I found myself sharing living space mainly with soldiers I only knew vaguely - and, in most cases, wished I didn't know at all. Several of them were staunch Ulster loyalists whose hatred of Catholics made them regard me as suspect. The more I got to know them the more I thought that sending them home to police their own community was not one of the British Empire's most inspired deeds. One of them I nicknamed Nasty: he was a loudmouth drunk and bully who claimed to relish the idea of going home to persecute Fenians. He had been promoted to lance-corporal several times, but each time had lost his stripe for fighting while drunk. He was stocky and intimidating and tried to give the impression that nothing would give him greater pleasure than to shoot a Catholic. He would often say to me: "Hiya, Fenian!" I would tell him to fuck off, which would make him laugh. "Ha! Ha! Ha!" he would cackle, as if we were best friends joshing. I hated the bastard.
Another was nicknamed Charisma (because he did not have any). He was about 23 but, with his moustache and boring manner, could have passed for 50. He was the non-smoking, non-drinking "saved" type. His "dah", a UDR man, was a disciple of the Reverend Ian Paisley. Charisma was full of himself and slagged off anyone who didn't share his fundamentalist Protestant beliefs: there were the doomed and the saved, the righteous and the unrighteous, and I knew which category he put me in. Once I was lying on my bed trying to sleep while listening to him droning on about God and republicans and loyalty to the Queen.
Finally I snapped and shouted: "Shut the fuck up, you lemon." In our regiment "lemon" was slang for a yellow (that is, gutless) Orangeman.
He was holding his rifle which he had been cleaning. He leant over my bed, pointed it at me and said: "Bang! Bang! You fucking Fenian."
I jumped out of bed and he ran off. I had no respect for people like Nasty and Charisma. They were full of hatred for people they had never spoken to or listened to. They sounded like they were parroting what their "dahs" had told them: bigots breeding bigots. I also wondered why, if they were so committed to getting in there and bashing the Fenians, they had not joined the RUC, the UDR or the Paras, rather than a regiment they believed would never visit their beloved homeland. When in their company I often felt that if I'd been brought up a Catholic alongside them I would probably have ended up stalking the countryside with black balaclava and Kalashnikov hoping to shoot them.
I made the mistake a few times of trying to have an argument with them about Northern Ireland. I had no real interest in the politics of the situation - quite frankly, it bored me - but I had the gut feeling, shared by most English, Welsh and even Scottish squaddies, that the six counties belonged to Ireland. When the loyalists said that Northern Ireland was (and always would be) British my argument was (and still is): "It's like saying London doesn't belong to the English." But you couldn't argue with them, because they wouldn't put forward any reasoned arguments. They would just bluster and shout and tell you that even to question the link with Great Britain was tantamount to treachery.
One time when Charisma told me that his ancestors, with God's help, had settled the land I drove him to a fury by telling him that when I had done thieving in the past I'd at least had the decency not to walk round saying that God had given me permission to do it and was happy for me to keep the spoils.
Not all of the regiment's Ulster Protestants shared the same attitudes. In fact, someone I got on well with was Mac from Derry. I never heard him utter a single word against Catholics and, if anything, he regarded extremist loyalists like Nasty and Charisma with even more disdain than I did. Mac was heavily built and, like me, lacked two front teeth, although in his case their absence did not hinder his ability to wolf down huge quantities of food. Like me, he hated the spit-and-polish army bullshit. He had enlisted because of the limited job opportunities in Derry. He had thought that by choosing "the Skins" (our regiment's nickname) he would not be called to serve in Northern Ireland. Like most squaddies, he was fond of a drink and, like me, he was not shy when violence, or the potential for it, presented itself.
I arrived at St Angelo as Bobby Sands seemed to be nearing the end of his hunger strike. He had done more than 50 days.
I suppose for the first few weeks no-one was convinced he would die: everyone expected a last-minute intervention from some quarter. But as he headed towards the 60-day mark people were sure he would go through with it. Soldiers tried to hide their anxiety about the consequences of Sands's death by making a joke of it. Apart from the "Slimmer of the Year" captions that covered the camp there was also a Hunger Strike Sweepstake: on a board in the operations room were listed the names of all republicans on hunger strike. Soldiers would have to guess the number of days a particular hunger striker would take to die. Each guess cost one pound and the soldier who guessed correctly would get to keep the pot.
But in those first few days at St Angelo the Hunger Strike was not uppermost in my mind. I had a more personal concern, namely, the agony being caused to me by piles — a common problem for soldiers near the border where everywhere you sat was either damp or cold. I could hardly walk or sleep: the back of my lightweight army trousers was covered in blood. I felt a little embarrassed and at first tried to bear my ailment uncomplainingly in the hope it would disappear.
One of my first shifts was on a permanent VCP near the border. When the helicopter dropped us off I found the VCP had been built on and around an old pig sty: soldiers used the troughs as beds. Everything stank. After a while 1 decided I could bear my condition no longer. I got on the radio to base. A female voice answered at the other end. I assumed she was one of the UDR Greenfinches who worked in the operations room. I explained my predicament and asked her to arrange for haemorrhoid cream to be sent to relieve my inflamed anus. I said: "I can't walk, I can't sleep and I look like I've been shot in the arse." I tried to get her to make the cream an urgent military priority. She laughed and said she would do what she could. Periodically I would get back on the radio to see if a special helicopter mission had been launched to save me. It became a big joke. However, I got what I wanted: the next helicopter dropped off the cream.
