As I walked through the main gate of the barracks, the tension began to crawl through my muscles. I felt nervous and apprehensive. I wondered what the chain-smoking shrink had written about me. I wondered whether fifteen years' drama-filled service in the SAS was about to end in an ignominious anticlimax, a definitive RTU. The mod plod on the gate gave me a friendly wave. That was reassuring – no urgent call to the telephone, no clipped voice ordering me to the CO's office to be hit by the report.
I pushed through the main door of the headquarters block and turned right into the orderly room. A large oil painting of David Stirling, the driving force behind the foundation of the SAS, hung on the far wall and dominated the office. The clerks looked indifferent. No arrangements had been made. There was no memo ordering me to attend a CO's interview. The chief clerk shrugged his shoulders and looked blank. I closed the door on the paper factory and headed for the operational research department to try my luck there. Still nothing doing. From there I was redirected to admin wing, the last refuge of the Regimental bad boys. At this rate, I thought, I'm going to end up in the stores blanket-stacking.
Just when I was fearing the worst, just when I thought the system had finally caught up with me, the message came down the line: a clean bill of health! The shrinks had given me a clean bill of health! I was elated. The gamble had paid off! Once more I'd brazened my way out of a tight corner. I was back in business with a vengeance. They were going to put my operational expertise to the best possible use: I was to be an instructor in the counter-revolutionary warfare wing. From trainee to tutor, after fifteen years my career in the SAS had come full circle. Being no longer in the field, exposed to the life-threatening situations, I had not only beaten the system, but I had now well and truly beaten the clock. I'd ridden the death-or-glory course and made it to the finishing post.
As the weeks went by, I threw myself wholeheartedly into the job in hand, counter-terrorism team training. As I did so, the realization dawned: I must be well and truly A1 and fit for service. There was no way the Head Shed would risk a training compromise. What was required of troops for these types of operations – even above and beyond all specialist skills – was a cool head, a clear mind and a rock-solid temperament. If the trainer was unstable, what hope for the trainees?
But before I was to close the door on CRW wing for the last time, before I was to face my next big battle – civvy life – I still had a significant contribution to make to the Regiment. I was about to train an SAS team from Northern Ireland whose 'spectacular' would set in motion events that would eventually force the IRA to the negotiation table.
On Friday 8 May 1987, eight IRA men were killed in a gun battle in the village of Loughgall, Co. Armagh. They were members of the lethal East Tyrone Brigade, and had tried to attack the local RUC station with a hijacked JCB digger, loaded with beer kegs containing 500lb of explosives. It was part of an ongoing campaign of intimidation against the RUC, and it was ambushed with deadly effect by the SAS team. One senior policeman said, 'We really needed a victory. It will do wonders for the morale of our men.'
It was a good way to end.
18
When the Camp Gates Close
On 31 December 1987 I retired from the Regiment.
Once that camp gate swings closed behind you for the last time and you stand there in Civvy Street you are on your own. You are Mr Nobody. All you come out with, believe it or not, is a reference – a few pieces of paper in exchange for twenty-six years of risking your life on an almost daily basis. I was shell-shocked. The days of taking part in high-drama, headline-grabbing operations were gone. The indescribable highs and mind-numbing lows, the despair and depression, the exhilaration, the pride, the intense camaraderie, the frustration, the boredom, all the achingly intense emotions that are the daily reality of a soldier's life suddenly drain away and leave you emptier than you've ever felt in your whole life.
A Roman general once talked of a soldier as one who 'knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, and spends himself in a worthy cause'. Well, when the cause itself is spent what's left? I sat in my armchair at home staring into empty space. How can anything prepare you for civilian life after twenty-six years in the Army, eighteen of those years with the SAS? 'The culture here is selfdiscipline, self-motivation. You can use that attitude. It means you can adjust when you come out.' That was the gist of the demob briefing when I left the SAS.
