The SAS Patrol Andy McNab Didn’t Write About — Bravo Three Zero, Iraq 1991
Bravo 30 deployed with vehicles. The Wikipedia article on the Bravo 20 mission records the fact cleanly. The two patrols shared their Chinuk transport and unlike Bravo 2030’s Land Rovers came with them into Iraqi airspace. 30 drove north into the desert. The patrol stayed out. All eight men came home. Most British people who think they know what the SAS did in the Gulf War have never heard of them.
This is what happened and why it matters. To understand why three patrols were being inserted into Western Iraq on the night of 22nd January, you need to understand what the preceding 5 days had done to the diplomatic architecture of the Gulf War. The military problem was real. The political problem was worse. Coalition air operations against Iraq began on January 17th, 1991.
[clears throat] Within hours, Saddam Hussein executed the strategic gamble he had been holding in reserve since the coalition began to form. He fired Scud missiles at Israel. The first strikes hit the Tel Aviv metropolitan area. None of the Scuds had carried chemical warheads, which had been the nightmare scenario. They didn’t need to.
The political pressure generated by conventional warheads landing in Tel Aviv was already close to unsustainable. The coalition Saddam was trying to fracture was a diplomatic construction that would have seemed implausible 18 months earlier. The United States had assembled a military alliance that included alongside Britain and France the armed forces of Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Syria.
Arab nations fighting under American command against another Arab state. That alliance held together on one explicit political condition. Israel stayed out. Saudi Arabia wouldn’t fight alongside Israel. Israeli Prime Minister Yitsak Shamir had pledged in a December 1990 White House meeting that Israel wouldn’t take preemptive action against Iraqi missile sites.
The Scud attacks changed the terms of that restraint. After the attacks began, Shamir sent a formal written letter to Bush. The Los Angeles Times reported on it on February 6th, 1991 after a White House official confirmed receipt. The letter stated its conditions with precision. If Scud attacks killed large numbers of Israeli civilians, or if a warhead carrying non-conventional material, chemical or biological, was used, Israel would respond, not consult, not request permission. Respond.
Israeli officials acknowledged privately that Shamir would act with or without Washington’s approval if those conditions were met. Bush’s reaction was immediate and personal. He called Shamir twice from Camp David in the days following. He dispatched Deputy Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleberger and Paul Wolovitz, two of Washington’s most senior foreign policy figures to Jerusalem, specifically to manage Israeli restraint in person.
Wolvitz and Eagleberger’s job in plain terms was to sit in Israeli government offices and make the American case directly. Hold on. The Scuds will stop because we are going to find the launchers and destroy them. The entire weight of American diplomatic pressure rested on one promise. The launchers could be found and destroyed. The coalition’s air assets were trying to make good on that promise, flying hundreds of sorties over western Iraq in January. They were failing.
Former Delta Force personnel later described to Business Insider exactly why. The Iraqis moved their mobile Scud launchers at night, laid them down during the day, and camouflaged the trucks against the desert landscape until they were nearly indistinguishable from altitude. A truck under desert netting at 15,000 ft looks like a truck parked in the desert.
Coalition aircraft couldn’t tell it from a 100 other trucks parked in a 100 other spots across western Iraq. The post-war Defense Intelligence Agency assessment delivered the verdict in the most unambiguous terms available. At war’s end, there had been no confirmed kills of mobile Scuds. Zero.
The coalition would claim by the end of the war to have destroyed over a 100 Scud launchers from the air. The postwar review couldn’t confirm a single confirmed mobile kill from aerial action. The solution was eyes on the ground. Ground level observation of Route One, the east west road the mobile launchers used for transit at night.
Grids passed to air assets within minutes of a launcher being spotted so a strike could be actioned while the vehicle was still in the open rather than buried under netting somewhere in the desert. Lieutenant General Sir Peter Deabilier, the British forces commander and former SAS officer, understood exactly what this required.
