The Regiment

by Rusty Firmin

  But that was pretty much it. We did a lot of ops but nothing came to anything and we handed over to another squadron, relieved to some extent, but also disappointed that we hadn’t got more out of the tour. Here’s the thing though. We spent a lot of time watching people we knew to be terrorists and who we also knew had been involved in terrible crimes. If we were the ‘death squad’ that leftists and terrorist sympathisers often claim the SAS is, we’d have had no practical difficulty in killing them and leaving nobody the wiser. But we didn’t. Everything we did was accountable to the law and that’s how we operated.

  One thing had puzzled me in the early part of the tour. Whenever I went to Belfast I was constantly being stopped and questioned by the RUC and British Army patrols, so much so that I took to carrying my ID card in my left hand at all times so that I could show it at the first sign of security forces interest. It took me a while to work out why this was but it turned out that one of the better known Provisional IRA (PIRA) terrorists in Belfast was a dead ringer for me. In fact so much so that we could have been identical twins. Same facial shape, same build, same colouring, same hair and moustache. His name was Joseph Doherty and although he was a couple of years younger than me, we could easily pass for each other. Several years later I showed his picture to my wife and she thought it was me.

  This was a bit of a joke back then but a few months later not so much. By 1980, Doherty was part of a four-man PIRA team which was equipped with, amongst other things, a US Army M-60 machine gun stolen from an armoury in Denver, Colorado and smuggled into the Province by American terrorist sympathisers. The M-60 is similar to the British general purpose machine gun (GPMG): a belt-fed, 7.62mm machine gun with a rate of fire around 600 rounds per minute. Altogether a devastating weapon.

  In April 1980 an intelligence source found out where this M-60 was. At the beginning of May 1980 – while we were at the Iranian Embassy – the weapon was moved in preparation for an ambush on an RUC Landrover and a team was tasked to intercept them.

  The terrorists with their M-60 were in a first-floor flat but as the team moved in, they were obstructed by civilians and then spotted. The IRA opened fire and Captain Westmacott, the troop commander, was hit and killed. Joseph Doherty was the leader of the IRA team, which surrendered soon afterwards. Not someone I want to be associated with.

  So, we packed up and handed over. This being ‘Big B’ Squadron, we needed to leave a parting gift and in our case it was stink-bombs, stuck to the underside of the accelerator and clutch pedals of the ops cars. Well, we wouldn’t want the next squadron to forget who’d been there before them, would we?

  Back in Hereford, in the late summer of 1978, we had a week or so to sort ourselves out and then got some leave. A few of us decided to take a couple of weeks in Spain to wind down which was fun, and then headed back to Hereford. Once we were back, I got my marching orders again.

  This time it was back to Belize. I mentioned before that Belize was a sort of operational posting for the SAS. As British Honduras it had been a Crown Colony for the best part of 200 years, but since the early 1970s it had been self-governing and was now moving towards full independence, as part of the Commonwealth and with the Queen as Head of State, which was due to happen in 1980. Guatemala, its neighbour to the west and south, had always had an eye on Belize’s Caribbean coastline and felt that this might be an opportunity to move in and take over. The Belizeans wanted nothing to do with them. Guatemala was a typical Central American banana republic, governed by a clique of corrupt politicians and military officers whose only legitimacy came from violence and intimidation and while Belize was something of a quiet backwater, they’d got used to freedom and democracy in the British tradition. With independence coming, the Belize government had asked Britain to maintain a military presence and help to guarantee the country’s borders and, perhaps surprisingly, the Labour government of the time had agreed, despite a well-established tradition of selling out our former friends.

  We flew out as usual on the trooping flight from Brize Norton via Washington and were soon back in the reasonably familiar surroundings of Airport Camp where I headed for the basha. After dropping my kit in my bed-space, I got my initial brief and started to sort myself out for deployment out on the 300-plus miles long border with Guatemala. The task was straightforward: maintain a watch on the border and report any activity by the Guatemalan military. The Guats had their own Special Forces, a unit called the ‘Kaibils’ based in the border town of Melchor de Mencos, and the fear was that these guys would try to launch incursions inside Belizean territory, possibly as the spearhead of a larger invasion force.

