Royal Armoured Corps News

Smugglers and scorpions in the desert war Prince Harry missed

18th August 2007

The King's Royal Hussars' desert war in Iraq. A battlegroup from the King’s Royal Hussars had to learn new tactics quickly as it scoured the sands for criminals

From the Times Online

At 4.30 am the desert is still enveloped in darkness when the sentry speaks. “Oi, lads,” he addresses the curled forms on canvas cots. “Time for the offski.”

Across the desolate plain, from small encampments here and there, dark shapes stumble into life, yawning into mugs of instant white tea and cursing the tepid sachet of corned beef hash that will be breakfast — yet again. Then the metal legs are whipped from the camp beds, the canvases rolled up and the mosquito nets collapsed and piled in the back of dustcovered Land Rovers. Empty water bottles are piled up with wrappers emptied of the reviled hash and set ablaze, destroying any evidence that they were ever here at all.

By the time The King’s Royal Hussars move off, a brisk half-hour later, the only sign of their home for three nights is a thin tendril of smoke.

This was the war that Prince Harry never fought. It was to the sands of Maysan that he was bound before the military leadership intervened.

“You can’t quite imagine him here, can you?” one soldier jokes, “doing his dumps in the desert.” Others express sympathy that he could not deploy; but also relief.

“I did think about the fact we’d get attacked more if he came,” Craftswoman Tracey Henry admits. “But it’s a shame for him he can’t do his job.”

Theirs is a low-tech existence more reminiscent of Lawrence of Arabia than the “shock-and-awe” bombardments that began this war. For a year British forces have been criss-crossing the sun-scorched deserts of Maysan like nomads, never stopping for more than a few nights for fear of detection, never following a man-made road for fear of booby traps.

Their quarry is the smugglers sneaking lethal weapons materials across the border from Iran. In temperatures nudging 60C (140F), they have suffered an average of one heat casualty a day, nearly lost a colleague to multiple scorpion bites and learnt many valuable lessons in desert survival, such as how to forge a water bottle cooler from a wet hiking sock.

Now, almost a year after this historical experiment in desert warfare began, it is about to come to an end; whether in triumph or frustration, a point apparently unresolved.

While Iran remains the No 1 suspect behind the deadly explosive devices that have taken so many British lives in Iraq, the troops who roam the desert in search of smugglers have failed to turn up anything more than a few bundles of AK47s. “It’s disappointing,” sighs Major Andrew Harman, the second-incommand of The King’s Royal Hussars 250-strong battlegroup. “We are quite convinced the stuff is coming through but we haven’t found it. It has to be coming through somewhere else.”

It was in August last year that the Maysan battlegroup took to the desert under the command of Lieutenant-Colonel David Labouchere, a maverick commander who had tired of the mortar attacks raining down on their Abu Naji base, where the group spent more time and energy supplying itself than getting out and doing its job. Colonel Labouchere turned to the history books for inspiration, and found it in the Long Range Desert Group, the “pirates of the high desert” who helped to drive the Axis powers from North Africa with tiny, highly mobile raids and patrols. Out went the Challenger tanks and in came unarmoured Land Rovers and Scimitar reconnaissance vehicles. Out, too, went the base, abandoned to looters. And into the desert went The Queen’s Royal Hussars and their travelling caravan.

The King’s Royal Hussars arrived in May. Yet despite two weeks’ acclimatisation and training in Kuwait, little could have prepared them for the harshness of conditions in Maysan, where hardened soldiers have been known to go down with severe heat exhaustion within hours.

“Welcome to Maysan!” barks a voice through the blowing sand as we step off the helicopter into the heat and dust of their latest encampment, somewhere in the north of the province. “Oh, and would you mind awfully switching off your mobile phone?

We’ve got the world’s second-best telecommunication trackers just about 20km away.” (This means the Iranians just across the border.) “They can use them to track us down and blow us up, which we don’t really want.” Bottles of water are handed swiftly around and food is thrust into our hands. Unless we drink ten bottles of water a day we are likely to keel over.

