In those last weeks we kept up our harassment of the prospective MP Owen Carron. The by-election was due to be held on 20 August, the day before our tour ended. On that last night I didn't stay up to hear the election result, but I woke the next day to discover our regiment had obviously failed to win the hearts and minds of the people of Fermanagh-South
Tyrone. The electors had voted overwhelmingly for Owen Carron. The most harassed man in the constituency had won by 2,230 votes. More than 31,000 had elected him to serve as their Member of Parliament. He had got even more votes than the previous MP, the dead hunger striker Bobby Sands. In the canteen his victory dampened any celebration there might otherwise have been over the news of the death of the tenth hunger striker, the 23-year-old INLA man, Michael Devine. On the news Mrs Thatcher said she was bitterly disappointed by Carron's win. As I ate my breakfast at St Angelo for the last time I wondered whether our regiment's presence - and I personally — had contributed towards this boost in the republicans' electoral strength.
One of the Enniskillen-born soldiers said: "We should have shot that cunt when we had the chance."
I couldn't see what difference it would have made. Overall, though, his victory didn't undermine our high spirits. It might have underlined the fact that we weren't winning anything, but none of us really cared: we were getting out of there and that was all that mattered. We just had to get through the last day.
Major Disaster gave us our final briefing. He outlined a slick plan of action for the hand-over to our replacement regiment, the Royal Anglians. We would be on a checkpoint near the border when the Royal Anglians arrived by Wessex helicopter. They would disembark and join us in our positions. During this time the Wessex would fly off and circle briefly before returning to take us on board. The Royal Anglians would cover our orderly departure. That last morning on the checkpoint was an agony of waiting. What if the Provos chose this time to launch an attack? I imagined dying as the helicopter came in to land. I think everyone else was thinking the same. We weren't going to feel safe until we were at least on that helicopter on its way to St Angelo. We divided our time between looking at our watches and staring at the sky, waiting for a longed-for sight of that Wessex and the comforting sound of its rotor blades. In the afternoon a code-word came through on the radio that told us the Wessex was ten minutes away. We checked our rucksacks were secure.
Then in the distant sky we spotted the Wessex. We all looked at each other, beaming, as if to say, "It's over. We're getting out of here." Soon we could hear the DUGG-DUGG-DUGG of the rotor blades as the Wessex swept towards us. Just as it touched the ground we all spontaneously jumped to our feet and ran towards it. The Royal Anglians, proper infantrymen, were jumping out, rolling in the grass and taking up firing positions, doing everything by the book. But before the last one of them had jumped out we had got to the Wessex and started jumping in. It was like one of those pitiful scenes from the Vietnam war: desperate refugees making a dash for the last chopper out of Saigon. The slick hand-over had not gone quite to plan. We had caught the helicopter's loader by surprise. He didn't know whether to tell the pilot to take off, because we were half in and half out. While he was deciding we were hurling our gear in and clambering on. The loader just stood there shaking his head. The Wessex lifted into the air. I looked at Major Disaster and smiled. He was almost laughing: he stuck his thumb up at me. Below us we could see the Royal Anglians looking up at us, gobsmacked. It was a great moment.
We still had the journey in the removal van to Aldergrove Airport, but everyone was a lot more relaxed than on the journey down. When we got to the airport we found ourselves in the same hangar as before. But now we were the jubilant soldiers — and we could watch the arrival of our grim-faced replacements.
A few hours later we were in coaches driving through the gates of Imphal Barracks in Osnabriick. We drove into the massive parade square where a waiting band struck up Cliff Richard's "Congratulations". Just behind the band were a crowd of people waiting to welcome us. They were waving and cheering. We felt chuffed.
Then a sergeant opened the coach's door and said: "Married men off the coach. Single men stay where you are."
The married men filed off and ran to the arms of their waiting wives and children. The regimental photographer took pictures of the embraces. Once everyone had gone, including the band and the photographer, the sergeant came back and told us that once we had unloaded the kit from the coach we could go. We got our gear, unloaded the stores and ambled back to our quarters, deflated.
