Eye of the Storm

by Peter Ratcliffe

  Old hands at Abingdon took a sadistic pleasure in telling us of one trainee who had ‘Roman candled’ – that is, his parachute had failed to open – and how he’d fallen 800 feet to smash through the winch cage like pickled red cabbage. I thought I was going to be sick, but kept an expressionless face. The instructors are watching for reaction, and I was not going to let anyone know how scared I really was.

  In the back of the 4-ton truck that took us to the DZ – dropping zone – that first morning, some of the more gung-ho trainees were singing a famous song about a parachutist whose canopy had not opened. Set to the tune of the Battle Hymn of the Republic, one of the verses ran, ‘Oh, they scraped him off the tarmac like a pound of strawberry jam.’ I just sat there by the tailboard, saying nothing, but fervently wishing they’d shut up.

  When our time came, we shuffled into the balloon cage and stood there anxiously with our instructor as the winch cable paid out until we were at 800 feet. There was very little wind – which was a pity, for if there had been more than a strong breeze the jump would have been cancelled. And I would have been allowed to live for one more day …

  The first men jumped, and presumably landed safely – I didn’t look. Then my name was called and I stepped forward to stand at the door of the cage. The instructor advised the NCOs on the ground, ‘One to come.’ I stepped towards the edge and crossed my arms, as we’d been taught in the hangars hundreds of feet below. Only this wasn’t a hangar. It was a cage under a balloon, swaying about high above the green drop zone. Beyond were fields of ripening wheat edging to the horizon and a pale blue sky dotted with cottonwool clouds.

  We had been told not to look down but to look up and concentrate on the fringe of the balloon. I did so, until the instructor shouted, ‘Red on. Green on. Go.’ Oh fucking hell! I thought as I jumped off the edge. It was terrifying.

  Suddenly I felt the parachute open. It tugged at my harness and I looked up and saw the canopy floating above me like a silken airborne jellyfish. And I knew that I wasn’t going to die – or not then, anyway.

  The canopy opened, and then it shut again, and then reopened. We had been warned about that, however, so I managed not to panic. Moments later I heard shouts from the ground, the parachute-jump instructors yelling at me to pull down on my left or right lift web or steering cord, to hold on and get my feet and knees together. I was totally confused. I had shut my eyes again and only opened them moments before I hit the ground, landing, as I was always to do after that, like a sack of spuds. I was never to get a parachute landing quite right.

  The second balloon jump should have been easier but because I now knew what was happening, it wasn’t. What made it worse, however, was the fact that the man before me refused to jump. Three times the instructor went through the routine. But the soldier would not step off the platform. No matter how much he was screamed at, he just kept shouting ‘No, no, no!’ The balloon was hauled down and he was taken away. We never saw him again.

  While this may seem harsh, the fact that a man gets no second chance makes sense. A man suddenly refusing to jump when the Paras are going into battle might be the guy carrying spare ammunition or the radio. His refusal would immediately jeopardize the lives of the rest of the team, as well as their mission. Seen in that context, it becomes clear why the Parachute Regiment cannot take the chance of a man losing his nerve at a crucial moment in an operation.

  A few weeks after those first jumps and I’d made it: I had successfully completed the Parachute Regiment entry course. With flying colours, as it turned out. At the passing-out parade on the barracks square in Aldershot, I received my red beret from a general, who then also presented me with a plaque for being Champion Recruit of my intake.

  It was a beautiful July day. The regimental band played and, puffed up with pride, I felt ten feet tall as I marched across crunchy gravel and snapped to attention in front of the general.

  Almost everyone else had their families and girlfriends there to watch them parade, but I had deliberately not invited my mother, because before the event I had thought that it was all a bit naff. So, instead of my family, I had invited my two former housemates from the Preston Labour Exchange to come and watch the parade. They loyally turned up, and I was glad they did, but suddenly, when it came to my turn to march out and collect the red beret and those blue, embroidered wings, I knew it wasn’t naff and it wasn’t showing off. Above all, I realized, albeit too late, that I should have had my mother there. Even so, I felt so proud of that red beret that for days afterwards I wore it day and night. It affected all of us like that – my friend Taff, the chap in our intake who won the big award for Champion Shot, was every bit as pleased and proud as I was.

