ely everything
we drew  out was brand-new.  We looked as  if  we'd  just stepped out  of  a
catalog"Turn up tomorrow," Danny said, "and we'll see what's going on."
     This was at ten o'clock in the morning.
     "What do we do in the meantime?" I asked.
     "Nothing. Go downtown if you like."
     This was  so different from the battalion, where we'd have had to stay,
even if there was nothing to do.
     When we did go back the next morning, we were  told: "Malaya, Thursday.
5 We packed all the brand-new kit and drew out shiny new jungle boots. There
wouldn't  be  time to break them in. On Thursday we boarded  the aircraft. I
still hadn't  organized the quarter for Debbie;  I  only  hoped that  things
would be sorted while I was away.
     Some  of the blokes had already been in the jungle for quite a while by
the time we turned up at the base  camp, two hours' drive from Kuala Lumpur.
We  drew some more kit, and the  next morning  we were choppered  in to join
them: four new  blokes, every bit of kit shiny and squeaking.  I felt like a
nun in a whorehouse, knowing none of the jargon and none of the people using
it. Nobody  wore  rank, everybody was on first-name terms; it was impossible
to make out who was who.
     Best, I reckoned, to follow the RSM's advice. I shut up and listened.
     The  squadron  setup  in  the jungle  was very much as  it  had been on
Selection. There  was the  squadron HQ element, then  the troops  positioned
satelliting it.  People had  set  up  home in the admin areas; A-frames were
dotted around, many  of them sprouting extensions. Figure "targets  had been
made into sit-up angle boards as a makeshift gym.
     Tables and chairs  had been made out  of crates. Here and  there two or
three  ponchos had gone  up  to join  A-frames and  make  what  looked  like
minicommunes.
     Everybody in sight had a beard and long, greasy hair.
     Some blokes were lying  in their  A-frames  reading books; others  were
bumming  around  in  shorts or squatting over  hexy burners, brewing up. But
whatever he was  doing, every  bloke  had  his belt  kit on, as well  as his
golack and weapon.
     The medic came up to us  and said, "Most people  are out at the moment.
When they come back, everything will be sorted. Do you want a brew?"
     While we  were drinking  tea, the squadron  O.C came over with all  his
entourage.
     "Good to see you! Right, we need a bloke for each  troop." He looked at
each of us in turn, then said, " You look like a diver George was a mountain
climber, so he said, "I'd like Mountain Troop."
     "Okay, you can  go to Mountain Troop. You, go to Mobility, and you look
like a free faller."
     The last bloke he was pointing at was me, and that was me in Air Troop.
"Wait here," he added, "and somebody will be along to pick you up."
     Blokes from different troops came down to pick up their new boys.
     The  O.C and  his  party  disappeared. I was sitting  there  on my own,
taking in a bit  of the setup, watching the signalers and  medics at work at
makeshift tables under  ponchos.  People  were coming  up  and saying,  "All
right? How you going? What troop you going to?"
     "Air Troop."
     "Bloody hell,  you'll  have  fun-the fucking ice-cream boys!  Got  your
sunglasses with you, I hope?"
     I didn't have time to  ask what  they meant.  A fellow who was six feet
his and  four feet wide appeared, p walking  on the balls  of his feet.  His
hands were so big his M16 looked like a toy.
     "Your name Andy?  I'm Tiny, Seven  Troop. We'll sort out some  bits and
pieces, and then we'll go back up to the troop area."
     I was smelling all  nice,  got my new boots on, and feeling like it was
my first day at big  school. Off we went, my eyes scanning the ground  for a
patch of mud to dunk my boots in.
     As we walked up the hill he said, "What battalion are you from then?"
     "Two."
     "Great! I'm Two Para myself."
     "No, two RGJ. I was a Green Jacket."
     Tiny stopped in his tracks, turned, and said, "Well, what  the fuck are
you doing here?"
     "I don't know-they just told me to come."
     "Fucking hell, we haven't had anybody here for eighteen months, and now
they're sending you."
     I'd never felt such a dickhead in my life.
     We went into the  troop area,  which  was  on  a small spur occupied by
A-frames. In the middle was a large fire. All eight members of 7
     Troop were sitting around, having a kefuddle and brewing up.
     As we walked in, Tiny said, "We've got  this fellow here turned up; his
name  ' s  Andy McNab, and  he's a Green jacket.  What the  fuck's  he doing
here?"
     He started  having a go at  a guy called Colin, who  I  assumed was the
senior bloke present.
     Colin was about five feet six inches, very quietly spoken but extremely
blunt in his replies to Tiny. He sounded as if he was from Yorkshire.
     "I'm a para, too," he said as he shook my hand.
     Christ, was anybody in 7 Troop not from Para Reg?
     They introduced themselves.
     "Nosh."
     "Frank."
     "Eddie."
     "Mat."
     "Steve."
     "Al."
     "Get yourself over there," Colin said, and bung a pole bed up."
     I went to the edge of the clearing, dropped my  bergen, and got out  my
golack.
     I'd  only  ever  made one A-frame, and  now everybody who  was  sitting
around brewing up was able to watch me make a bollocks of the second.
     Brunei seemed a  long  time ago as I thrashed at the trees and tried to
chop branches to  required lengths. Every time I pulled up  one bit the next
would fall down. God knows what they must have been thinking.
     I  wanted to  make a  ood impression  and was flailing away like a  man
possessed, but  my  pole bed was all over  the place. And they  were sitting
there, chatting away and smoking, watching me and scratching their heads.
     I  finally sorted it all out just as it  started to come to last light.
They didn't  stand  to. I thought,  Well, what goes on now? I didn't want to
intrude on their session, so I did a few exaggerated yawns and stretches and
got my  head  down. They carried on the  fuddle all night, probably thinking
that I was a right -antisocial prat.
     In the morning I got  a brew on and some food.  Then I wandered over to
Tiny and said, "What happens now?"
     "Just get ready and we'll go out, I suppose."
     "When do we go out?"
     "Don't worry about it."
     Colin took me in' his patrol. He seemed really switched on, and I clung
on to him. Colin was my role model.
     We were going  to do jungle lanes, very much as we'd done on Selection.
We patrolled along in  a group of  two, then in a  group of four, practicing
contact drills.
     The  Communist insurrection in Malaya  had started in  1948, and twelve
hundred  guerrillas,  under  the leadership of Chin Peng, still subsisted in
the  mountains along the Malay-That border. It had been one  of the  longest
wars in  Asia, but fairly  inconsequential; however,  hundreds of people had
been killed during anti-Chinese riots in Kuala Lumpur in 1969.
     The  New  Zealanders  had  a  battalion stationed  in  Singapore.  They
operated  in Malaya, but they couldn't  commit the battalion to  work in the
north,  for  whatever  political  reason.  We  were there  to demonstrate  a
presence.
     As Colin and I were patrolling, we saw a target. I remembered my drills
well; I got some rounds down, turned, and ran back.
     Inexplicably Colin gave it a full magazine, dropped in another one, and
kept going forward.
     He turned and shouted, "What  the  fuck  are  you  doing?$) "We weren't
taught to do it like that."
     "Oh,  for  fuck's  sake.$'   Every  squadron  did   it  differently,  I
discovered,  and so did every troop.  For  the rest of  the day Colin had me
running to and fro on the range until I was decimating targets with the best
of them. When  we  finished that  night,  I felt quite  good.  I'd  shown  a
shortcoming, but I had done what was expected of me: I had learned. I felt a
little bit accepted.
     We were sitting  round in a fuddle  that night,  and I sampled my first
"fruit  cocktail," a unique B Squadron concoction made from rum  and  boiled
sweets. I didn't have a clue what or who anybody was talking about.
     There were all  these different  terminologies and personalities, and I
had no idea. I had to ask for translations.
     I gathered that Colin had been rebuilding his house.
     He was honking about the price of logs: "Forty-five pounds a ton-it's a
rip-off. If you go down Pontralis, you can get them for lo-three." I sat and
listened, and over  the next few  days I pieced together what  I could about
all the characters.
     Nosh was  built  like  an athlete but apparently very rarely trained or
ran and  was a thirty-a-day man. He was passionate about anything to do with
the air and had logged in excess of a thousand free fall jumps.
     He struck me as incredibly intelligent; he'd be  sitting there, picking
his  nose, farting, and  burping but chipping  in with comments that sounded
like paragraphs from the Economist.
     Frank Collins had ginger hair, was about my height and  weight and came
from up  north  somewhere.  He was fairly quietly spoken and more forthright
than  blunt.  It  seemed  that  he  was  starting  to  get  into  born-again
Christianity. Everybody was giving him a slagging about it.
     A copy of  Holy Blood,  Holy  Grail was going the rounds,  with  people
reading it avidly for ammunition to give Frank a hard time with. They  had a
copy  of the Bible with them  as well, as a cross-reference.  It made an odd
sight, all these rough,  tough men in the middle of  the jungle listening to
people  reading  out passages from the Testaments and checking them  against
this book.
     I'd seen Al Slater before. He was the training corporal giving recruits
a hard time in the 1983 BBC series The Paras.  He  was about six feet, lean,
and he  looked like  an officer.  I could still remember him shouting at the
recruits, "Getting noticed is absolutely the last thing you want to do."
     Al's special seat was a massive bag of rice. There had been a fresh day
just before I arrived. Al had  asked for a large  bag of  rice, thinking  in
terms of a two-  or threepound bag.  To everybody's amazement, a fifty-pound
bag had turned up. Al immediately adopted it as his chair. He used to sit on
it,  scoop out some  rice now and then, and throw it in a pot. Over the next
few weeks we had rice pudding, fried rice, rice with onions, rice with dried
meat, rice with fish, and Al's arse got lower and lower.
     With the same drop,  the mail had come through. Al  was sitting  on his
bag of rice and put his book down to open his letters. He looked  inside one
envelope and started rolling up.  "I think  somebody's put  a major hint  in
here."  He  laughed,  pulling out  three  sheets  of paper, a self-addressed
envelope with a stamp on, and a pencil.
     Nosh  was having  a brew one day and said, "We  ought  to  have a Seven
Troop sun trap, somewhere we can wear our shades. We've got a reputation  to
keep up."
     I wondered what on earth he was on about.
     A couple of days later we were mincing around in the base camp, cooking
away and gabbing off, and Nosh decided that the time had come.
     He had  a fag  in his mouth and _ a golack in his hand and was  walking
around a massive buttress tree right on the edge of our area.
     He didn't say anything, but we suddenly heard ching, ching, ching.
     Colin walked over. "What the fuck are you doing, Nosh?"
     "Sun trap," Nosh said,  one hand down his trousers, scratching himself.
"If I do the cuts right, it'll fall downhill towards the river."
     "You sure?"
     "Trust me."
     If the tree  fell the other way, it would come down right on top of our
basha area. All day  we heard ching,  ching, ching. Finally the noise became
ching ching creak.
     The tree started to groan.
     Nosh came over to Mat and said, "I think you'd better move, mate.
     It might go  your way as well. I'm not too sure.  I think I  might have
fucked up here."
     People were running around with their weapons and belt kits, but nobody
was too sure which way to run. in the end we stood and watched.
     With an almighty scream and a screech the tree finally toppled, falling
just inches from Mat's basha.
