MRF Shadow Troop

by Simon Cursey

  The fact that our operation was established at this time is testament to the seriousness of the situation in Ulster. Somebody, somewhere very high up in the Army and in government, decided that an organisation of under-cover intelligence operators was badly needed as the eyes and ears – and the trigger finger – of an Army that was hampered by its disposition and rules of engagement. The British military was in need of a specialist under cover, covert group who were able, willing and capable to crawl down into the drains and sewers, seek out the enemy and confront the murders head on. However, what was most important of all; when it’s all over, they had the ability and mind set to step back up onto the curb.

  This is the previously untold story of the MRF, which stood for ‘Military Reaction Force’, a unit of approximately 30 men and a few women, specially chosen from elite Army units beginning sometime in late 1971. They were specially sifted, selected and trained to spy on and hunt down ‘hard-core’ terrorist killers, which Belfast was crawling with at the time. The aim was to beat them at their own game, striking fear deep into their hearts with expert and clinical brutality. We were a deadly ghost squad, a nightmare rumour in the guts of the baby-killers … a Shadow Troop.

  Chapter One – The Wall

  It was at the tender age of 14 that I decided Army life was the one I wanted to lead. At that time I was far more interested in the glossy recruitment posters and leaflets, which showed people enjoying life in sunny foreign places of lush white beaches and clear high mountains, than I was in guns, bombs and bullets. Lots of sport and lots of travel was what appealed to me the most. Initially, I never really considered the thought of military training, weapons and the possibility of being involved in wars – in little known places like Yemen, Northern Ireland and the Falkland Islands. I decided to join-up with the infantry, probably influenced by nothing more than the recruiting officer being an infantry man himself.

  He was a big guy wearing a dark blue peaked cap with a red trim around the edge. It was pulled low down over his eyes, which made him hold his chin up. He stood proudly with a variety of medals spread over his chest. I felt like a little mouse looking up at him, thinking he must be some kind of hero and as hard as nails.

  Looking down his crooked nose at me he said, in his harsh and gravelly voice, ‘The best way to get involved in sports with lots of travel, my lad, is to be in the infantry. The infantry travels to different parts of the world for long-term postings like a big family group. In other units,’ he added, ‘you’ll probably travel as well, but more as an individual, and it may be more difficult to get into the sports scene unless you have some specific talents.’ My main sporting interests at that time included swimming, high board diving and athletics. I realise now they were all individual sports rather than team ones. I’d never been one for games like football or cricket and always preferred the more technical activities where you pitched yourself against machinery, the elements, and most of all yourself. The list ran to cars, bikes and boats, together with world championship boxing and ski racing. I was especially mad about boxing – it carried a terrific freight of glamour at the time and I was quite good at it.

  Henry Cooper had been beaten just a few weeks earlier in May 1966 by a black US fighter called Cassius Clay. The ref stopped the fight in the sixth after a deep gash opened over Cooper’s left eye, and afterwards Clay visited Cooper in his dressing room and apologised for drawing blood. ‘It’s against my religion,’ he said, which was an interesting remark from somebody who had decided to become a professional boxer.

  Anyway, it was boxing all the way for me and that was my sport for the first two years of my Army career. Clay – soon to change his name to Mohammed Ali – went the opposite way, refusing to join the US Army and having his boxing licence revoked for his pains.

  Coming across me, wanting to join the infantry without needing any prompting or persuasion, the recruiting officer was lost for words, probably for the first time in his life. This was the sixties and the hippy counter-culture was starting to boil up a good head of steam. Who wanted to join the Army when you could turn on, tune in and drop out? In those days, many of the young lads in the infantry were sent there by the probation service or magistrates offering them a simple choice: Army or prison. Remember that bitter memories of conscription from World War Two were still fresh among the recruits’ parents’ generation; and National Service – widely resented – had only ended in 1960. I’m sure some of the kids chose prison!

  I originally signed up for the forces at York recruiting office in June 1966 after the medical check, but I couldn’t actually join my Army unit until I finished school, in fact in August, because I’d missed the April intake. So I had to sit it out, whiling away the time going for long walks in the Dales and swimming at the local pool during the summer holidays.

  ‘I’ll be a soldier, come September,’ I boasted to my friends as I worked at getting my fitness levels up and earned some money as a waiter and dishwasher at a local hotel. They were already beginning to grow their hair long; I can’t recall what they thought of me.

  On 30 July 1966 we had a big party at the hotel, with everyone crowded into the main restaurant. England had just won the World Cup against West Germany and we watched the match huddled around the TV in the restaurant with most of the guests. It was a time of sunny optimism – we were world champions and I was about to start a new life.

  By the end of that summer, with a bit of cash from the hotel job in my pocket, my bags packed and a travel warrant in my hand, I was off at the age of fifteen and a half on an adventure of fun, travel and sport courtesy of H.M. Armed Forces. Or so I thought.