Calories are vital too, and the best way to get enough inside you is to gulp down a milkshake, each of which contains 400. “If you drink them too fast you get really hyper,” says Craftswoman Henry, an army mechanic from Glasgow. “But you get used to just shovelling the food in.”

It is the middle of the day and all work, except for those off on patrol, has stopped because of the heat.

Soldiers sit gulping water on canvas beds encircled by four or five vehicles with camouflage netting thrown over the top. From a mile or so away, they are barely visible, melding into the desert brown.

That is the way they want it. Nothing is put up here that cannot be taken down and packed away in half an hour. By remaining on the move, they can evade enemy attack and keep would-be smugglers on their toes.

Today they are approaching their third night in one place, so the threat of attack is high. Unlike their base in Basra, there is no missile warning system here: the first that they know of a mortar or rocket attack is when it whistles right into camp. But in camp the soldiers do not wear body armour; the risk of heat exhaustion is greater than that of hostile action.

Soldiers spend stints of up to three weeks here, without fresh food, showers, lavatories or respite from the heat.

As dusk falls, the temperature plummets. We are lucky; the breeze will permit us some sleep tonight. The Royal Air Force, alas, will not. In the middle of the night a helicopter arrives and circles overhead several times before landing, flinging sand all over the sleeping soldiers to a chorus of profanities. The Hussars may rely on the RAF for support — their food and water has to be airdropped daily — but the age-old rivalry between the Forces lives on. Once they received an air drop only to find that it contained packet upon packet of microwave popcorn. “It was their idea of an amusing joke,” says Sergeant Josh Ormond.

Dawn has barely broken when the caravan starts off again, nearly a hundred vehicles stretched out for miles. We have been bumping along for no more than 20 minutes when the convoy halts. A lorry, the largest and heaviest vehicle in the convoy, has become stuck in a patch of marsh.

“Well, if they’d listened to me . . . ” grumbles Sergeant Ormond, who had reconnoitred another route a day earlier, only to be overruled. More than half an hour passes as recovery mechanics try to winch the lorry out. If they cannot it will be blown up.

That was the fate of a Hercules transport aircraft that hit a mine when it landed on a desert runway in February. No one was hurt but Major Harman and others in the reconnaissance team on board were forced to spend the night in the desert on guard while others fetched explosives to blow the craft up rather than let the technology fall into enemy hands.

Eventually the lorry is freed and the convoy rumbles on. Our new home, when we arrive, is an almost identical patch of desert somewhere else in Maysan. In the distance there are dunes, which means we have come north. Within 20 minutes, the camouflage netting is up, the camp beds are out and the trenches dug.

Many of the soldiers have a love-hate relationship with their surroundings. “After ten days I’m always desperate to leave and get a shower,” Lance Corporal Lucy Morrow says. “But after four days on base sleeping in the air-con, I’m desperate to come back.” The failure to intercept Iranian bombs has frustrated many. Major Harman says that he believes the materials are coming in, but probably through legal border crossings that were handed to Iraqi control — with the help of bribes.

“Yeah, I’m p***** off,” one soldier tells me. “I’ve lost friends down in Basra and we want to get these guys.” But word has come through that their time is up. The battlegroup is to move back to the main base at Basra; its roaming days are over. A border support mission will continue from Basra.

“The only thing that will change is where they sleep,” Michael Shearer, the British spokesman, says. Perhaps. But the return to Basra will bring to an end the romance for these modern-day Desert Rats. No more sleeping under a million stars, or microwave popcorn from the sky.

Sergeant Ormond trudges back from the command tent and plonks himself down with a washing bowl. He was to have left in only a few days; now he has been told he will be here till the end. “Ruined my laundry schedule,” he grumbles. “Had it all perfectly worked out.”

But as he bends over the bowl, there is no disguising the smile breaking across his dusty face.

Related Links

• Action This Day

• Harry’s war

• Prince Harry will deploy to Iraq

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