Soldier C: Secret War in Arabia Read online

  ‘We’ve seen all there is to see,’ Gumboot said, ‘and we’re frying out here, boss. Can we go somewhere cooler?’

  Lampton grinned as he took his seat in the Land Rover. ‘OK, lads. Let’s go and see some of the BATT handiwork. That’ll take us along the seashore and help cool you down.’

  He guided Ricketts back out through the walled town’s main gates and down to the shore, then made him head for Taqa, halfway between Salalah and Mirbat. The drive did indeed take them along the shore, with the ravishing turquoise sea on one side and rows of palm and date trees on the other. A cool breeze made the journey pleasant, though Ricketts had to be careful not to get stuck in the sand. Also, as he had noticed before, there were a great many crabs, in places in their hundreds, scuttling in both directions across the beach like monstrous ants and being crushed under the wheels of the Land Rover.

  ‘I get the shivers just looking at ’em,’ Gumboot told them while visibly shivering in the rear of the Land Rover. ‘I’d rather fight the adoo.’

  ‘There’s a BATT station at Taqa,’ Lampton said, oblivious to the masses of crabs, ‘so you can see the kind of work we do there. You know, of course, that the SAS has been in Oman before.’

  ‘I didn’t know that,’ Gumboot said to distract himself from the crabs. ‘But then I’m pig-ignorant, boss.’

  ‘I know they were here before,’ Andrew said, ‘but I don’t know why.’

  ‘He’s pig-ignorant as well,’ Gumboot said. ‘Now I don’t feel so lonely.’

  ‘It was because of Britain’s treaty obligations to Muscat and Oman,’ Lampton informed them. ‘In the late 1950s we were drawn into a counter-insurgency campaign when the Sultan’s regime was threatened by a rebellious army of expatriate Omanis from Saudi Arabia. As their first major move against the Sultan, they took over the Jebel Akhdar, or Green Mountain, in the north of Oman, and declared the region independent from him.’

  ‘Which did not amuse him greatly,’ Andrew said.

  ‘Definitely not,’ Lampton replied. ‘We Brits were called in to help. When British infantry, brought in from Kenya in 1957, failed to dislodge the rebels from the mountain, D Squadron and A Squadron of 22 SAS were flown in to solve the problem. In January 1959 they made their legendary assault on the Jebel Akhdar, winning it back from the rebels. Once they had done that, they implemented the first hearts-and-minds campaign to turn the rest of the locals into firm supporters of the Sultan. Unfortunately, with his medieval ways, Sultan Qaboos’s old man undid all the good done by the SAS. Now Qaboos has another rebellion on his hands.’

  ‘Which is why we’re here,’ Andrew said.

  ‘Yes. What we did in 1959, we’re going to have to do again twelve years later: engage in another hearts-and-minds campaign, while also defeating the adoo on the Jebel Dhofar.’

  ‘What exactly does a hearts-and-minds campaign involve?’ Ricketts asked him.

  ‘The concept was first devised in Malaya in the early 1950s and used successfully in Borneo from 1963 to 1966. It’s now an integral part of our counter-insurgency warfare methods. Its basic thrust is to gain the trust of the locals of any given area by sharing their lifestyle, language and customs. That’s why, for instance, in Borneo, SAS troopers actually lived with the natives in the jungle, assisting them with their everyday needs and providing medical care. In fact, medical care is one of the prime tools in the hearts-and-minds campaign. We even train some of the BATT men in midwifery and dentistry. Those skills, along with basic education, building small schools and hospitals, and teaching crafts that create work, have won us lots of friends in many regions.’

  ‘Fucked if I’d deliver a baby,’ Gumboot said. ‘There’s a limit to duty.’

  ‘You’d be surprised at the number of SAS men who’ve delivered babies and pulled teeth in emergencies.’ Lampton turned to Ricketts. ‘Watch out for the water here. This bay leads to Taqa.’

  Even as Lampton was speaking, the Land Rover was driving into the shallow water of a bay surrounded by small cliffs. By using four-wheel drive, Ricketts got them across to dry land, where they passed more cliffs and sand dunes, before arriving at another beach. There, flocks of seagulls were winging repeatedly over piles of rotten, stinking fish that were scattered between the beached fishing boats. After passing the boats and the Arab fishermen sitting in them repairing the nets, they arrived at a small village of mud huts. At the end of its single, dusty street were two buildings taller than the others, being three storeys high, with the Omani flag flying from one of them.

