by Andy McNab
Frank shook his head sadly. 'We were called together by the new OC. We thought it was to announce another delay, but a Sea King had crashed while cross-decking between ships at night. About twenty from D and G Squadrons and their signallers were dead. All of us had friends in that helicopter.'
Then, on 8 June, two transport ships, Sir Galahad and Sir Tristram, were hit by Argentine jets in Bluff Cove. Dozens of soldiers were killed or burnt, most of them Welsh Guards. All of a sudden, the mainland op was back on.
'We were due to take off at 0700.' Nish was now blowing smoke rings. 'I was in the baggage party, humping gear into the cargo hold. A Land Rover screamed up and we heard the news: the op had been cancelled. One of the newspapers had gone and published a story about us practising for a mainland operation! Within hours, the Argies had moved their aircraft away from the airfields and scattered them in ones and twos.'
B Squadron were deployed instead to join D Squadron on an assault on Port Stanley airport.
'We were going to fly down there in two C-130s so the Argies couldn't get all the Special Forces with one hit.' Frank smacked his neck and killed a mozzie. 'We were going to do a wet landing and be picked up by ships in the area. Next morning, our two C-130s took off. The flight was thirteen hours – a long time when you're sweating in a dry suit.'
Finally, the plane lost altitude, and they could see ships below.
I couldn't see the other plane with Nish aboard but I knew it was ahead of us. We circled. We circled some more. Suddenly we were gaining height and flying back in the direction we'd come from.
The jumpmaster appeared, waving his hands. 'It's off, no jump.' Back at Ascension Island after twenty-six hours' flying, they were told they had six hours before re-boarding and flying back.
'That was when we learnt why we'd been sent back . . .'
14
Frank handed over with a flourish. Nish gave a huge grin and smoke poured from his mouth. 'Fucking right. We reached the convoy and prepared for a static-line jump from a thousand feet, directly off the ramp.'
Their dry suits would give them about five minutes in the water before they froze, so it was all down to the navy. There were twenty-one guys, but only seven could jump on each pass because there weren't enough inflatables to pick them up. Nish was in the second stick.
'Red light, green light . . . I sat under my canopy, watching the last guy in the first stick just missing the stern of a ship. Ten feet from the water, I hit the release box and dropped away from the rig. Fuck me, the water was cold. Huge swells.' Nish's hand moved up and down. 'The coxswains were surfing down the waves to get to us. They pulled me on board and the Herc made a final pass and dropped all the kit. Bang . . .' Nish punched one hand into the other. 'The whole fucking lot burst open and sank. Bergens, weapons, personal stuff, everything.'
The drop was halted. The aircraft turned back to Ascension.
Nish giggled. 'When they did the final tally-up, the blokes were claiming enough lost kit to sink a couple of battleships. I lost a couple of Rolexes and a mink coat in my Bergen.'
He took a big suck from a brand new No. 6. 'We were on the deck, waiting to be heli'd in, when they announced white flags had been seen over Port Stanley. Story of my life.' Nish held his thumb and forefinger half an inch apart. 'So near, and yet so fucking far . . .'
Frank got up to bin it for the night. Nish picked up a log and lobbed it like a warning shot across a ship's bow.
Tiny wagged his finger. 'C'mon, Frank, what's the most Christian way for a soldier to kill a man?'
Frank was uncomfortable, but happy to defend his views. 'There is no Christian way to kill . . .'
'OK, then, as a Christian soldier, would you kill any differently?'
'No. You've still got to nullify the threat. In Romans thirteen it says something like, "He does not bear the sword for nothing for he is God's servant, an agent of wrath to bring God's punishment on the evil-doer." '
'What the fuck does that mean?'
'Killing is sometimes the best way to save life.'
'You going to heaven after all this, Frank?'
'I believe in the afterlife. Death is the next great adventure.'
'You think Jesus would have passed Selection?'
'He lasted forty days and nights in the desert, didn't he? Christ was hard.'
'You still coming over the water, then, or you off to Bible college?' Tiny was getting bored with the non-biting Frank. He leant back and stretched. He was going to get his head down too.
Frank got up, scratched around. He'd heard it all before. Chris looked up and smiled. 'No, come on, Frank, what are you going to do?'
'I'll do my job, like everybody else.'
I looked around me, bewildered. 'Are we going over the water?'
He nodded.
'When?'
Chris laughed. 'We get a long weekend off and then we start training. Soon as we get back, it's out of this lot and into jeans and trainers.'
That night, I lay in my A-frame as the rain pounded the shelter sheet and thought about Frank. He was a complicated piece of work. It was as if being Frank Collins wasn't enough.
