First Into Action (5 page)

It was a standard issue, single, wooden bed, sleeping for the use of, and there was a recruit sleeping in it in his pyjamas. During the night, members of his troop had carried his bed, with him in it, out of the grot and across camp to the parade ground without waking him. He must have had a few beers that night. He continued to sleep soundly even with all the heavy marching and yelling of orders going on around him. The drill instructors and NCOs remained poker-faced, none venturing near the recruit. They were all waiting for God to arrive on parade.

The God of any camp is not the commanding officer, as most would assume, but the Regimental Sergeant Major (RSM). He is chosen for his loud voice as well as for his immaculate bearing. Recruits cowered when he walked through the camp. He could spot a loose thread or an unpolished brass buckle at fifty yards. I was once standing with a couple of my squaddies outside the NAAFI during a break (we did a lot of that). One of them leaned back against a wall to support himself and placed a hand in his pocket.

A voice boomed from nowhere, like Zeus shouting down from Olympus. ‘You, with your ’and in your pocket!’

We jerked instantly to our feet like wide-eyed chickens having just heard a fox bark. We knew instantly who it was, but we just could not see where he was.

‘Christ,’ one of the lads said as he indicated with a jut of his chin, ‘he must be two ’undred soddin’ yards away.’

There was the RSM, silhouetted against the sky way up at the other end of the main drag, standing rigid and alone in his immaculate uniform. Our instincts were to run and hide but that would have been suicide. God would find us.

‘Come ’ere!’ he boomed. ‘At the double!’

The recruit dropped everything and ran towards the RSM as fast as he could. We watched from cover while he leaned back under the RSM’s mouth and received a severe bollocking.

Looking down on the parade ground, a hundred yards away, was the officers’ mess, and the RSM stepped out of it to survey his empire. Then his eyes locked on to the imperfection in the centre of it. If the camp was the RSM’s domain, the parade ground was his hallowed plot. There was no power on earth to help you if you desecrated this piece of terra firma. Everyone watched motionless – if you moved a finger of your white-gloved hand he would spot it, then you might as well faint and take your chances with a medical examination. There must have been 200 Marines frozen solid. If it suddenly poured down and lightning struck the parade ground no one would have moved.

The RSM marched slowly down the gravel path from the mess, digging his heels in, his cane in his left hand swinging parallel with the ground. The Royal Marines have a unique march in the British military. Whereas the rest of the Army, Navy and Air Force, without exception, march in a brisk, tick-tock fashion that looks like a speeded-up silent movie, the Marines march much more slowly with a longer pace and a proud, historically earned swagger. That is why Royal Marines rarely integrate with other branches of the armed forces while marching. Marines arrive at the same time as everyone else, they just do it with more panache.

The RSM came to a smart halt on the edge of the parade ground and stood staring at the bed some fifty yards away.

‘Who’s sleeping on my fucking parade ground?!’

No one moved except the recruit, who turned in his sleep to get more comfortable. The RSM developed a terrible grimace and marched towards the bed. The clip of his heels echoed as they cut into the ground. I started to feel sorry for the noddy curled up in his bed. The RSM halted by the bed and glared down at the recruit all snuggled up.

‘WAKE UP!’ he yelled with all his vast might.

The recruit sat bolt upright and for a second had no idea where on the planet he was.

‘Your fucking grot not spacious enough for you, then?’ boomed the RSM.

If there was ever a man who wished the world would swallow him up it was that recruit.

‘Get that bed off my parade ground, you maggot . . . NOW!’

The recruit fell out of the bed and started to drag it away as fast as he could.

‘Don’t you make a scratch on my floor or you’ll spend what career you ’ave left re-tarmacking it!’

The recruit struggled to lift the bed and carry it off. That night his entire troop ran several times around the camp in full equipment, each carrying their own mattress.

Before lunchtime we were awarded our green lids and passed for duty by the Admiral of the Fleet, Lord Louis Mountbatten. My father stood amongst the other parents. It felt odd knowing he was watching me in my immaculate uniform marching as a soldier. It must have felt strange to him too. I almost hadn’t called him to tell him about the pass-out parade. It was as if this was my new world, my new life, and I did not want him to be a part of it.