He pushed for SAS deployment to the Scud hunting role when the crisis became acute. B Squadron 22 SAS moved forward to Aljuf in northern Saudi Arabia. The mission was stated in the operational doctrine clearly. Road watch patrols inserted by helicopter watching the main supply routes from covert observation positions.
Reporting Scud launcher movements to air assets. Watch. Report. Target. The mission design was observation, not fighting. Three patrols, same night, same road. Three decisions about how to carry out the same mission. The equipment differential between Bravo 20 and Bravo 30 wasn’t an accident of logistics. It was a choice and its consequences were total.
Bravo 20 walked in without vehicles. Without vehicles, when Bravo 20 was compromised on the afternoon of January 24th, the patrol had one option. Move on foot through open desert toward the Syrian border. roughly 120 km to the northwest. In January, in the worst desert winter in living memory, a detail no intelligence briefing had provided.
The patrol was carrying roughly 15 stone of equipment per man. The temperature was dropping toward lethal. Bravo 30’s approach reflected a different calculation. Dez Powell, who served as patrol second in command and published the account with Damian Lewis in 2021, described the patrol’s philosophy through a phrase the regiment uses as operational guidance.
Any fool can be uncomfortable. The Land Rovers weren’t in good shape. Pal described in a 2022 Tactica magazine interview the scene at Alj before deployment. The patrol had been driving one of the vehicles around the air base when it shed a wheel. They continued on three wheels and drove to the American SEAL team’s position to borrow food and ammunition.
The SEAL teams, by Pal’s account, were blunt about what they saw. A British patrol that had arrived with inadequate kit, no food or ammunition to speak of in a vehicle that had just shed a wheel. Pal’s response captured the patrol’s attitude that turning up with nothing and getting the job done was in his view quite typically SAS. The vehicles weren’t luxury transport.
They were options. If the patrol was discovered with no cover to hide in, a vehicle can move at speed across open desert. Eight men on foot can’t cover ground fast enough to create tactical distance in flat terrain at night. A vehicle can haul equipment, water, and supplies that allow a patrol to remain operational for weeks rather than days.
Pal’s account describes the patrol’s most desperate moment. Compromised by Iraqi forces at some point during the operation, they tried to bug out in their two badly equipped Land Rovers and found that one wouldn’t start. They rigged a chain between the two vehicles, the working one dragging the broken one, and attempted to accelerate through snowcovered desert to create distance from the enemy.
Desperate, improvised and functional. The alternative, the Bravo 20 alternative, was to run on foot. The Osprey reference work, the SAS 1983 to 2014, confirms that the operational design for all three patrols was the same. Road watch teams inserted to watch the main supply routes from covert observation positions. The mission as designed was observation and reporting.
The difference between what Bravo 20 became and what Bravo 30 accomplished is a difference in how each patrol had answered one preparatory question. What happens when everything goes wrong? The compromise of Bravo 20 on 24th of January 1991 is one of the most documented single events in British military memoir history and also one of the most disputed.
In late afternoon, the patrol’s position was found. McNab’s account described a young shepherd who spotted them and reported to Iraqi authorities. Asher, a former territorial SAS soldier who traveled to the area in 2001 and interviewed the Bedawin family directly, found a materially different account. The family told him the patrol was spotted by the driver of a bulldozer working nearby, not a shepherd.
They were uncertain who the men were. They fired warning shots. The patrol returned fire and moved. Ash’s examination of the terrain found it inconsistent with McNab’s subsequent description of a firefight with Iraqi armored personnel carriers. When the Guardian covered Ash’s findings in 2002, he stated his conclusion directly.
The patrol was extraordinarily illequipped for its mission. They made basic mistakes. They took equipment to dig an observation post, but there was no cover to dig it in. Whether the trigger was a shepherd, a bulldozer driver, or some combination of both. What followed was documented across multiple accounts and partially confirmed by regimental records.
Sergeant Vince Phillips, the patrol’s own second in command, became separated from the group and died of exposure on the night of January 25th. Hypothermic, losing coherence, unable to navigate, dead somewhere in the dark north of the MSR. He was 36 years old. Robert Consilio, a former Royal Marine, was shot and killed on January 27th.
