Immediate Action Part 5

A few days later we learned what had happened. The cattle truck and a Ford Granada had driven into that side of Keady. The people in the Ford Granada got out and were going to get into this cattle truck and then drive past the other patrol to the north and drop as many as they could, then carry on driving over the border.

When the contact was initiated, it must have been very confusing for them. The player who was firing at me was also trying to give information to his team. As they got into the cattle truck, they were firing from a step that gave them higher elevation, and what they would have seen was Dave's patrol about two hundred meters away, moving through the river. Dave's patrol started to get incoming, but he couldn't fire back because he knew we were in the middle. The people in the truck didn't know that we were there; if they had, they would have been able to put some heavy fire down onto us.

They got outside Keady and went to a house that was run by an ex-prison officer. They tried to hijack his car, but he came out with a shotgun and gave them the good news, so they then moved off again in the cattle truck and got to Monaghan to drop off the boys who were dead and injured.

It was the first time I'd ever killed somebody. I was nineteen years old, and I couldn't have cared less. They were firing at me, and I was doing my job by firing back.

I did what I was taught. No matter what a person does in the infantry-he can be a signaler, driver, whateverwhat he's basically doing is getting himself or someone else into a position where he can put the b.u.t.t of a weapon into the shoulder, aim, and kill somebody.

I'd spent months and months training for this sort of situation.

I'd learned the drills; I was proficient. But when the s.h.i.t hit the fan, all I could think about was that the other character was trying to kill me. I just knew there were a lot of people firing, and I knew I had to get fire back, and that was about it. I considered myself very fortunate to have survived. It wasn't skill that had got me through; it was loads of rounds down the range and loads of luck.

We came back to the UK, and I went away on a course called an NCO's Cadre. I got an A and was promoted the same day, making me the youngest corporal in the infantry at that time.

Next came Junior Brecon, an eight-week section commander's course at Sennybridge training area. There was no bulls.h.i.t about it, just tactics and training, training and more training. It was a really intense two months, lots of physical stuff, running around with a helmet and bayonet on all the time, giving orders. I found it really hard, but I got a distinction.

By now I was totally army barmy and was letting my married life come a very poor second. I was immature, and I was a d.i.c.khead. I came back from the course on a Sat.u.r.day morning, said h.e.l.lo, and went out for a run.

Then I got up early on Sunday morning and went for another run, trying to keep fit for whatever course I was going to go on next-and I was putting my name down for every course that would have me.

For young wives in a garrison town like Tidworth, life could be very boring. It was difficult to get decent work because employers knew they were not there for long, and that made it almost impossible for married women to have a career. The battalions liked to promote a ramily atmosphere, but for the wives it didn't really work out like that. There was a hierarchy, and there were more wives who wore their rank than blokes: "I'm Georgina Smith, wife of Sergeant Smith."

The marriage started going to rats.h.i.t in about 1980.

Christine was in Tidworth, in quarters, ready to go to Germany, sitting there and thinking: Sod this. The ultimatum was delivered one morning during the cornflakes. "Are you going to come back with me or are you going to stay here in Tidworth in the army?"

No contest.

"I'm staying here," I said. "Away you go."

That was it. Over and done with, sorted out over bits of paper, and I didn't give a d.a.m.n. I threw myself into all the bone bravado: I was out with my mates now; I was going to stay in the army forever; I didn't need a wife. There were many like me; I was not the only one.

There was a NAAFI disco every Tuesday night at R.A.F Wroughton near Swindon. It was a great event, but then, so was anything that took place outside Tidworth.

Six or seven of us in freshly pressed kit would pile into the chocolate and cream Capri, everybody stinking of a different aftershave.

One Tuesday night I met a telephonist called Debbie and forgot all my resolutions about not needing women anymore.

A posting came up as a training corporal at Winchester, and I grabbed it. Germany could wait. Careerwise the job was known as an E posting-a good one to get.

By the time I came back I'd be a sergeant.

My platoon commander was a lieutenant; under him he had the platoon sergeant and three training corporals.

Each'of us full screws (corporals) was responsible for between twelve and fifteen recruits.

One or two of the lads were fairly switched on with life and really wanted to join the infantry for what it offered. Most of them, however, were there because they wanted to be in the army but lacked the intelligence to be anything but riflemen-a bit like me, really.

A lot of them hadn't got a clue what they were doing when they turned up. They'd been looking at the adverts of squaddies skiing and lying on the beach surrounded by a crowd of admiring women. They had the impression that they were in for three years lolling around on a windsurfer; then they'd come out, and employers would be gagging to get their hands on them.

We had to show them how to wash and shave and use a toothbrush.

