Zero Six Bravo — The SAS Patrol Bravo Two Zero Left in the Shadows

The operation Damian Lewis called 06 Bravo happened in March 2003 in northern Iraq during the second invasion, not in January 1991. 60 SPS operators and SAS embeds driving open Land Rovers over a thousand kilometers to request the surrender of a 100,000 strong Iraqi Army Corps. The operators themselves nicknamed it Operation No Return before they crossed the border.

 That mission and the press accusations of cowardice it generated a part of this story. The patterns it exposed are the same ones already visible 12 years earlier in the western desert when the Bravo patrols went in. While one patrol became a publishing phenomenon, others were left in the margins. Bravo 30, the silent sister mission that deployed with vehicles and came home without a book deal.

the arguments over radios, vehicles, orders, weather, and whether the plan was ever fit for the country it was dropped into. Was Bravo 20 exceptional, or was it the visible edge of a much larger failure? On 17th of January 1991, the coalition air campaign against Iraq began under Operation Desert Storm.

 One day later, Iraq fired Scud missiles at Israel. That single event changed the political calculus of the entire war. Israeli retaliation threatened to fracture the Arab coalition partners. General Sir Peter Dilabilier, the senior British commander, had already lobbied hard to place British special forces at the center of the operation.

 General Schwarzko had needed convincing of the SAS’s value. After the 18th of January, the argument made itself. Iraq fired 88 Scuds total throughout the war at Israel, Saudi Arabia, and Bahrain. Suppress the launches, keep Israel out, hold the coalition together. The SAS had a role, and it needed filling fast. B Squadron 22 SAS was stationed at a forward operating base in Saudi Arabia.

The squadron provided a number of long range similarly tasked patrols for deployment deep into western Iraq into what became known as Scud Alley, the corridor flanking the main highway between Baghdad and the Northwest. Three patrols from B Squadron carried the Bravo designation. A and D squadrons, meanwhile, operated differently, fighting columns of heavily armed Land Rover 110s with Unimog support trucks driving into the desert in force.

The UKSF vehicle pool in the included around 90 Land Rovers and recently acquired 110 DPVS. The Bravo patrols were smaller, lighter in concept, if not in practice, and far more dependent on individual decisions made before the helicopters even left Saudi airspace. Those decisions are where the record fractures.

The three B squadron patrols were designated Bravo 1, Bravo 20, and Bravo 30. Bravo 10 declined to deploy. One account states they found no adequate cover on arrival and aborted. The exact circumstances depend on which account you consult. What is confirmed across multiple sources is that they didn’t operate behind Iraqi lines in the way the others did.

 Bravo 20 is the one most people know. Eight men inserted on the night of 22nd 23rd January 1991 by RAF Chinuk into western Iraq. Patrol commander was Sergeant Steven Mitchell writing later under the pseudonym Andy McNab. Patrol second in command was Sergeant Vince Phillips. Other members included Corporal Colin Armstrong, better known as Chris Ryan, along with trooper Robert Consilio, trooper Steven Lane, Trooper Malcolm McGau, Lance Corporal Ian Pring, and Trooper Mike Coburn, a New Zealand SAS man recently transferred to B Squadron. Their mission, according to

McNab’s later account, was to find and destroy Iraqi Scud missile launchers along a 250 km stretch of the main supply route. According to Ryan’s account, the mission was reconnaissance, establishing an observation post, monitoring Scud launchers, gathering intelligence. Those two descriptions aren’t the same mission.

 That disagreement runs through every subsequent dispute in the literature and it matters because different missions carry different loadouts, different vehicle requirements and different extraction logic. Bravo 30 went in the same night, same Chinuk. Actually, the Wikipedia entry on Bravo 20 confirms both patrols were transported together, but Bravo 30 carried Land Rover 110 vehicles.

 Dez Powell, who co-authored the 2021 book on the patrol with Damian Lewis, was its second in command. He had served in the parachute regiment as a sergeant major before spending 20 years in the SAS at the heart of counterterrorism. Bravo 30 deployed into the same operational environment as Bravo 20 on the same winter night, completed its mission, engaged Scud related targets, fought off pursuit, and extracted.

The publishers’s summary of Powell’s book describes the contrast directly. These men thought differently, acted differently. That framing is commercially tidy. The operational distinction it describes is real. Bravo 20 was compromised on the afternoon of 24th January. A young shepherd saw the patrol first.

