Читать книгу A Fighting Spirit - Paul Burns - Страница 9

Now that I was a full-blown Para—to be precise, a member of 2nd Battalion, the Parachute Regiment, or 2 Para—I knew that at some point in the not-too-distant future I would be deployed to Northern Ireland. We all did—Woody, Jonesy and me. The Paras had been in the Province on and off ever since British armed forces moved in during the summer of 1969, under the umbrella of Operation Banner, which was to last until 2007, and they were preparing to return for another tour of duty. It was only a matter of time before we joined them.

First, however, we needed to undergo some pre-Northern Ireland training. In addition, the Parachute Regiment had responsibilities in parts of the world other than Northern Ireland. Once of these places was Berlin, and it was there that I was deployed in January 1979.

It’s easy, in the early part of the twenty-first century, to forget the tensions that seeped through Europe during the years of the Cold War. As a young man I was more concerned with soldiering than with international politics, but I took the time to acquaint myself with the history of that scarred city before I arrived.

Berlin had been under military occupation since the end of the Second World War. The victorious Allies had carved the city into Zones of Occupation at the Yalta Conference in 1945. There were British, American and French zones in the west, and in the east, bigger than any of these, the Russian zone. The idea was that Berlin should be governed equally by the four powers, but as the Cold War grew chillier the Russians excluded themselves from that joint administration.

For about fifteen years the citizens of Berlin were able to move fairly freely between the four zones. But as time went on, the inhabitants of the Russian sector grew dissatisfied with the communist regime. Increasingly large numbers of them started to migrate from the eastern part of the city to the western. So it was that in 1961, the year I was born, the Russians started to erect a wall. The Berlin Wall, and its infamous crossing point Checkpoint Charlie, became a symbol of the wider struggle between the rival political ideologies of the West and the East. Along sections of the wall were series of crosses commemorating those citizens shot by the East German border police while trying to escape into West Berlin.

If the wall symbolized communism’s stand against capitalism, the whole of West Berlin was the West’s rejoinder. Entirely surrounded by communist East Germany, it was situated more than 100 miles inside Soviet-occupied territory, a focal point for the Cold War. In 1948 the Soviets had blockaded all the roads and rail links into West Berlin in an attempt to literally starve the city, but the Allies managed to keep it going by means of a continuous airlift of supplies, and a year later the Soviets ended their blockade. Nevertheless, this situation had highlighted just how vulnerable West Berlin was. The threat from behind the Iron Curtain seemed very real indeed, and it was in no way fanciful to imagine that the Russians might make a nuclear strike against the West.

When I was sent to West Berlin, the city was crawling with soldiers. There were three Allied Infantry Brigades, which included the British Berlin Infantry Brigade, made up of three battalions, including 2 Para. Our reason, in principle, for being there was to halt the Russian hordes should the Soviet Union decide to invade Europe from the east. Of course, nobody was under any illusions about what that meant. If they did invade, we would be surrounded and vastly outnumbered. Our commanders clearly knew this too, and that was why the Berlin Infantry Brigade had been given the oldest tanks and other equipment. In truth the presence of so many Allied forces in Berlin was largely symbolic: an expression of the West’s refusal to surrender the city to the Soviets.

I’ll always remember arriving there on 1 January 1979, a fresh-faced Tom with my mates Woody and Jonesy. The temperatures were Arctic and the parade ground at our barracks was a mountain of snow because of the need to keep the paths around it clear. We arrived there carrying all our worldly goods, pleased to have joined the battalion, but a bit nervous too, and I’m sure we looked it. We were standing at the barrack gate when a corporal by the name of Norrie Porter approached us.

‘You lot new?’ he asked.

We nodded.

‘Got any German money?’

Of course, none of us had, so Norrie put his hand in his pocket and pulled out a few banknotes. ‘That’s all I’ve got,’ he said, and handed them round. ‘Go on. Go and settle in and get yourself down to the NAAFI for a coffee and some scoff.’

It was a small act of kindness—new recruits are generally the lowest of the low within a regiment, and given all the worst jobs to do—but it was typical of the group mentality of the Paras and it made us immediately feel as though we belonged.

