by Rusty Firmin
As we approached the civilian hospital’s HLS, I could see an ambulance waiting for us there and we quickly got Johnnie into it and moved him into the hospital. It was a typical third-world hospital, filthy and overcrowded and the room they wanted to put Johnnie in was full of sick, dirty people. I lied and told them Johnnie was a British Army officer and needed a room of his own, so they wheeled an old woman out of a side room and put him in there. It was still filthy but there wasn’t a lot I could do about that. I spoke on the phone to a guy at the British Embassy and he fixed me up with some accommodation at a place down the road and hired me an old scrambling type motorbike to get about on.
The doctors at the hospital had examined John and agreed to admit him and told me that I didn’t need to hang around as they knew where I was staying and they would call me if they needed me. I went off to get my head down.
Next morning I turned up first thing to find that they’d already taken John’s appendix out and he was on the mend. If we hadn’t got him off the mountain, he would not have made it.
There was an odd ‘side-bar’ to this story which occurred to me later on. Johnnie’s big mate Andy McNab was on that task with us but he never bothered to come and see Johnnie, even when he had time to do so. Andy was someone I never got to know well, even though we were in the same squadron for seven years, and it struck me that that was the kind of guy he was: it was all about himself. He isn’t a bad bloke but not someone I would want to spend a lot of time with.
CHAPTER EIGHT
LEARNING THE ROPES
One of the more enjoyable aspects of serving in the Regiment was that the training was almost always of a very high standard and we got to visit a huge number of interesting places to do it.
Having qualified as a patrol medic, the next course I was sent on was an ‘offensive driving’ qualification. This was only a short course but from what I’d heard it sounded like a lot of fun and I was keen to do it. This turned out to be right. The course was concerned with anti-ambush drills in single and multiple vehicle groupings and a lot of it was about live firing from inside and outside vehicles: a skill that would be very handy in the world of VIP protection where a lot of SAS soldiers work when they finish with the Regiment. Much of it took place at the SAS training area in the Welsh Borders where there is what’s called a 360° range – a range where you can shoot safely in all directions – which was ideal for what we were practising.
This was followed by the close quarter battle instructors course: again, a lot of shooting, much of which was with pistols and short-range weapons like the Heckler and Koch MP5 variants. You see a lot of rubbish in movies and TV but the basic skills are quite straightforward: you need a stable body position which will allow you to point and aim your weapon naturally, and basically you keep shooting – double taps, which are two rounds fired in rapid succession – until your target goes down and is therefore neutralised.
With all the esoteric stuff we did around the world, it was easy to forget that we had a role within NATO and this was practised from time to time as well. On one occasion B Squadron was sent to take part in a big NATO ‘Flintlock’ exercise in Germany in the winter of 1979. The weather then was as cold as I’ve been any time in my life and the initial plan of parachuting in to Germany and picking up the ‘pinkies’* was soon abandoned as the weather was too bad. Instead we flew in to an airfield and were then dispersed throughout Germany in teams with orders to attack various infrastructure targets, mirroring our role in the event of a major war and giving the exercising troops a live and dangerous enemy to defend against. Together with the pinkies, we also had some old BSA trail-bikes that were still being used in 8 Troop and these would be our principal means of movement during the target attacks. Essentially we would get as close as we could on the bikes, then cover the last half-mile or so by foot, plant our dummy charges on the targets and exfiltrate back to the bikes and take off. Once we were clear, the head shed would let the exercise umpires know what we’d done and they would come in and inspect our charges, making sure we’d used enough ‘explosive’ and placed it in the right places to destroy the target.
*Pinkies = specially converted long-wheelbase Landrovers used by the SAS as patrol vehicles.
We did this for a couple of weeks but the real fun came after the exercise was over. Major G, who had taken over as Officer Commanding B Squadron from Major T, had been speaking to one of the senior US Army generals in Germany who was commanding the exercise. The general had been talking about his personal security and had confidently told Major G that ‘he could not be captured’: his driver-bodyguard was so good and his security routines were so effective that nobody could intercept or kidnap him.
This was an important thing at the time. The so-called ‘Baader-Meinhof Gang’, alias the ‘Red Army Faction’, a bunch of hard-left student radicals turned terrorists, were still operating at this time and there was a real threat against all senior military figures, not just German ones. They had already launched terrorist attacks against US Army targets so his security did really need to be good.
But claiming that he couldn’t be kidnapped was a red rag to a bull as far as Major G was concerned and they made a bet. B Squadron would try to lift him during a particular five-day period. I don’t know what the stakes were but I doubt it was very much.
So the task was given to 8 Troop. Valdez was running the troop then – he was probably the best troop staffie I worked with – and we got down to business pretty quickly. The first step was to put a watch on the general’s movements. We saw that he would move about in an unmarked civilian car, sometimes with him driving and sometimes with the driver-bodyguard at the wheel. They varied their routes but we soon realised that there was one stretch of road – running through a forest – which he had to take on his way to work whichever other route they took. This was where we would hit them.
