I don't think they have a clue about where people like me come from.

He reckons the case has so far cost the MoD around £7m his own costs are £100,000.ĭid he ever think about giving up the legal fight? 'I suspect the MoD thought I would, but if you gave up at the first sign of adversity, you wouldn't have made a very good SAS soldier. However, Coburn will be back in court next Thursday when the MoD will seek to win the right to the profits accruing from the book. The MoD sought to block Coburn's book on the basis of a confidentiality agreement he had signed, but he argued that it was signed under duress and the courts in New Zealand, where the legal battle has been fought, eventually agreed. They suffered emotionally and that has never really resolved itself his father died a broken man over what had happened and his children were teased at school by other kids who said their father was a coward.' All sorts of things happened to Vince's family after Ryan's book was published. 'You can't have all this rubbish out there. 'I wanted to portray events as they really happened,' he says. Coburn wants to exculpate Phillips and pin the blame for the failure of the mission on the SAS officers who had failed to plan it properly and then refused to launch a rescue attempt. Ryan said Phillips, who was with him and another soldier who also died, lost the will to press on and that 'his heart wasn't in the operation'.

The patrol was attacked by Iraqi troops, they abandoned their mission and, in trying to reach Syria, accidentally split in two. Ryan alleged that Phillips had failed to hide from a passing goatherd, who raised the alarm. Worse, in his view, was that Ryan denigrated the memory of one of those who didn't come back, Vince Phillips, blaming him for giving away the position of the patrol and being too weak-willed to survive (Phillips died of hypothermia). His justification for revisiting Bravo Two Zero is his allegation that some of what McNab and Ryan wrote was fiction. Another book, 13 years on, might seem superfluous, but Coburn has spent the past five years fighting a legal battle against the Ministry of Defence for the right to publish. Coburn, which is not his real name, is one of the five survivors of the ill-fated mission in the first Gulf war, codenamed Bravo Two Zero, that cost the lives of three SAS soldiers, launched two writing careers (Andy McNab and Chris Ryan, also pseudonyms) and has already been dug over in numerous books and films.

Bravo to zero