Berlin was an amazing place to a teenager who’d never been abroad before. We worked hard, we partied hard, and as we were serving abroad we took full advantage of the duty-free drinks in the NAAFI, as well as getting to know the bars and clubs of both the borough of Spandau, where we were stationed, and of central Berlin. One night we went to see the great Muhammad Ali perform in an exhibition fight—a bit of a disappointment really, as he graced the ring for just a three-minute bout. But we were too busy, and money was too tight, for us to really see the side of the city that had earned Berlin a reputation as a centre of hedonism. Spandau itself didn’t look as if it had changed much since the war—it still had a rather old-fashioned feel about it, as if we were living in a time warp.

A couple of times we passed through Checkpoint Charlie and visited East Berlin. We were obliged to do this in units of four, wearing our No. 2 Dress—uniform reserved for those occasions when you had to look supersmart. Back then you could get four East German Ostmarks for one West German Deutschmark, which meant that even we could afford to sit in the nicest restaurants eating the best food. But the atmosphere behind the wall was bleak. Everything seemed very Spartan, quieter, poorer, and more subdued—as if the citizens of East Berlin were afraid to be seen enjoying themselves. But that didn’t stop some of them trying to persuade us to take their money and buy things in the West for them that they could never get their hands on otherwise. One guy asked me to bring him over a saxophone—very difficult to buy in East Germany—which really underlined the difference between our two cultures.

One of my reasons for joining the Army was to see the world. I was certainly doing that, and my first tour in Berlin seemed to justify the choices I’d made. I was enjoying myself, proud to be a Para, and looking forward to the challenges that my career would hold. But, of course, we weren’t there just to go sightseeing. In fact we were worked very hard indeed. My mates and I were deployed all around the British sector of West Berlin, guarding bridges and other points of strategic importance, ready to defend them the best we could if things should kick off. Looking back, it seems rather comical. Nobody would like the odds of a few rookie paratroopers successfully defending an attack from all sides by the massed might of the Soviet Army. Even then, it all seemed like a bit of a joke. Me and my band of newly badged Toms never seriously thought the Russians were going to invade. We were just thrilled to have got through training and excited to have finally joined the battalion.

Once a month our platoon would be on standby, which meant being stationed at the British Army HQ ready to be deployed at two minutes’ notice. On other occasions we would be instructed to perform guard duty at Spandau prison. This famous jail was originally built to hold more than 100 prisoners. But after the Second World War, it played host to only seven—all of them Nazi war criminals sentenced to imprisonment after the Nuremberg Trials. By the time I arrived, six of them had been released, leaving only one: Rudolf Hess, Hitler’s deputy, whom I remember seeing from a distance as he strolled round the exercise yard. The prison no longer exists. After Hess’s death in 1987 it was totally destroyed to stop it becoming a Nazi shrine.

Our six months in Berlin was not solely given over to protecting the West from the supposed threat of a Russian incursion, or guarding Nazi war criminals. We still had to undergo our continuation training, because when a recruit leaves the Para depot his training is not finished: old skills need to be refreshed and new ones learned. So, one day, after we’d been in Berlin for a few weeks, the call went up: ‘Inter-company fifty-mile march!’

I turned to Jonesy. ‘Are they joking?’

They weren’t joking. An inter-company race. None of us had ever done a march that long before—not even during P Company—and this was to be done with personal weapon and belt-order—a solid reminder that, although we’d finished our training, life in the Parachute Regiment was no walk in the park.

There were some moments of real excitement. Gatow Airport, in south-west Berlin, was a major strategic location within the British sector. The RAF troops stationed there needed to know how to defend it should it come under attack. For its training exercises, the Parachute Regiment had to pretend to be invaders. This involved flying over in American Hueys—the iconic American chopper that you see in all the Vietnam movies—since we didn’t have any aircraft big enough for troop transportation on that scale. We wore helmets and gas masks, and sat with our feet on the skids as the choppers swooped in. The RAF boys were all dressed in their NBC (nuclear, biological, and chemical warfare) suits, and we staged a pitched battle on the grounds of the airport—thrilling stuff to me as a novice.

