RCL impact at the Officers' Mess

I can recall standing by the then undamaged chair talking before going off to the FST to operate on a jebali, Hamid Salim, who had been injured at White City. Anaesthesia was induced at 21:10hrs and his very extensive wounds were debrided including a very rapid completion of a leg amputation when the word came through that the officers mess had been hit and that there were numerous casualties. The first casualty from the mess, Bill Cooper, was anaesthetised at 22:20. The last, Peter Gordon-Smith, was anaesthetised at 07:00 the next morning.  We had a rest until 13:00 when we took in Sher bin Mohammed with a gunshot wound. Five more casualties were treated that afternoon and evening, the last, Karim Busch, being anaesthetised at 01:00. There is an observation somewhere in Kipling's writing that "two thousand pounds of education drops to a ten rupee jezail". In this instance  a number of skilled and experienced SOAF pilots dropped to a single inexpensive RCL round critically injuring them and effectively limiting SOAF's operational capacity. Pete Starling is in the foreground with Joe Johnston and Nick Cetti in the background with the cameras The MOD record released under the FOI Act from the PRO in Kew DEFE 13/779 reads :

December 2010 : The garden is paved over, the trees have grown but still retain the scars from the RCL. The inside of the officers' mess has changed more than just a little bit as well. Not quite as I remember it from 1972.....