  ‘Taqa,’ Lampton said. ‘Stop here.’ Ricketts pulled up, then followed the others out of the vehicle. ‘The building with the flag,’ Lampton told them, ‘is the Wali’s house. The other tall building is the BATT house. Now let’s meet the BATT men.’

  Three of the latter were on the first floor of the BATT house, brewing tea on a No 1 burner and placing tin mugs on the trestle table that took up most of the tiny room. The shelves were stacked with tins of compo rations and cooking utensils, indicating that the room was used as a combined kitchen and mess room. SLR and M16 rifles were piled up in a corner, along with boxes of grenades, webbing, phosphorus flares and other ammunition.

  When introductions had been made, the tea was poured and the BATT men, constantly interrupting one another, explained that they were still working to win the hearts and minds of the villagers. They were having problems, however, because some of the men of the village were suspected of belonging to the adoo – for they often disappeared for weeks at a time – and the villagers, including the Wali, were worried about possible reprisals against them once the BATT teams moved out.

  ‘So one of our jobs,’ Corporal Roy Coleman said, ‘is to persuade the villagers that we won’t be leaving until the adoo have been defeated militarily and forced off the Jebel once and for all. Another problem is that these villagers are still pretty primitive, and although we give them medical treatment we’re up against a lot of their old beliefs and superstitions.’

  ‘Is this the whole BATT team?’ Ricketts asked, indicating the three troopers with a nod of his head.

  ‘No. There’s eight of us. Some are sleeping, a couple are in the Wali’s fort, keeping their ear to the radio, and the rest are performing their duties in the village. Let’s go outside and see what’s happening. If you hear gunshots, don’t worry. We’re giving firing lessons to some of the gendarmes on a makeshift firing range on the beach. It’s not the adoo.’

  Leaving the house, Coleman led them to the back of the building, where a tent had been set up as a basic, open-air surgery. Gunshots did indeed ring out from the direction of the beach as they approached the Omanis queuing for medical treatment at the tent. The SAS medic was standing behind a trestle table, sweating in the afternoon heat as he went about his work. Introduced to the probationers, he talked to them as he continued cleaning and bandaging cuts, lancing boils, treating bad burns and dispensing a wide variety of tablets.

  ‘Some of the tablets are genuine and some are piss-takes,’ he said. ‘You get hypochondriacs even in this place, believe me. I was trained at the US Army’s special forces medical school at Fort Sam, in Houston, and Fort Bragg, North Carolina – the best of its kind – which means that although I’m not a doctor I can deal with just about anything short of major surgery. Here, the most common problems are boils, burns, ruptures, messed-up circumcisions, conjunctivitis, dysentery, malaria, yellow fever, sand-fly fever and dengue from mosquitoes …’

  ‘Don’t tell me!’ Gumboot interrupted sardonically.

  ‘… trench fever from lice, spotted fever from ticks, every kind of typhus, even leprosy and the dire results of floggings ordered by the Wali. Like the other medics, if I come across something I can’t handle I simply call the BATT doctor at Um al Gwarif. Nevertheless, I have two major problems. One is being up against the primitive practices of the local witch doctors, who tend to cure all ills by branding the pained area with a red-hot iron. The other is trying to work out which of the village
rs are really sick and which are just becoming pill heads. Gradually, however, more and more of them are coming to depend increasingly on us while rejecting the advances of the adoo. That’s the whole point.’

  ‘It’s also the point of the school we’ve recently built for them,’ Coleman said as he led them away from the medical tent, ‘and for the firing practice we give to the gendarmes. The more we give them, the less they appreciate the adoo. And that, in a nutshell, is what’s known as the hearts-and-minds campaign.’

  The following day they were at Mirbat, on the south coast of Dhofar. It was little more than a collection of dusty mud huts and clay buildings, with the sea on one side and a protective barbed-wire fence running north and east. The settlement included a cluster of houses to the south; a market by the sea; some thirty armed Omanis, housed in an ancient Wali’s fort to the west; another small fort about 500 yards to the west, holding 25 men of the Dhofar Gendarmerie, or DG; and, near the market in the middle of the compound, a mud-built BATT house holding nine BATT men under the command of the 23-year-old Captain Mike Kealy. Eight hundred yards north of the northern perimeter, on the slopes of Jebel Ali, was another Dhofar Gendarmerie outpost.

