Soldier Five recounts the events of the infamous Bravo-Two-Zero mission that went so awry during the First Gulf War, and is also the personal story of how a young Kiwi (New Zealander) came to serve in 22 SAS, via the NZSAS. The author comes over as a very pleasant personality, full of youthful enthusiasm and ideals - and he's not afraid to poke gentle fun at himself from time to time as he looks back from an authorial position of greater experience.
The story is told more or less in chronological order, in a first-person action-man narrative. But unlike other books about the same events, Coburn is more focused on cock-ups (errors) than heroics. The litany of failures that led to three members of the patrol dying and four being captured is truly extraordinary and it is a testament to the skill of the author that the reader feels strongly the sense of astonishment, confusion, and frustration that mounts with each additional problem the soldiers had to face, effectively marooned hundreds of kilometres behind enemy lines.
This chronological approach makes the last third of the book more powerful, as we learn that Bravo-Two-Zero was placed into the theater of combat for no real purpose and that it was subsequently abandoned to its fate by an OC (officer commanding) who "would have sacrificed half a squadron to get a Scud." As Ken Connor, another ex-Regiment man, commented in his book Ghost Force, special forces had no business being deployed merely to chase around in the desert in the hope of finding one or two mobile Scud launchers. No matter how you dress it up, that's not a strategic mission. When one considers how much time, effort and money is spent on training members of the Regiment, it is very disappointing for the Rupert (officer) to have been so laissez-faire about the fate of his men. Like Coburn, by the end of the book we feel disgusted by the attitude of those in command and this disgust is then compounded by the long drawn-out saga of how the UK Ministry of Defence tried to suppress the publication of Soldier Five even though by that time Andy McNab's account and Chris Ryan's account plus a movie were already in circulation.
I came away feeling fortunate that Coburn's determination to get his book published was eventually successful, and that anyone who wants to can pick up this book and get more of a picture regarding the patrol and, by extension, some of the larger issues surrounding the use of the Regiment and the attitudes of those high up in the military command structure. It's something of a shame to consider that nearly eighty years on the words spawned by World War One should still seem to have some force: "lions led by donkeys."