Braver Men Walk Away Read online

  I gazed down at him and tried to think of something diplomatic to say. ‘Amal, there’s only one word for it: unforgettable.’

  I started up the engine and the Land Rover pitched and swayed off along the track. I glimpsed Amal in the mirror before the dust cloud obscured him. He was waving and smiling again.

  Libya, in 1956, was still classed by the World Bank as one of the world’s poorest countries. The fourth largest country in Africa, it had been successively invaded by Egyptians, Greeks, Arabs and Turks. From 1912 to 1943 it had been held by Italy. Over ninety-five per cent of the land was desert or semi-desert, the two main populated areas extending inland from the Mediterranean coast. To the north-west lay Tripolitania, to the north-east, on the other side of the wide, sweeping Gulf of Sirte, Cyrenaica; both were under British military administration from 1943 until 1951, when Libya became an independent monarchy under King Idris.

  I was sent to 624 Ordnance Depot, Benghazi, Cyrenaica, after the British withdrawal from the Canal Zone. The RAOC stores depot was housed in D’Aosta Barracks, originally built for the Italian army of occupation. There were two out-stations, a vehicle depot and an ammunition depot, this last a couple of miles from Benghazi. It held training stocks of munitions for the forces stationed in Cyrenaica together with reserve holdings for the much larger force that would be based here in the event of war.

  In the early days of my tour of duty Libya seemed pro-British. As time went by, however, the rise of Arab nationalism, the emergence of Colonel Nasser and the effects of the Suez crisis changed things; when I left in 1958, terrorist bombings and riots were commonplace.

  As before, my workload was heavy, particularly with clearance and disposal activity: Libya was littered with munitions left behind after the great battles of the Second World War, and tragedy struck at the most unlikely moments. During a visit to Tobruk the Queen of Libya and her entourage stopped to watch some Arab children playing a game similar to rounders. But when one of the boys finally hit the ball there was an explosion which killed him and seriously injured another child: the ball had actually been an Italian ‘Red Devil’ hand grenade. Horrified, the Queen asked King Idris to request British army help in clearing dangerous munitions from the Tobruk area, and thus I frequently found myself making the 220-mile journey east along the Alexandria road, past the groves and gardens of former Italian villas whose terraces looked out upon the deep blue of the Mediterranean.

  Each week brought something new. Once I was called out by a member of the public in Tobruk, an unusual occurrence given that much of the Arab population continued to show a marked indifference to the threat posed by stray munitions. I couldn’t work out if it was ignorance or fatalism or a combination of both; whatever the reason, the results were frequently lethal and sometimes downright bizarre.

  Two incidents in particular demonstrated the scale of the problem. In the first, the Benghazi police had asked for assistance in the investigation of an explosion which had ripped through the Souk and left three dead and over a dozen injured. I couldn’t at first identify the cause of the explosion from the physical evidence at the scene. Then I found an eye witness who told me that the blast occurred because an Arab welder, fed up with having his acetylene gas bottles stolen, had decided to weld his name-plate on to them.

  The second incident was but the latest in a whole series: yet again we had discovered an Arab home with walls constructed with unfired shell. Normally the occupants refused to believe the shell was dangerous; they listened to us with great courtesy but ignored everything we had to say. On this last occasion, however, courtesy was notably absent – a reflection of the hostility increasingly permeating Libyan society, much of it stoked up by Egyptians who filled teaching positions at all levels of education. I was told that my presence at the house had less to do with matters of safety than with a plan by the filthy British to dispossess as many Arabs as possible.

  On my way to Tobruk, I wondered what kind of reception I’d get this time. Following standard practice, I reported to the British army base in Tobruk and then set off for the incident location, expecting to find at least one or two of the local police on duty at the scene. Instead, a small crowd of Arabs was waiting by the ruins of what had once been a large villa, a merchant’s home on the edge of Tobruk.

  A series of holes had been cut into the floor. It wasn’t necessary to look into them to divine their purpose: a nauseating stench signalled only too clearly that the locals were using this place as a public lavatory. One of the Arabs, a sort of official representative of the group, came forward. ‘It’s in there,’ he said. ‘In the big hole.’

