Beyond No Mean Soldier

The Explosive Recollections of a Former Special Forces Operator

Peter McAleese

• Publisher: Helion & Company
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781910294017
• eBook ISBN: 9781911096795
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military Biographies
• Index: History

The SAS veteran, mercenary and author of No Mean Soldier looks back on a life of combat in this revised and expanded edition of his classic memoir.
 
Peter McAleese's No Mean Soldier set the bar for the modern military memoir. This completely revised and expanded edition sees a philosophical McAleese revisiting his time with Britain's Parachute Regiment, the SAS, Rhodesia's SAS and the South African Defense Force's 44 Para Brigade. Peter also recounts a range of other adventures, from his experiences with private military companies to near fatal skydiving accidents.
 
With previously unpublished photos from McAleese's private collection, Beyond No Mean Soldier delves deeper and further into the author's wide-ranging experiences, the men he's served with, and the operations he'd conducted. Here in startling detail are the Aden insurgency; covert operations with the Rhodesian SAS; one of the first ever operational HALO inserts in British military history; assaults on SWAPO positions with 44 Para's Pathfinder Company; a botched assassination attempt in Colombia; and much more.

1

First Principles

O Thou, who Man of baser Earth didst make,

And who with Eden didst devise the Snake:

For all the Sin wherewith the Face of Man

Is blackened-Man’s forgiveness give-and take.

The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam

(translated by Edward Fitzgerald)

I could not describe the first person I killed, nor the last. There is nothing personal in that. I have never felt any personal animosity towards the enemies I have fought. It was just the way it happened, in the darkness, in the chaos, the turmoil of fighting, but the first time was important to me, as I suppose it must be for anyone.

We were in the Aden Protectorate, about four hours’ uncomfortable driving in a truck from Aden Port over a rough-graded road into the interior which was an arid desert land of harsh rocky mountains. We lived in Habilayn, a dusty camp of tents, barbed wire and sandbags which the British Army had pegged out in neat military lines in the middle of a flat plain circled by hills, where our enemy lived. Every evening as the sun went down, the gunners fired the 105s into the mouths of wadis from which they thought the enemy would emerge to attack us. A group of us waited to go out on night patrol and I felt like a soldier on the North-West Frontier, listening to the roar of the guns and watching the orange explosions far out on the darkening hillsides while the sky faded to deep blue. Stars appeared in the east and away across the guy ropes and poles of Habilayn Camp and I could faintly hear the garrison bugler sounding the Retreat.

When the guns fell silent after nightfall, we walked out, in two half-squadron groups, in single file through the barbed wire and pickets towards the dark jagged ridges to the west under a black sky hanging with thousands of stars. The ground was brutal, rocky, like a moonscape and we humped heavy rucksacks, old Para-type, with canvas sacks and A-frames. We carried our trusty SLRs (Self Loading Rifles) and wore trousers and shirts, OG (olive green) and Clarks’ desert shoes because they were light and cooler than boots.

Our enemy were Arab tribesmen, the National Liberation Front (the NLF) and their rivals the Federation for the Liberation of South Yemen (FLOSY). They were hard men with dark faces, fine looking, with long hair and dirty robes. They lived like the Saracens of centuries ago but they had 20th century weapons, from the huge Second World War arms dumps which the British Army had left behind in Egypt when we were booted out after Suez in 1956, only nine years before.

The thing I remember most about the march that night was being literally soaked with sweat. I followed Sergeant Dave Haley, our patrol commander, or rather the huge rucksack on legs in front of me which was all he seemed to be. He stopped us every hour for a break. When I sat down, I shivered as the sweat cooled on me in the night air and I worried about the amount of water I would need. I was carrying two one-gallon heavy-duty plastic water containers in my rucksack and had two more water bottles on my belt kit. With that and ammunition, seven magazines and an extra link for the gunner carrying the GPMG (General Purpose Machine Gun), and food, which was last in order of priority, our rucksacks weighed nearly 90 lbs – excluding what we carried in pouches on our belts. It was tiring work and we needed to replace all the fluid lost.

