MRF Shadow Troop

by Simon Cursey

  We carried out searches on suspicious youths on quite a few occasions, and confiscated knives and steel bars. Many times we had to send back lads, usually Protestant, who were trying to pass through Bishops Gate over to the Catholic areas of Bogside, obviously looking for trouble.

  I wasn’t very keen on the occasional night patrols. It always seemed very dark, leery and a little spooky over the ‘other’ side. We typically set off at about 22:30 hrs, making our way through the dismal Catholic streets towards Bogside. There were usually quite a few people hanging around in the streets, just watching us. Many people, mainly the older folk, seemed quite friendly and offered us tea and cakes as we passed them by. But others just stood, watching us like we were zombies or some kind of freaks. Every half an hour or so we stopped, took up fire positions in all-round defence and spent 15 to 20 minutes just hanging around in the shadows silently watching and listening. It all seemed a bit of a show, taking up fire positions: we had bullets but couldn’t use them if we were attacked, or we weren’t supposed to. But the locals didn’t know that, and looking the business probably helped keep us safe.

  I got quite a bit of a scare on one of these patrols. We had been out for about four hours around the Bogside area, walking and occasionally stopping to listen. On our way back, Geoff Napinski suggested we stop in the old derelict prison for a while, which was a few hundred metres along the road from Bishops Gate. We set ourselves up in all-round-defence to just observe and listen for a couple of hours. We arrived there at around 03:00 hrs and at that dead hour it was really spooky and I did not like it one little bit.

  As we moved in, passing by him kneeling, Geoff quietly indicated to us where he wanted us to position ourselves. He came around ten minutes later, to check our positions and brief us all on our arcs of fire and the escape routes he wanted us to use if we had to make a quick exit. He was just going through the standard operating procedures (SOPs) and we all had five rounds (bullets). But as the OC had said: in no event could we use them.

  ‘If we are attacked from this side, jump over that low wall behind you and make your way around to the front to our pre-arranged RV position,’ Geoff told me. ‘Keep your eyes and ears open and we’ll set off back at first light, about 05:30 hrs – and don’t fall asleep.’

  He needn’t have worried. For the next couple of hours I sat there silently, squatting up against that wall, eyes wide open staring into the ghostly darkness, ears straining to listen for any out-of-the-ordinary sounds. I spent the entire night imagining all kinds of things happening around me. There was no way I was going to fall asleep. I was far too scared to do that. To help pass the time and relieve the tension, I silently sang to myself a couple of my old favourite Roy Orbison songs, ‘Blue Bayou’ and ‘Penny Arcade’.

  The night passed slowly and by the time we were ready to leave, with the dawn breaking, I took a look over the low wall, my ‘avenue of escape’. To my horror, on the other side was a 30-foot drop to the street below. If I had jumped over there in the dark, it would have surely been the end for me.

  It became clear to me during my stay in Londonderry during the summer of 1969 that much of the rioting and aggression in the early days of The Troubles was instigated by groups of Protestant youths directing their anger at the Catholic minority. It was later that it turned the other way. One factor which helped to fuel this reversal was that the police and B-Specials were seen to be on the side of the Protestants during the early rioting and fighting. Later, when the Army took control of the streets, the situation calmed for a short period. Both sides were watching us closely, monitoring our intentions and actions. The Catholic minority was genuinely happy when the Army took over control in Londonderry that August. They felt we were there to protect them against the Protestants, as many of them told me. In fact, we were there to protect everyone against aggression, wherever it came from. Religion didn’t come into it as far as we were concerned.

  It was only later that the tables turned, when the Army was instructed to and was commonly seen to be standing on the Protestant side of the fences and barricades. Even though I was only 18 at the time, I had been in the Army for three years and I had a reasonable idea of what I was doing. I smelled the changes in the air and the tide turning before we finished our first tour in Ulster, by the end of September 1969. I had never heard of the IRA before, until the night that little old lady delivered her witch-like prophecy:

  ‘The IRA’s commin tae get yous lot.’

  By the early part of October we were all back in Colchester after handing over our part of Londonderry to another unit. It was fine to be back on familiar home ground, but I had found my Northern Ireland experience to be very interesting and it was a good learning curve. But within days of being back to our normal duties – together with evenings holding up the bar in The Grapes – the OC had news for us.

  ‘For our next posting, we will all be spending two years in north Germany as part of BAOR [British Army of the Rhine], with opportunities of training visits to Africa and Canada while we are there. But first we have to fulfil a commitment of a short tour of Northern Ireland again, in January. Sorry but I couldn’t get us out of it.’ He paused and smiled vaguely. ‘We obviously did a good job in Derry over the summer.’

  We were due over in Belfast in the New Year and after a few weeks’ leave most of December was filled with Northern Ireland training, which included the new riot-control techniques we had to learn, together with the issue of some new equipment. This included new helmets, new-style DPM (Disrupted Pattern Material) combat suits and improved respirators. We didn’t have the Kevlar armoured flak jackets at that time as they were issued a year or so later. The trouble in January 1970 wasn’t as bad as it got by January the following year, but the rioting and bombing incidents had worsened since we left in September.