  He stepped between two of the smaller holes and beckoned me to follow. When we were at the biggest cavity of the lot he produced a torch and switched it on. The beam played on walls caked with faeces and veined with the tracks of dried urine, then shone downwards to a dark and semi-viscous mass alive with the black and bloated shapes of hundreds of crawling flies. The mass filled in the spaces between the walls of the hole and the cylindrical flanks of just about the biggest shell I’d ever seen.

  ‘We thought the British army should be informed,’ said the guide.

  I didn’t respond; with breath still held I continued to stare into the hole. Half hidden by the stinking filth, the shell had to be at least 15 inches in diameter. No weapon of this huge calibre had been used by land troops in the North African campaign so it must have come from a battleship on the Med. How it came to rest in the basement of the villa only God, or Allah, knew. I straightened up and stepped back, as though surveying the scene, aware of my companion’s mocking scrutiny.

  ‘You British know what to do. Or so they tell us.’ His eyes gleamed with malice. ‘You can deal with it … ?’

  In situations like this you can either waste time trying to think of clever witticisms or you can get on with the work. I stepped past the Arab and went back to the Land Rover. Within a few minutes I’d made up a 5-pound satchel-charge and attached it to one end of a reel of detonating cord. I picked up the charge and the cord, grabbed a wooden pole, and returned to the villa.

  The Arab continued to watch, his smile broadening in anticipation. I told him to get himself and his countrymen at least 400 yards away. The smile slowly faded and gave way to an expression of transparent uncertainty. He hesitated a moment longer, then walked over to the onlookers and began herding them to safety. At first they seemed reluctant to move, probably because there was still some last lingering hope that the filthy British soldier would get even filthier.

  I secured the satchel to the end of the pole, then carefully pushed it down the hole, reeling out the detonating cord behind it. By jiggling the pole around I was able to drape the satchel-charge over the shoulders of the shell. I then knelt down, secured a detonator to the cord and a length of safety fuze, and lit the fuze. I knew I had about a minute to take cover.

  Moving up-wind across a barren expanse of sun-baked mud which had once been the garden, I continued to distance myself from the villa’s foundations. I stopped at the top of a slight rise and looked down on the unkempt landscape with its semi-derelict houses, burnt-out cars and patchwork of debris-strewn earth. Beyond, the roof lines of Tobruk shimmered in the sun, white domes and slender towers etched against the sea and the sky.

  The shell exploded with a thunderous roar from all sides as the remains of the villa vanished in an eruption of smoke and dirt. Semi-vaporized by the detonation, hurled aloft by the blast, the contents of the holes became an ever-widening miasma, an enormous yellowish-brown stain that smeared itself across the sky. It hung in place for a few moments and then, caught by the breeze, moved slowly and remorselessly until, like some fine and delicate curtain, it began to come down on Tobruk.

  My Arab friends emerged from cover and regrouped at the freshly sanitized scene. There seemed to be a lot of gesticulating and shouting but I was too far away to hear. It didn’t matter anyway because they’d got nothing to complain about. The war had knocked the shit out of
Tobruk. Now, thanks to the British army, it had all been put back.

  And so the work continued: inspection of munitions, clearance and disposal activity, and investigation of accidents. Each week brought something new and something different, not least of them the case of the army vet who was shot by a horse.

  Despite every effort to save it, the horse had reached the end of its days. The veterinarian assembled the humane killer, loaded the chamber, placed the plate against the appropriate part of the animal’s skull, and hit the firing mechanism with the mallet. Unfortunately, the horse chose that moment to move its head. Mistargeted, the bullet glanced off at an oblique angle, ricocheted off a nearby ironwork column and wounded the vet in the thigh. The injury was relatively minor; I was glad the vet was OK and half-hoped the horse had survived, too, but the poor old thing was so stunned that the second attempt with the humane killer went as planned.

