Having left their heavy packs behind during the firefight, the men had no protection from the extreme cold. Cold rain became freezing rain, then snow.

Ryan’s group continued to head north, and the weather worsened. Of the five men in McNab’s group, two would be killed and three captured by the enemy. The two parts of the squad could not relocate each other. Not realizing five of the team members had stopped to make the radio call, Chris Ryan, Mal MacGown, and Vince Phillips continued traveling on. In the dark, the team became separated when McNab tried to call for help using the radios. Search and rescue helicopters bravely flying behind enemy lines in search of the team had no chance of finding them. The standard escape and evasion plan was to travel south toward the border with Saudi Arabia, but team leader McNab decided to head northeast for the Syrian border instead. This 1999 movie depicts Bravo Two Zero shooting it out with the Iraqi Army. The team knew they had to escape before enemy troops arrived. It turned out to be a man with a bulldozer, who clearly saw them and ran away. Almost immediately they heard the sounds of a tank approaching, and popped up to destroy it with LAW rockets. Believing he had discovered the patrol’s position, they prepared to move out. The next afternoon, a boy herding sheep passed close to the wadi. After finally reaching their position at night, the team hid in a wadi, a dry creek bed, just a short distance from the highway. The team had to walk for miles in the dark to their objective, carrying 200 pounds of gear each. The landscape was generally “flat as a billiard table” with few hiding places, and the rocky ground was too hard to dig into with their entrenching tools. They were also supposed to sabotage a fiber-optic communications line running along the highway. If it did, they were to report its location and call in an airstrike. The team hoped that a mobile scud launcher would roll by. Their job was to set up an observation post, called a lay-up place, where they could spy on a major highway. Chris Ryan Todayīravo Two Zero was the code name for a squad of eight SAS commandos dropped off by helicopter to the northwest of Baghdad, about 200 miles behind enemy lines.

Separated from the rest of his squad, he ran for his life for seven days, setting a unique escape-and-evasion record that still stands today. 30 years ago, he was a proud member of the 22nd Special Air Service, on a secret mission in the Iraqi desert, and he was all alone.

Now he’s 50 years old, the author of several books, a television star, and a personal bodyguard somewhere in the U.S.A.

Bravo two zero the real story