  After the passing-out parade I went on leave to Brighton with my two mates from Preston. We had a tremendous time, except that my Para wings didn’t seem to impress any girls in the seaside town. Maybe the spots on my face outweighed the wings on my sleeve, for I certainly never got lucky. Then at the end of my leave I was posted back home to spend a week in the Preston recruiting office as a sort of living advertisement for what a great life it is in ‘the Professionals’. After that I returned to Aldershot, posted to the 1st Battalion the Parachute Regiment. I was no longer a recruit, but a soldier.

  I was no longer a potential emigrant to Australia, either, nor a bored apprentice joiner, nor any of the other things I’d been or might have been. I had changed a lot in those six months. I had more respect for other people and more respect for myself. I was more disciplined, fitter and better trained than I had ever been in my life. I had a job and a possible career.

  I had even acquired a nickname, because in the Paras everyone has to have a nickname. I have, though, spent years trying to work out how the platoon corporal chose mine. ‘’Ere,’ he said, ‘where are you from?’ When I told him Salford, he said, ‘That’s it then. You’re a Salford Billy.’ I’d never heard of any Salford Billies, but from then on I was no longer Peter. My nickname was ‘Billy’, and that’s what I answered to.

  Then, on 20 September 1970, along with the rest of the 1st Battalion, I was posted to Northern Ireland. Life was never to be the same again.

  Chapter Three

  RAIN. A thin, persistent, miserable drizzle, the kind that finds its way down your neck, seeming to soak your clothes far worse than any proper downpour, was what welcomed us to Northern Ireland.

  I had never been abroad before, and although Northern Ireland was not really ‘abroad’, it had that curious feeling of foreignness about it. Partly that was the language. When I first arrived in Belfast, it took me weeks to understand a word some of the locals were saying – and they were supposed to be speaking English. Though I’m damned if it sounded like any English I’d come across before. To my ears, it was more like strangulation than speech. Mind you, to be fair, I doubt whether an Ulster-man finds pure Salford speech that comprehensible.

  Camouflaged trucks took us to our barracks in Belfast. On the drive in we passed row upon row of nearly identical, soot-streaked, red-brick houses. The rows stood back to back, as if lacking the dignity to stand alone. I tried to imagine George Best, my Manchester United hero, kicking a football in the street outside the Belfast house where he grew up. Graffiti – mostly political slogans – fought for space on walls and fences. As the cheapest form of advertising the IRA could find, it was everywhere, Republican mottoes sometimes standing alone, sometimes overscored with equally inflammatory Loyalist phrases.

  Yet when we stopped at traffic lights, people smiled at us as they passed by. One old woman switched her walking stick to her left hand and with her right made a sign of the cross. ‘God bless you, boys,’ she called, and even I had no problem understanding her.

  We were to need that old women’s blessing many times over before we were pulled back to the mainland two years later. By then, the cups of tea once so kindly offered to British soldiers by some of the Catholic population stood a fifty-fifty chance of being laced with rat poison. This was 1970,
and ‘the Troubles’ – this latest round of them, that is – were not much more than a year old. People still had hope, and in those days many Catholics saw the British Army as their deliverer from Protestant excesses; the same, albeit in reverse, was true of many Protestants. No one then foresaw that the problem would escalate enormously, and would last another thirty years – and perhaps longer. How could they have done? It is not generally in human nature to predict the worst.

  As for me, I found that one of the great things about being with a proper working unit, after spending months in training, was the end to hours of meaningless bullshit. Though the Paras were turned out as smartly as any Guards regiment, the days of mindlessly boxing our bedding were over. We were still expected to sweep and polish the barrack-room floors, but instead of boxing the bedclothes each day, we simply made the bed neat and tidy and went to work.

