Hateland (6 page)

    No one knew what to make of him. When you asked him why he'd joined the army, he'd say, 'It's something I ask myself every day.' Like a lot of squaddies, he was probably escaping something worse.

    On 2 April 1980, rioting took place in the St Paul's district of Bristol following a police raid on a black-run cafe where alcohol was being sold illegally. Squaddies taunted the two mixed-race soldiers in our regiment with the words, 'Oi! Have you paid for that?' every time they returned from the bar with drinks.

    The news that we were being posted to Northern Ireland landed like a mortar among us. We'd heard the army intended changing its policy of not posting Irish regiments there, but we'd assumed an infantry unit would have the privilege of being the first to be sent. We were tank soldiers, after all.

    The atmosphere of shock and gloom that followed this news made me realise the derogatory nickname 'war-dodgers' had been neither unkind nor inaccurate for many in 'the Skins' (as we were known). A lot of people had genuinely joined in the belief they'd never have to serve in Northern Ireland.

    Our four-and-a half-month tour of duty would start on 10 April 1981. What was more, we'd be going to the historical recruitment base of our regiment - Enniskillen in County Fermanagh. The idea of returning to patrol their own streets seemed to appeal greatly to the regiment's staunch Loyalists. Some of them made plain they had scores to settle with the Catholic population. I imagined how I - or indeed the locals - might react if I were sent back to patrol Codsall with a rifle. All the same, I had to wonder why - if they were really so keen to bash republicans - they'd joined a regiment they'd thought would never have to serve in their beloved land of Orange.

    Because of my Irish-Catholic background, I was told I didn't have to go if I didn't want to. I said I wanted to, but I didn't explain why. My desire had nothing to do with going to fight for Queen and country; I just wanted to be with my friends. My loyalty was to them - and I had no intention of being the one waving at the gate as they left. To me, it was like they were going out for a fight in the car park and I was going to join them.

    On the day we arrived in Ireland, riots broke out in Brixton, south London. The violence lasted two days before order was restored. Lord Scarman later wrote a report into the disturbances. The feeling in the regiment was that we should have been on the streets of Brixton rolling over Rastafarians in our Chieftain tanks, rather than patrolling Northern Ireland on foot.

    We arrived in Fermanagh a month after the local MP, the IRA prisoner Bobby Sands, started his hunger strike for political status. Sands, and nine other republican prisoners, starved themselves to death during our tour of duty. Pictures of Sands festooned our camp. Juxtaposed mockingly beside them were adverts for slimming products and headlines from articles celebrating the achievements of Weight Watchers ('I lost four stone in three months'). The most popular headline was 'Slimmer of the Year'. There was also a Hunger Strike Sweepstake: on a board in the operations room were listed the names of all republicans on hunger strike. Soldiers would have to guess the number of days a particular hunger striker would take to die. Each guess cost one pound and the soldier who guessed correctly would get to keep the pot.

    We hadn't been properly trained or prepared for Northern Ireland. As tank soldiers, the small arms we'd trained with were sub-machine guns, not the standard infantryman's Self-Loading Rifle (SLR). A week of special training to sharpen up our urban warfare skills had left our instructors almost crying with despair. But what could they expect? We were tankies, not nasty little 'grunts' (the name we used for infantrymen, who had to grunt round the countryside with huge packs on their backs while being showered with mud from the tracks of our regiment's tanks).

    I went for a week of extra training to Hollywood barracks outside Belfast, where I found myself in a group of about 20 soldiers from different regiments. On the first day, we sat in a room containing a large television. A major walked in, marched to the front and said, 'If you're going to die, we might as well tell you why.'

    He then played a video which condensed Ireland's history into 30 minutes. When the video finished, he began talking to us in a tone of matter-of-fact cynicism. He opened his talk by saying that the film had probably left us more confused than enlightened, but that this didn't really matter. The essential fact, he said, was that as British soldiers we were little more than piggies-in-the-middle in a baffling tribal conflict, the intricacies of which need not concern us too greatly. All we really needed to bear in mind as we went about our duties were the simple equations, 'Catholic = IRA = bad' and 'Protestant = British = good'. He said he didn't mean to give offence to any Catholics in the group, if there were any, as British Catholics were obviously different from Irish Catholics. He said he knew also he was being deeply unfair to the many Irish Catholics who didn't support the IRA. However, his purpose was merely to identify the tribal grouping from which the threat to our lives was most likely to come, and the simple fact of the matter was that we didn't need to be as wary of Protestants.