Steven Lane, formerly of Nine Parachute Squadron Royal Engineers, died of hypothermia that same morning after swimming the Euphrates. Malcolm McGau ran out of ammunition. The magazine in the weapon he was carrying had never been reloaded after the initial contact, a detail confirmed by his own subsequent interview with Asher, and was captured.
Ian Pring was captured. Mike Coburn, a New Zealander who fought a three-year legal battle in the New Zealand courts for the right to publish his own account, was shot in both the arm and ankle before being taken. McNab was eventually cornered alone, found hiding under a bridge, and delivered to Abu Grae.
Armstrong walked approximately 180 miles through freezing desert to the Syrian border, mostly at night, mostly alone. After his separation from Macau and the death of Phillips, he crossed the border and was taken in. He was the only member of the 8 to evade capture. Brigadier Andy Massie, the commander of SAS forces during the Gulf War, said in a BBC documentary on the war that tactical mistakes were made in the deployment of the soldiers.
He named the vehicle decision specifically. While the evasion was happening, while Philillips was dying in the dark, while McNab was being driven toward Baghdad, while Armstrong was covering miles of freezing open ground, Bravo 30 was still behind Iraqi lines, undetected, watching Route 1. The patrol had no idea of the full scale of what was happening to their sister patrol, but they were about to find out imperfectly and painfully through failing equipment in a desert blizzard.
The operational record of Bravo 30 from insertion through exfiltration is partially classified. The full debrief report isn’t in the public domain. What is established through Dez Powell’s own published account, his Tactica magazine interview, and the publisher materials for the 2021 book is this.
The patrol remained operational in western Iraq long after the Bravo 20 crisis had concluded. They observed Route One and called in targets. They encountered Iraqi forces at least once and every man returned to Saudi Arabia alive with the vehicles still running. The coalition command assessed the mission as a success when the patrol reported in a fact Powell described as a surprise because the failing communications equipment had led the men to believe their transmissions weren’t being received.
The most revealing passage pal gave in the Tactica interview wasn’t about an engagement or a target. It was about those days of failing communications, blizzard conditions, and the partial agonizing picture arriving from the Bravo 20 frequency. Two or three days, we knew guys had died. We knew guys had possibly been injured and guys were on the run, Powell said.
And it was frustrating for us because we weren’t in a position to do anything simply because we didn’t know where they were and we couldn’t send any messages by radio. Plus, it was snowing as well. So, we were going down with hypothermia and we knew that guys had possibly died as well. So, yes, those two or three evenings, they were very, very physical, but also mentally draining as well.
snow in western Iraq in January 1991. The pre-eployment intelligence had described weather equivalent to England in spring. What the patrol found was the worst desert winter in living memory. Snow drifts across the western scrublands, temperatures low enough that hypothermia was a medical reality for all three patrols, not just the one moving on foot.
The vehicle that had to be chain towed through the snow wasn’t a comic detail. It was the patrol working with what it had in conditions nobody had briefed them to expect. The patrol continued. Eight men sitting in observation on a snowcovered desert road, calling in what they saw on an intermittent radio link they believed wasn’t working.
receiving fragmented transmissions about the deaths of men they knew, unable to go to them, unable to change anything. Reviewers of Powell’s book, Writing on Publication, returned repeatedly to this quality of the account, its refusal to dramatize what didn’t need dramatizing, its straightforwardness about the weight of those evenings.
One reader who had read all three Bravo patrol accounts noted the contrast directly. 30’s mission lasted days and weeks despite atrocious weather, inaccurate intelligence, and inadequate kit. And when the patrol returned to Saudi Arabia, the higher command deemed it a success and wanted to send them back out almost immediately on another mission.
That last detail is the regimental assessment in one sentence. They wanted to send them back. When Powell and his patrol reached Saudi Arabia, the news came as genuine relief. We actually thought that our mission had possibly failed. Powell said. Only when we got back, we learned we had been successful. Not only did everyone get back safe, but we had been successful within our mission.
