Immediate Action (6 page)

    Sometimes the dogs lost the scent and sniffed around aimlessly.

    The handler sent them forward to cast for it.

    They'd pick it up again, and off we'd go. It was exciting stuff, like hare and hounds. It brought out a really basic human instinct.

    It was exciting to be part of something so much bigger than my own little rifle company. There were two helicopters going around on Night Sun, a fearsome big floodlight, with people on the ground directing them by radio. The effort put in to get these two people was massive, and I was a part of that. I was one of the two who instigated it, and it felt really good.

    We were out all night and came back well into first light, empty-handed.

    Our trousers had been shredded by barbed-wire fences. I was soaking wet, cold, and hungry and totally knackered. We still had to carry on work the next day; there were still stags to do, patrols to go out.

    But it didn't worry me at all because I felt so excited; at last I had done what I was there to do.

    Two days later a character turned up at a hospital in the South with a 7.62 wound in his leg. We were sparked up. Gil and I were the local heroes for the next day or two. In a rifle company we were just two dickheads, but now we had our fifteen minutes of fame because we were the latest ones to have had a contact.

    Then all the banter started about who claimed the hit.

    Both of us were crap shots; it was a surprise that anybody had been hit at all.

    The rest of our time in Ireland was just as busy. We had a bomb put outside Baruki sangar one night. It was an old trick, and it always worked: Two slappers came by, hollering and shouting at the boys inside, flashing their arses and working parts. While the lads were checking out the special of the day, a player walked behind the sangar and placed a bomb. When the stag changed, as they opened the door, the bomb should have gone off.

    The two blokes inside didn't have a clue what was going on.

    Luckily the bomb was discovered just in time, and there was a controlled explosion.

    Our colonel, Corden-Lloyd, was very keen on individualism. As far as he was concerned, we all had to wear the same outer clothing, purely so that we'd be recognized in the field. But what we wore underneath was down to us.

    In theory, we should have worn army-issue shirts, thick woolly things that were a pain in the arse. The UN shirt was a much more comfortable alternative, but it was expensive. Corden-Lloyd worked 'out a deal with the manufacturers and took a vote. "If everybody buys two UN shirts, we'll wear UN shirts when we get back to Tidworth," he said. They would work out at sixteen pounds for two-quite a lot, but money well spent.

    Very sadly, the purchase could not be completed. Colonel Corden-Lloyd was aboard a Gazelle helicopter that came down. PIRA said that they shot it down, MoD said it was mechanical failure. Whichever, the best officer I'd ever met was dead.

    When I joined the battalion in Gibraltar, there were one or two blokes that were getting ready to go on selection, running around the Rock on a route called the Med Steps, but being the rug, I'd no idea what it was all about. Then I heard-they were going for the S.A.S, pronounced Sass.

    It was only much later that I found out that to people in it or who work with it, it's not the Sass or even the S.A.S.

    It's just called the Regiment.

    A fellow called Rob lived in a little room in the base at XMG that was no bigger than a cupboard. Sometimes I'd go past and I'd hear the hish of radios and catch a glimpse of plies of maps of South Armagh all over the place. The room was like a rubbish tip; there were bergens, belt kit, and bits and pieces everywhere. Then Rob would go missing, and nobody saw him for weeks and weeks.

    He turned up in the washrooms one day, so I was scrutinizing, seeing what he looked like. He wasn't six feet six inches tall and four feet wide, as I'd expected.

    He was about five feet six inches and quite normal-looking. He was wearing a pair of skiddies, a T-shirt, and flip-flops. His washing and shaving kit consisted of a bit of soap in a plastic teacup from a vending machine, a toothbrush, and that was it. He had his wash and left, and that was my introduction to the Regiment.

    There was a warning one day that a chopper was due in ten minutes.

    All the spare hands that were on cookhouse fatigues had to come running out to pick up the load, so the helicopter would have the minimum amount of time on the ground. it could be delivering anything from equipment to food. Sometimes it would have a patrol on board.

