Special Forces Operator: Serving with the SAS and MRF

By Robert W. Brown

It is not just another war story: it is abrasive and defiantly politically incorrect. It has politics, secret agents and sex (but not so much); and the conspiracy of the globalist world order.

The killing part is the easy bit; the tricky part is finding the right people to kill.

Rob was a Special Forces operator with some of the world finest regiments and served in four national armies over a career that has spanned forty years and continues today. In 1965 he earned the converted Green Beret as a member of 2 Commando Australia. He left in 1968 to Southeast Asia. Finding work of a military nature in Laos, (in the war that never was). The end of the contract found him in England where he joined the British Parachute Regiment and completed three tours in Northern Ireland at the height of the troubles, taking part in Operation Demetrius. On his last tour, he was detached from his battalion and worked covert operations with a little-known group called the MRF (Military Reaction Force).

1974 saw Rob in Rhodesia as a member of the internationally acclaimed C Squadron SAS, where he was wounded on operations twice. This was a turning point in Rob’s life as he surrendered to Christ becoming a Christian. He was to carry on as an operator, but now with a biblical world view. Rob was recruited in 1980 by the South African Defense Force and was a member of 6 Reconnaissance Commando Special Forces and later became an operative with what was commonly called ‘the funnies’ or CSI Chief of Staff Intelligence.

From 1996 to 2007 Rob was in South Sudan and Iraq, receiving a letter of commendation from the United States Army. Still active today, Rob specializes in close protection and tactical security training for civilian personnel.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Pen and Sword
• Release date: Mar 23, 2021
• ISBN: 9781526785503

Robert W. Brown

Born in 1947 to a family that was considered wealthy. Through an unforeseen change of circumstances, he was at an early age thrust into the grey, post-war slums of London, the author’s family moved to Southern Rhodesia in the mid-1950s before migrating to Australia. Rob joins the Australian Special Forces at a young age, and over the next decades sees service, and combat, for several different masters first in Laos (in the war that never was), then Northern Ireland, Rhodesia, and South Africa, later he would work as a contract soldier in Iraq and South Sudan. Since 2010, he has been a security consultant and registered CPO Close Protection Operator (Bodyguard).

Book preview

Chapter 1

Beginnings

We are the Pilgrims, master; we shall go

Always a little further: it may be

Beyond the last blue mountain barred with snow,

Across that angry or that glimmering sea,

White on a throne or guarded in a cave

There lives a prophet who can

Understand why men were born: but surely we are brave

Who take the Golden Road to Samarkand

James Elroy Flecker, ‘The Golden Journey to Samarkand’

Ithink one could safely make the statement that I come from a military background. This utterance is not to imply that I live in a rambling house on a vast estate overlooking the shores of some loch surrounded by Highland heather, weather-beaten suits of armour and crusty old paintings of famous generals and war heroes. The best I could do for you in that regard would be to dredge up a couple of old former soldiers, these being my two grandfathers, now long dead. On my mother’s side, Bryant or O’Bryant and on my father’s Joe Brown. My grandfather on my mother’s side was an Irish Catholic.

I think he dropped the O because of the troubles in Ireland, before joining the Guards. Yes, I have Fenian blood in my veins. He served in the Guards, first in the Anglo-Boer War and later on the Western Front. He was much disturbed when they would not let him have another go at ‘Jerry’ in the 1939–1945 war, or the ‘rematch’ as he put it. An unrepentant alcoholic and violent man when possessed with the ‘demon drink’, he would fight off two or three bobbies at a time. His other remarkable achievement was he drank the family into a Catholic poorhouse and orphanage. I have this information on proper authority, having had endless lectures about this particular demon from my mother, one of Bryant’s many daughters.

I recall only ever meeting him once when he told me he possessed a pistol taken off a dead German soldier. Paddy, I will call him that as it’s an acceptable name, I not knowing his first name. I think it is also less abrasive than calling grandfather by his surname. Paddy also disclosed having been shot in the back and left for dead in a tent; fortunately, someone saw movement and he was revived and lived. He had the luck of the Irish. Why an old man would tell such a story to a 5-year-old, I don’t know. This meeting took place before my younger sister was born and she is six years my junior. This meeting resonated within my little head as I still remember it to this day.

Old Joe Brown took the Queen’s Shilling. Being a Scot, he served in the Black Watch, also seeing action in the South African War and later the First World War. Yes, I also have Scottish blood coursing through my veins. Joe sired thirteen children. After the army, he became a rag-and-bone man, calling out in an incomprehensible and unclear singsong tone that only the initiated could understand, collecting old items of scrap or clothing that he would then sell on. He was also a cobbler; in fact, he was almost straight out of Steptoe and Son.

