The Network - Jason Elliot [37]
Tak and Kealey, now firing point blank into the enemy, were on the point of being overrun when two Strikemaster jets from Salalah, braving the low cloud and storms of bullets from the Adoo guns, raked the enemy positions with machine-gun fire. On a second run a perfectly placed 500-pound bomb decimated the Adoo lines. The rescue helicopter now flew in and the dead and wounded and the body of Labalaba were gathered up. Tak refused all help and walked to the helicopter unaided.
The war dragged on for several more years until the guerrillas were finally pushed back to the border of Yemen, but they were never able to mount such a large-scale operation again. Back in England nothing was heard of this astonishing victory against the odds.
I ask H what his souvenir was. His hands move to the cuff of his shirt, and for a moment it looks as though he’s going to show me an Omani bracelet or a tattoo. But he pulls up the sleeve to his elbow and turns his forearm towards me. There’s a pale oval scar the size of an olive, matched by a slightly larger one on the other side. The bullet, he explains, passed between the bones of his forearm and lodged in the butt of his rifle, but was prevented from entering his chest by the metal base plate.
‘Bet that hurt,’ I say.
‘Didn’t feel a thing till afterwards. Bit messy though.’
‘Where were you?’
‘In the BATT house. Drove up from Taqa two days before, but the jeep behind me hit a mine so we had to overnight in Mirbat. I was supposed to fly out the next day with the injured driver, but the cloud was too low. Hell of a day to get stuck.’ He rolls down his sleeve and sighs. ‘Regiment’s gone downhill since then.’
It’s midday. H throws a restless look around the kitchen and asks if there’s a pub nearby. ‘We can have a walk and a blather,’ he suggests, ‘and make bit of a plan.’ I need the walk and agree. We take our coats, cut across the fields from the house, and walk the mile and a half to the Crown, soaking ourselves up to the knees in the wet grass. At the pub we sit by a smoky fireplace and talk over our beers, learning details of each other’s lives with a friendly complicity to which I’m unaccustomed but which I’m enjoying more than I expect.
H asks about Afghanistan. A few of his Regiment friends paid visits to the country in the 1980s, he says, training Afghan mujaheddin to use the Stinger missile. They even brought a few Afghans to Scotland to train them in guerrilla tactics and advanced communications. From a drab building behind Victoria station one or two others helped to dream up exotic operations to hinder the Soviets. But he doesn’t know much else about the place, he confesses.
I try to convey the fondness, despite all the privations and difficulties of conflict, that I feel for the place and its people. I’ve come to respect the Afghans for their bravery and hardiness, and I’m relieved when H says he felt the same mixture of sympathy and respect for the tribesmen he trained and fought alongside in Oman. From my wallet I pull a photograph taken on my very first trip to Afghanistan, and H points to the bearded Afghan posing next to me with an AK-47 assault rifle held proudly across his chest.
‘Looks like a fellow in my troop,’ he says, grinning.
He asks about politics too. I say the present conflict there can be traced back to the Soviet occupation of the country throughout the 1980s. The Soviets had hoped to establish a loyal communist regime in Afghanistan, calculating that the poorest people in all Asia would be quickly subdued. Things went badly from the start. There was widespread armed resistance to the Soviet presence, and their total failure to win popular support from the rural population was equalled