 A bulldozer appeared near their position and reversed when the operators came into view, confirming the compromise. Then, per McNab’s published account, a significant firefight with Iraqi armored personnel carriers and soldiers began. Per Michael Asher’s later ground investigation, the contact was less dramatic.

 Warning shots fired by the civilians. Suppressive rounds returned. A fighting withdrawal into the desert. Mike Coburn’s Soldier 5, a third patrol member account published in 2004, partially supports McNab, specifically noting one APC and fire from a 12.7 mm DSHK heavy machine gun at distance. But Coburn describes a 600 meter engagement with suppressive fire only.

No observed casualties on the Iraqi side. The gap between McNab’s account and the others on this afternoon alone isn’t a footnote. It’s the central argument about what the published legacy actually represents. The patrol split during the night of 24 25th January while McNab attempted to contact a passing coalition aircraft by TACB communicator.

Vince Phillips died on or around 25th January. The Wikipedia account says the evening of the 25th. The SAS regimenal role of honor records 22nd January. The cause in every account is hypothermia. Robert Consilio was killed in action on 27th January. Steven Lane died of hypothermia the same morning after swimming the Euphrates.

McNab Pring Coburn and Mcgown were captured and tortured by Iraqi forces. Colin Armstrong, writing as Chris Ryan, crossed approximately 180 mi to the Syrian border and completed what became the longest escape and evasion in SAS regimenal history. Andy McNab’s memoir, Bravo 20, was published by Banttom Press in 1993.

Chris Ryan’s The One That Got Away, followed in 1995. Both men were writing under pseudonyms. Their real names, Steven Mitchell and Colin Armstrong, appeared only later in public records and legal proceedings. Both books became bestsellers. The BBC produced a film adaptation in 1999 with Shaun Bean playing McNab.

By the time Michael Asher published the real Bravo 20 in 2002 and Channel 4 aired his accompanying documentary, the McNab Ryan version had had nearly a decade to establish itself as the account. Two bestsellers, a BBC film, a public narrative of heroism, firefights, and survival against overwhelming odds.

 When Mike Coburn attempted to publish his own account in 2004, the UK Ministry of Defense went to court in New Zealand to suppress it. Coburn had signed a confidentiality contract in 1996 when all SAS personnel were required to do so, prompted in part by the flood of memoirs the Gulf War had already generated.

 A New Zealand court dismissed the Ministry of Defense’s efforts to suppress the book. It was published, but by court order, the resulting proceeds went to the UK Ministry of Defense. That sequence deserves stating as a simple factual record. The regiment that officially required silence, first tolerated, then commercially benefited from memoirs that shaped public understanding of the mission.

 Then it deployed the courts against the next man who tried to add his version. The result was a public record built almost entirely on commercially motivated, legally contested, partially corroborated accounts written by individuals who disagreed with each other on fundamental facts. The official record, the SAS daily logs, the command level assessments, the afteraction reviews remained classified.

Everything else was testimony. Asher’s methodology deserves precise description because the same audience that sites Lewis and Connor is also familiar with its limitations. Asher is a former parah and 23 SAS territorial with extensive desert experience, Arabic fluency, and real credentials as a desert explorer.

 He and his wife were the first to cross the Sahara from west to east by camel, a journey of 4,500 m. He walked the actual patrol route in Iraq a decade after the Gulf War and interviewed Bedawin witnesses. His core findings, the patrol was spotted not by armed soldiers but by three elderly Arab civilians, one of them in his 70s.

 The claimed firefight with multiple APCs and the destruction of armored vehicles had no corroboration from any of the Iraqis he interviewed. And the 20 km march on insertion night that McNab described was almost certainly 2 km as Ryan Coburn and physical reenactment with weighted packs all confirm. But Asher conducted his research while Saddam Hussein was still in power.

 He had Iraqi government access which meant Iraqi government minders. The controlled access environment is a legitimate methodological limit, and it’s the argument McNab’s defenders return to most consistently. Iraqi witnesses who contradicted British SAS claims had no obvious motive to be coached by Barist officials to do so.

The logic of that objection is awkward, but it can’t be entirely dismissed. What can be stated with precision is that Ash’s finding on the walk distance is corroborated by two patrol members independently. His casualty estimate 10 at most against McNab’s claim of 250 can’t be verified from available sources and remains genuinely open.