When funds allowed, he would drink copious amounts of rum and smoked twist tobacco, a dark tar-like substance that he cut with a knife before stuffing it into a pipe. He loved his horse, dogs and cart in that order, more than his thirteen children. He had more dogs than I could count. He died at 93 years of age or thereabouts, we think, as no one knew when he was born.

The interaction I had with either side was of short duration, and to say we were not a close family would be an understatement. I don’t know the names of my mother’s parents and only know that one grandfather was Irish and a thoroughly objectionable one when drunk, this being most of the time. So, my mother had a dislike of alcohol. Christmas was the exception with the occasional eggnog, possibly why only one visit took place with O’Bryant – the one meeting as already mentioned. I can recall Old Joe, father’s father, but also my Grandmother Florence or Flo as everyone called her. She used to cuddle me, and I would disappear into her enormous bulk: Flo was a sizeable, cuddly woman. She had only one tooth that I could see, at the front of her mouth. Visits to them and reciprocal visits were few, but more than the one visit to the O’Bryants.

The only time I can recall my grandparents from my father’s side coming to London was at Christmas. One Christmas, that’s it. Travel from Derby to London in those days was an achievement. There were no highways as we know them today. The fastest means of transport would have been by train. At that time British Rail had been nationalized, and they were closing down many lines. I do recall an occasional visit to them. I spent hours playing with and stroking Old Joe’s dogs, not having a dog of my own at that early age. Possibly the friendliest of the lot was a dirty old cocker spaniel, the rest being aloof or not used to little people. Old Joe would tell me to ‘Watch that ’en’ meaning a particular dog did not like children, with never a suggestion that the dog should move out of my way. If one snapped at me, he’d say in his broad accent, ‘I told thee, leave dogs be.’ His workshop was full of exciting junk that I was never allowed to return home with, as it was ‘just old rubbish’ but probably worth a fortune today. When he repaired shoes, or whatever task he was undertaking, he always had his tongue out, a habit that my father also had. What does one know about anyone after only a few brief visits?

My father, Alf Brown, was in the Royal Air Force in the Second World War and became an air gunner (Tail-end Charlie) flying ‘Wimpys’ – Wellington bombers. The air force never had any need for him to ride around on horseback. So there was little chance of him having his portrait painted straddling a horse. I believe being an air gunner at the rear end of a plane was a somewhat hazardous occupation in wartime: not giving them time to become famous, let alone time to have portraits painted or become a war hero, before being shot down or up or sent home gibbering, incomprehensible idiots. One should read Catch 22 for an apt description of bomber crews.

The statement that I come from a military background does not rely on some vague, slender link to my grandfathers or my father. I have served in four regular units, as an active shoot-’em-up trigger-puller. When I mention four armies, it sounds as if I am incapable of keeping a job. Soldiering was my chosen profession. So, I am a professional Special Forces Operator, or soldier. I have been in eight theatres of conflict. Knowing this, one would think I have had or been given the opportunity to march in some jolly excellent victory parades. However, this is not so; I have not, not one.

Of course, this would imply that I have never been on the winning side. This is true and I hasten to add this is not my fault. I do think the blame must be laid squarely at the feet of politicians and generals. I did the best I could, having done a lot of shooting. One would assume not enough, as when the other side got to do the victory parades, there appeared to be a lot of them left. Plus, I never was a soldier of vital importance anyway. So I never got to make any world-shattering decisions on the stage of history. If my two grandfathers fought in the Anglo-Boer War and the world’s bloodiest conflict, the Great War, one could assume that they were slow learners. Is this a reflection on me or my ability to understand dangerous situations and remove myself from them to a place of sanctuary and safety? It has to be a DNA thing.

I think my family was dysfunctional; never the less, mother always kept me clean, watered and fed – like the horses in the portraits that would have been painted had any one of us become famous. My father was a quiet man and did not engage me in conversation, or maybe he just didn’t like me: why would you talk to someone you don’t like? Some of the things I remember about my father: he was never a drinker. How could he be, having married one of O Bryant’s daughters? He was married to the same woman, my mother, until the day he died, aged 93 and never once lifted his hand to her in all that time, although many doors did get slammed. I can also recall on specific dates he would raise a glass and with a middle-distance stare toast absent friends. My mother would always respond with, ‘That’s enough of that; we don’t want any of that here.’ Being young, I had no idea what that was all about and why we did not want it. I would only learn later in life what this meant. I never recall him being out of work. That counts for something in my way of reckoning. Alf was married to my mother until the day he died; that does not mean that she was the only wife. No, Alf was a lad in his younger days. I don’t have a clue about the first wife, who she was, where she came from or where she went. For that historical stuff one has to have a family that eats together and communicates well.

