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The incarnations of
55 FST illustrated in these pages were in existence at what was arguably the height of the Cold War.
Edward Heath was Prime Minister in the UK whilst Nikolai Podgorny was President of the USSR. In China the Cultural
Revolution was almost at an end and Mao Zedong's influence was
on the wane. Richard Nixon was the President of the USA. The
Vietnam War had three years to run. The most important aspect of this website to remember is that it presents
events that occurred in 1972. The politics, the practices and
technology were those of the early seventies and not those of
2005.
The "war" has
often been described as a "secret" war. This is a fair
observation in that there were no newspaper or television
reporters present and consequently nothing appeared in the
national media until a couple of column inches appeared on an
inside page in the Daily Telegraph a fortnight after
a successful rocket attack on RAF Salalah on the 8th of June.
The participation in the war by the SAS (Special Air Service) in
the form of BATT (British Army Training Team) who fought the
battle at Mirbat on the 19th of July 1972 are recorded in many
books about the regiment. Some of the pages on this website
record the brutal consequences of that battle which, as they
make uncomfortable reading, are omitted from the many accounts
of the engagement. The consequences that the medic sees, remote
from combat, identify only loosely with the preceding actions
which are later described usually by those who took no part in
the affair. For the medic there is nothing of "the glorious
dead" about the badybagged delivered by the casevac helicopter.
Legs, protruding bones and shredded by mines are not "heroic
wounds". The horrific reality of combat that piles up at the
door of the FST is sanitised in non-medical accounts with a
brief "and fourteen soldiers were wounded". It looks better in
the papers. It is even harder, when the subjects of that
violence, are aware that what they are undergoing will not be
publicly acknowledged by their political masters who
"volunteered" them for these duties.
The secrecy was primarily for political reasons. It was
also secret because it was in
a relatively remote region of the world. Mail to BFPO in Germany took a
week and a half there and a week and a half back. Mobile phones
would not be available for another twenty years. CCL technology
was years away. Reliance was placed upon teleprinter and CW. The nearest
fellow RAMC anaesthetist was ten hours flying time away in
Cyprus.
It was exciting to
be involved in such an enterprise but there was an underlying
sense that if it had not been successful it would not have been difficult
for our political masters to deny the true extent of British
involvement.
Date the page was last modified : -
07 August 2008 11:50
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