Soldier Of The Queen (18 page)

The pilots would often play tricks on civilians as well. Once we were flying low in daylight over Lough Erne. The Wessex pilot spotted a fisherman in a small boat and flew over to him. He positioned the helicopter directly over the boat and hovered there. The down-draught fabricated a mid-Atlantic storm, the waves of which tossed the boat about. The man gesticulated madly, waving his arms desperately until the waves forced him to stoop down and hold on to the side. As he clung on I could see him shouting furiously at us, but the roar of the engines drowned out his words. Inside the helicopter we were all laughing and cheering, hoping his boat would capsize, but before it did so the pilot headed back to St Angelo. Civilians also complained to the local papers about helicopters discharging poisonous substances over their homes. I think these were the by-products of a technique the pilots had for clearing waste from the engines. The pilots would also buzz houses which we had identified as containing republican sympathisers - or people who had annoyed us in some way, perhaps by making complaints. The pilots' favourite trick was to hover longer than necessary over particular houses as they came in to drop us off or pick us up. The down-draught would blow washing off lines, send dustbins flying through the air and generally dislodge anything that was not nailed down. If anyone made an official complaint, the pilot could always justify what he was doing in the area and explain the damage as an accident.

The pilots could drop us anywhere in any conditions. The helicopter would shudder in a distinctive way as it headed towards the ground. As a waterlogged field or peat bog rushed up towards me I would feel my stomach dislodging itself and moving elsewhere. The wheels would barely touch the ground before we leaped out, dashed for cover and sprawled ourselves on the grass in a firing position. A powerful wind from the rotor blades would blow over us as the helicopter lifted off and disappeared. In a few seconds all would be quiet and we would be alone.

On patrol we always had camouflage cream smeared on our faces. It was not the best for skin-care: it left us covered in spots. Patrolling rural areas was an exhausting experience made more arduous by the ban on taking the most obvious route from A to B. We were forbidden to use bridges, gates, stiles or even gaps in hedgerows - places where terrorists might plant booby-traps to catch lazy squaddies. So on even the most apparently straightforward hike we had to scale fences, climb walls, clamber over barbed wire and wade through streams, always loaded down with our backpacks (Bergens) and rifles. We even carried machetes for hacking our way through hedgerows.

We used to carry a special electronic device designed to detect radio-controlled bombs in our path. It looked like a normal transistor radio with a lead connected to an earpiece.

It was meant to give off a special tone if there was a radio-controlled explosive device nearby. Unfortunately, all sorts of innocent things seemed to trigger it off, so in the early days we would be constantly thrown into panic, fleeing in the opposite direction to whatever had caused the warning tone to sound. At times we made the men of
Dad's Army
look like an elite fighting force.

On top of everything certain "objectives" would have been set for us which, more often than not, were impossible to achieve. We would be expected to patrol for miles, checking out numerous farms, small holdings and remote homes. We had been told not to wear water-proofs as they made too much noise, so we would usually be trudging around the fields soaked to the skin. We were supposed to be knocking on doors to ask people questions from a list - names, ages, car registrations, occupations, schools attended by children, religion. I assumed these questionnaires were part of an overall plan to compile a detailed profile of the people living in particular areas. Local republicans complained about an "illegal census" of Catholics being carried out. The army always denied it was carrying out any such systematic census, yet we had been ordered to work our way methodically through areas using the questionnaires. If we were pushed for time, or just feeling lazy, we wouldn't even bother knocking on doors -we'd just enter false details to make it look like we had: "occupants not in", "occupants abusive", "refused to answer door/questions". I have no idea what the intelligence officer collating this material would have recommended for these people. They probably ended up under surveillance or perhaps found themselves thoroughly searched every time they encountered the Crown forces.

Although we concentrated on Catholic areas, we would frequently do Protestant areas too, just to show the natives we were even-handed, which most of us were, at least in the sense that we tried to be unpleasant to everyone equally. I remember on one gloriously sunny day - something unusual in Fermanagh - we went to a staunchly loyalist housing estate, the sort of place where grass was banned for being green and even the dogs were painted red, white and blue. We started knocking on doors with the questionnaires. A middle-aged woman answered my knock. I asked her questions from the list ("Who lives here? Who owns the house? Have you got any sons? Where do they work?").

The woman stared at me with a look of incomprehension. She said: "I'm a Protestant."

I said: "So?"

She began talking to me as if I were a stupid child failing to grasp something obvious: "I don't think you understand. I'm a Protestant."

I said I didn't care what the fuck she was: I wanted her to answer the questions. In those days I never thought there was any point in being polite.

Her face became flushed, her movements agitated. She said I shouldn't be going around bothering good law-abiding Protestant people when there were republican terrorists running around murdering people.

I ignored her and kept asking the questions on the list.

She would not answer them and just kept repeating: "Why are you asking me these questions?"

When she had said this for at least the tenth time I told her to shut the fuck up and answer them. "The sooner you answer them, the sooner I go."

These words sent her into a fury. She called me a foul-mouthed bastard, threatened to report me and told me to go back to England where I belonged. Meanwhile my radio had started making its normal CLLRR-CLRRR sound. She pointed at it and screamed sharply: "You're taping me! You're taping me!"

My corporal ran over from the other side of the road and asked what was happening. By this time the woman was shrieking at me; other neighbours were looking over. The corporal said: "Leave the silly bitch."

I filled in the questionnaire: "Occupant abusive. Refused to answer questions. Possible republican."

