In the heat and dust (THE BLACK WATCH AT WAR)

'After days of waiting, war came suddenly ... we were scrabbling for gas masks, jumping into trenches and troops were filled with a mixture of fear and excitement, wondering if they would ever come back'

BATHED in the light of a moon not quite full, the tanks and armoured vehicles stretched out in columns across the desert resembled, at first glance, some picture from a child’s story-book of great and strange and unfamiliar beasts from a time long gone, grazing amid what seemed at first to be a mist rising off the ground but which, looking closer, could be seen to be the fine sand of the desert floor, kicked up by their tracks as they rumbled forward.

The noise, coming from all directions at once, thunderous, deafening, terrifying, the smell of engines and exhaust fumes mingling with the earthy odour of the dust hanging in the air, the ground shaking, the vibrations entering the body through the soles of the feet and running up the spine, incessant, unforgiving.

None who witnessed the scene could fail to be moved in some way by that first glimpse of the seemingly endless columns of tanks and armoured vehicles, ammunition trucks and fuel wagons, Land Rovers and ambulances and all the other odds and ends that made up the Black Watch battle group as it began the journey that would end in Basra.

Barry Stephen, from Perth, was there that night, and the boys who fired the shell at the Fusiliers’ tank in the chaos and confusion of the fighting around Basra, and Luke Allsopp and Simon Cullingworth, the Royal Engineers who disappeared near Az Zubayr. And Douggie Hay, who would order his driver to plough his Warrior through the wall of a house and into the firefight that would mark the turning point of the battle to take Az Zubayr; and the CO, Mike Riddell-Webster, who would make his name by taking off his helmet and enhance the reputation of his regiment by taking Basra; and the snipers, Pedro and Robbo and Mark, who would end up fighting hand-to-hand with the men they expected to have been hunting across the rooftops. And Mark the radio operator who would think he heard a message to say 120 Iraqis were heading their way, only to find that they were 120mm mortars and they were already arriving; and Rob, who didn’t stop to worry about those mortars when he thought Davie was caught in the open; and Kev and Lee and Chris and all the other young men who had never been shot at, or been asked to fire a shot in anger before. All there, all sharing that same mixture of fear and excitement the night they broke camp and headed north toward the border, all wondering whether they would be coming back.

It was in that moment that the weeks of uncertainty and waiting in the desert of northern Kuwait melted away, to be replaced, at last, by the sure knowledge they were about to join the war that had seemed so inevitable and yet so remote.

And there was no mistaking then that the war was under way. Even in the camp a couple of dozen kilometres from the border, it was already very real.

At night we had watched the jets roaring overhead, and heard the sound of the explosions over the horizon, and seen the fires which were to become such a permanent fixture on the skyline springing up and colouring the edges of the night orange , the smoke blotting out the stars that filled the sky.

For days, we had been sitting in the desert waiting for something to happen, anything to break the monotony of army life, anything to take our minds off the little things that annoyed us then because there were no bigger worries on which to focus. The chemical toilets best approached with gas mask on; the mess tent running out of butter; the lights that went off without warning plunging everyone into darkness; the big television set that sat blankly at the end of the tent which sprang into life the night before we moved out, but expired again just as quickly; and the heat and dust which turned out to be nothing compared with what we were to face later but which, back then, seemed designed solely to make life that little bit less comfortable.

On those nights when nothing was happening, we gathered round our radios to listen to Tony Blair sounding presidential and George Bush sounding less so, and Donald Rumsfeld sounding like only Rumsfeld could sound. People stood around and talked and smoked, but didn’t drink because Kuwait was dry , and questioned what we were about to do.

Arguing with Kev who had a child of his own and who thought it was wrong that Iraqi children were going to die in a war in which he wanted to play no part. Fretting about the chemical weapons which would never be used, but the supposed existence of which meant that gas masks had to be carried at all times and tablets taken - though few did - to lessen the effects of any attack. And the hot and cumbersome nuclear, biological and chemical suits had to be unpacked ready to be pulled on , even though they took an age to get into, by which time it might be too late.

And then the ultimatum ran out and we sat up and watched the sky, waiting to be shocked and awed, but nothing happened and we drifted off to bed. In the morning, we awoke to learn that the war was under way, although we could not understand why so little was happening around us.

