West of the Nile.

The wind bending trees and flattening the grass, brings startling images. Pitches me not into memory, but fact. Bad dreams. Adrenaline rushes. I keep telling myself it is not happening. The churning rotor blades of helicopters blowing dust and sand. People shouting. Always innards. Men turned inside out, and charred bodies, and the smell of rancid meat. The unimaginable smell of the dead as we push them into body bags, and nowhere to hide. And in my cell on gale force nights I would sit up and scream, the sweating fear and loneliness bombarding me, and through the dust storm Casper Wainwright screaming “Hey Davy! Davy over here! Davy help me…!

The plane circled Benghazi. Green palm trees sheltered brown camels. White, flat roofed, buildings were scattered around Benina airfield, and in the long, cast shadows, it was possible to see the yellow and white flowers of acacia trees.

Our area of operation was to be the Kufra Oasis approximately four hundred miles west of the Nile, and a thousand miles south of our present position. I cared little for the political implications of what I was doing. My motives, like all of us there, were our own affair and concerned nobody but those who had selected us to undertake the task. We were in effect disposable, and in the event of our death nothing would come of it. There would be no funerals, no flowers, and no wreaths. We would disappear into the desert and never be found, like the armies of Islam that had been blown away, long before us…

Navigation in the main was by maps drawn up by David Sterling’s Long Range Desert Group. These had been compiled during the Second World War and were in many ways extremely helpful in locating waterholes and distant oasis; also they gave marked minefields, many of which had remained intact after the ending of hostilities. The desert tribes, particularly the Tebu, Senussi and the Bedouin, knew of many waterholes but these were often jealously guarded from outsiders and more precious than gold.

We left Benghazi the following morning, slipping out along the coastal road heading towards Derna. Firstly, we would climb up into the hills of the Jebel el Akhdar, a green and fertile stretch of land several hundred feet above sea level to the east. Our instructions were to turn in a southeasterly direction into the desert proper when we had got beyond the small town, and rendezvous with our tactical group at the Siwa oasis, approximately three hundred miles away, in seven days time. There were further hazards, in the sense that there were no motorable tracks, and few among us, excepting the Arabs, had any true understanding of the challenge.

At El Adem we took on extra water and more ammunition, along with metal sand tracks, which we hung on the side of our land rovers. We pressed on into the desert, using sextant readings from the sun, and compass bearings from distant hills to keep us on course towards the town of Jaghbub 120 miles away.

We camped the first night thirty miles south of the main coastal road. We had made good progress across the rough terrain of the desert suburb; this consisted of clumps of trees and a little grass along the wadi banks, the bed of which is boulders and sharp granite rocks that splintered under the wheels, cutting into the walls of the tyres.

The country is savage. Keep your guard up. Let your senses loose…smell, listen, and look. Open your mind. The tools of survival are underground…water sleeping within a buried plant. The coolness of caves prevents dehydration. Make hollows in the earth at the end of each day and line it with Polythene. The condensation will wet your lips and moisten a parched throat, and beware of mirages, they give false hope.

We are alone with the Universe. By day the fierce sun blazes down with almost intolerable radiance, and by night the great deep heaven, with its countless stars, brings a cold, breathless hush.

In the winter months the wadis fill quite suddenly with swirling yellow water that carry torn-up trees down from the hills, the remains of which dry out in the summer, and leave their skeletons along the banks to crumble, like all skeletons. Wherever there is water, there is a beautiful mellow greenness. Date trees, balm-shrubs, and trees of frankincense that are rich with perfume.

The nights are very cold, and few of us sleep. Most mornings, at about five, I step out of the small tent and help to light a fire. Sunrise is usually a couple of hours off. We pass around hot glasses of tea made by the Arabs. It is strong and sweet, boiled in small metal teapots on brushwood fires, adding green leaves and sugar almost continuously until it thickens like syrup. I would always try to eat at that time of day. Usually hard tack biscuits with water and dates, and a lump of cold, greasy, Spam, cut from a tin. Then more tea. Then after ablutions, we were ready to move off.

The hills are crumbling and barren, shapeless and desolate. Rock mountains are inaccessible, and for hundreds of miles, grim deserts lap their feet.

The empty, silent, wide horizon of sand gives unfettered isolation. A beautiful romantic vastness into which nomadic tribes are poured. The winds blow long and hard over the Jebel every night. Tribes have roamed this vastness for thousands of years, tending their herds, moving their camps like nomads, long before nation states and borders hemmed them in.

It was a breathless wind, with the furnace taste sometimes known in Libya when the Gibley came, and, as the day went on and the sun rose in the sky it grew stronger, more filled with the dust of the Sahara , the great sand desert to the south.

By noon it blew a half a gale, so dry that our shrivelled lips cracked open, and the skin of our face chapped; while our eyelids, gone granular, seemed to creep back and bare our shrinking eyes. The Arabs drew their head-cloths tightly across their noses, and pulled the brow folds forward like visors with only a loose flapping slit of vision.

We were hit by a sandstorm that came out of the clear morning, virtually from nowhere. Because of radio silence, Mufta, who was in the leading rover about a mile ahead, was signalling frantically, jumping up and down like a madman. At first we thought it was a enemy militia who occasionally slipped over the border, but then in the distance we saw a swirling wall of orange, and the breeze that had been trying to keep us cool, very suddenly strengthened.

Abraheim, the leading scout, pointed towards the floor of the changing desert. There, thousands of black and green scorpions were swirling along in some strange dance, being blown drunkenly before an advancing force.

It seemed as if there was some huge monster under the surface trying to break out. Sand, and small boulders rose upwards, and began to batter the sides of the vehicles. We rushed out and secured metal grilles over the windscreens and battened down the canvas covers. Instinctively we slowed down, putting the vehicles into four-wheel drive. We were going to stop, but the Arabs told us we had to keep moving, otherwise the sand would build up around us, and simply lock us in. You could be locked in forever.

For the five hours the storm lasted, tons of dust and rock battered our senses. We drove on slowly with no vision, totally petrified by this display of nature. It was not until early evening that it blew itself out by which point we were lost…

Then night fell. Dune by dune the Libyan Desert unfolded itself beneath the moon, and a sky as pure as water bathed the stars and brought them out. Under our soundless footsteps the sand had the richness of a thick carpet and shooting stars fell down the heavens.

I lay alone. On the stony ridge the wind was terrible. I shivered, my uniform flapping in the night breeze. As dawn approached stars hung, bare and shelterless, colder than ever. The magnified cratered moon, hung above the horizon, faint, and far off in the black night.

I remembered they brought him in full of morphine and his legs were gone. He was a young guy barely eighteen and he kept saying ‘am I all right? Are my legs okay?’
The Chaplain did not know what to say.
‘Father am I all right?’
‘You’ll have to talk about it with the doctors son.”
‘Father are my legs okay?’
‘Yes’ the priest was saying, ‘ everything is fine…’
Later that morning he died, never really knowing...

The afternoon passed. The light became dim, but the heat steadily increased with an oppression and sultriness that took us by surprise. There had been long rolls of thunder all morning in the hills. I could see in the distance two prominent peaks that for some reason appeared to be wrapped in swirling folds of blue and yellow vapour.

When we got near, the wind, which had been breathing it’s hot breathlessness upon us all morning, suddenly changed and became violent and cold, and damp, and blotted out the sun, sending thick rags of yellow dust over us…it was a horrible light that seemed to contain red blood cells and body parts that swirled around us in devastating eddies of brains and stinging grains of skin…

I woke with a start and listened to the heavy rain falling outside my cell window...