    As the rug I was simply told, "There's a helicopter due in in ten minutes, and there's some plastic bags. I want you to pick up the plastic bags and bring them into the camp."

    The chopper came in, the corrugated iron gates were flung open, and everybody ran like an idiot to pick up whatever was going to get dropped and then run back into the camp. I picked up two black plastic bags.

    Both contained what felt like Armalites. Then four or five blokes jumped from the helicopter. They had long curly hair and sideburns that came down and nearly met at the c ' bin like the lead singer of Slade, and they were wearing duvet jackets, jeans, and dessies (desert boots).

    Basically the donkeys, which was us, picked the kit up and legged it in with them. We were told not to speak to these people, just to let them get on with what they were doing. Not that any of us wanted to speak to them anyway; we didn't know how they'd react. All we knew was that they were the Special Air Service, big hard bastards, and they were going to fill us in. Me, the eighteen-year-old, I wasn't going to say jack shit.

    There was only one TV in the whole camp, and that was in a room full of lockers and bits and pieces of shit all over the place. So everybody used to get in really early and book a place, sitting on top of lockers and hanging off chairs, getting on wall units and all this, to watch.

    Even if blokes were asleep, you'd wake them up for Top of the Pops.

    The cookhouse was no bigger than a room in an ordinary house, and that- included the cooking facilities.

    We'd get a tray, go in and get four slices of bread, make big sandwiches and a mug of tea, and go and claim our places for the show.

    Blokes would be there straight from the shower, squashed up next to blokes in shit state straight from the field. Everybody would be getting stuck into a fistful of egg banjo. The room stank of cigarettes, sweat, mud, cowshit, and talcum powder.

    At the time, just after Christmas 1978, Debbie Harry and Kate Bush were on the same T.O.T.P. Debbie Harry was singing "Denis," and Kate Bush was doing "Wuthering Heights." When Kate Bush came on, the whole rifle company used to shout, "Burn the witch!" 'Then these blokes turned up as well, and I thought, They're only human after all because they've come in to watch Debbie Harry and Kate Bush.

    They didn't push in; they didn't get the prime spot; they just slotted in where they could; then pushed off again. Their behavior amazed me; they came in with respect.

    I envied them their apparent freedom to come and go as they pleased. I thought, it must be an amazing life, just flying in, doing the job, then going back to wherever they live.

    But there again, I thought, there was no chance whatsoever of a lowly rifleman like me making the grade, and that was that.

    There were eight infantry battalions at Tidworth, our new base in Wiltshire. The entertainment facilities in the town consisted of three pubs (one of which was out of bounds), two chip shops, a launderette, and a bank.

    The army spent all day teaching us to be aggressive, and then we'd go down to the town, get bored and drunk, and use our aggression against each other. We'd then get prosecuted severely as if we'd done something wrong.

    We did all the garrison sort of stuff like field firing exercises; then we started training again for Northern Ireland. The battalions wouldrotate, on average, one tour a year. I saw it as a great opportunity to save money. As a rifleman I could save a grand a tour because there was even less to do over the water than in Tidworth.

    There were three other bonuses. One, we got fifty pence extra pay per day, and two, we got soft toilet paper instead of the hard stuff in UK garrisons. It was actually dangled as a carrot during training:

    "Remember, it's soft toilet rolls over the water." And three, it was a pleasure to get away from Tidworth again. For the next three years the routine was going on exercises, get stinking drunk in Tidworth and Andover, and going over the water.

    People were coming back with their grand and getting ripped off buying cars that promptly fell apart. One bloke bought a hand-painted cream and chocolate brown Ford Capri for nine hundred pounds, and within two days things were falling off it. I looked at buying a Capri myself, but the insurance was more than the car was worth.

    I was still going out with Christine. She was living in Ashford, so I got down there weekends and whenever else I could. There was certainly no way she wanted to come and live in Tidworth. She had a job and still lived at home. We were in love-"we think"-and everything was coming up roses.

