Free Zero Six Bravo by Damien Lewis

the enemy, but he reckoned the cowboy-style holster would be about as much use as an ashtray on a motorbike once they got going in Iraq.
    “Mate, it looks supercool,” Grey told him. “But don’t worry about it too much. Just concentrate on your driving.”
    With each man in the Squadron tasked with taking the surrender of over sixteen hundred Iraqi troops, it made sense to get some basic Arabic into them. This was going to be Sebastian’s baby. Trouble was, Sebastian had just been issued with a brand-new SBS beret, and no one seemed to have told him that you had to shape the distinctive headgear with hot—some argued boiling—water, so as to give it its distinctive, right-side-down skull-hugging profile.
    When he walked in to the mess tent for the Squadron’s first Arabic lesson, there was a chorus of “Fuck me, I didn’t know the chefs did Arabic!”
    But somehow Sebastian seemed able to take all the piss-taking in his stride. It was like water off a duck’s back, and he certainly didn’t let it lessen his enthusiasm for banging some Arabic into the men of the Squadron.
    He began by handing out some crib cards that he’d got printed up. They contained a list of common Arabic words and sentences, though oddly enough the phrase “Would you like to surrender?” appeared to be absent.
    Sebastian was like a human dynamo as he talked the men through the basics of the language. He kept hopping about from foot to foot, and there was something about his boyish enthusiasm that was strangely infectious.
    “Now, here’s one you may have heard of— Insh’Allah , pronounced ‘Insha-a-lah.’” He beamed. “It means ‘God willing,’ and absolutely everything is Insh’Allah in Arabic-speaking countries. Don’t you just love the sound of it? Try it, all of you, now: Insh’Allah . Insh’Allah —really rolls off the tongue, don’t you think?”
    Seb was clearly playing to his audience and playing up to the fact that all thought him to be some kind of mad, eccentric Englishman. “Try it, Raggy, try it!” he enthused as Raggy wandered in—his trademark five minutes late. “ Insh’Allah . Insh’Allah . That’s it. Fantastic, Raggy! Marvelous, isn’t it?”
    At the end of that first Arabic session Sebastian sidled up to Grey as they joined the queue for some tea. “So, erm, what do you think?” he ventured, a little self-consciously.
    At first Grey figured he wanted some feedback on his Arabic teaching, but then he realized Seb was indicating the beret perched proudly atop his head. What on earth was there that he could say? He did some quick thinking. “Mate, I dunno if you’ve noticed, but no one’s wearing their berets much around here. OPSEC, mate. Operational security . We don’t want to risk anyone getting a photo of us, and rumor has it there are a few press types around the base. If they get a pic of any of us lot in the beret, well, they’ll know SF types are off to Iraq, won’t they?”
    “Ahhh . . .” Seb looked a little crestfallen. He whipped the beret off his head and folded it into one of his pockets. “Oh, well, waz-oh. Don’t want to blow it that we’re off on a spot of foreign adventure, do we?”
    After acquiring some Arabic, the other key priority was getting the NBC (nuclear, biological, and chemical) warfare defenses sorted for the Squadron. Iraq had produced various chemical warfare agents over the years, including mustard, sarin, tabun, and even VX—one of the most deadly nerve gases known to man—and the area the Squadron would be moving through was believed to harbor an underground chemical weapons plant.
    Saddam had used chemical weapons extensively in the north of Iraq, both against both the Kurds and the Iranians, and the threat was seen as being very real. It was the avowed reason that the West was going to war. But it didn’t make NBC defense any more of a popular a topic amongst the men. Compared to Sebastian’s Arabic lessons, rehashing NBC drills was like