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Somerset & Cornwall Light Infantry
"Where the F###'s Aden"
by Duncan Drake
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Whispered conversation circa 1965, winter, far away
north of the arctic circle……..
“Hey Dunc!”
“What?….”
“Where the f*ck’s Aden?”
“Somewhere near the Red Sea I think – down the southern
end on the right, it’s full of camels, Arabs, sand and spiders……why?”
“Pronto sez we’re going out there in April…………..!!”
“OH SHIT!!….but hey, at least it’ll be a bit bloody
warmer than here…….brrrrrrrrrr”
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
The passing of the years has clouded my memory of the
exact wording, but it went something like that anyway! I do remember
we were crouched, shivering fiercely in an icy slit-trench at that
particular moment and that it was cold enough to freeze the balls
off a billiard table. Alan and I were wondering whether to watch to
our front for possible exercise enemy movement, or to watch the northern
lights displaying so vividly overhead. Looking back, I’m pretty
sure the light show would have won easily.
To be honest, although I had heard of Aden and could
just about pinpoint it on a world map, I had no idea of the politics
of the region. I knew it was hot. I also knew that the locals appeared
to be a bit piqued with the British troops for some reason, and that
they had started taking the odd potshot and rolling the occasional
grenade at us to reinforce their point of view – whatever that
point of view was. I guess in those days life was like that for all
of us squaddies – “Ours is not to reason why……and
etc,” (carefully omitting the ‘do or die’ bit!)
and I never thought for even a moment to look up or inquire about
the history of the place, or even find out what we were trying to
achieve. We all just knew it was a bit hairy out there, and that we
had to go. Our ambition was to simply to survive for the six month
tour without disgracing oneself, one’s comrades, or the regiment.
We had a few weeks to prepare ourselves and our kit,
but it wasn’t a full tactical move thank goodness. Our own vehicles
and stuff was stored in the barracks in Gravesend, and we travelled
only with our personal equipment and belongings. We moved in buses
to RAF Lyneham, and boarded the aircraft in “chalks”.
Some were lucky and had a direct journey by the bright and gleaming
spanking new new VC10s, but others like me were herded into dowdy
and slow ancient Bristol Britannias for a 16 hour flight, with stops
in Istanbul and Bahrain. We arrived at Radfan Camp eventually at just
after mid-day, the temperature was 98 degrees, it was humid, sandy,
smelly and every fly in the place was right there to welcome us –
made a good job of it too. They never left us alone for the whole
six months.
I was a private soldier in the Signals Platoon, and
for my past sins had been given the job of C.O.’s driver/operator
for the duration of our tour of duty in the protectorate. The CO at
the time was Lt/Col. I. G. Mathews. He was a very ‘hands on’
type commander and took a constant upfront attitude, out with the
patrols and checkpoints at all hours of the day or night and he was
jolly good company too, judging by the number of people he winked
at every day! I thought it odd in the beginning that not too many
winked back!
Our temporary “home”, Radfan Camp never
really ‘grew’ on us. It started off as ‘the absolute
pits’, and I’m sure we all agreed it went steeply downhill
after that until we willingly left it all to the 3rd Royal Anglian
Regiment six months later. Mostly it was an arrangement of large tents
with a sandbag sangar around each one, and a long perimeter defensive
trench around the whole camp. Every tent had a large fan in the roof
which didn’t so much cool the place as constantly raise and
circulate vast quantities of red dust. We might as well have been
on Mars. The daily weapon cleaning and accommodation inspections were
almost impossible to complete without every surface being smothered
in this magnetic grit. We were constantly getting some bollocking
or other from the NCOs. These fans also had voices of their own, and
for six months they royally entertained us with a concert of squeaks,
pings, buzzes and thumps that would make a jazz band proud!
There were a few ‘real’ buildings. The cookhouse
and NAAFI weren’t too bad, and the fact that they had no doors
and patterned ventilation holes in the walls was a positive boon to
our own friendly flies and larger insects, giving them unrestricted
access to our food. The camp cinema had no roof and I was sure we’d
fallen victim to one of those legendary arab thievings, but they assured
me that that the lack of roof was deliberate!!
