ they both lied.

‘The vomiting’s always followed by diarrhoea,’ Ken helpfully informed them. ‘You’ll be shitting for days.’

‘It rushes out before you can stop it,’ Les added. ‘As thin as pea soup. It’s in your pants before you even know you’ve done it. A right fucking mess, it makes.’

‘Christ!’ Ben exclaimed.

‘God Almighty!’ Taff groaned.

‘Keep your religious sentiments to yourselves,’ Jimbo admonished them, materializing out of the shimmering heat haze to study them keenly. ‘Are you two OK?’

‘Yes, Sarge,’ they both answered.

‘You look a bit shaky.’

‘I’m all right, Sarge,’ Ben said.

‘So am I,’ Taff insisted.

‘They don’t have any insides left,’ Ken explained. ‘But apart from that, they’re perfectly normal.’

Jimbo was too distracted to take in the corporal’s little joke. ‘Good,’ he said. ‘So pick up your kit, hump it over to those tents, find yourselves a basha, have a smoko and brew-up, then meet me at the quartermaster’s store in thirty minutes precisely. Get to it.’

When Jimbo had marched away, the weary men humped their 60-pound bergens onto their backs, picked up their personal weapons – either 5.56mm M16 assault rifles, 7.62mm L1A1 SLRs or 7.62mm L42A1 bolt-action sniper rifles – and marched across the dusty clearing to the bashas. Because the two new troopers had been placed in their care, Ken and Les were to share a tent with Ben and Taff.

‘Well, it isn’t exactly the Ritz,’ Ken said, leaning forward to keep his head from scraping the roof of the tent, ‘but I suppose it’ll do.’

‘They wouldn’t let you into the Ritz,’ Les replied, ‘if you had the Queen Mother on your arm. This tent is probably more luxurious than anything you’ve had in your whole life.’

‘Before I joined the Army,’ Ken replied, swatting uselessly at the swarm of flies and mosquitoes at his face, ‘when I was just a lad, I lived in a spacious two-up, two-down that had all the mod cons, including a real toilet in the backyard with a nice bolt and chain.’

‘All right, lads,’ Les said to Ben and Taff, who were both wiping sweat from their faces, swatting at the flies and mosquitoes, and nervously examining the sandy soil beneath the camp-beds for signs of scorpions or snakes, ‘put your bergens down, roll your sleeping bags out on the beds, then let’s go to the QM’s tent for the rest of our kit.’

‘More kit?’ Ben asked in disbelief as he gratefully lowered his heavy bergen to the ground, recalling that it contained a hollow-fill sleeping bag; a waterproof one-man sheet; a portable hexamine stove with blocks of fuel; an aluminium mess tin, mug and utensils; a brew kit, including sachets of tea, powdered milk and sugar; spare radio batteries; water bottles; extra ammunition; matches and flint; an emergency first-aid kit; signal flares; and various survival aids, including compass, pencil torch and batteries, and even surgical blades and butterfly sutures.

‘Dead right,’ Les said with a sly grin. ‘More kit. This is just the beginning, kid. Now lay your sleeping bag out and let’s get out of here.’

Jimbo and Dead-eye were sharing the adjoining tent with the medical specialist, Larry, leaving the fourth bed free for the eventual return of their squadron signaller, Trooper Terry Malkin. After picking a bed, each man unstrapped his bergen, removed his sleeping bag, rolled it out on the bed, then picked up his weapon and left the tent, to gather with the others outside the quartermaster’s store.

‘A pretty basic camp,’ Jimbo said to Dead-eye as they crossed the hot, dusty clearing.

‘It’ll do,’ Dead-eye replied, glancing about him with what seemed like a lack of interest, though in fact his grey gaze missed nothing.

‘Makes no difference to you, does it, Dead-eye? Just another home from home.’

‘That’s right,’ Dead-eye said quietly.

‘What do you think of the new men?’

‘They throw up too easily. But now that they’ve emptied their stomachs, they might be OK.’

‘They’ll be all right with Brooke and Moody?’

‘I reckon so.’

The four men under discussion were already gathered together with the rest of the squadron, waiting to collect the balance of their kit. Already concerned about the weight of his bergen, Ben was relieved to discover that the additional kit consisted only of a mosquito net, insect repellent, extra soap, an aluminium wash-basin, a small battery-operated reading lamp for use in the tent, a pair of ankle-length, rubber-soled desert boots, a DPM (disruptive pattern material) cotton shirt and trousers, and an Arab shemagh to protect the nose, mouth and eyes from the sun, sand and insects.

‘All right,’ Jimbo said when the men, still holding their rifles in one hand, somehow managed to gather the new kit up under their free arm and stood awkwardly in the fading light of the sinking sun, ‘carry that lot back to your tents, leave it on your bashas, then go off to the mess tent for dinner. Report to the HQ tent for your briefing at seven p.m. sharp…Are you deaf? Get going!’

Though dazed from heat and exhaustion, the men hurried back through the mercifully cooling dusk to raise their mosquito nets over the camp-beds. This done, they left their kit under the nets and then made their way gratefully to the mess tent. There they had a replenishing meal of ‘compo’ sausage, mashed potatoes and beans, followed by rice pudding, all washed down with hot tea.

While eating his meal, Les struck up a conversation with Corporal Jamie McBride of A Squadron, who had just returned from one of the OPs located high in the Radfan, the bare, rocky area to the north of Aden.

‘What’s it like up there?’ Les asked.

‘Hot, dusty, wind-blown and fart-boring,’ McBride replied indifferently.

‘Good to get back down, eh?’

‘Right,’ the corporal said.

‘I note we have a NAAFI tent,’ Les said, getting to the subject that concerned him the most. ‘Anything in it?’

‘Beer and cigarettes,’ the weary McBride replied.

‘Anything else?’

‘Blue magazines and films, whores, whips and chains…What do you think?’

‘Just asking, mate. Sorry.’

Realizing that his fellow soldier was under some stress, Les gulped down the last of his hot tea, waved his hand in farewell, then followed the others out of the mess tent.

‘Another fucking briefing,’ he complained to Ken as they crossed the clearing to the big HQ tent. ‘I need it like a hole in the head.’

‘You’ve already got that,’ his mate replied. ‘Between one ear and the other there’s nothing but a great big empty space.’

‘Up yours an’ all,’ said Les wearily.