Commando witness backs soldier's story

One of the commandos on the doomed Bravo Two Zero patrol behind Iraqi lines in the 1991 Gulf War has dismissed passages in two books about the mission as "fiction."

The soldier, referred to in the High Court at Auckland as Mal, said that Chris Ryan's account in The One that Got Away, of his Rambo-like attack on two armoured personnel carriers, described an incident that never happened.

Fellow soldier Andy McNab in Bravo Two Zero described torture by the Iraqis such as having teeth pulled and being burned with a heated spoon, but Mal said that, too, was fantasy.

Mal, who practised as a dentist in Australia before joining the British SAS in 1990, was giving evidence in support of New Zealand commando Mike Coburn, who has written his account of the ill-fated mission in Soldier 5.

The British Ministry of Defence says that a confidentiality contract Coburn signed in 1996 prevents him publishing.

Mal said that Ryan unfairly attacked the character and actions of a slain member of the patrol, Sergeant Vince Phillips.

Soldier 5, he said, corrected those injustices and factual errors.

It was the first book about the mission in which the author was not promoting himself above all others or spurred on by "egocentricity and financial greed."

Mal told Justice Peter Salmon that in his view, the book did not breach any confidentiality or put the SAS regiment in any danger.

He understood the purpose of the confidentiality contract was to prohibit publication of information not already in the public domain on operations and methods that could affect future operational ability of the SAS.

Many books had been published by SAS insiders since 1996 with no apparent steps by the ministry to stop them, he said.

"There appears to be a very selective morality or criteria applying as to who can publish material on the SAS."