Knife Edge: Life as a Special Forces Surgeon (24 page)

For some operatives, the condition meant they could never go on Northern Ireland OP duty again. Trench foot is one form of what is called ‘cold injury’. Other conditions in this family include frostbite and frostnip. Frostbite is the most serious, with extremities eventually turning black. Frostnip is between the two, with the extremities turning deathly pale but eventually recovering. In all three — trench foot, frostnip, frostbite - the result is often lifelong sensitivity to cold. For a covert operative this is, understandably, a catastrophe.

As part of Dan’s Northern Ireland tour I was fully briefed on many aspects of counterterrorist activities in the province. Sometimes I was faced with unexpected surprises. On one occasion I was visiting a remote location, talking with some Det operatives about what they were doing. I was fascinated, becoming so engrossed by the detail that I did not notice the figure positioning itself at my side. Slowly, I became aware someone was there. I looked to my right.

‘Hi, Doc!’ came the smiling voice. ‘Remember me?’

For a moment I frowned, struggling to hide my lack of recognition. I remember hips, knees and the occasional backside in clear detail. With names and faces I am hopeless. Then, with a flash, even I remembered.

‘You! But… what are
you
doing here? I don’t believe it!’

The smiling face nodded, and then put its thin arm around my shoulders, head inclined slightly towards me. ‘Yes, Doc. It’s me. The airplane — do you remember? You were going to thump me, you bastard, weren’t you?’

I nodded. I had to. It was him - the unsavoury fellow. I was dumbfounded. There, behind, was the voluptuous, leggy blonde busily cleaning her small pistol. Once again, I thought, no one in life is who they appear.

Love them or hate them, the Det operatives are immensely brave. Exposed, often isolated, and occasionally unsupported, they must find it hard to fit into normal life when they return to the mainland. This was certainly the situation for many SOE operatives after the Second World War. The Det was involved with one tragedy that hit me particularly hard - the death of James R. Having listened to his comments on the effects of lignocaine when I had first arrived in Hereford’s Officers’ Mess, our old friendship had been rekindled. In a combined SAS/Det operation he was killed trying to assault a terrorist gun team. His SAS group was advised to assault through the wrong front door during the attack, the one next to the terrorists’ house rather than the house itself. James, last out of the covert civilian car, was shot dead. The sad photograph of his body lying covered on a Northern Ireland pavement appears frequently in newspapers and books to this day. I feel awful whenever I see it. It highlights the waste of life these things create. After the tragedy, I remember one SAS officer saying to me that James had died ‘because he wasn’t quick enough’. I realize the remark was a soldier’s effort at justifying death, something that is in fact impossible, but I nearly hit him at the time. The reality was death was unavoidable. At least he died quickly.

As a member of the security services in Northern Ireland, one must accept a percentage of the population hates you. However nice you are, whatever you do to help, to them you represent something they truly dislike. It is what you stand for, not what you are, that is the trouble. Driving round the harder areas of Belfast, regions that look similar to a city in the aftermath of nuclear war, you can detect real hatred in some people’s eyes. Once, I was performing the simple task of carrying a ladder from one building to another. It was not a covert operation. All I was doing was adjusting guttering on the front of a house in which I was billeted, a very non-SAS activity. I was outside a military base, unarmed and looked outwardly like any member of the Northern Ireland civilian community. I would have done credit to the Det. As I walked along the pavement, the short distance to the building, a car pulled up to ask directions. Inside were four young men. None would have been over twenty years of age. Four youths in a Belfast car spells trouble, but my mind was on other things. I was stupid.

‘Can yer tell me where the hospital is?’ said the driver, in a broad Belfast accent, winding down his window as he spoke.

‘Of course,’ I replied, sounding terribly English. It is one of the perils of a public-school education. As I spoke I kicked myself. I would usually revert to Scottish when communicating with the locals as my attempts at mimicking an Irish accent are normally disastrous.

The moment I opened my mouth I saw the eyes of each of the car’s occupants glaze over. Immediately they realized where I was from. No use my telling them I had operated on at least twenty of their countrymen in a local hospital during the past week. It would have made no difference. The driver looked me hard in the eye, then spat on the ground out of the window, his gaze never once faltering. ‘Don’t bother, yer monarchist bastard,’ he said as he drove off, loathing in every syllable. ‘We’ll get yer all in the end.’