In darkness, we crossed a small range of hills about four miles from Habilayn and then the moon came up. Six miles later, somewhere after midnight, we started to climb up the side of the Jebel Barash, which was very distinct, a sharp ridge with two mounds on it like a camel’s hump. We slogged upwards, each one of us exhausted, drenched with sweat and almost mindlessly following the dark shape of the man ahead, until we finally breasted the top and moved into a saddle, on a reverse slope. We collected loose rocks lying about, of which there was no shortage, to make sangars (protective walls) and then set up our shade for the day ahead. I stretched four netted face veils sewn together across the sangar, from wall to wall, held with rocks and supported in the middle with bits of stick I always brought with me. There weren’t any trees in those mountains, not that we would have been allowed to go out and cut them. We settled down to rest, sleep and lie up for the day.

The heat was really intense, and the Jebel was bare, like the moon. You could see for miles. Any movement in the open would have been seen by the enemy tribesmen who kept lookouts sitting about on the tops of the mountains, so before first light we always ran a piece of string out between the sangars tied to a rock which could be moved to attract the attention of people in other sangars. This meant sentry duty was done sangar by sangar, in pairs so one person could not fall asleep on his own, and the sangars were mutually supporting. We used binos, with the objective lenses covered with a piece of face veil, in case the enemy saw a glint of reflected sunlight.

The year before, a nine-man patrol from 3 Troop of ‘A’ Squadron had marched into the centre of the Radfan mountains and a goatherd had stumbled across them by chance. The enemy had grouped fast, pinned them down all day and killed two and wounded another two before the patrol could make a fighting withdrawal to safety. We were 16 and we had plenty of support, A41 radios to call up the 105 mm artillery and Sarbe radios to bring in RAF ground-attack Hunter jets, and I could even see Habilayn Camp in heat haze far below us on the valley floor, but all that seemed a long way off and we kept very still in our sangars.

In the heat of the afternoon, we ate our meal – curry and rice – had a brew of tea, and then packed our rucksacks ready to go. As the sun faded, we had stand-down, a fine British military tradition. We crouched in our sangars, weapons ready, peering over the rocky hillside for about three-quarters of an hour while the sun set. This marked the transition from day routine to night routine. After dark, we took down the face veils, stowed them away and set about taking down the sangars, scattering the rocks about.

Then we started walking down the western side of the Jebel Barash into a small wadi which connected with the Wadi Mishwarrah. Halfway through the night after about four hours’ walking, Dave Haley stopped us at some muddy water and we filled our water bottles. Our Troop Sergeant, Dave was the consummate SAS soldier – short, stocky and aggressive. A steady guy and a first class role model for me. If he said, “Fill yer water bottles!” then we did it!

The water was filthy and brackish, but we were gasping. I filled my bottles without a second’s thought and added the blue and white sterilisation tablets. Suddenly I smelled a scented sweetness on the still night air and the next moment a young goatherd appeared. ‘Shep’ Shepherd was leading scout and Dave called me forward to speak to the goatherd. I had done an Arabic course in Aden three years before and was on the patrol to act as his interpreter. It wasn’t a language I found easy, but here I was, ready to translate at a moment’s notice.

“Salaam alikum,” I said softly; “Greetings to you.”

“Wa’alikum salaam!” “And to you!” he replied, shouting.

When I asked him if he had seen any other British soldiers, he shouted, “Aywa!” “Yes!” About half an hour before.

“Uskat, uskat!” “Be calm,” I said, warning him to make less noise, whilst quickly translating for Dave Haley, who was just to my left with his weapon at the ready.

The goatherd talked as if he had seen the other half-squadron which we knew was ahead of us and which sounded as if it had turned back up the Wadi Mishwarrah, while the goatherd had come into our tributary wadi behind them. We assumed everything was going according to plan, and moved on, carefully. The moon was not up yet and it was so dark in the narrow wadi I could only just see the rock walls rearing up beside us.

