A Mug's Game
By Cliff Sweeting
1st Battalion
Prince of Wales's Own Regiment
of Yorkshire (1 PWO)
Towards the end of my first Aden posting from 1965 to 1966, I was sick and tired of the boredom and the office politics that went with my job as a clerk in the Orderly Room. One of the quirks of following my father into the Regiment, was that I inherited his friends...but, alas, his enemies as well. One of these was my boss, the Orderly Room Quartermaster Sergeant, or Chief Clerk. Staff-Sergeant Len Wilkinson made it crystal-clear to me that I was not welcome on his team. By the time the battalion returned to Colchester at the end of the year, I had served as Company clerk in Delta Company (where Private Les Lloyd had had enough of paper-shuffling and wanted to get back with the lads); then I'd asked D Coy CSM, WOII Mick Dillon, for assignment to a rifle platoon. Which was why I was in 9 Platoon when the battalion was reorganised as an airportable unit, with Delta Coy renamed as Alpha. 9 Pl became 3 Pl, and we were still in that organisational format when called out in 1967 to assist the Argylls in retaking Crater.
In August, Alpha Coy moved in for a week's guard duty at Al Mansoura prison, on the outskirts of Sheikh Othman township. A change being as good as a rest, we welcomed the switch of scene. It did not, however, bring any easing in the tempo of duties. The prison was the (temporary) home of the heavyweight political figures who would no doubt don the mantle of power on their release. We had no personal contact with the inmates, whose welfare was very carefully monitored by the Military Provost Staff Corps, within the inner compound. The guard company were accommodated in the outer compound, where we daily cursed the Moslem plumbing. The prison itself was all but impregnable: fifty-foot high, five-foot thick stone walls surmounted by searchlight towers equipped with 7.62mm GPMGs. Each of these towers was manned around the clock - by one man for the twelve hours of daylight, and by two men overnight.
We rotated between the 24-hour guard (followed by 24 hours off) and the 12-hour night increment (12 hours off.) After breakfast, there would be a rush for the truck running a shuttle service to the Dolphin Club at Elephant Bay, set within the secure cantonment of HQ Middle East Command. Here, we could relax with a swim in the crystal-clear waters of the Gulf of Aden, sip luxuriously at a tall, ice-cool Tom Collins, stretch out on the pristine white sand, and.....sleeep! Nobody could warn us sun-starved young Brits about the combined effects of fatigue, sun and alcohol. The start of the next night increment guard would be a harsh lesson, as coarse denim trousers and khaki flannel shirts abraded fresh sunburn on legs, backs and shoulders. Cries of agony would ring around the prison as the sufferers slowly climbed their fifty feet of metal ladder, laden with SLR, three full magazines, Verey pistol and flares, and a fresh radio battery for the A40 short-range set. Nobody dared report sick - "Rendering himself unfit for duty" was a chargeable offence, and sunburn fell well within that category.
The third part of the duty rotation was the nightly "finger patrols" - a sweep of the outer perimeter at last light. Their aim was to prevent any enemy attempt to take advantage of the sensitive settling-in period for the night guards. The day guards, feeling the effects of their 12-hour lone vigil, were as vulnerable as the newly-arrived night increment. The patrols would leave the prison in an armoured "pig" - basically a standard Bedford RL 3-tonner encased in half-inch armour plating - and sweep around the perimeter of the prison. Mortar baseplates, buried in the sand of the wadis north of the compound, were the main target of this operation. Finding a baseplate was usually enough to cancel that night's planned activity by the opposition. Then the patrol would return to the starting-point and conduct overlapping sweeps of the area of the township fronting the prison. I had already taken part in one of these patrols (led by Lt Tony Phelan and the newly-arrived 2Lt Chris Adams), during which we'd been forced to seek cover in a wadi when the local mortar team zeroed-in on us. On leaving and returning to the prison, the clang of AK 47 rounds on the outside of the pig had told us that the local hotshots were watching us. I'd decided there and then that it was a mug's game, and I'd much rather be battling boredom up in the towers (where I at least had a Jimpy and 200 rounds), than making a target of myself on the mean streets of Sheikh Othman. I had no trouble changing places with others - the finger patrols lasted no more than two hours, and their members then stood down for the rest of the night.
And so there I was one night, admiring the sunset from my lofty perch, the eerie warbling of the local muezzin calling the faithful to prayer from the mosque across the road. (Wonder where they stash their AK's when they go in to pray?) The pig came around to the front, having completed the nightly sweeps. The huge, armour-plated outer gate clanged shut as the pig and its occupants were admitted to safety. Weapons were cleared - the familiar sounds of the "mag off - cock, lock & look" drill echoing up from the road space just outside the guardroom. The inner gate opened; the pig made its way into the outer courtyard. The troops debussed, then wandered off to the modest canteen on the left side of the main entrance. We were watching all this, taking an interest in seeing our mates get back safely from a hazardous finger patrol...
Which was why we didn't see the battered blue sedan which cruised in from the direction of Little Aden. Mere minutes after the finger patrol had returned, a tongue of flame jetted from the right rear window of the vehicle, as a yellow-green streak of fuel trailled the rocket on its way to the gate of the prison. The bane of our existence in Aden - apart from the often fairly inept grenade-throwers - was the Belgian-manufactured 83mm Brant Blindicide rocket launcher. We were watching one in action right under our noses. From the outer gate came a huge "Ker-langg!!" as the HEAT (High Explosive Anti-Tank) rocket slammed into it. Three inches of hardened steel finished up with a hole in it nearly four inches wide, narrowing down to a "keyhole" of about 3/4 of an inch. Luckily, the blast dissipated after the projectile penetrated the gate. The idea of such a warhead is to burn through the outer skin of a tank and cause the maximum damage in a fairly confined area. The quite spacious assembly area in front of the guardroom ensured that the HE jet blast was merely shocking, rather than lethal. Nobody was standing behind the gate at the time - although the watchers in the guardroom did not hear too well for the next day or so.
As for myself, I thought: I was standing inside that bloody gate just ten minutes ago! I volunteered for the next night's finger patrols. Skulking in a tower for 12 hours? A mug's game.
Cliff Sweeting
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