We’d all taken a set of civilian clothes with us and this was what we’d be wearing, along with balaclavas and respirators. Because of the security situation, and the fact that it was an unofficial exercise, we wouldn’t take live weapons with us – we didn’t want any entanglements with the German police – but we did have some iron bars and CS gas grenades. We also nicked a couple of ‘Umleitung’ (diversion) signs.
The plan was simple. We had two civilian cars, one of which would be in front of the general and one following on a few hundred yards behind. We were going to stop the car by pulling a big log across the road just over the brow of a hill where they wouldn’t see it until too late. With the car stopped we would smash the windows and throw in the gas, then pull the general out and get him into one of the cars and take him away to our safe house. The clever part was to be using the diversion signs to prevent any random civilian cars from showing up and getting in the way, or, worse, reporting us.
And that was how it played. My role was to hide in the bushes by the log and to be ready to smash windows and throw in a gas grenade, together with Gonzo, Mink, Gerry, Tak and Valdez. Sure enough, we soon got word that the general was on his way and not long afterwards we saw him heading up the hill. We pulled the log into position and as the driver came over the brow he saw it too late, tried to stop, lost control and ploughed right into it. We moved fast, swinging iron bars and car jacks to smash the windows and get the gas in. The driver came out first, shouting and crying that he was blinded – he wasn’t going to be a problem – but the general was a huge fucker, six foot six and strong with it, and he came out fighting. We grappled with him for few seconds – he managed to rip the sleeve off my nice warm civilian padded jacket – but we quickly got a bag over his head and shoved both of them into our vehicles and took off for the safe house. We didn’t speak to him or say who we were but I imagine he guessed. Once he was bagged the struggle was over and he came quietly, helped by the plasticuffs we’d got on his wrists. At the safe house we left the general on a chair while we got Major G over and then it was time for the big reveal. To give him his due, the general
took it well and there were no comebacks, even though his car was smashed up and one of ours had got damaged too. I doubt we would get away with that kind of thing nowadays. The only annoyance was losing the sleeve on my jacket: I put in a claim for a new one but got fucked off at the high port.
Around about this time I managed to get myself on the demolition instructors course. Just like a little kid I really fancied the idea of learning how to blow things up and then teaching people how to do it and I thought it would be a good fun course to get under my belt. It wasn’t just standard demolitions either. The course included quite a bit about making our own explosives, from easy to obtain household materials, and a fairly hefty section on arson too. It can’t be bad to be paid to learn how to burn things down!
To my surprise, there was an awful lot more theoretical study on this course than I had expected and almost every other day, work would start with a test on what we’d learned the day before, so I had to study hard to keep up. Safety rules were paramount. They weren’t going to let us loose with explosives and detonators until we knew exactly what we were doing, so I knuckled down and learned everything parrot-fashion.
I soon learned that this was one course where you couldn’t afford to fuck about. Something as simple as a detonator going off in your hand would lead at best to a loss of fingers and at worst the whole hand coming off and that was not on my agenda.
The key with the explosives training was calculating exactly how much plastic explosive you need to destroy a given target, and clearly this would vary with what it was made from and where you placed the explosives. The message from the instructors was simple, if in doubt, give it P for plenty; it was better to be slightly over the top than under with plastic explosives.
The home-made explosives part of the course was also fascinating. We learned several different formulas and put them to the test by blowing up tree stumps out on the training area. We also learned how to make improvised claymore* devices using mortar rounds, detonating cord, detonators and a means of initiation. The arson part of the course was also fun and I wondered just how much damage I could do now with my professional knowledge of how to burn stuff down.
*A claymore mine is a mine designed to send fragmentation in a specific direction.
The final exercise took place down at the ranges at Hythe on the coast in Kent. There we were let loose on all kinds of targets using a range of different explosives to take down buildings, cut railway lines, flatten trees and so on. Our final trick was to get rid of all the left over explosive. We placed it under an old tank that was used as a target out on the ranges and managed to turn it over. Not bad at all.
I didn’t get a lot of opportunity to use my demolition skills for real but a few years down the line there was a call for a couple of volunteers to go to St Peter Port in Guernsey to help with the demolition of an old World War II bunker. I decided to go along with Bob P from A Squadron. We got one of the Counter Terrorist (CT) Team white Range Rovers and took the ferry out to Guernsey and met up with a guy called Sidney, who was a civilian demolition expert of great standing and a bit of an explosives guru.
Sidney had been there for several days already but the sheer hard work of demolishing the huge German bunker was too much for him and he needed a couple of young fit guys to help out. Sidney was no spring chicken but Bob and I were keen to learn at the feet of the master and we were up for it.
By the time we got there, Sidney had done all the calculations and our job was mostly drilling the holes that the explosives would go into. With that done, we set up a ‘ring main’ of detonating cord and then placed sheets of rubber matting over the top of the bunker which would prevent fragments from being launched towards a nearby housing estate. Finally, we inserted the plastic explosive into the holes and connected the initiation set.
