The unknown warriors

Published on Wednesday 1 November 2006 00:32

THE SCENT from frankincense trees newly flayed by shell fire, the glint of moonlight on blood washing over a booby-trapped bunker floor...

While the Vietnam War was dominating headlines, as well as inspiring legions of protestors, across the world, Gardiner and other seconded British military personnel found themselves fighting alongside Muslim Omani forces in a largely unsung conflict against Communist guerrillas amid the jebel, the unforgiving terrain of the Qara and Qamar mountains in Oman's south-westerly province of Dhofar.

Gardiner, who grew up in Ayrshire and was schooled at Fettes, arrived in Oman in June 1973. He was just 23, a lieutenant in the Royal Marines and had already seen "very active" service in Northern Ireland. Newly emerged from ten weeks at the Defence School of Languages at Beaconsfield (where possession of a Scottish accent helped him to master Arabic gutturals) as a seconded officer in the Sultan of Oman's forces, he was second in command of A Company, Northern Frontier Regiment. In this isolated and largely forgotten sharp end of the Cold War, he served alongside Omanis, as well as Baluchis from Pakistan (once part of the Omani empire) and Indians. Outwith his regiment, further forces were provided by the Shah of Iran.

The adoo - the enemy - were the hard-fighting Dhofari mountain men, and sometimes women, whose grievances against Oman's ageing Sultan Said bin Taimur stoked their willingness to swell the ranks of Communist guerrillas operating in Oman with support of the neighbouring People's Democratic Republic of Yemen. By the time Gardiner arrived, Oman was ruled by the progressive, Sandhurst-trained young Sultan Qaboos bin Said, who had replaced his ultra-conservative father after a palace coup in 1970.

As Gardiner stresses in the book, this was no "post-colonial scrap". As the rebellion of disaffected Dhofaris became a Communist insurgency, at stake were the oil fields being developed between Dhofar and the north of Oman, and particularly the domination of the Strait of Hormuz, the south-easterly entrance to the Gulf, through which passed some 40 per cent of western Europe's oil.

He learned a lot about warfare in Dhofar, patrolling inhospitable mountain passes, and valleys full of the frankincense trees which had been a source of trade since biblical times. In the book, he recalls the fragrance after the guerrillas' mortar shells had blasted the trees, releasing their sap. Oman is one of the hottest places on Earth, but Gardiner also describes it as "one of the most starkly beautiful", and one whose history and lore ranged from the Queen of Sheba to Sinbad. "I felt like an intruder on history," he recalls, amid the comfort of his home on the periphery of Edinburgh's New Town, a far cry from the high passes of the jebel, where he would find himself "sitting behind my machine gun, ambushing along tracks which were... I don't know how many thousands of years old".

They were not on the lookout for wise men bearing gifts, however. With the unflappable support of helicopters and aircraft, they took on the Dhofari highlanders in an ugly conflict of mountain ambushes, night raids, land mines and booby traps. He'd been shot at more than once in Northern Ireland, but, in Oman, Gardiner took part in some savage, two-way firefights.

It was a particularly drastic form of self-discovery - "courage," as he puts it, "is the art of being the only one who knows you're scared to death" - in episodes such as one "contact" when he and his men came under heavy fire. The SAS trooper next to Gardiner was shot dead, then they were strafed by one of their own aircraft, owing to confusion in Gardiner's hastily radioed directions. Eventually, they managed to turn the tables on their ambushers, and Gardiner was later awarded the Omani Distinguished Service Medal for Gallantry .

His darkest hour in Oman was when one of his troops ventured into a booby-trapped sangar - one of the stone bunkers which littered the terrain - and was mortally wounded when he triggered a mine. "I arrived at the low-roofed sangar," he recalls in the book, "and I could hear a sound like a cow pishing as [the soldier's] lifeblood squirted away. He was groaning loudly and shouting for his mother in Arabic..."

Gardiner knew that, although one mine had gone off in the bunker, there might still be another one there. However, clutching his private parts just in case, the young officer entered the stone structure, then carried out the horribly injured soldier. The company's Baluchi medic and Gardiner patched him up as best as they could and, with great difficulty, a helicopter lifted the man out, but he died before reaching hospital. To this day, Gardiner still does not know whether there was a second mine in that bunker, "but I do know that the sangar next door was further mined," he says.