And then all of a sudden the war came to us and we were scrabbling for our gas masks and pulling them on and jumping into the trenches that the diggers were frantically excavating around the camp.

All day the alerts were called; for the first time we knew real fear and had something tangible to concern us. Scud launches reported from across the other side of the border, although what the missiles were and why they had not been knocked out no-one was quite sure.

Listening to the Patriot missile batteries firing their salvoes, a distinctive double thump and then another and another, wondering why they were still firing and clearly missing whatever it was they could see that we could not. Looking at the faces of those crouched in the trenches who tried to stare ahead at the sand a few inches from their faces, but whose eyes were drawn inexorably back to the narrow slit of sky above.

Then, the sound of the first explosion, maybe 15km away, and the relief of the all-clear tempered by reports that the missile had landed near the marines and people may have been hurt. We never did find out the truth about those reports, although the BBC World Service told us that those people roughing it in the comfort of Kuwait City had been frightened enough to leave their pool-sides to seek shelter, which was some small comfort as we sprinted for shelter again, sand pouring down the backs of our necks as we craned our heads above the parapet to scour the sky for whatever we thought we might see.

But the real war came soon enough. One last alert and then we were moving, out on to the road and north towards the holding area just our side of the border, and then another pause to regroup and then north, the days of waiting becoming a distant memory amid the ever-present signs of battle.

Abandoned tanks and armoured personnel carriers littered the countryside, burnt-out trucks stood by the roadside, hit by tanks or artillery or air strikes as the Americans headed for Baghdad . Groups of prisoners of war sat miserably beside the road, ringed by hoops of barbed wire and guarded by British soldiers with bayonets fixed to their rifles.

From up ahead came the first reports of Black Watch units engaging the Iraqis near the town of Az Zubayr, a place which would become all too familiar in the days to come. But we didn’t know that then.

At night we camped up where we could, barren patches of land littered with rubbish and patrolled by packs of noisy dogs, our sleep broken by the explosions all around, the flash of bombs and artillery shells, the sky glowing orange from the oil-filled fire trenches lit by the Iraqis and the burning fractured pipelines. If there were no explosions, then there were more alerts, scrambling out of sleeping bags into ditches or under vehicles, searching in the dark for helmets and body armour and gas masks.

The days ran together, sand-storms blotted out everything around, giving way to thunder, lightning and driving rain that turned the dust to mud.

We camped beside the road, protected by machine gunners perched on sand bags at the end of that stretch of tarmac, tanks and armoured vehicles offering cover to those with little protection, the Land Rovers and the ammunition and fuel trucks.

Ahead of us, on the approaches to Basra, the fighting raged on. The ground shuddered and the sky was lit up by blinding flashes. In the distance, parachute flares sank to earth as the dull thud of gunfire and falling bombs appeared to come from all directions. Ahead of us, the Warrior armoured vehicles and Challenger tanks tore across the countryside, taking on Iraqi units wherever they found them.

Caught near a bridge, half a dozen Iraqi T55 tanks opened fire on the advancing Challengers, but were quickly dispatched. The Iraqi units were abandoning their positions and fleeing, but a new, more insidious threat, was already emerging. Retreating Iraqi troops had dumped their uniforms, but not their weapons, and civilians were seizing whatever they could find to oppose the advance. The sheer volume of abandoned weaponry had provided ample opportunity for anyone so inclined to arm themselves against the invading army . Tanks sat dug into defensive positions, armoured personnel carriers stood by the edge of the road, the muzzles of artillery pieces poked out from behind the sand berms which criss-crossed the land at the sides of the road.

In the abandoned heliport outside Az Zubayr, we came across bunker after bunker crammed with weapons of all descriptions, anti-shipping mines, rocket-propelled grenades, huge Russian-built Frog missiles, renamed al-Harith by the Iraqis, stored in enormous concrete bunkers protected by sliding steel doors a foot thick.

In one bunker crammed with parts and warheads for the rocket-propelled grenade launchers were boxes bearing the name of a British company, and though they were sealed shut and no-one wanted to open them for fear of booby traps in a room packed to the rafters with explosives, the company’s later denials that they contained anything which would have been of interest to the Iraqi armed forces brought wry smiles to the faces of those who had found them.

What bad luck, one soldier said, to be the only firm supplying something totally innocent and peaceful to have their products stored in a weapons bunker.