     "There you go," Nosh said. "Very professional job."
     It was,  too. A big beam of light suddenly appeared through the canopy,
and 7 Troop got its sunglasses out.
     Food plays such an important part in anybody's life in the military-not
so much  for the calorific value  and the fact that it keeps you warm as for
the fact that  it's one of the only  areas where you're going to get variety
and can spend time doing something entirely for yourself.
     We talked a  lot  about what we were going to cook and how, and all the
different mustards  or spices we'd be using. It was a diversion  from normal
routine. Some people  would go  and catch  fish to supplement  the  rations.
Others would set a trap and see what they caught, then make a big  stew  out
of it.
     Al Slater was having a wash in the river one morning.
     We  heard a couple of five-round bursts going down the river and rushed
to see what was going on. It was Al  with big Hissing Sid  coming up to him,
now deceased.
     We ate it that night. It tasted shit but was fine after being marinaded
in Tabasco.
     Tiny and Eddie made a friend that they refused to eat.
     His name was Stan the  Scorpion. He lived in a hole below  Tiny's  pole
bed and seemed to like the Spam that was fed to him.
     We were  sitting on the floor in  the middle of nowhere one day. It was
pissing  down  with  rain.  I  was drenched, rivulets  of  rainwater running
through my matted hair and trickling from my chin. I put up a little shelter
sheet  to stop the embuggerance of everything dripping  off my nose while  I
was trying to brew up.
     As  I stood up, trying to sort my  belt kit  out, I felt something drop
down my leg. I didn't think much of it; there's  always beasties making best
friends with you in the jungle. Then I felt a warm  and wet sensation around
i my bollocks and thought, right, I'll have  a look and see what's going on.
I pulled my trousers and  pants down  and  found that the  whole of my groin
area  was covered in blood.  Fuck! It was capillary bleeding, exacerbated by
the fact that the skin was so wet with -all the rain and sweat.
     I was flapping good style trying to see what was going on and pulled my
trousers right  off. Down  by my  boots was  the  world's  fattest, happiest
leech,  as big as  my thumb. It had got inside my clothing somehow, attached
itself to my cock, and then drunk so much it fell off.
     When leeches bite,  they put in an anticoagulant and  anesthetic  twist
ball, so you keep bleeding and you don't feel a thing. I had instant visions
of  other leeches crawling up my pride and joy, so one  of the boys  had  to
have a quick look inside to make sure everything was all right.
     The leech was very proud of himself, very full  up.  I  kept him to one
side  for ten minutes or so  while I  tried to  decide what  to do with him.
Eventually I gave  him a  burst of mozzie rep, which really  pissed him off.
Then he died, poor soul.
     It took ages for the bleeding to stop. Afterward I had a bite mark that
looked like a cigarette burn, which would stay there  for life. It was quite
a shock,  and the blokes were very solicitous. Then they spent the next week
reminding me that the  leech was  considerably bigger than the morsel it had
eaten for dinner.
     We  had  an American with us  called  Dan  Dan  the Chain  Saw  Man. On
secondment from Delta Force, the U.S equivalent  of the Regiment, he  was in
his late thirties and deeply macho.  The problem  with Dan was that  he  was
running around too much, trying to impress everybody, when there was no need
to. He'd brought a chain  saw with him and wanted  to  chop the whole forest
down for everybody so they could build things.
     Hammocks  or A-frames  were not for Dan. "The jungle floor is good," he
drawled.
     Within  a  week he was  in  shit  state. He  wouldn't use a  poncho; he
built'a sort of tepee with leaves and branches. He  would scream  and shout,
"Goddamn shit!" in the middle of the night as things bit him.
     He had lumps and bumps all over him, but there was no way he was  going
to submit.
     One of squadron HQ came down and said, "Look, here's a poncho."
     "Naw, don't need it."
     One of the blokes was down on his haunches making a brew one day.
     He looked up and could see into Dan's atap shelter.  Dan had been using
the poncho after all,  but he'd covered it with leaves so  he wouldn't  lose
face.
     Gotcha, Delta!
     Dan lived in  his own little world in more  ways than  one. 0 . the day
Tiny, who was well into demolitions, was preparing a  thing called an A-Type
ambush. it was an  explosive ambush,  tripped by any patrol that walked into
it. Dan had made  a DIY claymore mine out  of  his little soap dish,  and he
wanted  Tiny  to  try it out.  This A-Type ambush  consisted  of about forty
pounds of  P.E  (plastic  explosive), plus about five or  six 81  MM  mortar
rounds, claymores, and homemade claymores.
     It was a massive accumulation of explosive, to which Dan in also sisted
on adding his soap dish. The explosion took the top off the spur, flattening
an area of about twenty meters square so it looked like a landing site.
     Dan came up and said to Tiny, "So, how did the soap dish do?"
     Tiny said, "Ever watched a mouse rape an elephant?"
     We finished the  trip  and had six days off. A lot of blokes were going
to  go  to Thailand and to see the Burma railway.  The Kiwis were  going  to
sponsor the rest of us in Singapore. Dan couldn't wait to get there.
     When   we  reached  the  base  area  at  Kluang,  the  SQMS   (squadron
quartermaster sergeant) had laid on tables of beers and food. But  everybody
knew he had to clean his weapons first. Well, everybody except Dan.
     I had the GPMG at that stage. It was a section weapon, so everybody was
responsible for  cleaning  it, not just  the  person who carried  it. In  my
battalion  days a corporal had to dish out  the  weapons,  because  everyone
selfishly just  did his own. Tiny  came over and  started to help  me,  then
another bloke came over and  took another  bit,  and somebody took  another,
which  was all  rather nice.  It made me  feel a bit more part of the group.
We'd been together now for about two months, but I was still on probation. I
could still be fucked off if these blokes didn't want me.
     Meanwhile Dan Dan the Chain Saw Man  was nowhere to be seen. He was too
busy  throwing  two-pint bottles of Heineken down his  neck, and had gone on
overload. Instead of sorting his kit out, he just went straight on the  piss
because he thought it was the manly thing to do.
     It was nice to have a party after work, get the barbecue going,  have a
few  beers, but  there  were priorities.  Everybody was  looking  forward to
having a couple  of beers, then going  downtown  and  having a proper shave.
Nobody, however, wanted to get  stinking and  out of his head; you just lose
the day.
     We got a wonderful picture of Dan to be put up in the squadron interest
room when we got back to the UK.
     After an hour on the Heineken  Dan was out on the floor. We heard later
that about two weeks after he returned to the States, he shot his neighbor's
son for ljumping over his fence. Nothing about Dan would have surprised me.
     We went down to the local town  of Kluang. It  was  the  first time I'd
been to Malaya, and I wanted a barber's shave and a look around.
     Three or  four of  us wandered around, bumping into some of  the others
from  time  to time.  We went and had some fried chicken, visited a  bar and
listened to karaoke, hit another bar, had  another  bit of chicken  and more
beers. By the end  of the night we were stinking, and soon only George and I
were  left.  We were walking around the town at two o'clock  in the morning,
and we couldn't remember where the camp was.
     "We'll get a taxi," George said.
     "What taxi?" I said.
     We  knew the camp was uphill, so we set off. After a few minutes George
said, "Let's nick a car."
     "Well ' I land up getting hung for this," I said.
     A few hundred yards further on we came across a large red tricycle with
a trailer on the back.
     "Perfect."
     We both jumped on it,  George in the saddle, me in the trailer.  We got
to  the  steep  uphill  bit,  and George couldn't  pedal, so  we got off and
pushed.  When we  got to the  camp, it was such  a large  place  we couldn't
remember where we were supposed to be. The gate was closed.
     "We'll leave the bike there and get over the fence," I said.
     Within minutes we were in our beds and fast asleep.
     In the  morning  we  were lining up to get  some money and the sergeant
major was pacing up and down. "Is George about anywhere?" he said.
     "That's me," George said.
     "Did you have that bike away last night?"
     "Er, I might have."
     "Well, I  think you ought  to  go and get it, cycle it back down to the
town. That's probably someone's livelihood you've got there.
     Don't fuck these people about."
     George looked  at me, but I had developed  sloping shoulders and a wide
grin.  The  last  I saw of him was a rear  view as he wobbled off toward the
town. When he eventually reappeared an hour or so later,  he  was struggling
with the world's biggest sheaf of long green vegetables on his shoulder.
     "Men, nice souvenirs," I said.
     "You  owe me a fucking tenner,"  George  said. "I  was cycling down the
hill when the  owner spotted me going past his vegetable stall. The only way
I could calm him down was to buy this lot."
     Off we went to Singapore, and the occasion was designated a  bone shirt
night. We had to look like dickheads, but not blatant anorak wearers; we had
to do it in such a way that people thought, Hmm, strange!
     Everybody else had brought one with him; a few of us had to s end a day
running around Singapore looking p for a decent specimen.
     I went into one shop, half pissed, and said, "I've  come  in for a bone
shirt."
     "Ah, bone shirt! You know Tiny! Number one!"
     I ended up  with a rather sophisticated Hawaiian number, sun jet orange
with green palm trees and great big purple flowers.
     It had been a really good trip  for me. I was fortunate in joining  the
squadron  when  the  majority  of people were together.  Sometimes, I heard,
blokes could join a squadron and not see all the members for maybe a year or
two because of all the different jobs.
     True, I could hardly count  myself as a mate, but at  least I was aware
of them and they were  aware  of  me. I  felt that in my  own small way  I'd
arrived-whether for good or bad, I  didn't know. And  the memories of Malaya
wouldn't leave me for as long as I lived-or at least, not as long as I had a
small brown circular scar halfway down the leech's dinner.
     e  were on  probation  for  our first year. After Selection we lost our
rank but kept the same pay since  we hadn't qualified yet  as Special Forces
soldiers. I became a trooper but  was still receiving a sergeant's  infantry
pay, which was less than a trooper earned in the Special Air Service.
     To qualify  for  SF  pay,  I would  have to  get a patrol  skill-either
signals, demolitions, medical, or a language. The first one  everyone has to
have is  signals; if the shit  hits the fan, everybody's got  to be  able to
shout, "Help!
     I  would also need my entry skill.  Mobility  Troop need to know how to
drive a  whole range of vehicles;  divers need to  be able to dive; Mountain
Troop need to get themselves up and down  hills; free-fallers need  to learn
how to free-fall into a location. No patrol skill, no  extra pay, but it was
a Catch-22:  We were  going away and doing the job, but we couldn't get paid
unless  we'd  got the qualifications to do  the job, but we couldn't get the
qualifications because we were too busy doing it.
     Soon after I came back from Malaya, we were going to start training for
the counterterrorist team. One  troop from the squadron would go to Northern
Ireland;  the other three troops would  then constitute the counterterrorism
team. Seven Troop had been designated for over the water.
     There were no patrol skill courses  running in my  time slot, but there
was one for my entry skill. It wouldn't qualify me for  the  pay on its own,
but at least I would  understand what  the  other blokes  in the troop  were
talking about when they  mentioned riggers, risers, brake  lines, baselines,
or flare.
     When people think about the S.A.S, their image is either of Land Rovers
screaming around the desert, men in black  kit abseiling down embassy walls,
or free fallers with all the kit on, leaping into the night. Free fall, like
the other entry skills, is in fact just a means of getting from A to B.