It was as hot as hell all day and all night. As I remember, almost
the only airconditioned building was the Royal Signals radio technician’s
hut next to our signals stores. It was the ‘cool’ place
to be, in both the old and the more modern language. On any given
day you would find at least 20 people looking for an excuse to take
a radio in for repair, even if they had to break it themselves especially
for the occasion. They always seemed quite willing to wait there in
the cool until it was repaired too, even if the techs had to send
back to blighty for spare parts! Dick Draper, our signals platoon
storeman at the time was the only SCLI member to return to the UK
without the slightest sign of a suntan! Oh, I forgot, of course the
nearby battalion headquarters was beautifully cool, comfortable and
relatively dust-free, but we kept away from there as much as possible.
The duties consisted of two main activities. Manning
the various road checkpoints in and out of the area that we controlled,
and providing vehicle and foot patrols around the whole of the Al
Mansoura and Sheikh Othman districts. Trust us to have the “Dodge
City” of the middle east, the legendary “grenade corner”
right there on our patch!! I lost count of the number of ‘incidents’
that took place there – but mostly we took the corner so fast
in our open Land Rovers that the terrorists were hard pressed to unpin
a grenade and throw it before all that was left of the patrol was
a cloud of swirling dust, the whiff of a hot engine and some tyre
smoke! Our very own ‘keeni-meeni’ group, more properly
known as Recce Platoon or “Bogan’s Heroes”, were
prone to hanging around this corner in their civvies, lying doggo
up on a roof or perhaps lurking in a dark alley in order to catch
some amateur arab grenadier in the act. I’m not sure exactly
how many of these bad guys we actually caught, but I know it worked
well for a while.
Around that time I well remember being out and about in the CO’s
landrover, when we spotted a couple of very drunk British soldiers,
in full uniform arguing, swearing and swaying down the road right
in the middle of Sheikh Othman. God knows what they were doing there
right about midnight slap bang in the middle of the hairiest area
of Aden. Being very concerned for their safety we stopped and persuaded
them that perhaps this wasn’t a very good place to be and offered
them a lift to a safer area. They refused at first, but after I threatened
to give them a severe slap or two, they got into the back of the landrover
albeit with great reluctance, continuing to shout and swear like troopers
and generally giving us a hard time. As soon as we got out of the
brightly lit area and into the countryside they very suddenly became
stone cold sober, grew at least a foot taller and wider and became
serious in the extreme. They thanked us very much for the kind thought,
jumped out of the vehicle and told us they were from A Squadron, SAS,
and were there trying to tempt the local arabs into ‘having
a go’ at them. Apparently there were a few more of ‘the
boys’ hidden nearby and ready to take out any terrorists that
might have been tempted to play. And I was ready to give them a slap
or two…..yeah, right, good job they had a sense of humour. They
were last seen running menacingly back towards grenade corner –
for all we know they might still be there.
Days were long and hot, and the nights even longer and
hotter. We were able to get away occasionally down to Little Aden,
stronghold of 45 Marine Commando, where there was a spectacular beach
and club. To this day I’m not sure if I got there only as a
perk of being the CO’s driver/operator, or whether the club
was available to others in the battalion, but it sure was a rare but
relaxing way to spend an afternoon. We got lots of news from the UK
and the rest of the world via two radio stations, the ever-present
BFBS, and a smaller unit, the Aden Forces Broadcasting Association
(AFBA). I remember that Cpl. Ian Woodman from our own legendary signals
platoon was DJ of a programme featuring Latin American music and was
actually very good at it. I got to drive him to his studio on most
Sundays instead of going on church parade and helped him select his
music from the station record library. I’d have done almost
anything to get away from the constant round of patrols, patrols and
more patrols.
During the tour the 1966 world cup took place. At the time I wasn’t
a soccer fan at all because coming from the Bristol area meant that
there never was a team worth supporting anywhere nearby. However,
on the very evening of the final between England and West Germany
I just happened to be scanning around frequencies on the world-wide
C11 HF radio in the back of the Land Rover when I happened across
the ‘live’ broadcast on the world service of the BBC.
It was scratchy and full of atmospherics, but it seemed
to be the only live coverage that anyone could find. I dared to rebroadcast
just a little bit of the commentary from the world service across
onto the battalion VHF command net just as a joke, and immediately
had a flood of calls asking for more from every patrol, checkpoint
and operator on the net!! So I just flicked a few switches and left
the second half broadcasting away, quite illegally, including the
now famous extra time. All this from my parked vehicle safe within
the confines of the Mansoura Prison compound. I guess it was well
appreciated because I never officially heard any complaints, but please
don’t tell Roger Wigram (the RSO) that it was me – he’s
probably still kept the charge sheet ready to use to this day! If
that’s the case, may I mention that I couldn’t have done
it without the assistance of my ol’ mate Vic Vaughan keeping
an eye out for me, I’d hate to have to face the music alone.