What they really mean is you're on your own. Self-discipline? The only discipline I'd ever known was fire discipline – counting your rounds and making sure every shot counts – and water discipline – metering your water out into the cap of your water bottle so you know not only how much water you have drunk per hour but how much you have left. Crucial survival skills in the Army, but they weren't going to help me now.
When you leave the SAS you're out on a limb, isolated. All you've got is cold turkey withdrawal symptoms after years of mainlining on adrenaline. It's always the same. It's always after the battle that the shock and the sorrow and the trauma of it all comes pouring out, when the adrenaline and fear have gone. It's the eerie silence after a battle. It's as if you've just opened your eyes for the first time in hours and you're suddenly surveying a scene of devastation. Roads, trees, houses, animals all completely blasted. All you're left with is the sad, quiet debris of conflict lying everywhere: abandoned weapons, bits of clothing and webbing, mangled vehicles, the bodies of the dead, the slow, agonized writhing of the dying, pools of blood getting ever bigger. It's desolate and it's forlorn.
And that's how it felt now leaving the Army and looking out on the aftermath of twenty-six years of battles. It's the swing of the pendulum, one extreme to the other. From twenty-six years of superhuman endeavour – in combat, feeling unbeatable and euphoric; out of combat, charged with eager anticipation waiting for the next battle to begin – to this, the intense boredom that could be the rest of my life.
I picked up the Hereford Times and broke into a cold sweat. My eyes focused in sharply on the article as if it were a gun-wielding enemy looming up into my line of fire. I felt strangely compelled to read it even though I knew it would stir up a slurry of black emotions. 'Tragic End for Shell Shocked Hero', ran the headline. It was about Private Jones who lived in the Hereford area at the beginning of the twentieth century. He had won the VC for heroism at Rorke's Drift in 1879. When he got back, he couldn't adjust to civilian life in rural Herefordshire. He was tormented by recurring nightmares of the stabbing, slashing, blood-soaked spears of screaming Zulu warriors. He walked out one day and blew his head off with a double-barrel shotgun.
Will the day finally dawn when all my stress comes bubbling out? How will it show itself? It doesn't take a genius to work that one out. 'These Men are Dangerous' – that was the title of a communiqué from Adolf Hitler to the French occupation forces, directing that all captured SAS troops be turned over to the Gestapo. The Army turns you into a ruthless killing machine. In every battle, instinct tells you to keep your head down, hug the ground, keep a low profile. So what was it drove men to stand up and charge over the top of the trenches in the First World War, sacrificing their lives for another yard of mud? And what drove men to storm full frontal up the murderous beaches of D-Day to face near-certain death? Army training and discipline, perfected through centuries of practice, that's what does it. That's what overcomes fear, confusion, logic and the survival instinct itself. That's what turns you into a killing machine. The trouble is, what turns you back into a human being at the end of it all?
I dropped the Hereford Times down the side of my armchair and went into the kitchen to make a brew. I stood gazing out of the window waiting for the kettle to boil, my mind drifting over my turbulent career in the SAS. I recollected the very first day of selection, that twenty-six-week course from hell. The Colonel was addressing the rows of hopeful candidates, 135 of us in all: 'You have a difficult task ahead of you. Twenty-six weeks of exhaustive scrutiny. Half a year of uncertainty.'
/> He was wrong. It wasn't half a year of scrutiny and uncertainty. The ones that got through, only seventeen of us in total, faced a lifetime of uncertainty, never knowing if we are going to explode with the stress of it all. That niggling thought never leaves you. As it says in the SAS survival Top Ten: all five-second grenade fuses are three seconds. So how long was my fuse? I had survived the stresses of the Army and even the psychiatrists' scrutiny at Woolwich but Civvy Street was another matter.
