Soldiers caught up in the dirtiest war

The Gulf War lasted 100 hours. That's how long the soldiers of the 11 Armoured Workshops and other multi-national ground troops assembled for the fight against Saddam pushed on through the desert.

It was a flat, barren landscape, littered with burned-out and abandoned vehicles. The only 'road' was made by the tracks of the armoured vehicles of the Royal Scots ahead.

Occasionally they would come under fire from isolated pockets of Iraqi soldiers, but most Iraqis they met were a sorry sight, injured, half-starving and desperate to surrender.

"There were thousands of soldiers, coming up to you saying 'please, no shoot, no shoot, surrender! Surrender!'" recalls Terry Walker. "They were kids and old men, with gunshot wounds or limbs hanging off, hardly fed, with no food, no water. Some of them were just in rags. You felt sorry for them. You were giving them food and water. They didn't have anything."

This was the reality of the Gulf War. For weeks, ever since January 17, 1991, the Iraqi troops had been pounded from the air. Just how effective the bombardment had been was revealed when ground forces moved in across the Iraqi border from Saudi Arabia at the end of February. "There were bodies scattered all over the place," says Terry.

Terry, who now lives at Wheldrake, was a Lance Corporal with the 11 Armoured Workshops, which was in the first wave of the attack just behind the front-line troops. "We were the main support for the armoured divisions, to keep the armoured vehicles running," he says.

Nothing about that war was like anything the Falklands veteran with 15 years in the Army had experienced.

Shortly after crossing into Iraq by bulldozing through a giant sand wall, the troops turned east and crossed into Kuwait, pushing on to within 50 kilometres of Kuwait City.

Within four days the war was over as Iraqi resistance collapsed. It was a surreal war typified by the story of two Iraqi brigadiers the British troops captured as they pushed on through the desert.

"One of them had trained at Sandhurst, and spoke very good English," Terry says. "We asked them how long they had been there, and they said since the end of the war with Iran."

What surprised the British troops even more was that the Iraqis had no idea it was the British they were fighting. "They said 'What are the Israelis doing here?'" he recalls. "Our equipment was virtually the same as the Israelis."

It may have been surreal - but it was brutal and hideous, too. After 100 hours, with the war suddenly over, the 11 Armoured Workshops stopped just short of the Basrah Road - the 'Highway of Death'.

For a kilometre or more, the road was choked, Terry says - with burned and mangled vehicles and bodies, the legacy of a bombing run.

"I have never seen anything like it in my life," he says. "The stench was unreal. Basically, they British, American and other coalition bombers slaughtered them."

It was the 11 Armoured Workshops' job to clear the road. Long afterwards, when he got back to Army HQ in Germany, he found a captured Iraqi vehicle and climbed into the back. The smell brought back memories of that time clearing the Highway of Death. "It smelled of death," he says. "Once that is in your nostrils..."

Perhaps the most horrifying aspect of the Gulf War, however, was not the numbers of Iraqis killed by coalition troops, but the horrifying possibility that Saddam may have used chemical weapons. The Gulf War was the dirtiest of all modern wars.

Terry has no doubt that chemical weapons were used. The British and other troops fought the war wearing 'NBC' suits - nuclear, biological and chemical suits - designed to protect them from the fallout of a 'dirty' war.

They also had alarm systems to warn them of nerve agents in the air. As they pushed on through the desert, the alarms were going off all the time.

"In the end we were told to ignore it. They said it was just a false alarm," Terry says. But if they were false alarms, what could explain the dead Iraqi bodies found with not a single mark on them? "They had just died where they fell," he says. "Even the flies on the bodies were dead."

He and other soldiers are convinced Saddam used chemical weapons - but he says the British Government has always "covered it up".

It wasn't all they tried to cover up, he maintains. Officially, Terry says, only four British soldiers died in the first Gulf War. But since then, according to the National Gulf Veterans and Families Association (NGVFA) - 560 Gulf War veterans have died and a further 5,410 have, like Terry, been taken ill with what he and other veterans like him insist is Gulf War Syndrome

Terry - whose book about the war, 'The Mother Of All Battles', he expects to have published soon - was invalided out of the Army in November 1992, suffering from mood swings, swelling joints, bowel problems and blinding headaches. He has been unable to work since, his marriage to first wife Linda ended in divorce, and while now happily married to Nikki he is, at 43, forced to live on an army pension.

He says his problems may have been caused by vaccinations and tablets he and other soldiers were put on before and during their service in the Gulf.

It may well have been done, he accepts, for honourable reasons - to protect troops from the effects of chemical and possibly even biological weapons, such as anthrax. But he already felt ill during the push through the desert - and there are worrying signs, he says, that British soldiers now being vaccinated in preparation for a second Gulf War are also falling ill.

Terry is no supporter of Saddam. "Saddam cannot do what he's doing," he says. "His government signed an agreement in 1991 that he would disarm, and he has not done that." Push him hard enough and he admits reluctantly that he would support a second war against the Iraqi dictator, providing it is fought with full UN approval.

But the costs are going to be high, he warns - and his heart goes out to the soldiers who will fight it, and to their families. A second war will be every bit as dirty as the first, he believes - and this time, British and American troops will be fighting, not in the desert against demoralised troops, but in Baghdad itself, against soldiers determined to defend their homeland. "They are ready for a fight, and it is going to be in the cities this time," he says. "There are going to be boys coming back in body bags.

"If the UN approves it, I would support a war. But I've been in that situation and I feel for the lads going out there. And for their families. The families must be going through murder."

Updated: 12:32 Tuesday, January 21, 2003