They pleaded with us to do it... they were in agony
vehicles were spotted approaching the checkpoint.
An SAS officer sent a radio message to the Scorpion Force commander telling him to abandon the area. SAS troops then opened fire, striking the vehicles with Milan anti-tank rockets which caused huge explosions. Afterwards, UK snipers eliminated the ‘runners’ – Iraqi troops seeking to flee the wreckage on foot.
Then, Maclachlan says he and about eight other SAS troops drove their Land Rovers from the high ground to the checkpoint.
He told The Mail on Sunday last night how, after surveying the charred remains of the three vehicles, it was clear there were a number of Iraqi casualties.
He said: ‘We treated those we could save using tourniquets but there were three wounded guys who were very close to death. Two of these guys were disembowelled, the other had severe blast wounds and had lost three of his limbs.
‘They would have been dead in anything from a few minutes to an hour or two at the maximum.
‘These guys were pleading for us to do it, they were in agony. We also knew how we would have wanted to be treated in that situation.
‘The crueller thing would have been to continue their suffering.
‘If I ever met their families I would explain what happened. Should I really have just left them there, dying, screaming and burning for the next hour?
‘I know there’s no law that says you can finish someone off, so it’s murder. But we are compassionate human beings, not robots. This is the harsh reality of combat with ordinary servicemen, and that’s what we are, being put in positions of extraordinary decision-making.’
Maclachlan, from Edinburgh, completed his tour of duty in Iraq with the SAS in 2003 and returned to the country in 2005. It was then that he and an SAS colleague were kidnapped by insurgents and held captive in a police station in Basra.
The SAS men were badly beaten and tortured before they were rescued as part of a dramatic mission of the public being put through a gruelling series of physical and mental tests based on the SAS’s selection course. A second series of the show, set in the jungles of Brunei, is due to start on Channel 4 tomorrow. But following a dispute with producers earlier this year, Maclachlan is not part of the cast. The success of the series persuaded publishers Headline to commission a book about how SAS skills can be used in non-military professions, which contained the passage that prompted the murder probe. The book, out next month, features ideas on leadership and decisionmaking from Maclachlan and the other ex-Special Forces instructors, Anthony Middleton, Jason Fox and Matthew Ollerton. Maclachlan had submitted the passage about ‘mercy killings’ as part of a chapter called Handling the Dirty Work.
Before describing the shootings at the checkpoint, he writes: ‘Sometimes in the Special Forces we are called upon to execute an unpleasant task, one that makes us feel uncomfortable, even though we know its success is imperative for the greater good.’
Last night, an MoD official inside the Government said there were well-established procedures for considering manuscripts submitted by former personnel for publication.
An MoD spokesman added: ‘Our Armed Forces will continue to be held to the very highest standards.
‘Credible allegations of criminal behaviour will always be investigated properly.’
HOW strange and wrong it is that the actions of soldiers are often judged by those whose closest experience of danger is crossing the road, or putting too much sugar in their tea.
Soldiers are used to being needed one day and scorned the next. One moment, politicians pose alongside soldiers in combat gear. The next moment they make laws and sign treaties which leave those same soldiers absurdly vulnerable to prosecutions for actions taken under extreme pressure, in circumstances few of us can imagine.
You might have thought, after the Government pledged to protect soldiers from vexatious complaints about their conduct in war, that this sort of thing was at an end.
But the experience of former SAS sergeant Colin Maclachlan shows that the key lesson has yet to be learned. The Ministry of Defence casually informed him that long-ago events in Iraq, which he had described in a book manuscript submitted to the MoD, are being investigated by the police.
Mr Maclachlan described how he had shot severely wounded Iraqis, 13 years ago, as an act of mercy.
This event is bound to be compared with the shooting of a badly wounded Taliban fighter in Afghanistan by Royal Marine Sgt Alexander Blackman. And while the circumstances could not be more different, the MoD has in both cases hung the soldiers involved out to dry.
Mr Maclachlan, who was deployed behind enemy lines out of reach of professional medical care, acted as soldiers have done to friend and foe throughout history. Seeing men hideously injured and in great pain, with no realistic hope of recovery, he killed them to end their misery.
Everyone with experience of real warfare knows that such things happen, but are seldom publicly mentioned – mainly for the sake of civilian morale. There is even a precedent, in the Falklands War, in which a soldier who shot a terribly burned Argentine prisoner was investigated and rightly spared prosecution.
We cannot expect men and women to go into battle on our behalf if we refuse to recognise that war is utterly unlike civilian life, and cannot be ruled by civilian ideas of right and wrong.