What was I going to do? I doubted if the NHS could help. Can you imagine it, a group therapy session with the flotsam and jetsam of today's society – alkies, druggies, divorcees? I'm sat there like some fucking freak till it's my turn. What questions would they ask me? Are you married? Do you have any children? What does it feel like to storm an Embassy and kill terrorists? And then they move on to the next case, some sad bastard whose life has been torn apart because his pet dog died… No, I couldn't quite see it somehow. NHS counsellors don't spend time in execution chambers watching people get killed. They're not taken round mortuaries to see the dead. They don't ride shotgun with paramedics to see bodies ripped to shreds in road traffic accidents. They don't get desensitized, they don't get to become immune. What do they know?
What can a civilian possibly know about the unremitting brutality, the violence, the aggression, the twisted and ugly spectacle of a battle zone? Combat in the front line? I'll tell you what it's all about. It's about ruptured arteries spurting out plumes of blood. It's about that frogspawn of scarlet foam, that gurgling and unearthly whistling coming from some poor bastard's throat with a hole the size of a fist ripped from it. It's about that deadly cocktail of looks in a fatally wounded man's eyes – the torment, the urgent plea, the faltering realization, the imminence of his last breath struggling up out of tortured lungs. It's about the shock in the eyes of your best mate lying there staring in disbelief at the oozing sausage-spill of purple-veined innards splashed out over his webbing belt, the ignominious stench of his private sewage consuming the air all around you. Wringing wet, sleeping rough, surviving on hard tack and cheese out of a tube, senses tormented by seeing bodies ripped apart and blown limb from limb, ears seeming to be ringing permanently with some voice screaming 'I'm hit… I'm hit… I'm hit…' – and any moment it could be your turn next. How could a civilian diagnose me and offer me a cure after that?
My trouble was I'd fought the wrong kind of wars. When my father was in the Army during the Second World War, there were no sociological questions about the ethics of war being debated on primetime TV. There was no hand-wringing and agonizing over hidden political agendas and what the true objective of the conflict was. Where Hitler was concerned it was black and white, good versus evil. And at the end of it all, there were cheering crowds in the streets to welcome you back, to prove you'd righted the wrong, to slap you on the back and tell you what a marvellous job you'd done. My kinds of wars were the bad kind. Nothing was clear-cut. The enemy was not always obvious, there was scepticism and lack of popular support at home, our hands were tied by legal and political constraints. No black and white there, just treacherous shades of grey. No cheering crowds in the streets when you come back. Shrouded in secrecy, we were processed through RAF Lynham or RAF Brize Norton in the dead of night. Whether returning from deadly combat or routine exercise, it was exactly the same.
The Yanks returning from Vietnam soon found out the moralebursting stress of that particular kind of silence. At least the American public knew about Vietnam. Most of my wars were not only the wrong kind but they were secret too. Covert operations, confidential assignments, anonymous infiltrations. We moved in silently, did our job, and melted away again. No speak, no tell, no profile. The British public were none the wiser. The Sixties and early Seventies – flower power, summer of love, make love not war, better red than dead? Bullshit! I was fighting in the Middle East in the 1970s. The Commies seemed to be taking over the world and we soldiers were the ones tasked with doing something about it. But no one shouted it from the rooftops. That's the culture of secrecy. Everything's clamped up inside, suppressed, bottled up. That's when the time bomb starts ticking.
I could hear the church bells ringing down in the centre of Hereford. I used to dream of days like this when I was undercover in some far-off land preparing for combat. The sun would be shining, the civilians around me going about their usual business, everything eerily normal. I'd suddenly think that back home right now my father would be relaxing in his armchair reading his Sunday paper and drinking a brew of tea, my mates would be going down to the pub for a livener, and there I was about to enter battle and fight for my life. Very weird. But now it was Sunday and it was me that was at home, wishing I was back in combat. I had to face up to the fact I was hooked on the adrenaline hit, the camaraderie, the SAS gallows humour. The hit is so powerful and so addictive that you get withdrawal symptoms sat at home, worrying about mortgages, gas and electricity bills, all the mundane elements of so-called normal life.
