Zero Six Bravo (36 page)

The Iraqis had also displayed a plethora of captured British supplies, including various weaponry, maps, and radio systems. Because the two captured Pinkies were only lightly damaged and still drivable, it seemed likely that these had been taken—along with the radio sets—at the wadi of death, and that the demolition charges had failed to blow, as many of the men had suspected. Detonators failing to go off constituted an equipment failure as opposed to human error, but still this loss weighed heavily on the Squadron.

By now day one of the Coalition war effort in Iraq was drawing to a close, and American and British forces were pushing across the border from Kuwait. It was far from welcome news that supplies had been captured by the enemy, and particularly when it included such sensitive gear. But above all, it was extremely worrying to have so many elite operators from M Squadron still missing or potentially killed in action as there were right then.

The day of their extraction, the men of M Squadron were shown photos taken from a series of air recces flown over the LUP where they had first been attacked. These showed that the area was crisscrossed with tank tracks, demonstrating that it had been comprehensively overrun by Iraqi armor. Without any MILANs or similar heavy-armor-killing capability, the Squadron would have faced Iraqi T-72s at close range with no way of fighting back had they not abandoned the LUP when they did.

In an extraordinary turn of events, the third force was finally pulled out of Iraq late that day. With one Pinkie, three surviving quads, and twenty-one men, their group had been horribly overloaded and lacking in mobility. Fortunately for them, it was the remnant of Six Troop at the southern end of the wadi of death that had drawn the main enemy force.

As the Iraqis pursued the Six Troop remnant east and south, this third group had been able to sneak away into the dark at a slow crawl, which was all their vehicles could manage. Being barely mobile and low on fuel, they had no option but to find a location in which to go to ground. They’d stumbled on a ravine, which made a decent hideaway. By the time the extraction Chinook was able to get in to lift them out, they’d been lying low for many hours, during which time the battle had been moving south and west and away from their location. They were forced to blow their Pinkie just before being extracted, for there was no room on the Chinook for the vehicle.

The twenty-one men thus rescued included Mucker, the quad driver on Grey’s team. He had been one of the first into the wadi of death, following Gunner as quad leader. He’d made the decision to keep going through the soft ground, and he was nearly through when his quad bike had sunk to its axles. He’d rigged the bike with explosives, set it to blow, and joined the group gathering at the far end of the wadi.

Now that the third force was reunited with the rest of M Squadron, they were all but complete. Miraculously, there had been no loss of life. There were injuries, but nothing life-threatening. The story put out by the Iraqis that ten British Special Forces had been killed had to be a tissue of lies—although the two men on the quad were still missing. Nothing had been heard of Gunner and the officer perched on the rear of his machine. The two men were listed as “missing in action.”

From the
G2
airfield the men of the Squadron were ferried back to their forward mounting base. There, the initial debriefs took place, during which the bigger picture began to emerge.

The major revelation resulting from their mission into northern Iraq was how woefully inaccurate the intelligence had proved to be. At this stage in the conflict, and contrary to what the Squadron had been led to believe, the Iraqi 5th Corps—not to mention the Fedayeen—were far from ready to surrender. If nothing else,
M Squadron’s epic mission had secured ground truth in northern Iraq, proving that the Coalition were going to have to fight for every last inch of territory.

CSAR (combat search and rescue) flights overflew Iraq, as well as the combat RV point in Syria, as they tried to find the elusive two-man quad force. A good week after the rest of the Squadron had been pulled out, these repeated Chinook flights over Syrian territory forced the Syrians finally to admit that they had captured Gunner and his passenger and were holding them. During all this time the two men had remained listed as missing in action.

It wasn’t until April 14—the day that the war in Iraq effectively ended, with the fall of Tikrit—that Gunner and his passenger were finally released. They’d been held for approaching three full weeks by the Syrians.

It turned out that they had made it well into Syrian territory and were a good four hours into “safe” terrain and making for the combat RV, when the quad had hit a ditch. They’d upended it and were attempting to drag the machine out of the ditch when the Syrian forces had overrun them. Because dress was down to personal choice in the Squadron, Gunner had been wearing a U.S.-style combat uniform which have better rip-stop qualities. As a result, the Syrians at first mistook him for an American elite operator.

