Spec Ops Magazine

Former British Diplomat, Caroline Jaine, and security detail outside of the Office of the British Embassy in Basra, Iraq. 2006.

Look at that fishing grandpa vest. Absolute unit. Somewhere in Basra in 2006, in one of the most dangerous cities on earth, a bloke on a close protection detail decided the answer to carrying mags, radio, med kit and everything else was pure tackle-shop chic, and honestly? He was right. This is the low-profile CP world in a nutshell.

Bravo Two Zero, the call sign of an eight-man SAS patrol dropped deep into Iraq during the First Gulf War in January 1991. From left to right: Armstrong, Consiglio, MacGown, Lane, Coburn, Mitchell, Phillips, and Pring. Eight men from B Squadron, inserted by Chinook on the night of January 22nd, tasked with locating and destroying Saddam's SCUD launchers and severing fibre-optic communications along the main supply route. Of the eight in this frame, only one would escape.

What makes a photo like this so heavy is knowing what came next. Almost everything that could go wrong did. The signaller carried the wrong radio codes. The emergency beacons were hundreds of miles outside their operational range. The ground was too hard to dig an observation post. When a goat herder stumbled onto them on January 24th, the patrol was compromised and hunted across open desert with no realistic escape plan beyond running south or west. In the chaos that followed, the men were split apart in the freezing dark.

Three of these men would not come home. Sergeant Vince Phillips died of exposure while evading capture. Lance Corporal Robert Consiglio and Trooper Steven Lane were killed. Four more, including patrol commander Steven Mitchell, were captured and endured torture at the hands of the Iraqis before their eventual release. Only Colin Armstrong, later known to the world by his pen name Chris Ryan, escaped, walking 180 miles across seven days and eight nights to the Syrian border, the longest escape and evasion in SAS history.

Eight men, looking into a camera, hours away from a mission that would cost most of them everything. The accounts of what happened out there remain fiercely disputed to this day, told and retold across books that contradict each other, but the roll of the dead never changes. Phillips. Consiglio. Lane. Who Dares Wins. Never forgotten.

Chris Ryan, MM, formerly of B Squadron, 22 SAS, and the man who walked into military legend. Born Colin Armstrong in a village near Newcastle, he attached himself to the Territorial SAS at 16, spent seven years covering hundreds of miles of moor and mountain, and passed selection for 22 SAS in 1984. He served ten years in the Regiment as an assaulter, a sniper, and finally a Sniper Team Commander on the Special Projects counterterrorism team, but it was eight days in January 1991 that would define him forever.

Bravo Two Zero was an eight-man patrol inserted deep behind Iraqi lines by Chinook on the night of January 22, tasked with finding and destroying Saddam's SCUD launchers and cutting fibre-optic communications. Almost everything went wrong. The signaller had the wrong radio codes, their emergency beacons were hundreds of miles outside their operational range, and the ground was too hard to dig an observation post. As Ryan later put it, his map dated to 1944 and his smock was Second World War issue. When a goat herder compromised them on January 24, the patrol was hunted across the open desert. Three men died. Four were captured and tortured. One got away.

Ryan walked 180 miles (290km) to the Syrian border across seven days and eight nights, freezing at night, baking by day, often in plain view of enemy patrols, with almost no food and water so contaminated it damaged his liver and left him warned never to have children. He arrived at Abu Kamal having lost close to 36 pounds, with no toenails, pus weeping from his blistered feet, and cold injuries throughout. It stands as the longest escape and evasion by any SAS trooper or any soldier in history, roughly 100 miles further than Jack Sillito's famous Sahara walk in 1942. He was awarded the Military Medal on June 29, 1991.

He never returned to operational duty, spending his last two years selecting and training recruits before an honourable discharge in 1994. He told the story in The One That Got Away and built a career as a bestselling author. Thirty years on he says he isn't bitter, that it was the fog of war, that mistakes were made and the Regiment learned from them so no young man would have to walk seven days and eight nights again. Who Dares Wins.

Sir Ranulph Fiennes, the renowned British explorer and former Special Air Service soldier, pictured with men of the Reconnaissance Platoon of the Sultan of Oman’s Muscat Regiment during the Dhofar Rebellion, Oman, in the late 1960s. Long before he became known as one of the greatest living explorers, Fiennes was a young officer at war in the deserts and mountains of Arabia. Having served with the SAS earlier in the decade, he was seconded to the army of the Sultan of Oman, where he commanded a reconnaissance platoon fighting communist-backed insurgents in the harsh, mountainous Dhofar region in the south of the country.