by Rusty Firmin
The second jump was a land jump onto a rock-hard drop zone, which made it interesting. We jumped in military kit with weapons, and afterwards Fred Marafono showed me the massive bruise he got when the butt of his SLR got jammed up into his armpit. Ouch.
I had my own problems. Ginger J was in my stick and at around 600 feet I couldn’t help but notice that he was colliding with my canopy. It was like a cartoon in that I could see his face and the palms of his hands pushing through the nylon but there was nothing I could do other than try to steer away. Even so, whatever I did, Ginger seemed to keep on following me. In the end we both landed fairly heavily but OK. No damage was done.
Towards the end of the training, a few of us decided to go out for a beer and Barry the storeman, who was attached to the squadron from the Royal Green Jackets, offered to drive and didn’t mind not drinking. We had the usual army white minibus which took us from Bloodhound Camp into the local city of Limassol and got set about the beer.
We hadn’t been there long when we noticed that there were some other Brits in the same bar as us. They were obviously officers from the way they were dressed, in blazers, shirts and ties, and some stealthy reconnaissance suggested that they were the Red Arrows display team. The little red Hawk aircraft tiepins they all wore were a dead giveaway.
They may have been the elite of the RAF but we were the SAS and after quite a number of beers and a few flaming Drambuies (top tip: throw it down quickly and it goes out; sip it and you get third degree burns on your face) I asked one of them what darts team they were from. This led to some banter and after more beers and more flaming Drambuies, we decided to move on. Barry found us another bar, and this was a bit less friendly.
It took a while to realise it but these guys didn’t like us. The whole Cyprus insurgency had passed me by when I was a kid in Carlisle in the early 1960s but there were plenty of people out in Cyprus who really hated the British Army and all its manifestations. It didn’t bother us, we just carried on drinking, but there was an atmosphere which I couldn’t put my finger on and my hackles were slowly but surely rising.
There was one particular guy who wouldn’t look at us. I’d spotted him but he hadn’t seen me. I was switched on enough at this point to ease back on the alcohol and I watched as he followed Fred Marafono into the toilets. It didn’t look good. I went after him and Bobby C followed me.
Fred was standing at one of the urinals taking a piss and as he did this, I saw the Cypriot take a knife from his pocket. I didn’t hesitate; I hit the guy as hard as I could and he went down, face first into the piss trough. The knife skidded to a halt by one of the toilets.
Fred was finished and shaking off in a bemused way when I told him, ‘We need to leave here now!’ We moved out quickly into the bar and I grabbed the guys: ‘This place is trouble. We’ve got to go.’
We trusted each other enough for this to be an effective warning and we bundled ourselves out of the bar, jumping into the minibus laughing and joking.
Even so, on the way back, emotions were running high. We had two Bobby Cs in the Troop and for some reason they were at each other’s throats. As we headed back to camp, it all kicked off and they were throwing punches. Tak was the senior NCO and as he turned round to say something, he got a stray boot to the side of the face. It wasn’t a good move. The rest of us tried to wind things down but back at camp it kicked off again in our tent, only finishing when one of the combatants took off for the rest of the night.
At the end of the training, we had a rugby match against the local Royal Military Police unit at Happy Valley in Episkopi. We had quite a good team then so that wasn’t a worry but Kempy, the squadron sergeant major, was concerned that we would misbehave in their mess and gave us all a good talking to beforehand, reminding us that there would be wives and kids there for the inevitable curry lunch and beer after the game. It came as a slight surprise when, after a few beers had gone down, we saw Kempy doing handstands against the wall of the bar with his backside hanging out. We didn’t let him forget that.
Our next major training exercise was in Botswana. This was supposed to be a deployment to reassure the Botswanan government that we were their friends and would support them in the event of any difficulties with their neighbours, so we had to keep a fairly low profile. The aim of the exercise was to conduct jungle patrolling, recces and finally an assault on an enemy location, but we were also testing some new 110 Landrovers which were being introduced to replace the old pinkies, and also trialling some quad bikes to see whether they might have any operational role in the future.