    There began to be talk of the battalion going to Germany for five years, and I knew this would present a problem for our relationship.

    If you were "wife of", accommodation was provided; if you were just "girlfriend of," then it was up to you to go rent a place downtown.

    We'd never be able to afford the German rents, so I thought, what the hell, let's do it, and that was us married. It was a white wedding; the plan was that she would stay in Ashford, and after the next Northern Ireland tour we could get a quarter in Tidworth.

    I got made up to lance corporal in time for the next tour. Still based in South Armagh, I was now a "brick" commander, in charge of a four-man patrol. As such, I had to write a short patrol report after each patrol: what we had seen, what we had done, what we would like to have done. While I was on my way to the operations room one night, three or four blokes turned up in a car with all their equipment. I saw on the map that certain areas had been put out of bounds; I knew these boys were going to go do some stuff. It made me think that as the infantry battalion we were working our arses off here, but these guys were working to a very different agenda. We used to come back from a patrol and think, We've done this and we've done that, tis really good stuff, but at the end of the day we were just walking Figures (standard target, depicting a charging enemy soldier). We were so isolated in our own little world.

    Seeing these guys suddenly made me think, Hey, what else is going on that we'll never get to hear about? I felt what was almost a pang of jealousy.

    I went into the briefing room to pick up a patrol report. There were masses of kit strewn everywhere on the floor. The thing that really struck me was an Armalite that was painted weird and wonderful camouflage colors, dappled with bits of black and green. In the infantry there was no way we could tamper with our weapons like that.

    Weapons were sacred; we could clean them, but that was about it.

    There was a torch mounted under the Armalite, held on with bits of masking tape on the furniture stock. I thought, That's quite Gucci; I wouldn't mind one of those.

    As I turned, I found myself face-to-face with one of the regiment blokes. Or rather, face to arse. He had no kit on, and all I could see was the crack of his bum as he was bending over to put his trousers on.

    I could see he had a fearsome suntan and had obviously been away somewhere nice before he'd come on this job.

    He turned around and said, "All right, mate?"

    I went, "Hello."

    He said, "You can go now if you like."

    I said, "Okay, I think it's time for me to go now."

    That was the last time I saw any of these particular S.A.S men.

    Again, I was surprised at how they looked.

    One of them was positively skeletal; he was the only man I'd ever seen with the veins on the outside of his body.

    We were patrolling one Saturday evening as a multipletwo four-man patrols. The multiple commander was Dave, a corporal, and I was the 2 i/c (second-in-command), in command of the other brick.

    I had first met Dave in XMG but didn't have too much to do with him as he was in another platoon. On promotion I was sent to 6 Platoon and became his 2 i/c.

    Dave was known as a maverick and was always on the edge of being demoted or fined. He came from the East End of London and kept very close contact with his family and friends. He was in his mid-twenties, and his arms were covered in tattoos. He had a girlfriend back in London, but the more I got to know him, the more I saw him as single for the rest of his life, wrecking any car that he had after two months and having dealings with dodgy people from the Mile End Road. We got on very well, and he became a close friend.

    We were going out at six o'clock in the evening and assembled for a quick five-minute brief. Dave told us the direction we were going to go out, whether we were going to use the front gate or the back gate, information on any activity in the town, anything that we needed to know from the patrol that had just come in.

    "There seem to be a lot more people running around the community center than usual," he said. "And perhaps some activity in the derelict house on the corner of Liam Gardens. We'll check it out as we pass."

    Derelicts were usually to be avoided since they were natural draw points for booby traps. Something had looked different in that house to the last patrol; it could be just an old druggle in there, or it could be something put in as a come-on.

    We loaded our weapons in the loading bay and stood behind the main gate, waiting for the order to go. It was a lazy, hot summer evening, not much traffic, and the birds were singing. We listened on the net to the'other patrol who were in the town, speaking in code words and numbers because our comms were not secure and the players had scanners.