Soldier Of The Queen (16 page)

Our sergeant screamed: "Get those fuckers back here! Get them back!" But it was too late — they had disappeared into the night.

Within 20 minutes the fire had almost burnt itself out and we were in pitch darkness. Instead of staying put, the sergeant said we had to clear the area to create a safe cordon all round the camp. We advanced slowly through the field.

Suddenly I heard a soldier shout: "Halt! Who goes there?"

There was no reply. We crouched down and pointed our rifles in front of us. I could feel my heart pounding. Was this the Provo who had got Edwards? Was this the bastard? If it was, he was going to die - the crate of beer would be mine. I noticed a movement just ahead of us.

Someone shouted again: "Who goes there?" Still no reply. After a short pause we got up and began advancing slowly towards the figure, fingers on triggers. We surrounded it - and it suddenly ran at us. I don't know why none of us started shooting; I myself was within a millisecond of pulling the trigger. That sheep would never know how close it had come to losing its life.

We stayed in the fields until first light. As we waited for the sun to come up I spoke to a soldier who had been in the camp during the attack. He said that by a miraculous fluke almost all the soldiers, except for Edwards, had been in the one Portakabin that had escaped unscathed.

In the morning the fire brigade returned and hosed down the smouldering Portakabins. Then the bomb-disposal people arrived. A short way from the camp I could see the lorry from which the mortars had been fired: a three-ton Bedford with ten firing tubes on the back. Apparently, only three mortars had hit the base. Those three had been accurate because they had been the first to be fired. However, they had shot off with such force that the pressure had broken the lorry's back suspension. This had altered the trajectory of the other mortars, all of which had missed their target. One had even landed in the pig farm next door.

Once the area had been declared safe a helicopter landed to bring more troops and to take us back to St Angelo.

It was hard to get any news of Edwards. The army tried to stop us dwelling on the misfortunes of our comrades, presumably to stop morale sinking even lower. "He's all right. Forget about him." was the official attitude, one that I'd come across before in Germany. Naturally, it achieved the opposite of what was intended: we only dwelled more on the fate of our injured friend - and rumours filled the vacuum created by the lack of information. One of the most bizarre things that would happen after such an incident was the stripping of the injured person's bed: they would remove everything — sheets, blankets and even the mattress. Sometimes the first you knew that something had happened was when you returned to the bare bed-springs in the bunk above you. You didn't know what had happened, but you assumed it wasn't good. Within a few days of the mortar attack there was even the rumour that Edwards had died — and been secretly buried to maintain morale. However, by the end of the week, with persistent questioning, we'd managed to establish that Edwards's condition was stable. He was expected to make a full recovery.

In a strange way the Provos' attack helped settle nerves a little. It provided a weird reassurance: we had been anticipating something awful, so when it happened it confirmed we were right to have expected the worst. Not that any of us thought we had yet experienced the worst. We could see the republican prisoners chugging along the starvation conveyor belt - and we knew their friends on the outside would be looking to avenge each one that came to the end of the line.

On the surface people tried to treat the Hunger Strike as a joke, usually by making quips about the regimental sweepstake, but among friends huddled in smaller groups most people would be more circumspect. Soldiers rarely admitted openly to being afraid, but fear was all around. We would discuss the news and hope that none of the soon-to-be-deceased would be buried in Fermanagh: Provo funerals could only mean trouble. Outside the company of trusted friends, and especially in the presence of UDR soldiers, many would join in the celebratory sneering at the impending deaths of republican prisoners. Indeed, when the next hunger striker died most people in the canteen started cheering. The 2 5-year-old IRA man Francis Hughes went within a week of Bobby Sands after starving himself for 59 days. Once again sympathisers came onto the streets to bang dustbin lids on the ground. In the canteen I heard one UDR man suggest that the army ought to raid Catholic areas and confiscate all dustbin lids for the duration of the Hunger Strike. I think he was serious.

We all turned into news junkies, eagerly congregating in the television room to catch the news bulletins. The whole of Northern Ireland seemed to be erupting during this period. In Belfast masked youths stoned and petrol-bombed the security forces, set up roadblocks and set vehicles ablaze. A soldier was shot in the chest when his foot patrol came under fire in West Belfast. We tutted in disgust when the reporter said the rest of the patrol had been unable to return fire because of the civilians milling around. Soldiers shouted at the TV screen: "Shoot them all, the bastards." In Dungannon a police patrol was ambushed with petrol bombs. In Newry a car showroom went up in flames. The camera panned across the smouldering cars. In the TV room a soldier got a laugh by saying: "Shit! I'd put a deposit on that one."

Out on patrol I remember feeling puzzled by the huge number of small black mourning flags flying from lamp-posts, houses, pubs and other businesses. I thought people were foolish to advertise their loyalty to the IRA in that way. To my criminal mind it seemed as absurd as the idea of my sticking a poster in my front-room window at home saying, "Dear Police. I am a criminal. Please arrest me." Yet at the same time part of me admired what I saw as the flag-wavers' come-and-get-me defiance of the authorities. We took note of who was flying the flag - and we intended coming to get them if we had time to get round to them all. I am sure the RUC, UDR and loyalist paramilitaries thought the same. In briefings we were warned not to try to pull down the flags in case they were booby-trapped. We had to be content with setting fire to a few of them. There was even a report of loyalists firing gunshots at black flags in Maguiresbridge. I thought it was probably some of the UDR men on a works outing.

I remember another briefing around this time when a sergeant told us that republicans were now throwing acid bombs as well as petrol bombs - milk bottles full of sulphuric acid. The thought of acid eating into my skin horrified me more than the thought of being engulfed in flames. The sergeant said that if anyone was hit with an acid bomb we had to rinse him thoroughly with water as soon as possible. It seemed to me that the acid would have done its corrosive work by the time any rinsing took place. Nevertheless, we started making sure we never left camp without filling our water bottles to the brim.