 What can also be stated precisely is this. The patrol members who published accounts didn’t agree with each other. McNab and Ryan disagree on mission objectives, patrol load weight, who was carrying a 66 mm law rocket during the initial contact, whether Philillips was known to be dead when the patrol separated, and what happened at the taxi checkpoint near the Syrian border.

Coburn’s Soldier 5 is more critical of command than either McNab or Ryan. Peter Ratcliffe, the regimental sergeant major at the time, published Eye of the Storm in 2000 and places significant blame on McNab personally for the radio failure. It was the patrol commander’s responsibility to verify equipment before insertion.

 And Ratcliffe was specifically critical of both McNab and Ryan for publishing under pseudonyms while naming the dead. Walking through each dispute with attribution is the only responsible approach because flattening them produces false certainty the record doesn’t support. McNab’s account gives the patrol load at 95 kg per man.

 Ryan’s account gives it at 120 kg. On radio frequencies, McNab claims the patrol was issued incorrect ones at base. A 2002 BBC investigation found no error with the frequencies, noting that the patrol’s transmissions appeared in the SAS daily record log. Radcliffe’s position is that regardless of the frequency question, the patrol commander was responsible for verifying equipment before leaving the FOB.

Coburn’s account suggests the PRC 319 could transmit but not receive, meaning the patrol didn’t know US jet pilots had heard their signals and were attempting to assist. Three different failure modes producing the same operational result, isolation. On mission objectives, McNab describes a directaction tasking against Scud launchers.

Ryan describes a reconnaissance mission. Coburn’s account, which names specific instructions from the B Squadron commanding officer, states the primary goal was locating Scud launchers for air strike designation. A covert, not overt approach. These aren’t stylistic differences. They describe different tactical doctrines with different equipment requirements, different movement disciplines and different vehicle logic.

On the Xfiltration route, the official plan directed the patrol south towards Saudi Arabia. The SAS daily logs TACB entry from 24th of January noted the patrol was assumed to be moving south. The patrol was moving northwest to Syria. Coburn states the B squadron commanding officer specifically instructed the patrol to ENE into Syria in an emergency pre-planned not improvised with CIA prepared safeouses across the border.

 If Coburn is right, the command failure is at the communications level. extraction was pointed the wrong way because base assumed south while the patrol headed north on authorized instructions. If the Syria decision was improvised, a different distribution of responsibility applies. The consequence was identical in either case. All rescue efforts went south.

 No one was looking in the right direction. The emergency helicopter standard SAS procedure required one at the insertion point every 24 hours never appeared. Ratcliffe attributed this to the pilot suffering illness on route forcing him to abort. That explanation comes from a single source. The most significant statement in Coburn’s book, the one that moves the planning failure question from individual to institutional, is what he says happened at the Sterling Lines debrief after the surviving patrol members returned when they asked why rescue helicopters hadn’t come for them.

   

 

Coburn records being told that the regiment’s priority was preventing further Scud launches and the patrol had been left to operate or not in order to preserve the available Chinuks for the four other SAS half squadrons then operating behind Iraqi lines. That claim comes from one source under court contested circumstances written years after the fact.

 It can’t be presented as confirmed but it’s specific attributed and the kind of statement that if accurate reframes the entire question of individual versus institutional accountability. Now take the five specific planning variables together. Radio failure by whichever mechanism. Patrol loads of between 95 and 120 kg per man producing a movement rate that required shuttling equipment across a 2 km insertion distance.

 No cold weather intelligence to account for the conditions that killed two men. no vehicles against a verified backdrop of other patrols operating vehicles on the same task in the same period and extraction machinery directed at the wrong border. Each variable in isolation is a tragedy of contingency.

 Together they describe a patrol inserted without the physical capacity to move efficiently, without communication reliability, without adequate cold weather preparation, without the mobility that a companion patrol used to survive a comparable mission, and without command awareness of where it was actually going in an emergency. That isn’t three independent outcomes.

That is a data set. Bravo 30 went in the same night. Dez Powell, its second in command, later described the patrol as operating as the furthest coalition forces behind Iraqi lines while remaining undetected. The patrol fought what the book describes as a running battle, engaged Scud related targets, and extracted.

