Soldier Of The Queen (23 page)

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You stupid little cunt," I said, "I could have fucking shot you." The police arrived and we left.

In the following days I felt sick with myself. Even today I find myself sweating when I think of what almost happened. That incident disturbed me more than anything else I did in Northern Ireland, perhaps more than anything else I've done in my life. Why? Because I felt I had met full-on a real badness within myself. I had desperately wanted to kill those boys. I had known instinctively as soon as I had seen them properly that they were not terrorists. We all had: that was why the corporal kept telling us not to shoot. Yet I had wanted to kill them. I had wanted to pull that trigger and blow them away; and I'd wanted to do it not because they were Irish but because I knew I could have got away with it. Under the army's rules of engagement I knew I could have shot both boys dead with no recriminations. We had come under fire and, after shouting a warning to two armed fugitives who refused to stop, we had returned fire. It would have been a tragic misadventure. The only glimmer of comfort I got from encountering my own darkness was the knowledge that I wouldn't have been able to live with myself if I'd done what I'd wanted to do.

That experience knocked out of me a lot of my new-found soldierly cockiness. It made me feel strange inside. I felt at times as if the badness within me would bring badness upon me. I wondered seriously if I would get out of Northern Ireland alive, even though we had entered the last three weeks of the tour.

On 1 August another hunger striker died, 2 5-year-old INLA member Kevin Lynch, after 71 days. The next day an IRA hunger striker died, also aged 25. Kieran Doherty had fasted for 73 days and during that time had been elected to the Irish parliament.

Throughout the tour I had been travelling regularly in the covert car to the military dental centre in Omagh where I was being fitted with two new front teeth to replace the originals that had been knocked out at a nightclub. On the day Doherty died the IRA blew up an unmarked police car just outside Omagh, killing two policemen. On the same day in Belfast the IRA fired a rocket at an army Land Rover. A 21-year-old soldier had to have both legs amputated below the knee. I remember watching the news and thinking, "21 - my age -and a cripple." Over the next few days there were concentrated car-bomb and incendiary attacks all over the north and at the end of the week the ninth hunger striker died, 23-year-old IRA man Thomas McElwee. Over that weekend more than 1,000 petrol bombs were thrown at the security forces. The whole place seemed about to go up in flames. My feelings of guilt diminished, my hatred for the terrorists returned. I was soon back to my old self.

With less than two weeks to go everyone was nervous. We had often been told we were most likely to be hit either in the first few weeks when we were "green" or in the last few weeks when we were preoccupied with thoughts of home. The fields around permanent checkpoints became at night a real danger zone for animals. They would walk into the trip wires, setting off flares. At other times they might have escaped with their lives, but we were all so jumpy that if a flare went off we tended to open fire. I only ever saw sheep shot, but others had tales of foxes, rabbits and even the odd cow, being slaughtered. When a flare went off someone had to go out into the darkness amongst the bushes and re-set it. This often led to arguments.

It s your turn.

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No, it's not. It's yours."

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Fuck off. I'm not going."

One night I was off-duty and sleeping at a permanent checkpoint. Mac was there. There was no electricity or running water. We used to use paraffin-fuelled storm-lamps for light. They looked like those old miners' lanterns. You had to put the fuel in, pump a small handle and light the wick. So long as the air pressure was kept up by pumping the handle they gave off light. While we were sleeping another soldier filled the lamp and began pumping madly. Suddenly it exploded, bursting into a ball of flame. We found out later that he had filled it with petrol by mistake. His lower leg caught fire and he began screaming as his lightweight green nylon combat trousers melted onto his leg. He threw himself to the ground and began rolling around and kicking his legs and arms, screaming for help. Mac and I jumped up, saw the flames and assumed we'd been petrol-bombed. I ran to hold our mate to stop him moving around in case he set something else on fire, and Mac grabbed a huge water pot which we used to heat water for washing. The soldier was still screaming as Mac ran over and threw the contents of the pot over his leg.

