No other Marine has since been allowed to attend the SBS selection course straight out of recruit training. For whatever reasons they scrapped the whole idea after my course. I was in by the skin of my teeth.
I had changed substantially since I had left home, physically and mentally. It’s as if I had grabbed an express train and crashed out of adolescence and into adulthood. Life seemed as if it was all about getting to the top of one ladder to find oneself at the bottom of another. But there was no doubt which direction I was headed. I never gave a thought to the dangers of the job. I never stopped to think how the chances of biting the big one were many times greater than as a civilian. I was soon to get my first lesson in that fact and would receive reminders once or twice a year throughout my career.
The first SBS operative to congratulate me was also the first SBS member I talked with before the course. I had been placed on camp guard duty. His name was Chris and he was the duty corporal in charge of the guard for that night. He was one of the new breed of soldiers in special forces, an intelligent man with a broad, hungry outlook on the squadron and its future. He had been surprised when I told him I was in Poole to do the selection course. He knew I had just come from CTC, but he was genuine when he wished me luck. The day I passed the course he grinned as he shook my hand warmly. He said he liked to see the system bucked now and then.
‘You can take my place. I’m out in six months,’ he said.
I did not know him well, but I was immediately disappointed. Here was I doing everything I could to be accepted, and here was a man where I was aiming to be who was not content with his lot. The reason turned out to be simple and understandable. His wife was pregnant with twins and he wanted to be with them as they grew up. He was studying to be a youth probation officer and would have a job waiting for him the day he went outside. He explained that, although life in the SBS was great, it would not allow him to spend enough time with his family. I’ll remember him as the first Marine to make me feel welcome within the corps as well as the SBS. A few months later I saw the entire squadron gathered in one place for the first time. It was at Chris’s funeral. He had died while pioneering a dangerous infiltration technique from a submarine only weeks before he was due to go outside.
The last night outside O’Sally’s house was more windy than previous nights. Noises and movement surrounded me. Each night increased the odds on O’Sally and his partner coming and still they had not shown. I was growing old fast.
A clicking sound alerted me. It was the pre-arranged signal from my SAS partner. I returned it and he walked out from behind the building and came towards me. He approached casually, his weapon held low, as if somehow he knew there was no danger.
‘The op’s been pulled,’ he said. ‘We have to break down the hide then head to the pick-up.’
‘Why?’
‘O’Sally ain’t comin’,’ he shrugged, not knowing any more than that.
I climbed off my perch and, as I walked away, I looked back at the spot where I had spent hours of my life, all for nothing, it seemed.
In the pick-up car an SAS sergeant was seated in front beside the driver. My partner and I sat in the back, wrapped in civilian coats, wiping the worst of the cam-cream off.
The sergeant leaned around and said, ‘According to the tout, O’Sally has been home twice. Three nights ago and tonight. Both times were just after midnight.’
I could not believe my ears.
The sergeant looked at me when he said, ‘And he used the back door.’
My partner threw me a look.
That got my back up instantly.
‘Even if I had fallen asleep O’Sally would’ve had to step over me to get into his house,’ I said.
The SAS sergeant’s look was not accusing. ‘It ain’t you, mate. Something’s fucked up.’
I sat there in disbelief as we drove on.
At the debrief in the TV room we learned we had been sitting outside the wrong address. RUC Special Branch was blamed as they had provided the intelligence. O’Sally’s house was the next one along, less than half a mile down the road.
I spent much of that night awake in my caravan, thinking about it all. What if we had been given the right address? O’Sally would be dead by now, I told myself. I would have had him. I was certain. I had played up his toughness in my head too much, as I always did. I would have seen him seconds before he would have seen me, and I would have blown his head clean off before he squeezed that trigger.
I remained convinced of that for many months until I heard news that caused me to wonder all over again what my fate might have been. A few miles from where I had spent those nights waiting for O’Sally, he had faced two men from special forces in a similar situation. He killed one and seriously wounded the other.
