Free Michael Asher by The Real Bravo Two Zero Page B

par�ties � British and Arab � one above, one below, both knowing the other was there, but not yet certain they were hostile. For the SAS, I guessed, the strain must have been almost unbearable. Although some of the men in Bravo Two Zero, like Vince Phillips, were veterans, this was their first operation in a 'real war'. Several of the team � perhaps most � had been involved in operations in Northern Ireland, but those were security operations rather than genuine combat. This was the Big One they had all been waiting for. They might have fought terrorists, but none of the team � not even McNab � had been involved in a real firefight against superior numbers of troops, and they were asking them�selves, perhaps, how they and their comrades would react. `This was what we were there for,' Peter Ratcliffe wrote, 'what all the years of training were about. However useful we had proved ourselves in dealing with terrorists, only in a war could we ever put our training to full use and only in a war would we get the chance to prove conclusively that we were worth our pay.' 14 They were selected SAS soldiers � the finest Special Forces men in the world � but as Ratcliffe has pointed out, 'Selection doesn't tell you everything you need to know about a man. Only what he does in battle will ever show you what he's really like.15 They were a tiny unit inn hostile environment, without transport and without communica�tions. The infiltration with so much equipment must have been incredibly tense, and on top of the revelation that the ground was too hard to dig an OP had come the real�ization that the radio wouldn't work, and finally, that there were anti-aircraft guns almost on top of the LUP. As they moved out that afternoon, watching the Arabs for the first move in a drama that must inevitably come, the tension among the patrol members must have been like a taut bowstring waiting for release. I saw that the wadi was flattening out into a basin five or six hundred metres wide, rimmed by stony shale out�crops on both sides. The basin was grassy, with a few stunted thorn bushes, and to the west the desert stretched away in galleries of serrated humpbacks as far as the eye could see. Abbas led me over to the eastern side of the basin, nearest to his house, which was still in full view. The place where he claimed to have found the Chinook tracks lay less than a kilometre to the south. 'This is where we were when they came out of the wadi,' he said. `We waited for them to come one by one. There were eight of them and I remember the last but one � the sev�enth � actually waved at us.' I was intensely interested in this point because I remembered that Ryan wrote that he had waved at the Arabs, though he also said that he had been first in the file, not seventh. Hayil, Abbas's brother, confirmed that it was the seventh man who had waved, but neither could remember if the man had used his left or right hand. This was significant also, because Ryan said that by waving with his left hand he inadvertently revealed to the watch-ing Arabs that the patrol were Christians. An Arab, he writes, will never wave with his left hand, which is con-sidered unclean. While it is true that Bedouin use their left hands to clean themselves after defecating, a left-hand wave has no particular significance, and evidently it meant nothing to Abbas and Hayil. Nevertheless, the detail was important, for if these Bedouin had somehow been got at and briefed by the Iraqi government, why would they be so insistent that it was the seventh man who waved, when Ryan is adamant in his book that he was in the lead? Since no spin could be put in the waver's position, wouldn't they have left this insig�nificant detail intact in order to convince me of their veracity? The question was, who was right: these Bedouin or Ryan? Turning to McNab's book, I thought I might have the solution. McNab writes clearly that Ryan was placed in the lead only after the