About halfway through our deployment, Prince Charles—who is the regiment’s Colonel-in-Chief—came to visit us. We performed a casualty evacuation exercise for him at one of the British training areas in the Grunewald Forest, and for the purposes of the exercise the officer in charge asked for a volunteer to be the casualty. This would mean being casevaced out in a Huey. I stuck my hand straight up and was given the role.

Five or six of us climbed into the back of an open-topped Land Rover and drove through the training area. I was operating the general-purpose machine-gun, and was scanning the horizon for potential threats. Suddenly there was an enormous bang from a thunderflash—a mock-up IED—and loads of smoke grenades started spewing out thick smoke. Within minutes the Huey was there. The medics moved me onto a stretcher and into the aircraft, and I was airlifted over the Grunewald.

My ears were ringing from the noise of the thunderflash. But otherwise I was entirely unscathed. It was just an exercise, after all. Back at base everyone talked about the novelty of it all. The exercise had been a bit different from our usual regime, and doing it in front of Prince Charles had been a bonus. In retrospect, it all seems so innocent, because real-life casevacs are very far from exciting. And I sometimes wonder what, if I could go back in time and talk to that teenage lad, I would say to him. Would I tell him that before the year was out, he and his mates would be trundling along a road in circumstances eerily similar to those of that exercise? Would I tell him that there would be no royalty on hand to clap, or beers in the mess with the lads at the end of the day? Would I tell him that a thunderflash and a few smoke grenades could never prepare him for what was to come?

Or would I say nothing, and let him enjoy those last few months of blissful ignorance of the brutal realities of war? Those last few months of being unscarred and unbroken. Of being ordinary.

Northern Ireland, where we would be deployed after my six-month tour of Berlin, would involve a kind of soldiering totally different from that for which we had trained. Normal soldiering generally meant being out in the countryside and in the woods; in the Province we’d be in the streets, in built-up areas and among civilians. This meant there were new techniques to be learned: dealing with riot situations and petrol bombs, evading snipers, and coping with an enemy in plain clothes who looked no different from any other man in the street.

We had to acquaint ourselves fully with the British Army’s Rules of Engagement. These are the strict guidelines set in place by the military that determine where, when, how and against whom force may or may not be used. The Rules of Engagement for Northern Ireland were particularly complicated. We were given a wad of cards that stated what we could and could not do in all kinds of situations, which we had to commit to memory. Of course, it wasn’t lost on any of us that the enemy we were up against—the IRA—had no rules of engagement of their own; or that as members of the military, with our uniforms and red berets, we would be prime targets for armed Republicans. But we paid close attention to the Rules of Engagement, because we’d heard stories of people breaching them in the heat of battle and ending up being court-martialled and imprisoned.

We were taught recognition techniques—how to recall and describe the dress and features of someone you’ve only glanced at for a split second, or how to remember the details and registration number of a suspicious car. We honed these techniques over and over again until they became almost instinctive. And we learned how to look out for anything unusual. Why is it quiet in the street today? Why is there nobody about? On the streets of Northern Ireland we would need to be constantly vigilant, and that fact was drummed into us during our tour of Berlin.

On deployment in the Province, everyone within the regiment would have a different role. You might be an anti-tank gunner, or a machine-gun operator, or in signals, or a medic. I was part of the search team. This meant our speciality would be to go into an area and search for anything unusual or, where a suspicious package had been reported, identify whether it was a bomb or an IED and if necessary call in the bomb disposal unit. I loved training for the search team. It meant handling every sort of explosive there was and familiarizing myself with all the many kinds of devices that had been used by the IRA. I was astonished by the ingenuity of their bomb-makers. Most of their explosive materials were home-made out of easily obtainable fertilizer. As for the devices, once you’d got your head around the simple mechanics of a bomb—a circuit with a power source and a switch—you could booby-trap practically anything. I learned how it was possible to take a simple clothes peg and insert two drawing pins inside the clip end to make contact points. You could arm that trigger by placing, say, a book cover between the drawing pins. The moment somebody lifts up the book, the pins touch and the circuit is completed. We learned how to make a simple tilt switch using a test tube, a bung, and a ball bearing or a drop of mercury. Place the ball bearing into the tube and insert the bung. Then insert two wires through the bung. If the test tube is at one angle, the ball bearing or mercury will stay harmlessly at the safe end. But as soon as it tilts, it will roll towards the two wires and complete the circuit. Bang!