  Apart from boots, puttees and battledress trousers, we wore Dennison smocks and our red berets. Wearing a steel helmet might seem to have made more sense, but the red berets were much more effective. Their distinctive colour allowed the terrorists to see who they were dealing with while we were still a mile away. Once they knew they were confronting the Parachute Regiment, the IRA recognized that they were dealing with the toughest and most effective troops in the British Army. Most times, they’d pull out and leave us alone.

  In fact, because our don’t-mess-with-us reputation had gone ahead of us, we tended to have less trouble from the IRA than other regiments. The terrorists frequently backed off at the sight of the red beret and waited until another battalion with a less fearsome reputation took over the tour of duty. Then they would direct their activities against our successors.

  I remember a Yorkshire battalion, the Green Howards, starting a tour in Belfast and taking a number of casualties, losing five or six men killed by the IRA. Their morale slumped so low that we were sent in to relieve them. We were barracked in the Flax Street mill in the city’s Ardoyne area, right in the heart of IRA territory, yet we didn’t have a single incident. The reason was simply because the IRA took the view that if the Paras are here, leave it alone until they have gone away again.

  We were both feared and respected, depending upon who was expressing a view, and which side they were on. People knew we were a tough force and that, when challenged, we didn’t pull our punches. Even so, the fear factor was always with us in Northern Ireland. You never knew when a sniper had you in the cross hairs of his telescope sight, or when an explosive charge might detonate – until it was too late.

  The trick was to keep moving. Running from corner to corner, moving all the time so that nobody could draw a bead on you. We covered each other, and every action was quick, quick, quick. If you kept moving, you kept breathing – or at least, you had a hell of a sight better chance of staying alive.

  Life in Northern Ireland was horrible. We never got any leave, and we always seemed to be on standby for something. We were constantly called out to deal with riots, and the locals would chuck bricks and petrol bombs at us. Yet we never suffered anything too life-threatening, partly because of the regiment’s reputation, and partly because of the directions we received when it came to handling trouble. The CO was not given to allowing his men to be humiliated by a bunch of hot-heads. If they hit you, he said, make sure you are in the right, and then grab them with as much force as you reckon it takes, though no more.

  In Belfast in the early 1970s, Friday and Saturday nights meant rioting, since those rioters who had jobs could lie in the following day. The mayhem had to be seen to be believed, although it could generally be contained before it got too out of hand. Even so, there were dangers for soldiers beyond the obvious ones of being attacked. One Friday night we were called out to deal with the usual missile-throwing, petrol-bombing mob. Wearing flak jackets, we had rushed into the crowd to grab a few ringleaders and sling them into the back of trucks to be carted off to the police cells. The violence went on until three o’clock in the morning, and we were pretty exhausted by the time we trailed wearily back to barracks.

  I was still sleeping when a warrant officer walked into the barrack room on the Saturday morning and, grabbing my shoulder, shook me awake. He then shoved an army Intelligence Corps flashcard – a photograph mounted on card used to identify suspected terrorists – under my nose. For a few moments, I didn’t know where I was, let alone who the guy on the flashcard was supposed to be. Slowly the cobwebs cleared, however, and I heard the sergeant-major telling me that I was to attend court when the man I had arrested on Friday night was arraigned. The man in the photo on the card.

  When tear-gas rounds are popping and police sirens are wailing and yobs are chucking bricks and petrol bombs at you, and there are milling groups of people and smoke and confusion everywhere, no one has time to take a good look at the rioters they are grabbing. If someone gave us grief, we went in hard, cracking his knees with our weapons or banging the rifle butt into his shoulders where it hurt. That tended to take a rioter’s mind off lighting any petrol bombs.