It had taken personal intervention from the then prime minister Tony Blair, who sent the Foreign Office minister Mike O’Brien to Damascus, Syria’s capital, to win the men’s release. He managed to convince the Syrians that the two soldiers were British Special Forces and not Americans and to persuade them to let the men go.

They’d suffered the usual kind of interrogation at the hands of the Syrian authorities, but survived it all remarkably well. Gunner’s biggest gripe seemed to be that the Syrians had dressed him in a cheap black nylon suit to prepare him for release, complete with black winkle-picker shoes. He’d have preferred to look the part of the man who was first in and last out on what was without doubt the mission of a lifetime.

When Gunner and his pillion passenger were flown out of Syria, they were the last men of the Squadron to be heading home. Incredibly, the entire body of M Squadron had escaped from the fire of that mission without the loss of one single man. Gunner’s escape and evasion to Syria had taken more than a hundred miles to achieve, and it was hailed by the British media as “one of the most stirring escape stories yet to emerge from the Iraq War.”

The
Times
newspaper spoke about their achievement as an epic “triumph over adversity.” Charles Heyman, editor of the definitive
Jane’s World Armies
, commented: “There’s no doubt whatsoever that this is the sort of high standard of evasion of the enemy on the ground that we’ve come to expect of our Special Forces. It’s still pretty remarkable.”

As with the Bravo Two Zero patrol of the First Gulf War, M Squadron had been given a mission that they doubted was doable from the get-go. Even so, when they set out to achieve that mission they little realized the extent to which the intelligence they had been given would prove faulty. The reality they drove into on the ground in northern Iraq proved almost the complete opposite to what the intel had suggested, rendering their objective largely unachievable.

In the immediate aftermath of the mission, M Squadron was pilloried in the media, especially when the captured Land Rovers were paraded on Iraqi TV and the story was picked up by the international press. Headlines appeared in the British newspapers declaring that the men of the Squadron had “run away from the Iraqis,” and there were even accusations that they had “panicked and fled.” They were given almost no opportunity to respond to such criticism, which rankled. They had been largely vilified, and undeservedly so. Sadly, some of the men depicted in this book went on to be killed on future operations or exercises, so they will not have the opportunity to read the full story as told in these pages.

The truth is that M Squadron had been ordered to undertake a mission that was unprecedented in terms of geographic scope and goals, as well as being next to impossible in view of the faulty
intelligence provided. Nonetheless, they went ahead to the best of their ability to achieve that mission, in keeping with the ethos of UK Special Forces whereby small groups of elite operators are sent in to achieve the seemingly impossible.

The Squadron penetrated some seven hundred kilometers into Iraq—amounting to over 1,000 kilometers driving—without being compromised. When it was eventually hit in a deliberate attack by a combined force of Fedayeen, Iraqi infantry, and heavy armor, the Squadron managed to extract with no loss of life—despite being trapped so far behind enemy lines, despite facing a vastly superior enemy force, and despite the fact that the limited air power provided was unable to mount any air strikes because of the confused battle situation on the ground.

The longest-ever British Special Forces mission behind enemy lines was one of David Stirling’s operations with the SAS and the Long Range Desert Group during the North Africa campaign of the Second World War. In September 1942 the LRDG undertook Operation Caravan (mentioned in the main body of this book), penetrating some 1,859 kilometers across the desert, to attack airfields and barracks at the Italian-held Libyan town of Barce, and destroying many enemy aircraft on the ground.

Covering well over 1,000 kilometers all told, M Squadron’s mission into northern Iraq was certainly up there with the most epic undertakings by British Special Forces.

Ten days after the Squadron were pulled out of Iraq, a unit from Delta Force went into the same area, tasked with a similar mission. They had armor attached to their patrol and 24/7 dedicated air cover. They were hit by the Fedayeen in pretty much the same location as M Squadron. They ended up taking casualties, and although they inflicted heavy losses on the Fedayeen via air strikes, they, too, had to pull out and abandon their mission.