A basic car bomb could be made using a Tupperware box, a magnet and an alarm clock. All you needed to do was wire the alarm clock up to act as a timer for a detonator when the alarm rings, then pack the box with home-made explosives and tape the magnet to the inside of the lid so that the whole unit would stick to the underside of a vehicle.

Nowadays the IEDs laid in places like Afghanistan are far more sophisticated, using lasers and other advanced technology. Back then the devices were a lot more Heath Robinson, but that didn’t make them any less devastating, and my time training for the search team brought home to me that, in a dirty conflict like the Troubles in Northern Ireland, you could never assume that anything or anyone was safe. As I was to find out to my cost, however, vigilance isn’t always enough.

When our time in Berlin was over, Scotty and Dylan—good friends I’d made in the battalion—and I made our own way back to the UK, taking a train through East Germany to Frankfurt, then back across Europe, passing through Switzerland, France, Luxembourg, and Belgium. A little holiday. A happy time. And in the brief period of leave I had before our departure for Northern Ireland I went home to Nottingham and started going out with a girl called Claire, whom I’d known since my schooldays. This was a bit of a rarity. Not many of the guys had girlfriends, because our lives were so unsettled and so dominated by the Army—first during training in Aldershot, then on deployment in Berlin.

Life seemed good, and I was looking forward to the future.

By the time the battalion arrived in Northern Ireland in July 1979, the Troubles had been blazing for over a decade. In fact there had been tensions between Protestants and Catholics in the area for almost three centuries, but it was in 1968 that things deteriorated dramatically. It was in that year that members of the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association, a Catholic body, marched through Londonderry in defiance of a government ban. A number of the protesters were injured by the RUC—the Royal Ulster Constabulary—that day, and this was the catalyst that sparked an increasingly devastating spiral of violence. Protestant and Catholic militants took to the streets of Belfast and Londonderry, leading to the Battle of Bogside—a two-day conflict between the Catholics and the RUC during which almost 1,500 people were injured.

The Northern Ireland government requested the help of the British Army in late 1969, and at first the soldiers were largely welcomed by the Catholic population. That didn’t last. The perception soon arose that the police and the military were more on the side of the Protestants than the Catholics, and the situation in Northern Ireland became more and more volatile—a three-way war between the unionist Catholics who wanted a united Ireland, the loyalist Protestants who wanted the Province to remain part of the United Kingdom, and the police and military, whose role it was to keep the peace but who soon became an integral part of this political struggle. British soldiers became accustomed to angry taunts from both the Catholic and the Protestant communities. They could deal with that. But everyone knew it would only be a matter of time before a member of the security forces was killed in Northern Ireland. That day arrived on 6 February 1971, when Gunner Robert Curtis, of the Royal Artillery, was shot during a riot in Belfast.

Robert Curtis’s death changed everything. When Brian Faulkner became the new Prime Minister of Northern Ireland the following month, he declared war on the IRA. Internment—the practice of holding prisoners without trial—was introduced. The violence escalated. More troops died—and more civilians too—and the sectarianism grew worse. One Catholic girl, treacherous enough to go out with a British soldier, had her hair shaved before being tarred and feathered and tied to a lamp-post. That March three squaddies went home with some girls they’d met in the pub. A Republican death squad was waiting for them.

At the beginning of 1970 the IRA had split into two wings: the official IRA and the new Provisional IRA, or ‘Provos’, who were more aggressive and militant. During 1971 there were more than 1,000 bombings, and while the British forces were obliged to stick to their Rules of Engagement and only fire when they were fired upon, the Provos used whatever tactics they could to gain an advantage.