We didn't always bring questionnaires. Other times patrols had other aims. An occasional task was the counting of TV aerials. In some streets, without people knowing what we were doing, we had to count the number of aerials on roofs. If there was more than one then the house was likely to get raided, because the army felt that each household only really needed one, so any others were probably radio aerials for illegal activities. There was also the milk patrol. These were morning patrols in which we would arrange to go down particular streets just after the milkman had completed his rounds. The aim was to count how many bottles he was delivering to each house. The following week we would return with the questionnaire. If, for instance, someone said they lived alone, yet we knew the milkman was delivering six pints of milk, then we might have discovered an IRA safe-house. Of course, the occupant might just have been a fanatical milk drinker, but the place would have got raided all the same. There was no end to the bizarre information they ordered us to collect (number of dogs in street, positioning of lamp-posts and so on). Most of the time they didn't tell us why they needed it -and ours was not to reason
why.

The war is fought largely in your own mind and to survive you have to conquer the sinister power of your own imagination, the insidious enemy within. Our foe was invisible. He wore no uniform and held no territory we could attack. To me he was everywhere, looking at me down the barrel of his rifle. The thought of being viewed through the telescopic sights of a sniper's rifle used to unsettle everyone. It was never far from your mind when you were out on patrol. This intense fear of snipers had been fostered in training when our trainers had drummed into us that at some point during a tour we would all come into a sniper's field of vision.

"
Bullets travel faster than sound," we used to say to each other, "So you'll never know anything about it." This was comforting only if you assumed the bullet would kill you outright. I assumed it would leave me crippled. So we tried all the time to look for ways of minimising the sniper's chances of getting in a good shot.

Apart from the standard textbook procedures for making yourself a difficult target — zig-zagging, constant movement, keeping heads below parapets — we developed a technique of our own, one that I doubt can be found in any official British Army manual. On republican housing estates we would hand out sweets to 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. Obviously, neither the children nor their parents knew what we were doing. The idea of using children as sniper-deterrents developed gradually. When we patrolled republican housing estates groups of children would usually follow us, sometimes catcalling and spitting. However, we soon discovered that their apparent loathing for us did not extend to our sweets. At first, we started using the children only when we wanted a quick break. We would crouch down in a doorway and offer any nearby children the Mars bars that usually came with our rations. But some soldiers didn't like handing over their Mars bars. Either they liked eating the bars themselves or they resented giving such a generous present to little Fenians who only moments before might have been abusing them. So we started buying sweets especially to give to the children.

We did it almost as a joke at first, but after a while we became quite serious about it: we would buy lots of the cheap supermarket-own-brand variety which we'd store in our gasmask holders. Our sweet technique became more sophisticated as time passed - to the extent that we could usually keep children by our side for the whole of our yomp through the estate. They chomped happily, we yomped happily. Sweets soon became as important to us as our flak jackets. Sometimes on patrol you could just have a sixth sense about impending danger. You might have been mistaken - most of the time you probably were — but it was always best to follow those instincts; and at those times when, for whatever reason, a street or a place just didn't feel right we would stop and wait for children to come along.

"
Anyone want some sweeties?"

Within seconds they would be swarming around us squealing, "Gimme one! Gimme one!" and we could sweep through the area feeling a lot safer.

We didn't feel we were putting the children at risk, although most of us didn't really care if we were. We used to joke: "If they're old enough to give abuse, they're old enough to take a bullet." No-one could have blamed us if a kid got shot: we wouldn't have pulled the trigger. In a way we were only adapting the army's long-standing practice of building military installations next to schools. Many of what we regarded as the most dangerous republican estates were deprived areas. The children probably didn't get much pocket money for sweets, so a little could go a long way. Over time we became less generous with our hand-outs: we found we could pass through a whole estate with a protective shield of infants secured at little more than the cost of a packet of Opal Fruits.

On 21 May two hunger strikers died, both after 61 days of fasting: Raymond McCreesh, a 24-year-old IRA man, and 23-year-old Patsy O'Hara, of the smaller republican terrorist group, the Irish National Liberation Army (INLA). I remember someone winning the regimental sweepstake. There was particular satisfaction that McCreesh had gone, because he was from the area where the five soldiers had been blown up earlier in the week. He also had a brother who was a priest, which seemed to convince some of the UDR soldiers that God was indeed on their side - not that they'd ever doubted it. Four hunger strikers had now died. No-one now thought that republicans might be bluffing. Now many of us were convinced they'd be willing to lose at least another 20, especially with the worldwide attention they were getting. In Catholic areas we experienced a real groundswell of anti-British hatred. You could really feel the resentment whenever you went out on patrol. Everyone tried to put on the we-don't-care, let's-hope-they-all-fucking-die attitude, but we were all worried.

We transferred a lot of our anxiety into caring for our weapons. Much spare time was taken up sitting on our beds taking our rifles apart, cleaning them, oiling them, checking their every moving part. The thought of a weapon jamming during a "contact" was frightening enough to make even me extremely conscientious in that area at least. However, my shooting skills remained dire and I tended to doubt whether I would be much use in a firefight anyway, unless the enemy was very close. We were given regular target practice at St Angelo, partly to ensure our sights were set correctly. We had to sit in shooting tunnels - concrete pipes, in fact - at the end of which sat the targets. We would shoot off a few rounds and the instructors would bring up the targets for inspection. They would establish whether you were shooting too much to the right or to the left. If necessary, they would adjust your sights by tweaking them with a special little tool. The adjustment was meant to ensure that when you fired you at least hit the target in its central area, if not always in the bull's-eye. I frequently missed the target completely - with or without adjustment. This used to puzzle the instructors: "You're inside the tunnel, you cunt. You can't miss." They could not adjust my sights if they did not know where I was shooting. I think some of them thought I was playing games. I wish I had been.