  My parents were none too keen on the idea of me leaving home at that age. I was and remain the baby in the family, and I fought to make my decision prevail (at that age my parents possessed a legal veto over my career decision). Eventually, after many heated discussions, they accepted it, but my older brother best voiced their main objection when he said, ‘You must be stupid joining the Army. You’ll get nowhere and just end up as cannon fodder. If you go, you should at least learn a trade.’ I was so innocent back then that I wasn’t even sure what ‘cannon fodder’ was. I imagined it was some type of special food only served in the Army.

  In early September, my father and brother took me to the local railway station. We sat and had a farewell coffee in the station café while we waited for the train. We didn’t have much of a conversation while we sat there, more of a companionable silence to be honest, although my brother said to make sure to stay in touch and let Mum know how things were going.

  After a two-hour train journey I was collected at the end station by an Army green bus with a group of about 30 other boys my age. Half an hour later we arrived at the Army camp, home of a Junior Leader Battalion in the north of England. Junior Leader Battalions, which were cut in 1985, were very much like military college, with mornings of education and afternoons of military training.

  On arrival, the first thing we had to do after dropping our bags on our beds and checking around our accommodation, was to line up outside our barrack room. A big ugly sergeant was there, like the recruiting sergeant looking down his nose at us from under his hat, with a face like the dark side of the moon that looked like he’d lost a lot of fights.

  It was my very first experience of having orders such as, ‘Get into line!’ and ‘Stand bloody still!’ screamed into my face.

  After shuffling ourselves into some kind of snake-like queue, he began growling his orders at us while we tried unsuccessfully to keep in step, tripping over each other’s heels. We were then marched down to the camp barber to receive our shapeless Army haircuts. Sitting, waiting, in the little saloon by the NAAFI, we had no choice but to gaze in silent horror. Other hapless recruits still lined up outside peered through the windows behind us, over our shoulders, transfixed as if by some gruesome surgery. The butcher/barber happily whistled while he carved up our wonderful ‘mods and rockers’ hair styles, which many of us had all spent
months or even years cultivating. Some of the guys were actually crying real tears as their amputated locks tumbled to the floor.

  Afterwards, we were again marched off, stumbling over each other in our twisted line, to be issued with our baggy over-sized uniforms at the quartermaster’s dungeon. There, we had to throw our flared trousers and brightly coloured shirts into a jumbled pile in the corner of the room, to be wrapped up and returned to us much later. After getting fitted out with our uniforms, boots, equipment and oddments, we had to fill in a stack of documentation which needed to be completed before dinner that evening. We were told that if we moved independently around the camp area, we must ‘march’ in groups (squads) of four to six, and that when carrying KFS (your knife, fork and spoon – or diggers) we had to hold them behind our back in our left hand. The right hand had always to be free so we could salute any officers when we met them.

  That first evening, after dinner – which I thought was actually quite nice, being roast beef, Yorkshire pudding, chips and peas, followed by a big rum and raisin sponge pudding – we all had to get together for our introductory briefing. It was given at the education centre in the middle of the camp, a pleasant building with large glass cabinets lining the interior walls, displaying Army uniforms from different periods in military history. There were many wooden plaques commemorating battles dating far back to the days of empire in India. In fact it was more like a museum than an education centre, come to think of it. As we all tumbled and piled in through the doorway, we were confronted by another big man, this time in officer’s uniform.

  ‘Come on in, you lads. Take a seat, take your hats off, keep quiet and no smoking.’

  He must have thought we were older ‘Training Company’ recruits and perhaps didn’t realise we were all under 16 and that none of us smoked anyway. The Training Company recruits were usually aged between 18 and 20, and received only 12 weeks’ training before going off to their units. We, on the other hand, were there for two years until we were seventeen-and-a-half, before moving on to our chosen units.

  After we had shuffled ourselves about and settled down, he introduced himself. ‘I’m Captain Blyth of the Training Wing and I will be your OC [Officer Commanding] until further notice. Also, the three corporals with the sergeant standing behind you are all called “Staff” … Don’t look now, look later.’

  He continued, giving us details of our training programme for the next six months and which included barrack discipline, fitness training, foot drill, weapon training and shooting, and of course education in the mornings. Barrack discipline was code for endless cleaning and polishing tasks. The biggest shock for me was when he explained that we were basically prisoners.

  ‘OK, you boys get your barracks in order, get them cleaned and tidied, because tonight at 22:30 hrs I’m holding your first inspection. Also, for the next six months none of you are allowed out of camp.’ Perhaps he saw the look on our faces. ‘If you work hard, maybe we’ll give you a weekend pass at the end of February.’

  I leaned over and whispered to a new pal, ‘Jesus, six months stuck in this camp. I don’t know if I’ll be able to get through all this.’

  ‘Yes, but it’ll be OK, the time will fly by after we get busy.’

  Just then I thought to myself perhaps I’d made a mistake and that it was going to be too tough. Not physically – that was all right by me – but mentally or something, in a way that didn’t gel with who I was, and that I had taken a very wrong turning. I was used to doing what I wanted, and at that moment I thought maybe the whole Army regime was something that might not suit me.