An unpleasant, but fortunately rare, duty of an SAS doctor is the handling of death and its aftermath. Though this is officially the task of a Commanding Officer, in reality it may be delegated to others. I hated it. I was dealing with some of the nation’s fittest people and yet had to tell their nearest and dearest they had died. Furthermore, the dead men had frequently been friends. I therefore had my own grief reaction to contend with, as well as a job to do. James R highlighted this particularly well. Deaths could occur at any time, and usually when you least expected it. Even the Det was not exempt.

Late one evening, a particularly dark and damp one as I recall, I received a telephone call from Regimental HQ. A rising star in the covert world, no more than twenty-five years old, had been shot in the head by a high-velocity bullet. Despite an appalling injury, he had managed to survive the initial impact. Local medics had struggled to revive him, being sufficiently successful to evacuate him to a neurosurgical unit in Scotland. It was there I first saw him, surrounded by his family, later that night. We did not have a padre, so with me came a highly respected Regimental Welfare Officer, Robert P. The operative was connected to all manner of tubes and bleeping electronic devices to keep him alive. Despite these, a brief word with the neurosurgeons told me his chances of survival were almost zero. He would most likely die soon. Should he survive, brain damage was too severe to allow him to be in anything other than a vegetative state for the rest of his days.

Breaking news like this to a family is one of the hardest things a doctor can do. Some choose to get on with it directly, calling a spade a spade. Others work up to it more slowly, fencing around the subject until the topic of death is eventually reached. Worse still, the young man’s family had no idea of the type of work in which he was involved and we were not allowed to tell them. As so often happens on these occasions, the father controlled his distress by asking questions about the incident and telling us of the outstanding abilities and ambitions of his son. The mother, quite naturally, was horrorstruck by the affair and could barely speak. Human distress presents in so many different ways. Medical training cannot prepare you for scenes like this. You must simply do the best you can. I often end up crying myself. Certainly neither civilian teaching hospital, nor Army, had given me any training in such counselling at all. When faced with a bereaved family, staying in control, and yet remaining supportive, is immensely difficult. You must be prepared for anything, including being blamed for the event yourself. It was during our discussions with the family that I realized how much a general experience of life helps. Robert P was many years my senior and medically untrained. What he had was an undefinable, enviable ability to reach into the hearts of those with whom he talked. I learned a lot from him that night. He handled the situation beautifully, allowing the family to talk as they wished, prompting them when they fell silent, holding a hand when needed. It was a brilliant display of counselling, unrivalled by anything I have seen either before or since. His manner permitted us to leave the family settled and content, though naturally still distressed.

My time in antiterrorism was ideal for my planned surgical career. Though much of what I did was preparation and negotiation, it put me in touch with civilian medicine once more. I needed to know which hospitals in the land could cater for casualties we might create, what facilities they had and whether their staff were suitably trained. Much of this took place in the UK, so that I was in continuous contact with civilian colleagues. I needed this, for the break I would have to make one day from under the Army’s broad umbrella. So far, the training and experience I had received was excellent, particularly for medical organization and experience in the Third World. My SAS patients had exposed me to a wealth of conditions, many of which would never be seen by a civilian practitioner. Clinics were frequently stuffed full of patients with minor orthopaedic problems - torn knee cartilages, broken wrists, funny hips or ankles. However, as a doctor, working singlehanded from a basic medical centre, there were limits to the depth of treatment I could offer. If the situation became too complex, I would have to refer the patient to others. I realized it was time to move on. Flattered by the CO’s offer that I should extend my SAS service, I declined. He, too, was a hard-core professional and subsequently reached even dizzier heights in the Army. Nevertheless, he understood my reasoning. Thus it was I turned my back on Hereford’s Bradbury Lines, thinking I would never be involved in SAS activities again. I was desperately sad. With 21 and 22 SAS combined, I already had seven years of Special Forces’ activities to my credit. The Regiment was a second family. Something I had eaten, breathed and slept for so long.

