Worse, in his view, was that Ryan denigrated the memory of one of those who didn't come back, Vince Phillips, blaming him for giving away the position of the patrol and being too weak-willed to survive (Phillips died of hypothermia). His justification for revisiting Bravo Two Zero is his allegation that some of what McNab and Ryan wrote was fiction. Another book, 13 years on, might seem superfluous, but Coburn has spent the past five years fighting a legal battle against the Ministry of Defence for the right to publish. I hope that for the families of Vince Phillips, Bob Consiglio and Steve Lane that this investigation provides some closure.Coburn, which is not his real name, is one of the five survivors of the ill-fated mission in the first Gulf war, codenamed Bravo Two Zero, that cost the lives of three SAS soldiers, launched two writing careers (Andy McNab and Chris Ryan, also pseudonyms) and has already been dug over in numerous books and films. Pity.Īlthough this book can never erase the hurt caused by the odious war trash McNab and Chris Ryan penned, denigrating the dead men, thus breaking every code of the Special Forces. Here is the kind of SAS character I’m accustomed to, mild mannered, educated and without ego, Messrs McNab and Ryan could have learned a lot from this man. Nevertheless, Michael Asher is balanced in his criticism which, given the information he came into possession of, I have great admiration for. Inexperienced in actual combat, full of his own self-importance and unwilling to listen to his superiors regarding excessive kit and no transport, the disaster that was Bravo Two Zero was firmly the fault of McNab, no doubt exacerbated by the usual lack of decision making higher up. And how easy it is to dupe a readership desperate to cling to the myth of superhuman British soldiers, battling to the death against die-hard bloodthirsty insurgents.
Having read McNab's work of fiction and Mike Coburn's more honest portrayal of a patrol lead by an individual who felt a desperate need to prove himself, what comes out here is how easy it is to fact check, even in a war zone. Sadly, having been dropped too close to settlements and subsequently compromised, what actually failed them was their lack of understanding with regards to locals/ their motives and their own overreaction. Yes, they needed to be covert, yes they were one of the most vulnerable patrols of elite soldiers probably anywhere.
A measured and sobering account of what can go wrong when SF soldiers are dropped into an area believing everyone is out to get them.
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