We quickly learnt that nothing was quite as innocent as it first seemed. There was the Baath Party office in Az Zubayr, decorated with pictures of Saddam and defended by machine guns and sandbagged bunkers, but which seemed too small inside for the walls around it, a mystery solved when a sledgehammer taken to one of the crudely built internal walls revealed the children’s health clinic which filled most of the building and which had been clumsily bricked off, the piles of medical records and thousands of boxes of unused medicines piled high on shelves next door to rooms crammed with yet more weapons.

Kevin Beaton, the senior medical officer whose rank of lieutenant colonel meant he didn’t care very much what he said, called it a crime. There were children who needed those medicines, he said.

And there was the petro-chemical plant at Dirhamiyah which the maps showed to be an oil-processing operation, but which also housed more of the big grey-painted missiles the soldiers took to be Scuds, although no-one was sure.

Everywhere, it seemed, there were more people in civilian clothing firing rifles, machine guns and rocket-propelled grenades. One Warrior crew was attacked four times in the one morning. And John, the motor transport officer, shaking his head in disbelief. "I’ve never seen anything like it," he told us. "The bastards are everywhere."

For days, the success of the entire venture seemed to hang in the balance, what had been expected by many to be an easy campaign bogged down by heavy fighting wherever we turned. On the bridges over the Shatt al-Basra canal, which ran along the western edge of Basra, the fighting was intense, Iraqi mortar rounds falling with uncanny accuracy on the British positions, the Black Watch guns and mortars returning fire. The British suspected that the Iraqis were using civilians to walk past their positions, carrying global positioning satellite devices which could later pinpoint their location to within a few inches, and the Iraqis probably quickly realised that the British ability to pick them off when they emerged in the converted pick-up trucks armed with mortars and machine guns was not simply down to good fortune. There were British soldiers in unconventional clothing and carrying an odd selection of weaponry stalking them through the city, and both sides knew it.

Over the city hung massive clouds of oily black smoke, pouring from the oil-filled trenches set alight by the Iraqi defenders to hamper visibility and make life more difficult for the pilots called in to deliver the air strikes .

Burnt-out trucks lined the roadside running up towards Bridge 4, where the Black Watch had set up home in a smashed and shattered transport depot; and in one pick-up truck, two charred bodies, trapped by the flames which consumed them when the tank’s shell or missile exploded. They had been facing towards the advancing troops, but many other vehicles had been picked off as they tried to escape back towards the city.

At first, people still jumped when an explosion went off nearby, but as the days passed we became more used to the sudden reports, found it easier to tell which was ours and which were theirs, although sometimes a gun firing from very close by sounded much the same as an incoming round and people flinched involuntarily and looked at each other’s face to gauge whether they should be running for cover, or passing it off with an insouciant shrug.

After a while, it became possible to differentiate between different weapons: AK47s, the automatic rifle favoured by the Iraqi fighters, were easy to spot, the slow chugging beat of the firing quite different to the sharp chatter of the British SA80s.

Mortars made a thumping, whooshing noise as they left the tube, although we later discovered they didn’t sound much different when they landed. And tank rounds were simply deafening.

Slowly, the British seemed to be gaining the upper hand, although there were still setbacks along the way, but it was becoming clear that they would be expected to fight a very different war to the one first envisaged. Instead of a standing army equipped with tanks and artillery pieces and all the other paraphernalia of war, the opposition were militia men, Baath Party members with nothing left to lose, who emerged from the shadow to fire what weapons they could find and which they knew enough about to operate, and then disappeared as quickly.

It was like fighting ghosts. They would hide among the houses, in the schools, in the hospitals, even in the mosques, or so the soldiers who had been inside the city said.

The Iraqi army had turned out to have no stomach for a fight, tired of years of war and quick to understand that any attempt to take on a force which was so much better equipped and which had total control of the skies was tantamount to suicide. They just put down their guns, took off their uniforms and went home.

But the militiamen were a different breed. They were the Baath Party men, the people who had ruled the country for so long that they could not just put aside their weapons and live ordinary lives. They had nothing to lose, so they fought on. How many of them there were was hard to tell. Sometimes they would never be defeated.