  My accident investigation report made for curious reading. But it was as nought compared to the charge sheet in the Shebani affair.

  Shebani was one of the civilian workers at the ammunition depot, a cheerful, elderly and bald Arab who spent most of his time tending the depot vegetable garden.

  In his youth, Shebani had been digging a well when, several metres down, he found his progress blocked by a large rock. He called up for a pick and his brother obliged by dropping it on to his head. Shebani survived but still bore the scar, a circular indentation about half an inch across and half an inch deep.

  On the morning I encountered him in the vegetable garden, he was clearly upset and close to tears. He didn’t want to talk, still less explain why the top of his head had a patch of dried mud on it. Eventually the story came out: he’d been explaining his scar to some of our ammunition storemen and one of them had found it so funny that he’d taken a sunflower seed, placed it in the indentation, and covered it with mud. Shebani had been threatened with a beating if he tried to stop the seed from growing.

  I’d nothing against practical jokes but when the victim was a defenceless old man then the humour ceased to be funny. I tracked down the storeman, a soldier called McPherson, and charged him.

  The hearing took place in the office of the Major commanding the Ordnance Depot. The accused was duly marched in by the Company Sergeant Major and I read out the charge.

  Trying not to look at McPherson, the Major, his adjutant or the CSM, I heard myself saying that the accused was charged with conduct prejudicial to the order and maintenance of military discipline in that he did on the day in question take a sunflower seed and insert it into the cranial indentation of a civilian employee, namely –

  ‘Pardon?’ The Major stared blankly at me.

  ‘That, er, contrary to section five, subsection three of the regulations appertaining to –’

  ‘The accused inserted a … sunflower seed?’ The Major seemed to be having difficulty following all this. ‘In a what indentation?’

  ‘Cranial, sir.’

  ‘A chap’s head?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  The Major looked at his adjutant then back to me again. ‘You mean we’re employing a civilian with a hole in his head?’

  ‘It’s a sort of scar, sir. Caused by a pickaxe.’

  The Major’s eyes widened still more. ‘McPherson hit him with a pickaxe?’

  ‘No, sir. It was the man’s brother.’

  ‘Why? Were they having a fight?’

  ‘It was an accident, sir. Some years ago.’

  The Major exhaled noisily. ‘That’s a relief anyway.’ He paused, shook his head in the manner of one wrestling with an ever mounting sense of disbelief. ‘Well. Carry on.’

  ‘The accused made threats of bodily harm if the sunflower seed was removed before the germination process had been concluded and–’

  The Major had pulled from his pocket a handkerchief that now almost covered his face. Loud choking and gurgling noises issued from behind the handkerchief. Eventually he removed it and, with tears streaming down his face, ordered the CSM to remove McPherson from the room. As soon as the door closed, both he and the adjutant doubled up with laughter.

  The hearing resumed some time later. Despite the earlier hilarity, the Major understood the potential seriousness of McPherson’s actions, considering his threats of violence at such a politically sensitive time. McPherson was therefore reprimanded and confined to barracks for several weeks. It was a good way of discouraging him from any further attempts at gardening.

  In the mean time terrorist attacks were increasing and, if the injury wasn’t too bad, the insult certainly was: the majority of the explosives and ancillaries used seemed to have come from 9 BAD, now seized by the Egyptians. The bombs were simple things, usually consisting of a one pound block of Tetryl/TNT set off by a detonator fired by a Switch Delay Number 9.

  That they didn’t cause too much damage to our installations was due in part to the terrorists’ frequent mismanagement. An attack on a fuel tank farm resulted in the holing of two structures but nothing else because the terrorists had targeted tanks containing diesel, which is very difficult to ignite. Three attempts to blow up the ammunition depot also failed. On each occasion a bomb was thrown over the perimeter fence from a passing car: the first tangled in the wire mesh, the second completely missed the storage site and the third hit a tree and fell harmlessly to earth because the bomber forgot to light the fuze.

