Epilepsy is common. Five hundred thousand people in Britain alone are epileptics. The disorder can attack anyone, at any time, sometimes developing in old age. Genetic factors are often responsible but, as in Mac’s case, an accident can cause structural abnormality to the brain and bring on “secondary” epilepsy. Anticonvulsant pills usually help epileptics lead a normal life but there are often side effects such as nausea, hair loss, coarsening of the features, drowsiness, double vision, and disturbing nightmares.
Mac had served with distinction in the SAS until, when he was driving a Land Rover over the Dhofar jebel in 1975, a land mine had blown him into the windshield. His skull was driven inward, impacting his brain. Mac had suffered intermittent epileptic fits ever since. His eleven-year-old daughter, Lucia, was a plucky, loving girl who had never known a time when Daddy did not have fits. She knew about the recovery position, the dangers of choking, and had coped all alone on occasions when she was back from school but her mother was still at work.
Mac never remembered anything about his attacks. But many of his dreams recurred so often that they lingered etched in vivid colors in his waking mind. Most were corrupted regurgitations of his past but, obedient to no normal chronology, they unfolded in a weird disorder as though conjured into being by a madman. Mac was able to repeat every facet of the dreams to Pauline; not that she was able to draw much meaning from them. He would see himself plucking chickens at the factory the previous week and then, in an instant, playing children’s games with his brother on the hills above Cork back in the forties.
The war dreams came often and with particular clarity. One began at Windsor Castle with Mac in the dress uniform of the Grenadier Guards. The drill parade passed directly through a wall and entered the dripping woods of the wadi Naheez. Now the other men were in sweat-streaked camouflage, SAS comrades bearing heavy bergens, their wary eyes darting sideways through dense groves of habok, the euphorbia used to treat camel mange. A huge bird alighted and the men-all but Mac and a Hadr tribesman-were gone. Mac loved all living things. He knew the bird was a sacred ibis from the sea- khors, or creek. From the habok there now issued other wonders, Tristram’s grackle, great white pelicans, shrike and sunbird, yellow-vented bulbul, kingfisher, and Paradise flycatcher.
The Hadr led Mac into a fluted limestone cavern where together they took combs of light honey from the bees’ nests. They sat on a rock and ate the honey unharmed by the angry bees.
“With many others,” said the Hadr, “I fled from the Yemen to avoid death by thaa’r. Everywhere the blood is spilled to avenge previous killings. There can be no end to it.”
Mac’s honeycomb became a packet of army hardtack biscuits. As he crouched low among the boulders, sweat ran down into his eyes. A spider crawled over the back of his neck: he flicked out with repulsion but it was only the parachute-cord necklace to which he had taped his morphine syrettes, wristwatch and identity discs.
Jock Logan tapped him on the shoulder and nodded. The advance was on. The “Duke” was there, Major Richard Pirie, dead now but always in the dreams. And the CO, Johnnie Watts, with his great wide grin and enormous confidence. G Squadron SAS. Jebel Samhan, Dhofar. Mac, the mortar expert, was part of the heavy gun troop, each man burdened by 120 pounds of weaponry, ammunition and water ration: in that heat a crippling load.
Up ahead the ex-communist firqat group began to crouch as they advanced, a sheepdoglike lowering of their backs as though sensing some alien presence close by. Mac knew that they could smell the enemy.
An Englishman, Kenneth Edwards, led the firqat, the Khalid bin Walid band, and Mac saw him bring up his rifle. Suddenly, immediately below them and dead ahead, Mac saw thirty or forty heavily armed adoo . Their Kalashnikov assault rifles indicated hard-core guerrillas; the adoo militia toted semiautomatic Simonovs. Smoke curled from cook fires. For once the adoo had been caught napping.
Mac and his group opened fire. Jock Logan, Barrie Davies and Ian Winstone sent a hail of GMPG bullets and 66mm LAW rockets into the midst of the adoo. They charged down, bloodlust up, fear and heavy loads forgotten. Dead and wounded from both sides soon littered the dustbowl.
