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choosing someone lean, because he had prominent veins; tough though the SAS may be, some of them were also pretty squeamish, and it's not unknown for them to faint when it comes to injections. Most of our training took place inside our hangar, but we also went on the ranges to zero our weapons, which included 203s, Minimi machine-guns (also 5.56 calibre), and the more potent general-purpose machine-guns (GMPGs, known as gympis), which fire 7.62 rounds, have a greater range and are harder-hitting than the Minimis. There was one set of ranges only a couple of hundred yards away, and a larger complex three hours out into the desert. We'd fired the weapons already on a gallery range in Hereford, but 12The One That Got Away because they'd all been packed up, loaded and unloaded several times, we needed to zero them again. The trouble was, we were short of ammunition. For our contact drills on foot � practising reaction when you bump into enemy�we had only thirty or forty rounds per man. In a full practice for a single contact � contact front, contact left or right, contact rear � you can easily fire a couple of hundred rounds. We drilled in groups of four or six, as if we were patrolling along. Cardboard targets would appear ahead, somebody would shout, 'CONTACT FRONT!' and we'd split into pairs to fight our way back, each pair covering the others as they moved. The SOP, or standard operating procedure, was never to go forward after a con�tact, always to move back. For one thing, we never knew the size of the force opposing us, and in a reconnaissance patrol there were too few of us to take on any major enemy unit. For another, we couldn't carry enough ammunition for a prolonged engagement. Working in small groups, our im�mediate aim was to shoot our way clear of trouble, which gave us a better chance of escaping uninjured. But now in training, with our severely limited ammunition, all we could do when someone called 'Contact!' was to go to ground and put in one round each; then we were out of rounds � and doing it dry is never the same. At that stage we had no 203 grenades, and we badly needed some to zero our sexton sights � pieces of auxiliary kit that you can bolt on to the side of the weapon to improve accuracy. We hadn't been issued with these sights, but I'd had one for years and had brought it with me, so now I fitted it myself. We seemed to be short of everything, not least proper desert vehicles. What we needed were purpose-built, long�wheel-base 110 Land-Rovers, known as 'Pinkies' ever since they'd been painted pink for the Oman campaign of the 1970s. 'A' and D Squadrons both had Pinkies, which they had brought out with them; the vehicles had mounts for heavy machine-guns and posts for Milan anti-tank missile launchers. All we could get were short-wheel-base 90 Stand By . . . Stand By . . . Go!13 Land-Rovers, which had no seat-belts or gun-mountings, and were derisively known as Dinkies'. We also had one bigger truck, a Unimog, to act as a mother craft, carrying ammunition. Under the guidance of a sergeant from Mobility Troop, we got stuck in and stripped down the Land-Rovers, taking off the doors, tailgates, wing-mirrors and canvas tops, re�moving windscreens, fixing hessian over the lights and mirrors to prevent any reflection at night, and welding bas�kets for jerricans on to the sides. Somebody said that when the war was over, we would have to put the vehicles back to�gether again, and we looked at each other, thinking, 'You bet!' But we kept all the pieces and piled them in a corner of the hangar. We also had three trials motorbikes, but only a handful of us had been trained to ride them. With bikes of our own at home, we had plenty of experience, and we took the Armstrongs out and practised throwing them around in the desert. Even as we worked, we were looking at our Dinkies and thinking, 'Bollocks! This is crap!' When we practised navi�gation and drove about the sand-dunes, we wasted a