I do know he had three children from his first wife, and for a time Eddy and the two girls Sheryl and Jenny came to stay with us, then disappeared much like their mother must have, and I had no idea where they went. The memories of this early part of my life are vague; they would be – I was only 3 years old. The bits I have pieced together are from when I met Jenny twenty years later when on leave from the Parachute Regiment. Eddy went into the British Army for a time; there was still national service in his younger days. I think he served in Suez or Cyprus – some crisis or other that the British always appeared to be having in the fifties and early sixties. They still do until they become too expensive to finance. Eddy was successful after he left the army, although I never really learned what he did.

My sister Jenny … well, Jenny was just Jenny, a lovely person. I found her by accident or by one of those unexplainable coincidences that sometimes takes place in our lives. I was in the 2nd Battalion, The British Parachute Regiment at the time. It was known as a Jock battalion because of the high number of Scots in the ranks. However, one of the lads was from London, a proper Cockney. I just mentioned I had family someplace in London and as the conversation unfolded, he listened and became more and more interested in what I was saying and the description I was giving. He then just blurted out, ‘I know them!’ He did too, so on our next leave he took me to her front door. I have pleasant memories and listened to many entertaining stories from her. I learned a lot, about skeletons. Jenny had lived in the same suburb in London and the same flat for years.

My side of the family has had a transient life; the chances of finding any of us would have been slim. Then maybe that was the object of the exercise. The reality is I was never to stay in any one home or country for more than two years until later in life and similarly at any one school. In the nine or ten years of schooling I had, I was in and out of nine different schools. The longest I stayed at any one school was at a private school that I had to leave when my father lost his business. The family moved from what I always thought of as the big house where I had spent my formative years before we became transient, much like Bedouins.

The 1950s was the first new decade after the Second World War and most of the world breathed a collective sigh of relief. Breathing in 1952 was difficult, as thousands who had survived the war died in the London smog of that year. The early 1950s, apart from the London smog, was a time of street parties held in celebration of Princess Elizabeth’s coronation. All across Britain people had street parties and fancy-dress competitions, flags and bunting being put up all over the place. They forgot that only a short while ago, in living memory, they had twice put up the same flags and bunting to send fathers, husbands and sons off to war.

It was in the late fifties and early sixties the world was to witness a mass movement of people migrating to greener pastures. Men and women had come home from the Second World War to rebuild, men to marry widows who had lost husbands and widows to marry men who had survived. Those who did return changed forever. For the second time in twenty-two years young men served King and Country to return if God willed it, and like their fathers, many of them left as mere boys to return as cynical old men. Lives changed and homes were destroyed. Many returned to no family at all. Wives and mothers had evacuated their children never to reclaim them; husbands went off to war and survived but never returned, becoming part of this mass flux of people throughout the world. By the fifties, families had been reformed and established. More than a few saw no future for their children in the country they had fought for and became part of this wandering horde – many unable to live under the shadow of the Bomb and the threat of another war, this time, nuclear. Real or imagined, they just wanted to get away, and the war children who were now in their teens and twenties wondered what the big deal was all about; they were looking for new, freer life, whatever that was meant to mean. It always surprised me how England had an empire. Other than missionaries, traders, soldiers and of course convicts, it would appear everyone in England just wanted to stay at home. The opportunity for worldwide travel would increase for John Ploughboy with the advent of the Great War.

Finding Jenny who had lived in one place forever was not too complicated. She lived in a high-rise flat, as did most of London (other than the Queen who has a large garden), and of course, I did know her name – Jenny’s name, not the Queen’s. I was clueless where this suburb was in London, a city teeming with people.

I recall a story told me by Jenny as we sat and talked. My mother was somewhat set in her ways. When out shopping one day she came across Sheryl walking up the street with an American member of the US armed forces. Being just after the Second World War, Europe had an oversupply of American soldiers waiting to be sent back home. My mother sprang into action, wielding her shopping bag much like a medieval weapon of war. Then, with the two of them within striking distance, she pounced as the two young hand-holders broke and ran, the GI in one direction and Sheryl in the other with my mother in pursuit, determined to brain this shameful, wanton teenager into the next world. From the telling of the story, I could imagine a determination to kill. The situation was aggravated by the fact the GI was black.

Sheryl later married a US sailor; apparently, she liked men in uniform (this one was white I think; his named was Westmorland something or other). Of these three siblings or half-siblings, I do have some memories.

From what I learned from Jenny and the little I can recall of my early years, my mother could be difficult. I was fascinated. I had found my English relatives, the missing part of my family. Jenny’s stories had me absorbed as she told how they would go out on to Black Heath Common to watch the dogfights between the RAF Spits and the German Luftwaffe. Through their young eyes, the Battle of Britain must have been quite exciting even if all they could see were vapour trails and aircraft that looked like swallows. Jenny would laugh, saying ‘Silly little buggers’ then tell me how they used to put up their umbrellas to stop the shrapnel from falling on them.