The quad bikes turned out to be a lot of fun for racing around in the thick African bush but they weren’t much more than toys and we ended up giving them the thumbs down. Our Can-Am motorbikes also caused problems in the rough terrain: they were very unreliable and needed far too many spares to keep them going. We also found that you couldn’t go for long in the bush without stopping to take the huge thorns out of our bodies.
The new Landrovers weren’t ideal either, certainly in comparison to the old pinkies. We discovered that they were very prone to getting their radiators punctured by the thick scrub and it was decided they needed serious modification to toughen them up before we could take them into operational use.
The final part of the exercise took place in the dense jungle around the Okavango River and each troop had its own role to play. My patrol of four were making for an RV in order to get into position for the final attack when we reached the river just after midnight. The river looked huge in the moonlight and we spent some time trying to find a useable crossing point. We were on foot and we could see that we were going to have to try to wade it. The problem was that we could hear the unmistakeable sound of hippopotamuses splashing around in the river nearby and they aren’t good news. Hippos are big strong bastards and they’ll go for you without batting an eyelid if you get too close to them. Another thought occurred to me: what about crocodiles?
Now don’t get me wrong, the SAS is full of brave, well motivated guys but, to be honest, none of us fancied getting eaten by a croc. We got down into cover and I decided to hold a ‘Chinese Parliament’ to work out the best and safest way to get across. This is a normal process in the Regiment where you have all kinds of different experience within a patrol: the commander, in this case me, might not necessarily know the best way to do something but one of the others might.
In this case, nobody had any particularly good ideas. The river was at least 60 yards across and we couldn’t see a safe way of crossing. Shit. At this point something quite bizarre happened. As we sat in cover, we heard the sound of somebody singing loudly and out of tune. We sat and observed as a local man, who appeared to be drunk, out of his mind or high on drugs walked up to a point on the riverbank and, without hesitating, splashed into the river and waded across, still singing lustily. It’s fair to say we all felt a bit shamefaced at this: if a local drunk isn’t afraid to cross the river, then the big tough SAS shouldn’t have much of an issue either. We followed him over, tactically of course, one at a time and covering each other’s crossings from the bank.
While we heard a lot of splashing about from the hippos, they didn’t come close to us and we didn’t have any problem with them. This wasn’t the case for everyone. One patrol, which was infiltrating in Gemini inflatable boats, got too close and wound up having the engine off the back end of their boats bitten off; fortunately nobody was injured.
With the exercise completed we headed back to our camp, which was just outside Gaborone, for a few days of packing up and some R and R. When we got there, Mink and I were told that one of the parents of one of the Signallers had died and that he and I were to drive him to the international airport in Johannesburg in next door South Africa so that he could catch a flight home for the funeral. The idea was that we would do the whole trip in a day.
In fact, after we’d dropped the guy off at the airport, we learned that the land border between South Africa and Botswana closed at 8pm a
nd we realised that we weren’t going to make it in time. Instead we checked into the Holiday Inn at the airport and spent the evening drinking in the disco there.
The next day we drove back to Botswana uneventfully and were back in time for the squadron ‘end-of-exercise’ party. This was a typical B Squadron affair. Someone had made punch with the G10 issue dark navy rum and crates of beer had been brought in whilst the barbecue got fired up. What could go wrong? Well, this. Sometime late in the evening one of the guys in 6 Troop, Andy, an ex-Para, decided to throw a thunderflash over the roof of one of the buildings. Of course it went off with a loud bang, as they do. For some reason this really annoyed Major P, who had taken over from Major L as Officer Commanding B Squadron, and all of a sudden he and Kempy stopped the party in its tracks while he attempted to find out who the culprit was.