     To count myself as proficient in the  skill, I would have to be able to
jump  as part of a patrol and keep together in the air  at night  on oxygen,
with full equipment loads weighing in excess of 120 pounds.
     I would have to be able  to follow a bundle  (container) holding my own
extra  equipment  or  gear  that  we were  delivering to other troops on the
ground, and  the  patrol must have maintained  its integrity.  If  the entry
phase went wrong, there would be a snowball effect and big cock-ups.
     For all that, it  was obviously addictive. There were  world-class free
fall  jumpers  in  the  Regiment,  people  who had  represented  the  UK  in
international competition.
     The free fall course was about six weeks long, and by the end  of  it I
would be  able to jump confidently. It would provide a baseline;  from there
the troop would bring me on.
     My particular course entailed two weeks in the UK,  two weeks in Pau, a
French military base  in the Pyrenees, and  then two more back in the UK. If
the weather was bad, some courses would  take place  entirely in the  United
States, with R.A.F instructors. It's no  good having  an expensive  aircraft
sitting  down  doing nothing because  the weather's  shit; it's cheaper  and
better  to  go to somewhere  with a guarantee of sunny skies, so the job can
get done.
     The way  of, life in Brize Norton was even easier than  it  had been on
the basic parachuting  course. The intake consisted of just me  and four SBS
(Special Boat Service) blokes, and we had an excellent relationship with the
instructors.  The  majority  of them  were on the Falcons display team; they
knew that a  lot  of the stuff they were teaching us was outdated,  but that
was what the manual  said. I found it strange to be learning for the sake of
learning  again; I thought  I'd left "bullshit baffles brains" behind  me at
the basic parachuting phase. It was only later that  I  found  out that free
fall   manuals  were  obsolete   almost  before  they  were  printed.  Sport
techniques,  were changing  at a  weekly  rate; the Regiment monitored  them
constantly to  see how  it  could adapt  their  equipment and  methods  to a
military context.
     We  had about two days of ground training, learning how  to put  on the
basic  free fall kit. Our  first  lump  would be  with a  PB6,  round-canopy
parachute. We would then go on to a TAP, which was much like the sports rig,
a Para Commander. Even that  was an antiquated bit  of kit;  all it could do
was turn left, turn right, and go with the wind.
     On  day three I sat  there in  the  C130 (Hercules transport  aircraft)
thinking,  Whatever happens, I  don't want to look  like a dickhead.  I  was
going to jump,  there were no problems with that, but  I just didn't want to
cock it up. I was mentally going through my drills.
     "Even professional jumpers who've been  jumping for years and  years do
the same,"  the  instructors had  told us. "As they  go up in the  aircraft,
they're  mentally  and  physically  dry drilling, simulating  pulling  their
emergency  cutaway,  then deploying their reserve." it didn't mean they were
scared; it meant they were thinking about their future.
     I closed  my  eyes and went through  the exit drill: One thousand,  two
thousand, three thousand, check canopy.
     No canopy? Cut away from the main chute; then pull the reserve.
     Once we got above six thousand feet it turned quite  cold. I started to
feel a bit light-headed as the oxygen  got thinner. If we'd wanted  to talk,
we'd  have  needed to shout;  the noise of the aircraft  was deafening, even
from inside our helmets.
     There was one instructor per student, and we jumped  together.  When my
time  came  I was called up  onto the tailgate. I stood on the edge, on  the
balls of my  feet, facing back down the aircraft. My instructor was  looking
at me and  holding me steady with one hand. Our eyes were locked together as
I  waited  for  the  signal. A  gale was  thrashing at  my jumpsuit;  twelve
thousand feet below us was Oxfordshire.
     "Ready!"
     This was  it.  On the next  two  commands he would pull  me  toward him
slightly in a rocking motion and then away-and down.
     "Set!"
     I rocked forward.
     "Go!
     I launched myself back.
     I  kept my eyes fixed on the tailgate and watched the instructor exit a
split second behind me. A,gap of orfe second between  jumpers  equated to in
excess of sixty  feet,  so  he  was  jumping virtually on  top  of  me.  The
slipstream created a natural gap.
     For the first couple of  jumps we had to be  stable on  heading" -as we
jumped, we didn't turn left or right, or tumble.
     I came out; I didn't tumble.
     I kept looking  ahead. We were supposed to pick a point  on the  ground
and make sure that we  were not moving left or right of  it or going forward
or back-just stable  on heading, falling straight  until the altimeter  read
thirty-five  hundred  feet and it was time  to pull  the  cord. I was moving
slowly around to the left, and I didn't correct it.
     The altimeter reached thirty-five hundred feet, and I pulled.
     There was a rumbling sensation as the chute unfurled, then flapping and
a fearsome jerk.
     I felt as if I had come to a complete stop.
     I looked  up,  checking the canopy. Everything was where it should have
been. I reached for the  steering toggles and looked down and around to make
sure there were no other canopies near me.
     I  watched  the  main  dual carriageway going  into  Oxford,  then  the
vehicles, huts, and  people at the  DZ (drop zone). There was total silence.
It felt as if I  was suspended in the sky, but  before I knew it, the ground
was rushing up  to  meet me. I  hit,  rolled, and controlled the canopy. And
that was it, straight into a  vehicle  for  the half hour drive  back to the
airfield and the waiting C130.
     The first  couple  of jumps  were rather cumbersome, as we just thought
about how  to move  and  control  ourselves in the  sky. We  were  in "clean
fatigue"-just the parachute, no equipment, no weapons, no oxygen kit.
     Once we could  fall stable  on  heading we had to  turn left  and right
through  360  degrees, then  do  a  somersault. To get  used to  handling an
unstable  exit, we next had to  force ourselves to fall out unstable. It was
quite strange.
     Only a week before we hadn't had to practice at all; it just happened.
     If we got unstable,  we "banged ourselves out"stretching our  limbs out
into a  big star. Like the concave surface of  a saucer  falling toward  the
earth, you instantly level out. It was no big problem at all-until we jumped
with our kit on.
     We learned how to prepare and pack our equipment and to rig it onto our
parachutes.  We  would only  find out  a  bit  later,  when  we got  to  the
squadrons,  that  what they  were teaching  us  on the  course  wasn't  that
realistic; they were teaching us to release our equipment once we were under
the canopy  and let  it dangle  on  a  nine-foot  rope. If we  had sensitive
equipment  in the bergen,  this  method  would damage it.  So  what we would
eventually  learn to do was release it and then gradually bring  it down our
legs so that the shoulder straps were on our toes and we  were  holding  it.
just as we landed, we'd gently let it tap onto the ground and we'd flare the
canOPY.
     We then  started learning about the oxygen equipment  that  we would be
jumping with.  When we went onto an aircraft,  we  had our oxygen bottle on,
but we didn't use it. There  was only a certain amount of gas in the bottle,
so  we went onto  the  main  console instead,  linking us  to the aircraft's
supply. When we jumped, we switched onto our own.
     There were drills that we had  to  learn, and  it was all done with big
flash cards held up by the oxygen NCO. It was serious stuff, learning how to
rig on to one console, then come off that and go on to your own.
     The  next  jumps  were called  simulated  oxygen.  We'd  go  up  in the
aircraft, go through all the drills, and jump with our equipment but without
weapons. We  weren't doing  any jumps higher  than twelve grand, the maximum
height we could go to without oxygen.
     Our   first   lot   of   night    jumps   started,   and   they    were
wonderful-absolutely splendid.  I was standing on the tailgate and could see
nothing but the lights of Oxford twinkling away below me.
     Soon we were doing night jumps with oxygen and kit.
     Whenever we "jumped kit" and whenever we jumped at night, we would have
an  automatic  opening  device  attached  to  the parachute. This  worked by
barometric  pressure;  every day a  reading had to be  taken so we knew  the
pressure at thirty-five hundred feet. I'd make the necessary adjustment so I
knew that at thirty-five hundred feet the AOD (automatic opening device) was
going to kick in; if I got into a spin or had a midair collision and knocked
myself out, nothing was going to open; this device was there at least to get
the rig up.
     Within the squadrons there were horrendous stories of people going into
spins,  especially with heavy  kits.  If the kit wasn't  packed  or balanced
right, then as they jumped and the wind hit them, it did its own thing.
     You'd have to adjust your position to fly correctly with it. If you had
to fly to somebody and dock with all your equipment on and one of the straps
wasn't done up tight, or  one of  the pouches on the side was  catching air,
that might lift up your  left-hand side and  you'd have  to  compensate with
your right; you could end up flying in some really weird positions. But most
dangerously, it could put you into a spin, and once that starts it just gets
faster and faster.
     One fellow in D Squadron got into a spin, and the only way he could get
out of it was to try to track  to get away. He did, but all  the capillaries
in his eyes exploded.
     He looked like Christopher Lee for months afterward.
     We reached the  point where  we were simulating oxygen jumps, doing all
the  drills but  not going high;  we were doing it at night, with equipment,
and as individuals. That was us ready to go to France.
     The French DZ had a quick turnaround  because the  site we jumped  onto
was also where the aircraft landed.
     In the UK we had  to jump on  a DZ and from there get transport back to
Brize  Norton; the turnaround was inefficiently long. In Pau we could  jump,
the aircraft could land, get us back on, and throw us back out again.
     We were  starting now  to  do  day jumps  in teams of four,  practicing
keeping together, then night jumps with  equipment. We started  to learn how
to put weapons  on the equipment,  first so  that  they were good and secure
while  we were in free fall and second, so we  could get them off as soon as
we landed.
     The rule within the R.A.F was that we did only three jumps a day.
     There was a big fear of hypoxia if we were going up to  twelve thousand
feet  continuously;  the symptoms  were rapid tiredness, which could lead to
mistakes. Hypoxia didn't affect people in the sports world because they took
little oxygen bottles up with them, but it was the R.A.F's ball, and  we had
to play by their rules.
     We went  afterward to R.A.F Luffingham, the  R.A.F medical center,  for
chest X rays  and lectures  about the sins and symptoms  of h poxia and what
would happen if our teeth were not  in good condition. A small air pocket in
a filling would expand with altitude, until finally the tooth exploded.
     I saw it happ,-n twice to other people, and it was nasty. Stomach gases
also expanded  as  we  climbed in an  unpressurized aircraft, so  we  farted
continuously. I'd have taken the exploding tooth any day.
     We  then  spent time in  a decompression  chamber,  doing  exactly  the
opposite of what divers do, gradually  being starved of oxygen. We sat there
chatting away and were  asked to do our ten tim&s table and draw pictures of
pigs and elephants. My  elephants were  outrageous,  with disproportionately
big eyes. Then, as the chamber drained of oxygen, my ten times table went to
ratshit; I felt myself getting slow and lethargic. The moment I  was allowed
to put my mask back on and take a breath, it all came good again. Apart from
the elephant; the  monster with big eyes was the best I  could do under  any
conditions.
     We would have to go to R.A.F Luffingham once a year for the rest of our
careers in  order  to keep our free fall qualification. Every year  we would
have to go  through the same lecture,  have another set of chest X rays, and
have  our ears checked; if we couldn't clear the  pressure in our ears, we'd
be heading for major dramas.
