Soldier Of The Queen (17 page)

But the six counties were not short of narrow-minded Catholics either. In early May all soldiers on patrol or at checkpoints had been given the details of a Fermanagh musician who had apparently gone missing while on a trip to Dublin. He had formed a heavy rock band called "Mama's Boys", although his parents had been long associated with the traditional Irish music scene. We thought he wouldn't be seen alive again, expecting his body to turn up at a border crossing with a bag over his head - the usual outcome when someone from the north went missing on a trip to the south. However, after a few days he turned up alive. The following week I read in the local paper that his captors had sent a letter to journalists saying they had detained the man because his group had "left Irish traditional music to play nigger junk". It was signed "Irish Traditional Purists". In my mind the words "nationalists", "republicans", "unionists", and "loyalists" just represented one set of mad bastards fighting another set of mad bastards. Most of the time I felt they could live in this madhouse slaughtering each other for all eternity. I just wanted to make sure that in the process they didn't slaughter me or anyone I cared about.

I suppose a complicating factor was that I was beginning to care about Elizabeth. Not hugely - I wasn't a falling-in-love sort of person - but enough to start viewing things at times in a different way, one that was not entirely hostile to the indigenous tribes. Elizabeth was shy and gentle and didn't speak with hatred of anyone. She came from a family that was well-known and respected within the area. Most members of her family were involved in one way or another in defending the northern Irish part of Her Majesty's realm. Her father and brother were policemen and she said her mother was active in the Democratic Unionist Party. I looked blank when she told me - I didn't have much of a clue about local politics - but she helped me clarify what the DUP stood for when she said it was the party led by the Reverend Ian Paisley. Apparently, the Official Unionists were the other, bigger unionist party and they were not led by Paisley.

Elizabeth told me her mother was campaigning to be elected onto the local council. She gave me one of her campaign leaflets for the May elections. The photo showed a well-groomed matron staring sternly. In the blurb Elizabeth's mother said she solemnly promised, among other things, to "stand against any sell out of Northern Ireland" and "to speak out on moral issues affecting society". The leaflet urged electors to "vote for the unionist party you can trust — Democratic Unionists (DUP). SERVICE EVER -SURRENDER NEVER." The rest of it was taken up with an attack on the rival Official Unionists, although it referred to people and events of whom and of which I was almost wholly ignorant:

An Answer to Powell, Molyneaux etc WHO???

Handed over the "B" Specials;

Voted away the Stormont Parliament;

Accepted the Sunningdale Agreement;

Shared Power with Republicans;

Avoided voting for a Stormont Parliament;

Agreed with the Government's Security;

Destroyed the Loyalist Coalition;

Wrecked the UUUC;

Ruined Fermanagh/S. Tyrone Unionist Unity;

Called the election that suited the IRA;

Laughed at the Toome Loyalist farmers;

Co-operated with Eire Councillors;

Asked for items on the Dublin Talks agenda;

Used the Pope for electioneering;

Mocked morality and the Lord Jesus Christ: THE OFFICIAL UNIONISTS!

I could see where Elizabeth had got her traditional values from.

I remember those May elections for the way we set out to harass candidates standing in support of the hunger strikers. We would stop and search them and their supporters whenever possible and generally try to disrupt their campaign in whatever petty ways presented themselves. Not that we had much effect: they still managed to strengthen their position on Fermanagh District Council, taking four seats. Elizabeth's mother came bottom of the poll in her area. Elsewhere in Northern Ireland H-Block candidates picked up another 32 seats, getting 51,000 votes in total.