4
When I first saw Northern Ireland it was through the cabin window of a C130 transport aircraft. I did not look upon it as a country of lush, green beauty, rambling hills and winding roads through quaint towns and villages that were centuries old. To me the commanding hilltops hid snipers, hedgerows were booby-trapped and country roads invited ambush. I doubt I will ever see Ireland any other way, certainly not as long as the Troubles continue.
That first year in Northern Ireland had begun badly for special forces when Robert Nairac, a liaison officer (non-badged) to the SAS, was kidnapped by Provo and IRA sympathisers while leaving the Three Steps Inn near the border in South Armagh. The fact that he should not have been there, alone, posing as a local, is by the by. He paid dearly for his adventure and, as usual, the press provided some highly creative reports of the incident.
Revenge was never a factor even when we lost one of our own. Not generally, anyhow. We had a job to do and it had its pros and cons. One day it was in Northern Ireland, another day somewhere else in the world. But in Northern Ireland the job was different from other places because we had to play by a specific set of rules. The referees were world politicians and the media. Points would be deducted for foul play, on our side only, and the IRA could do anything they wanted as long as they eventually said sorry. We were aware that in the eyes of much of the world England was the bad guy and its special forces lurked in the shadows of Northern Ireland like the trolls of Mordor. It did not bother us in the slightest. We knew it was not who we were or what we did that defined our image. It was where we did it. In the Falklands and Gulf Wars, for instance, we were heroic. It seemed that the media pretty much controlled how the average person perceived the situation. We had little respect for journalists. Throughout my career, reporters always seemed to invent what they did not know and misinterpret what they saw.
There was some bitterness when rumours circulated about the torture Nairac went through before the IRA killed him. We knew all about the IRA’s interrogation techniques, which they practised most often on their own people. The first torture victim I saw had been a tout. He was hanging by his wrists from the rafters of a barn and had been slowly killed with an oxyacetylene torch applied to various parts of his naked body, the majority of the burns being on his penis and testicles.
Nairac was an SAS man as far as the Provisionals were concerned and the temptation to get information from him during his interrogation was irresistible. In war, when a captive is known to hold valuable information, he can expect to be interrogated. The quality of the interrogation depends on the sophistication and malice of the captor. Nairac’s capture was not a major security concern. It was standard procedure to cancel every operation remotely connected to an operative who had been taken alive. The IRA knew that. They operated in the same way. We expected Nairac’s body to turn up when they had executed him, but when, after several days, it did not it was because the IRA had elected to hide or destroy it for what they obviously considered to be a sound reason. Nairac’s body has never been found to this day. There was no advantage in withholding the body apart from some minor bluff tactic. If anything, it was damaging to the IRA not to hand it over as it denied his family the chance to give him a Christian burial which Catholics everywhere found deplorable. The IRA did not give up the body simply because of the brutality to which it had been subjected. It might have had an adverse effect on the media attention the IRA was constantly enjoying regarding the ‘tough treatment’ of their own ‘political’ prisoners.
After arriving at base camp, I paired up with the SAS trooper I was to have my first outing with. Norman was his name. He was an interesting man of few words with the stoop and facial expressions of early man. I looked forward to learning something from this experienced trooper. After a ground orientation period of a few days I was called to a briefing with Norman. I was excited to be going on my first job. It was midnight when we set off together in the back of a civilian van driven by two SAS lads. The entire province was covered in a thick fog. Norman was in charge as I was the new boy on the block, though I don’t think he knew how new I was. I squatted opposite him on the cold floor of the van as it trundled over bumpy, narrow roads that wove through the countryside. We didn’t exchange a word. We were dressed in regular cammies over thermal longjohns and our faces were blacked out. Our backpacks contained spare radio batteries, extra warm clothes, a sleeping bag, medical supplies, and food and water for several days. Our job was to relieve two operatives in a long-term observation position (OP) passed on by the previous SAS tour that had left the province the day we arrived.