Most of us may have difficulty in imagining how we'd react amid such hellish circumstances. Gardiner, a burly, quiet-voiced man, chuckles and points to the rigours of Royal Marine training: "There's nothing that can really train you for the shock of what happens in battle, but you are taken a long way towards coping with it. You've trained and rehearsed, and you've trained your men, but that doesn't take away from the fact that it's still a pretty hard experience, watching people getting killed next to you and trying to control aircraft and guns and mortars at the same time."

He was able to draw on such hard-won experience some years later when, as a company commander with the Arbroath-based 45 Commando, he led the attack on the Two Sisters outside Stanley, during the Falklands conflict. Others of his fellow British officers weren't so lucky in Dhofar, and one of his reasons for writing the book was to preserve the memory of comrades who paid the ultimate price for their involvement: "I realised that if I didn't write this down, it would all evaporate. There were men doing things in your name and mine over there, in the name of this country, some of them making the ultimate sacrifice, and people here just haven't a clue." And he cites his commander and friend, Johnny Braddell-Smith, killed on Christmas morning of 1974 after trying to retrieve the body of his Omani sergeant major under fire, for which he was posthumously awarded the Omani equivalent of the Victoria Cross.

Nevertheless, Gardiner maintained a healthy respect, and a certain sympathy, for the enemy: "One couldn't help but respect them, to see what they were doing physically as soldiers, although they were backed by a corrupt political ideology." He believes a more peaceful solution might have been found back in the 1960s if the old Sultan had been less intransigent. "They were just asking that the resources of their country be used to develop it, asking for the kind of things that you and I would think very normal. Sultan Said was completely out of touch with the aspirations of his people."

If things had gone differently, and Oman had become a Communist stronghold, might it have acted to some extent as a bulwark against the Islamic fundamentalism which so worries us today? "It's difficult," he says, "to imagine the Ayatollah on one side of the Strait, glowering across at this Communist atheist state." But he regards my bulwark phrase as unreasonably loaded. "It implies that we're about to be overwhelmed and I do not agree with that." As he wrote recently in this newspaper, he regards the current perception of "a struggle between liberal, progressive, peaceful Christianity and repressive, intolerant and violent Islam" as "simplistic, dangerous and wrong". He views the current situation as more of a crisis within Islam, from which the west is getting the backlash. On the other hand, the strain of Islam he encountered in Oman he found old, conservative but tolerant.

Today, he points out, the progressive Sultan Qaboos subsidises the building of Christian churches in the country - "but no-one ever talks about that. Instead we have this notion of Islam being constantly at odds with us."

But for Britain's assistance in quelling the rebellion, he believes, things would have been very different, and he regards the forgotten war in which he fought as strategically more important than America's ill-starred intervention in Vietnam: "The Americans lost something like 55,000. God knows how many Vietnamese were killed; also, it affected the politics and whole social outlook of America for the next 30 years. But what great strategic resources did America lose, what courses of action were shut to her because she lost the Vietnam war? And what would have been strategic effect of victory?" he asks, adding that with the benefit of 30 years' hindsight, it is very difficult to identify any.

The conversation naturally turns to the current vexed western involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan, on which he is reluctant to comment, apart from quoting the composer Arnold Schoenberg's remark that "contemporaries are not final judges, but are generally overruled by history". "So I think it's too early to say, but what I think they got right in Oman is that the politicians had a very clear vision of the end state they were seeking to achieve."

He retired from the Royal Marines as a brigadier five years ago, but remains Honorary Colonel of the Royal Marines Reserve in Scotland. Having spent three years as the chief executive of the Scottish Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, he is now a freelance speaker and writer, as well as a visiting lecturer in defence studies. As we chat, his packed bags are sitting in the hall. He is leaving for Aldershot to lecture a group of officers, many of whom will be heading for Iraq in the near future. His topic will be "the realities of command in war". No doubt it will encapsulate some lessons learned the hard way, in the high passes of Dhofar.

• In the Service of the Sultan is published by Pen & Sword Books, priced 19.99