Again, I cannot give details of the climbing techniques, but the first man scurried up. Once at the rails he prepared the way for the rest of us. I was second man up behind an Australian character, Rhino. Rhino had originally visited the SBS as an exchange sergeant from the Australian SAS, but he liked it so much, on returning to Australia he resigned from the SAS and returned to England to join the SBS.
As we ascended, we passed the rusty name of the vessel, its letters embossed vertically for a length of eight or ten feet. As we had approached from the stern we had not seen it before, and besides, each man had been concentrating entirely on his responsibilities. I noticed one of the chipped and over-painted letters was a ‘Z’. I seemed to recall there was no ‘Z’ in the name of the ferry we had been waiting for. When I reached the deck I called down to the officer and asked him to confirm the name of the boat we were supposed to be assaulting. He looked at the name on the boat and was suddenly unsure.
While he searched his schedule, we went ahead at full steam and the rest of the team climbed on board. Normally we would have continued the assault and taken over the bridge and essential control points of the ship, but this was simply a boarding rehearsal, and a good thing, too.
‘Shit!’ the officer exclaimed as he found what he was looking for. ‘Get off! It’s a bloody Frog ferry!’
At that, a door leading on to the stern deck opened and a French crewman, going about his normal duties, took one step out and froze on seeing us. He stared at the ten heavily armed men in black standing on the deck yards in front of him. One can only imagine what was going through his mind. He leapt back inside the ship, slammed the door shut and we heard the bolt being thrown across.
We were just as quick as we grabbed our gear, leapt overboard into the water, scrambled and hauled each other into the rib boat, which then turned and powered away at full speed while we hung on. By the time the crewman could have raced up to the bridge to report the boarding of terrorists we were out of sight. We never heard from the French regarding the incident and can only imagine the captain must have thought the crewman was either drunk or losing it.
Tragically, Rhino, my Aussie friend, is confined to a wheelchair now. He was abseiling with his team from a helicopter in Belize, Central America, when, as last man out, at 200 feet, he got entangled in the rope. He was being choked to death by his rifle sling which was caught on the chopper’s night-sun (searchlight) when the crewman cut it away and he fell. He was clinically dead by the time the rest of his team got to him. With their medical training they revived him, but his back was broken. Rhino was a great loss to the SBS.
A few weeks later, the French were the target of another special forces gaffe, thistime a combined SBS and SAS cock-up. It happened while we were HALO parachuting in the south of the country outside a town called Pau.
Special forces HALO parachute jumping takes place from around 25,000 feet, about five miles up, whilst you are breathing oxygen and carrying weapons and the bulk of your personal equipment between your legs. When a man is fully rigged and ready to jump, he has to shuffle along the cabin, looking something like a beetle walking upright on its back legs with the rifle attached vertically down one side. If extra operational equipment is needed, such as 4x4s, bikes, canoes or snowmobiles, these are placed inside large cylindrical containers six feet long and four feet wide. The containers have barometrically operated sixty-foot, heavy-duty parachutes that open automatically at around 3,000 feet. Prior to the cylinders, we used six-foot square wooden crates. The cylinders took over from the cubed crates because, due to the poor aerodynamics of the crates, they had a tendency to go wherever the hell they wanted to.
It was the jump team’s job to follow the loads, but the crates would change direction without warning across the sky in one direction, then zoom off in another. The team, usually four at a time for training purposes, would try to maintain a large diamond formation a hundred yards apart above and around the crate, facing inwards to keep an eye on it, ready to move wherever it moved, or, more to the point, to get out of its way. The trick was always to stay higher than the crate, but a most important rule was not to let it get directly below you. If that happened, just as its chute opened, a free-faller would hit it like a fly on a windscreen.