Scouse Elliot, a Bravo 30 patrol member from six troop B Squadron, gave interviews to the hard routine YouTube channel. The National Army Museum hosted the 2021 book launch, and the recording is publicly accessible. Dez Powell has given multiple podcast appearances, including on Jack Car’s Danger Close. The information exists.

The Patrol exists in the documented record. It simply never had a Shaun Bean film. Cameron Spence writing under a pseudonym in Saber Squadron published in 1998 provides a third perspective the Bravo patrols don’t. What the successful vehicle-mounted SAS operations looked like from the inside.

 He was a senior NCO on a column operation during the same period. His account describes six weeks behind Iraqi lines in a vehicle column, including an account of successful action against Scud related targets. That book is significantly less well-known than McNabs or Ryan’s. Its relative obscurity demonstrates the fame asymmetry more cleanly than any analysis of publishing economics could.

 The patrol that drove successfully through Scud Alley for 6 weeks generated a book that most people haven’t heard of. The patrol that lost three men and was captured generated a BBC film and a defining public narrative of Gulf War British special forces. The commercial conditions under which military experience becomes public knowledge select heavily for particular kinds of stories.

Ken Connor, a 23-year SAS veteran who published Ghost Force in 1998, provides the command level institutional perspective that individual patrol memoirs can’t. The book covers the SAS from 1947 through the Gulf War. Mike Curtis, whose CQB describes a career from Welsh coal miner to Falkland’s parah to Gulf War SAS, adds texture on how the regiment operated in Iraq as part of a wider career account.

The viewer who recommended Ghost Force in the comments was asking the right question. What did the people operating above patrol level know about the conditions, the resources, and the likely outcomes? That question belongs in the same conversation as the specific disputes over load weight and radio frequencies.

And those two books are where it most clearly lives in the available published record. Now to the specific name this audience asked for. March 2003, Northern Iraq. M Squadron, an SBS unit with embedded SAS operators and some American attachments. Roughly 60 operators total received orders to drive over a thousand kilometers into Iraq and negotiate the surrender of the Iraqi fifth corps.

 A force of approximately 100,000 soldiers. The intelligence assessment was that the fifth corps had low morale, was disconnected from central command, and was likely to defect rather than fight. That assessment was wrong. The core wasn’t preparing to surrender. It was waiting to see whether an anticipated Turkish front would open from the north.

The silence that intelligence services read as disillusionment was tactical patience. M squadron drove into a ferocious ambush. Fedí in Toyota technicals with 12.7 mm heavy machine guns alongside the heavy armor of the fifth core. The British operators in open Land Rovers with standard machine guns had no anti-tank capability.

One goodreads review of Lewis’s book includes a moment where an operator looks at the available firepower and says essentially, “Welcome to the poor man’s military.” The unit fought its way out over several days, destroyed vehicles and sensitive equipment when necessary, and extracted by Chinuk on a route that was, by the evidence of a map in Lewis’s book, near circular.

Then the press called them cowards. The spectator review of Lewis’s book carried the headline,06 Bravo proves that too much secrecy over special forces is a bad thing. The operators were bound by the same institutional silence that had shaped what the public knew about 1991. The difference was that by 2003 that silence had been partially eroded by the very memoirs the silence rule was supposed to prevent.

But the confidentiality contracts signed in 1996 under threat of involuntary return to unit had tightened the architecture again. So the 2003 operators fought a thousand kmter battle and then watched the newspapers call it a retreat unable to respond publicly. The name 06 Bravo in this context connects to the 1991 story not as the same operation but as a continuation of the same institutional pattern.

Intelligence that underestimated the enemy. Inadequate backup operators unable to defend themselves in the public record because the institution officially required silence while commercially enabling the narrative framework within which silence became a liability. The interval between the two stories is 12 years, one war, and a publishing industry that had already written the script about what SAS operations looked like.

The SAS regiment’s official culture is silence. The Gulf War destroyed the practice of that culture while leaving its official structure intact. Between 1993 and 2004, the Bravo 20 patrol alone generated four published firsterson memoirs. McNab in 1993, Ryan in 1995, Ratcliffe in 2000, and Coburn in 2004. Academic analysis of British military memoirs by Rachel Woodward and K.

 Neil Jenkins describes McNab’s Bravo 20 as establishing one of the template visual and commercial designs for the entire genre in the 1990s. It didn’t just tell a story, it created the grammar for how elite unit memoirs would be packaged and sold for the next decade. McNab’s subsequent Nick Stone Thriller series was vetted by the MOD and could only be published with official approval.