     The culmination of the course  was everybody leaping out at night, with
full equipment,  from  over twenty-five grand. We jumped together and landed
together, and  that  was us qualified as free fallers-until we  got  to  the
squadrons and had to retrain completely with square rigs.
     It was madness not to be training with the  equipment  we were going to
use. Crazier still that in a few days with my troop I was to learn more than
I had in six weeks with the R.A.F; you  learn what life's all about when you
have oxygen  equipment,  radios, and a  GPMG strapped to your bergen, packed
out  to the brim with an excess of one hundred pounds of kit. You might also
be  bringing in ammunition  for the  squadron; there  might be mortar  bombs
strapped on to  you,  a mortar baseplate,  all sorts  wrapped  all over you.
Basically, you can't move for the amount  of equipment that you have on, and
you can't  do much in the air. You fall,  try  to keep yourself stable,  and
work like a man possessed to keep in a group.
     Members  of  Air Troop  were  starting to practice BABO (high altitude,
high opening) instead of HALO (high altitude, low opening).
     Free falling at night was  dangerous and  required an  aircraft  to fly
near the target.
     When parachutes are  deployed close to the ground,  the loud,  telltale
crack of an opening canopy  can alert the very  people you're trying to jump
on. Using this new  technique, they  could land  accurately from an aircraft
flying at high altitude anything up  to fifty miles from the target. jumping
from a  commercial  airliner at forty thousand feet and  immediately opening
their rigs,  they could use a square canopy fitted with an electronic device
to guide them to within fifty meters  of a beacon placed on  target, even in
bad weather or  at  night. The first  man,  however,  still had to  map-read
himself in with a compass and sat nay.
     The  blokes  had  to  wear  special oxygen equipment and astronaut-type
heated  suits  to  survive  temperatures  of  minus  40'C-especially  as   a
fifty-mile cross-ground descent could take over an hour.
     BABO was  soon replacing more  traditional free fall  infits. By  being
dropped many miles away  from recognized civil air routes as a deception,  a
free fall troop could fly under the canopy to a target undetected by  radar.
A  counterterrorist team could land close to  a hijacked airliner and put in
an assault with total surprise.
     Instead  of  free  falling toward the ground with  the possiblity of no
real idea of where they were  heading or where the other  blokes  were  once
they were on the ground, they could be guided  gently onto the target on the
end of a comfortable parachute. Madness not to, quite frankly.
     Toward the end of the course I got a letter from Debbie. She had by now
already  moved  into a quarter in Hereford on her own. "I'm by  myself," she
wrote,  "and spending most of my time alone." Like a dickhead, I took  it at
face value. I was too busy having fun without her.
     was told I was going over the water with my troop but first I had to do
a "buildup"-the training beforehand.
     A  buildup could last  anything  from a couple of days to  six  months,
depending on the task. For North-, em Ireland,  the main component  was  the
CQB (close quarter battle) training.
     The DS said, "The aim is to familiarize you with all the small  weapons
that the Regiment uses over the water, especially covert operations with the
pistol. On the continuation phase of Selection you learned all the basics of
the pistol, how to fire it, how  to carry it, how to draw it, but now you're
going to put in so many manhours that the weapon becomes part of your body."
     In conjunction with the pistol, we  learned unarmed combat  or, as some
called it, jap-slapping.  I was half expecting to come out the other side as
a black belt in karate, but karate is a  sport  in  which one man is  pitted
against another,  both  using the  same techniques and  adhering  to certain
rules. The basis of CQB was  learning how  to drop  the boys as quickly  and
efficiently as possible so that  we  could get away. The Regiment was not in
the  province as a belligerent  force;  the  object  was to  conduct  covert
operations.  If  there was  ever a problem, we  were  going to do one of two
things to the enemy: either drop him and run away, or kill him. It would all
depend on the circumstances.
     The instructor said,  "You  need to know how to control a threat within
closed environments-down alleyways,  in  pubs,  while  you're in your  cars,
while you're getting out of your cars."
     More important,  we needed  to  know how to recognize  a  threat in the
first  place. It was all well and good having weapons and the skills to drop
people, but unless we knew when and where to use them, we were in trouble.
     We couldn't  automatically use our weapons to  protect ourselves;  that
might compromise  an operation that had been running for two or three months
and therefore put other people needlessly at risk. If we  could get out of a
tight corner by  using just our  hands, head,  knees, and  feet, so much the
better,  but  if we couldn't  do that, we had to start using our pistols The
instructor carried on. "'There's a big difference between firing at a static
target  on a range and being in a situation where people are  trying to push
and shove or get in the way, and the targets can fire back."
     Mick had been in charge of jap-slapping in the Regiment for years.
     He was about five  feet  six inches and  wiry, slightly cross-eyed, and
with only about two inches between his chin and his nose.  He reminded me of
Punch, but I wouldn't have mentioned it to him; we'd been  told he came from
the world's most aggressive family of Taffs.
     Apparently his  old man  still  walked  into  pubs and tried  to  start
fights, and he was in his eighties.
     As a schoolboy Mick had been picked for  the  Welsh gymnastics team but
couldn't take  part because his  old  man wouldn't give  him the  fare to go
training. He then got seriously into the jap-slapping and fought for the UK.
Mick had become a millionaire in his  youth with a shop-fitting business but
got  ripped off by  his partner  and ended up in  a  council flat  on social
security.
     We'd  driven  to the training area in the  civilian  cars that we  were
going to be trained in.  We were sitting in a big, long concrete  shelter in
our jeans and T-shirts and long hair, pistols in our belts.
     It was  a dusty, musty building with gym mats on the  floor, punch bags
hanging  from  the  girders and targets on  the walls-all the equipment we'd
need to go around beating one another up.
     "What I'm going to teach you is from twenty-seven years of experience,"
Mick said. "However,  the  first  twenty-five years of it, the martial arts,
has been a  waste  of time. If you're my height and  ten stone, and he's six
foot six and sixteen stone, knowing a few chops and flying kicks isn't going
to do you much good.
     "If  a  sixteen-stone monster hits you in the face, you're going to  go
down, no  two ways  about it. When you  have a  slight knock from a cupboard
drawer, it  hurtsso if you get a  fist with sixteen  stone behind  it coming
down at  you, you're going to go down like a bag  of shit, no matter who you
are."
     What  was called for was a combination of  street fighting  and certain
skills from the jap-slapping catalog, together with the  controlled  use  of
weapons. If we got involved  in a scuffle outside  a Belfast  pub, the other
person wasn't going to bow politely  from the waist and stick to  the rules.
It would  be arms  and legs  everywhere, head butts, biting, and gouging. In
other words,  we had to learn to fight dirty. If we got cornered in Northern
Ireland and did a Bruce Lee, they were  going to  say, "He knew what  he was
doing. It looked  too clear and precise; there's something wrong." But if it
just looked  like a  good old scrap  with ears torn  and noses  bitten  off,
they'd  think  it  was a run-of-the-mill street fight and nothing to do with
the security forces.
     "And when  it's done," Mick said, "the idea is not  to stand over them,
cross your arms, and wait for the applause. The idea is  to fuck off as fast
as you can."
     What  we needed was, as always, speed, aggression, and surprise.  "Once
you've committed yourself  to go for it, you must crack into  it  as hard as
you can,  apply maximum aggression, and  get  it  done.  If you  dillydally,
you'll go down,  and once you're  down, and somebody's  on top of  you, it's
very difficult to turn  things around. If the sixteen-stone monster gets you
on the  floor and is lying on top of you, it's going to be very difficult to
get up again."
     He pointed at Tiny and said, "If he's on top of me, all I'm going to do
is bite his nose off, and run like fuck."
     We learned how to use our weapons while being pushed against a  wall or
into a  corner,  or  in a  lift,  or closed in on by  a group of people.  We
learned how to use the weapon just as it came  out of the holster; you don't
need to be in  a full on-the-range  shooting  position, just close enough to
know you're going to hit what you're firing at.
     It has  to be well practiced,  however,  if  you don't want to land  up
shooting yourself.  By the  end of the  session we were  wet with sweat  and
covered with  dirt and  dust.  For the  others it  was revision,  but  I was
learning all this for the first time and really enjoying it.
     We  learned how to  get out of situations  where  people  were aiming a
pistol  at  us  at close quarters.  In the films I was used to seeing people
with a pistol about a foot away from somebody,  and they're saying,  "If you
move,  I'm going to shoot you." In fact  it's very simple: You just  slap it
out of the way and  drop  them.  It's only got to move six inches and you're
out of the line of aim. Even if they fire, it's going  to miss. "Bang it out
of the way," Mick said, "then use speed  and aggression to get him down, get
hold of the pistol, and decide whether you're going to shoot him  with it or
run."
     This  phase  included a lot  of  'ap-slapping live on the  range, where
people would come up  behind  us, say,  "Get  your hands up!" and  we had to
fight our way out of it to a position where we were using them as cover  and
we were doing the firing.
     After a few days everybody was covered in bruises, lumps, and bumps. We
moved on to the next stage, which was learning how to fight and shoot at the
same time. We might  be in a very closed environment but want  to shoot some
of the people around us.
     We might be in a shopping area, so we'd have to push people out  of the
way, maneuvering our way around them. We had to be looking for  our targets,
holding people down, yet still be firing.
     It might be that we were getting  pushed  around by a group  of blokes.
They're  not exactly sure who we are at  the moment, but we've decided we're
not going to fight and go. This would be a  terrorist situation, not just  a
couple of pissheads coming out of  the pub looking for trouble. We'd have to
decide when to draw our pistols and take these people down.
     . ' . 'People who flap get killed,"  Mick said. "Make  a decision about
what you're going to do, every time. If you don't, you're going to die."
     He told  us  about  a member  of  the  Regiment  who  was  operating in
Londonderry.  He had  a job on  where he  had to go into a  place called the
Shantello, a large  housing estate. He was on his own, wearing his pistol in
the front of his trousers. As he  was walking along,  three players came out
and  began to  follow  him-not because  they knew what  he  was,  but simply
because  he  was  somebody  strange they had  seen getting out of a car  and
walking down one of the alleyways.
     As he neared the end of  the alleyway, they came up behind him and gave
him a push. The moment he felt it, he started to  roll: "If  you get pushed,
you don't fall own on your knees;  as soon as  you  feel that push, you know
there's something wrong, so you're going to try to roll out of that  and get
into a position where you can fire."
     As the  bloke rolled on  his shoulder, he could see the problem behind:
two boys  with pistols. Still in the roll, he pulled his weapon out and shot
two of them; the third one ran. The whole thing had taken no more than three
seconds. The combination of jap-slapping-going with the shove-and the pistol
drills, saved his life. He had a successful night.
     "You've got to remember what these people are going to do to you," Mick
said. "If you look at the victims of the Shankill Butchers, you'll know that
these  people don't mess about. They  start playing with  you  with electric
drills and lumps of steel and rock."
     We were told that a lot of people in Northern Ireland had guns and were
all macho  with  them,  but it was the  intention to use them  that counted.
Sometimes  blokes had  walked straight  up to people with guns  and disarmed
them because they didn't know when to fire.
     We knew that every  time we drew a pistol we must have the intention to
use it; we were never to make a threat that we weren't going to carry out.
     Mick said, "It isn't enough to know how; you have . to know when.