And then Douggie Hay put his Warrior through the wall of the Baath Party headquarters in Az Zubayr. Looking back now, it was a defining moment, the moment when the British, who had been harried from all sides for days, finally snapped and hit back decisively. Nothing could have been more certain to sap the spirit of those militiamen still determined to hold out than the sight of the British troops crashing straight through the wall of what should have been the most heavily defended position in the town.

The Iraqis had gone to great lengths to protect their headquarters. They had gunmen in all the houses around, lookouts in the streets, a 10ft high wall, a difficult approach of narrow streets. And Major Hay simply drove straight into their house. By the time the guards came to, it was as good as over.

Troops were piling out of the back of the Warrior embedded in the living room of the house, the key figures in the Baath Party were being dragged out of their beds, and in the street outside, the Black Watch were knocking the living daylights out of anything that moved. It was over in a matter of minutes and then they were gone. Later, Douggie Hay could not suppress a grin as he told the story and the CO called it a job well done. At least the Iraqis knew that now they meant business.

Wow!

Some things never change. Sounds like my dad's stories of house-to-house fighting in the little towns in Italy in the winter of 43-44.

"None who witnessed the scene could fail to be moved in some way by that first glimpse of the seemingly endless columns of tanks and armoured vehicles, ammunition trucks and fuel wagons, Land Rovers and ambulances and all the other odds and ends that made up the Black Watch battle group as it began the journey that would end in Basra."

Damn, Basra is just over the border from Kuwait. Not much of a journey.

I understand that this interesting article was written for British consumption, but (paraphrasing) "George Bush sounding less than Presidential???" How insulting!

It is obvious that this writer does not understand Americans, Texans, or the Bush family. They say what they mean and they mean what they say -- no mincing or parsing of words. And most of us consider President George W. Bush a breath of fresh air and quite Presidential, thank you very much.

That human anomoly, Clinton, which many Brits are so entranced by is such a disgusting piece of filth that the only Brit that he should associate with is your MP, the treasonous Galloway! And Mr. Galloway would be stooping to a new low!

A gripping, earthy story to be told and retold someday by the Black Watch unsung heroes to their children and grandchildren.

Bless them all!

Leni

"And then all of a sudden the war came to us and we were scrabbling for our gas masks and pulling them on and jumping into the trenches that the diggers were frantically excavating around the camp."

Nothing like waiting until the last minute to start digging. It seems like those trenches should have been dug while they were sitting on their asses listening to Blair sounding Presidential and Bush sounding less so.

Damn, Basra is just over the border from Kuwait. Not much of a journey.

Are you done insulting the bravery of the British troops yet? You are beneath contempt as it is, don't explore even deeper levels.

Ivan

National pride is one thing. Insulting the bravery, honour and decency of British troops is another.

Regards, Ivan

Curious sentence. I wonder what it means.

First master finding your arse with both hands before you start analysing anything deeper than that.

Ivan

Better late than never.

If you are trying to goad me to the point of saying something that will get me banned, forget it, gobshite.

Ivan

Facts are stubborn things.

What is Basra, maybe thirty miles from the border of Kuwait? Most folks in Texas commute back and forth to work more than thirty miles every morning and evening. They don't say that they are about to set out on a "journey" when they head off to work in the morning.

"Insulting the bravery, honour and decency of British troops is another."

I quite agree, which is why I have never done so. On the other hand, I seem to remember a story that you posted and defended that insulted the decency of American Special Forces.

I don't like it either.I was referring to the Bush not sounding Presidential comment.I believe the Brits were great! I have no patience with slurs against our allied forces.

What is Basra, maybe thirty miles from the border of Kuwait? Most folks in Texas commute back and forth to work more than thirty miles every morning and evening. They don't say that they are about to set out on a "journey" when they head off to work in the morning.

If you think driving into enemy territory is the same as commuting to your job in Texas, then I suggest you consult your psychiatrist immediately. Obviously you have "issues".

Ivan

``Better late than never.''

Pukka, why are you saying this? Every time the British troops are mentioned in articles, you come up with cynical criticism. (Of course, most of the articles about the British troops posted on Freerepublic are from the British press)

Every time, you come up with a remark that is snide in the least, and contemptible at the worst.

Having talked to you about this on other threads, you say that you 'appreciate' the work done by British troops. And yet, you continue to derride them with sarcastic one-liners with little substance.

Why not come out and say what's up yer snot?

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