There was one would-be politician whom we tormented

mercilessly for months. His name was Owen Carron. He had been the election agent of the hunger striker and MP Bobby Sands and he subsequently became the republicans' candidate in the parliamentary by-election following Sands's death. The election was due to be held on the second last day of our tour in August 1981. I first saw him outside Enniskillen library, a small bearded man with an intense look. He was ranting through a grey loud-hailer at a small crowd. In briefings at St Angelo I remember officers telling us he was a teacher. For some reason this made him even more of a bogeyman for us. I think we resented the idea that he might be tutoring innocent little children in the ways of terrorism. "Now, Seaneen, when you've done your homework I want you to go out and throw a gob-stopper at one of those Brit bastards." At several of these briefings we were clearly instructed to make life difficult for him - and the order seemed to have come down from on high.

All of us, whenever we got the chance, proceeded to make his life hell. Our pursuit of him was so sustained and relentless that after a while I even began to feel a little sorry for him. One patrol would stop his car, detain him for as long as possible while searching him, let him go, then radio ahead to another patrol who would intercept him and repeat the procedure. He could rarely get more than a few miles without being stopped. If we stopped him on his own in a quiet area we would tell him we were setting him up for assassination by loyalist paramilitaries or threaten to shoot him ourselves. If we stopped his partner in his car we would tell her he was having affairs with other women, that we had caught him with this or that Sinn Fein woman. All lies, of course. Our aim was to hound him into the ground. We wanted to make his life completely miserable - and I think we succeeded. Most of the time he just stood there saying nothing while we took his car apart. But occasionally, very occasionally, he would lose his temper and start shouting - you fucking this, you fucking that. These outbursts would give us great pleasure: we knew we were getting to him. Another element in our pleasure was the bizarre feeling of relief that came from encountering a "known" enemy, someone clearly identifiable in our eyes as a terrorist or terrorist sympathiser. It was as if the spirit of evil that we felt surrounded us at all times had suddenly taken bodily form. And you could get a real rush from confronting the beast.

Some years later, a long time after I had left Northern Ireland, I read in the paper that Carron had gone on the run after being found carrying a rifle in the back of his car. He had probably been looking for me.

It was through Elizabeth that I got to meet so many of the UDR soldiers. By and large, soldiers are quite clannish and tend to keep to the company of their own regimental colleagues, so I didn't expect to be accepted immediately. Several of the UDR people seemed all right, although none of them left me feeling overwhelmed by the desire to form a lifelong friendship. There were, however, several out-and-out bigots who made no attempt to hide their hatred of Catholics. I also noticed that while several of them were friendly enough to me at first they turned cold as soon as they realised my Irish-Catholic origins.

One of the worst bigots was someone I nicknamed Billy Bunter. He was overweight, with a red face, and had the unpleasant habit of sniffing when he finished a sentence. His favourite saying was: "What would really make me happy is if you gave me a pope on a rope." Another of his sayings -though not uniquely his as it was popular with others — was: "Kill all Catholics. Let God sort them out." He used to boast that his patrol would pick up Catholics in the street for no legitimate reason and, when they begged to be released, would drop them in the middle of loyalist areas. I'd heard of other regiments doing this too. When he found out about my Irish Catholic roots he made a point continually of telling me not to be anywhere near him if a gun battle broke out.

"
Yer man," he would say, "Watch your Fenian back if the bullets start flying."

But he was all mouth. I would reply: "Why wait till my back's turned, fat boy?" He would pretend to laugh. Elizabeth told me he had seen one of his relatives shot dead in the street by the IRA. After that I was more tolerant of him, although I still loathed him. It would not have been hard for any of the UDR people to justify their hatred of republicans. Most of them had lost friends or relatives at the hands of the IRA. And all of them, especially the part-timers, lived with a constant sense of personal threat. Out of uniform, at home and at work, they must have felt vulnerable all the time. Behind their backs we used to refer to them as "the Utterly Defenceless Regiment".

