The Regiment

by Rusty Firmin

  We flew out to Lagos and were promptly taken for a briefing at the British High Commission on what we could and couldn’t do. We had an officer with us – I don’t remember who it was – but his role as usual was to be a kind of figurehead and liaison officer between us, the High Commission and the Nigerian government. The real leader was Tommy, with me as, in effect, the training advisor. Having spent two years in the CRW Wing training bodyguards, I was by far the most experienced bodyguard trainer out there and I was in a position to know if we were getting it right.

  Almost the first thing that happened when we got there was that we were each issued a 9mm Browning Hi Power as a personal protection weapon, together with a weapon permit signed by the President himself. Lagos was, and is, a seriously dodgy place and we didn’t need any mishaps on what was a very low-profile mission.

  It turned out to be quite complicated working with the Nigerians. Tribalism seemed to dominate everything and all of our students were striving to be the top dog but, on the other hand, their shooting skills were excellent, they were very physically fit and their willingness to learn was a joy to behold.

  Not all of them stayed the course, because there’s a difference between learning to be a good bodyguard and learning to train bodyguards but I came away from the process with the strong impression that, after six weeks of training, this group of Nigerians were the best and probably the keenest group of students I had instructed throughout my time in the SAS.

  We finished the course with the inevitable party and this involved an arm-wrestling competition, where ‘Smudge’ and I took on all comers and beat them. All in all, it was a good time.

  Still, we nearly came to grief on the drive back to Lagos the next day. The weather was horrendous, with torrential rain, thunder and lightning. On the way into town, two of our vehicles smashed into a huge cow which had wandered out into the road in almost zero visibility and it took some time to disentangle its corpse from the vehicles; but we did finally make it. The final act of the course was meeting General Babangida himself, who presented us with a plaque to thank us for our efforts. There were no gold Rolexes on this occasion;* from his reputation, he’d probably flogged them all on the black market.

  *An SAS training team which I wasn’t involved with got into severe difficulties with the Inland Revenue after a foreign Head of State presented every member with a Rolex at the end of their task. Fortunately – or sadly maybe – that never happened to me.

  Back in Hereford, I discovered from the Officer Commanding B Squadron, that I was being sent on the ‘brigade and regimental intelligence cadre’ (BRIC) course which was held down at the School of Service Intelligence at Ashford in Kent. This was a really weird course to be sent on. It was basically aimed at corporals who were being posted to work in their battalion or regimental intelligence cells and lieutenants and captains who were being made regimental intelligence officers or brigade G2 officers. Essentially it was all about learning really basic Soviet tactics, together with Soviet and Warsaw Pact vehicle recognition. Now the Cold War was still on, and the Berlin Wall was intact, but Gorbachev was in power in Russia and the threat was rapidly diminishing. I couldn’t see what benefit either I – as now a staff sergeant – or the Regiment was going to get from it but ‘Ours not to reason why’ and all, so I signed out a box of motivation tablets from the quartermaster’s store and went.

  It turned out to be as shit as I’d imagined. Everyone else there was keen and well motivated because for them it was an upwards move, but for me it was sideways at best. Much of it was a slow death by viewfoil and slide projector, with a deadly dull Intelligence Corps warrant officer, with a whiny voice, droning through the recognition features of BRDMs, T-74s, BTRs, BMPs,* Mig jets and all the other equipment used by the Russians and the Warsaw Pact. Every morning we were tested to ensure that we had learned the stuff we were supposed to have assimilated the day before and that was yet more slides of little bits of Russian vehicles. Death would have been a welcome release.

  *Soviet armoured vehicles of the Cold War era, some of which are still in use in Russia, Eastern Europe and the Middle East.

  The BRIC was followed by the Nuclear, Biological and Chemical Warfare (NBC) instructors course which was more practical and more to my taste. For part of it we lived in NBC gear in a bunker, simulating what would happen if a nuclear weapon had been used, calculating how the atomic cloud would move under different wind and weather conditions. It was interesting enough but I still couldn’t see why I had been sent on it. A previous victim had been the Mink. He’d been away when the course came up and, unable to defend himself, we’d volunteered him for it. It didn’t do him or the Regiment any good either. It was made even more ludicrous by the fact that by then the Intelligence Corps was spreading all over the Regiment like a noxious green mould.

  Since I had finished with the CRW Wing, I’d been told time and again by the powers that be that I would soon be promoted to warrant officer class 2 before I ended my 22 years’ regular service, and this was due in 1990. For reasons that nobody could explain to me, this never happened. By now, Gonzo was the squadron sergeant major and an officer called Ian had taken over as squadron commander, but I remained as a staff sergeant as squadron operations manager, which struck me as odd. I had broad experience across the board in SAS operations, I’d done well enough on every course I was sent on and I had never significantly fucked up; but that last promotion remained tantalisingly out of reach. Nobody could question my commitment to the Regiment; nobody could question my ability, which I’d proved time and again; and my disciplinary record, formal and informal, was better than many. So why was I stuck as a staff sergeant?