17
A Job Well Done
The first few weeks back in Germany were a time of drinking and swapping tales from the war zone.
I caught up with my best friends, Paul and Lofty, whom I hadn't seen since April. They had both emerged unscathed and seemed to have spent their time in tranquil backwaters. I also met Edwards, the soldier wounded in the mortar attack. He said he could hardly remember anything about it. He certainly couldn't remember me being there. He hadn't responded to me when I was trying to help him. Of course, I realised I had kept calling him "Clarkey" for some reason, probably shock. "No wonder I didn't answer you," Edwards said. He did not bad-mouth the Irish over what had happened to him, at least not in my hearing. He just talked about the
injuries. The main scar was an awful purple-coloured monstrosity. It was in an L-shape, one end of which was on his back, the other on his right side, about 18 inches in length and half an inch in width. He had another unsightly scar across his cheek and jaw. Fortunately, he had been walking beside a blast-wall when the mortars landed. White-hot shrapnel had spun through the air and torn into him. After seeing his injuries I couldn't call him lucky, but it could have been worse: without the blast-wall to cushion the explosion he would have been "fertiliser".
It was good to be back in a relatively relaxed environment with women and children around the place. Something struck me that I had only half noticed before - the way a lot of soldiers spoke to their wives and children as if they were in the army. NCOs were the worst for this: many of them talked to their loved ones as if they were on parade. You could always spot army kids. They were the ones with creases in their shirts — three down the back, two down the front, one down each sleeve - and highly polished football boots.
I rang Elizabeth in Ireland regularly. We had agreed to try to keep the relationship going, despite the distance. We planned to meet up: she was going to come to Germany for a holiday and I was going to spend Christmas in Enniskillen. She kept me informed about what was going on back at St Angelo. I told her we had all received individual certificates from the chairman of Fermanagh District Council thanking us for having served in the area. I read mine out to her: In Recognition and Appreciation of service during four and a half months tour of duty by 24516117 Trooper B.P. O'Mahoney (4th Troop) with the
5th Royal Enniskilling Dragoon Guards in County Fermanagh, Northern Ireland from April 1981 till August 1981 It was decorated with the Fermanagh coat of arms and had been personally signed by the council chairman, Councillor Raymond Ferguson. We all thought it was a nice gesture, although the council had misspelt the regiment's name: it should have been "Inniskilling".
On 3 October 1981 the six remaining hunger strikers called off their action. I read that during the period of the Hunger Strike sixty-one people had died in violent incidents. Among them were fifteen policemen, eight soldiers and seven UDR members. The rest were civilians, including seven people (two of them girls of 11 and 14) who died from injuries inflicted by plastic bullets fired by the police and army.
We seemed to spend most of the next few months on exercises. You would no sooner finish one exercise than you would be preparing for the next. For all our fear of imminent death in Northern Ireland I think it was a statistical fact that a soldier was in more danger of dying on exercise in Germany. We had even been told that the army set an "acceptable" death toll before each exercise. If that number was reached, or exceeded, the exercise would be stopped. It
didn't surprise me that so many soldiers died, because they really pushed you. Most accidents would happen with people doing stupid things through tiredness — lorries going off the road or helicopters flying into power lines. Quite a few German civilians would die as well: you would get a family driving up the road in a Volkswagen Beetle and they'd smash into a camouflaged tank parked in a lay-by. Working with tanks carried special dangers. You were told always to sleep on top of a tank. In bad weather
some soldiers would sleep underneath because there's a two-foot clearance. However, if the tank was on soft ground it would sink gradually over the course of several hours. Then the only way to get it off the person being crushed would be to start the engine and drive off. But sometimes the act of driving off would push the tank down further and any soldiers underneath would be crushed to death. I never saw this happen, but I had heard of it happening a few times when I was in the army.