On 19 May the IRA killed five soldiers from another regiment, the Royal Green Jackets, when they blew up a Saracen armoured personnel carrier on a country road just outside Newry. The news gave us all a jolt of fear. The TV room at St Angelo was full of soldiers that evening. We watched the report in silence: up to 1,000lbs of explosives had been used in the land mine which had been placed beneath a culvert and detonated by command wire. The explosion had been heard for miles around and had caused power cuts when it severed overhead electricity lines. The solid metal vehicle had been blown to pieces - one of its wheels had been found several hundred yards away, while bits of metal plating had landed in nearby fields. You did not need a vivid imagination to picture what had happened to the Saracen's five occupants. Stories soon circulated that the largest intact piece of body was an arm attached to a shoulder.

Although the attack had taken place well outside our area it still seemed close to home. The countryside there looked exactly like the countryside we were patrolling every day. Around the camp officers tried to treat the incident with indifference. At our first briefing after the attack 1 remember an officer treating the deaths of these five young men like a bad result at a cricket match - we had lost five, but we would soon even up the score. I was not much given to emotional displays, but even I felt uncomfortable with the lack of humanity in the response.

I read in the paper the statement issued by the Provos' South Armagh Brigade claiming responsibility for the attack. There was one sentence that chilled me: "British soldiers should recognise that the English public and English politicians do not give a damn about the waste of their lives. How many times have you been told that the IRA have been defeated? You are fighting a war you cannot win." It seemed like a personal message to me and confirmed all my most negative feelings. I knew we could not win a war against an invisible enemy and I knew we were just cannon-fodder there to keep things reasonably stable while the politicians worked out what to do. The IRA were right: politicians did not care about those five dead men, any more than they would care about one dead Bernard O'Mahoney. As for the Great British public - they would readily give Ireland back to the Irish for a promise of peace. The only people who would grieve over those mangled bodies were the dead soldiers' families.

"
If it could happen to them, it could happen to us," was the unspoken thought in everyone's mind. We all became even more paranoid and fearful whenever we left the camp. I treated everyone, Catholics and Protestants, as a potential threat. Motorists who were nice to me tended to be treated the worst of all. I had the theory that if someone was being nice then they probably had something to hide. Someone who was abusive, on the other hand, was unlikely to have anything in his car because he knew it would be ripped to pieces. I would even turn over English families, because we had been told that there were a lot of English people involved with the Provos. They would stop and I would see on their smiling faces that they were thinking, "Hello! It's our boys here!" Then I would say: "Get out the fucking car." I can still remember the shock and horror on their faces when I treated them like dirt, particularly men who had their wives and children with them. Some would get angry, others would just look hurt, genuinely hurt. One Englishman seemed astonished when I made him empty his car. He said: "But. . . I'm English." On one patrol I stopped a Volkswagen Camper van containing three white Rhodesians. They stopped willingly and were really friendly, congratulating us on the job we were doing. We turned their van upside down, pulling out all their belongings and scattering them over the road. Surprisingly, they maintained their friendliness, even as we body-searched them. Before they drove off one of them offered me a tea towel inscribed with the words, "Welcome to Botswana". I left it in the gutter.

I grew to love the smell of aviation fuel. Even today when I smell it at airports I find myself thinking of Northern Ireland and those days of travelling everywhere by helicopter.

I usually felt safe inside those noisy wombs, especially at night, when all I could see below were the lights of farmhouses or the headlights of cars as they twisted along border roads. I felt, quite literally, lifted above the troubles. Attacks on helicopters were extremely rare and almost always unsuccessful, so most of the time I could relax and enjoy the view, only being jogged back to paranoid alertness as the pilot zoomed down to the drop zone.

Not all journeys were relaxing. Pilots would sometimes terrorise us with their games. Some Lynx pilots would fly incredibly fast and low, skimming tree tops then turning suddenly to leave us all gasping. Wessex helicopters were heavier and slower, but their pilots would sometimes climb high, then stall the engine, causing the machine to fall rapidly through the air for a few seconds. The effect on your insides was like the one you get in the back-seat of a car going at speed over a hump-back bridge - only 100 times worse. My stomach would rise in my chest and stay there until the pilot bump-started the engine and the machine rose again. The effect was especially devastating if I'd been drinking the night before.