by Rusty Firmin
Within a month of arriving at Kingstanding I was thoroughly bored and wondering whether I would be able to stick it. This was compounded when, in August 1990, the Gulf War broke out. I knew very quickly that 22 SAS would be involved and I desperately wanted to go with them. I thought: Fuck my luck! I immediately called the adjutant at Hereford to volunteer. I was 40 years old and still very fit, and obviously I had a wealth of SAS experience. The answer was bitterly disappointing: if I was called back to the Regiment, they would just have to find someone to replace me and SAS NCOs of my level of experience don’t grow on trees, so no dice. The ridiculous thing was that you don’t need to be an experienced SAS NCO to be squadron quartermaster sergeant of an SAS squadron, and particularly a TA one: you need to be good at logistics. It’s like insisting that an airline pilot should be chief steward: sure he could do it, but why would you want him to?
In fact it later emerged that General de la Billière had banned all SAS NCOs over the age of 40 from deploying to the Gulf. DLB wasn’t as popular within the Regiment as he’s often been portrayed: a lot of the guys joked that ‘DLB’ actually stood for ‘Dirty Lying Bastard’. One of the reasons for his unpopularity was his habit of making arbitrary rulings like this. The reality is that fiascos like ‘Bravo Two Zero’ could have been prevented if there had been some more experienced operators around to have an input into the planning and leadership of the operations.
Let’s look at that for a moment. Bravo Two Zero got into trouble because once they were compromised and were unable to make contact with base, they had no means to get themselves out of trouble other than on foot. The result was that three good men died and most of the rest were subjected to a violent ordeal in an Iraqi prison. The fact is that if they’d taken vehicles with them, they could have moved quickly to a position where their communications actually worked and organised an evacuation, but they didn’t because they didn’t have the experienced people present to insist that that was how to do it. You can argue all you like about the practicality of taking vehicles behind enemy lines but the fact of the matter is that the SAS have been successfully concealing vehicles in the desert since 1942. It’s part of what we do, particularly in the Mobility Troops, and the Regiment actually did it in numbers during the Gulf War itself. As far as I remember, none of the Bravo Two Zero patrol had served in Mobility Troop and if any had, it wasn’t for very long, but this kind of infiltration was our speciality. The reality was that it was a big time fuck up.
I was personally devastated that I couldn’t get out to the Gulf to fight alongside my squadron and others were too. A squadron warrant officer actually got out to the Gulf before accidentally bumping into DLB and finding himself sent home. You’d have thought that the daft old bugger would have better things to worry about than the fact that an SAS warrant officer was a few months over the arbitrary age limit he’d set. Even so, a few ‘over 40s’ did get out there on operations and did well. It wasn’t like a Saga Holiday.
Rather than wallowing in disappointment, I decided to get on with my primary purpose in going to 23 SAS which was to get myself set up for the transition to civilian life. I was planning to move onto the security circuit, but the TA squadron quatermaster sergeant, with his RoSPa hat on, suggested that I should get myself a few qualifications which would help to enhance my CV.
The first course I was able to get on was a forklift instructors qualification run by the army, which would give me a five-year licence to train forklift drivers, and I also booked myself onto a diploma course in ‘health and safety at work’ and a couple of other minor related courses. The bad news, as I realised, was that these would be deeply dull, but on the plus side the army would pay for the courses and give me a subsistence allowance as part of my resettlement package.
Then, completely out of the blue, Yorkie, the adjutant at 22 SAS, gave me a call. Would I be interested in moving to the Honourable Artillery Company to be their SAS PSI?
