side and that wind blows it back in, over us, you’ll have to lick us clean with your furry tongue. So do it over the rear, lad.’
His cheeks deathly white and still bulging, the trooper nodded and threw himself to the back of the vehicle, hanging over the tailgate and vomiting unrestrainedly into the cloud of dust being churned up by the wheels. He was soon followed by his fellow trooper, Taff Thomas, who picked the exact same spot to empty his tortured stomach, while the more experienced men covered their faces with scarves and either practised deep, even breathing or amused themselves with some traditional bullshit.
‘Don’t worry about it,’ Ken said to Taff as the latter wiped his mucky lips clean with a handkerchief and tried to control his heavy breathing. ‘You’ll feel better after you’ve had a good nosh at Thumier. Great grub they do there. Raw liver, tripe, runny eggs, oysters, octopus, snails that look like snot, green pea soup…’
Taff groaned and went to throw up again over the back of the bouncing, rattling Bedford, into boiling, choking clouds of sand.
‘Bet you’ve never eaten a snail in your life,’ Larry said, more loudly than was strictly necessary. ‘That’s nosh for refined folk.’
‘Refined?’ Ken replied, glancing sideways as Taff continued heaving over the tailgate. ‘What’s so refined about pulling a piece of snot out of a shell and letting it slither down your throat? That’s puke-making – not refined.’
‘Ah, God!’ Ben groaned, then covered his mouth with his soiled handkerchief as he shuddered visibly.
‘Throw up in that,’ Jimbo warned him, ‘and I’ll make you wipe your face with it. Go and join your friend there.’
Shuddering even more violently, Ben dived for the tailgate, hanging over it beside his heaving friend.
‘A little vomit goes a long way,’ Ken said. ‘Across half of this bloody desert, in fact. I never knew those two had it in ’em. It just goes to show.’
Men in the other Bedfords were suffering in the same way, but the column continued across the desert to where the lower slopes of the mountains, covered in lava, with a mixture of limestone and sand, made for an even rougher, slower ride. Here there were no trees, so no protection from the sun, and when the lorries slowed to practically a crawl – which they had to do repeatedly to navigate the rocky terrain – they filled up immediately with swarms of buzzing flies and whining, biting mosquitoes.
‘Shit!’ Les complained, swiping frantically at the frantic insects. ‘I’m being eaten alive here!’
‘Malaria’s next on the list,’ Ken added. ‘That bloody Paludrine’s useless.’
‘Why the hell doesn’t this driver go faster?’ Larry asked as he too swatted uselessly at the attacking insects. ‘At this rate, we might as well get out and walk.’
‘It’s the mountains,’ Ben explained, feeling better for having emptied his stomach and seemingly oblivious to the insects. ‘This road’s running across their lower slopes, which are rocky and full of holes.’
‘How observant!’ Ken exclaimed.
‘A bright lad!’ Les added.
‘Real officer material,’ Larry chimed in. ‘These bleedin’ insects only go for red blood, so his must be blue.’
‘I’m never bothered by insects,’ Ben confirmed. ‘It’s odd, but it’s true.’
‘How’s your stomach?’ Ken asked the trooper.
‘Feeling sick again?’ queried Les.
‘I can still smell his vomit from an hour ago,’ Larry said, ‘and it’s probably what attracted these bloody insects. They’re after his puke.’
Ben and Taff dived simultaneously for the rear of the lorry and started heaving yet again while the others, feeling superior once more, kept swatting at and cursing the insects. This went on until the Bedford bounced down off the slopes and headed across another relatively flat plain of limestone, sandstone and lava fields. They had now been on the Dhala road for two hours, but it seemed longer than that.
Mercifully, after another hour of hellish heat and dust, with the sun even higher in a silvery-white sky, they arrived at the SAS forward base at Thumier, located near the Habilayn airstrip, sixty miles from Aden and just thirty miles from the hostile Yemeni border.
‘We could have been flown here!’ Ben complained.
‘That would have been too easy,’ Ken explained. ‘For us, nothing’s made easy.’
In reality the camp was little more than an uninviting collection of tents pitched in a sandy area surrounded by high, rocky ridges where half a dozen SAS observation posts, hidden from view and swept constantly by dust, recced the landscape for enemy troop movements. There were no guards at the camp entrance because there were no gates; nor was there a perimeter fence. However, the base was surrounded by sandbagged gun emplacements raised an equal distance apart in a loose circular shape and nicknamed ‘hedgehogs’ because they were bristling with 25-pounder guns, 3-inch mortars, and Browning 0.5-inch heavy machine-guns. Though the landscape precluded the use of aeroplanes, a flattened area of desert near one of the hedgehogs was being used as a helicopter landing pad, on which were now parked the camp’s helicopters, including a Sikorski S-55 Whirlwind and a British-built Wessex S-58 Mark 1. The Bedfords of A Squadron were lined up near the helicopters. A line of men, mostly from that squadron, all with tin plates and eating utensils, was inching into the largest tent of all – the mess tent – for their evening meal. A modified 4×4 Willys jeep, with armoured perspex screens and a Browning 0.5-inch heavy machine-gun mounted on the front, was parked outside the second largest tent, which was being used as a combined HQ and briefing room. Other medium-sized tents were being used as the quartermaster’s store, armoury, NAAFI and surgery. A row of smaller tents located near portable showers and boxed-in, roofless chemical latrines were the make-do ‘bashas’, or sleeping quarters. Beyond those tents lay the desert.
‘Home, sweet fucking home,’ Les said in disgust as he clambered out of the Bedford to stand beside his mate Ken and the still shaky troopers, Ben and Taff, in the unrelenting sunlight. ‘Welcome to Purgatory!’
Ken turned to Ben and Taff, both of whom were white as ghosts and wiping sweat from their faces. ‘Feel better, do you?’ he asked.
‘Yes, Corporal,’ they both lied.
‘The vomiting’s always followed by diarrhoea,’ Ken helpfully informed them. ‘You’ll be shitting for days.’
‘It rushes out before you can stop it,’ Les added. ‘As thin as pea soup. It’s in your pants before you even know you’ve done it. A right fucking mess, it makes.’
‘Christ!’ Ben exclaimed.
‘God Almighty!’ Taff groaned.
‘Keep your religious sentiments to yourselves,’ Jimbo admonished them, materializing out of the shimmering heat haze to study them keenly. ‘Are you two OK?’
‘Yes, Sarge,’ they both answered.
‘You look a bit shaky.’
‘I’m all right, Sarge,’ Ben said.
‘So am I,’ Taff insisted.
‘They don’t have any insides left,’ Ken explained. ‘But apart from that, they’re perfectly normal.’
Jimbo was too distracted to take in the corporal’s little joke. ‘Good,’ he said. ‘So pick up your kit, hump it over to those tents, find yourselves a basha, have a smoko and brew-up, then meet me at the quartermaster’s store in thirty minutes precisely. Get to it.’
When Jimbo had marched away, the weary men humped their 60-pound bergens onto their backs, picked up their personal weapons – either 5.56mm M16 assault rifles, 7.62mm L1A1 SLRs or 7.62mm L42A1 bolt-action sniper rifles – and marched across the dusty clearing to