     The  intention  to  use  the  skills  is  as  important as  the  skills
themselves. Otherwise, in  a place like Northern Ireland,  you'd be  drawing
your pistol  every five minutes, and that's just going to get you killed and
compromise your operation.
     "Sometimes people will come up and say, 'Who the fuck are you?"
     Or people will stare at you the whole length of a street. You've got to
have that Colgate air of confidence; it's your most important weapon."
     Walking through any of the housing estates over the water, we'd get the
boys coming  up.  They might be  coming out of their houses or just  mincing
around having a fag by the  car. They'd look at us with  their eyes, saying,
"Who the fuck are you?" If we looked at the floor and thought, Oh, dear, I'd
better get out of  here, that  would alert  them- they wouldn't  know who we
were, or what we were, but they'd sense there was something wrong.
     "You don't draw your pistol," Mick said, rounding off the lesson.
     "You use your secret weapon: a good, loud  Irish 'Fuck  off!"-and  nine
times out of ten they'll take you as one of their own."
     Nosh said, "It's okay for you, you already have a bone accent."
     The training went on for weeks. We did  everything from CTR  skills  to
fast  driving drills, shooting out of  cars and shooting  into  cars,  and I
loved every minute of it.
     I  was  picked  up at Belfast airport and driven to  our location.  The
smells and sounds inside the building took me  straight back to Crossmaglen:
fried eggs and talcum powder,  music and shouting. Four or five dogs mooched
around the place, looking as if they got fed to no end.
     "Finished your  leave, have you?"  said  a  familiar voice  behind  me,
followed  by  a  resounding fart.  "About  fucking time. They said they were
sending some wanker from the Green jackets."
     "Hello, Nosh." I grinned.
     He'd just come  out  of  his  room and  was  wearing a  pair  of jeans,
flip-flops, and an old clinging T-shirt. His hair was sticking up, and there
was a cigarette in the corner of his mouth. At least he had his teeth in.
     Brew?"
     I  followed  him  over  to  the  brew  area  just  outside  the  living
accommodation. The  Burco boiler looked  as if it was kept going twenty-four
hours a day; next  to it was a big box of  NAAFI biscuits and jars of coffee
and sugar.
     "How's the ice-cream boys then?" I said.
     I'd  eventually  solved the mystery of  that nickname, discovering that
the Air Troop had always had the piss taken out of them. Wherever  there was
a  camera, said everybody  else  in the squadrons,  the Air  Troop  would be
posing in front  of it-usually with shades and a  deep  tan. It stemmed from
the way  we  had  to operate.  When there  was troop  training  or  squadron
exercises, Mountain Troop  would go and live on a mountain, Boat Troop might
go down to the dark and murky waters of Poole Harbor and paddle about in the
freezing  cold, but we'd  have to go where  the  clear skies were, and  that
happened  to be where the sun and Cornettos  were  too, so a few jumps, then
rig  and  jumpsuit off,  get  an ice  cream and walk  around in  shorts  and
flip-flops, looking good.  No  one said it  'Would  be  easy. There  was one
exception,  and  that was G  Squadron  Air  Troop,  which  was known as  the
Lonsdale  Troop  because they were  forever  fighting one another. They even
fought a pitched battle on a  petrol station forecourt one day because  they
couldn't agree about who should get out of the minibus  and  do the  filling
up.
     "Seen anybody yet?"  Nosh said. "The ops room is up the top there. just
leave your  kit here. Fuck knows where you're sleeping. I think you're going
in Steve's room. But if you  go upstairs and see  who's up there, they'll be
able to sort  you out. Tiny  got  his bike nicked in London, so he's  really
fucking pleased about thatmake sure you ask him about it because he gets all
bitter and twisted. What's even worse, I'm living with him now, and he hates
it. Got to go now, Blockbusters is
     on."
     Nosh, I discovered that evening,  after finding myself a  bed space  in
Steve's room, was still a nose-picking exmember of the civilized human race,
living in a disgusting  world of gunge.  If he didn't like  something on the
television, he picked his nose  and  flicked  the  bogey at the screen.  The
glass was covered with things.
     "He's decided he wants to learn the guitar," said Frank. "He spends all
his free  time  knocking  out 'Dueling Banjos." Not  that you'll be  able to
tell. It sounds like 'Colonel Bogey' to me."
     "Talking of which," Steve said to me, "don't look inside the guitar."
     "Why not?"
     "Just don't."
     I did. To judge by the volume of the crop, it was a miracle Nosh's head
hadn't caved in.
     Besides fatting, picking his nose, and strumming, his other  passion in
life was eggy-weggies  and  Marmite  soldiers. Every  night he'd go  to  the
cookhouse  to get his boiled eggs and Marmite toast; then he'd come back, do
the crossword, watch the telly, have a fag and a fart, and go to sleep.
     Johnny Two-Combs was also with us, from Boat Troop. There  still wasn't
a hair out of place. The last time I'd seen him was in a bar in Hereford. He
was  wearing  a black polo-neck jumper, a yellow shirt  over that, and black
trousers.  He  went up  to a  girl  and  said,  eyes  half  closed and  half
flickering, doing his best Robert De Niro, "I just want to tell you that you
have the most beautiful eyes."
     It was the most ridiulous chat-up line I'd ever heard.
     Half an hour later he was escorting her into a cab.
     Colin had been in charge of the troop when I went to Malaya.
     Getting words out of him was still like drawing teeth; it would just be
a sniff and "That was good," or a sniff and "That was shit."
     Eno had been on my first Selection  and passed,  getting in  six months
before  me.  He was  from the  Queen's Regiment,  a rarity in the  Regiment.
Predictably,  everybody  spoke  to  him  in   a  camp  voice  but  for  some
inexplicable  reason also shouted, "Three  queens,  three  queens," whenever
they saw him.  A thin  little  midget,  Eno was a  tremendous racing  snake,
heavily into triathlons. He smoked twenty  a day but was  so fit that at one
championship he stood at the start line with a fag in his mouth.
     "Got to spark myself up, ain't I?"  he  said. Eno was  very  much  like
Colin, never flapped, never got excited, and you had to beat him up to  have
a conversation.
     Jock was  there, too, whom I'd met  on Selection. There seemed to be no
compromise  with him.  He  had  a  policy  of  working  really  hard,  being
incredibly serious at work; then when it was fun time, it was outrageous fun
time.
     We were at a squadron party once; he went up to the colonel's wife, and
he said, "Do you fancy a dance?"
     She said,  "Yes,  that would  be  lovely," so  Jock walked her onto the
middle of the dance floor, pulled out a Michael Jackson mask, and taught her
to moon-walk.
     Frank Collins was still Mr.  Calm  and Casual.  He never shouted, never
got  annoyed. Steve told me he had been one of the youngest soldiers in  the
Regiment when  he did the embassy in 1980. From the first night of the siege
he and the rest  of the assault team were ready on the roof, dressed in full
black kit and expecting  the order to go in at any moment. It must have been
tense stuffbut not for Frank.
     Apparently he was so  relaxed he took a pillow  with him to snooze away
an hour or  two.  I  knew  he was into  climbing, canoeing,  free  fall, and
religion, and I found out he was being  called Joseph at this stage  because
he was into carpentry as well.
     "You'll never see Frank when there's nothing going on," Nosh said.
     "He'll be doing the family business."
     He was going down to one  of  the local  timber yards and making tables
and cupboards and things that  he was going to be  taking back to the UK for
his house. In fact they were quite good-big kitchen tables and things.
     I was  lying on my bed one  day,  scratching my arse  and drinking tea,
when Frank came in said, "You bored, or what?"
     "Yeah, I'm doing nothing, just hanging around."
     I "Do you want something to read?"
     "Yeah, what you got?"
     "I've got something with sex, violence, intrigue, you name it, it's got
it."
     "Okay, yeah, I'll have a read of it."
     So Frank went to his room, fetched the book, and tossed it onto my bed.
It was the Bible.
     I'd turned up with big  wide eyes. One  of the first things I had to do
was familiarize myself with the various weapons. Over the water at that time
they were  using the  Heckler  & Koch family and the LMG-the  old Bren  gun,
converted to 7.62-as well as GPMGS.
     Pistols were 9MM Brownings and the Walther PPK,  known as the disco gun
because it was nice and small and therefore easy to conceal.
     If I didn't want to  carry my Browning when I was out and about but not
working, I could slip the disco gun into my belt.
     Most people would have an M16 or 203, an HK53
     5.56  men or MPS, so  that whatever job we were doing we could take the
relevant  weapon-whatever gave  the right  balance  between  concealment and
firepower.
     I was  talking  to  Tiny in the armory. Every day the weapons had to be
checked, and Tiny, the armorer for that day, was showing me the ropes.
     ' "What's the score on this  shoot-to-kill  policy  I  keep  on hearing
about?" I said, half expecting him to say, "Hose the lot down."
     "Is there fuck such a thing?" he said. "If there was, we wouldn't still
be here. We'd be back  home and they'd be  dead. We know where they all are.
If someone was giving the green light, we'd just go in and take-them out."
     "Very clear-cut," I said.
     "And totally counterproductive. It's little things like that that bring
down governments. Of course at the same time there can't be a shoot-to-wound
policy  either."  Tiny  went  on.  "It  would  take  a  laser gun  that  was
self-guiding to  the shoulder to  do that shit. People's perceptions of what
goes on are so wrong. I remember after the embassy,  when we were making our
statements, there were all these questions coming up, commentators on the TV
saying,  'Why didn't they  just  shoot him in the leg?" How the fuck can you
shoot to wound somebody?
     It's impossible.  You can't  say, if somebody's a  hundred meters away,
'Right, I'm going  to shoot him in the legs." You  just see a mass of  body,
and if he's shooting at you,  you're going to shoot back at him. It, s not a
shoot-tokill policy; it's just reacting to the threat. The  problem is,  the
people who make  these sort  of comments  have  never had  a  gun pointed at
them."
     I knew that if I was staring down a barrel, I wasn't going to be firing
at their legs. If thiqy ended up just wounded, they'd be lucky.
     That  wasn't a shoot-to-kill policy; that  was reacting  to a perceived
threat  and saving your  own life and the lives of those around you that you
had a responsibility for.
     My  roommate   Steve,  also  an  embassy  and  Falklands  veteran,  was
originally from the airborne Ordnance Corps, heavy drop, which were based in
Aldershot.
     Married with a  couple of kids, he was a local lad from Gloucester; the
first  words  I'd  hear every morning  were,  "All  roight, boy?" Steve  was
slightly shorter than I  was but much stockier, and  he played rugby for the
army; as  a result, all  his  front  teeth  were  false.  He was  one of the
original bone shirt people,  one of the four drug smugglers  who'd come back
with us  on the  British  Caledonian flight  from  Hong Kong. He  shared the
passion of most of the troop for watching Blockbusters, but had one annoying
habit that  was  all his own. Every time  he saw an aircraft  he'd say, "See
that  aircraft?  The distance we're oing  to walk today, he's  just traveled
with one sip of his gin and tonic."
     Clive was  a singley  who'd been a Royal  Engineer  and was another old
embassy  and Falklands hand.  He kept himself  to himself but  was very much
into cycling and running; he had all the cycling stuff and bone T-shirts.