  At some point in the first few days in Airport Camp, I bought myself a ‘Twat a Guat’ t-shirt in the NAAFI and I remember consciously deciding not to pack it in my bergan for my first patrol. I figured that if I did get captured, it would only wind them up.

  The big difference between my deployment and the jungle phase of selection was that we weren’t in the jungle all of the time. In between patrols we would come back to APC for some rest and down-time; a chance to eat and sleep properly, above all else. But when we were out in the jungle, nothing much had changed: we sweated our nuts off during the day and sheltered from thunder, lightning and torrential rain at night, while half the insects and creepy-crawlies in Central America feasted on us. Our patrols pushed right up to the border and, from time to time, we did see the Guatemalan Army on the other side. The truth is they looked a sorry and unprofessional bunch, there because they were there, and not because there was any enthusiasm to invade.

  Every now and then we would hear big outbreaks of gunfire from the Guat side of the border but eventually we figured out that they would occasionally just shoot their weapons off into the jungle. From what we saw they never came over the border.

  The reality is that you can’t move in the jungle at night, not least because you can’t see anything. As soon as night began to fall, we’d basha up. These patrols were on what we called ‘hard routine’. After dark you didn’t smoke or cook, and you didn’t show any lights. If you were eating, you ate what you had cold. We used the old, tinned, compo rations which were pre-cooked so there was no problem with just troughing them from the can, but they weren’t exactly nice. By day, the patrolling was all about stealth rather than speed and it was exhausting, but you had the eight to ten hours of darkness to rest and recover from it.

  On the other hand, when our patrol was over, we did get helicoptered back to APC and that was a chance to recharge batteries, both literally and metaphorically. You could wash, eat hot food and get a shower and a beer, and that was good. You could also try to chat up the nurses from the Force Hospital and the clerks from the various units there. Every now and again, you got a weekend off and a trip to the Cayes, the string of palm-covered sandbanks along the Belizean Barrier Reef and that was really special. You could swim, sunbathe, fish and barbecue and it was a huge contrast to the squalor of the dirty Belizean jungle. Even better if you could get a couple of the nurses from APC to go along with you.

  When we weren’t in the jungle, we had a standby role as a kind of medical QRF* for British Forces and in my first tour out there we had a couple of incidents. One was a soldier from the Irish Rangers who had been bitten by a snake; the other was an incident where two soldiers had broken limbs during an exercise. Most of us had done a fair bit of first aid training over the years and we had several SAS ‘patrol medics’, guys with a theoretical and practical training much the same as modern ambulance paramedics. When an incident happened, it was far quicker to get us out into the jungle by helicopter and fast-roped down to the casualty than it would be to get a military doctor and his team in by vehicle and foot. We were able to get to them, stabilise them and get them back to proper medical care at APC far quicker than a conventional medical team could.

  *QRF = Quick Reaction Force.

  When the Belize tour came to an end and we’d flown back to the UK, I was surprised and more than a little plea
sed to find I’d been promoted to lance corporal.

  The main reason for being surprised was because, by SAS standards, I wasn’t even properly qualified to be a full patrol member yet. Every SAS soldier at that time was supposed to have a ‘patrol skill’ which would be as a signaller, a demolitionist, a linguist or a medic. This was meant to be in addition to their ‘troop skill’ as a free-faller, climber, mobility driver or swimmer. I’d done none of these courses, but Alastair McKenzie had recommended me for promotion, justified it, and got me through the promotion board. I was chuffed to fuck.

  But promotion didn’t mean I could bypass training and I found that I was down for the SAS patrol medic course. Once again, I was really pleased because this was one of those courses you do in the army that stands you in really good stead for the rest of your life.