This produced a stand-off. Andy wasn’t going to own up and potentially get himself RTU’d and his mates weren’t going to grass on him. The issue was partly that Major P wasn’t particularly well liked in the squadron – of all the squadron commanders I served with he was, in my opinion, the worst – but also that it just didn’t seem that important. We were miles from anywhere: it was hardly drawing attention to us. Anyway, that was the end of the party and we were all sent to bed like naughty schoolboys.
Next morning, the squadron was paraded and, once again, we were asked to name the person who had let off the thunderflash. Nobody owned up and, in consequence, Major P decided to confine us all to camp. I wasn’t particularly affected by this but quite a few of the guys had booked and paid for a two-day safari in the local area and they all lost their money, which put a big damper on the whole deployment.
After the fun and games in Botswana, it was time for B Squadron to prepare for another tour in Northern Ireland. Our accommodation wasn’t particularly great but it was all liveable-in and, as usual, we had our own bar for socialising.
Within a couple of days of our arrival I was walking through the barracks when I bumped into one of the senior NCOs from 7 Troop. He was a bit flustered because he’d been due to take his HGV 1 test that morning but something had come up and he wasn’t going to be able to make it, and the QTO was already on his way over. He had a sudden brainwave:
‘Rusty, you work all the time with vehicles in Mobility Troop: you take it!’
I thought about this for a moment. I hadn’t actually driven an HGV for a while but I reckoned I could do it.
‘Yeah, all right.’
When the QTO showed up I was introduced to him and we went into the bar to sort out the paperwork, then went out for the test.
‘So, how do you think you did?’ the QTO asked me.
‘I reckon I did OK,’ I told him.
‘Yes, you passed. Well done.’ And that was that; out of the blue I had my HGV 1 licence.
If only everything was that simple. This tour turned out to be just as frustrating as the others I’d done with B Squadron. As always, we were completely reliant for results on the quality of information that we got and, as always, this was rarely reliable.
A huge amount of the tour was spent lying in hedgerows or derelict buildings watching terrorist suspects or their houses, trying to gather the pieces of information that would help to fill in the jigsaw puzzle and set up a big operation. If you haven’t spent time in Ireland, the weather there can get pretty shitty at times and much of the time I would be freezing cold and piss-wet through. I learned on this tour that Northern Ireland must have the most inquisitive cows in the world. Whenever we were patrolling in rural areas, they would follow us and if we were mounting an OP in a hedgerow, they would congregate around us to see what we were doing.
On one operation, we spent weeks mounting an OP on a house close to the border, carefully noting everything that happened there and waiting for the bad guys to show up, only for the penny to drop somewhere as we realised we had been sent to the wrong house.
On another occasion we were crashed out for a house assault in Andersonstown in Belfast. We had a quick briefing before we left and were told that the building was full of armed terrorists and we were to arrest them if possible. We moved out in six or seven operations vehicles, all dressed in civilian clothes but armed to the teeth. As we reached the Glenshane Pass we were probably doing in the region of 90 miles per hour in convoy in our rush to get there. The plan was for part of the team to form a cordon round the building and then for a group of six of us to smash our way in and make the arrests. As we screamed eastwards, the adrenaline was pumping round our bodies and I was mentally rehearsing how it should all pan out.
We managed to get there in one piece, Christ knows how, and the cordon was set up. The door was smashed down and we peeled off and in, looking for the terrorists. I heard shots being fired but I knew this would be the guys taking the locks off doors. I moved into one of the bedrooms and saw what appeared to be two little old ladies literally trying to climb up the walls. It turned out that I was right. They were the only occupants of the house and they were, indeed, two old ladies who were now somewhat the worse for wear with shock. Shit. The police arrived a few minutes later and after a quick on-site debrief, we headed back to Portadown at a more sedate pace. The reality was that for every successful operation we mounted, there were probably a hundred of these abortive fuck ups. I suppose the important thing was that we always tried to learn from them and never became complacent.