  We seized them by whatever bits of their clothing we could lay a free hand on and, dragging them out of the crowd, threw them over the tailboard of the nearest truck. From then on they were the responsibility of the police, who took them away, checked their records and questioned them to see if they were on any wanted lists, and banged them up in cells pending a court hearing to establish their guilt or innocence in the matter of charges ranging from causing an affray or incitement to riot, to grievous bodily harm, or worse. While on the subject of the RUC, I have often read of them being accused of bias, tending to favour Protestants. I never saw any bias, however. They were tough men, true, but they upheld the law in a place and in circumstances where that was all too often a very difficult thing to do.

  It was not often that a terrorist ‘hard man’ got caught in the net, however. Their leaders were too smart to let them get close to a confrontation in which there was nothing to be gained but aggravation. Besides, the local aggrieved citizenry gave the RUC and the army plenty of trouble without any of the IRA having to get involved beyond offering a bit of encouragement.

  But I went to court and gave evidence that I had arrested the defendant in question. He denied it vehemently, while his barrister claimed that he had never been in trouble with the police before. ‘Only because he’s never been caught before,’ I said, at which the ruffled defence brief called me a smart alec. The judge believed me, however, and found the still-protesting prisoner guilty of whichever offence he’d been charged with.

  As serious and potentially dangerous as these riots could be, there were also funny incidents too. Soon after we arrived in Belfast we were called out to quell a riot of angry Roman Catholics. Basically, the ordinary people of Northern Ireland are warm-hearted, decent souls. Being a Roman Catholic myself, I often felt sorry for the Catholics who did most of the rioting, because there is no doubt that they had had a rough time at the hands of the Protestant majority. Besides, rioting probably brightened up their otherwise dull lives.

  As riots go, this one was not much to write home about. We were held in reserve in a parallel street while soldiers from another battalion tried to dodge the half-bricks and the jars of piss that were being hurled at them. Gradually the situation began to get out of hand, and we were warned to be ready to go in and do our bit. When it was finally decided to deploy us, we unfurled a big banner and held it up for all to see. In large letters, it told the mob to disperse and go home immediately.

  Unfortunately, none of the local demonstrators could read Arabic – which was what the words on the banner were written in. Our masterpiece of peaceful riot control, it turned out, had last been used in Aden during the 1960s, and had been brought out to Northern Ireland without anybody checking to see what it said – or in which language it said it.

  It proved singularly effective, however. When we unfurled the banner, the shouting and jeering stopped. For a moment there was dead silence. Then the crowd began to laugh. Standi
ng behind the banner, none of us could see what they were laughing about, so an officer sent a man round to the front to find out what was so amusing.

  He came back, also laughing, and reported that the warning to disperse was in Arabic, at which the officer said, ‘I’m getting awfully bored by all this. Now tell them – in English, please – to pack in this nonsense and go home. Pronto.’ And they did, still laughing and pointing to that idiotic banner as they walked away.

  By the early 1970s the IRA operated under its own terms, many of them quite far removed from the fight for a united, republican Ireland. In South Armagh, for instance, they seemed able to recruit a special brand of psychopath to ‘the Cause’. But there was no ‘Cause’ any more. Much of the IRA’s leadership was little more than a bunch of gangsters, controlling armed robbery, protection rackets, smuggling, and a great many other illegal activities.

  When someone had their kneecaps blown off as a punishment, as often as not the real reason that the IRA had crippled him was because he’d been muscling-in on their territory, or had in some way failed to follow their line. The bullets through the legs were a warning. If he was mad enough to dabble again, the next bullet would have been in his head.

  All these ‘punishment beatings’ were ostensibly carried out in the name of cleaning up the community. But the truth is that most of Ulster’s Catholic population, who had at first welcomed the protection of the IRA as a buffer against marauding Protestant terrorists, came to live in abject fear of their ‘protectors’. They came to wish, above all, for peace with their Protestant neighbours, and for the gunmen to disappear from their communities for ever, so that they could all get on with their lives.