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.