Soldier Of The Queen (13 page)

Over the next few days I had my introduction to what was to be our other main pastime - manning vehicle checkpoints, the dreaded VCPs. There were two types - mobile and permanent. We would set up the mobile ones while out on patrol. Usually, a helicopter would drop us in the countryside and our officer would choose a spot on an isolated road where we would start stopping cars. We would stay there for half an hour or so and then tramp across fields to another spot to do the same.

If you were not checking cars you had to take up firing positions on the ground which, being Irish ground, was usually soaking wet. However, I still preferred the mobile VCPs to the permanent ones, which tended to guarantee you several days of the most astonishing boredom. The permanent VCPs were fortified: they had a machine-gun position at either end in a "sangar", of which there were two types. One was the size of two telephone boxes, made of breeze-blocks and sandbags. In these you had to stand to look out of the three viewing holes. The other was even smaller, made only of sandbags. You had to crawl into it and lie down for 12 hours gazing down the barrel of a heavy machine-gun which pointed through a shoebox-size hole across a deserted country road.

Motorists would drive past the first machine-gun post and zig-zag into the centre where their licences would be checked before they were allowed to zig-zag past the other post. I much preferred to be in the middle zone checking drivers. Squaddies in the machine-gun sangars used to spend their shifts making tea or heating tinned food on the small camp cooker, masturbating and fantasising about opening fire on the occasional passing motorist.

If you wanted a piss or a shit you could ask someone to relieve you while you relieved yourself, but it was hardly worth the trouble. Toilets in the main central area were only holes in the ground. So soldiers in the outer sangars usually used a carrier bag into which they would do their business. They would then tie it up and drop it outside until the end of their "stag" (slang for their work shift), when they would take it to the main area to bury it.

When it rained the sangar flooded and I would find myself squatting in mud: when the sun shone the stench and the occasional rat would keep me awake. And staying awake was difficult when all you did all day was stare down a machine-gun barrel at cows or sheep. An occupational hazard in those conditions was piles caused by sitting for hours in the damp while eating tinned garbage that provoked either constipation or diarrhoea.

In those early days I found people recoiling from me as I stuck my face in drivers' windows. I had had my two front teeth knocked out by a nightclub bouncer's knuckle-duster a few months before arriving in Ireland. I realised that my teeth's absence gave me a slightly intimidating look, at least when combined with a head shorn of hair, a face smeared with camouflage cream and a rifle that even civilians could tell I was holding inexpertly. An officer even said to me one day that I needed to get my teeth sorted out as I looked like a bit of a thug. It was arranged for me to visit the army dentist at Omagh to get fitted with a new plate of false teeth.

My missing teeth did not alter significantly my Midlands accent, which the locals seemed to understand easily enough. Not all English regional accents translated well in Northern Ireland: another soldier from Tyneside kept having problems making himself understood. Questions like, "Where ya gooin', old un?" tended to result in blank looks from the Fermanagh public. Tail-backs would develop at checkpoints as baffled drivers tried to work out what he was saying. At first he thought the Irish were mocking him, but officers realised his accent was the problem and they ordered him to spend his shifts where he would not come into contact with civilians. He ended up spending most of the tour sitting sullenly in a sangar with only a machine-gun and cows for company.

Throughout those first few weeks the tension rose in the camp and on the streets as our local MP, Bobby Sands, slowly starved himself to death. Around 1,000 people took part in what was described in the local paper as "the most impressive ever Easter Sunday commemoration in Fermanagh" when the IRA fired a volley of shots over the grave of a local IRA man, Louis Leonard, at Donagh. The same paper carried a warning from the South Fermanagh Provisional IRA. It read: "Anyone who is to be found informing or collaborating with the security forces - RUC, UDR or British Army - will be dealt with without mercy."

This paragraph gave us an idea. We started giving special treatment to certain republicans, especially those we regarded as sympathisers on the margins of the movement. If we came across one of them in the street we would be overly friendly. For instance, we might pat him gently on the arm and start laughing, as if he had told us something funny. Or else we would let him walk off and then shout after him something like: "Cheers, Sean. Thanks for that." or "Speak to you Wednesday, then." This behaviour seemed to disturb them more than outright harassment. One publican from

Newtownbutler even pleaded with me once to stop doing it because people were beginning to think he was an informer.

"
That's the idea, shitface," I said.

I didn't mind harassing republicans on the street, but I hated searching their houses, especially if there were children present. We never found anything — nor did we really expect to find anything. As far as I could see, the primary purpose of searches was to harass the occupants, to put pressure on them and to remind them that we knew what they were up to. We did not kick in doors and charge in: we were more cold and calculating than that.

I remember doing one with the RUC in those first few weeks. We were told it was the home of an IRA man on the run. Initially, I stayed in the front garden while the RUC men entered the run-down council house. After a few minutes I walked in myself. The inside was tidy, but spartan. A woman stood in the front room. Her two boys, aged about eight and ten, stood next to her with their arms around her. I could tell they were protecting her rather than seeking protection. I had clung to my own mother in the same way in the face of my father's brutality. I recognised the look on their faces, that expressionless gaze of silent hatred.

A coal fire blazed behind the woman. On the mantelpiece were framed photos of her family, although none included her absent husband. I assumed she had hidden those in case we seized them. One of the boys looked at me. I smiled instinctively. But he didn't respond: all he could see was my rifle and my British uniform. The woman spoke with a soft quiet voice, which somehow made everything worse. I looked around and noticed Jesus Christ looking down on us all from a large wooden crucifix on the wall. He had that same mournful expression I remembered from the picture in my own family home. I imagined those boys praying to Him for my sudden death, like I had prayed for my father's. I hoped that they too would get a negative response from the Lord. I left the house feeling deflated and uneasy. It was at those times that I felt like a Judas betraying my own kind. The RUC men seemed happy with their day's work, talking about "the lying whore" and her "Fenian murdering bastard" of a husband. We never raided Protestant houses looking for loyalist terrorists. The latter were always mentioned in terms of approval: soldiers and police regarded them as part of the common good.