The patrol had been transmitting throughout. The transmissions had been received. The air strikes had been actioned. The Scud hunting mission as designed, observe, report, target, had been executed by one of the three patrols sent to execute it. Powell’s book, drawing on his direct testimony, describes a patrol that took its gallantry awards as standard regimental process.
The full citations for Operation Grandby Gallantry Awards are partially classified and some were published in the London Gazette under the operational pseudonyms the SAS uses rather than legal names. What can be said from the open record is that distinguished conduct medals, the second highest decoration available to an NCO in the British Army, second only to the Victoria Cross, were awarded to SAS patrol leaders for Gulf War operations.
The DCM’s citation category for Powell’s patrol, as described in published materials, is consistent with an assessment of significant operational contribution. McNab’s own book cover carries the notation of his DCM and MM. The British government rewarded the patrols it assessed as having done the job. Andy McNab left 22 SAS in 1993.
The book came out in October that year. The Goodreads listing for Bravo 20, which carries McNab’s author biography in full, describes the book as the highests selling war title of all time with over 1.7 million copies sold in the UK, published in 17 countries, and translated into 16 languages. The BBC’s Shaun Bean film aired on prime time in 1999.
By any commercial measure, McNab had not simply written a book. He had established a format. Academic analysis of the military memoir genre has confirmed what the sales figures suggest. Bravo 20 is critical in establishing a new set of conventions for the modern SAS memoir. There was no comparable predecessor.
McNab’s template, first person operator, classified adjacent disclosure, the psychological arc of a man under extreme duress, worked because the story had everything narrative structure requires. A mission gone catastrophically wrong, men dying and men enduring, capture, torture, eventual release.
a narrator who could write about all of it with pace and specificity and a voice that felt immediate. Chris Ryan’s The One That Got Away followed in 1995, covering the same patrol from the perspective of the man who had walked out. That book sold well, too. Within 3 years, the SAS memoir was a commercial genre with a recognizable formula and an established market.
The Ministry of Defense responded in 1996. The Daily Telegraph documented the Defense Council instruction in October of that year. Serving and future members of the SAS and SBS were required to sign a lifelong confidentiality contract forbidding disclosure of operational information without prior authorization. Those who refused would be returned to their original units.
McNab and Ryan were formerly banned from Sterling Lines in Heraford, banned from the base where they had trained, where their regiment was quartered, where their dead colleagues were commemorated. The regimental association rewrote its membership terms to exclude anyone who had received an exclusion order. Soldiers who had been published or who were suspected of having been sources for journalists were blacklisted.
Peter Ratcliffe’s Eye of the Storm appeared in 2000, contradicting McNab’s account on the vehicle decision and on the estimated Iraqi casualty figures. Ratcliffe wrote plainly that McNab’s claimed figure of 250 Iraqi casualties had never appeared in any regimental debrief. Michael Asher went to Iraq in 2001, interviewed the Bedawin family and returned with the real Bravo 20 in 2002.
Channel 4 made a documentary on the same material. Mike Coburn fought his legal battle and won. Each published account added material to the record, refined or contradicted the previous version, and extended the public life of the Bravo 20 story. By the time the NDAs were in force, the publishing wave had already happened.
The commercial template was established, the market existed. And the patrol that had completed its mission, without incident, without capture, without deaths, without a single scene that generated the kind of dramatic necessity a publisher could build a book around, was still saying nothing. Dez Powell said nothing because he was still in the regiment until the late 1990s.
He said nothing because the NDA culture inside the SAS made silence the default. He said nothing because, as he described in his 2022 Tactica interview, he simply hadn’t thought of the story as something the public needed to hear. The idea of telling it came through an introduction. A colleague named Paul Hughes mentioned Bravo 30 to Damian Lewis, who had made his career writing SAS history books and had not known until that conversation that there were two Bravo patrols besides 20.