  ‘We’ve won the hearts and minds of this town,’ Captain Kealy informed them, ‘but the adoo harass us all the time and, so it’s rumoured, are determined to capture the town and wipe out the defenders as an inspiration to their own wavering troops and a warning to all those who oppose them.’

  ‘What kind of defences do you have?’ Ricketts asked him.

  ‘You mean, apart from the men?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Kealy shrugged. ‘Not much. The only heavy weapons are an old 25-pounder in a gun-pit next to the DG fort, a single 7.62mm GPMG on the BATT house roof, an 81mm mortar emplaced beside the building and a 0.5in-calibre heavy machine gun.’ Kealy shrugged again. ‘That’s it.’

  ‘That’s not much.’

  ‘If they come,’ Kealy said, ‘we’ll be waiting for them. Don’t doubt that, Trooper.’

  ‘I won’t,’ Ricketts replied.

  Leaving the BATT house, they were introduced to other members of B Squadron, including three Fijians – the enormous Corporal Labalaba, known as Laba, Valdez, and Sekonia, known as Sek. They were told that all three had joined up during the British Army’s major recruitment drive in Fiji and were veterans of the Keeni Meeni operations in Aden, as well as later missions in Borneo.

  ‘What’s “Keeni Meeni” mean?’ Gumboot asked, almost tripping over his own tongue.

  The enormous Labalaba, who was even taller than Andrew, looked down at Gumboot and grinned. ‘Keeni Meeni? It’s a Swahili phrase used to describe the movement of a snake in the grass. In Aden we’d disguise ourselves as Arabs, infiltrate our chosen district and seek out the enemy, quickly pull our Browning handguns from our futahs, the traditional Arab robes, neutralize the enemy with a “double-tap”, then melt back into the scenery – just like snakes in the grass!’

  ‘You mean, you’d blow the poor fucker away.’

  ‘You’ve got it, Trooper.’

  Leaving the sandbagged gun-pit, where the three Fijians had been cleaning the big gun, they saw their first firqats, just down from the hills and returning their FN rifles and other weapons to the armoury in the Wali’s fort. Though they all had similar shemaghs, the rest of their clothing was widely varied, ranging from the loose robes worn by most locals to Khaki Drill (KD), or Light Tropical, uniforms. Festooned with webbing, ponchos and bandoliers of ammunition, and with the large Omani knives called kunjias tied around their waists, they looked like a particularly fierce band of brigands.

  ‘I wouldn’t like to fucking tangle with them,’ Gumboot said admiringly.

  ‘Don’t,’ warned Lampton. ‘They’re extremely efficient with those knives and quick to use them. Only last year, they murdered a British officer in his tent when he refused to give them what they wanted. And those men, believe it or not, are the ones you depend on. Now let’s get back to the basha and have a couple of cooling beers.’

  ‘The word’s soothing,’ Andrew corrected him, glancing back over his shoulder at the fierce-looking firqats. ‘Let’s all go for a soothing beer.’

  They drove gratefully back to base.

  Chapter 5

  The indoctrination tour continued. Lampton had Ricketts drive them to Rayzut, where British Army engineers were constructing a new harbour from large blocks raised around the bay and an SAS BATT team was inoculating the local labour force. Many of the latter, Ricketts noticed, were so intrigued by modern medicine that they queued up eagerly to have their jabs.

  At Arzat, which was little more than a random collection of mud huts with a small garrison of Dhofar Gendarmerie, they found an SAS BATT team showing the locals how to purify the water tanks with fluoride and transform their rubbish into fuel. SAS veterinary surgeons were also present, showing the locals how to improve the breeding of their cattle and training them in basic veterinary medicine.

  At Janook, the probationers were given an enthusiastic lecture by a four-man BATT ‘Psyops’ team, formerly of the Northern Ireland regiments and now responsible for Psychological Operations in Oman. These activities included, apart from the writing of the propaganda leaflets dropped from the Skyvans, the showing of British and Hollywood movies to the locals.