I'd get into the shower and say, "Right, I'm having a shower now," taking with me the socks that I'd been wearing that day. I'd put them on my hands and use them like flannels, so I was washing my socks at the same time as my body. Then I had to show them how to shower, making sure they pulled their foreskin back and cleaned it and shampooed their hair.

Every one of them had to do it exactly the same-way, cleaning their ears, cleaning their teeth in the shower at the same time, cleaning the shower out afterward. i,d then show them how to cut their toenails correctly. A lot of them didn't cut them at all, and they were stinking, or they just got the edge and then pulled it away so they were destroying the cuticle. In the infantry, if your feet are f.u.c.ked, then the rest of you is f.u.c.ked.

A lot of them had never done their own washing. We even had to show them how to use an iron. But soon everybody was all squared away, and they knew what they were doing and, more important, why.

The idea of the training was to keep them under pressure but make it enjoyable. The training corporals had to do everything that they did, leading by example. And all the time we were also aiming to create compet.i.tion, a sense of achievement for their group, building up teamwork.

The results of the section reflected directly on us, so we had that extra incentive to do the job as best we could. But it came to the stage where I was so involved in it that incentives weren't necessary.

I didn't believe in giving a boy who was slow a hard time because it wouldn't help him at all. All it would do was make him feel worse; if he needed extra training, we had to give it to him. I would encourage other people in that section to make sure they gave him extra training as well. I would tell them, "He's a part of your section; he's as much a responsibility to you as he is to me.

When a recruit got to the battalion, the first thing anybody would ask was "Who was your training screw?" If we were sending t.o.s.s.e.rs to the battalion, we'd be in for a hard time.

The bullying that was supposed to be going on in these infantry battalions and training establishments could only have been very isolated incidents. I certainly never saw any of it. if you're doing your job right, you don't need to bully, you don't need to push and shove, punch and kick. What you've got to do is lead by example, show them the skills that they need to know, make it enjoyable, give them incentives-and they'll do it. By the same token, the culture within the army is quite aggressive and close to the bone. There is a need for hard, physical work and a hard, physical existence. But that's not bullying. If people can't actually survive that or adapt to it, or simply don't have the apt.i.tude, that's when they should go. As the saying goes, train hard, fight easy; train easy, fight hard-and die.

Within the battalion, if people weren't performing, they'd get decked. I had been filled in a few times, and after a while I always understood the reasons why. As for these daily scenes of regimental baths and scouring with Vim, I never saw it. I never went through any sort of initiation and was never present at one. People had better things to do with their time than run around playing stupid games.

They wanted to finish work, go downtown, and get legless.

I still enjoyed the army, but it was all the niggly bits that I p.i.s.sed me off. I went shopping in the town one dinnertime with another of the training corporals, a bloke in his early thirties, married, three kids, responsible. He wanted to buy a three-piece suite. He chose the suite and sat down with the manager to do the paperwork. The manager took a check for the deposit but then said, "I'm sorry, but you can't have credit without your commanding officer's permission."

"I beg your pardon?"

"You have to get this form signed by your commanding officer."

"You're joking?"

"No, I'm afraid if you're military, that's it."

So here was a boy with responsibilities, a house, family, all the normal things. Yet he couldn't get credit to buy a three-piece suite until somebody who was probably up to his eyeb.a.l.l.s in debt had had a chat with him and said, "Well, do you think you can afford this threepiece suite?

Do you think you're responsible enough to buy it?"

If there was any problem with the credit, they wouldn't go to the bloke who was getting the credit; they'd go straight to the commanding officer and say, "This man isn't paying." He'd then go on O.C's orders, and it would get taken out of his pay.

I had been overdrawn once in my life, for E2.50, when I was nineteen.

The letter from the bank wasn't sent to me; it was sent to the battalion. I had to go on O.C's orders and explain why I was e2.50 overdrawn to somebody who probably owed the bank half his annual salary.

I asked Debbie to move to Winchester and rent a flat with me, but I had to get permission from the O.C for that as well.

I pondered a bit more about Selection and the life of a Special Forces soldier. From the limited amount I had seen, these people in Hereford seemed to have a much freer existence; I doubted very much that in the Special Air Service a platoon commander aged about twenty-one or twenty-two had to say whether a thirty-year-old sergeant should be allowed to take a credit application form to his commanding officer.

I started to do a bit of bergen work just to see and found I could move over the ground pretty fast.

Debbie and I lived together for about six or seven months. I had a great relationship with her and her family. Then came crunch time, my posting back to the battalion. She now had a problem: Was she going to stay in the UK or come over to Germany for three years? Exactly the same as last time, I thought: What the heck, we'll get married-and we did, in August 1982. This time, being a corporal, I got a quarter straightaway. s soon as I got to Germany I started to dream about a return ticket.

