Where Soldiers Fear to Tread

Sir Ranulph Fiennes served in Oman from 1968 to 1970 as a "contact" officer on loan with others from the British Army to aid the Sultan in his skirmishes with the Marxist-indoctrinated guerrillas (the PFLOAG) in Dhofar, treacherous territory on the border of the People's Democratic Republic of South Yemen. Conditions were arid, unpredictable and dangerous. When he returned in 1973 to make a television documentary, the Sultan had been unseated in favour of his son, and Oman had been transformed by hugely increased oil revenue into a 20th-century state. In this book Fiennes tells the story of that return, describing the country he knew and the changes it had undergone.