Free Michael Asher by The Real Bravo Two Zero

in was this family's backyard. Given Bedouin powers of observa�tion and the very proximity of the place, there had really been no more chance of the SAS escaping unseen than if a band of Iraqis had landed on a British council estate. Was McNab right, then, to blame the Head Shed for the compromise because they were dropped in inhabited country, in the middle of more than 3,500 Iraqi troops?. According to McNab's own text, the patrol alone picked the place on the MSR where they would insert their LUP. They also decided to be flown in by Chinook rather than driving or going on foot, and selected the dropping-off place themselves. To choose a point twenty kilometres from the site of the LUP when you are carrying 95 kilos of gear looks like unsound strategy, but McNab explains this by saying that he didn't want the heli to be compromised by locals. At the same time, he says that the house `shouldn't have been there', and that they had been dropped in an area as crowded as Piccadilly Circus: it is difficult to see how he could have been afraid of being compromised by locals he didn't know were there, especially when he adds that the object was to reach the LUP as quickly as possible." According to the blurb of McNab's book, supported by his sketch-map, the patrol lugged their equipment � Bergens, belt-kit, jerrycans of water and two full sandbags apiece �twenty kilometres, in the dark over unknown, hostile country, in only nine hours. Anyone who has tried to carry 95, or even 80 kilos any distance, even in daylight, will recognize this as no mean feat of endurance. To make things doubly difficult, half of the team had to be protecting the others as they moved, so every few hun�dred metres they had to dump what they had shifted and go back for more � which would presumably have taken twice the time. If it is true that the SAS men patrolled twenty kilometres across flat desert to reach their objec�tive carrying such burdens, as the blurb, of Bravo Two Zero states, then it is rightly celebrated. The question is, did it really happen in the first place? I asked Abbas how he thought the enemy patrol had arrived in the area. 'They came by helicopter,' he told me confidently. 'In fact, we heard it come in, at about eight o'clock on 22 January. I remember the time because I sent someone to the nearest military base to report it. I knew it was a twin-engined helicopter by the sound, but of course at the time I wasn't sure whether it was one of theirs or one of ours. It landed not more than two kilo�metres from the house � I know that for certain because we found the tracks later. It was very muddy then and the tracks were clear � big wheels, you couldn't mistake it. In fact the tracks stayed there for weeks until the rain washed them away, and everybody here saw them.' I asked what the military had done when his messenger had reported the aircraft. `They didn't investigate it,' he said, `because they thought it was one of ours. It was only later we connected it with the foreign commandos and realized it must have brought them in.' He showed me a flat-bottomed wadi where he had found the Chinook's tracks, and I later measured it with the Magellan as about two kilometres south of the LUP. If Abbas was telling the truth, it meant the feat made so much of in the blurb of McNab's book was incorrect. Moreover, if the patrol had really reached their objective at 0445 hours on 23 January, as McNab said, it had taken them just under nine hours to ferry their kit two kilometres � a feat of a far more mundane, but also more reasonable order. I tried carrying four twenty-litre jerrycans � a total weight of 80 kilos � a distance of one kilometre, and with pauses for rest it took an agonizing hour. Of course, the SAS patrol were much younger and fitter than me, but even if they managed to do it in half the time, it would still have taken ten hours to cover twenty kilometres, assuming each man was carrying his own kit. But we know