There were to be only two container jumps that week in Pau and they arrived in a truck, which backed up to the tail-gate of our C130 transport aircraft which was parked on the peaceful, sun-drenched runway. There was only one cylinder available that day, and so the RAF, who always organised the jumps, had hauled out an old crate to jump with. There were six SBS operatives and about eight SAS troopers on that trip. We all gathered around the first container, the standard heavy-duty wooden crate, to lift it from the truck’s tail-gate and up no more than two feet on to the rear ramp of the C130. We took the strain, and on the command ‘Lift!’ picked it up and nearly bust a gut getting it the short distance on to the ramp. It was ridiculously heavy. It was full of sandbags to simulate equipment. We then faced the cigar-shaped cylinder, gathered around it and braced ourselves for another gut-busting lift.
On the command ‘Lift!’ we heaved it up, but it was empty and we inadvertently slammed it up into the tail of the plane five feet above us. The sandbags for both containers had been stored in the wooden crate which was why it was so heavy. We laughed at ourselves, and left to fit our chutes while the air crew sorted out the containers and the irritated pilot inspected the underside of his tail for a dent.
Within an hour we were airborne and climbing to 25,000 feet. I had no stomach butterflies by now, as we had been jumping constantly for days. However, that wasn’t the case for me on the first jump of the week, when I always experienced a slight nervousness. I don’t think I was the only one, as everyone was always quiet and thoughtful in the aircraft for a first jump. By midweek, everyone was their usual self and chatting away normally right up to putting on the oxygen masks and then falling out the back without a care.
Free-falling with full equipment, with cumbersome loads between your legs, was not as straightforward. The load made it more difficult to manoeuvre and if it shifted in flight it was awkward to control, and the free-faller was often forced to adopt some strange body positions to maintain stability.
In Pau, a popular discussion while preparing to jump was deciding what the French Army had given us for lunch that day. I had learned from experience not to ask until after I had eaten it. I’m not squeamish about food, but after the first meal in the camp, where the menu often showed a choice of sheeps’ brains in a white sauce or pigs’ intestines in a red sauce for starters, and sheeps’ testicles or some part of a horse for the main course, I decided to just eat whatever they wanted to give me, as long as I did not know what it was till afterwards.
I was in the first stick along with three SAS lads and would be jumping with the conventional wooden cube crate. The cigar would come out close behind with the second stick, another mixture of SBS and SAS.
As we were all breathing oxygen through masks and could not talk properly, the jump-master held up a card that read: ONE MINUTE (till red-on). The cubed crate was pushed by crew members to the edge of the rear ramp on rollers and stopped there, held by blocks. We shuffled alongside it, dressed in black, breathing through oxygen masks, wearing dark bug-eye goggles, weapons fixed down our sides and backpacks secured between our legs, as the jump-master gave us a final check. The Pyrenees formed one side of the horizon and below were uneven, chequered fields and woods crisscrossed by country roads and boundaries and dotted with farms and villages.
The drop zone (DZ) was several miles away and it was calculated that, although we would actually jump out over an inhabited area, after the free-fall and the wind-drift under silk we would land in the DZ. There was no single clean field to use, the DZ being a large area of farmland the French had cleared for use with the local farmers. In this part of the country many of the fields had maize growing in them and it was sometimes hard to tell from directly above if the plants were two feet tall or ten. There was a big difference when it came to trying to haul in and fold up a chute in ten-foot maize and remember where the nearest edge was. A trick I soon learned was to try to be the last to land and watch where the others touched down. If a jumper completely disappeared into the maize I would do my best to avoid that particular field.
The red lights around the door flashed on.
We shuffled right up to the edge of the tail-gate. I was front man and I leant slightly over so that I could see the land below. There was something mesmerising about it, perhaps because it was so unnatural to be seeing it from this height, or perhaps it was the obvious fact that only one small thing had to go wrong for this to be my last two minutes alive. I had already had one parachute malfunction by then and the memory was always vivid prior to a jump. The SAS had lost several men over the years, but they had been HALOing longer than us and had many more men. We eventually had our first, and so far only, casualty when one of our lads died in California while jumping with the SEALs.