The soldier's screams intensified, "ARGH! ARGH! ARGH!" and he was obviously in greater pain.

Mac looked at the pot and said: "Shit. That was boiling water."

Our friend was whisked off to hospital. Later we got word that the burns to his legs from the boiling water were far more serious than those caused by the petrol.

In those last weeks we kept up our harassment of the prospective MP Owen Carron. The by-election was due to be held on 20 August, the day before our tour ended. On that last night I didn't stay up to hear the election result, but I woke the next day to discover our regiment had obviously failed to win the hearts and minds of the people of Fermanagh-South

Tyrone. The electors had voted overwhelmingly for Owen Carron. The most harassed man in the constituency had won by 2,230 votes. More than 31,000 had elected him to serve as their Member of Parliament. He had got even more votes than the previous MP, the dead hunger striker Bobby Sands. In the canteen his victory dampened any celebration there might otherwise have been over the news of the death of the tenth hunger striker, the 23-year-old INLA man, Michael Devine. On the news Mrs Thatcher said she was bitterly disappointed by Carron's win. As I ate my breakfast at St Angelo for the last time I wondered whether our regiment's presence - and I personally — had contributed towards this boost in the republicans' electoral strength.

One of the Enniskillen-born soldiers said: "We should have shot that cunt when we had the chance."

I couldn't see what difference it would have made. Overall, though, his victory didn't undermine our high spirits. It might have underlined the fact that we weren't winning anything, but none of us really cared: we were getting out of there and that was all that mattered. We just had to get through the last day.

Major Disaster gave us our final briefing. He outlined a slick plan of action for the hand-over to our replacement regiment, the Royal Anglians. We would be on a checkpoint near the border when the Royal Anglians arrived by Wessex helicopter. They would disembark and join us in our positions. During this time the Wessex would fly off and circle briefly before returning to take us on board. The Royal Anglians would cover our orderly departure. That last morning on the checkpoint was an agony of waiting. What if the Provos chose this time to launch an attack? I imagined dying as the helicopter came in to land. I think everyone else was thinking the same. We weren't going to feel safe until we were at least on that helicopter on its way to St Angelo. We divided our time between looking at our watches and staring at the sky, waiting for a longed-for sight of that Wessex and the comforting sound of its rotor blades. In the afternoon a code-word came through on the radio that told us the Wessex was ten minutes away. We checked our rucksacks were secure.

Then in the distant sky we spotted the Wessex. We all looked at each other, beaming, as if to say, "It's over. We're getting out of here." Soon we could hear the DUGG-DUGG-DUGG of the rotor blades as the Wessex swept towards us. Just as it touched the ground we all spontaneously jumped to our feet and ran towards it. The Royal Anglians, proper infantrymen, were jumping out, rolling in the grass and taking up firing positions, doing everything by the book. But before the last one of them had jumped out we had got to the Wessex and started jumping in. It was like one of those pitiful scenes from the Vietnam war: desperate refugees making a dash for the last chopper out of Saigon. The slick hand-over had not gone quite to plan. We had caught the helicopter's loader by surprise. He didn't know whether to tell the pilot to take off, because we were half in and half out. While he was deciding we were hurling our gear in and clambering on. The loader just stood there shaking his head. The Wessex lifted into the air. I looked at Major Disaster and smiled. He was almost laughing: he stuck his thumb up at me. Below us we could see the Royal Anglians looking up at us, gobsmacked. It was a great moment.

We still had the journey in the removal van to Aldergrove Airport, but everyone was a lot more relaxed than on the journey down. When we got to the airport we found ourselves in the same hangar as before. But now we were the jubilant soldiers — and we could watch the arrival of our grim-faced replacements.

A few hours later we were in coaches driving through the gates of Imphal Barracks in Osnabriick. We drove into the massive parade square where a waiting band struck up Cliff Richard's "Congratulations". Just behind the band were a crowd of people waiting to welcome us. They were waving and cheering. We felt chuffed.