This was interesting. The HAC wasn’t formally part of Special Forces but its role in those days was very similar to that of 21 and 23 SAS: operating stay-behind observation posts to call in strikes against targets behind enemy lines. Consequently, they had several SAS PSIs as part of their set-up. As an ex-Gunner I was interested enough. Two points held me back: firstly, one of the senior SAS guys there was a guy who had the nickname ‘Wendy’. I didn’t get on with him at all: I don’t know any other SAS guys with a woman’s name for a nickname, for a start. In any case, I had a strong suspicion that I was going to be the guy making everything work, and he was going to be sitting behind his desk, taking the credit. Secondly, I had all my resettlement courses booked: would I have a guarantee that I could take up my place on the courses? I wasn’t sure about this; Yorkie was the same character who’d once told me, a couple of weeks before we both started selection when he and I were both corporals, that the SAS needed him for the regimental rugby team. Did I really trust him? I don’t think so.
There was some to-ing and fro-ing over several telephone calls but eventually the answer came that they would do what they could, but there was no guarantee. I decided to say no. This didn’t please Yorkie at all. He suddenly got his adjutant’s head on and began to tell me that they would have to reconsider my promotion to warrant officer class 2. Blackmail doesn’t work with me, and actually his threats made my choice easier. Some poor sucker from D Squadron ended up with that particular poisoned chalice.
So there was no move to the HAC, which was a shame, as it is undeniably a great place to make contacts through its close links with the City of London. Instead I decided to crack on with 23 SAS. The boredom was threatening to kill me so I decided to invent some jobs for myself.
Instead of hanging around in Birmingham dying of tedium, I decided to take myself off on trips to the various 23 SAS outstations in Prudhoe outside Newcastle, Dundee and Leeds, where I could get on with moving kit and equipment around for training and exercises. Of course, this also gave me the opportunity to go for a few beers and a chinwag with my friends who were working as PSIs in these locations, all paid for by the army which was happy to pay me subsistence as I went round the country doing stuff that in the regular army would be done by private soldiers and junior NCOs at best. I also did some foreign weapons training for the TA, which gave me another excuse to travel around the country.
On one occasion I was at the 21 SAS base at the Duke of York’s headquarters on the King’s Road in Chelsea where I’d gone to meet up with Tommy, an Irishman who had been cross-posted from D Squadron to B in 22 SAS, and had eventually wound up with 21 SAS and was one of the PSIs there. After we’d taken care of business, our plan was to have a beer and a chat in the bar. Tommy happened to be the orderly officer that day, so it was part of his job to make sure everything was closed down and locked up for the night. After Tommy had done his rounds that evening, we were walking across to the bar when we heard a noise which seemed to be coming from the sergeants’ mess, which Tommy had already closed down and locked up.
This was odd, to say the least, so we went back to the sergeants’ mess, which was upstairs in the main 21 SAS building. The door was still locked and secured, so maybe we’d imagined it? Then there was another noise from inside. There was definitely someone there, so Tommy banged on the door. I suppose we imagined it might be burglars or something of the sort, although I guessed only the most deranged burglar would try to rob an SAS barracks while there were still people around.
But no, it wasn’t burglars. After a short interlude, the door was unlocked from the inside and a head poked round. It was an NCO from 21 SAS.
‘I locked this bar up. What the fuck is going on?’ Tommy asked, reasonably enough in my view.
‘Oh, don’t worry, it’s just a meeting of the Rosemary Lodge. The Poison Dwarf said we could use the sergeants’ mess.’
Both of us knew the Poison Dwarf all too well. He’d been squadron sergeant major at B Squadron not long after I’d joined, was still a commissioned officer in the R
egiment – training major at 21 SAS – and not somebody you wanted to get on the wrong side of. Tommy, as orderly officer, was effectively powerless, so we left them to it, baring their breasts at each other or whatever it is that Freemasons get up to.
We wandered back to the bar and chewed over what had happened. As I mentioned before, I’d had little notion of just how many Freemasons were in the SAS (or is it vice versa?) until my promotion prospects had begun to stumble when I reached the rank of sergeant. Before then, along with my mates like Snapper, if I’d given any thoughts to the Freemasons in the Regiment it had only been to take the piss out of them, but I had begun to realise how all-pervasive and influential they were.