An aircrewman, attached to the aircraft by a life-line in case he fell out, crouched by my side and gripped the block that held the container in position.
The green lights went on all around the door. The block was removed and the container was pushed out by crewmen. I jumped out right behind it, almost touching it, tightly followed by the other three. Within seconds we were spread in formation around the crate. But something was wrong.
Normally, to keep up with a container, I only needed to spread my limbs out comfortably, like a spider, to maintain pace with it. For some reason this container was plummeting like an elevator with its cables cut. And it was not moving from side to side very much as usual, either. It was heading towards the earth like a screaming meteor. I pulled my arms into my sides and pointed my head towards the earth in a straight dive in an effort to catch it up. I must have been dropping at over 120 mph, which was our average terminal velocity with the equipment we carried, but it was obvious the crate was going even faster and I did not stand a chance of catching it.
A quick scan around showed me I was not alone. The rest of my team were tracking earthwards like missiles in an effort to keep up with it. Meanwhile, the cigar container was released behind us, closely followed by its team who found themselves in a completely opposite predicament. On leaving the aircraft the cigar-shaped container seemed to go up. The team had to stretch themselves out like starfish to grab as much air as they could in an effort to stay with it. They rolled over on their backs to keep an eye on it and dropped uncontrollably away from the cigar as it got smaller above them. It didn’t take a genius to work out what had happened.
By some misunderstanding on the part of the RAF crew, none of the heavy sandbags had been shifted from the wooden crate to the cigar. The wooden crate was double its recommended safe weight and the cigar was empty.
I was at 5,000 feet when the container’s chute opened and then instantly shattered to bits under the awesome weight-times-velocity of the crate. It continued, unimpeded, hurtling towards the earth. A ripple of concern passed through me as I realised there were farmhouses directly below. Suddenly my body was jerked by a horrendous power.
My head whipped forward on my neck like a rag doll’s and my feet whiplashed under me and swung up till they faced skywards, then lashed back down, my heavy bundle still firmly between them. I groaned as the wind was knocked out of me. My chute had been pulled at 3,500 feet by the automatic opening device we always used and my body had not been in the ideal position. I had been concentrating so much on the crate’s impact point I did not notice my own height. My goggles were halfway off my face.
Seconds after my chute opened, I felt a shock wave come up from below. The crate had hit with such impact it shook the ground like an earthquake. I had not seen exactly where it had landed, but there was a cottage at the point of impact and I steered towards it.
Just before landing, I released my heavy pack from between my legs and it swung from my waist on a line. A grassy field sloped down towards the cottage and I chose a landing spot fifty feet from the building. As soon as I hit the ground, I climbed out of my chute harness, ditched my equipment and hurried towards the cottage. The SAS lads were not far behind me. We gathered at the short picket-fence that divided the field from the cottage’s small vegetable garden and studied the scene.
All was quiet and peaceful. The back door was only yards away. It was an old red-brick building with a slate-tile roof. There was no sign of the crate. A tile slid from the roof to join several others freshly shaken to the ground by the tremor. Suddenly we feared the worst. We were about to move around to the front of the house, praying the crate had not fallen inside, when we saw it, or at least the top of it, in the middle of the vegetable garden not far from the back door. The top was only just visible a couple of feet below ground level in a neat, square hole. The entire crate was compressed into the earth as if it had been driven in and countersunk by a giant hammer.
The door to the cottage creaked open slightly and a man and woman poked their heads out to look around warily. They stared at us wide-eyed. They had no idea what had caused the earthquake and looked a little frightened.
There was not much we could do. We waved, bid them ‘Bonjour’, then ‘Au revoir’, and left them to figure it out.
They’d find the crate, or the top of it, the next time they went out to pick some vegetables.
Meanwhile, the other stick had landed in a field and were craning skyward watching the cigar container as it floated down. At 3,000 feet its sixty-foot parachute opened, which actually gave it some lift. They watched until it drifted out of sight over the horizon giving no sign of ever landing. It was never seen or heard of again.