Everyone did 12-hour shifts: if you were not manning VCPs you were out on patrol or on guard duty at the camp. I did one guard duty, but found it so tedious that from then on I would swap my guard shifts with soldiers who had been rostered for patrol duty. After your shift you would try to get some sleep in a room with 20 others. There was never silence: soldiers were always coming and going, but the greatest enemy of sleep, if not mental stability, was the room's cassette-player. On it, 24-hours-a-day, every day, was played the one and only tape - Phil Collins's first album, Face Value. I soon knew every word of every song on that LP. The drum solo on "In the Air Tonight" still haunts me today. Indeed, when any of those songs comes on the radio I feel ill.
I can't remember where exactly I was when Bobby Sands died on the 66th day of his fast, but I remember the moment the news came through. I was on a mobile patrol which we had set up on the outskirts of a predominantly nationalist town. Someone had devised a special code in preparation for the event. It was something like, "Grey Fox has left." I was near the radio operator when the words came over the airwaves. Everyone in the patrol knew within seconds and everyone looked worried: we knew his death could only spell trouble -and we still had more than three months to do. Shortly afterwards, as if to underline our fears, people from houses a few hundred yards away came out onto the streets and started
banging dustbin lids on the ground. Everyone was on edge. Even the motorists we stopped that night seemed more bolshy and aggressive. I felt relieved when the helicopter came to take us back to camp.
Bobby Sands's death and the crowd of 70,000 at his subsequent funeral added to the atmosphere of fear and paranoia at St Angelo. Every nationalist area in Fermanagh seemed covered with black flags and memorial posters. This widespread sympathy for the dead Provo confirmed the prejudices of people like Nasty and Charisma that all Catholics were closet republicans. The locally-recruited UDR soldiers with w
hom we shared the camp felt the same. In the canteen and bar they would talk as if an uprising were imminent. I often heard UDR people say, "Kill all Catholics. Let God sort them out." But behind their bravado I could smell fear - fear of the growing strength of the IRA, both on the ground and in terms of the international support the Hunger Strike was attracting for the republican movement. Some UDR people seemed to be anticipating the day when they and their families would be slaughtered in their beds by the rampaging Fenian hordes.
Everyone was jumpy. We were reminded never to accept gifts from people at VCPs. There were various horror stories of how republicans had ground down lightbulbs and then put the glass powder in bottles of soft drinks to be given to thirsty soldiers; or how soldiers had accepted a portable television from a kindly motorist only to have it explode when they turned it on. You had to remember that everyone you met might potentially be out to kill you. This awareness of being surrounded by hidden threats put a great strain on all our minds and I could see some soldiers beginning to crack, especially the younger ones. You had to be 18 to qualify for service in Northern Ireland. There was one soldier nicknamed Foxy who had only moved into technical adulthood a fortnight before the start of our tour. He was small and slight with mousy features and a nervous manner. From the moment he knew we were being sent to Ireland he pestered me. I suppose he latched on to me because we were both from the Black Country - I from near Wolverhampton, he from West Bromwich. In Fermanagh he pestered me even more. He would say things like: "Do you think there's going to be a lot more trouble if more hunger strikers die?" I would think the answer reasonably obvious and would say yes. Foxy would then dispute what I'd said. In fact I don't know why he ever asked me anything. I never told him what he needed to hear - I would always tell him the worst - and then he would disagree with me. We were usually told the night before where we would be going on patrol the next day. Once we knew the location Foxy would invariably seek me out and engage me in the same conversation, night after night. It usually went something like this:
"What d'you think about this, O'Mahoney?"
"Think about what?"
"Where we're going tomorrow. Is it really bad there?"
"I don't know."
"What do you think? Do you think it's really bad there?"
"How the fuck do I know?"
"They reckon it's bad there..."
He was a master of the unanswerable question. He began to drive me round the bend, so I started taking revenge by winding him up. The more nervous he got, the more I would wind him up. One day we talked about the possibility of being
separated from your "brick" and being captured by the enemy. In training we had been told that if we were unable to shoot our way out then we ought to consider shooting ourselves: capture would lead to unimaginable horrors, at the end of which the only certainty was death. This thought preyed on Foxy's mind. We discussed it one night - and many nights thereafter. In fact we had so many similar conversations that I can remember his ramblings almost word for word:
"Would you shoot yourself if that happened, O'Mahoney?"
"Fucking right I would, Foxy."
"No you wouldn't. You're just saying that."
"All right then, I wouldn't. I'd let them beat me, torture me, hack off my remaining bollock and then shoot me."
"No you wouldn't." Pause. "What sort of things do you think they'd do?"
"How the fuck do I know?"
"Do you think they'd use weapons on you or just beat you?"
"Foxy. I do not fucking know."
"Have they ever let anyone go?"
"No."
