An unanswered SOS from the SAS

The epic survival story of the SAS patrol known as Bravo Two Zero during the first Gulf war until now, has largely overshadowed a darker story of incompetence and worse on the part of some of those who sent eight brave men into the desert on foot, on a Scud-hunt that was doomed from the start. In 1991, soldiers of the regiment’s B Squadron had been here before. A quixotic proposal to land a raiding party on an Argentine airfield a decade earlier, during the South Atlantic war, prompted a refusal on the part of some of the key players to perform.

In cases such as these, a political imperative when things are not going well — the need to buoy up public morale, as in the ill-fated St Nazaire raid of 1942 — overrides military sense. Some military formations, such as the French Foreign Legion and the Parachute Regiment, do embrace a sacrificial tradition, whether at Dien Bien Phu or Arnhem. The SAS, however, nourishes the illusion that ‘I do not die for my country, but I do help the enemy to die for his’.

This difference explains why Kiwi Coburn’s account is a story of lost innocence. Lying shackled in a malodorous cell, his ankle mangled by a bullet, he wanted to know why the fail-safe mechanisms for rescue had all failed.

When an SAS patrol is in the shit and calls for assistance, someone comes, that is part of the ethos behind the regiment’s operations. If you are intent on sending people hundreds of kilometres behind enemy lines, you have to offer some kind of backup … Had we got it so badly wrong that we were beyond help? And if so, why?