  ‘The theory,’ they were informed by Corporal Hamlyn of the BATT team, ‘is that with little or no command of English, the locals can receive the benefits of Western civilization more easily from moving images than they can from the printed page.’

  ‘Never attack the written word,’ Andrew said, jotting some in his notebook, presumably for future poems. ‘There are aspects of humanity that the moving image can never describe.’

  The corporal looked up in surprise at the immense black newcomer. ‘What’s that, Trooper? I’m not sure I heard that right.’

  ‘The moving image is severely limited in its payload. It’s the printed word that will always knock ‘em out.’

  ‘Not in this case, Trooper. These folk in their jellabas and shemaghs don’t speak any English, so it’s easier to show them some movies, preferably action-packed.’

  ‘Charles Bronson,’ Gumboot said.

  ‘Clint Eastwood,’ Ricketts added.

  ‘I’m with you,’ Andrew said. ‘Movies that demonstrate Democracy in action – lots of guns and dead bodies.’

  ‘Are you taking the piss, Trooper?’

  ‘Just bouncing a few ideas, Corporal.’

  ‘He’s just stopped living off bananas,’ Gumboot explained, ‘and has withdrawal symptoms.’

  ‘Piss off, you lot,’ Hamlyn said.

  Andrew was more impressed when, at Suda, another windswept, dusty village scattered around a lovely bay on the Arabian Sea, they spent some time with a BATT team who were teaching the local children English with the aid of carefully selected illustrated books that showed them the wealth and wonders of the West – none of which, the BATT team repeatedly emphasized to their impressionable pupils, would be supplied by the communists.

  ‘See what I mean?’ Andrew said triumphantly. ‘When it really gets down to the nitty-gritty, the printed word is what matters.’

  ‘Not forgetting the pretty pictures,’ Gumboot reminded him.

  ‘They’re only there to support the words.’

  ‘Every kid I saw was looking at the pictures,’ Ricketts chipped in. ‘Not reading the words.’

  ‘A mere diversion,’ Andrew insisted. ‘They were merely stopping to think a bit. The pictures visually confirmed what the words had conveyed to them, but it’s the words, not the pictures, that they’ll be able to use in the future. We’re talking language here, man!’

  ‘That’s quite a mouthful, Andrew.’

  ‘It’s verbal diarrhoea,’ Gumboot insisted, ‘caused by all those bananas.’

  ‘Better than mental constipation,’ Andrew retorted, ‘of the kind you know so well.’

  ‘Cut out the bullshit,’ Lampton sa
id. ‘These matters are serious. The point is that whether with pictures or prose, movies or chewing gum, we’re showing these people what they can have if they side with us instead of the communists. Call it brainwashing if you like, but that’s what we’re about here.’

  Finally, during the late afternoon of their fourth day, Lampton guided Ricketts – still driving while Andrew and Gumboot kept a constant watch for adoo snipers – to a desolate village located in rough, gravel flatland west of the Jebel Dhofar, in a region once patrolled by the rebels but now back in the hands of the SAF.

  ‘Never forget,’ Lampton told them as they approached the village in four-wheel drive, bouncing over the rough, rocky ground, ‘that the adoo are fanatical communists, backed by the Soviet Union and the Chinese. Often removed from their parents to be schooled in the PDRY – the People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen, formerly Aden – or sent to guerrilla-warfare schools in Russia and China, they’re returned to their mountain villages as fanatics. There they establish communist cells, breaking down former loyalties, organizing their converts first into village militias, then into seasoned battle groups who show absolutely no mercy to the Muslims. They ban all religious practices, torture village elders into denying their faith and routinely rape their women. In other words, they’re engaged in a campaign of terror designed to wipe out Islam altogether and establish communism in Oman – and they’re ruthless in doing it.’

  The Land Rover bounced down off the rough ground on the lower slopes of the Jebel, then travelled along the flat gravel plain until it arrived at a dusty village of clay huts, Arabs in traditional dress and a surprising variety of animals, including cattle, mountain goats, mangy dogs and chickens.

  The sun was just beginning to sink, casting great shadows over the village, when Lampton told Ricketts to stop the Land Rover near the two wells, where a group of SAS men had gathered. Explosive charges, detonating cords, primers and other demolition equipment could be seen in opened boxes on the ground by their feet.