Bravo Two Zero

Has anyone ever read this book?I found it hard to buy but it´s fantastic.It´s the first time that I found a book that hasn´t Rambo-like action and is really cool.Andy McNab is my personal hero now!Immidiate Action is also another McNab´s book very good but B20 it´s to much-I read it in one nigh(with school in the other day)started at 9 p.m. endede at 5:30 a.m.!

 

The part where he was being tortured by the Iraqis was pretty intense. I've have folded about 5 minutes into the same situation.

 

That book is a helluva read. What would have bugged me was how close several of them got to getting out of Iraq only to be caught just before crossing the border.

It's definitely not a Rambo type story, and in fact much of the action of the story is downplayed as being just part of the job.

 

Chris Ryan´s book about B20-The One That Got Away(because he was the only member of the patrol that got to Syria)-it´s very good because it shows that sometimes the will to survive is the only factor that keeps you going.Still I enjoy most B20 since it was written by the leader of the patrol.

 

Try reading Peter Ratcliffe's account of the mission in his book Eye of the Storm. That book deals more with Ratcliffe's career in the SAS, culminating as Regimental Sergeant Major. Put it this way, Ratcliffe essentially trashes the way McNab and Ryan (both psuedonyms) handled the mission, their decisions in the field which led to the deaths of three men, and the overall escape and evasion plan. In their defence, though, he writes off most mistakes to inexperience.

Before you criticise Ratcliffe as someone who wasn't there - he was. He led more than one successful patrol in the Gulf War, distinguished himself in the Falklands, and in Oman in the '70s.

 

I think I once read somewhere that some of the events in Bravo Two Zero were exaggerated. Has anyone else heard anything similar to this?

 

Is the movie any good if we don't have time to read a book right now?

 

Stecm, yes, more than just a few of the details of Bravo Two Zero were exaggerated. One example is "McNab"'s claim that the patrol killed over 250 Iraqis in their escape attempt. To this day, no proof exists that any Iraqis were killed by the patrol.

"McNab" blamed a lot of the things that went wrong on poor intelligence - an almost believable excuse, except for one thing - the SAS was founded in the midst of WW2 as a long range desert operations group. Such an organisation would have hard earned knowledge of the commonalites of deserts, ie that deserts get very cold at night, sometimes to below freezing. Personally, I find it ludicrous that even the most inexperienced member of the SAS would willingly go wandering in the desert with next to no protection against cold weather.

Another bluster was about the radios being non-functional. Any self-respecting patrol signaller would have checked that sort of thing before the operation launched, and the patrol leader should have checked that fact. However, since B-20's patrol signaller was one of the men who died, we can't really ask, and about the only decent thing "McNab" did was place the blame on unnamed persons who had nothing to do with the mission.

"McNab" also complained about a rescue mission not making rendevous. Peter Ratcliffe's book states that a helicopter was sent to the RV point B-20 listed in their patrol briefing, and even searched the area north and south of the RV point. However, in the middle of the patrol, a decision was made by "McNab" and others to head west, which went against their Escape and Evasion briefing of heading south.

Those are just a few of the contradiction between the tale told in Bravo Two Zero and information gleaned from various sources such as Ratcliffe's book, snippets released by British military sources, and other means.

 

I've spoken to a friend of mine's brother who was in the Australian SAS before he was injured in a helicopter roping accident. He trained with the English SAS. He served in Somalia supporting Pakistani troops and in East Timor ahead of the UN forces landing there. He's got good credentials.

Basically he doesn't like McNab, and said don't believe everything in Bravo Two Zero. It's been exaggerated for dramatic effect.

 

I concur; Peter Ratcliffe RSM's book is a brilliant read which debunks a lot of 22SAS myths - the notion of an issued SAS fighting knife, for ecample, as well as the myths of Bravo-Two-Zero. If you enjoyed McNab's book, you'll love Ratcliffe's. Much better than Mcnab's stuff, Ryan's stuff, or the dodgy book Jihad! by Tom (?) Carew.

E_S