Extract from debriefing of Colour Sergeant Sean Murphy – formerly attached to British Army SAS Regiment – given to Canadian military post-war.
[Part 4]
We'd lost. The whole of RAF Fairford was about to fall to the enemy, those Zombie hordes that I had little understanding of at that point.
Too many of them were flooding through the gap in the fence and were spreading in every direction before we could kill them. The TA soldiers at the main gate were still there and were refusing to take my calls on the radio. Wing Commander Curtis, the man in-charge, was also unavailable on the radio and he was the only one with the authority to change things. There was gunfire still all around the flight-line where the aircraft and helicopters were lined up – they and the civilians around them were all lost. Smith was (presumably) dead and Jones wasn't listening to my demands for him to get back into firing position: the stupid ******* was opening the roof-hatch to the building below us so that he could go after his pal.
With all this in mind, I made my decision: we had lost and it was time to save what I could.
I told Underwood to stop firing and that I had decided we were going to leave. All order had collapsed and Fairford was lost. We'd very soon be trapped on this rooftop and face death. The surrounding fence, I explained when he questioned my reasoning, would soon become a death trap. It was there to keep people out, but would soon be keeping people like us inside to face death.
We had to get out and continue the fight somewhere that we could make a difference.
Instead of going down into the maintenance building below, where I reckoned at least several of the wholly fearless enemy were already inside by now, Underwood and I walked over to the south side of the roof. There was a truck parked there: one with a canvas roof that would provide a soft landing for us when we jumped. I hadn't seen any enemy go that way yet and we both had our M16's. We couldn't take on hundreds of the enemy, but we could handle a few.
We were off that roof and away from the truck as soon as possible. Underwood was as resigned to leaving as I was by that point and he followed my lead with no more questions. It was he who suggested that we go across to the far side of the airbase where there was an access point to escape the confines of the perimeter fence.
Underwood was a bright fellow, God rest his soul.
The thought of taking a vehicle had been dismissed also the instant I'd had it. We would have been able to move quickly, but the enemy were seemingly attracted to noise and movement – that was a suspicion of mine confirmed post-Fairford. We ran instead and hoped that the Zombies pouring into Fairford wouldn't take as much notice of us compared to all the other running people about.
I didn't like running away. I had convinced myself of the need to do so, but I still wasn't happy doing it. I had no choice though.
The enemy was now among those people on the flight-line. There were armed RAF personnel who chose to stand and fight, and others who ran away. It was chaos because of all the unarmed civilians alongside them who decided to do one or the other too. Underwood and I both stayed away – how could we have realistically helped out there?
It was a long run to the gate that Underwood had spotted. We both had out combat backpacks with us (their supplies meant that we HAD to take them or we'd soon be dead) and it was a warm day despite the time of year. I was drenched in sweat as I ran but we couldn't stop. Two enemy had to be put down to allow us to reach that gate. I took head shots against both, firing three-round tactical bursts, and then they were no more trouble. How to kill the enemy was something that I had now learnt, but I knew that other soldiers at other places were still fighting the enemy the old-fashioned way. Hits to the torso or the limbs didn't stop a Zombie, but, thankfully, a head-shot did.
Once we reached the gate, Underwood and I came to a stop. We had to get through it… while there were enemy closing up on us from the rear.