Now 2RGJ were a mechanized battalion, which didn't grip my s.h.i.t at all.

I was supposed to be a section commander, but I didn't even know how to get into an A.P.C (armored personnel carrier), let alone command one. I had about a week to sort myself out, and then the battalion was off to Canada for two months of battle group training. All the tanks and infantry came together to form the battle group, screaming over the vast Canadian prairies in live-firing attacks. It was probably good training, but I hated b.u.mming around in these turn-of-the century machines. They were falling apart; most of the time was spent drinking tea while half the REME (Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers) were underneath them with spanners. Out of four vehicles in my platoon it was a safe bet that at least one of them would not even make it to the start line. The crew would spend days on the-roadside waiting for recovery.

After three or four weeks back in Germany the quarter was ready, and Debbie flew out. Almost immediately we started having to do two or three-week exercises.

We'd drive to a location, dig in, stay there for a couple of days, jump in our A.P.C again, go somewhere else, and dig in again. It was incredibly boring, and as far as I was concerned, we weren't really achieving that much. Certainly none of us at the coal face was ever told what the big plan was.

As in Canada, most of these exercises were spent at the roadside -either broken down or grounded for two days because the Germans wouldn't allow armored vehicles to move at weekends. A fair one if you were the indigenous population, I supposed, but if you were the squaddy parked up just ten kilometers from the comforts of home, it was a downright drag.

The general level of bulls.h.i.t was outrageous, and it started to wear me down. Any time we weren't trundling around in geriatric A.P.C.S we were doing battalion duties. At least five times a month I'd be on guard.

Then we'd have all the other regimental duties, which were twenty-four-hour duties. Then we had brigade duties.

Because it was the British Army on the Rhine, we had to look good at all times. Princess Anne was going to visit the camp one day, and there were yellow marks where some boxes and bits of wood had.been resting on the gra.s.s. The management ordered it to be painted green.

I realized then that all the royal family must think the world smells of shoe polish, floor wax, and fresh paint.

We were practicing for the sake of practicing, and the soldiers were getting p.i.s.sed off. When we'd got the promise of a posting to Germany, it sounded very attractive: local overseas allowance, tax-free car, petrol concessions, all this sort of thing. But at the end of the day the quality of life for a single soldier was not that good. We hadn't really got the time to go out and explore the place. It wasn't as if we could just jump in a car and travel down to the south of Germany to go skiing for a weekend; chances were we'd be on some weird and wonderful duty, such as being the barrier technician on the gate.

Life in Germany was unpleasant in other ways. There were a few rows with the other battalions and plenty of rows with the Turks, who ran all the s.e.x operations, bar, and discos. Then there were all the interbattalion horizontal maneuvers. As soon as a battalion was away over the water, all the singlies were straight over to check out the wives. Boxes of OMO appeared in the windows to advertise "old man out."

I didn't find it funny. None of the married blokes did.

The army seemed to promote smoking and drinking because the only recreational facilities available were cheap f.a.gs and drink at the NAAFI and the company clubs. If weight-training facilities had been available, the lads would have used them-not because they thought that upper body strength would make them better soldiers but because of a reason far more fundamental to an eighteen-year-old: If you look fit, you'll pull more.

I felt my morale being slowly eroded. I sat down one day and asked myself: What am I going to do? Am I going to stay here or f.u.c.k off? I was doing pretty well, I was coming up toward platoon sergeant, but I felt compelled to make that decision. It was a right pain in the a.r.s.e sweeping up unwanted puddles, painting gra.s.s that had been discolored by boxes, and maintaining vehicles that were falling apart.

By this time Debbie had got a job at the local military hospital.

She enjoyed it very much, but we really didn't get much time together.

If I had free time, I'd be training for Selection, coming home late at night. It just wasn't really happening between us. The social life was fine, and we had become good friends with Key and his wife.

He was in B Company and now a corporal. His wife worked in the same hospital as Debbie.

By now Dave was back in battalion after a posting and we'd all go out together. Key's idea of a good Sat.u.r.day would be football and a few pints. He was a fair player himself and represented the battalion in the same team as Johnny Two-Combs. He'd joined the army when he was in his mid-twenties and had a flat, a car and a good j'oh. We thought he must have joined for a bet.

I became obsessed with getting into the Regiment. In the long term it would be beltter for our relationship because the Regiment was permanently based in Hereford. We'd be able to buy a house and settle down.

There would be continuity in Debbie's life, and she could get a decent job. That was how I rationalized it to her anyway. In reality I wanted it for me.