We were a fair way away from the bunker for safety reasons but when Sidney – the ‘silver fox’ as we called him – gave the order to fire it was clear that something was wrong. There was a gigantic bang and we watched in disbelief as huge lumps of concrete were launched into the air. Some of it crashed down onto a road, some landed very close to us and a fair amount ended up in the playground of a nearby school. Whoops.
Within a couple of minutes we were surrounded by angry residents, pointing their fingers and generally giving us a hard time. Sidney was trying to work out what had gone wrong and asked us to deal with the residents and we tried to, but it wasn’t long before the police turned up and took over. We explained who we were and what we were doing but they weren’t that interested and gave us the Gypsy’s warning to be out of Guernsey the next morning and not to come back. Sidney too.
We arrived back in Hereford and went to see the operations officer for a debrief. The Regiment had obviously had an angry phone call or two from the Guernsey Police but the ops officer wasn’t too worried; we’d been asked to go out there to do the donkey work so it clearly wasn’t our fault that Sidney’s own ‘P for Plenty’ was a bit over the top.
One weird thing that the ops officer told us was that the Guernsey Police had been keeping us under surveillance while we were there. We’d seen this but had just got on with the job at hand and hadn’t worried about it, although it did seem a little strange. I can’t imagine who they thought we were: after all, we were in an SAS vehicle and they’d surely checked the number plates?
Soon after I did my demolitions course, B Squadron went out to Canada for a big exercise hosted by the Canadian Special Forces who were based in Edmonton. The exercise would be split into several phases, starting with troop training, so that 6 Troop would do an amphibious exercise, 7 Troop would go free-falling, we would do mobility training using our pinkies and the new Can-Am motorcycles we were trialling for the Regiment and 9 Troop would be climbing in the Rockies.
We flew out there and had a day or so to shake out before we headed off for our troop training. We had all the pinkies with us, together with a couple of guys driving a ‘mother ship’ truck and the rest of us on the Can-Am motorbikes. We’d also brought a qualified testing officer (QTO) with us, a senior NCO from the Royal Corps of Transport called Alan, who was there to assess and test all the guys who didn’t have their motorcycle licences and was attached to us for the duration of the exercise.
Alan made the mistake on the first day of turning up in a motorcycle helmet with ‘Instructor’ printed on it. Within minutes, all the trainees had strips of masking tape with ‘Student 1’, ‘Student 2’ etcetera written on them. Alan got the message very quickly and removed the ‘Instructor’ strip, and moments later, the ‘Student 1’, ‘Student 2’ signs had gone as well.
The plan was to drive out to the huge training area at Wainwright and then, because we were self-sufficient thanks to the vehicles and their stores, we would move around, basha-ing up wherever we ended up at the end of the day’s training.
It was late when we got to Wainwright and we decided to go to a civilian campsite for the night. We got there and started to sort ourselves out and a few of the lads got chatting with some Canadians who were also there. It soon emerged that there was a big strike on in Canada at the time and this had led to a shortage of beer as it wasn’t being distributed round the country. It so happened that we had quite a large amount in the mother ship which we’d bought at the Canadian NAAFI in Edmonton so Valdez, the Fijian staff sergeant who was running 8 Troop, cut a deal: the Canadians would supply the barbecue and we would supply the beer. It was something we did several times over the next few weeks and nobody complained on either side.
Next morning we got on to the training area proper and began our motorcycle training. Alan the QTO decided that the best thing would be to spend the day playing ‘follow the leader’ with him up front. To be fair, he was a pretty good motorcyclist but we were a mixed bag: some guys were fine, others not so much. The terrain was rough and hilly, with thick bushes and trees, plenty of sandy areas and also a lot of trenches and foxholes which had been dug by troops on exercise and not filled in
. ‘Follow the leader’ was fine for a couple of hours but then began to get boring and the guys were beginning to fuck around like a bunch of kids. This wasn’t supposed to be a tactical exercise at this point; we were just getting to know the bikes, which had been originally designed for motocross.
As it happens the bikes were OK, but perhaps a little complicated, and, as we found, spares were in short supply. Even so, we were able to have some fun on them and soon we were disappearing in all directions as we put them through their paces. Alan found a comfy place to sit and watch, wondering, I suspect, how we didn’t manage to seriously injure ourselves. The next couple of days were really more of the same but we did start to rack up the injuries. George S managed to hit a foxhole lengthways at speed: the bike stopped dead and he was thrown over the handlebars, dislocating his thumbs so they stuck out like Fonzie’s from Happy Days and he spent most of the rest of the exercise confined to one of the pinkies.
One feature of Wainwright was that it had the biggest mosquitoes I think I’ve ever seen. As soon as you came off your bike, they’d be all over you, biting away.
After a couple of weeks at Wainwright we headed back to Edmonton for a break and to regroup as a squadron. The Canadian Special Forces had challenged us to a football match and for some reason thought they were going to win. Wrong. We gave them a thorough thrashing and then took them on in some competitive drinking which was a bit closer.
This is important. SAS soldiers are given a lot of responsibility but the second you demonstrate that you aren’t worthy of it, you’re in trouble as this story demonstrates.