In the final days of one exercise we were camped in a forest. The weather was bitterly cold and we decided to make a fire using twigs, paper and petrol. As we stood around it talking and warming ourselves a Geordie thought it was not warm enough, so he picked up the bucket containing the petrol, which was about a quarter full, and ineptly threw the remainder towards the fire. The stream of airborne petrol passed through the fire, ignited and continued on its flaming flight towards me. I didn't see it until the last second, when I put my hands up to my face and fell to the floor. I could feel a burning sensation around my right eye and I could hear Paul shouting: "Put him out! Put him out!" Fortunately I was wearing several layers of thick clothing because of the extreme German winter. Paul was beating me, kicking foliage over me and generally causing more damage to me in his efforts to extinguish the flames than would have occurred if he had left me to burn. When I eventually got to my feet, I found I couldn't see properly through my right eye, so I was taken to hospital. They kept me overnight and the next day told me my injury was not serious. Apparently, it had not been caused by the fire, but by the pine needles contained in the foliage Paul had kicked over my face. The fire left me with slight blistering on the face and hands and scorch marks on my clothes.
I kept up my calls to Elizabeth. I liked to hear what was going on at St Angelo and around the town. For all my keenness to get out of Northern Ireland I found once again that I was actually missing the place. I suppose it was a combination of missing Elizabeth and missing that sense of excitement and focus that fear and tension bring. On top of all that, though, was the question of what I was going to do when my term of service ended in a few months' time. I didn't have a clue. The army hadn't equipped me for anything other than being a soldier. And there was nothing from my old life that I could return to - apart from crime.
I'm not sure who first suggested it as an idea, but in one of my telephone conversations with Elizabeth we started discussing the possibility of my joining the Ulster Defence Regiment. At first I thought it was a mad idea. Apart from Elizabeth there were not too many UDR people I liked and I knew my Irish-Catholic background was a source of discomfort to some of the bigots. But I had heard that quite a few English-born soldiers joined the UDR after serving in Northern Ireland and I began to wonder seriously whether I could make a go of it. Over the following weeks I churned over the idea and, to my surprise, it became more appealing as time went on. I didn't see myself as someone who would make a career of it, but as the horizon seemed empty of other possibilities I thought I could at least do it for a short while. It would offer me a temporary haven while I worked out what I wanted to do with the rest of my life. At least I would be with Elizabeth, in a place I knew, earning money doing the only job*! was trained for. It seemed better than being on the dole in Codsall, renewing my acquaintance with the local police. After several weeks of indecision I decided to go for it. I was going to join the UDR.
I had another period of leave due before I left. I wanted to buy a car and drive it over to England. Another soldier, a horrible little Welsh bastard, heard I was looking for one and offered to sell me his. It was a very nice car, albeit left-hand drive, and worth about £3,000. I decided I'd buy it, but as I didn't have that sort of money I asked for a loan from the German bank into which my wages were paid. At first they would not give me it, because they saw I was due to leave the army. But I lied, saying I had just signed up for another three years. Surprisingly they gave me the money without checking my story. I showed the Welshman the loan agreement, but said the money was not going to come through for several weeks. I asked him if in the meantime he would let me take the car with me on leave. He agreed. I didn't tell him the money had already been paid into my account.
Paul was coming with me, and on the ferry over we got extremely drunk. When the boat docked I was asleep in the bar and Paul had collapsed in the shower cubicle in our cabin. It took quite a while for the appeals they were making over the tannoy to penetrate my drunken brain. When I finally realised the registration number they were calling out was my own I ran to the cabin to get Paul. He was totally out of it, so I switched on the shower to wake him up. When the two of us got down to the car deck the place was empty apart from my car. An irritated-looking deck hand came up to us and asked if it was ours. I said it was. He said: "Have you been drinking?" I said: "No, I'm just feeling tired."