The RSM, naturally, had the last words before we marched off the parade ground as he shouted the immortal phrase, ‘Royal Marines! To your duties, quick march!’

My green beret felt good on my head. But I did not quite feel like a Marine Commando. That would come when I could make important decisions on my own. There were still many things inside my head I had to straighten out. Only a month earlier my section of ten noddies had been spread out in arrow-head formation headed up a barren, rocky slope in the middle of Dartmoor. It was past midnight and we were on an advance-to-contact patrol with live ammunition, expecting to be attacked at any time. The ground was sodden and heavily pitted as if an artillery bombardment had struck several years before. Suddenly the still, misty night erupted in explosions as simulated mortar shells flashed and boomed, tossing earth skyward all around us. A heavy machine-gun nest then began firing from the crest. The instructors supplemented the enemy attack with a continuous flow of thunderflashes (like bangers but several times more powerful), literally throwing them at us. We hit the dirt and rolled away in preparation to return fire once a fire control order was given. My ears were ringing. Our section commander for that exercise was about to direct our counter-attack when the senior instructor put his foot on the recruit’s back and told him to lie still and play dead. The instructors had deliberately not told us who was second or third in command, and so for a moment no one was in command and confusion reigned. I lay there, like the others, waiting to be told what to do. Suddenly a voice boomed behind me.

‘You! Yes, you. You’re in command.’

He emphasised the order with a thunderflash that bounced off my back to explode only feet in front of me, forcing me to roll away as I tried to gather my thoughts. It seemed to take me ages to recall the sequence of orders and considerations when under attack. We had practised it often on the camp sports field or on Woodbury Common in daylight with blank ammo, but never under these conditions. I stretched my neck to see where everyone was.

‘Get your ’ead down!’ shouted the instructor.

‘Gun group, go left!’ I yelled.

‘They’ve gone left,’ he continued angrily as he towered directly behind me. ‘Move your fuckin’ self! Your men are dyin’ out here!’

I squinted ahead to look for the enemy position so that I could give a fire control order.

‘Section. Pile of rocks . . . !’

‘Which pile of rocks, moron?’ The instructor was causing me more stress than the guns and explosions.

‘To your front,’ I shouted. ‘Three hundred metres!’

‘Bollocks. It’s less than two!’

‘Section! Rapid f . . .’ Before I could get out the word ‘fire’ the instructor shouted above my voice.

‘Cancel that!’ Then crouching closer to make his dark words penetrate further. ‘You waste of fucking space. God help any section you ever command . . . Harris! Take over.’

I numbly joined the others to assault the enemy position. All I could think of was what a useless bastard I had been. The instructor knew exactly what he was doing, though. The Royal Marines had been churning out professional soldiers for over 300 years. He knew that making a fool of me and letting me see myself fumble under pressure would rile me enough to make sure it never happened again. Several years later, while on my junior command course, seventy-five of us were lined up in a ditch in full combat gear waiting to mount a sweep through a forest at the end of a heavy five-minute bombardment. The instructors had given each of the seven sections orders, but had omitted to select an overall commander to launch the attack. That was only apparent when the deathly silence fell after the bombardment and no one moved. It felt like a scene from World War One – waiting to go over the top. But there were no officers to lead the charge. I had never forgotten my pathetic effort in training. Once I realised no one else was going to, I jumped up on to the lip of the ditch and shouted for each section commander to advance his men in staggered formation. Then I turned and led them into the wood. Although it was just an exercise I knew I would have done it for real. I had notched up another lesson in life. Whenever you drop down, and the odds are you will once in a while, use it to bounce yourself back even higher. But I was never destined to lead a section of soldiers into a battle like that. During my career in the British military, my involvement in every conflict would be in small teams, pairs, or alone.

After the pass-out parade I walked up to my father feeling a little awkward, as he had never seen me in uniform before. When I got to him, the way he greeted me, I suddenly felt like a schoolboy again. He forced a smile and nodded his understanding of the whole charade then immediately moved on to the subject of times of buses and trains back to London. He never asked what the training was like, or where was I headed next. He wasn’t deliberately trying to be mean. That’s just the way he was. Why did I think my new experiences would change him at all?