  I discovered one reason for this in conversation with some of the lads over a few beers one evening. I must have had a few drinks and was moaning about not being promoted.

  ‘Rusty, mate, you aren’t in the Lodge. They aren’t going to promote you; why would they?’

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘Freemasons. If you’re not a Mason, you’re going to struggle to move up.’

  This had never occurred to me. I knew a few of the senior ranks were involved with Freemasonry, but I had never realised how important it was.

  ‘Look at the last few boards. The Masons look after their own; that’s how it works.’

  Freemasonry had never been on my radar. I’d been asked if I was interested in joining a few times but I’d thought it was just one more thing to have to worry about and had always turned them down. Now it seemed I’d fucked up. It was subtle but it was there. If there were two candidates for a promotion of more or less equal ability, you could be sure that the Freemason would get it. One of the reasons I’d stayed with the SAS for so long was because I thought it was a strict meritocracy. You travelled as far as your ability took you. It turned out that wasn’t really true and, to be honest, I was rather disgusted.

  But there was another reason too. My adoptive father, John Arthur Russell Firmin, had been living and working in Saudi Arabia as a shipping import and export manager and for a number of years I’d had very little contact with him. It wasn’t because I didn’t like him, simply that we were on different continents doing different things. In 1989 we went out to Australia and New Zealand to train with their SAS units. The training went fine, but at one stage I was summoned to the officer commanding’s office for a security interview.

  These were usually routine: everyone in the SAS is security vetted as a matter of course because a lot of what we do is highly classified. But this interview was a little different. The questions kept on coming back to what contact I had with my father; how often we spoke and exchanged letters; what contacts I had with other members of my family.

  This was all very mysterious and I decided to do some digging. What I uncovered really surprised me quite a lot. Dad was not only working in Saudi but he had also converted to Islam, and a fundamentalist version at that. In fact my father was now going by the name Mohammed Hassan Abdul
lah and this had led to me being put on a watch list. Everything fell into place.

  In the normal course of events, my time in the army would have come to an end in February 1990 with my 22 years of adult service completed, but I wasn’t such a disaster that the Regiment wanted to get rid of me just like that. Instead I was offered two years of continuance to serve as a squadron quartermaster sergeant with 23 SAS in Kingstanding in Birmingham. This would raise my pension and also, according to the adjutant of 22 SAS, allow them to promote me in due course to warrant officer class 2. I thought about it for a while. I’d never had much to do with the Territorial Army and I suspected it was going to be dull, but I also thought that I could use it as a prolonged, paid period of resettlement, and that was an attractive prospect. I said yes.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  SWAN SONG

  So at the grand old age of 40, with 22 years of adult service in the regular army behind me, I was now off to serve with the TA for the first time. To be completely honest, I knew relatively little about it other than second-hand gossip from other guys within the Regiment who had served with it. From time to time, the powers that be in the SAS had tried to make it a condition of promotion above sergeant that we should spend some time as a permanent staff instructor (PSI) with one of 21 SAS who were based around London and the south of England, 23 SAS who were in Birmingham and up north into Leeds, Newcastle and Scotland, and the Honourable Artillery Company who were right in the City of London. In reality, most of us made a big effort to dodge this particular bullet and it wasn’t difficult to understand why. Almost all of us had joined the Regiment because we wanted the kind of full-on operational experience that you could only get with the regular SAS.

  Back then, members of the TA, including TA SAS, simply didn’t get to serve on operations at all, unless they volunteered to actually join the regular army for a set period. They certainly didn’t get mobilised. That all changed after the Gulf War and the wars in the Balkans in the 1990s but in the spring of 1990, when I was sent to 23 SAS, that was all in the future. The TA had, for years, been basically a drinking club in uniform. 21 and 23 SAS formed what was called the ‘Corps Patrol Unit’ which was designed to penetrate behind the Russian lines in the event of an all-out war in Europe. Then they would dig in, creating a combination of observation post and bunker, from which they would watch and report on Soviet movements on main supply routes using the Mark 1 eyeball and whatever sensors and viewing aids they could carry. Fair enough, this would have been an important job if there had been a war, but many of us didn’t understand why the unit that did it needed to be an ‘SAS’ unit, with all the connotations that had. They were trained in a tiny fraction of the techniques that we used routinely and there was simply no comparison between us. It seemed to me that a halfway decent infantry unit – even a TA one – would be able to handle the same role that these two units of TA ‘SAS’ had.

  Which is not to say that the people were all crap: they weren’t, but they weren’t SAS in the same sense that we were. A good example is Chris Ryan, who became famous for his feat of endurance during the great Bravo Two Zero cock-up. He came to B Squadron from 23 SAS but he had to do the whole of selection and continuation training from scratch, and then serve for a while in a regular Para battalion, before they let him loose in 22 SAS. He was a good bloke, fit, intelligent and conscientious, but he needed a lot of training to bring him up to 22 SAS standard. He definitely had what it takes and he went about joining the Regiment in the right way. From my perspective, he was one of the few guys in 7 Troop who wasn’t afraid to get his hands dirty.

