Tak and Kealey, now firing point blank into the enemy, were on the point of being overrun when two Strikemaster jets from Salalah, braving the low cloud and storms of bullets from the Adoo guns, raked the enemy positions with machine-gun fire. On a second run a perfectly placed 500-pound bomb decimated the Adoo lines. The rescue helicopter now flew in and the dead and wounded and the body of Labalaba were gathered up. Tak refused all help and walked to the helicopter unaided.
The war dragged on for several more years until the guerrillas were finally pushed back to the border of Yemen, but they were never able to mount such a large-scale operation again. Back in England nothing was heard of this astonishing victory against the odds.
I ask H what his souvenir was. His hands move to the cuff of his shirt, and for a moment it looks as though he’s going to show me an Omani bracelet or a tattoo. But he pulls up the sleeve to his elbow and turns his forearm towards me. There’s a pale oval scar the size of an olive, matched by a slightly larger one on the other side. The bullet, he explains, passed between the bones of his forearm and lodged in the butt of his rifle, but was prevented from entering his chest by the metal base plate.
‘Bet that hurt,’ I say.
‘Didn’t feel a thing till afterwards. Bit messy though.’
‘Where were you?’
‘In the BATT house. Drove up from Taqa two days before, but the jeep behind me hit a mine so we had to overnight in Mirbat. I was supposed to fly out the next day with the injured driver, but the cloud was too low. Hell of a day to get stuck.’ He rolls down his sleeve and sighs. ‘Regiment’s gone downhill since then.’
It’s midday. H throws a restless look around the kitchen and asks if there’s a pub nearby. ‘We can have a walk and a blather,’ he suggests, ‘and make bit of a plan.’ I need the walk and agree. We take our coats, cut across the fields from the house, and walk the mile and a half to the Crown, soaking ourselves up to the knees in the wet grass. At the pub we sit by a smoky fireplace and talk over our beers, learning details of each other’s lives with a friendly complicity to which I’m unaccustomed but which I’m enjoying more than I expect.
H asks about Afghanistan. A few of his Regiment friends paid visits to the country in the 1980s, he says, training Afghan mujaheddin to use the Stinger missile. They even brought a few Afghans to Scotland to train them in guerrilla tactics and advanced communications. From a drab building behind Victoria station one or two others helped to dream up exotic operations to hinder the Soviets. But he doesn’t know much else about the place, he confesses.
I try to convey the fondness, despite all the privations and difficulties of conflict, that I feel for the place and its people. I’ve come to respect the Afghans for their bravery and hardiness, and I’m relieved when H says he felt the same mixture of sympathy and respect for the tribesmen he trained and fought alongside in Oman. From my wallet I pull a photograph taken on my very first trip to Afghanistan, and H points to the bearded Afghan posing next to me with an AK-47 assault rifle held proudly across his chest.
‘Looks like a fellow in my troop,’ he says, grinning.
He asks about politics too. I say the present conflict there can be traced back to the Soviet occupation of the country throughout the 1980s. The Soviets had hoped to establish a loyal communist regime in Afghanistan, calculating that the poorest people in all Asia would be quickly subdued. Things went badly from the start. There was widespread armed resistance to the Soviet presence, and their total failure to win popular support from the rural population was equalled by their poor strategy. Pinned down in their bases and controlling only the cities and main roads, Soviet soldiers were rarely able to move freely about the country, relying on airpower and heavily armoured operations to bludgeon their enemies into submission. There was no attempt to win the hearts and minds of a deeply traditional and religious people, who had been fighting – and beating – invaders since the beginning of time.
‘Mindset,’ says H quietly, nodding. ‘You can’t win a war without understanding the mindset.’
For ten years the Soviets fought an increasingly brutal and unsuccessful conflict, killing as many as a million Afghans in the process. They withdrew in 1989, leaving an ailing communist government in a shattered nation, which further disintegrated as rival mujaheddin factions fought each other for control. American support for the Afghans evaporated in the wake of the Soviet exodus, and in the lawless provinces of the south the Taliban were born a few years later, supported increasingly by extremists from abroad. They took Kabul in 1996 and soon imposed their cruelly medieval outlook on almost the entire country. Only a shrinking province in the north controlled by Massoud continued to resist their rule.