He'd gone into the army to escape the fighting, alcoholism and misery at home and joined 264 Signal (SAS) squadron, then passed Selection as one of the youngest ever. During the embassy siege he had taken a pillow up onto the roof during the many stand-tos for an assault. He reasoned he might as well get some sleep while he waited. When the assault finally happened, Frank was number one into the building.
The Royal Signals had a strange system when one of their own passed Selection: they wanted him back after three years. But Frank had changed that system for ever. When it was his time to return he'd simply refused and said he'd rather quit. It was a risky bluff, but it worked. Maybe, though, just like his conviction about God, he would have carried it through.
15
It was a shock, but a good shock. I was excited about going back to Northern Ireland. I'd been there on plenty of tours with the Green Jackets, doing all the normal army town patrols in places like Crossmaglen and Belfast, but ultimately we were just mobile Figure-11 targets.
It was nearly seven years since I'd started my first tour, at Christmas 1977. So many seventeen-year-old soldiers had been killed in the early years of the Ulster emergency that you now had to be eighteen before you could serve there. So, when the battalion had left on 6 December, I couldn't join them: I had to wait until my birthday at the end of the month.
I was in Crossmaglen, a cattle-market town known to us as XMG, right on the border, in bandit country. This meant the players could prepare on the other side, in Dundalk, then pop over and give us the good news, or just rig up their mortars in the south and get a few rounds down on us.
We didn't use vehicles because so many had been blown up by improvised explosive devices (IEDs). Everything came in by helicopter, but even they weren't immune. Our CO (officer commanding a regiment), Corton-Lloyd, was killed when one was brought down as he left the location. By the time peace was finally declared in the Good Friday Agreement in 1998, more than 2,300 civilians had been killed in Northern Ireland. So, too, were more than 950 members of the security forces – a greater number than so far in Iraq and Afghanistan combined.
It was in XMG that I first met a guy from the Regiment. At least, I thought he was. I didn't see him for the first two months I was there, but I knew his name was Rob, and was told he wore a dirty white submariner's polo-neck jumper, minging jeans and wellies, and lived near the operations room. I'd go past his door sometimes, hear the hiss of radios and catch a glimpse of maps of South Armagh. His place was a dump: there were Bergens, belt kit, old crisps packets everywhere. But no Rob.
Then he turned up in the washrooms one day and didn't look at all as I'd expected. He could have been anyone in a crowd. He was wearing just a pair of pants, T-shirt and flip-flops. His washing and shaving kit consisted of a toothbrush and a bit of soap in a plastic cup from a vending machine. We, at the bottom of the food chain,
had been told not to talk to him.
'All right, mate?' He was from up north somewhere.
I'd smiled back through a face full of shaving cream. Not that I needed to shave that much at eighteen. 'All right.'
That was as far as my introduction to the Regiment went from Rob. I was to see him quite a lot in H (Hereford) in the future, but never got round to asking if he remembered the zit-covered dickhead in the washroom.
That tour had been the first time I'd had to shoot at real live people, and the first time a friend had been killed in front of me. Nicky Smith was a year older than me when he got blown in half by a booby trap on the outskirts of town. His head was cut off diagonally at the neck, and his lower legs were missing. The bit in the middle was intact – badly messed up, but intact. I felt his blood splatter on my face, could smell the flesh that now hung from a fence, and it took hours to find his left foot.
It was an abrupt end to soldiering just being a good laugh. I still had Nicky's map: I'd picked it up from the bloodstained street to remind me this was serious business.
It was a different story when the Special Air Service showed up. These were the guys who carried the war to the Provisional IRA (PIRA), the Irish National Liberation Army (INLA) and the rest. What they did was proactive and aggressive. And now, wearing jeans and trainers rather than helmet and body armour, I was going to be joining them.
Frank left for the Cameron Highlands the next day to do his hearts-and-minds thing. I was happy he could dodge the flak for a while. Everyone gave him a hard time, but I knew now it was only out of concern – for his wellbeing, and their own. We depended on each other for our lives, and if Frank's finger hesitated on the trigger because of stuff a guy had allegedly been spouting a couple of thousand years ago, well, it was just plain scary. At the same time, I was sorry he wasn't there. It's fun to take the piss out of someone, and if the other lads didn't have him as the butt of their jokes, they might turn their attention to somebody else.
I wondered what the next few months held in store. I was still on probation. I was still on an infantry sergeant's pay, but it was less than a qualified trooper earned in the SAS.
To qualify for Special Forces' pay I still had to get a patrol skill. Everyone has to have signals – if the shit hits the fan you've got to be able to shout, 'Help!'
I would also need my entry skill. Mobility Troop need to know how to drive a whole range of vehicles; divers need to be able to dive; Mountain Troop need to get themselves up and down hills; in Air Troop, we needed to know how to freefall. No patrol skill, no extra pay, but it was Catch 22: we wouldn't be paid unless we'd got the qualifications to do the job – but we couldn't get the qualifications because we were too busy doing it.