The institution that officially prohibited disclosure was simultaneously licensing fictionalizations of the same world for commercial sale. Academic work on the SAS contribution to Operation Granby notes that the subsequent publication of memoirs substantially shaped public understanding of what British special forces operations looked like.

 That public understanding was built on commercially motivated, legally contested, partially corroborated accounts by individuals who disagreed with each other on fundamental facts. The institutional question the memoir industry made harder to ask isn’t whether individual patrol members behaved heroically or not.

 The evidence of courage and endurance isn’t seriously in dispute across any of the accounts. The question is whether B Squadron’s Bravo patrols were sent out with the resources, intelligence, and extraction infrastructure to have a reasonable operational chance if anything went wrong. Bravo 10 found no usable cover and didn’t deploy.

 Bravo 20 deployed without vehicles reached its observation post carrying loads that made vehicle-free movement barely functional. Lost radio contact was compromised by civilians the patrol couldn’t identify as a threat in time. Split while attempting to signal aircraft overhead. lost three men to cold and combat and had all rescue efforts directed at the wrong border for the reasons described above.

Bravo 30 deployed with vehicles and came back. The vehicle columns from A and D squadrons operated throughout the Scardali period. Cameron Spence was in one of them. That isn’t three independent outcomes. When McNab’s memoir was published in 1993, the Gulf War was 2 years old, and the public appetite for elite unit stories wasn’t yet saturated.

The Iranian embassy siege of 1980 had introduced the SAS to the British public. The Falklands had added to the reputation, but the Gulf War Books arrived at a specific commercial moment, the early 1990s paperback market. the rise of the military thriller, the appetite for true stories that read like action novels, and Bravo 20 landed on all of those marks simultaneously.

Ryan’s account followed. The BBC film followed. the question of what the other patrols were doing, what the vehicle columns found, what Bravo 30’s vehicles meant for the comparison, what command knew about extraction and weather. None of that became part of the public conversation. Books were the only mechanism by which that conversation was happening at all.

And the books that sold were the ones that ended in survival, not the ones that asked whether the planning was sound. Bravo 30 published 30 years after the events. 06 Bravo, the 2003 mission published in 2013, a decade after it happened, by a civilian journalist rather than a patrol member, specifically in order to counter the accusation of cowardice that the operators couldn’t counter themselves.

In both cases, what broke the silence wasn’t official disclosure. It was the market finding a story it could package the classified files, the SAS daily logs beyond the fragments that appeared in the 2002 BBC investigation, the command level assessments, the pre-insertion intelligence briefings, the specific vehicle allocation decisions for the Bravo patrols on 22nd 23rd January 1991.

Those documents aren’t available. They may never be. The public is left with McNab and Ryan and Coburn and Ratcliffe and Asher and Powell and Lewis. A conversation between people who were there and people who walked the ground afterwards. all working within the constraints of what the institution permits them to say and what the commercial environment incentivizes them to emphasize.

If you’re building a reading list from this dispute, the order that makes most sense is McNab first, then Ryan, then Coburn’s soldier 5. The most institutionally critical and the most legally fraught of the patrol accounts. Then Ash’s real Bravo 20 with its methodological limits clearly in mind. Then Ratcliff’s eye of the storm for the RSM level perspective on individual responsibility.

And Connor ghost force for the command level institutional view the patrol memoirs can’t provide. The literature doesn’t resolve. That is the point. It’s a contested record maintained by people with competing interests, shaped by commercial forces the regiment both resisted and exploited. What Bravo 30 adds to that record is comparative evidence from the same night.

 What the 2003 06 Bravo adds is a second parallel from the same institution in a different war, confirming that the patterns, bad intelligence, inadequate backup, operators unable to respond publicly to press accusations weren’t a one-time accident of January 1991. They were structural. The desert in January 1991 and the northern Iraqi desert in March 2003 asked the same question of British special forces planning.

 The answers the institution gave differed in their specifics. The gap between what was planned and what was required closed at the individual level as it always does through individual courage and endurance. The gap didn’t close at the institutional level. The desert didn’t care which patrol would become famous. It didn’t care which man would get the book deal, which version would sell, or which argument would still be running 35 years later. It only exposed the plan.

One patrol became a legend. The others became footnotes. But sometimes the footnotes are where the operation finally tells the truth.