  An attack on the British Forces Broadcasting Compound also went badly awry. The compound was protected by guard dogs chained by individual ten-foot slip chains secured to a series of steel bars set just above ground level, an arrangement which allowed them to guard a predetermined area of the frontage. The bomber fed them some doped meat, then retreated to wait for the drug to take effect.

  In his absence, however, a handler checked the zone and found that his dogs were semi-comatose. Anxious for their health, he took them away and chained up their replacements. The bomber returned and the wide-awake dogs duly dealt with not only him but also his bomb, as I found when I came to deal with it a short time later.

  To provide a respite from official duties and the goings-on around us, the Ordnance Depot decided to stage an athletics meeting. Challenges were issued to the RAF base at El Adam and the Infantry Regiment at Beda. In the spirit of good Public Relations, the Libyan army was also invited to enter a team. To our surprise they accepted.

  The field was neither Olympic nor sylvan, but it was level and had enough parched grass to make track events feasible. As the day neared, the event began to take on a carnival aspect; it was, after all, summertime and a rapidly widening assortment of organizers and volunteers seemed determined to make this the biggest thing that had happened in Libya for quite a while. The event committee included representatives from all the British units as well as the splendid ladies of the Women’s Royal Voluntary Service, (WRVS).

  The committee lacked for nothing in the way of ambition or imagination: a substantial £150 prize fund was created for the competitors, special free beer vouchers were ordered from the Printing & Stationery Unit, and a variety of side shows, stalls and specialty events were devised by the WRVS. A redoubtable matriarch called Mrs Ethne Powers took responsibility for the Donkey Derby, the highlight of what was intended to be a memorable and fun-filled day.

  Bearing in mind the need to involve the Libyans as much as possible, it was proposed that they be given the job of buying the prizes. In 1958 £150 was probably worth what £1,500 is today; with that kind of money to play with, and their contacts with local shop-keepers, the Libyans, we thought, would be able to come up with some pretty remarkable prizes.

  The great day dawned. I won the 100 yards, the 220 yards and the javelin, and was formally presented with a four-inch-high wooden camel, a small empty leather purse, and a bag of boiled sweets.

  I thought about tracking down Captain Ellison to tell him about the prizes but by this time other things were beginning to crop up. Someone had fed the donkeys with an aphrodisiac – reputed to
be freshly baked yeast bread – with the result that they were not so much in the mood for a derby as an orgy. Eeeh-awing all over the place, they had erections which dragged in the dust. Being of good English middle-class stock, the WRVS ladies were unfazed by the sight of rampant donkeys.

  Walking back from the track, I chanced upon Mrs Powers as she whacked a donkey’s penis with a stick.

  In an effort to help I said: ‘Excuse me, but I don’t think that’s going to do any good.’

  Mrs Powers glared at me with a haughtiness which suggested that dealing with one prick was bad enough without another turning up to offer advice.

  ‘I suppose,’ she said, ‘you speak from experience?’

  I left her with her stick and grinning donkey for what was supposed to be the relative calm of the NAAFI, where I could exchange my voucher for a free pint of beer. But the NAAFI was in uproar: half of Libya seemed to be trying to get to the bar. The free beer vouchers had been intended solely for the use of event participants and helpers, but someone had taken advantage of the Printing & Stationery Unit’s lax security to re-run the printing plate on one of the machines. As a result, thousands of the vouchers were now in circulation. That the NAAFI wasn’t yet dry was due only to the fact that the beer had to cross the bar in glasses; with so many full glasses in so many hands the flow was temporarily staunched. Later that night it did run out, thanks partly to the efforts of enterprising soldiers who turned a bath in one of the barracks blocks into a storage tank and worked in relays to fill it, glass by glass.

  Before I left Libya I saw some important new arrivals: survey crews from international oil companies in search of black gold. Ordinarily, civilian operations of this kind would not have involved me. But as the crews were encountering serious problems with uncleared desert battlefields and uncharted minefields, one of the companies sought my assistance. With the Commanding Officer’s permission, I took local leave and spent three weeks with Oasis Exploration, a company set up by a multi-national outfit for the purpose of identifying Libyan oil reserves.