  We all arrived in a group of about 30 lads that day and we stayed together as one platoon for the whole time we were there. However, quite a few other boys had arrived the day before and altogether we made up three platoons, making one company of about 80 or 90 boys. That’s when I learned the Army is all about threes: three companies make a battalion, three battalions a regiment, three regiments a brigade, three brigades a division, three of them a corps, and so on.

  The following six months were quite tough but the time did indeed fly past, filled with school classes in the mornings – covering the usual subjects of English, Maths, Geography and History – and military training in the afternoons. As promised by Captain Blyth, it involved lots of foot drill, weapons training, field-craft and shooting on the ranges. Almost every evening, for that first six months we had a room inspection, which meant continuous cleaning and polishing of everything that stood still. The ugly sergeant would always arrive before the OC and give us all a real tough time, shouting and throwing things about in anger when he decided they weren’t clean and sparkling. The OC would turn up in a bad mood half an hour later and again everything was thrown up in the air. He would even tip over our beds. Sometimes we’d be sitting up until 03:00 hrs cleaning the toilets and showers, so to be ready for another punishment inspection in the morning.

  As time went by and we began to understand the required standard, the inspections became less aggressive. I preferred the military training to the education and found myself longing for lunch time, so we could grab some food before drawing the weapons. We also had to spend lots of time in the gym, mixed with scampering about on the elevated confidence course. There were also regular cross-country runs around the range area behind camp, alternated with tiring 15-mile route marches a couple of times a week that weaved around the local villages and gave us the chance to wave to the girls as we passed by them.

  Saturday morning was ‘Assault Course Day’, when we all had to thrash around the camp’s obstacle course for a couple of hours, getting totally wet through and scratched to pieces as we tried to master a variety of traps and challenges. These included the rope water jump, tunnels, monkey rails and the notorious ‘12-foot wall’ which dominated the end of the course – and us, when we stood next to it. I was five feet five inches tall when I was 15 and ‘That Wall’ seemed overpowering and quite menacing to most of us. It even gave us nightmares, as if it was some impregnable barrier to our future lives. We all spent many evenings gathered around with pens and paper, planning possible ways of getting over it as a team. During those early months we also had regular inter-platoon assault course competitions, although we never won, as many in my platoon were frankly quite short, weak and spindly. However, having said that, we did quite well and better than the other platoons at shooting on the ranges, which proves brawn doesn’t count for everything. Also, we were much better at the field-craft activities – patrolling, radio communications, camouflage and concealment, and advance-to-contact-section battle drills/formations.

  In time, we did eventually manage to master the techniques to get over that damn wall, which we did by formulating and building a specially-designed human pyramid. It began with the tallest five or six lads at the bottom and the smallest going up first, most of whom stayed on top and pulled the others up after. After we cracked it we enjoyed the assault course days so much that a bunch of us often spent our ‘free Sunday’ practicing there, until we were marinated in filth, scared and exhausted, but having a great time. Later, we all piled into the cook-house canteen for evening dinner, looking (and smelling) like shit and attracting some strange comments from all the others, which at that age we all thought was really good fun. We were just kids, really. But we were getting good.

  By the time October came around we realised we had all slowly grown fitter and fitter. We were beginning to feel pleased and even proud, but on the twenty-first came news that genuinely affected us all as no other had done. At about 09:15 hrs that morning, just as the pupils were beginning their day’s lessons, a vast spoil heap from the local colliery slid down into the village of Aberfan in Wales and totally smothered the local school, Pantglas Junior. More than 130 people were buried, most of them children, 116 of whom died. The last body was recovered almost a week after the disaster, and in one classroom 14 bodies were found. The body of Mr Beynon, the deputy headteacher, was discovered clutching five children in his arms
as if he was protecting them. It took the wind out of our sails, the kids not being much younger than us, really; that and the idea of the vulnerability of the innocent, and that they should be protected. That’s something that stayed with me.

  February soon arrived: I had grown four inches and put on six pounds in weight. I had muscles. I had big lungs. At last it was announced that we were to be issued with ‘weekend passes’ so we could enjoy a couple of days off. But the problem was, we were given the passes at about 20:00 hrs on the Friday evening. I immediately checked the bus times and train connections to get me home that night. I’m from Leyburn in North Yorkshire, and to my dismay I discovered that I had missed the last connection that night and there was no chance to be home before lunch time on Saturday. So much for the weekend pass.

  However (this is where the training kicks in), desperate to get out of camp and go home for the whole weekend, I decided to walk and hitch-hike even though it was more than 20 miles across country, overnight, and in freezing February rain. It really was bitterly cold that evening and the other lads thought I was nuts, but I said, ‘Come on you pussies, it’s nothing. We can all do 20 miles any day, whatever the weather.’ And it was true, except that it was night not day, of course. It had got to the stage, without me even noticing, that I could take a 20-mile yomp in my stride, so to speak.

  I wrapped myself up in some warm woollies, jeans and combat jacket, packed my rucksack with all my dirty washing for mum (naturally), laced on my army boots and was away. I must have looked like a short-haired toy version of John Rambo as I signed out in the Guard Room at about 21:30 hrs.