     Clive's nightly  ritual  was a  pint of beer  and  a  cigar. He  was an
excellent  long-distance  runner despite his height; he looked too  tall and
gangly to move fast. It was very annoying; he looked like this uncoordinated
mess on  the run,  but - he really motored. One New Year's Day  Bulmer's had
organized a  ten-kilometer  race. Clive  and I turned  up with  a couple  of
runners from A  Squadron, and I thought it would be really good to beat him,
just for once. I'd been doing a lot of training and was feeling  really fit;
off  we went,  and for the  whole race  there was  no sign of  Clive. I  was
chuffed  to  bits that he was behind me and  was looking forward to stagging
him when he got in.
     Then, as I was running down the hill toward the finish line,  I spotted
him. He was on his bike all wrapped up in his Belly Hansen,  having finished
the race and already on his way home.
     Ken was  the  staff sergeant,  the troop  head boy,  and had  been away
during Malaya. A  southerner  from the Intelligence Corps,  he was  a fellow
jap-slapper  of Mick's. The  two of them had known each  other  for donkey's
years, even when Mick  was a civvy;  when Mick was shivering  in his council
flat in Wales after everything  had gone bust, half a ton of coal had turned
up.  Mick had  run  outside  shouting, "No, no,  no, don't deliver. I  can't
afford this!" but the driver  had shown him the chit, paid for by a "Ken" in
Hereford.  It was something  that  Mick had  never forgotten, and  he  still
talked about Ken as the one who had saved him.
     Ken  was an  excellent troop  head  shed,  always very honest about his
capabilities; rather than bluff he wouldn't be  afraid to say, "I don't know
about this.
     Anybody got  any ideas?" He  was  tall and  toothless, having lost  his
front  teeth while jap-slapping for Britain; you'd  know when Ken was pissed
because his  jaw would sag and his falsies would clatter out onto the table.
He talked very rapidly and aggressively; somebody would ask, "Hey, Ken, give
us  that newspaper a minute,"  and  he'd say, "Fight you for it." Joking but
meaning it.  Sade  was doing well in the charts and he  drooled over her. We
used to slag her down  all  the time and call  her Sadie, then wonder why we
were walking around with black eyes.
     Ken had brought  his  dog  over with him,  a big Doberman. When he went
away on operations, he'd say, "Don't overfeed this dog. It gets one scoff  a
day and that's it." Tiny -used  to get trays  of sausages  and feed this dog
stupid until it  couldn't  move; it would be splayed out all over the place.
It would get so exhausted with the amount of food it had eaten that we'd get
it into  Ken's bed and tuck it  in. Ken would come back to find the dog fast
asleep in his bed, farting and severely overweight.
     Fraser was the troop sergeant and very experienced, which was good when
it came to working with other organizations-communicating  with helicopters,
for example, if  they were going to  come  in. It was  his job to  have  the
overall picture.  He had been part of the training wing when I  did my first
Selection; then he went back to the squadron and I caught sight of him again
in Malaya.
     Everybody was after stitching  Fraser up.  Like Steve, he had  been  in
heavy drop before transferring to Para Reg, and the easiest way to spark him
up was to say, "Fraser, when you were in the Ordnance Corps .
     It started with putting a kipper in the little portable radiator in his
room  so  it was  stinking for  weeks, and  got worse from there.  He  was a
big-time boxer with  a broken nose and  cauliflower ears, spending  hours in
the gym punching the bag. He used to love  watching bouts on the TV. A fight
that he particularly  wanted to watch was coming up one evening, so to  stop
himself getting stitched up, he locked himself in his room with a sixpack of
beer  and  a  pile of  sandwiches.  Poor  bloke, he  spent  the whole  fight
wondering why the channels  kept hopping. He got  more and  more  irate.  He
didn't cotton on to the fact  that all the television  sets in  the building
were exactly  the same, and each one  had an  identical remote control. We'd
spent  the  evening outside  his  window, flicking  the  channel button  and
tittering like schoolgirls.
     Purple in the face, he was so angry, Fraser deciaea to salvage a bit of
the  evening by going  out for a pint. He  went  to  have  a  shave, only to
discover that as he was  lathering his face with  his shaving stick, a prawn
gradually materialized. Somebody had cut the stick in half, grooved out  the
center,  inserted an  old prawn, and then  soaped  it  all  up again. Fraser
stormed around the compound throwing a  major eppie scoppie, while even  the
innocent hid behind locked doors, giggling.
     "Solid Shot"  was  there from  the Signals. He came  from somewhere  up
north and annoyed the hell out  of all of us, being a big old boy and one of
life's natural good lookers. He had all his own teeth, and  they were white;
he did the weights and a bit of running,  and his only physical imperfection
was that he sometimes found it hard to walk because there were so many women
hanging around his feet. He had also  got in on the  Selection before me. He
was very  experienced,  having done the Falklands and  been  over  the water
before;  he was also  very funny and confident. His nickname had  come about
because his favorite weapon was a  Remington pump-action shotgun. There were
different kinds of ammunition that we used  for shotguns,  including a round
called solid shot-basically a big lump of lead. He was always running around
with his favorite Remington pump action, so he came to be called Solid Shot.
     But really it had a  secret meaning; it also meant that he was thick as
shit. And he must have been because he never switched on to it.
     Eddie's  motto was:  All  work and  no play keeps  you alive  to  fight
another  day. He was ex-Para Reg, ex-embassy, ex-Falklands. He shared a room
with  Al  Slater, who  was still  as I remembered him from the  jungle: very
straightforward and very  serious  about  everything.  His nickname was  Mr.
Grumpy, and somebody managed to find the appropriate Mister Men  sticker  to
put on his door.
     Jock  and Johnny Two-Combs shared a  room. Somebody  had  had  a notice
printed and put up  on their door that said: "Johnny and jock's Hairdressing
SaloonMince and a rinse, L2.50-Johnny's famous blue  rinse,  kl.50," and  so
on, complete  with two  bone hair models  from the sixties with styles  like
Engelbert Humperdinck.
     Boredom's a terrible thing.
     That was the troop, apart from the Boss. His job was not so much on the
ground but liaison between us and all  the other organizations that we dealt
with. He left quite early  during the tour; we didn't know if  it was  a new
job, promotion, or the number of times he found prawns in his shaving kit.
     A job  came up. We took mugs of tea with us to the briefing room,  Nosh
still honking  because Solid Shot  had solved the conundrum on Blockbusters.
We sat on a mixture of plastic chairs and  armchairs; on the walls were maps
of the province, close-up maps of different areas, blackboards, Magic Marker
boards.
     Nosh and Eno filled  the place with smoke. Ken walked in with the Boss,
carrying armfuls of paper.
     "It looks  like there's a  job  on," Ken said. "It's going to be a hit,
just outside of Portadown, on a U.D.R major.
     As far as  he's concerned,  the players are on to him and are going  to
take him down. From what  he says he's seen, its going to be on the  way  to
work.  TCG  [Tasking and Coordination Group] obviously want to confirm this;
he's being debriefed  at the moment to confirm  what  he' seen and to  make
sure he isn't just flapping.
     "If the job goes down, what we're looking  at is  having someone in the
car with him. Al, do you fancy it? Have a think about it; it's up to you."
     We all looked at Mr. Grumpy. Without batting an eyelid, he said, "Yeah,
that's all right, I'll do that."
     "We're going to be covering him from midnight tomorrow. What I want you
to  do is get down  there tomorrow morning, have a look around, get yourself
familiarized, and be back  here  for two o'clock. Liaise with Fraser;  he'll
sort it out, stagger you down there.
     Hopefully by two o'clock we'll have some more information and  a set of
orders before we shoot off."
     Back in our room, Steve said, in a serious  voice, "As soon as the boys
start  hosing thlose  two down, Al and  his mate are going to be severely in
the shit. We'll have to be right up Grumpy's arse on this one."
     Ken, Fraser, and the Boss would be going through the options.
     There were  many  considerations  when  providing protection. To  start
with, what sort of threat was it?
     Did it mean that somebody was going  to  blow the boy up? Did it mean a
close-quarter shoot? Were they likely to threaten his family?
     Then  how much cover  did  the  man  want? Did he want to  cut  himself
totally away from  everyday life, or did  he want to carry on  as if nothing
had happened' A lot of people choose just to  carry on; they might have kids
and want them to have a normal existence.
     Fraser got us together the next morning, and we left ',n pairs, driving
around the area. We drove past  the U.D.R man's house, then  took the  route
that he  normally took to work, which was downhill from the house, down what
was  known as the old Dungannon road. There wasn't  that much to look at; we
just oriented ourselves to the area,  turning down all the roads. Fraser had
it staggered so there  weren't loads of  cars screaming around the place  at
the same time.
     At two o'clock we arrived for another briefing. Ken and  the  Boss came
in, straight from TCG in Armagh.
     en sai , "Right, it's on. The boy's  no  hyper dickhead; he's  switched
on, and he knows what he's seen. As  far as TCG is  concerned, the  boys are
going to hit him on the way to work, just as he reckoned.
     So the plan still stands. Al, you still on for it?"
     "No problems."
     "Good  news. Okay, we're going to insert at about four  o'clock  in the
morning. Al's going  to go to the house and sort  all the  shit out for  the
drive to work.
     We're  going to have three groups. I want one  group that's going to be
on the roundabout on the old Dungannon road.
     They'll be dropped off by a  two-man car team, who'll then stay out  of
the area backing up the two blokes on  the roundabout. Your names are up  on
the board with the vehicles.
     "Then there's going to be two cars to back Al in the Saab.
     There's going to be my car, the Lancia, call sign Bravo, and we'll take
the maroon Renault, call sign India. My  car will be three up, including me;
the Renaults going to be four up."
     As I looked on the board, I could see my name down as the driver of the
Renault.
     "Bravo and  India are going to move down to the area, and I'll drop off
Al. Al will go into the house and stay.
     We'll then support Al from the outside. About an  hour later I want the
ground call sign to insert. I reckon that the  hit's  got  to be around that
area anyway, because once  he  gets on  the  old Dungannon road it's quite a
good run all the way to work. The dodgy area is the slow patch where there's
all the junctions going up to Henderson's."
     I knew the roundabout he was talking about. It was where the Mi met the
Coalisland and Dungannon road.
     The U.D.R major was always running down the old road, which was smaller
and with less traffic. Everything converged at this roundabout.  From  there
it became a faster road.
     "Ground call sign, you will be in uniform. Your job is to give us early
warning of anything that you see. If we're really going  for it, your job is
to get out on the road and act as a cutoff. India, when Al starts moving  in
the  Saab,  I want you  to back him.  Al  will give a  running commentary of
what's  going on. I'm going to be floating  around.  I just want you to stay
static, backing up Al all the time.
     If  there's   any   hijackings  in  the  area,  hopefully   we'll  know
straightaway, and we should get a list of recent stolen vehicles as well."
     It would have to be a van  or truck, so they  could  get in a good fire
position  to take out the Saab- Even if they were looking at ramming it, the
Saab was a big heavy machine, so they'd need something really big.
     "It's  a matter of keeping flexible," Ken  said, "and keeping  on  Al's
arse, making sure you back him up."
     If  nothing  happened on the way  down, we'd  then cover him on the way
back. All  he was going to do was drive  the route to work, turn around, and
drive back to the house.
     "Any questions?"
     Eno said, "Do we know how many players are involved?