I’d always known of the Bravo 20 patrol, Lewis said at the Tactica interview. I never knew there were two other Bravo B Squadron patrols, Bravo 1 and Bravo 3. Just that was amazing. It made the story stand out. Powell agreed to the book. Lewis asked him how the collaboration came about and Powell described it with characteristic plainness.
A guy named Paul Hughes introduced Damian and me. He was talking to me one day in his garden and he asked me, “What have you been involved in?” I only just managed to mention Bravo 30 and I didn’t even tell him the story. I just mentioned it. 30 years of operational silence ended in a garden conversation in which Powell mentioned the name of the patrol before changing the subject.
SAS Bravo 30, the gripping true story was published on October 28th, 2021 by Quirkus. The name on the cover was Dez Powell with Damen Lewis as co-author. Pal’s author biography as confirmed in the publisher materials and in the review published on release day by Gen Med’s book reviews gave his background in detail.
a former PT instructor in one parah who became the unarmed combat and fitness instructor for B squadron who pioneered Halo and Haro covert airborne insertion techniques who had served in Somalia who had spent 20 years at the heart of B squadron’s counterterrorism and special projects work. His role in Bravo 30 was second in command.
The patrol commander, whose name hasn’t surfaced in any available open-source account connected to the mission, remains unidentified in the public record. The Goodreads rating for the book from 1,256 readers is 4.17 out of five. The reviews are consistent in a way that is worth noting.
One reader described the book’s defining quality as its restraint. Powell doesn’t shout. He doesn’t posture. He simply lays out events as he experienced them with clarity and quiet authority. Another who had read all three Bravo patrol accounts across multiple books specified the factual discrepancy the book corrects.
A detail in Chris Ryan’s published account suggested Bravo 30 had almost immediately assessed the terrain as too dangerous and turned back for the Saudi border within 2 days. The full POW account establishes the mission lasted not 2 days but weeks. taking out targets, observing Route One, calling in strikes on transmissions the patrol believed were failing, and eventually returning to a headquarters that was surprised and gratified by the success.
Compare Bravo 20’s Goodreads profile, 4.13 rating, 16,416 ratings. The gap in readership, roughly 13 times more reviews for the failed patrols book, isn’t a gap in quality or audience interest. It’s a 30-year head start and 17 countries of distribution. It’s what happens when one patrol publishes in 1993 and the other doesn’t publish until 2021.
The book reportedly reached number two on the Sunday Times hardback non-fiction bestseller list in its first weeks. The number one that autumn based on Amazon’s listing, which carries the Sunday Times number one designation on the cover, was Jeremy Clarkson’s Didley Squat, a memoir about learning to run a farm in the Cotsworlds.
Whether the chart positions aligned in the specific week Bravo 30 debuted hasn’t been independently confirmed from the Sunday Times’s archived lists, but the structural fact is documented. Clarkson’s Farm Book was a number one Sunday Times bestseller in autumn 2021, and Powell’s patrol history was in the top tier of the same chart at the same time.
The patrol that spent weeks in the Iraqi desert calling in scud strikes on failing communications was selling fewer copies in Britain than a television presenter’s account of arguing with a tractor. There is somewhere in that comparison the entire argument of this video made concrete. The National Army Museum held a launch event for the book and recorded Dez Powell in conversation.
The YouTube footage accumulated over 400,000 views, a figure that confirms what should have been obvious from the moment the book appeared. The audience for this story existed. It had always existed. The story of the SAS patrol that worked, that came home, that decorated itself and said nothing for three decades wasn’t a niche interest for military specialists.
It was a mainstream story with mainstream demand that had simply never been told at scale because the man who could tell it had spent three decades not telling it. 400,000 views on a single National Army Museum YouTube video from a channel with a small general subscriber base for footage of an SAS veteran doing a book event. The demand signal is unambiguous.