  22 SAS was lucky to have a couple of Royal Army Medical Corps warrant officers attached who were gifted instructors – Paul Brown and Paddy – and who were both well liked and highly respected by the guys in the Regiment. Paddy and Paul ran the 12-week ‘theoretical’ stage of the course, although there were actually a lot of practical simulation exercises as part of it, after which we would be unleashed on a civilian hospital for the next stage. This sort of thing was entirely new to me. I’d been a terrible student at school with no interest in learning, but this was different. Homework had always been something I brushed off, but if I was going to get through this, I needed to get stuck in, and I did.

  The theoretical side involved learning about anatomy and physiology together with a reasonable helping of pharmacology. I struggled at first but Paddy and Paul were always there to help and eventually I got through it. In terms of the practical skills, I learned how to insert IV lines and set up intravenous drips, together with other skills like suturing, splinting and a range of things I would never have imagined being able to do before.

  There were 14 of us on the course, including John Mac from 8 Troop and once the theoretical part was safely done and dusted we were sent out to the Accident and Emergency (A & E) department of an NHS hospital to put our newly acquired skills into practice for a month.

  The idea was that we would be attached to one of the A & E doctors and would shadow them throughout their shifts, doing the practical treatment under their close supervision. Only the doctors were supposed to know who we were but, of course, word did get around to some extent. Even so, most civilians back then had never heard of the SAS so it didn’t cause too much excitement.

  John and I were sent to Leeds General for our attachment and while I suppose we could have taken the opportunity to let rip, it was really in our best interests to knuckle down and spend as much time on the wards as we could, so that’s what we did. This was one of the hospitals that Jimmy Savile used to infest back then although we saw very little of him. I knew of him as a disc jockey, of course, and we heard one or two odd stories about him, but I paid very little attention at the time. He wasn’t really on my radar. In any case, our attachment took place around the time of an ambulance strike which made the A & E department a little more hectic than it usually would be but we didn’t get involved and nobody asked us to go out driving.

  Back in 1979 Leeds could be a rough old place and we saw plenty of action there. We dressed as doctors: shirt and tie; neat trousers and polished shoes; white coat and stethoscope, but I’ve got to say that ‘Love’ and ‘Hate’ tattooed on John’s knuckles did look a little unusual. We got involved in dealing with all kinds of stuff under careful supervision: intubation; broken arms, legs and fingers; pregnant women; scalds; lacerations; dead bodies; everything really.

  One benefit of our presence was that when the drunks came in late at night and were kicking off at the doctors and nurses, we could take them somewhere quiet and show them the error of their ways. I suppose I’d been in the army for about 14 years by then and was used to a more or less disciplined, respectful environment and it amazed me to hear the drunken, foul-mouthed abuse being dished out by these louts at people who were trying to help them. Our presence gave the doctors a bit of peace and quiet to get on with their work and they appreciated it. Once they had seen that we were competent, we were accepted as members of the team and got along fine.

  The hospital attachment flew by and once we were back in Hereford, I was really keen to get out into a patrol and put my skills into practice. I didn’t have long to wait. A few months later we were on exercise in Brunei, patrolling through the nice clean jungle out there. Although it was easier to move through, the Bruneian jungle was similar enough to Belize: hot and humid with plenty of rain and thunder by night, and just as exhausting. We were practising an ‘advance to contact’ along a riverbed with the idea being that we would come under fire, then return the fire and manoeuvre as a team back to our last RV point. There were four of us in the patrol: me, DJ, Gerry and David J, our new troop commander. As we came under fire, David had a grenade primed and ready to throw. But as he let go of it, DJ stood up to give covering fire and the grenade hit him smack bang on the back of the head and dropped into the river next to us. I shouted ‘Grenade!’ and we all dropped down into the mud and water on the riverbank just as the grenade exploded.

