Bravo Two-Zero

'We put the SAS deep into enemy territory...they let us know what was going on out there.

They were our eyes.' General H Norman Schwarzkopf, Supreme Commander Allied Forces, February 1991 On the night of 22 January 1991, eight members of the SAS regiment boarded a helicopter that was to infiltrate them deep behind enemy lines.

Their mission, under the command of Sergeant Andy McNab, was to sever the underground communication link between Baghdad and north-west Iraq, and to seek and destroy mobile Scud launchers before Israel was provoked into entering the war.

Their call-sign Bravo Two Zero. They patrolled across flat desert to reach their objective and find a hiding place before first light.

Within days, their location was compromised. The Iraqis attacked and after a fierce firefight the patrol was forced to escape.

In the desperate days that followed, though stricken by hypothermia and other injuries, the patrol lost seven men.

Only one escaped. But for Andy McNab and the other survivors, however, the worst ordeals were yet to come. This story is a chronicle of superhuman courage, endurance and dark humour in the face of overwhelming odds. Bravo Two Zero is already part of SAS legend and here, Andy McNab himself relates the story which will surely become a classic of war history.