I filled in an application form and started really working on my fitness but at first didn't tell anyone but Key what I was up to.

"I was thinking about doing it myself," he said. "I'll join you.)) Then I talked to Dave, who said, "Yeah, f.u.c.k it, let's all do it."

We got our bergens on, did some running and circuit training.

Then Dave introduced us to a captain, a Canadian called Max, who wanted to throw in his lot with us as well. He'd been away to Oman for two years on secondment to the sultan's forces; he'd met some of the Regiment and had got a taste for it. His family owned farmland near Winnipeg, and he spoke with a distinctive tw.a.n.g. He planned to do the tour with the Regiment, go to Staff College, and carry on his career.

The ultimate aim was to go back to the farm. He was married and very down-to-earth, not' at all the officer type. The great thing from our point of view was that he'd have the authority to get us places.

We spoke to everybody we could think of who knew somebody who'd danced with somebody who'd done Selection. "What's the best stuff for hardening the feet?" we'd ask when we tracked them down. "Any hints on special food or drink?"

"I know somebody in Third Battalion who pa.s.sed Selection and he swore by neat's-foot oil," was the furthest we got.

We tried it for two weeks, then switched back to meths.

Once the buzz started going around the battalion that there were people going for Selection, a fellow called Bob came forward. A bricklayer from London, he had joined the army late in life. He was five feet seven inches and strongly built; fitness seemed to come very naturally to him. Nothing fazed Bob; he laughed everything off.

"If I don't pa.s.s, I'll get out anyway," he said. "I've had enough; I'll go back on the sites."

Bob had a diary written by a fellow called Jeff, who had just pa.s.sed Selection and at twenty-one was one of the youngest people ever to get into the Regiment. It contained details of routes used in the Brecon Beacons and became our bible.

The captain, having more money than we did, decided to buy a VW camper van so we could get over to the UK for training; we chipped in for petrol. We were helped enormously in our training program by Alex, the ant.i.tank platoon commander, who had been in the Regiment himself and was now back with the battalion. He organized a three-week exercise in Wales for us as an excuse for us to get up on the hills.

We drove through the night, caught the early-morning ferry, and reached one of the military transit camps near Brecon by breakfast the next day.

We met up with Johnny Two-Combs. He'd already done Selection at the same time as Jeff and had failed.

He'd made the commitment to go straight back and do the next Selection and was doing his own training. It was great; he had more information.

"Try witch hazel on the feet," he said. "And if you get blisters, sort them out with iodine."

It was all desperation stuff, trying to find some magic formula that would save our feet. Name the old wives' tale, we'd be trying it.

Some people, we heard, wrapped orthopedic tape around their heels and toes. anything was worth a try because if we started getting injuries, there wouldn't be time for them to heal. We'd just have to carry on day after day.

As we learned the hard way, b.u.g.g.e.r all worked. All it took was two pairs of socks and a decent pair of boots.

The inner sock was thin and the outer was a thick woolen one, and that stopped the friction rub.

Every day we were trying something different to make the bergen comfortable.

Johnny said, "Half a roll bed put down the back of the bergen works wonders."

I tried it, and it was just uncomfortable for me. I still got bergen sores, and they were really painful. They wore me down more and more each day. We tried other precautions, including bandages strapped around the chest to protect our backs. I had tried padding out the actual straps on the bergen, but that was no good; it just wore away and rode up the masking tape. I experimented with cutting up a bit of foam roll bed, but that just used to slip along the back of it. What I found was best was simply to leave the thing alone. At the end of the day what you've got is your world stuck on your back, two straps over your shoulders, and the thing digging in. You've just got to put up with it and crack on.

Then it came to drinking water. How were w'e going to get water down our necks? Did we want to have to stop every five minutes and take the bergen off? There were weird and wonderful devices coming out of people's bergens. Max was the Mr. Gadget Man. He had everything dangling off him. He'd worked out that water stops robbed us of a lot of time and turned up one day with a large water bottle of the kind that cyclists use, with a long tube coming out. He'd sellotaped the tube onto the straps of his bergen, so all he had to do was put the tube in his mouth and suck it. I had tried all that, and it was all a bag of s.h.i.t: It would go wrong; the piping would break or pull out of the bottle. What it boiled down to was that you had water on your belt and some more in your bergen. You drank from your belt kit water bottle, stopped to fill it up from the kit in your bergen, and off you went.

None of the Heath Robinson kit worked-unfortunately.

Then there was the question, How were we going to carry our map?

Max had a plastic orienteering map case that hung around his neck.

I tried that and found that I spent most of my time with it blowing in my face or wrapped around my neck because it was so windy up there.