I glanced at my watch. Eleven o'clock already. The pubs would be open soon. Time for a shave. At least I still bothered to take some kind of basic care of my personal appearance. Which was more than I could say for the appearance of the bathroom. The bath and loo mats were grimy. The plugholes in the bath and hand basin were matted over with enough hair to weave a rug. A tiny scrap of soap, no mirror, one torn towel, one toothbrush in a holder, toothpaste dribbling down like bird droppings under a perch, a loo seat that had a mind of its own and would come crashing down in mid-piss, and a weird, pervasive smell of decay. Was it the drains, the mould on the shower curtain, a dead mouse beneath the bath panels? I didn't know, and I didn't really care. I'd get round to sorting it one day. My wife had left me and taken my son with her. I didn't need to bother any more on the domestic front.
The downstairs was no better. You could say it was lacking a woman's touch. Curtains always drawn, the television blaring out constantly, half-drunk cups of tea lying around the place like in an under-staffed café, rooms not vaccuumed in months, the garden looking like the Borneo jungle. There were even exotic mushrooms growing under the fridge and getting bigger by the day. I thought of preserving them under glass and taking them down to the survival course briefing room at the camp as an exhibit in the dangerous fungi section. But what can you expect? The SAS is not a school for aspiring ballet dancers. You can't expect us to go in for civilised niceties like cleaning the house. I was even toying with the idea of moving out of my bedroom and getting my head down at nights in the back garden under a poncho to see if that would make me feel more at home.
It was all getting too much. I wasn't sure I could hack it. I was still functioning in this society, but only just. Our mortar man at the battle of Mirbat, Fuzz, had already cracked up in Civvy Street. More would go the same way, I was sure of that. Would I join them? Would I end up burnt out, just another statistic, another skeleton in the nation's cupboard? 'Tragic End for Shell Shocked Hero', would they write that about me too in the Hereford Times?
Enough! Enough! This morbid navel-gazing had gone on far too long. I couldn't spend the rest of my life like this. I shook my head and came to my senses. I was disgusted with myself for feeling so edgy and discontented. People should be able to handle their own feelings. I wasn't a civilian under some kind of imminent threat: I wasn't living through some kind of civil war or trying to survive a conflict-induced famine or vicious ethnic cleansing. I was a proud soldier. I'd come through the battle of Mirbat, the Embassy siege, the Falklands War, Northern Ireland. Why should I feel dissatisfied now? I was a pampered Westerner with everything on a plate.
No more self-pity. It was time to pick up the phone.
19
On the Circuit
'Tak. I need a job. I need some anti-boredom pills.' In the Army that was the slang for getting in some money, and I could always rely on my Fijian brother-in-arms to get me out of a fix. He'd done it often enough in the past. He'd left the SAS a bit before me and in typical Tak fashion h
ad quickly risen through the ranks of his new profession to become a director of Kilo Alpha Services (KAS) – a private security firm. KAS were part of 'the Circuit' – a network of companies run mainly by ex-SAS members specializing in close protection, risk assessment, UK and international security and hostile-environment survival training. It's a sphere of operations that demands the same degree of stealth, silence and anonymity that became second nature to me in the Army. As with the world of espionage and secret intelligence, the general public gets only the faintest glimpse of what really goes on behind the scenes. This was familiar territory.
'Get yourself down to London tomorrow. I might have something for you.' The phone clicked and Tak was gone. In all the years I'd known him, Tak had never, ever discussed operational matters over the telephone.
The offices of KAS were at 22 South Audley Street right in the middle of London's Mayfair. I smiled as I clocked the abbreviation of this address – 22 SAS. Familiar territory indeed! As I pushed open the front door I was confronted by an imposing six-foot-six figure. Slightly stooped as if apologizing for his unusual height, his clothes were immaculate, his manners perfect. Softly spoken and of modest demeanour, with an obvious aristocratic background, in the Regiment he had been nicknamed 'the Scarlet Pimpernel' for his actions behind enemy lines in the Second World War. It was none other than Sir Archibald David Stirling DSO OBE, the legendary founder of the SAS and now chairman of KAS.
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