  At this stage as the smoke cleared, we didn’t know if anyone had been injured. DJ stood up with blood streaming down his face and body, literally from head to foot. My first reaction was that he’d taken some of the shrapnel from the grenade as I hadn’t seen it hit him on the head. DJ wasn’t exactly in shock yet but he knew he was in trouble and I spoke with David to tell him we needed to get DJ back to base camp as soon as possible. Mel, who was the DS on this particular serial,* agreed with me. The three of us assisted DJ back to camp, which wasn’t too far away, with me trying to stem the bleeding. As you can imagine, soaking wet and covered in mud, DJ looked pretty bad – in fact far worse than it actually was. Once back in camp, Doctor Rusty got to work and soon got him sorted out. The first thing I did was to shave the hair away around the gash on his scalp. The cut was probably an inch and a half long but very deep. I cleaned the wound up, then injected Lignocaine all around it as a local anaesthetic, and then sutured the cut with stitches. Finally, I injected him up the backside with antibiotics to deal with any secondary infection and dressed the wound to keep it clean, and we gave him the rest of the day off to recover. All in all, a neat piece of work and no lasting harm done, but it could have been much nastier and without my training DJ would have been in real trouble. Of course, DJ’s head did now look a bit of a mess and as a vain, good-looking sort of chap he wasn’t best pleased about it. Naturally, we spent the rest of the exercise taking the piss whenever we could.

  *A ‘serial’ is a specific planned event within a training exercise.

  There were a couple of other occasions in my SAS career when my medical training helped me to save a life. The first of these also took place in the jungle although this time in Malaya. We were doing a four-man patrol deep in the jungle when Johnny McAleese picked up a bug of some sort. As his condition deteriorated, I realised that he probably had amoebic dysentery but it was night-time by now and there was no way to move him or bring in help. My job for the next 36 hours was to keep him hydrated and to replace the fluids he was losing by continuously shitting. Believe me, the stench was foul but there was nothing to be done about it. I got a drip into John and using the fluid sets we all carried for just this kind of eventuality, I was able to keep him alive until we could get a helicopter in and evacuated him to hospital. John survived and I was able to confirm that he did indeed have an eye tattooed on each cheek of his arse.

  The second occasion happened in Nepal some years later when we were on a task training the Nepalese Special Forces. We had to trek from Kathmandu to a base somewhere high up in the mountains where the training would be taking place. Although there were several SAS Patrol Medics in the group we also had a Nepalese Army doctor with us who would be in charge of the medical side of things. After several hours marching, I noticed that one of our
guys, Johnnie ‘Two Combs’ Howard, was beginning to fall behind. This struck me as odd: Johnnie was a fit guy and it wasn’t like him at all to be off the pace. I spoke to Scobie who was the senior NCO in charge of the team and told him I was concerned that there was something wrong with John and we stopped to take a look at him. John wasn’t complaining but he was sweating more than usual and his face had gone a nasty grey-green colour. We got a message to the doctor who was up ahead to come back and assess John’s condition but when he’d looked John over, he said he thought he’d maybe picked up a bug or possibly it was something to do with the altitude.

  I didn’t agree with this but I didn’t want a shouting match with the doctor so I made my feelings known to Scobie, and he backed me up. The doctor wanted to continue the march and get Johnnie to the base camp; I wanted to get him off the hill and get him to a hospital. The Nepalese team leader came over and we had a heated discussion but eventually it was decided that Scobie would call for a helicopter and that I would go with John to hospital while the rest carried on up to base camp.

  Some time later a Nepalese military helicopter showed up and we got John loaded into it. He was feeling pretty bad by now and the plan was to get him to a military hospital somewhere nearby but we hadn’t been flying much more than ten minutes when we spotted a heavy snowstorm up ahead. The pilot told me he wouldn’t be able to fly through the storm so I asked him to turn us round and take us to a civilian hospital, as John was clearly now in an even worse state than he’d been when we got him on the helicopter.