It is difficult to settle into normal routine once you leave the SAS. The Army posted me to a military hospital in London, where I began work as a junior orthopaedic surgeon. I found it both fun and professionally rewarding, but missed the unpredictability of Special Forces life. No longer was I required to be on thirty minutes’ standby to move, nor asked to dine with leading politicians. I was now just any old surgeon, in an ordinary hospital, struggling to climb the orthopaedic ladder. At least that is what I thought until I was asked by the RAMC to command an SMT. Having fiercely criticized such teams when RMO to the SAS I now did a complete about-face. Suddenly, to hear me speak, SMTs became the most indispensable items in the land.

There were four of us, each based in my hospital, attached to our commitment by a long-range bleep. Though the Army had offered personnel for SMT service, it had not thought through how we were to reach the scene of the action physically. After much discussion, the hospital’s Commanding Officer, a kindly brigadier, offered his official car. If summoned, we would have first call on it, irrespective of his commitments.

It was important to establish whether such a loose arrangement would work in practice. Late one night I decided to experiment. Gathering my three SMT colleagues together, I created an imaginary terrorist incident somewhere in north London. The system ran like clockwork. The team assembled in the hospital reception area and the CO’s driver appeared, somewhat overcome by events. He was quite convinced he was off on his first secret mission. Very quietly, and not daring to ask what we were doing, he drove us to a prearranged location thirty minutes away. I had dreamt the spot out of thin air, as I used to pass it on my daily jog. Good, I thought, once we reached our objective, no more than a dogpee-stained lamppost near an Underground station. At least the transport works, even if my SMT had yet to be tested in action. Satisfied my worries about SMT transport were ill-founded, I asked him to turn round and drive us back to the hospital again. All credit to him, confused though he was, he never asked the purpose of such an apparently pointless exercise.

We returned to our beds, for a brief two hours’ sleep prior to the morning’s duties. Even so, the driver was not to be deterred. While we snoozed, he sat firmly in his car, for the rest of the day, refusing all orders to go elsewhere. The CO, with an important meeting in central London that morning, could not budge him and had to travel by tube. ‘I’m sorry, sir. I have a priority engagement,’ was all the driver would say. It was my fault, of course, failing to stand the man down when we returned to the hospital. As a true soldier he was not going to move until I told him so. Villar was not a popular name with the hierarchy that day. It is the story of my life.

Not long afterwards my SMT was called out for real. An African airliner had been hijacked and was sitting at a provincial airport. The call came from the hospital switchboard early one evening. ‘Captain Villar?’ it said.

‘Yes?’

‘I’m to say the words “Spanish Galleon” to you, sir.’

‘Spanish Galleon?’ I asked, having no idea what the man meant.

‘Yes, sir. Spanish Galleon.’

‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘Can’t help you. I haven’t a clue what you’re getting at. Got to go. Bye.’ I hung up. The hospital switchboard must be off its rocker, I thought. It was a frenetic day as I had at least eight young men with cancer to treat, all of whom required chemotherapy. As soon as I put the telephone down it rang again. Exasperated, and sighing loudly, I picked up the receiver. ‘Yes?’ I shouted.

‘Spanish Galleon, Captain Villar. Spanish Galleon is what I’ve been told to say.’ The switchboard operator’s voice was now somewhat hesitant.

I was furious. I was well behind with my work and knew that cancer chemotherapy was not something you could rush. Spanish Galleon indeed! Then, in my anger, a brief thought flashed through my mind. Blast! Of course! A sick realization welled up in my stomach as I suddenly recognized the codeword for emergency SMT call-out. Spanish Galleon it would be.

Despite all our plans, and dress rehearsal, the CO’s car was unavailable that evening. It was getting dark and I had trouble enough finding my three colleagues. Bleeps are not a guaranteed method of communication. Three hours later, we bundled ourselves and our mass of equipment into my tiny, gold Renault 5, setting off towards the airport. I knew the SAS would already be there, guided by police escort along hard shoulders, between crash barriers and the wrong way up many one-way streets. The waters would have parted for them. For their SMT medical support the situation was different. We jerked our way from London in my car, aided only by an Automobile Association
Book of the Road
. None of us had been there before, so we had no idea where to go.