Then a sergeant opened the coach's door and said: "Married men off the coach. Single men stay where you are."

The married men filed off and ran to the arms of their waiting wives and children. The regimental photographer took pictures of the embraces. Once everyone had gone, including the band and the photographer, the sergeant came back and told us that once we had unloaded the kit from the coach we could go. We got our gear, unloaded the stores and ambled back to our quarters, deflated.

The first few weeks back in Germany were a time of drinking and swapping tales from the war zone.

I caught up with my best friends, Paul and Lofty, whom I hadn't seen since April. They had both emerged unscathed and seemed to have spent their time in tranquil backwaters. I also met Edwards, the soldier wounded in the mortar attack. He said he could hardly remember anything about it. He certainly couldn't remember me being there. He hadn't responded to me when I was trying to help him. Of course, I realised I had kept calling him "Clarkey" for some reason, probably shock. "No wonder I didn't answer you," Edwards said. He did not bad-mouth the Irish over what had happened to him, at least not in my hearing. He just talked about the

injuries. The main scar was an awful purple-coloured monstrosity. It was in an L-shape, one end of which was on his back, the other on his right side, about 18 inches in length and half an inch in width. He had another unsightly scar across his cheek and jaw. Fortunately, he had been walking beside a blast-wall when the mortars landed. White-hot shrapnel had spun through the air and torn into him. After seeing his injuries I couldn't call him lucky, but it could have been worse: without the blast-wall to cushion the explosion he would have been "fertiliser".

It was good to be back in a relatively relaxed environment with women and children around the place. Something struck me that I had only half noticed before - the way a lot of soldiers spoke to their wives and children as if they were in the army. NCOs were the worst for this: many of them talked to their loved ones as if they were on parade. You could always spot army kids. They were the ones with creases in their shirts — three down the back, two down the front, one down each sleeve - and highly polished football boots.

I rang Elizabeth in Ireland regularly. We had agreed to try to keep the relationship going, despite the distance. We planned to meet up: she was going to come to Germany for a holiday and I was going to spend Christmas in Enniskillen. She kept me informed about what was going on back at St Angelo. I told her we had all received individual certificates from the chairman of Fermanagh District Council thanking us for having served in the area. I read mine out to her: In Recognition and Appreciation of service during four and a half months tour of duty by 24516117 Trooper B.P. O'Mahoney (4th Troop) with the

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th Royal Enniskilling Dragoon Guards in County Fermanagh, Northern Ireland from April 1981 till August 1981 It was decorated with the Fermanagh coat of arms and had been personally signed by the council chairman, Councillor Raymond Ferguson. We all thought it was a nice gesture, although the council had misspelt the regiment's name: it should have been "Inniskilling".

On 3 October 1981 the six remaining hunger strikers called off their action. I read that during the period of the Hunger Strike sixty-one people had died in violent incidents. Among them were fifteen policemen, eight soldiers and seven UDR members. The rest were civilians, including seven people (two of them girls of 11 and 14) who died from injuries inflicted by plastic bullets fired by the police and army.

We seemed to spend most of the next few months on exercises. You would no sooner finish one exercise than you would be preparing for the next. For all our fear of imminent death in Northern Ireland I think it was a statistical fact that a soldier was in more danger of dying on exercise in Germany. We had even been told that the army set an "acceptable" death toll before each exercise. If that number was reached, or exceeded, the exercise would be stopped. It didn't surprise me that so many soldiers died, because they really pushed you. Most accidents would happen with people doing stupid things through tiredness — lorries going off the road or helicopters flying into power lines. Quite a few German civilians would die as well: you would get a family driving up the road in a Volkswagen Beetle and they'd smash into a camouflaged tank parked in a lay-by. Working with tanks carried special dangers. You were told always to sleep on top of a tank. In bad weather