The counter-insurgency campaign in Oman, though on a much smaller scale, made an instructive contrast. The Regiment had made it a priority to understand the local culture, realising from the outset that without local support they could never hope to defeat the enemy. The strategic emphasis was on winning allies rather than killing the enemy, and on avoiding the death of civilians at any cost. When Adoo defectors surrendered to the government side they were neither imprisoned nor even interrogated, but gently persuaded to see the logic of fighting for a progressive sultan rather than the brutal hierarchy of their communist sponsors.
‘When we found a village we wanted to keep the Adoo out of,’ says H, ‘we’d build a well and a clinic, and a school if they needed it. And we’d never have any trouble from it again. Simple, but it worked.’
‘Imagine we’d done the same thing in Afghanistan in the 90s,’ I say. ‘The Taliban would never have got the platform they have now.’
‘Probably some accountant in the Foreign Office said it was too expensive,’ he replies.
H asks how soon I can come to Hereford. As soon as he wants, I say. He suggests we meet in two days’ time, and I stay with him until the end of the week. He gives me his phone number and directions to his home, and advises me to memorise them rather than write them down. I’ll need boots, he says, outdoor gear, and a Bergen. He doesn’t use the word rucksack.
‘We’ll go for some nice tabs, and work on some security SOPs,’ he says. It’s strange to hear army-speak again. A tab is a tactical advance to battle. Basically a long walk. SOP means standard operating procedure.
‘The SOPs are common sense mostly, but we’ll need to get them in our system,’ says H. ‘What sort of weapons do they use out there?’
‘Anyone who’s anyone has an AK-47,’ I say, half surprised he doesn’t already know. ‘Russian, Egyptian and Chinese versions mostly. There’s a few AK-74s around, but you don’t see many.’ The AK-74 is the smaller-calibre short-barrelled version of the AK-47, a prestige weapon carried by a number of distinguished commanders. There is no point in mentioning the endless variety of heavier weapons in use in the country.
‘Surprise, surprise. What about shorts?’
‘Makarov, I suppose.’ This is the Soviet-designed 9-millimetre pistol most often seen in Afghanistan. I’d nearly bought one for myself when I’d been there, but was dissuaded by my Afghan friend and driver, who said a pistol was ineffective. He carried a grenade with an extra-short fuse in his pocket instead.
‘Alright. We’ll brush up on weapons,’ says H, ‘and you can teach me about mines. I’ll see what other kit I can get out of the Kremlin. Are you fit?’
‘Been fitter.’
‘Try five K a day in under half an hour and we’ll take it from there.’ That sounds ominous. I can’t remember the last time I ran five kilometres, but all of a sudden I’m looking forward to the discipline.
‘Right,’ says H, glancing at his watch. ‘Got to get back to the memsahib.’
We walk back to the house. It starts to rain. H won’t come in again, he says. He puts up his collar, wishes me luck and walks to the end of the driveway and out towards his car. I head back inside and change into my running gear.
Then I stretch out on the sofa and fall asleep.
6
I no longer recall the exact sequence of the training that begins that week. It’s dark and drizzling when I leave for Hereford on the Tuesday morning. The sky begins to lighten only as I turn west on the M50, and soon the Malverns loom up on my right. An hour later, on the outskirts of a small village to the north-west of Hereford, I turn off a narrow lane and pull up facing a wooden front gate. Across a tended gravel driveway stands a small black and white timbered house typical of the county. An ageing dark blue Range Rover is parked in front of a detached garage.
A barking terrier runs up, and H appears moments later with an eager wave, opens the gate and invites me inside for coffee, defying once again my naive impression of the SAS soldier as a hard-hearted killer. In the front hallway of his home is a large framed photograph of H, looking youthful and wearing the unmistakable sand-coloured beret with the flaming-dagger badge. I imagine it lit up in the beam of a burglar’s torch, the muttered curses and the swift retreat.
‘Good man,’ says H, noticing that I’m already wearing my boots. ‘How’s the running coming along?’