In the dream Mac felt again the unbelievable heat, smelled the cordite, heard the buzz of the flies.
They ran short of ammunition and enemy guns from surrounding ridges began to pick them off.
The scene switched to the wadi Adonib in February 1975 with three G Squadron troops “beating” the forested wadi floor. Mac was halfway up one flanking hill, and at a smoke signal from the squadron boss, a peer of the realm, he brought his deadly 60mm mortar into play with backing from his team, Mick and Ginge. The second round targeted an adoo patrol and, when the SAS beaters arrived, nothing was left but a leg and a pair of rubber flip-flops.
Now Mac sat in the long narrow saloon of Chancers Wine Bar with Tosh Ash, as witty as ever, and drinking like there was no tomorrow. Tosh had been one of the lads and fit as could be. Now a pubkeeper and bon viveur, his face was florid, unhealthy. They drank to Mac, Callsign Five, Mortar Man Extraordinary. It was one of the better dreams.
On November 28, 1987, thirteen years after the end of their time in Dhofar, Jock Logan and Barry Davies met in Hereford, as was often their wont, and walked together along Hampton Park Road to see their old friend. There were those who no longer visited Mac, perhaps because they had seen him on a bad day when the mood was on him, perhaps merely because their friendship had dissolved with time, as is the way of life. But Jock and Barry shared with Mac moments and memories that each of them savored and knew could never again be matched for sheer intensity of feeling.
Jock had with him a fat and well-thumbed album of photographs, not just of Oman days, but going back to the sixties, when he and Mac and Frank Bilcliff were at the forefront of Britain’s rock-climbers. Among many other feats their group had been the first Army men ever to scale the Old Man of Hoy’s crumbling flanks. Since Dhofar days, Jock had married a pretty lass who had worked at the Bunch of Grapes from 1967 to 1971. They had a lovely daughter now who was the best of friends with Mac’s daughter, Lucia, and Jock had been Mac’s best man. Jock’s home was in Aberdeen, where he thrived at his job as salesman for a drill-bit manufacturer servicing the flourishing oil industry.
Barry Davies was a salesman for Cardiff-based BCB, manufacturers and retailers of survival equipment. He’d had his first book published earlier that year, a best-selling manual on survival techniques. Ten years earlier Barry had received the British Empire Medal for his part in an SAS operation sanctioned jointly by Prime Minister Jim Callaghan and Chancellor Helmut Schmidt.
In October 1977 four Palestinian terrorists hijacked a Lufthansa airliner. They were acting in support of the Baader-Meinhof gang and demanded release of the gang’s leaders from German jails. A German commando unit from GSG-9 was tasked to release the Lufthansa hostages with help from an SAS officer, Major Alistair Morrison. (Morrison had relieved Kealy’s group at Mirbat five years before, and in 1979 he was one of the first to learn of Kealy’s death on the Brecon Beacons.) Barry, then a sergeant, was tasked to accompany Major Morrison with a supply of special SAS flash-grenades. The hijackers led the Anglo-German team a merry dance and in Aden they murdered the airliner’s pilot. Flying on to Mogadishu in Somalia, they dumped the body on the runway, ending any remaining chances of negotiation. Morrison and Davies then led the highly successful attack by GSG-9, and both men were later decorated for their courage.
Barry was well respected in the SAS but he was by nature an entrepreneur and had for a long while been interested in the housing market inside Hereford. In the late sixties he found an excellent house in a suburb of Hereford for his friend Mac and soon afterward introduced him to a lovely girl named Pauline, who became Mac’s lodger and later his wife.
The two men turned into Salisbury Avenue. It was Saturday. Pauline was at work in town but they had called at her shop, Chelsea Girl, to collect the house keys.
“Pauline says the fits are slowly getting worse despite Mac’s medication. His dark moods come more frequently. It must be very difficult for Pauline.”
Jock nodded. “He’s a lucky man having those lassies for wife and daughter. They will stand by him to the end.”