The Parachute Regiment had been deployed in Northern Ireland in the early 1970s. On 30 January 1972 an event occurred that would again deepen the Troubles, be for ever written in the history books of the Paras, and enter the public consciousness on both sides of the sectarian divide. That event came to be known as Bloody Sunday.

What really happened that day is a matter of dispute, and it’s not up to me to argue the rights and wrongs. All I know is that on that day an enormous protest march, 30,000 strong, was planned to pass through the streets of Londonderry—or Derry, as the Catholic majority in that town call it. At that time, Derry was a divided city. There was a ‘line of containment’—an invisible border beyond which the security forces seldom dared to go. On the edge of this was an area known as Aggro Corner, from where young Republicans would hurl petrol bombs at the British forces. The Army had erected barricades along the line of containment, past which the protesters were not allowed to march. Some did, and a riot ensued, during which the Paras were given the order to fire with live rounds. Thirteen marchers—including seven teenagers—were killed that day; another man died a few months later of his injuries.

Bloody Sunday became a defining moment in the Troubles. As I write this, nearly forty years later, it is still written deep in the memory of those who were affected by it. Many millions of pounds were spent on an inquiry which lasted twelve years and concluded in 2010 that the Paras were at fault for firing into the crowd that day. I have mixed feelings about this finding. For the young men in Northern Ireland, the conflict was a new kind of war—a war in which you couldn’t tell who was your friend and who was your enemy. When you join the Army you expect to have an enemy you can at least recognize, in a uniform that you can identify. Northern Ireland was very different from that. It was common for British troops to be shot at by plain-clothes snipers; the sniper would immediately pass the weapon on to an accomplice, who would run off with it and pass it on again. In circumstances like that, it’s no wonder the Paras were jumpy on Bloody Sunday. I’ve no doubt that they reacted in as professional a way as they possibly could. After Bloody Sunday, the training for British troops serving in Northern Ireland became more intense, the procedures more clearly defined. But Derry and Belfast were scary places, and to me it’s a shame that British troops were put in that position in the first place.

I was just a child at the time, not even yet an Army Cadet. But Bloody Sunday affected me too, because from that day on the Parachute Regiment was the bête noire of the IRA. Anything they could do to take one of us out would be cause for celebration.

Our period of leave between Berlin and Northern Ireland was brief—just a couple of weeks. Back home in Nottingham, my mum seemed perfectly resigned to the idea of me going to the Province. I don’t remember any great anxiety, no tears or displays of emotion. She was far more concerned about my plans to buy a motorbike, for which I’d been scrupulously saving. When she heard about that, she did wring her hands and beg me to reconsider, and I agreed, just to stop her from fretting.

Nor do I recall being nervous about my new posting. I’ve no memory of what incidents in Northern Ireland had been particularly newsworthy in the early months of 1979. For a start, I’d been abroad, but I was also just a young lad with my mind on matters other than current affairs. Perhaps I’d glance at the news headlines now and then, but I certainly wasn’t the type to read the paper cover to cover. So when the time came for me to leave, no big fuss was made. I hugged my mum and my sisters, shook my brother by the hand and made my way to the station, where I caught a train to Liverpool. It was great to meet up with the lads again and take a ferry across the water. We were all looking forward to putting our training into action, and ready for our next adventure.

The battalion was stationed in Ballykinler, a small village on the coast in County Down. It’s the most breathtaking location—three miles of desolate beach, with the granite peaks of the Mountains of Mourne in the background. Very out of the way, but that suited me fine. Ballykinler was home to an old army camp that had a long history. It had been a training camp during both World Wars, and during the Irish War of Independence it was controversially used as an internment camp. In 1974 the Provisional IRA planted a 300-pound bomb on the site, killing two soldiers and destroying some of the buildings.

From Ballykinler, we would be deployed down into ‘Bandit Country’. This was the nickname given to the southern part of County Armagh. To look at it, you would never think this was one of the most dangerous postings in the world for a British soldier. It’s a beautiful place: lush green fields, rugged moorland, rolling hills, and impressive mountains. There were no big cities in South Armagh—just small villages that felt as if they hadn’t changed much in recent times. It’s no wonder the people who live there are so fiercely protective of their homeland.