The patrol was unknown. Not because the public didn’t want to know about it, but because the commercial machinery that creates public knowledge of military operations had been built around the patrol’s failure, not its success. the regimental structure that produced Bravo 30, the selection process, the doctrine, the institutional emphasis on observation over engagement, the SAS principle that a patrol which isn’t found is a patrol that can complete its mission is precisely what the commercial structure of the military memoir
industry couldn’t package. Memoirs sell on drama. Drama requires failure, capture, survival, and endurance under juress. A patrol that hid well, watched carefully, called in what it saw, and walked home isn’t dramatically insufficient. Powell’s book demonstrates that clearly. But it’s structurally harder to sell in 1993 when the market is new and the public’s appetite is primed for the most extreme version of the story.
The most extreme version was Bravo 20. The argument here isn’t that McNab fabricated a story or claimed unearned distinction. Three men died on that mission. That is documented. Four were tortured in Abu Grae. That is documented. The physical and psychological endurance displayed by the members of Bravo 20 in the worst possible operational circumstances was real.
The distinguished conduct medal McNab received is the second highest decoration available to an NCO in the British Army. None of that is disputed. What is also documented, Ratcliffe wrote that McNab was advised to take vehicles and declined. Asher went to Iraq and found accounts that differed from McNabs in specific verifiable respects. Brigadier Massie said publicly that tactical mistakes were made in the deployment.
The patrol was compromised within 48 hours of insertion. Three men died, four were captured. The mission as designed, covert road watch observation, was never executed. Powell’s patrol executed the mission as designed. Eight men came home. The gallantry awards were processed. The debrief report was filed, classified, and archived. Then Powell declined every interview request for 30 years.
When the Bravo 20 public history accumulated through McNab, Ryan, Ratcliffe, Asher, and Coburn, each book adding or contradicting something in the previous versions, each adding another layer to the public story. Powell was absent from it entirely. Not because the story wasn’t his to tell, but because telling it wasn’t what the regiment did and wasn’t apparently what he wanted to do.
In 2021, when Damian Lewis was sitting in Paul Hughes’s garden and heard the name Bravo 30 for the first time, something that had been in the classified record for 30 years began its movement toward the public record. Powell agreed to the book. He appeared at events. He gave the Tactica interview. He answered questions about hypothermia and failing radios and snow in a desert where the intelligence briefings had promised spring conditions.
He described the gratification of learning on return to Saudi Arabia that the transmissions had been received, that the mission had worked, that everyone was alive. And then when a journalist asked him to characterize the patrol and what it had meant, he gave one written statement. The statement reads in full.
It was a job. We did it. Most of us are still here. Not all. Most eight went in. 8 came home. Powell knew saying that that Bravo 20 couldn’t say the same thing. Phillips, Consilio, Lane. Three names on a regimental role of honor that the public associated entirely with a patrol that had failed from a mission that the British public believed it understood because one of its survivors had written the best-selling British military book of the century.
The gap between that statement and 1.7 million copies sold in the UK alone, between it was a job and a prime time BBC film, isn’t a gap in what the two patrols did. It’s a gap in what the two patrols wrote down afterwards and when. Britain’s public memory of the SAS in the Gulf War was built on the patrol that went catastrophically wrong.
Because the patrol that went wrong produced the account that reached the market first in the most commercially viable form at the moment the market was being created. The patrol that completed its mission closed its file in 1991 and declined to open it for 30 years. The patrol the British public knows isn’t by the metrics the regiment uses the better patrol.
The patrol the British public has never heard of. Eight men, vehicles, covert observation positions, targets called in, all home, said nothing. Is Dez Powell knows this. He appears from everything he has said publicly to regard it as a fact of limited importance. The mission was accomplished. The men came home. The record, classified or otherwise, says what it says.
The British public’s awareness of that record is in his evident view a secondary consideration at best. That is finally the most quietly extraordinary thing about Bravo 30. The patrol that completed the mission remained for 30 years content to be the patrol the public hadn’t heard about. In the context of the SAS publishing industry that grew up around the failure of the patrol the public did hear about that restraint is itself the story. Subscribe for more histories.