"Well, perhaps it would be better to shoot yourself, then."
Pause. Then: "How would you know they were for real, though? What if they weren't really the IRA and..."
And on and on he would gibber into the night, torturing himself, and me, with his dark thoughts. I said to him once that the Provos would soon regret capturing him: he would bore them to death with his questions. He could really work himself into a state. I began to see that the biggest threat to soldiers in Northern Ireland came from the workings of their own minds. It was, more than anything else, a psychological conflict.
But of course there were real threats. Sometimes the faceless terrorists could be given names. At that time the most feared IRA man in our area was James Lynagh. He lived over the border and was considered so dangerous that the security forces gave him his own code name. There were lots of stories about his daredevil cunning, such as how he would hide in car boots which he would spring open as he passed police stations to open fire with a machine-gun. He must have been under surveillance by the southern Irish Special Branch because whenever he went on the missing list a warning would come on the radio: "Bill has left the stage," or something like that. If he had gone missing everyone assumed he had crossed the border and that an attack was imminent. If you were at a permanent checkpoint when those words came over the radio you couldn't help feeling a little spooked. You would be sitting in your sandbag sangar 100 yards away from everyone else and your mind would start playing games with you. Any movement in the darkness in front of you would be terrifying. You could not see what was making the noise so you assumed it was James Lynagh.
The VCP would be surrounded by trip wires armed with flares at night - disarmed during the day. If a flare went off you would automatically want to open fire. However, the intruders were always animals. It was in an incident like that around that time that I shot my first sheep. In fact, soldiers often accidentally shot sheep or rabbits or foxes or even, occasionally, cows. In fact, no animal was safe, especially if paratroopers were on duty. Sometimes we used to share a VCP with 2 Para. They were different from us, more professional, which in military terms meant they just wanted to kill things, people preferably, but any animal would do. Once we were sharing a
VCP near a farm with members of 2 Para. The farm dog would start barking whenever soldiers changed guard and moved from the sleeping quarters to the machine-gun post. The paras decided that the dog's barking would alert terrorists to the movement of soldiers when they were at their most vulnerable. So a para crawled into the farm and silenced the dog for good with a knife.
As for James Lynagh — he was part of an eight-man IRA unit wiped out by the SAS at Loughgall six years later. The RUC claimed that weapons recovered from the bodies had been used in seven murders and nine attempted murders in the previous two years.
Other strange things would happen at night when the darkness could provide cover for our antics. Around the time Bobby Sands died we tended to feel safer back at base. One evening I was on a mobile patrol roving through the countryside around Belcoo. It had been raining in that special Irish way since we had first jumped off the helicopter. Everyone was soaked. Most depressingly, all our sleeping bags were soaked, which meant that if we had to set up temporary camp we would not even be able to have the comfort of a warm sleeping bag (our "green maggot", as it was known) for a short snooze. Our corporal was equally dejected.
We decided to have a false "contact". If you encountered terrorists while on patrol and opened fire you were supposed to get on the radio immediately and shout "Contact! Contact! Contact!" That night's Quick Reaction Force would then be despatched to you swiftly by helicopter as back-up. But, most importantly, as your position had been compromised you would have to be taken back to camp to your nice warm bed and a cup of tea. We all agreed on our story in case there was an investigation: we had spotted a figure who appeared to be carrying a rifle near a tree several hundred yards away. I laughed as we took up firing positions. Then, at the corporal's command, we fired off two flares and opened fire on the tree and bushes. The sky lit up like it was Fireworks Night and the machine-gunner blasted countless rounds of tracer bullets into the tree and bushes, while we added to the show with bullets from our SLRs. Meanwhile the corporal was screaming into the radio handset: "Contact! Contact! Contact!"
Back at base they must have thought we'd encountered an IR
A Flying Column. Within seven minutes we heard the whirr of the helicopter. Soldiers jumped from it before it had even touched the ground. They ran towards us, hyped up and ready for action. Our corporal pointed in the direction of the tree and the QRF soldiers moved off to hunt down the enemy, helped by the helicopter's powerful search beam. When we got back to base I could tell that some of the officers suspected something, but nothing was said. I think they put our reaction down to nervousness.
And everyone was nervous. Within days our regiment had its second casualty. A soldier was shot in the foot. Thankfully, he hadn't been shot by other soldiers — he'd shot himself. At the front of St Angelo were two watchtowers near the main gate. I was on QRF duty when the call came that there had been a shooting incident in one of the watchtowers. I ran with the others the few hundred yards to the tower and climbed to die top of the steps where I could see a soldier lying on the floor surrounded by five or six others who were shouting at him. When I got closer I could see a perfect hole in one of the prone soldier's boots. The boot was still on his foot and there was remarkably little blood. The soldier was not saying anything, just lying there rigid, his face drained of colour. He was obviously in shock, but the other soldiers were giving him abuse, rather than sympathy. Someone kept screaming: "What the fuck have you done? What the fuck have you done?" They eventually put him on a stretcher and carried him to a helicopter which flew him to hospital. Later he claimed the gun had gone off accidentally while he was sitting with his foot up.
He might have been telling the truth, but no-one believed him.
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