  By the first week of January 1970 we were on our way to Ulster for our second tour within six months. This was due to us being based in the UK: there weren’t many other units to choose from. We were informed that we would be taking the ferry with our vehicles this time, from Liverpool direct to Belfast. After disembarkation, we would move to a location not far from the terminal on Donegal Quay, on the north-west side of the river.

  After we arrived and settled in to our accommodation, which was quite basic, we were heavily occupied with many briefing sessions for the first day or so, before taking to the streets on familiarity patrols with members of the outgoing unit.

  We had a pretty uneventful three months at our new location, an old warehouse near the Grove Playing Fields to the east of the M2, along from Donegal Quay. We spent most of our time on regular patrols around the local streets and carrying out VCPs (Vehicle Control/Check Points) on the country roads north of the city. This wasn’t a particularly hard area compared to other parts of Belfast. There were some minor incidents, but nothing that caused any gossip or anything worth writing home about. One good thing that happened for me was that I was put on a driving cadre (driving course) which took two weeks of driver training a couple of hours a day around the local streets, and at the end of it I took and fortunately passed my test. I don’t think there are many people that can say they took their driving test with a loaded submachine gun lying across their knees.

  At the end of March we had handed over to another unit and then were all back on the ferry to Liverpool, looking forward to another couple of weeks’ leave before preparing for our posting to Germany.

  When the time came we flew to Germany with only our personal equipment because we simply took over all the vehicles and heavy weapons from the outgoing unit there.

  I enjoyed Germany. Our duties mainly involved patrolling along the East-West German border area, together with regular battalion exercises, some of which lasted between ten days and two weeks. We’d all move off in our tracked armoured APC-432s, and spend the next fortnight driving around north Germany and living out of the back of these vehicles. Usually the summers were OK, but in winter it was extremely hard goi
ng. We broke down in our APC one time, miles from anywhere, and had to sit there on the edge of a remote forest waiting for recovery. All we could do was play cards and sunbathe for three days while we waited. Our food quickly ran short, so we lived for two days off corn-on-the-cobs which we stole from the nearby fields – quite tasty when grilled over an open fire. Our biggest problem was that we had to survive on one tea bag for the three days, six of us living off a five-second ‘dip’ twice a day.

  On the border guard-and-patrol duties, we often waved to the Soviet-Bloc troops as we patrolled past their watchtowers, which were dotted along the frontier, and the communists always smiled and vigorously waved back to us. To most people’s surprise, I generally enjoyed these patrols. It was interesting rolling along the frontier and being able to see our so-called enemy. Sometimes we were so close we could see the whites of their eyes.

  The best part of my time there, however, was leaving for our scheduled training visits to Canada and Africa. We spent about six weeks at Suffield training base, Canada, on advance-to-contact ‘live-firing’ exercises. We flew from Germany to Edmonton airbase via St John, Newfoundland, where we stopped off for a few hours’ break.

  Suffield training camp was a few miles from the small cowboy town of Medicine Hat in Alberta. It was a fairly comfortable place on the edge of an enormous training area. On our arrival, we took over all the vehicles and weapons, cleaning and checking them, before setting off on our first exercise. We’d return to base camp every five or six days to clean up and re-check all our equipment.

  We moved through the countryside as a tactical company of 100 troops in vehicles, taking on a variety of targets along the way. At night, we harboured in an LUP (laying up position) and planned our next day’s direction of advance, to carry on the war games. This lasted on-and-off for about five weeks. Then later, at the end of the exercise, after cleaning and packing away our equipment and weapons for the last time, we had another three weeks’ leave before flying back to Germany.

  Taking advantage of this, a few of us hired a big, gleaming Ford and set off touring around places like Calgary, Banff in the Rockies and a lovely place called Radium Hot Springs. The Banff Springs Hotel there was eccentric and wonderful hotel, made up in a Scottish theme: even the doormen were Scots dressed in kilts. Another hostelry we stopped at for a while on our way to Radium was a hotel on a cliff, overlooking a swimming complex with thermal pools everywhere. We had a great day there, swimming, eating and drinking. Most nights we crashed out in the car, two in the front, two in the back and one in the boot. In the morning we all washed in the river before setting off again. Being in the Army we were used to roughing it and didn’t think twice about the discomfort.

  On our return to Germany, everyone was talking about the death of the Rock Legend Jimi Hendrix, who had apparently collapsed at a party in London on September 18. A number of sleeping pills were found at the house in Notting Hill but the police felt there was no reason to suggest any foul play had taken place. Whatever the case, it was another of many signs that the 1960s were truly over. Altamont had been less than a year earlier, and Janis Joplin would be dead in a few weeks’ time. The atmosphere seemed to be somehow changing to something darker.

  The following year, on a visit to Kenya, with me promoted to lance corporal, we were involved in field training exercises for about five weeks, initially located near the village of Nanuki. But most of the time we were up in the hills, living in make-shift base camps in an area called Don Doll, practicing field-craft and patrolling in the bush and forests.

