44 The Times Magazineeneath the smoke-hazed starlight
of the desert night a young tank
captain waited for his moment of
war. He was a romantic man and
it was his first conflict. Now, on
the eve of battle, as the trails of
rockets arced steeply skywards
from launch positions behind him
and the crash of artillery rumbled
through the darkness, the captain
hoped not only that he would see combat but
that he would prove himself in action, and
perhaps find glory too.
Thousands of other British soldiers waited
in the sands that February night in 1991. Their
orders had been issued and some were already
in action; others were readying themselves for
the moment at which they too would move
from the Saudi Arabian desert and advance
into southern Iraq as part of Operation Desert
Sabre. Saddam Hussein’s forces had invaded
Kuwait six months earlier. The ground war to
eject them had just begun.
As they waited to move, many soldiers
were wondering if Saddam would use chemical
weapons to counter the coalition advance.
Cognisant of the Iraqi army’s previous use of
poison gas against Iranian troops and Kurds,
the captain and his men had already been
injected with a soup of vaccines to boost their
immunity against biological weaponry, and
they took daily doses of tablets designed to
blunt the effects of nerve gas. So prepared, the
captain waited for action with a mixture of
apprehension, curiosity and excitement.
Yet when war found him that night, it was
not as he expected. Before his unit had even
left its position, Iraqi Scud missiles were fired
at coalition forces, triggering the gas alerts
among the desert troops. For the first time
since 1918 the cry of “gas, gas, gas” went up
against the sound of shellfire as British soldiers
fumbled for real to don their respirators.
No sooner had the captain pulled on his
gas mask than the valves malfunctioned,
stopping the flow of air through the canister.
He could not breathe. Eyes popping and face
reddening, suffocating but too afraid to take
off the mask for fear of being gassed, he
stumbled from his position back to a Land
Rover, clambering inside and driving off until
he felt far enough away from any gas cloud to
pull off the respirator and suck in gulps of air.
He found himself weeping with relief.
Adding to the ignominy, it soon transpired
that it was a false alarm: there was no gas
attack that night. His unit pushed forward into
Iraq. When finally he did come under fire it
was not from the enemy but from one of his
own unit’s armoured vehicles, which was lost
and fired 15 rounds of heavy machinegun fire
into his turret, thinking it was an Iraqi vehicle.
In this way, spooked by a gas alert, half
suffocated by a faulty respirator and firedupon by his own forces, Captain Hamish de
Bretton-Gordon found war. Far from glorious,
the experience seemed slightly shameful.Twenty-nine years later, the young captain
is a pivotal figure in the fight against the
proliferation and use of chemical weapons.
De Bretton-Gordon’s work inside Syria has
not only earned widespread admiration but
saved many lives too, by directly obstructing
the ability of the Syrian regime to gas its
subjects with the ease it would choose. He
has trained doctors and medics inside Syria
to identify and treat chemical casualties;
advised the UK government at the highest
level on chemical and biological weapon use- including over the novichok poisonings
in Salisbury; and he has regularly and
heatedly clashed with propagandists in
efforts to establish fact within the febrile
miasma of claim and counter-claim that
typifies warfare in the age of social media.
It may well be, too, that Syria’s President
Assad, a victor in war, is one day brought
to account for crimes against humanity
on the back of evidence removed from gas
attack sites by doctors trained by de Bretton-
Gordon: evidence videoed at every step of
the process to preserve its integrity from the
moment samples of soil, rubble, blood and
tissue are extracted from chemical strike
locations; sealed in triple-layer bags and
refrigerated in cooling units; then smuggled
out along clandestine routes and taken
abroad for analysis.
B
“After so many failures and missed
opportunities, and so much bloodshed, justice
is the one thing we might still be able to give
Syrians,” he says.
That the start of a long career so entwined
with chemical and biological warfare began
so inauspiciously in the desert war of ’91 is an
irony de Bretton-Gordon acknowledges. He is
refreshingly self-effacing for a man who spent
23 years in the army.
“It was a little bit of failure,” he says of that
debut war experience. “This was the first bit
of action – and I was a romantic soldier. You
want to be winning the MC [Military Cross]
and all the rest of it, and instead I was left
thinking, ‘Bloody hell, first sign of gunfire and
you are running for the hills – this is not a
very auspicious start.’ ”
The fear of chemical weapons, of dying
at the hand of something unseen, drowning
in froth, lungs spuming, is dread itself. That
same night, lying in a shell scrape in the sand,
a 24-year-old infantry lieutenant – his unit
similarly filled with a cocktail of bio-warfare
inoculations and pills – also wondered if the
gas alarm really meant the start of a chemical
attack. He sat up and slammed on his gas
mask. I recall the details of that night vividly.
The lieutenant was me.
Although I had never met de Bretton-
Gordon in person until last month, we have
corresponded and spoken many times over
the past eight years: his expertise in Syria’s
chemical war keeps me calling back.
PREVIOUS SPREAD: ERBIN NEWS/NURPHOTO/GETTY IMAGES. THIS SPREAD: TOM JACKSON, HALIL EL-ABDULLAH/ANADOLU AGENCY/GETTY IMAGES Since the first confirmed chemical attacks
‘OUR FAILURE TO
REMOVE ASSAD
GAVE HIM THE
GREEN LIGHT TO
USE CHEMICAL
WEAPONS’
De Bretton-Gordon at home