Norman peeked through the curtains at the front of the van, between the driver and passenger. He compared what he saw with his map and told the driver to drop us off here. The van slowed to a crawl, I slid the door open and we climbed out with our equipment. The van was still moving as I slid the door nearly closed. The passenger’s job was to hold the door closed from the inside, but without slamming it locked, until the van was out of the area. The fog was thinner here with visibility at fifty yards. I crouched in the darkness on the short, narrow pavement against the wall of the only house in the area and scanned around. It was as quiet as a grave after our van left. Both sides of the road were lined with hedges. Directly across the road was the only other structure, an old derelict stone cottage with a broken thatched roof. Norman’s brow was furrowed and his bottom lip was wrapped up over his top one as he scanned around. The lesson I learned that night was, no matter what your responsibility is in a team, be it the lowest in rank, in a plane or on a boat or at the rear of a battalion snake, always have a map of the area and know exactly where you are at all times. I did not know exactly where I was and I was curious as to why we had dropped off against an occupied building.
‘How far are we from the target?’ I whispered as I pulled my pack on in preparation for an expected mile or so yomp across country.
‘This house is the target,’ he said, indicating the one I was leaning against with its lights on inside.
He pointed to the derelict cottage across the road, the only other structure around, and said, ‘That’s the OP.’
Headlights approached in the distance so, before I got a chance to ask the obvious, we picked up our stuff and hurried across the road and around the back of the derelict cottage. We climbed up the back wall and in through the partially collapsed roof to find the SAS trooper and my SBS colleague we were here to relieve. They had seen us drop off in front of them and my SBS colleague gave me a questioning look which I did not wish to answer in mixed company.
As I removed my pack there was a pounding on the bolted front door of the derelict building. We snatched up our weapons and spread back inside ready to return any fire.
A man’s voice shouted, ‘Would you SAS get the fock outta moy shed. Der’s nottin’ for you to see here.’
He walked briskly across the road, into the house opposite and slammed the front door shut. I don’t know why he thought we were SAS men. We had done nothing to suggest we were soldiers of that quality.
It was not the last time Norman was to drop off in the wrong place. His next time, a few years later, was to be far more memorable and only just missed by millions of people all over the world. He was one of the SAS entry men on the Iranian Embassy siege in London.
There are two conflicting versions to this story. They both begin in the same way, with Norman alongside the rest of his SAS team, many of them the same lads I shared my first Northern Ireland tour with. They were all in the Pagoda Team by then, on one of the balconies of the Iranian Embassy, ready to go in. Seconds before ‘Go! Go! Go!’ Norman fell off his balcony and landed on the one below. He got to his feet and realised he was alone with no hope of climbing back up to the others in time. Suddenly all hell erupted as explosions signalled the combined entry of the various teams surrounding the embassy. Norman made an instant decision to storm this part of the embassy alone. With his MP5 levelled he burst in through the balcony windows. It is from this point on that the two stories differ.
The following is Norman’s version.
On crashing in through the balcony windows he saw, across the far side of the room, a masked terrorist with a pistol held at the head of a desperately frightened hostage. Norman confidently went for the difficult head-shot, immediately aimed and squeezed the trigger of his MP5, but the first round in the chamber was faulty and failed to fire. The odds on this happening are apparently one in 10,000 for this type of bullet (the very same thing happened to me on a rehearsal many years later – I still have the bullet as a reminder). The terrorist took advantage of Norman’s misfire and moved his pistol from the hostage’s head to aim it at Norman. Norman moved like lightning and, with a dexterity that comes only with years of practice, let go of his MP5, letting it swing on its harness under his left arm while his right hand swiftly reached down for his 9mm pistol at his right hip. Before the terrorist could squeeze off a round, Norman drew his pistol, slick as any Wild West gunfighter, and fired a double-tap straight through the terrorist’s head, killing him instantly. The hostage broke down and thanked Norman for saving his life.