Five minutes later, Dave Haley whispered, “Pete, come up. There’s some more chappies down here.” I padded up to Dave to speak to them and made out the dark shapes of a group of shepherds, lying on the ground ahead. Just as I started to speak, I saw one of them shift on his side. It was probably the way he moved which warned me and I thought, “This is never right!”

Without any warning, the Arab shot Dave Haley, full in the chest. I wasn’t surprised – I think I expected something like this, but thinking now, he should have shot me as I was closest, standing to one side, ready to interpret. If the Arab had got a clear line on me, I’d have been a real goner.

Dave collapsed, badly wounded, and I instinctively shot the Arab – five times – then all hell let loose. The wadi walls came in close just there and bright red tracer streamed past, pinning me to the warm rock at the side. The enemy had Russian made DPM light machine guns with the big pan-shaped magazines on the top and the darkness echoed with shouting and screaming as they started throwing old British 36 grenades.

The others behind me ran to the flanks at once, Mick Seale shouting he was going to one side and Shep to the other, climbing the steep rocks to find a higher position where they poured fire down onto the enemy. Our medic, Jock Phillips, came up to help Dave Haley who had somehow managed to crawl to one side.

I heard a vicious explosive crack at my feet as the detonator from a grenade went off – if the thing had properly gone off then I would have been in serious trouble. I doubled back from my exposed position in the middle of the wadi and scrambled up the rocks to join the flanking movement. As I climbed, I looked up and saw Shep hit in the shoulder. He was standing on a rock firing down into the wadi beyond and cartwheeled straight off the rock like in some Wild West film.

Jock Phillips and another of the guys, Dave Abbott, now had two wounded men to deal with. Jock was well trained, with weeks of experience in a hospital emergency ward back home, but here he had none of the kit now issued to SAS patrol medics. What he really needed was plasma drips and giving sets (the needle and tube connecting an emergency plasma drip to the arm), but all he could do was pack on shell dressings to stop the bleeding (the gaping hole in the side of Dave’s chest took six), jab in two ml units of Penicillin and make them comfortable on the sand. Super calm; there was never a better medic than Jock. A squat guy from Edinburgh, prone to quoting the poet Robbie Burns, we all knew we were in good hands.

Each man carried two syrettes of Omnopon (a Morphine derivative), taped on string round his neck, but Morphine can’t be used on wounds to the head, chest or stomach, so in this instance and unfortunately for him, Dave Haley did without.

I was extremely busy, my mind was working overtime. Taking a position high up at the front once Shep was lifted down, I kept firing at the muzzle flashes of the Arabs’ weapons and throwing grenades which the others passed up to me from below. I used deadly white phosphorus grenades to light the wadi ahead and to flush the Arabs out of cover, as the phosphorus blown into the air fell back onto them behind the rocks where they were hiding. High explosive American M26s, which were devastatingly lethal, did their work on the hard open ground. A ‘mixed grill’ we used to call this – a fearful combination of white phosphorous and fragmentation grenades – and if you did get caught up in this, you’d really be ‘well done’.

The explosions lit the night and boomed deafeningly in the narrow valley and the exchange of fire went on for a couple of hours. We were never too concerned about counter-attack because we held the steep wadi flanks. After the firing died down we lay there alert all night, until dawn at about five o’clock.

Come first light, several of us advanced down the wadi ahead. The Arabs had gone, leaving the fine silver sand and yellow rocks covered with blood. Another group of the guys picked up a trail of bloodstains which they followed up the hill above the wadi till they found an Arab who had somehow crawled up the steep slope and hidden under a rock. He was very badly wounded but refused to give up. He stupidly opened fire and they shot him dead where he lay.

In the wadi bottom, I looked round the scene of the battle. In their haste, the Arabs had left behind shoes, clothes and little bags of their belongings, including money and watches which they used as currency. Needless to say, these were pounced on by the chaps. We worked out there had been about 12 of them.