  So I knew from speaking to a few of our lads who had worked with the TA SAS, and from the members of the TA that I’d run into along the way, that being with 23 SAS in Birmingham wasn’t exactly going to be a thrill ride. I’d taken the job because it would give me two extra years of pension contributions and because I saw it as a reasonable way to ease my transition into the civilian world, giving me the chance to get a few useful courses under my belt before I left.

  Before I left 22 SAS, I was given the traditional ‘dining out’ by the sergeants’ mess, along with a few others who were leaving at more or less the same time. It was a great evening which actually lasted well into the early hours of the morning and, along with the traditional farewells, there was also the traditional settling of old scores too. At some point, after considerable quantities of alcohol had been consumed, I found myself having a punch-up in the sergeants’ mess toilets with a guy called Dave, from A Squadron and also a grade A wanker who had been a student on one of my bodyguarding courses and had been damned sure he knew more about it than I did. We’d both had so much to drink that we didn’t do any real damage but I’m happy to say that the few spots of blood which were spattered around didn’t come from me. It was odd really; by and large I got on with most of the guys from other squadrons I came into contact with, but never with him.

  I walked home afterwards and, as far as I was concerned, that was the end of my career with 22 SAS. I had the weekend off to shake off the hangover and then it was off to Birmingham.

  On Monday morning I was picked up by a couple of the other 23 SAS PSIs, one of whom was my old mate Bobby C, and we headed off to the 23 SAS headquarters in Kingstanding, Birmingham. This was only 64 miles from my house but took the best part of two hours through the country roads and then battling through the city traffic. When I got there, the whole place exuded a laid-back atmosphere. For most of the week, the only people present were the permanent staff and the cleaners. My job was to be the squadron quartermaster sergeant PSI in HQ Squadron, which meant overseeing all the weapons, kit and equipment on issue to members of the squadron, as well as the other squadron stores, vehicles and all the rest of it. This wasn’t a difficult job at all, just a boring one, and I was lucky in that my TA counterpart, Mac, was well on top of it all and didn’t need much more than an occasional look over my shoulder to make sure it was going OK.

  The other permanent staff in Birmingham included Trevor W, an ex-G Squadron guy with a broad Yorkshire accent, who was sergeant major PSI in the squadron, ‘Slaphead’, who was regimental sergeant major, and Major Mick H and WO2 Don W, who were quartermaster and regimental quartermaster sergeant respectively. As it happens, Major C, who had left the regular army a few years before, was the commanding officer.

  The idea was that we were supposed to live locally, paying rent with a ‘lodging allowance’ that was given to all of us, so that we would be around if any ‘fast-balls’ turned up but it was made clear to me right from the word go that nothing ever happened and that almost all the other PSIs were living in their own homes around Hereford and commuting in, paying their petrol money out of the lodging allowance and taking the rest as a perk of the job. That didn’t seem a bad idea at all. If I needed to be in Birmingham overnight, when we were preparing for an exercise or something of the sort, I could doss down in the stores in a sleeping bag. Nobody minded.

  HQ Squadron wasn’t one of the ‘sabre squadrons’ but the home of people like the storemen, the cooks, the medics, the operations-intelligence team and other assorted REMFs* and it had about 120 men under command. They were a mixed bag of people. Some were good, committed members of the unit, some were out-and-out Walter Mittys and some just seemed to be along for a bit of a jolly.

  *Rear Echelon Motherfuckers.

  For most of the week, Kingstanding was quiet as the grave but on Tuesday afternoon and evening it became a hive of activity as it filled with TA soldiers taking their weekly opportunity to dress as an SAS soldier and ‘live the dream’ for a couple of hours. This sounds like I’m being cynical and unfair, and I probably am, but it struck me as faintly ridiculous that this group of people who, at that time, were barred from going on operations, had this amount of fuss lavished on them. Nevertheless, I knuckled down and got on with helping the TA squadron quartermaster sergeant to ensure that everything was properly prepared: equipment readied; meals booked; ammunition delivered and
so on. Some of them were good guys. The TA squadron sergeant major lived in Hereford and was a good mate, as well as being the captain of the HQ Squadron drinking team.

  Working closely with the TA squadron quartermaster sergeant, who by general agreement of the regulars and TA was one of the sharpest guys there, I soon discovered that he was a big noise in the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents (RoSPA) and he subsequently helped me gain several qualifications which would help in my transition to civilian life. The great thing about him was that, provided I did my share of the preparation work during the week, he was completely competent to cover any problems during weekend training, which meant I didn’t usually have to turn to at the weekends as well as during the week. He was genuinely the most impressive TA soldier I worked with.

  The weekend training varied. Sometimes they would go off to the ranges for some shooting; or they might go parachuting to stay ‘in date’ with their qualifications; and then there was the seemingly endless process of TA SAS selection which, because it was done in instalments, dragged on for more than a year. Fortunately, with the TA squadron quatermaster sergeant in place, I rarely had to chase the weekend warriors around.