Seven Troop was off to Northern Ireland; the other three troops would comprise the counter-terrorism team.
Chris gave me another bit of good news. We were going to Oman as soon as we got back from over the water, and would be on a 'fast glide'. I eventually found out that meant military freefall training, and we'd be doing it for weeks on end. And I discovered, at last, the reason we needed sunglasses: it's no good having an expensive aircraft sitting doing nothing because the weather's closed in, so it's cheaper and more effective to go somewhere with a guarantee of sunny skies. And where there's sun, there has to be ice cream.
I needed my entry skill before the Oman trip so that when the other blokes in the troop mentioned riggers, risers, brakelines, baselines or flare I'd understand what the fuck they were talking about.
The public image of the SAS is synonymous with Land Rovers screaming around the desert, men in black abseiling down embassy walls, or freefallers leaping into the night. But freefall, like the other entry skills, is just a means of getting from A to B.
To count myself proficient I would have to be able to jump as part of a patrol and keep with the others in the air at night on oxygen, with full equipment loads weighing in excess of 120 pounds. Basically, I would have to get up there and jump my arse off until the entry phase of the operation became second nature. If the entry phase went wrong, there would be a domino effect of cock-ups.
For all that, it was addictive, from what I'd heard round the fire. There were world-class freefall jumpers in the Regiment, people who had represented the UK in international competitions. Nish, for all his farts and eccentricity, was one of them.
16
Al was worried about Frank. Not so much about him getting God, but what he was proposing to do now that he had. His rice sack was empty so he had to sit on a log like the rest of us. 'Do you think he'll get out?'
The general consensus was that he wouldn't. It was a phase; he'd soon see the error of his ways.
'Moving on . . .' Chris had a more pressing point. He'd had a letter. Frank and Chris were corporals, the senior ranks here, but the troop sergeant was Ken. He was away on a German course in Beaconsfield, west of London. I had no idea why, but that didn't matter. The main thing was that now Frank had gone the piss-taking had shifted, not to me but to Ken, even though he wasn't there – and, as I would discover, that was the only time to take the piss out of him.
Chris read out a snippet about German being a very interesting language. The grammar, apparently, was very similar to English. Both had identical pluperfects, or something.
Nish couldn't stop laughing. 'What the fuck is he on about? He eaten a dictionary?'
Tiny had only two words to say: 'Crap hat.' He looked across the fire at me. 'Even you can call him one. He's Int Corps.'
That made my day.
*
The next month under the canopy was taken up with a tracking course. That was why the Kiwi regiment were there. Those lads really knew their stuff. In fact, their course is famous, the best in the world. The Regiment send people there all the time. Not only are they really good at it, but also they've got all the different terrains in New Zealand to practise in: rainforest, mountains, snow, ice.
After we'd come out of the jungle there was a two-day clear-up of all the weapons and equipment. Nobody shaved. They were saving it for our week off in Singapore.
17
Hereford
I felt good after the Malaysian trip. I'd blended in. I'd also been lucky, although I didn't realize it until I got back to the UK. The jungle trip turned out to have been one of the few times the entire squadron was together in one location. One or all of the four troops were often away training, then there were team jobs: six, ten, twenty guys, however many were required, might be away on operations. Others might be at specialist training establishments, learning everything from demolition to trauma care. The squadron is like a clearing house; it's not like a rifle company, where everybody's together all the time.
My freefall course was starting in three weeks. It would entail two weeks back at No. 1 Parachute Training School at RAF Brize Norton in Oxfordshire, the same place I'd learnt to static-line jump at the end of Selection, then two weeks in Pau, in the foothills of the Pyrenees, and finally two more weeks in Brize Norton. But first I had to go and get all my black kit for the counter-terrorism (CT) team build-up, and get some basic training with the Counter-revolutionary Warfare Wing (CRW). I was going to be part of the team I'd watched storm the embassy. I just hoped I didn't fuck up.
CRW had been born out of the Munich Olympics massacre. On 5 September 1972, eight Palestinian terrorists had burst into a room housing eleven Israeli athletes. They'd shot two dead and taken the others hostage, demanding the release of PLO prisoners held in Israel and members of the German Red Army Faction held in West Germany. They also wanted a plane to fly them to Cairo.
The West German government, who had no specially trained counter-terrorist forces, gave in to the terrorists' demands after a day of negotiation. They were flown to a military airbase in two helicopters, and army snipers opened fire as they prepared to board the aircraft. Visibility was bad, and the snipers were too far away. The terrorists had time to blow up both helicopters, killing all nine hostages and a policem
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