Most of the COs patrol activity took place after dark
and consisted of visiting checkpoints and chatting with the guys on
duty. Occasionally we were nearby when an ‘incident’ took
place against a mobile patrol and actually I got to do some real soldiering
on the follow-up activities. This sometimes got quite exciting, culminating
one night after a hand grenade had been rolled out of a doorway and
timed so that it would explode between the two vehicles of a mobile
patrol from ‘B’ Company. The grenadier timed it to perfection,
apparently there was a splendid flash and bang, but luckily none of
the schrapnel hit anyone or anything important. The guys dismounted
from the vehicles and took up all round defence as per Bn SOPs and
called for assistance. We, in the CO’s landrover, arrived within
seconds and drove in to park next to one of the patrol trucks. Col.
Mathews, 9mm Luger in hand and glory in his mind winked wildly, vaulted
into the action leaving me to man the radios and send a sitrep to
the ops room. Halfway through the radio message I heard the by now
familiar “ting…pop……..thump” of another
grenade landing, and very close to me!! In desperately diving round
to the other side of the vehicle I forgot just how short the cable
on a radio headset is, and ended up flat on my back, staring at the
stars, deaf as the proverbial post and being strangled by that same
cable. The exploding grenade simultaneously punctured our drinking
water tank and three of the four Land Rover tyres.
I found myself being covered simultaneously by a lot
of water plus the thick dust being blown around by the rapidly deflating
wheels. The result was, of course, that my head was covered in sandy
mud and nicely camouflaged in the darkness. I forget who got to me
first (and I wouldn’t tell you anyway!!) because he let out
the most heart stopping of screams before shouting that there was
a headless body down by the COs Landrover and to send for an ambulance
bloody quick. It took a fair bit of time and reassurance to calm him
down, even after I had washed off the dust and explained what had
happened, but meanwhile both the grenadiers had escaped into the night
in the confusion. Can’t win them all.
There are so many stories that come out of this time
spent in Aden, and for most of us it was the first time we had been
in any sort of hostile action. Not all of it was pleasant, we lost
two popular guys, Corporal Roy Collings and young Private Oakley,
but under the circumstances I think we can count ourselves fortunate
not to have lost more. I can remember that morale always seemed high
and people did their various patrols and duties as cheerfully as possible
considering that we were mostly young and very far from home. I can’t
say that I have fond memories of the place, but I do have plenty of
them to savour in my old age. I did manage to climb Mount Shamsan
late one afternoon, and a local legend says that if you reach the
very summit and look all around the view, it is assured that you will
never return to Aden. I’d have climbed it ten times a day on
that promise alone.
Postscript……..
Five years ago, after another blighty holiday I was
due to fly back to Australia on Royal Brunei Airlines from Heathrow.
Due to unexpected traffic on the M4 and my own incompetence I missed
my flight by a good hour. I was rescheduled by the airline to fly
the next day albeit by a different route, and discovered it was the
airline’s sort of ‘milk-run’ stopping just about
everywhere before finally getting to Bandar Seri Begawan a day later.
One of the stops was Aden – so much for climbing Shamsan all
those years ago – what a waste of effort! I had an enforced
4 hour stopover there, and filled the time by leaving the airport
complex and taking a taxi ride around the place. It looked, felt and
smelled just the same to me as it had done 33 years previously. In
fact it looked like exactly the same old yellow cab that I had seen
outside the airport the night I left in October 1966. The driver spoke
English but he didn’t seem to remember me at all. He did remember
the British being there, and stated that after we had left times got
much harder for them and they had no love at all for our mostly Russian
replacements. How very sad, I thought with a satisfied smile……….!
Copyright Text and Images: Duncan Drake.
Webmasters note (Keith)
My grateful thanks to Duncan for this article, Duncan
has supported this site from the outset and wrote much of the original
pages text, he was in the SCLI after I was demobbed but we are in
touch regularly by Email and hope to meet on one of his return trips
to UK.
