NONE OF
US were particularly enamoured with what little we saw
of Saudi social life. We had expected a male oriented
society for sure, but I don’t think we were ready for
the true extent of it. The women were very much in the
background, and we seldom spoke to any. Funnily enough,
when we bumped into them without any Saudi men around,
in the lift at the Marriott for example, they were very
quick to open the conversation, but as soon as a Saudi
male entered they were silent.
I used to watch the men socialising at night in the
hotel, a ritual which seemed to consist entirely of
drinking coffee with the male members of their families,
and my immediate thought was how sterile their social
lives were. This, of course, was an entirely
ethnocentric judgement. I just couldn’t understand how
they enjoyed themselves, that’s all. A social life
without alcohol is easy and no barrier to fun, but the
absence of female company is another thing altogether.
Rumour had it that the women’s custom of dressing in
black from head to foot and wearing a veil gave them
complete anonymity and allowed them to partake in all
sorts of indiscretions, but I doubt it very much. I felt
sorry for the women and, correspondingly, a degree of
antipathy towards the Saudi male. As for the country as
a whole, it felt to me as if a society of mainly simple
peasant people had suddenly been granted riches beyond
their wildest dreams in the space of a generation and
was struggling to come to terms with it, which is of
course more or less exactly what had happened.
Our morale got a fillip with the announcement that the
Saudi government was going to give us all a medal, so
all 43,000 British service (wo)men were going to have
something to hang on our chests afterwards. We all hoped
that the British government would also authorise a
campaign medal, and wondered whether the Kuwaiti
government would follow the Saudi lead too (They did,
but we weren’t allowed to wear them. Spoilsports ). I
think we had visions of returning with chestfuls of
medals clanking as we marched in the victory parade down
the Mall. In fact, the award of campaign medals became
one of the more emotive issues in the war, right up
there with the payment of allowances, the issue of
desert combat uniform, and the previously provision of
hire cars.
All of us thought we were entitled to them having been
in theatre and been fired at by the baddies, but we
became quite irritated when we learned that, for
example, those working at JHQ back in the UK considered
themselves worthy recipients too. Where did one draw the
line? In the end it was all sorted out amicably, but
there were all sorts of anomalies. A celebrated, and
possibly apocryphal, example was that those attending a
polo course in Cyprus, which technically was within SCUD
range, were to receive the Gulf medal despite having
absolutely nothing to do with the campaign. I was
pleased to hear that some COs had banned those who had
“won” their medals in this way from ever wearing them.
A couple of nights later the Americans dropped two
15,000 airburst bombs on the Iraqis, and we watched
video footage of them being launched from the open cargo
bays of Hercules transport aircraft. For the first time
I heard doubts expressed on the morality of our actions.
It seemed to be an awful lot of death and destruction to
visit on people who were essentially defenceless against
air attack by this stage, and some of us didn’t like it
very much. We hoped the US wasn’t just using the war as
a convenient testing ground for its weapons systems. It
was interesting to see that, even in a war which most of
us felt was justified (although we were generally
cynical as to the real reason we were there), a strong
sense of “fair play” remained. This feeling was to
emerge again later in the war when the Iraqis were
caught from the air on the Kuwait to Basra highway, the
infamous “Highway of Death”.
Around this time I met Mark Urban, now the BBC Newsnight
anchor, in Riyadh. He had served with 4RTR back in the
early 1980s and I knew him quite well, so we had lunch
together at the Marriott. By this time I was fully au
fait with the Coalition ground attack plan, which was of
course secret, but naturally Mark sounded me out on what
I thought would happen. I couldn’t say anything, but by
starting from first principles he already had an
extremely accurate view of how the ground attack might
enfold. For a start, he knew that 1 (UK) Division was
not where we said it was but much further west. He had
also assessed the terrain from which he correctly
guessed would lend itself perfectly to the Division
executing an armoured left hook into northern Kuwait,
thereby cutting off and isolating the bulk of the Iraqi
troops there. In fact he got most of it right, and in
retrospect I’m surprised the enemy didn’t second guess
it too. After our short meeting Mark went up country and
I didn’t see him again during the campaign.
On 10 February the Foreign Secretary, Douglas Hurd, came
round the HQ on a visit (pictured). I shook his hand and
remember thinking how ill he looked. He was terribly
nice, and I attempted to brief him using the large scale
map on the current situation but without much success.
It wasn’t helped when he said something along the lines
of “So this is where the Division is” and pointed at a
spot on the map about 500 kilometres off its actual
location. To be fair, I reckon he had more than enough
on his plate at that point and the precise location of
our chaps was the least of his worries. But at least he
came round to say hello and broke up the general tedium
at the time.
We did, however, now know the date of G Day, the day the
Coalition ground offensive was due to start. John
Cantwell, an Aussie on attachment to Div HQ and who
claimed to have been specially “licenced to die” by the
Australian Government so he could take part in the war,
came down to Riyadh from the Division. He was looking
for any information we could give him on Iraqi
dispositions in the path of the Division’s projected
advance. Despite the Coalition’s array of sophisticated
surveillance and target acquisition systems and its
ability to fly at will across Iraq, the troops in the
front line had very little information on the enemy at
the tactical level, it seemed.
The intelligence system was simply swamped by the vast
amount of information being gathered from all sources
and very little properly sifted intelligence filtered
down to those at the sharp end. In particular, 1 (UK)
Div wanted photographs of the Iraqi positions they would
have to attack and I think we at HQBFME were able to get
some for them. The Americans didn’t seem to be capable
of getting this sort of low-level information, although
their strategic and operational stuff was remarkably
good. Cantwell told us his task in the forthcoming
operation and my reaction was that he was a goner and we
wouldn’t see him again on this Earth. Thankfully I was
wrong. He made the most of his short stay in the
Marriott with us and enjoyed his first bath for a month,
following it up with several more one after the other.
On St Valentine’s Day the news was dominated by the
deaths of approximately 500 Iraqi civilians in a bunker
in Baghdad, hit and destroyed by two bombs from an F117
Stealth Fighter. The US authorities were adamant that it
was a communications centre and therefore a legitimate
target, but it was a terrible event and in HQBFME we
felt awful about it. For all the trumpeting there had
been about the new generation of precision weapons and
concomitant reduction in collateral damage, innocent
civilians had still been killed and injured. We hadn’t
made much progress over the past 50 years.
There was also the suspicion that the RAF might have
killed some Iraqi civilians on the same day during a
bombing raid on bridges over the Tigris, and the media
picked up this one too. Later we saw video footage taken
by the attacking aircraft which confirmed our worst
fears; at least a couple of bombs had failed to be
guided to the intended target and had hit the village
beyond it. How very sad.
But the ground offensive was not far off. I’ll deal with
the opening gambits next episode.
To come in Part 26; the ground war starts. |