‘Fine,’ I lie. I’ve started a five-K routine, but not without a few pauses on the way. Five kilometres seems like a long distance until you’re used to it. Boredom and the body’s resistance make it seem like about a hundred. My legs aren’t the problem. The protest comes from my lungs. No matter how fit I’ve been in the past, I’ve always hated long-distance running. ‘I’m a bit slow,’ I concede, feeling uncomfortable with the deceit, ‘but fine.’
‘Well, alright. You work on it. Come and have a look at the route, then we’ll walk and talk.’ He’s put a large-scale Ordnance Survey map of the Brecon Beacons, laminated in soft plastic film, on the kitchen sideboard. ‘We’ll start here,’ he says, pointing to a small building at the edge of a patch of forest just off the A470 in the heart of the Beacons, ‘at the Storey Arms.’ To the north of the road the light-brown contour lines thicken like a fingerprint.
I know what that means: up Pen-y-Fan in the rain.
‘We’ll leave the car in the car park and RV there if we get separated on the south side.’ He traces the route with the tip of a pencil. The plan is to head for the summit, walk down Cwm Llwch on the far side, follow a small road for a couple of miles around the base of the slope, then ascend again via a point called the Obelisk before heading down to the car. He points out an alternative rendezvous point for the north leg of the journey. RVs, backup RVs and emergency RVs are an obsession with the SAS, I’m learning.
Half an hour later we’re at our starting point. The weather’s not ideal. I last climbed Pen-y-Fan in shorts and a T-shirt several years ago, on a brilliant summer’s day. Now it’s cold and raining. Not heavily, but gusting in sheets, and there’s a distinct lack of ramblers. The slope above us disappears into a barricade of cloud. H offers to carry the Bergen, which holds our water, dry clothes and a heavy-duty orange plastic sheet for use as shelter in an emergency. I’m too proud to allow him to take it. We put on our waterproofs and H sees me grimace at the cold.
‘Better than being too hot,’ he says.
We trudge up and establish our pace. At least we’re walking. For selection to the SAS, we’d be running, says H when I ask him about his time in the Regiment. Despite being known for the gruelling tabs in the Beacons that every would-be trooper had to undergo, the Regiment’s selection process was designed to uncover mental resilience as much as physical grit. ‘You’d see a lot of muscle-bound guys packing it in,’ says H, recalling time spent as directing staff on selection. ‘Not because they weren’t fit enough, but because they got fed up the quickest. Too used to being tough, I suppose. It was the squinty-eyed little fellows who’d get through.’
Those who survived the gruelling Fan dance – up Pen-y-Fan and back three times – the night-time navigation to control points at memorised grid references, the heavily laden cross-country marches and mock interrogations, would end up on a month’s continuation training in the jungle. Brunei was the chosen location. H calls it ‘good jungle’. I don’t know what bad jungle is. He says it’s the jungle that really sorts people out, and where the real selection takes place.
‘Everything’s wet the whole time and there’s beasties all over the place. A lot of guys who did well on selection couldn’t handle the jungle,’ he says. I ask him how he’d fared on his own jungle training.
‘Me? Loved it,’ he says, beaming as the rain cascades over his eyebrows. ‘Happy as a pig in shit.’
We enter the cloud and feel its coldness. A purplish scar of track leads upwards. Beyond a dozen yards, every feature of the landscape is absorbed into the whiteness. H walks behind me and gives directions where the route looks uncertain. Higher up, a slippery outcrop of stone resembling a ruined wall marks the steepest portion of the ascent. The summit of Pen-y-Fan lies several hundred yards to the north-east. We reach it at the end of a narrow ridge where the flanks descend with spectacular steepness into deep glacial valleys on either side. But we can see nothing of the views.
It’s too cold to stop for more than a few moments. Using the corner of his compass, H points out our position on the map as the raindrops roll across its laminated surface, and we check our bearing for the long descent into Cwm Llwch. Beyond the valley at its base, we reach Cwm Gwdi, the remnants of the Parachute Regiment battle camp and the deserted road beyond. It loops west towards the shorter steeper ridge leading back up to the Obelisk.