I certainly knew of one incident where a B Squadron senior NCO had been driving home after drinking at a mess function and had run a woman over. His ‘punishment’, for want of a better word, had been to get a promotion and a posting to Germany until the fuss had died down. As I began to realise, the role of the Freemasons in the SAS was to look after their own and in some ways they did it very effectively. There was one occasion, I was told, when a promotion board within 21 SAS had been so stitched up by the Masons that it nearly provoked a mutiny, in part because some of the people who were promoted had been virtually invisible in the regiment for months if not years; there was certainly no merit involved.
I believed at the time – and still do – that my failure to join the Freemasons, in combination with the fact that my dad had converted to fundamentalist Islam and had married an Eritrean woman, despite having a sick wife – Dorothy – back home in the UK, had seriously got in the way of my career prospects
Another thing that pissed me off about my new life was how petty it all turned out to be. When I was in 8 Troop, the things that kept you awake all night were worrying about whether you would make it through the next day; it might have been dying in a hail of gunfire on a god-forsaken airstrip on Tierra del Fuego or having an unfortunate encounter with a hippopotamus somewhere on the Okavango Delta. In 23 SAS, the only thing likely to kill us was the flood of paperwork.
Any time a new directive came in from the powers that be, Slaphead, the regimental sergeant major, would churn out reams of paperwork to greet it and get his requisite slap on the back. Rainforests were destroyed in the process. There came a time when Slaphead decided, for reasons best known to himself, that he would get a grip on the PSIs at Kingstanding and elsewhere over lodging allowances. As I explained, this was money that was given to us so that we could be sure that we were within easy reach of the headquarters if we were needed. The reality was that we were never really needed on such an urgent basis that we had to live within a few miles of the barracks, so we took the cash and got on with our lives.
Slaphead had noticed that there was a caravan parked within the barracks and, one morning, when we were both in work early, he came to my office and told me:
‘Rusty, find out who owns that caravan and tell them to report to me as soon as possible.’
‘Yes, Sir!’ I responded.
‘I want to know if any fucker is sleeping in it. There’ll be hell to pay if there is.’
I had to go to the loo to stop laughing. Slaphead was so buried in his paperwork he didn’t have a clue what was going on around the unit. In truth I knew exactly who owned it: Mick H, the quartermaster, who had been a warrant officer class 1 in 22 SAS and wasn’t about to be intimidated by any regimental sergeant major. Of course he was sleeping in it. Like the rest of us, he knew that 23 SAS wasn’t going to be called out to any embassy sieges in the immediate future.
Not long afterwards I saw Mick the quartermaster walking into the drill hall with a towel over his shoulder, evidently off to the shower after another night in the caravan.
‘Sir,’ I told him, ‘the RSM wants to see you about the caravan; he wants to know who owns it. I think it’s to do with sleeping in the barracks while claiming lodging allowance.’
Mick rolled his eyes. ‘Tell the RSM that the caravan is mine and if he wants to talk about it, he should come to my office.’
I was on a trouble-making roll by now and thought: Why not?
I headed over to the regimental sergeant major’s office and knocked. I heard him call me in and entered.
‘What is it, Rusty?’ he asked wearily.
‘You asked about the caravan,’ I told him, ‘it belongs to the QM and he wants to see you now.’
Slaphead realised that he’d fucked up but there was nothing he could do about it. He walked across the drill hall and knocked on the quartermaster’s door and I watched him go in. I couldn’t resist following him and listening outside. Mostly it was muffled by the door but eventually I did hear, loud and clear: ‘Mind your own fucking business! You get on with being RSM and I’ll get on with being the QM, got that?’
I scuttled out of sight sharpish as Slaphead left. Oddly the subject of lodging allowance didn’t come up again.
