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Brits Go Undercover As Yanks
By JONATHAN FOREMAN in Baghdad
The New York Post, April 23, 2003

They're tough, seasoned and lethal when they need to be - and they're working secretly in Baghdad, masking their identity by wearing U.S. Army uniforms and traveling in U.S. military vehicles.

Fortunately, they're on our side. They're members of Britain's elite, highly secretive SAS, the special operations group that inspired the Army's counter-terrorist Delta Force.

Members of the Special Air Service have been working undercover alongside American troops in the Iraqi capital.

The SAS's first job was liberating the British Embassy, which had been closed since 1990.

Since then, they've been sharing their peacekeeping and policing expertise - gained in Northern Ireland, Sierra Leone and elsewhere - with Army units that have begun shifting from combat operations to what the military calls SASO: Stabilization and Support Operations.

"It's amazing to just watch them [the SAS] operate - the way they blend in the street, the way they look so relaxed but are so alert to everything around them," said Staff Sgt. Gannon, who's in the recon platoon of the Army's 64th Armored Regiment.

"They move like water downhill," Gannon noted. "They flow over and around walls and buildings and things, rather than against them."

Recon Platoon Sgt. Michael Anslinger has been most taken by the SAS team's modesty: "They're not like our Special Forces guys - they don't have that arrogant attitude."

His platoon, which includes GIs who served as peacekeepers in Bosnia and Kosovo, is the first U.S. outfit in Baghdad to send out "presence patrols" in Humvees and on foot rather than in tanks and armored personnel carriers.

And it's doing it with SAS help.

During a recent daylight foot patrol along the dusty streets of Baghdad's exclusive Mansour district, only a sharp-eyed observer could pick out the four Brits in the group.

Although they were wearing GI fatigues to keep a low profile, they were the only soldiers without helmets or body armor.

When the platoon stopped to talk to some friendly locals, it was one of the SAS team who was able to communicate - in Arabic - and who also warned the rest of the unit not to stare too longingly at the women smiling at them from upstairs windows.