The Network - Jason Elliot [35]
‘No, not on the balcony,’ he says in a thoughtful tone. ‘Anyway, the blokes on the balcony were only there for the TV cameras.’
Good answer. I ask how long he’s been in the Regiment.
‘I’m a twenty-fourer.’ He chuckles. ‘Boy soldier.’ He’s served in every major theatre where the SAS has deployed. Aden, Borneo, Oman, Northern Ireland, the Falklands, Iraq, Bosnia and, between training some other military units in far-off places and what he calls ‘extra-curricular stuff’, a dozen other countries.
‘I’m surprised you haven’t thought of a literary career,’ I say. ‘Wasn’t it your CO who started the trend?’
He shrugs cynically. ‘DLB was a good soldier. Anyway, it’s his memoirs they’ll be reading in ten years, not the other bloke’s.’
He’s loyal too, I’m thinking to myself, to his former Regimental commanding officer, Peter de la Billiere. By the sound of it he doesn’t care much for the celebrity authors the Regiment has also produced over the past few years. Then I remember what Seethrough told me the day before.
‘What’s a Mirbat vet?’ I ask.
‘I am, for starters,’ he says.
‘Then what’s a Mirbat?’
‘Mirbat? That’s the name of the town. On the Omani coast. Operation Storm.’ His eyes light up. ‘The Regiment’s golden hour. Have you got an atlas?’
A vet, it now dawns on me, is obviously a veteran, but I’ve been thinking a Mirbat is some kind of animal, not the site of a battle. Feeling very ignorant, I fetch the atlas from the sitting room, where I’ve left it. We push our cups aside and a few moments later our fingers are trailing southwards across the Arabian peninsula. I’ve forgotten how strategically placed Oman is, with its north-eastern tip pointing into Iran across the narrowest stretch of the Persian Gulf. H’s finger comes to rest on the coastline not far east of the border with Yemen.
‘We were down south, here, in Salalah. And there,’ he says, pointing to a long mountainous shadow running east to west, ‘was where the Adoo were, up on the Jebel.’
‘What were you doing there?’
‘We weren’t. Officially. Too secret at the time. No one back home knew we were out there. But look.’ He points to the map again. ‘Everything coming in and out of the Gulf has to run through the Straits of Hormuz. Imagine if we’d lost it.’ He smiles and then does a comic caricature of an officer. ‘We couldn’t very well let them have our oil, could we?’ Then as if he regrets making light of the subject, adds, ‘That wasn’t the point at the time. We were British. We knew we’d win.’
He flattens out the sheet gently with his hand, and we lean over it to peer at the names. From the coastal plain around Salalah, several dark lines cut into the looming escarpment that H calls the Jebel, which means mountain in Arabic. The lines split and waver like veins as they travel north. They’re the giant wadis that lead into the hinterland of the enemy, he explains, verdant in the monsoon season and blisteringly barren in the summer.
‘That’s Wadi Arzat,’ he says. He smiles. ‘God, I remember hiking all the way up there with a jimpy.’ Jimpy is army slang for GPMG, the unpleasantly heavy general purpose machine gun. He takes a key ring from his pocket and uses the tip of a key to follow the coastline to the east, until it comes to rest on a town at the foot of the great Jebel.
‘There,’ he says, ‘that’s Mirbat. That’s where I got my first souvenir.’
There isn’t much written about Mirbat or Operation Storm, so I’m pleased to be hearing about it from someone who was actually there, and I fill in the gaps later. Mirbat itself was the most dramatic engagement in a six-year-long campaign spanning the final days of British control in the Gulf. In 1970 the British protectorate of Aden had fallen to a Marxist-oriented government. On its eastern border lay Oman, governed by an ageing and autocratic sultan with the help of a small army run by British officers. When intelligence reports began to suggest that communist-trained guerrillas from Yemen, as well as others from revolutionary Iraq, were infiltrating the country, there was a reappraisal