I lived in the anticipation of being shot or blown up. We had all written our blood group in indelible ink on the underside of our combat-jacket pockets; and in Germany I had been given two metal identity tags containing my name, rank and serial number. You were supposed to tie one tag around your neck and attach the other to one of your bootlaces. The idea was that if you were blown to bits your remains would still be identifiable - or at least one of your feet would be.

In those early weeks there was one incident which could have necessitated the use of my ID tags. One of our regular tasks was to check the area's culverts (large drains which allow water to pass under a road). The IRA had frequently used culverts to hide bombs which they detonated under passing military or police vehicles. To prevent culverts being used in this way the army had placed bars or security gates across them. One day we were told that a milk churn had been spotted under a culvert: our job was to clear the area while the bomb-disposal people went to work. A helicopter dropped us in a field near the culvert. I could not see what there was to clear as we were in the middle of an empty field. However, we spread out several hundred yards away from the suspected bomb and remained there staring at it for about eight hours. During that time an army spotter plane flew over, taking photos of the ground to see if there were any buried command wires leading from the bomb to the terrorists' planned detonation point. Suddenly we got the order to evacuate the area. When we got back to base we were told that the plane had spotted two command wires. One led from the culvert to an overlooking hill; the other started several hundred yards away from the culvert - roughly where we had taken cover -and finished on top of another hill. We had been sitting on a bomb: the Provos had obviously hoped to hit a security forces' vehicle with the culvert bomb, then have a second crack at the soldiers who arrived to pick up the pieces. Both bombs had failed to detonate, but the experience drove home to us how vulnerable we were.

However, boredom, not the Provos, caused our regiment's first casualty. I was not present at the incident, but I heard the commotion on the radio. A soldier on duty in one of the outer sangars of a permanent VCP had probably decided to relieve his boredom by cleaning his General Purpose Machine-Gun (GPMG). There was, after all, little else to do. He started stripping the gun down, but left in a bullet-belt. He must have removed one of the gun's fail-safe components and then accidentally pulled the trigger, because the GPMG suddenly started spraying bullets all over the place. Unfortunately, one of them slammed in to the thigh of a soldier standing further down the road. The gun kept firing despite the gunner's efforts to stop it. Finally, he had to twist the bullet-belt to jam it. We had been taught various code words to use on the radio to cover incidents for which we needed assistance. For instance, you had to shout "Contact! Contact! Contact!" if someone shot at you. However, there was no code for shooting yourself. I could hear the soldiers on the radio asking for help, but not being quite sure what to say.

There had not been any civilians nearby at the time and the wounded soldier was not critically injured, so there was no major inquiry. To me the incident just underlined that we were the wrong soldiers in the wrong place at the wrong time.

I had been at Lisnaskea for less than a fortnight when I found myself transferred to Fermanagh's main military base. I was sent to St Angelo Barracks, sited on a disused airfield outside Enniskillen, to join a new roving unit of 16 soldiers. The idea was that we'd be available to float around the county at short notice to fill in gaps and provide back-up where necessary. When we first arrived a few of the squaddies were terrified because the camp was surrounded by hills. We had been taught that you had to take the high ground in order to launch a successful attack. And we remembered our instructors' promise that at some stage in Northern Ireland all of us would have a rifle trained on our heads. Taken together, these observations convinced a few soldiers that the hills were swarming with snipers. For the first few days I noticed one squaddie stooping his head whenever he came out of a building. He stopped doing it after I ridiculed him by asking if he'd lost some money.

The conditions were a huge improvement on Lisnaskea: there were even women walking around — Ulster Defence Regiment Greenfinches who worked in the operations room. The base comprised about 20 Portakabins on an old runway and acted as the nerve centre for all operations in the county. Each Portakabin was surrounded by six-foot high grey breeze-block blast-walls, which were meant to give protection from mortars. Several of the Portakabins acted as cramped sleeping quarters for our soldiers and others were used by the Ulster Defence Regiment (UDR) for various things. One was used by a squad of eight SAS men and soldiers from our regiment's Close Observation Team, who were specially trained in undercover surveillance. Others contained the radio room, the intelligence cell (which collated information about republican activity), the stores, the TV room and the REMF. I never found out what the letters REMF stood for. To us they signified a room full of uniform-wearing clerks who only blacked up and carried rifles to pose for photographs for the regimental magazine. The unofficial transcription of the words REMF was: Rear Echelon Mother Fuckers. The camp, like the others I visited, also had its own shop. These shops were always run by Asians and were known as "Chogi" shops. They were not walk-in-and-browse concerns: they were more like school tuck shops with a raised counter and serving hatch. You queued up, peered in, found they had run out of the sweets you wanted, then left. There was also a small shooting range and a helicopter pad, used by Wessex and Lynx helicopters.

I was pleased to see there was a bar and a proper canteen, which seated about 50. At first I thought I might finally get to eat some decent food, but I soon discovered that the cooks served only the most diabolical slop: allegedly-corned-beef hash, allegedly-chicken curry (bones included) and a stew which seemed to contain the unidentifiable flesh of long-buried animals dug up and reheated. We ate off stainless-steel trays indented with three spaces, presumably to help maintain discipline on the plate. "Diggers" (army slang for knives, forks and spoons) were provided, but most squaddies preferred to use their own snap-together camping utensils as the diggers looked as if they were cleaned irregularly. Tea, known as "slurp", was always available and was drunk from half-pint black-plastic field mugs.