  The African trip was great, especially living out in the bush. Soon after our arrival at Don Doll, we had a task to repair and re-build an old road/track in the hills above our camp. A kind of ‘hearts and minds’ initiative for the local villagers. But we didn’t find it easy while the baboons on the cliff-tops above entertained themselves for most of the time by throwing rocks down on us.

  After racing around finding and putting on our steel helmets, we managed to finish the road in a couple of days, which pleased the locals. The Baboons must have thought it was great fun, screeching and jumping around, until we started throwing stones back at them. The villagers probably thought we were all crazy, involved in stone-age skirmishing with a pack of baboons.

  A day or so later, one of the cooks was told to set alight the cesspit where all the waste food was put. This needed to be done a few times a week, to stop animals creeping around the camp area at night. Then later, when it was burnt out, the pit would be covered with earth.

  It was his first time, and the young cook-house lad apparently overdid it with the petrol, emptying about two gallons over the slops. A moment later, he threw a lit match into the pit while he stood by the edge. After the enormous explosion, which bowled him over, the young lad emerged from the bellowing black smoke on his hands and knees, covered from head to foot in all sorts of smelly crap, and his hair had vanished. He was OK but far too embarrassed to discuss the incident with anyone.

  The combat engineer platoon designed our relaxation and bar area, cutting trees down by wrapping det-cord around the trunks and blowing them. They cleared away any unwanted tree stumps using explosives – great fun. Then the engineers redesigned all the convenient stumps with a chain saw to make chairs and bar stools for us to sit on while we got drunk most nights on ‘Tusker’ beer.

  Also, the combat engineer lads must have built the deepest toilet in Africa. By using a ‘Camaflay’ set, they drilled a neat 12 inch diameter hole approximately one hundred feet deep. Needless to say, we kept that young cook-house lad away from this pit with his can of petrol.

  At the end of this month-long training period living in the bush, the CSM announced that all junior ranks below Corporal had to be on parade in five minutes. He got us all strung out in one long line and told us to sit down and take off our left boot.

  ‘Today gentlemen,’ he began, ‘we’re having a mucky foot competition, and the one with the muckiest foot will be the winner.’ To our mutual surprise, most of our feet were quite clean.

  Your two feet are an important asset in the Infantry and we are always reminded to take care of them. However, when the CSM reached an older member, an ex-national service chap in our company who was known as a bit of a scruff, he went nuts. The guy’s feet were black with thick jungle dirt and on closer inspection we all noticed that his boots were full of holes, worn out with age and split along the sides. His boots were effectively full of mud and his feet stank like swamp water and had been like that for weeks. The CSM announced him as the winner and his prize was to buy us all (50 of us) a beer in the bar that night.

  We did manage a few days off at the end of our stay and some of us went off in a couple of our land rovers, visiting Lake Navasha, and later the game reserve at Samburu National Park – all great fun and just the kind of life I had been hoping for.

  On the day of our return to Germany we had a bit of fun at the airport in Nairobi. One of the guys in our platoon decided to take back loads of extra cigarettes. You could buy cigarettes quite cheaply in Germany but they were half the price in Kenya.

  This guy had hidden away in his kit and equipment very many extra cigarettes. He even decided to pull the springs out of his weapon magazines, filling them with about 30 cigarettes in each magazine, of which we all carried about eight, and then sealing them up. He also went as far as slotting cigarettes down the barrel of his rifle, which took about 15 end to end.

  Another nutty chap caught a little monkey about the size of a small cat wandering around our camp one day. He kept it as a pet for a while, feeding it, playing with it and taking it out on patrols with him. But when it came time to leave he decided to hide it in his kit bag, to smuggle it back to Germany so he could give it to his wife as a birthday present.

  Needless to say, they both got caught passing through the customs at Nairobi and had the cigarettes and monkey confiscated with just a slap on the wrist from the authorities. Back in Germany they were both charged f
or attempted smuggling, but received only a small fine for their stupidity. The officer-magistrate was probably struggling not to laugh.

  Back in Germany, nearing the end of the tour in November 1971, with us noticing miserably how much colder the northern European weather was than the African, word started going around that we were up for another tour of Northern Ireland, probably starting in March or April 1972. This was to be immediately followed in August by six months in Dover before perhaps a two-year posting to Hong Kong. My thoughts at that time were simple: ‘Great!’ Europe, Africa, Asia – I was becoming a real globe-trotter already. Ireland would be a doddle and only be for four months. What more could a young lad of 20 want?

  By Christmas, Belfast was confirmed for early March together with a few months in Dover later, but nothing so far was fixed for Hong Kong.

  Most of January and February 1972 was again spent on Northern Ireland riot-control training, together with familiarisation with some of the IEDs (improvised explosive devices) we might expect to come across. While Don McLean’s epic new song, ‘American Pie’ was racing up the charts, we were busy being issued with some new-style helmets and respirators together with our new, armoured, flak jackets. We hadn’t seen these jackets before and found them bulky and heavy, being made of a kind of woven fibreglass type of material. But we were told to carry them around most of the time, especially while training, to help us get used to the extra weight. The kind of training we had to undergo for Northern Ireland was based on riot-control techniques, prisoner handling and patrolling formations and techniques, together with familiarisation of the area we’d be responsible for during our forthcoming tour.