One of the things that bothered me at Kingstanding was the amount of kit we signed out to the TA which never got returned. There was literally thousands of pounds worth of, mostly, clothing, webbing, sleeping bags, rucksacks and other bits and pieces which had been issued to TA soldiers who then seemed to have vanished into thin air, and I decided to do something about this. I put together a file of issue and receipt vouchers all signed by the missing weekend warriors, and then went round to their last known addresses and waited for them. When someone turned up, I would introduce myself, show them their signed chit and asked for the kit back. Mostly they were co-operative and dug it out of their cupboards and garages and gave it to me. For those that had moved on, I tracked them down to their forwarding addresses and went through the same routine. This proved quite cost effective and we were able to bring back into use a lot of kit that would otherwise have been written off. I even got a big pat on the back from the squadron commander and the quartermaster but sadly no MBE: the citation must have got lost in the post.
Another problem was with a kit car which had been left in the barracks by a soldier who’d left. It was an Eagle fibreglass body on some chassis with huge alloy wheels and fat tyres: a real boy-racer special – but untaxed and uninsured – and the head shed were getting antsy that it was just sitting there. I phoned the guy who owned it and told him it had to be moved but he told me he had nowhere to put it and he couldn’t drive it because of the lack of MOT, insurance and tax. After a bit of discussion, I offered him £80 for it which he accepted. I got it loaded on to a three-ton truck which was taking some stuff over to Hereford and took it back to my home where, after a few hours’ work on it, I was able to sell it for £800.
The two years at Kingstanding were an absolute bore and, by the end, I wished I’d never taken the job. This may look like a jack attitude on my part but the reality was that I hadn’t joined the Regiment to do this kind of thing and I was the wrong guy to send there. The positives were that I got to see my family a lot more than I would have done had I still been with 22 SAS and I got to do my resettlement courses but I suspect I would have been better off not trying to jam those in in the midst of work I wasn’t enjoying. There was an exciting world outside the army which I was just about to get stuck into, and I’d been putting it off.
At the end of my two years at Kingstanding, I was dined out of the sergeants’ mess of 23 SAS and handed over my job to the next poor sucker – Lew, also ex-B Squadron. A few days later I went to Stirling Lines to be completely de-kitted. As I handed over my ID card to the chief clerk in the orderly room, it occurred to me that for the first time since I was 15, I was a civilian. I walked out of the gates without any great handshakes or farewells. I knew I would be seeing the people I liked anyway. So that was that. A total of 24 years in the army, 15 in the SAS, and time to do something different.
What happened next? That’s another story.
PLATES
Me (left) with my family in Carlisle in the late 1950s.
Me (right) with George Creighton and his air rifle, about 1963.
Me, third from the left, with 143 Battery, 49 Field Regiment, Belfast, 1973.
All-Arms Commando Course, Lympstone (me, back row, second from left).
Receiving the Rothmans six-a-side trophy from Bertie Vogts, 1974.
SAS jungle training, Belize 1977 (me on the right).
8 Troop exercise, Wainwright, Canada.
Patrolling the Belizean border (me on the right).
Sim Harris gingerly makes his way across to the balcony of the adjoining building during the siege on the Iranian Embassy, 5 May 1980. (Photo by Keystone/Hulton Archive/ Getty Images)
Evidence tag for the MP5 that I used to shoot Faisal.
The last two members of the four-man, front balcony assault team, about to enter the building to clear the first floor. (STF/AFP/Getty Images)
8 Troop, jungle training (me, third from left).
8 Troop and Baluchis of the Sultan’s Armed Forces, Oman 1981.
Me with comedian Jim Davidson at the opening of the new Stirling Lines barracks in Hereford.
B Squadron on board RFA Fort Austin, South Atlantic, June 1982.
Me with a Pucara at Port Stanley Airfield, June 1982.
Surrendered Argentinian weapons at Port Stanley, June 1982.
Me with baby son Mark, 1982.
B Squadron preparing for a water jump, Cyprus, 1983.
Botswana, mid-1980s. Me posing next to my basha and Can-Am motorcycle during our training exercise.