2

The second night I waited for O’Sally and his partner to appear, the wind had picked up. I was disappointed they had not showed the night before. Another lesson. Never expect. Patience is a special forces operative’s most important virtue, something I for one was not born with. Recognising its importance was easy. Nurturing it into a quality was hard. I was helped along by knowing the odds on them turning up tonight were now greater. I would wait quietly.

As the wind blew erratically through the farm, causing noise and movement, it allowed me to shift my weight a little, which gave my aching backside some relief. But I was paying a price for that added comfort I had wished for. I had lost some of my advantage. The wind meant O’Sally could get closer before I could hear him. Swaying branches were no longer a warning signal. A new noise no longer proved life was close by. The ground around the old farm was littered with obstacles big enough for O’Sally to sneak up to and hide behind. There were piles of rubbish and foliage, pieces of rusting farm equipment and dozens of bushes and trees. A low stone wall came out from the far corner of the house and curved in a dog-leg in front of me. It would be possible for O’Sally to crawl close to my position behind the wall without me seeing or hearing him. A loose object was now constantly banging against one side of the building, like a hinged shutter. I thought through the several possible scenarios that could happen.

The most important thing of all was not only did I have to get off the first shot, it had to kill O’Sally instantly, otherwise, even peppered with bullets, if he was not dead he would hang on to that trigger, set to full-automatic, and spray everything in front of him as he went down. Twenty bullets his magazine held, and it only needed one to hit me. The high velocity of an M16 bullet meant it would make a pinhole puncture in the front of a man and an exit hole the size of a frying pan in his back. That was the main difference between low and high velocity bullets if they hit you. If I did get O’Sally, what about the other man? He would no doubt be several yards behind and would likely bolt the instant there was trouble. I wondered if I should chase him, and if so, how far? Obviously not at all if he headed around to the front of the house, because the SAS lad would destroy him. I could not pursue him far into the fields either because of the danger of running into other special forces in the area. That could prove lethal for the hound as well as the fox.

We were not always briefed on minor details. I was expected to work out the finer points and make decisions for myself. Regular soldiers are told when to eat, sleep and take a shit. Special forces are given the mission objective and expected to succeed in the best way they see fit, drawing from their experience. But I did not have any. There must have been a reason that the powers that be had decided I would make the right choice. I did prefer to think for myself. I had been doing it since I could remember. I just had to make sure no one else suffered because of my inexperience. I would be the only one to pay the price tonight if I screwed up. But if I could bag O’Sally and his partner, that would be an experience. Then again, killing people did not make you any better at it. Training did that. Every operative in special forces wants that first kill. It’s like a baby touching heat – you don’t really know what it’s like until you do. Afterwards, you either get less sensitive to it or are disgusted by it. I decided I would leave the second man if he ran. He was not the priority; he wasn’t even significant. It was the tout-maker who wanted him killed anyway, and I didn’t know why. He had given what was called a ‘Becket Approval’.
^*

Tout-makers (handlers they are also called) were a curious breed. This was the only one I met in all my years in the job. His user-name was Mr Tallyho. Like just about everybody in his department, he was a grey, insignificant man, unhealthy-looking, sharp and skittish. He chain-smoked, looked as if he drank too much too often (though I never saw him even slightly drunk), wore a drab suit under a grey coat and sometimes reacted to sudden noises with a flinch. His nerves were somewhat frayed, and understandably so. Tout-makers have the riskiest job in the whole crazy business. They are usually recruited from Military Intelligence, some from the old SIS. They come out of the same school as the Cold War spy-makers. But theirs was a far more dangerous game in Northern Ireland. When handlers recruited foreign spies it was like a chess game and few died as a result. Recruiting an IRA terrorist is like trying to make an ally out of a vicious dog. You never know if it’s your hand he’s suddenly going to bite. Most IRA touts working for Military Intelligence are pressured into it in much the same way as criminals are offered deals by the civilian police in exchange for information. Others are offered hard cash.