Behind us, in cover back up the wadi, our patrol signaller had been busy. As soon as early morning atmospheric conditions allowed, just before dawn, he had tapped out a signal to our base calling for helicopter casevac and just as it was light we heard the beating din of a navy Wessex from the Royal Navy carrier standing off Aden Port. Someone talked the pilot down on a Sarbe ground-to-air radio but the wadi was too narrow for the helicopter’s big rotors. The pilot pulled off-to circle round while we carried Dave and Shep as carefully as we could up the steep sides of the wadi. The sweat poured off us. The Wessex tried again, but was still unable to land. Finally the pilot hovered about 50 feet up, his rotor blades terribly close to the rocks. The loadmaster winched them in and the Wessex pulled away, on course for the hospital.

While all this was going on, the other half of our patrol picketed the heights above the wadi, just like the British Army had done high above the Khyber Pass. When we prepared to move on, I found the place where I had shot the first Arab. Typically, the others had dragged him off. The Arabs hated leaving their dead and I was certain I had killed him. The rock slab which had been behind him was covered in blood and there were five holes, in a good group, chipped deep into the stone. Clearly, my 7.62mm rounds had passed straight through the Arab. I found this a little unreal and looked closer to check what I was seeing was true. Strange as it might seem, I was euphoric – ecstatic even. I had done what I’d always set out to do: ‘close with and kill the enemy’. I also discovered the debris from the grenade that had failed to go off the night before. It was an old British type 36 grenade that had landed on a hard rock. The casing had been blown apart by the detonator but for some reason the main charge did not ignite. I had been lucky – that was a close one. I had survived.

I felt good, proud almost. I felt fit, I felt hard. This was the first time I had been in a contact and killed anyone. This euphoria was nothing to do with ending another person’s life. I felt good because I had not panicked, I had not let down my friends, I had reacted as a professional soldier trained by professional soldiers, and the excitement of the firelight had been nothing short of fantastic. Despite all of the many experiences I have had in my life, I can’t believe there’s anything which can equal the thrill of battle. I loved it.

This was no surprise. I was a very aggressive young man and I had found an arena that I could sublimate this aggression.

* * *

I’ve been told that there is a balance in everyone between what we learn from our families and what we are born with. If that’s so, I think I was given more than my fair share of extremes in both cases. I’m making no excuses for myself, but you need to understand my background.

I was born on 7 September 1942 at Number 15 Kenmore Street, Shettleston, in Glasgow. My father and grandfather were miners and life in Glasgow was rough. We had moved twice by the time I was five. First to Number 290 Carntyne Road in Carntyne, where three families shared our ‘house’, and then to Number 15 Lethamhill Road, Riddrie. This was a block of brick-built Victorian tenements which belonged to Barlinnie Prison and had been built as living quarters for prison warders. In 1947, they were empty and derelict and because life was so cramped in Carntyne Road, a number of families moved in to Lethamhill Road as squatters. There was no caring Department for Work and Pensions then and the council had nowhere else for us to go. Lethamhill Road was in sight of the prison so it was not long before the prison authorities called the police to evict us. My father was away, either in the army or in prison (or both) but my mother gathered up her family, me, my elder brother Billy, Molly who was only three and her youngest, Rose, who was only just born, and the police took us all off to the prison. The...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of photographs
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Chapter 1: First Principles
• Chapter 2: Planning and Preparation
• Chapter 3: Retirement
• Chapter 4: Catharsis
• Chapter 5: Interesting Work Abroad
• Chapter 6: Trigger Time
• Chapter 7: The Death of a Country
• Chapter 8: High Standards are the Only Ones Acceptable
• Chapter 9: A State of Emergency
• Chapter 10: Guardians of the Myth
• Chapter 11: The Colombian Adventure
• Chapter 12: The Colombian Adventure: Part 2
• The Reckoning
• Appendices