I drove off at Harwich at about two o'clock in the morning. I thought I was still in Germany and started driving down the wrong side of the road. It was an easy mistake to make at the time because there were no other cars on the road and my car was left-hand drive. However, I took a bend and saw a car coming towards me on what I thought was the wrong side of the road. I swerved the car between two bollards that were meant to prevent cars driving into a pub car park. Somehow I got through and came to a halt. I jumped out of the car and started shouting at the driver of the other car, which had stopped nearby. I soon realised that he was a policeman. He couldn't work out how I had managed to get through the bollards. He breathalysed me, but amazingly I passed.
"Look, I'm not daft," he said, "I know you've been drinking, even if it hasn't registered." He told me I was not to drive the car again that night. So we slept in the car until the sun came up.
The rest of my leave was spent in a drunken haze: I decided I was going to blow the £3,000 whatever the consequences. I thought that the way I had passed the breathalyser test despite being drunk meant there was something in my metabolism that could allow me to drink as much as I liked and still drive without fear of being done by the police.
On one of the last days of my leave I got in the car after a drinking session. Two friends from home were with me. The windscreen was covered with ice, so I cleared a little slit in the ice to enable me to see. Then I drove off at high speed into the fog. A little way down the road I smashed into the back of a parked car. Unfortunately, there were two people inside, a man and his girlfriend. His head hit the windscreen and was split open, but he wasn't badly hurt. His girlfriend was all right and so was everyone in my car. The police arrived with the breathalyser. I thought I'd pass it easily as I hadn't drunk half
as much as before. However, I failed. I was arrested and ended up being fined £250 and banned from driving for 12 months. The car was a write-off and I had spent almost all the £3,000.
Back in Germany I told the car's owner that I'd had a smash in it and that the bank were not releasing the money. I said that when the insurance money came through I would pay him. He wasn't happy, but there was not a lot he could do. I only had a few weeks to do in the army. In the end neither he nor the bank got their money.
In those last few weeks I was called in for a careers-advice chat with a senior officer. I told him I was thinking of joining the UDR. He asked me what else I could do. I said the army had not really equipped me for anything, despite everything they had promised when I had signed up. He suggested I took the test for the higher-grade Class 2 Heavy Goods Vehicle licence (I already held the Class 3). I didn't tell him I was banned from driving. He must have had a word
with the army examiner, because my test was very straightforward.
"See if you can drive that," the examiner said, pointing to an amphibious lorry called a Stalwart. I got in and drove it round a field a few times. I didn't take it onto the public highway. After a short while he told me to pull over. I asked him if I had passed the test. "What do you think?" he said.
Before I left I received my Certificate of Service. The range of Military Conduct Gradings is: 1) Exemplary, 2) Very Good, 3) Good, 4) Fair, 5) Unsatisfactory. I was given an "exemplary" grading. The commanding officer added a testimonial:
O'Mahoney has been in the army since 1979 during which time he has been employed as driver and is qualified to HGV level.
He is a cheerful soldier who can be relied upon to do his best. I have no doubt that he will do well in civilian life as a driver and I would recommend him to any future employer.
With only a short time to go before I left I had let my hair grow longer than the regulation length. I did this deliberately because I didn't want to go back to Northern Ireland with a soldier's short hair-cut. However, a good friend of Nasty's in the regimental police approached me one day and told me to get my hair cut. He was from Northern Ireland himself. I told him why I didn't want to, but he insisted. We had a big argument which resulted in my being arrested for insubordination. I was taken before the troop leader. I explained my reasons for not wanting to cut my hair, but he wouldn't listen. He fined me and ordered me to have my hair cut. I was sure that Nasty had had something to do with it. He knew I was going back to the North and he was probably hoping that republicans would realise I was a squaddie and shoot me. The idea of Fenians shooting a Fenian would have had great appeal to him, especially if he had known what I only discovered myself years later: that "Fenian" — the favourite loyalist nickname for Catholics - came from the activities of one of my nineteenth-century namesakes. John O'Mahoney co-founded and named the IRA's historical forerunner, the Fenian Brotherhood (later notorious for the so-called "Fenian Rising" of 1867). I don't think Johnno was from our branch of the family, but I might have met him once at a party.
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