But the peace and gentleness of the landscape were deceptive. Nestled against the border with the Republic, this part of Northern Ireland had always been proudly Republican. It was a hotbed of IRA activity and a front line in the battle between them and the security forces. In the winding lanes of South Armagh, we could expect to be shot at, mortared, bombed. The area close to the border became known as the ‘Murder Circle’, because during the Troubles nearly 400 people lost their lives in this dangerous stretch of country. And of all the British soldiers killed by the IRA during the first ten years of the Troubles, nearly half died in South Armagh.

The role of the British Army in Bandit Country was to back up the police force and to be a visible sign of the rule of law. The duties of 2 Para were varied, and we rotated between different roles. We would be deployed to various fortifications and watchtowers down on the border; we would man vehicle checkpoints; we’d do escort duties and training exercises; and we’d perform patrols. Most of our patrolling was done on foot. This was for a good reason. The South Armagh branch of the IRA were specialists in roadside bomb ambushes. From my training in West Berlin I knew that to create a devastating bomb was alarmingly simple. The IRA knew that too. They placed their bombs in locations that they knew British soldiers were likely to pass, and they employed special scouts to record the security forces’ regular activities, so they knew where we were likely to be, and when. So travelling by vehicle was particularly dangerous. To the IRA it was simplicity itself to put a bomb in a culvert under the road or in a roadside ditch, where it could remain for weeks without being noticed. It became so dangerous to travel overland through South Armagh that most Army deliveries were made by helicopter into an airfield that had been set up in the small village of Bessbrook. And it was because vehicle travel was so hazardous that we tended to patrol more often on foot. There was still a risk of sniper fire, but it meant that we could vary our routes more easily and not fall prey to the Provos’ booby-traps.

During our training we had been shown a book that contained gruesome pictures of injured men. There was blood and gore everywhere, and bodies halfway between life and death. I remember looking at an image of a guy with a gunshot wound to the head and averting my eyes in disgust. My friends did the same. Revolted though we were by these pictures, we didn’t allow ourselves to be worried by them. Traumas like that had nothing to do with us. They were the kind of thing you would have expected to see in Vietnam, where there had been a real war. But in the UK? No way.

Looking back, it seems naive, but although we all knew that South Armagh was a potentially dangerous place to be, I don’t think any of us seriously thought we’d come to harm in Northern Ireland. Or if we did, we certainly never talked about it. Even the medical staff in the battalion, and the training NCOs who’d served previous tours in the Province, tended not to speak about the possibility of injury. It was taboo, off limits, something you just didn’t discuss back then. When a soldier goes on active duty, he doesn’t allow thoughts of what the enemy might do to him to prey on his mind. He can’t. Otherwise he’d never do anything.

We weren’t stupid. We knew there was the potential for rounds to be flying. We knew there was a likelihood of explosive devices—we’d been trained to search for them, after all. But for the first couple of months of our deployment in South Armagh everything seemed remarkably calm. No rounds were fired in anger; there were no bombs; we didn’t even have exposure to any anti-British feeling, and as far as I knew, that was true for the whole of 2 Para. All the little jobs I went on ran smoothly.

It seems strange to say it now, but I enjoyed myself during those first two months. I remembered the motto of No.1 Parachute Training School—‘Knowledge Dispels Fear’—and it was true. I felt that I’d been equipped with the right knowledge to counter anything that might come along, and I was too young—too green, I suppose—to worry about death or injury.

Some events cannot be predicted. Some horrors are too dreadful to imagine. They come without warning, out of the blue, when you’re looking the other way. And it doesn’t matter how long life has been uneventful. It doesn’t matter how prepared you are, or confident in your abilities. Sometimes it only takes a moment for life to change beyond recognition.

Knowledge might well dispel fear. But had I known that what was around the corner would be worse than any of the gory images of wounded soldiers we had been shown, I don’t doubt that I would have been filled with the kind of fear that no knowledge in the world could ever dispel.