     "Not a clue. It's got to be at least three men-two firing, one driving.
It might be a hit as soon as he comes out of the house, but it's our job  to
make  sure that doesn't  happen." He turned to Al and said, "If you  want to
try some body armor on, it's up to you, mate.
     You  can wear  it or not.  Make  sure the U.D.R  boy's got so much body
armor on the fucker can only just about get in the car!"
     Al said, "I'll try it on and see what it looks like. If  it looks shit,
I'll take it off."
     "I  want you with comms, and I want you to give us a running commentary
as you're going along the road.
     You can hear what we're doing, so if we say to get out of the way, just
fuck off out of it and we'll take over. If the van comes up in front of you,
act on  it.  just ram the fucker," and  we'll  be  straight in and  climbing
aboard them."
     That was it; there wasn't much else to say. "There'll be no move before
two o'clock."
     This was where,  as  much as the training  and  the  skills  that  we'd
learned, the relationships between people came into the equation:  Al had to
have total and utter trust in the people who were covering him.
     He  also had to make sure the  U.D.R man was  calm and  feeling  secure
because he might have  to control him if the shit  hit the fan. Al's job was
twice as hard as  ours; not only would he have to react to the incident, but
he'd also have to get to grips with the man he was protecting.
     During  all the planning and preparation, the  head shed and  the troop
worked out together  the  way we  could  best protect, these two.  We worked
through  our "actions on" for all  the possibilities-whether they were going
to  come and  ram the  car  or come  up behind it, overtake, and then  start
shooting at him  as they  drove past and got  in front of him;  whether they
were going to force his vehicle to stop and then shoot him or wait  until he
got out of his house and into the car, or vice versa.
     Ken  said to Al,  "When  you  come  out of the  house, we'll  have  you
covered, so don't worry about that. Let him ' do the  normal  checks that he
does under the vehicle, get in, and away you go."
     "No drama."
     We all knew that the highest risk times of any hit were (a) when coming
out of the house, (b) driving to and  from work, and  (c) coming out of  the
place of work.
     Terrorists studied routines. There was nearly always a time frame, say,
between eight or eight-thirty, when  the  target would go out, kiss his wife
and kids good-bye, get  in the car, and go; people always drov set routes if
they were unaware. At  the  other end of the day they'd always leave work at
the  same time.  A professional  terrorist  would  always  go for  the  most
predictable timings.
     That's when kidnappers, struck, too.
     Al tried on some of the  different body armors, but he just didn't look
right. He decided to bin it. It was a personal choice. Had he wanted to look
like the Michelin man, that would have been his prerogative;  he was the boy
who was going to get shot at.
     At two o'clock we were ready to go. All the weapons  were loaded and in
the cars. I took an HK53, the 5.56
     assault rifle.  Most  people were taking 9MM  MP5s  or  5.56 to  give a
combination of concealment in the car and a good amount of firepower.
     The other weapon I had was the car itself; I could use it to ram.
     Fraser was going to be running the  desk with a  couple of the scaleys.
We had the two boys  in uniform, who had  M16s. The cars were loaded up with
flasks, pies, and sandwiches; it looked like it could b'e a long night and a
long day.
     We sat in the briefing room again,  our  9MM pistols in holsters on our
belts. We had magazines  strapped all around us, we had body comms, and each
man had a pair of thin leather gloves and industrial glasses, so that if the
windows went in, at least we could still drive and protect ourselves.
     Ken said, "Before we go, any questions? No . . .
     right, let's crack on and get it done."
     I got into the driver's seat and put my  HK53 across the  bottom of the
footwell with the muzzle sticking UP  by the gearstick. I checked the comms:
"Bravo, India, check?"
     "India, okay."
     From the ground call sign dropoff car we heard: "Delta, check?"
     "Bravo, okay."
     We drove along and kept Fraser informed  of our  location. We were  the
first ones in position; I drove past  the house and  got on the net: "Bravo,
India, that's the house clear."
     Ken came on the net: "Bravo, roger that, going for the drop now."
     The car pulled up, and Al got out casually and walked to the door.
     The door  opened and he walked  in.  As the  car drove away,  Ken said:
"Bravo, that's dropoff complete.
     "Delta, roger that."
     "India, roger."
     It was Just a matter of hanging around now. After about five minutes we
heard Al doing his radio check on his personal comms. We were ready to go.
     We  were parked up in a little alleyway about three hundred meters from
the house, drinking coffee and eating biscuits. There was a pocket scope NVA
(night viewing)  in the car and occasionally somebody would pick  it  up and
have a look around.
     Everything was fine.
     We sat in darkness.
     Every half hour Ken came on  the net.  "Hello,  all  stations,  this is
Bravo, radio check."
     "Delta."
     "India."
     "Bravo, roger that."
     It was quite chilly. My feet were cold, and I started to shiver.
     I did my coat up a bit more, and then I became conscious of the wind on
my face from the half-open window. I was starting to get a bit tired.
     I wanted morning to come so we could get the job over and done with.
     It started to get  light  at about half past seven, and we heard Ken on
the net: "That's Bravo going mobile."
     He was  going  to have  a  cruise around the area to see  if there  was
anything outrageous going on. We knew that Al would soon be coming out.
     A couple of minutes later Al came up: "Radio check."
     "Bravo, roger that."
     "Another five minutes and I'll be going."
     "Bravo, roger that."
     The  Lancia,  call  sign  Bravo, was  cruising around  but  didn't  see
anything. The plan  was that Ken was going to be in front, clearing the area
as we moved; Al was going to be in the center, and we'd  be backing him from
the rear.
     "That's me moving out of the house now," Al said.
     "Bravo, roger that. India and Delta, acknowledge."
     I switched the  engine on.  Everybody picked up his  weapon and held it
between his legs,  ready to go. All the banter stopped now; this was serious
time.
     "That's me now at the door."
     "Bravo, roger that. Call signs acknowledge."
     "Delta."
     "India."
     "Walking towards the car."
     "Bravo."
     "That's garage doors open."
     "Bravo."
     "He's checking the car."
     "That's me now in the car."
     "Bravo."
     "Engine on."
     "Bravo."
     "Stand by, stand by. That's me now mobile., "Bravo, roger that."
     We came up: "That's India mobile."
     "Bravo, roger that."
     Al drove past us in the car, a  top-of-the-range Saab. I fell in behind
him, covering his moves from positions where we knew we would be able to get
to him as soon as the shoot took place.
     Al was giving a running commentary as he was  moving along:  what  cars
were coming  up, their registrations, how many  people were inside,  what he
could see  ahead, what he could see behind him, what speed he was  traveling
at, whereabouts he was on the road. I had  a mental picture of exactly where
he was and what was going on around him.
     Ken  came  on the net from  his vehicle: "That's  a  yellow  van moving
around  in  the  area.  It  just doesn't look right; it's hanging around the
junction for too long. It's a.
     yellow Enterprise Ulster van. It's gone towards the old  Dungannon road
and I can't see it now. It's out of sight.
     Call signs acknowledge."
     Everybody  acknowledged. We were  all  sparked up; it  looked as if  it
might be on.
     Ken drove up toward the roundabout and parked up.
     He was going to let the Saab and us go past. All of us were looking for
this yellow van. It sounded right.
     Al, still very calm, was talking into his covert comms.
     There's quite  a  skill  in  talking while  people are looking  at you,
without their realizing what you're doing.
     Even if this van came up in front of  him, he would still have to drive
up naturally to it, for a number of reasons.
     The first  was that if he started to slow down and move back, they'd be
aware that  something  was  wrong.  The  second  was  that  if he  stayed up
close-not exactly nose to tail but almost-then as soon as he saw the barrels
come out of the back of the van, he could put his foot down and ram the back
of the wagon with three-quarters of a  ton  of Saab. If that stopped it, all
well and good;  we  could all get out  and start shooting.  If not, he could
either back off, get out,  and start firing or get out and start running. Al
was only armed with a pistol.
     If there were a couple  of boys in the back  of the van pointing G3s at
him,  he wasn't going to  be able,  to do much  in return-unless  they  were
off-balance after being  rammed. But if he rammed the vehicle at  full  pelt
there was a  possibility that he might damage himself.  ,  "That's a Renault
five coming towards me now.
     That's now past. My Sierra [speed] thirty to thirty-five mph."
     I adjusted my speed to maintain distance.
     "Bravo, roger that: Sierra thirty to thirty-five."
     "That's now approaching Venners Bridge."
     "Roger that."
     "That's at the bridge, and still towards Henderson's."
     "Roger that."
     If there is a calm net, there are calm reactions. if  there's hollering
and shouting on the net, it sparks everybody up; either  calmness or tension
will radiate to everybody else.
     By  now  Al had passed the roundabout  that  was manned  by the  troop,
concealed and acting as a cutoff.
     We were still  backing  him-close enough to  give  protection  but  far
enough away not to stand out.
     Everything was still under control except that  we didn't know what had
happened to the van. The one thing we did know was that Al was there  on his
own.  By  now  we  had  passed the roundabout and were  well  on the  way to
Dungannon.
     Bravo came up: "That's me static at Henderson's."
     The  Saab passed,  and then  we  passed.  If  it didn't  happen  at the
roundabout, it was going to be really difficult for them to do anything.
     I was  slightly pissed off that there  was nothing happening. We did so
many jobs where we got really revved up, only for nothing to happen.
     Al got some  speed on and headed down the  old Dungannon  road. We were
still behind him.
     Suddenly we heard from  the ground call  sign: "Stand by,  stand by-the
van's coming back towards the roundabout! They've missed him, they've missed
him! The back windows are out. It's on. He's coming back to you, Bravo."
     "Roger that, we will take it, wait out."
     Ken and his group were still the other  side of the roundabout, and the
van was  coming  toward them at  full  speed. It seemed that the players had
missed  Al and  didn't realize that he  was well down the road to Dungannon.
They were probably panicking; if they fucked this up, they'd be in the shit.
     Ken  could  see  the  van  now  coming  toward them.  As far as  he was
concerned, he was going to take it. He shouted, "Ram it! Take it!"
     Ken put his seat belt on, and he was ready to go.
     Everyone just hung on and waited for the bang.
     As the van came toward him, there  was a  boy on the front  seat firing
through  the windscreen. Both vehicles swerved, and Ken came to a screeching
halt.
     The only bangs that happened were the gunfire from the van. The boy was
firing at the car as it approached.
     They  started to take rounds into the windscreen; everyone ducked  down
as both vehicles missed each other by inches. As the van passed, firing came
from the  back All three  Regiment blokes went to roll out of their  vehicle
and  start firing. They wouldn't have enough time  to  turn  it around. They
were  taking  incoming; it took the back window out and the  boys  were  now
firing out of the hole. The best  thing  was to get out  of  the way of  the
vehicle, because that was going to take the majority of the shots.
     Ken shouted: "Get out! Get out!"
     Eno was in the back, firing away, waiting for  the others to get out so
he could follow.
     Ken had put  on his seat belt as the intention had been to have a major
crash and take these boys on. In fact it'll saved his life.
     Eno, the unflappable, was still putting rounds through the back window.
He fired  nice  threeround  bursts;  all  he needed'was  one  of the  twenty
cigarettes that he smoked every day and he'd  have looked like he was having
a day out on the range.  Ken opened  his door and started to get out but was
restrained by his belt. -In that instant the door took three or four rounds,
just where he would have been standing.