At times, in my ignorance, I mistook the older men I worked with, including my father, as grumpy uncommunicative, miserable old sods. Character traits, which may have been the results of night after night sitting in the back of an aeroplane, wondering if you would get back for breakfast. Alternatively, sitting in a hole in the ground waiting for what? They’re last-gasp, or that of a close cobber torn to bits by razor-sharp shards of metal, flying at an unimaginable speed. Men, laughing and reminiscing about some personal private joke, only they who share death can understand, gone now, gone forever. These men of my grandfathers’ and father’s generation, always amazed me. No personal reality tell-all TV shows revealing their suffering. I do recall Alf was a little disappointed that Bomber Command was never given a medal for their efforts in the war. He was pretty damning about a man called Winston. Bomber Command lost 57,000 killed out of 125,000 aircrew, that’s a 46 per cent casualty rate. Include the wounded and POWs and it came to over 60 per cent casualty rate. Yes, most certainly ‘to absent friends’. Alf had a right to be pissed with Winston. Alf before the war was a builder, an expert builder, City and Guilds no less. Strangely, he was not able to stay out of the war. I think he could have as builders were classed as essential services. Alternatively, maybe he enlisted before everyone started to drop bombs and blow up things, so builders were not needed then but air gunners were. At the end of the war, builders were most certainly needed. When Alf came out of the Royal Air Force, he started a profitable building company. All over Britain, massive rebuilding was needed. I can still remember the bomb sites in my childhood, and the war had been over six years. Food rationing only ended some years later, not that it had any impact on one as young as me. My father was a good builder and businessman, so the construction company of A.E. Brown & Sons took off like a homesick angel.

I had one sibling left after the other three had mysteriously disappeared – that was Keith. He was eighteen months older than me. Keith and I were fortunate enough to grow up in a large house because of Alf ’s building business doing well. Maybe everything looked big as I was so small. The term ‘an agreeable early childhood’ would be an apt description of my life, thanks to the success of the construction company. I should point out some credit must go to Adolf and the Luftwaffe for the time and effort they put in trying to level large parts of London. The house I called home consisted of four floors, including a basement where the offices were and an attic right at the top. Alf had converted the attic into a pigeon loft. He may have driven a Mark IV Jaguar and had the trappings of wealth, but Alf was still just a lad from Derby and a pigeon fancier at that. He raced them. Pigeons always had a distinctive smell. I can even recall that smell today when not smelling cordite.

Vague memories, before my sister was born. I remember one of my father’s labourers, indeed the only one I do remember. I could not remember when he had not been there, and he would be the last one I would see after all the others had gone. I use to watch him digging a trench, and his nose would start to run, at the same time he had a cigarette in his mouth, what they commonly called a fag. I would watch in childlike amazement as the drop from his nose would get longer and longer. I was sure it would drip onto his fag and put it out. Just as it was going to go drip, he would sniff and the drip would disappear back up his nose. I would sit and wait and, sure enough, down would come the drip … down, down, down, almost to the cigarette between his lips but a mighty sniff and it would be retrieved back up a nostril. Wouldn’t you know it, his name was Drip. That’s what everyone used to call him. He never stopped digging. Now that was an exercise in physics. He would also offer me a ciggy after he had rolled one before he lit it up. I learned the rolling of a fag was an art form that took much dexterity. If one became an expert, one could roll a fag using just one hand. Of course, this would take years of practice. I know all this because Drip told me, and I watched him roll a cigarette with one hand. He also smoked things called Woodbines or Woodies. After asking me if I’d like a smoke, he would say, ‘Better not … stunt your growth.’ He had thick white hair, almost silver, and a red face and he was big. He was from Ireland. I had no idea where that was, but he did tell me they had tiny people there. Not children but little people who lived down holes. I thought that was absolutely amazing. He called them the wee people. I believed in Father Christmas and the Tooth Fairy so no conflict there. All in all, it looked as if I was going to get through my childhood without too much drama.

I even went to a nice school. Nice is such a nebulous word and says nothing yet at the same time can say much. At lunchtime, we sat at a table that was the right size for four little people. The teachers sat at a large table, looking out at us. A bit like in Harry Potter minus the weird stuff. The tables had tablecloths and knives and forks and even real glasses for drinking. In those days, no one was paranoid about some 5-year-old smashing the glass in another pupil’s face. I was civilized at a very early age.

The world I lived in consisted of people who worked for my father on site or drove trucks, as well as the secretary who came into the office, along with the char who cleaned out the budgie’s cage, until she forgot to give it food and water and it died.

There was another world that I did not know of that one would