The rioters were devising more and more ingeniously vicious ways of causing us damage. Just as you could trace the Provos' developments in mortar-bomb technology (the Mark One turning into the more sophisticated Mark Two turning into the more sophisticated Mark Three and so on) you could also trace developments in petrol-bomb technology. We were told they had started putting balls of elastic bands into bottles. The burning petrol would cause the elastic to melt into a thick blob of goo. If the rioters scored a direct hit on a soldier or policeman this goo would stick to the victim, impossible to shake off, burning furiously as it melted into flesh or clothing. In the first few weeks of the tour we had been allowed to carry carbon-dioxide fire extinguishers with us for use in petrol-bomb attacks. They worked on the principle of extinguishing a fire by starving the flames of oxygen. However, the instruction came through that we were not to use the extinguishers on burning colleagues. Apparently a soldier in Belfast had almost died when his mates had used one on him when his uniform had caught fire during a riot. The carbon dioxide had starved the soldier, as well as the flames, of oxygen and he had come close to suffocating.

The canteen was a lively place during the day. The duty cooks would be crashing about, washing the steel trays or moving the steel pots and steel pans from steel surface to steel surface. Soldiers would sit in groups of four or five; events would dictate their mood and conversation. A lot was said among the cannon-fodder which would not have been aired in the company of officers or those we regarded as "real" soldiers.

A regular topic of conversation was the number of days you had to do before R and R (Rest and Recuperation). The latter was the three days' special leave you were granted for being in Northern Ireland. Only a few soldiers would be on R and R at the same time. Some got theirs after only a week in the country, while others had to wait until the last fortnight of the tour. Many soldiers had "days-to-do" charts pinned beside their beds next to the A3-size Page-Three pin-ups sent by
The Sun
to "Our Brave Boys". The charts marked the day of arrival to the day of supposed departure: R and R days would be highlighted with shades from fluorescent marker pens. Those who seemed to pine most for the day when they could put a cross through the last date were usually the ones making the jokes about the regimental sweepstake. They made me sick.

By late evening the canteen would be a much quieter place where you could seek refuge from others. There would still be two cooks on duty, washing up, preparing food or making urns of the ever-available tea. By the early hours there was rarely more than a handful of soldiers sitting around, usually members of patrols that had just come in or were about to go out. Soldiers tended not to talk much at those times: either they were too tired to bother or too immersed in their thoughts of what awaited them on their next trip outside the camp.

The canteen was sometimes used for a show - two strippers and a comedian whose career had probably peaked 20 years earlier. Usually the only people who got to see the shows were the Rear Echelon Mother Fuckers. Most of the other squaddies would be either on guard duty, manning VCPs, out on patrol or sleeping. Not that they missed much. I went to one - and regretted going as soon as I sat down. The presence of officers had sucked from the atmosphere any potential for fun. With them there we were expected to behave with discipline and restraint, so the raunchy show supposedly designed to take a young man's mind off the horrors of Ulster for a few hours usually failed to achieve its artistic purpose. At the one I attended the lowest point came when one of the strippers, the marginally more animated one, dangled her breasts over an officer's face and the audience applauded politely. Boredom drove me back to my bunk for an early night.

In the main the recreation was in the bar, a pokey but tolerable place with a dance floor and tables and chairs for up to 80 people. Even there you were expected to behave in a disciplined and restrained manner. You were not supposed to have more than three pints, even though you were off-duty. The bar staff had the job of monitoring and regulating your intake. Of course I broke that rule, like I broke all the others, but you didn't have to be a criminal mastermind to work your way around it — you just got the more sensible non-drinkers to go to the bar for you. A lot of soldiers who had been fond of drink in Germany avoided it at St Angelo in order to be fully sober at all times in case the Provos tried to storm the camp. Mac, I and a few others had a more relaxed attitude: we often emerged from that bar very well pissed, having drunk our own, and several other soldiers', alcohol quotas.

The bar's most regular inhabitants were off-duty UDR men: it was probably the only place in Fermanagh where they felt they could drink safely. Friday and Saturday nights were the busiest in the bar. A DJ would come in and the UDR soldiers would bring in their families. At first I didn't have too much to do with the UDR men, but I soon became interested in one of the UDR women. She was slim with long raven-black hair. In that male-dominated environment she attracted a lot of attention. I managed to get talking to her one night when she came to the bar with a few of the other Greenfinches from the operations room. She said her name was Elizabeth and she soon recognised my voice as that of the soldier who had been making the urgent requests for cream to ease his piles. Apparently, I had caused a lot of amusement in the ops room. She asked me if the cream had arrived safely. I said it had and asked her if she would let me say thank-you to the ops room Greenfinches by buying her a drink. Over the following weeks as we spent more time together in the bar we drifted into a relationship. It was very romantic: my piles had brought us together.

On 13 May 1981, only a day after Francis Hughes's death, someone shot the Pope in Rome, seriously wounding him. This 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 Anti-Christ. I heard people like Nasty and Charisma debating the incident 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 had used a different weapon. Groups of UDR men pored over newspaper reports in the canteen, bitterly criticising the would-be assassin's failings. Religion was an irrelevance to me, and I had not been to church in years, yet at the same time I still regarded myself as a Catholic, if only in name. I couldn't blame the Ulster Protestants for hating Irish republicans, but I didn't like the way their hatred seemed to cover every member of the Catholic Church, regardless of nationality. Edwards, who had just been wounded, was a Catholic. It was one of those moments when I felt distanced from these people, although I wore the same uniform. I felt no sense of loyalty to them and certainly didn't see myself as fighting for them.