    He rounded off his talk by saying that of course Britain should give Northern Ireland back to the Irish, but the Province was such a good training ground that the army didn't want to let it go. He said that in most years more soldiers were killed on exercises in Germany than died at the hands of terrorists in Northern Ireland.

    After he'd left the room, a Liverpudlian recruit turned to me and said, 'Was he taking the piss?'

    Before I went out on my first street patrol, the troop sergeant had a chat with us. He said that if, for whatever reason, we had to open fire on anyone, and we wounded him, we had to ensure he didn't live. We had to kill him outright. He said surviving victims might be able to dispute the army's version of events - and the last thing any of us needed was a prolonged investigation and a messy court case in which we had to go back and forward to Ireland to be examined by 'cunts in wigs'.

    He said, 'Just shoot the fucker dead and we'll make it up from there.' I saw a few people looking uncomfortable. I wasn't one of them. I thought the sergeant's advice extremely astute. Perhaps to lighten the atmosphere, he finished by saying there'd be a crate of beer for the first one of us to kill a paddy. A real paddy, that is, not a plastic paddy.

    You had to remember that everyone you met might be out to kill you. This awareness put a great strain on all our minds. Some soldiers cracked up completely and had to be returned to Germany. Others would cry themselves to sleep at night. More than once, I had to shout out, 'Shut up, you wimp!'

    Most of us were in our late teens or early 20s and we all lived in the anticipation of being shot or blown up. I didn't give a toss about the politics of the situation. I just wanted to survive - and was determined to do so in the best way I knew how. I'd survive by dealing ruthlessly with any potential threats. And, as far as I was concerned, anyone I didn't know personally, Catholic or Protestant, was a threat.

    Motorists who were nice to me at checkpoints tended to be treated the worst. I had the theory that if someone was being nice then they probably had something to hide. Vehicles would be turned upside down, regardless of who was inside - granddad on crutches, granny in a sling, pregnant wife with birth pangs, husband in a wheelchair. And that was my behaviour with ordinary, innocent civilians. People we identified as republicans could expect a lot worse.

    One job I hated was raiding houses. I remember once going into the home of an IRA man on the run. His wife stood in the front room. Her two sons, aged about eight and ten, stood next to her with their arms around her. I could tell they were protecting her, rather than seeking protection. I'd clung to my own mother in the same way in the face of my father's brutality. I recognised the look on their faces, that expressionless gaze of silent hatred. At such times, I felt like a Judas betraying my own kind. I wanted to reach out to them and explain myself: 'Look, I'm not here to oppress you. I just didn't want to go to prison, OK'

    At other times, when Catholic youths would spit or throw stones, I could happily have smashed their heads open with the butt of my British oppressor's rifle.

    On republican housing estates, we'd hand out sweets to small children knowing that as they eagerly swarmed around us they'd effectively be shielding us. No IRA sniper would dare fire at a soldier surrounded by children, especially Catholic children.

    The regiment soon had its first casualty. While cleaning his General Purpose Machine Gun at a permanent checkpoint, a soldier accidentally shot and wounded another soldier. We'd been taught various code words to use on the radio to cover incidents for which we needed assistance. However, there was no code for shooting a comrade. I could hear the soldiers on the radio asking for help, but not being quite sure what to say. To me, this incident merely underlined that we were the wrong soldiers in the wrong place at the wrong time.

    For most of the tour, I stayed at Fermanagh's main military base, St Angelo Barracks, sited on a disused airfield outside Enniskillen. I found myself sharing living space with a few staunch Ulster Loyalists whose hatred of Catholics made them regard me as suspect. The more I got to know them, the more I thought that sending them home to police their own community was not one of the British Empire's most inspired deeds. One of them, I nicknamed Nasty. He was a loudmouth drunk and bully who claimed to relish the idea of going home to persecute 'Fenians'.