Back from Northern Ireland, I learned that I was being put on the VIP protection and bodyguarding instructors course. This was a big step forward for me because it effectively meant, if I did well, that I was likely to become one of the two close protection instructors working in the Regiment’s Counter Revolutionary Warfare Wing, and that would mean being detached from B Squadron for two years. It’s also a nod that you’re seen as being likely to move on to bigger and better things within the SAS. Of course, it also meant that my employability outside the Regiment would be considerably improved too and that was no bad thing.
The content of the course was much the same as when I’d done the basic VIP protection and bodyguarding course a few years earlier but this time the focus was on delivering the content as training, so it was about instructional technique, designing safe shooting packages, realism and so on, together with knowing the subject matter inside and out. As always, I put everything into it and I was pleased to come away from the course with a top grade.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
LATER YEARS
In 1985 I was duly posted from B Squadron to the Counter Revolutionary Warfare (CRW) Wing as chief instructor in the ‘protective security cell’. The changes in the Regiment which had started after the Iranian Embassy Siege were well advanced and there was a very different atmosphere in the SAS from what it had been like when I first joined. In some ways it was an improvement: we were certainly much better funded than we had been back in the 1970s and that could only lead to an improvement in capability. But at the same time there were other changes which, in my opinion, were for the worse.
I’ve mentioned before that junior officers in the SAS by and large left the day to day running of their troops to their troop staff sergeant – the good ones did at any rate. A lot of officers saw this as a bad thing but I’m really not so sure. An SAS troop commander is given command of his troop immediately after passing selection and continuation training when he has, literally, no experience of participating in Special Forces operations at all. In his troop, he will almost certainly have NCOs who have been with the Regiment for eight, ten or twelve years, and often longer. These aren’t the sort of dim-witted ‘grunts’ you see in crappy war films but men who have been selected for the SAS and then remained in it because they are intelligent, adaptable and capable.
On the face of it, it looks like an insane idea that a 25- or 26-year-old captain should be in command of such men, but actually the system usually worked out. The reason for this is the traditional SAS relationship between a young officer and the members of his troop, and pa
rticularly the troop staff sergeant.
Ideally, the new troop commander will join his troop realising that he is on a really steep learning curve and for the first weeks and months he needs to be in listening mode. In this way, he can learn from his NCOs what works and what doesn’t, as well as how to deal with soldiers who are often older and more experienced than he is. When this relationship is working well, his staff sergeant and other NCOs will guide him and help him develop so that as his tour goes on, he can assume more and more responsibility. In this way, the troop commanders will eventually reach the position where they can make a real, positive difference to a troop.
On the other hand, if a young officer can’t accept this – and some can’t – then fundamentally he was demonstrating that despite having got through selection and continuation, he was not really suited to being an SAS officer and would probably be better off elsewhere, in the more traditional parts of the army. And if you think that I’m being patronising or dismissive of officers, I’m not. It was exactly the same for soldiers in the SAS: they were constantly being observed by the officers and senior ranks to see whether they were suitable and if not, off they went. That’s how it had always worked: it was a system that wasn’t broken and didn’t need fixing.
The majority of the officers who commanded 8 Troop when I was there, men like Alastair McKenzie, David J and Tim Collins, were really great guys. I remember when Tim Collins came to us in the mid-1980s. He had exactly the right attitude: he was willing to listen and learn; he didn’t mind getting his hands dirty in routine work on the vehicles and so on; and he had a good sense of humour. Once he’d learned the ropes – and he was a quick learner – we were more than happy to follow his lead.
But there were some in the SAS hierarchy who didn’t like this at all. They took, if you like, a more ‘traditional’ view of the relationship between officers and NCOs and there was a feeling amongst some of these senior officers that the senior ranks in the SAS needed to be put back in their place. This was a discussion which had been going on in the Regiment since the 1970s, when DLB had been the commanding officer, but it came to a head in 1984, when Lieutenant Colonel M became commanding officer of 22 SAS.