     All three were out now, and Ken was on the net giving directions to the
rest of the troop. The other two were still firing at the van.
     "Contact, contact, contact! That's the van still going straight, that's
at the crossroads-India acknowledge."
     "India, we have it, wait out."
     As  soon as we heard that the van was  racing  down, we screamed around
and started driving  fast toward  the  roundabout. Everybody already had his
gloves on. Now they started putting their goggles on, too; they knew we were
going to start firing through the car.
     We  could see Ken's car, Bravo,  facing  us. The boys were  starting to
sort themselves  out and get back in the car. The yellow van  was moving off
fast. Ken  was going to turn around and  back us. I put my foot down hard on
the floor.
     We got in range of the van and opened up on it.
     T .  he front passenger uses his legs to push himself back  against his
seat for support as he fires. One of the back men leans between  him and the
driver and fires through the windscreen.
     One boy was firing from the front seat, another from the back.
     The barrel of his HK53 was right next to me.
     As the 5.56 Armalite rounds went off, my whole body shuddered.
     There was a fearsome burst of  flame  from the muzzle each time, and it
was scorching me. My eyes clenched up involuntarily with each round.
     Our windscreen had crazed with the first round, but being safety glass,
it didn't cave in. I had  to lean over to the right-hand side so I could see
through a good patch.
     We drove toward the van.
     There  was  glass  everywhere; my  hands  were  bleeding;  everyone was
shouting to be heard above the wind rush.
     I  was trying to keep the car as stable as possible as it sped along so
that the fire could be accurate.
     "Faster, faster, we're going to lose him!"
     We were  gagging on cordite  fumes. The wind howled through gaps in the
glass with weird whistling noises.
     Everybody was shouting.
     By now Ken and his gang had got back into their wreck of a car and were
moving toward the contact.
     "Bravo is trying to back you, India."
     We were starting to lose him.
     "He's going left, he's going left!"
     I could see the turning and had to slow down to  make sure  I could get
around. By now we had Bravo backing us. We screamed left on the  wrong  side
of the road that went under the motorway. Suddenly there were  roads leading
everywhere. We drove. down a steep right-hand bend shouting, "Where the fuck
are they?"
     Ken got  on the  net. "You take the  first option  right; I'll take the
second option left. Let's sort this out!"
     We started turning into the little roads. Every time we saw somebody we
stopped and shouted, "Where's the van? Have you seen the van?"
     "That's first option right cleared."
     "Roger that."
     "Check the next option left."
     "Roger that."
     In my  mind  I knew  we'd lost them now,  but we had  to go through the
motions. They  could be anywhere. Al was halfway  to  Dungannon; he'd pulled
off the road and was waiting.
     By now the whole community was out  looking to see  what was happening.
All  they  saw was two  cars screaming around with  no  windows and  weapons
sticking out of them.
     Everyone  was  severely pissed off. Bravo had taken hits; we had  fired
back without results, apart from the  fact that none of us was dead. Al  and
the target weren't  shot, and there were no injuries. A success is doing the
job and everybody coming back alive. If a task was technically a success but
we had a man down, then to me that would be a failure.
     Al Slater  did his job well that  day.  He knew that he was going to be
part of the  target and that to survive, he'd have to take on the  threat on
his own, as well as look after  the U.D.R man. And all the time he'd have to
stick  with the attackers, until everybody  else  could  get up with him and
take them on.
     "You're all wankers,"  he said to  us that night. "I can't see what the
problem was. I had a lovely drive into Dungannon."
     What Al did showed a lot of bottle and he got the MM for it, but he was
doing  it because  it  was  his job.  It  had nothing  to do with Queen  and
country. He wouldn't  have looked  at it and said, "Hell, this is exciting."
He would just  have  thought, I need to sort my  shit out for this one.  The
fact  that  there  was a possibility  of  dying  wouldn't  have particularly
worried him. If it had, he'd have been in a different line of work.
     Everybody  took a job like this  extremely  seriously. We were  talking
about people's lives, and we all knew the value of life because we'd all had
our Nicky Smiths.
     True, we might make  light of it  and have a  laugh  at the dead  man's
auction, when all  the man's  kit was  sold off and the proceeds sent to the
next of  kin. But bravery didn't come into it;  if  anyone was doing  it for
heroics, he'd soon get  kicked out. The Regiment  didn't want heroes; heroic
blokes do things that are unpredictable and put other lives in danger.
     The idea was always to let the enemy die for his  country,  not you for
yours.
     The op had failed,  but that was  just one  of those  things.  I wasn't
pissed off long term about it. No problem; it would be a long war.
     Sadly,  later in the day,  we  discovered there had  been  a  casualty,
Frederick Jackson. An innocent victim of  the fight  against terrorism, he'd
been hit with a round from one of our weapons during the firefight.
     The  van was later found abandoned in  one of  the culde-sacs. The boys
had legged it cross-country before hi jacking another car for their getaway.
Inside the van were a shotgun, a radio,  and empty  cases from an  automatic
weapon. The players had been there to kill-at long  range with the automatic
or, if they had the chance, close up with the shotgun.
     Some lessons were learned. We had  been needing  a large-caliber weapon
that could be easily concealed for our type of work; the SLR was too big and
bulky  for use in cars, and in any case 5.56 didn't give  us enough stopping
power if we were firing out of one car into another.
     The short-term answer, until the 7.62 G3s arrived from Heckler  & Koch,
was  to acquire  some  Argentinian  folding stock FNs that  the Regiment had
brought back from the Falklands. They did the business very nicely.
     Later on that tour we had a "fast ball."
     There were a lot of close-quarter shoots going on at the time in County
Fermanagh. The players would come up to a  front door, knock, and just barge
in and shoot as soon as somebody answered.  The targets were mostly R.U.C or
U.D.R people; whether  on foot  or by vehicle, the players would get back to
safety. What we planned to  do was split ourselves up over a period of a few
nights to cover a number of main targets,  but this time we'd  be waiting on
the premises.
     The tactic might involve a combination of being in  the house and being
the one who opened the door  or being outside and  watching  them make their
approach.  It  all  depended  on the terrain  and the makeup of  the  house,
garden, and outbuildings.
     There were four of us in one house, sitting with the main target.
     Of  all  the possible targets we could think of,  this one was the most
likely to be  hit. It was a large bungalow  in the  middle  of nowhere,  the
nearest neighbor being over a quarter of a mile away.
     Frank was  in  charge. The rest of the team  was me, Eno,  and a rupert
called Boss S.  To avoid suspicion, we had  decided to make it look as if we
were a vanload of friends  turning up with six-packs of beer and big bags of
fun-size Mars bars.
     He  was a  great old boy  in his  forties,  full  of  jokes and totally
nonchalant about the situation. This might have had something to do with the
fact  that everywhere we  went  in the house there  seemed to be  a  shotgun
hanging off a wall ready to give somebody the good news.
     "Let's  get the kettle  on, boys,  and  we'll  sit down and  watch some
television. I've had this for years and years: They  say there's a threat on
me, and all you lads  come  down  and look after us for  a couple of days. I
wouldn't take it too seriously if I were you. But  it'll be  interesting  to
see what happens. It's a cold night; I can't see them coming out in this."
     It was  a beautiful house. The kitchen was boiling hot, with  a Rayburn
going full tilt on  one side and a  huge kettle steaming  away on one of the
hot  plates. He  shooed  away the flask and  sandwiches he  saw me bring in.
"Forget that horrible stuff," he said. "I'll do us a  decent cup of tea, and
there's pie and things cooking in the Rayburn."
     . It was  a  still and  icy cold night. I  was so  glad  to be  inside,
stuffing my face with pies  and tea, instead of  lying in an  OP in  a bush.
Frank and Boss S were watching the telly with him in the front room. Eno and
I  were  in  the kitchen, sitting in armchairs that we'd  pulled up near the
large double-glazed back door. All the lights were off; nobody would be able
to  see us. We sat  with our feet up on pouffes, our weapons  resting across
t'he arms of the chairs. It was a brilliant way to go to war.
     There was no  way the  players would come to the front of the house; it
was one of those places where the front door had never been used.
     From our armchairs we had a  grandstand  view  of the approach that  we
reckoned they'd use. They were  very unlikely to drive in; they'd  be coming
across country and  entering  via the back.  If  they did, they wouldn't  be
exiting.
     Eno whispered, "I'm gagging for a fag."
     "Why  the fuck  do  you  smoke?" I said. "It  costs  too  much, and you
stink."
     "Yeah, but it's  good for the training. The old kickstart. I'll give it
up one of these days."
     The still of the night was shattered by Fraser coming on the net to us:
"Everybody,  sort your shit out,"TCG wants you down at  the  Drumrush  Lodge
now. Nobody  knows what's going on, but everyone  needs to  get down  there.
I'll give you sitreps if anything comes in. Get down there-now!"
     Frank said, "Roger that. We're on our way."
     We got our kit together and went to the van.
     Frank said, "Boss,  you  map-read,  I'll drive.  Andy and  Eno, in  the
back."
     The U.D.R boy waved us off a- nd said, "Don't worry about  me. I've got
more shotguns and Mars bars than you can shake a stick at. See you later."
     Fraser  came back on the  net: "A  few minutes  ago a woman phoned  the
R.U.C  station at Kesh. She  said, 'Listen carefully, this is the  Fermanagh
Brigade of the IRA.
     There  are a number of blast incendiaries in the Drumrush  Lodge Hotel.
The  reason for this is  that the Drumrush  Lodge serves the bastards of the
security forces."
     "  The weather  was horrendous. The mist was heavy, 226 with visibility
down  to  no more  than twenty  to thirty meters, and ice  on the  road  was
slowing everybody down.  As  soon as we went over about  30 mph, we  started
skidding. It was better just  to slow  down,  take the vehicle to a  maximum
speed of about 25 mph; at least we would get there, not crash and lose 25
     percent of the troop's effectiveness.
     We could hear on the net  that the other two cars were  now in the area
of the hotel and starting to search. One of the suspicious vehicles in  that
area that we knew to look out for was a blue van, possibly of foreign make.
     Eno said, "I bet it's  a fucking come-on." Maybe the  boys wanted us in
the area because they had planned a party.
     The Boss was map-reading with a  small Maglite  torch: "Down here, turn
left."
     The car slithered around the bend. Frank said, "No point rushing.
     Let's just trogon; we'll get there eventually."
     Then we heard: "Stand by, we have a possible here, wait out."
     Everybody shut up now, 'waiting to hear what happened next.
     Al, Eddie,  and Clive were in one  of the  cars  and drove past  a blue
Toyota van parked up on another road just off the Drumrush Lodge.
     Everyone apart from the driver was keeping right down; they didn't want
to put anyone off their work. They came ' back on the net: "It's  parked up,
no  lights,  no  movement, but  the  door  is slightly open. It  looks  like
something's going down."
     Ken was on the net: "Block  the road. We'll  stake it  out and see what
turns up."
     His team was now at the other end of the road.  The van wasn't going to
go anywhere; with luck the area was contained. However, we still didn't know
what was going on.
     Clive's team were out of their  car and Al put out the caltrops, spiked
ch