It wasn’t until April 11, 2003—approaching three weeks after the ground war proper had begun in Iraq—that the Iraqi 5th Corps chose to surrender. By that time Saddam’s regime had fallen, Basra,
Baghdad, and the northern city of Kirkuk were in Coalition hands, and the rump of Saddam’s regime had retreated to the Tikrit–Bayji area and were surrounded. Supported by thousands of Kurdish Peshmerga guerrilla fighters, 1,000 elite operators from the U.S. 10th Special Operations Group, plus 2,000 soldiers from the elite 173rd Airborne Brigade, took the Iraqi city of Mosul and accepted the surrender of the 5th Corps commander. However, only some 15,000 5th Corps troops—a fraction of the suspected strength of the corps—actually surrendered, and they were mostly sent back to their villages.

Most of the 5th Corps soldiers were believed to have simply “melted away,” discarding their uniforms for civilian clothing and mixing with the civilian population. This was a recurring feature of the war in Iraq once Saddam’s regime had fallen, and it contributed to the mass of weapons sloshing around the country in the aftermath of the conflict.

Thus it was that M Squadron’s mission, the surrender of the Iraqi 5th Corps, had finally been achieved—but only by using 3,000 crack American forces, with many battle-hardened Kurdish guerrilla fighters in support, in contrast to one squadron of sixty elite British—and American—operators. Those 3,000 U.S. forces were also backed by comprehensive and overwhelming air power.

Perhaps most importantly, the surrender of the Iraqi 5th Corps was taken only several weeks into the war and
after
the fall of Saddam Hussein’s regime, when it was patently obvious that the Iraqi leader was never going to return to power. By that stage the corps’ commanders would have known they had nothing to lose—and potentially everything to gain—by agreeing to surrender.

When Saddam Hussein was eventually captured in Iraq in December 2003, he was discovered hiding in the town of Ad-Dawr, not far from Bayji and nearby Tikrit, his hometown. The city of Bayji and its inhabitants had indeed been a stronghold of support for the Iraqi leader, and subsequent months would prove it to be a scene of numerous insurgent attacks against U.S. and allied forces.

To this day, Steve Greyling is convinced that M Squadron came out of the cauldron of northern Iraq without loss of life for one simple
reason: because he let the Iraqi goat herder—the boy who had stumbled on their first LUP—live. Not normally one to be superstitious, Greyling has no doubt that the men of M Squadron had the gods looking after them when they found themselves center stage in the mother of all battles. Only the good karma of his earlier action, when he let his human instinct of compassion override his killer instincts—instincts that it might have made more sense to indulge at the time—earned the men of the Squadron the right to survive. To this day, this is his firm belief.

Whatever the truth of this, the Squadron’s achievement against such overwhelming odds is extraordinary, and one that remains unparalleled in the modern history of Special Forces soldiering.

GLOSSARY

AFV.
Armored fighting vehicle. A blanket term used by the military that encompasses tanks, armored cars, and armored troop carriers.

Black light.
Vehicle operations conducted at night without using lights.

C-130 (Lockheed C-130 Hercules).
A four-engine turboprop military aircraft employed primarily for transporting troops and supplies.

Chinook (Boeing CH-47 Chinook).
A twin-engine, tandem rotor heavy-lift helicopter employed primarily for transporting troops and supplies.

Colt C7 7.62mm assault rifle.
A variation of the popular M16 rifle that has become the weapon of choice for the UK Special Forces.

Cyalume.
A chemical light stick.

Dicker.
A term first used by British soldiers in Northern Ireland to describe lookouts posing as civilians who conducted reconnaissance on behalf of the IRA.

DPV.
Desert patrol vehicle: an open-topped Land Rover designed for penetration missions deep behind enemy lines.

DShK.
A 12.7mm Russian-designed antiaircraft gun that can churn out 600 12.7mm rounds per minute. Known as the “Dushka,”
meaning “sweetie” in Russian, it can only fire on automatic, and it is a devastating weapon when targeting low-level aircraft.