    Only years later did I discover that 'Fenian' - the favourite Loyalist nickname for Catholics - came from the activities of one of my nineteenth-century near-namesakes. John O'Mahony co-founded and named the IRA's historical forerunner, the Fenian Brotherhood (later notorious for the so-called 'Fenian Rising' of 1867).

    Nasty would often say to me, 'Hiya, Fenian!' I'd tell him to fuck off, which would make him laugh. 'Ha! Ha! Ha!' he'd cackle, as if we were best friends joshing. I hated the bastard.

    Another Loyalist bigot was nicknamed Charisma (because he didn't have any). He was about 23 but, with his moustache and boring manner, could have passed for 50. He was the non-smoking, non-drinking 'saved' type. His 'da', a locally recruited

    Ulster Defence Regiment (UDR) man, was a disciple of the Reverend Ian Paisley - the fanatical Orangeman, Defender of Ulster and hater of popery. Charisma was full of himself and slagged off anyone who didn't share his fundamentalist Protestant beliefs. There were the doomed and the saved, the righteous and the unrighteous, and I knew which category he put me in.

    Once, I was lying on my bed trying to sleep while listening to him droning on about God and republicans and loyalty to the Queen. Finally, I snapped and shouted, 'Shut the fuck up, you lemon.' In our regiment, 'lemon' was slang for a yellow (that is, gutless) Orangeman. He was holding his rifle, which he'd been cleaning. He leant over my bed, pointed it at me and said, 'Bang! Bang! You fucking Fenian.' I jumped out of bed and he ran off.

    I made the mistake a few times of trying to have an argument with the Orangemen about Northern Ireland. I had no real interest in the politics of the situation - quite frankly, it bored me - but I had the gut feeling, shared by most English, Welsh and even Scottish squaddies, that the six counties belonged to Ireland. When the Loyalists said Northern Ireland was (and always would be) British, my argument was (and still is), 'It's like saying London doesn't belong to the English.' But you couldn't debate things with them, because they wouldn't put forward any reasoned arguments. They'd just bluster and shout and tell you that even to question the link with Great Britain was tantamount to treachery.

    One time, when Charisma told me his ancestors, with God's help, had settled the land, I drove him to fury by saying that when I was a thief, I at least had the decency not to walk round saying that God had given me permission to do it and was happy for me to keep the spoils. When Bobby Sands died after 66 days on hunger strike, every nationalist area in Fermanagh seemed covered with black flags and memorial posters. This widespread sympathy for the dead Provo confirmed the prejudices of people like Nasty and Charisma that all Catholics were closet republicans.

    The UDR soldiers with whom we shared the camp felt the same. In the canteen and bar, they'd talk as if an uprising were imminent. I often heard UDR people say, 'Kill all Catholics. Let God sort them out.' However, despite their loudmouth displays among their mates, I felt I could see the brown-trousered signs of people shitting themselves in fear that the day of reckoning might finally have arrived for a society built on injustice. As republicans died on hunger strike, a Provo mortar attack tore apart a small outlying base that our regiment shared with the Royal Ulster Constabulary, injuring one of my friends.

    One person we harassed into the ground was Owen Carron, the republicans' candidate in the parliamentary by-election following Sands's death. Carron could rarely get a few miles in his car without being stopped. Then we'd turn his car inside out and threaten to shoot him. Half a mile down the road, another patrol would stop him - and repeat the procedure. Some years later, I read that Carron had gone on the run after being found carrying a rifle in the back of his car. He'd probably been looking for me.

    On 13 May 1981, a Turkish man shot the Pope in Rome, seriously wounding him. The attempted assassination became the talk of the camp, especially among the fundamentalist Protestants, who were hugely disappointed by the gunman's failure to kill the Antichrist. I heard them debating the attack as they would a vital goal that had been disallowed at a cup final: if only the stupid bastard had shot him in the head or if only he'd used a different weapon. I didn't like the way their hatred seemed to cover every member of the Catholic Church, regardless of nationality. My friend who'd just been wounded in a mortar attack was an English Catholic. And, although religion was an irrelevance to me, I still regarded myself as a Catholic, if only in name.