by Andy McNab
104
8 January 2002
The early-morning traffic snaked along the Oxford road. I was on my way from London to Hereford for a meeting with Andrew, then hoping to hook up with Nish the following day. I'd see him every month or so, unless he was away jumping.
He had married Livvy, but things didn't pan out. Last I'd heard she was in the Caribbean with her children, working as a property developer. I'd never asked him about it; I wasn't sure what the reaction would be. I didn't want to turn him even loopier than he already was. And just because we were mates didn't mean we had to do the big emotional thing every time we stopped off for a brew.
The meds kept him under control, and he was spending a lot of time freefalling in Spain. He still dreamt about the jump from the edge of space. Things were all right – as far as any of us could tell.
He'd called me the week before, sounding happy and upbeat.
'All right, mate? Listen, I'll be in H on the ninth – you there?' I'd asked.
He'd laughed. 'Yeah, I'll be there all right. Hey, I've got a new mobile number.'
'Wait.' I grabbed a pencil and pad. 'Go on.'
'I'll see you later on, mate.' He carried on laughing.
'Your number, dickhead – what's your number? Where are you, anyway?'
The phone went dead. I'd tried to call him back, but the number was withheld. That wasn't a problem. He knew I'd be in Hereford, and he knew I'd be with Andrew.
Since Frank's death I'd just been getting on with my life, much like anybody else. I was still writing, working on the odd movie and building the security company with Andrew. My big interest outside work was promoting army education. Al and Nish were my inspiration.
All infantry recruits, from the Guards to the Paras, received their basic training at the Infantry Training Centre at Catterick in North Yorkshire. At any one time, about eighteen thousand squaddies were based in the garrison town, making it Europe's largest military base. I did a regular turn. I stood in front of a roomful of recruits, all aged between seventeen and twenty-one, and began with an apology. Andy McNab wasn't six foot six and four feet wide, and he didn't wear a Superman costume. Then I talked about the first book I ever read as a boy soldier: Janet and John Book 10. It had been written for eleven-year-olds, which was just as well because that had been my reading age.
I showed them clips of film and bits and pieces of SAS derring-do, the gist of my message being: 'Look, lads, if I can do it, so can you. Use the Education Corps. Suck them dry, because that's what they're there for.' Then I finished by quoting the Education Corps captain who'd changed my life the day he told me and the rest of the zit-covered sixteen-year-olds at Infantry Junior Leaders Battalion: 'Everybody thinks you're thick as shit, but you're not. The only reason you cannot read or write is because you do not read or write.'
Not much had changed since then. These lads were still predominantly from the inner cities, and came with all the baggage: broken families, social deprivation, little or no education, exposure to drugs. Nearly half the new recruits still joined the army with the reading ability of an eleven-year-old. Nine per cent of them joined with the skill levels of five- to seven-year-olds. That didn't mean they were thick. It meant the state-school system hadn't gripped them.
Literacy skills were now as much part of basic training as weapons, fitness and battlefield tactics. You could be educated and a soldier. Go that route, and you had the world at your feet. I'd got quite passionate about it. Any minute now I'd turn into an ayatollah.
I smiled to myself and tuned in for the traffic news.
What I heard instead was the story of a man who'd jumped out of a Cessna yesterday, on the way back from Spain. It wasn't a freefall accident. He'd jumped out on purpose, without a parachute, while a female friend flew the aircraft. The man had been identified as Charles Bruce, forty-six, one of the world's best freefallers, with nearly four thousand skydives to his credit.
He had a friend and business partner called Judith, who was also a big-time pilot and freefaller. They owned a plane together. I guessed she must have been flying it. But I didn't have her number.
I called Andrew. 'You heard?'
'You didn't get my message?'
I hadn't bothered to listen to my voicemail. I'd been in too much of a hurry to get on the road.
I stayed in Hereford for three days, and the story became clearer by the hour. I phoned Jim Davidson. Minky had already called him, and he was in pieces.
Nish and Judith had been in Spain for a couple of weeks. That must have been where he'd phoned me from. They were doing a series of freefall displays. As they were making their way back to Hinton airfield in Northamptonshire, Judith radioed Brize Norton and requested permission to make an emergency landing. The wings were icing up.
Bad weather had forced them to land at La Rochelle. After the cloud had lifted they'd refuelled and set off again. The plane's wings started to ice up so Judith decided to take the aircraft up to 5,000 feet, above the cloud. Ten miles from Brize Norton, Nish had slid his seat right back and undone his belt. She'd tried to grab him, but he'd pushed open the door and gone out head first.
Judith descended over Fyfield and flew in low circles, trying to see where he'd impacted. She must have been absolutely traumatized. The locals watched the plane nearly roof-hopping before she finally had to bank away and head for Brize Norton. Soon afterwards, someone found Nish's body on a football pitch at the edge of the village.
We bounced around the pubs and wine bars, bumping into lads who'd known him, and a couple of his ex-girlfriends.
Nish had finally completed his skydive from the edge of space, and the general consensus was that he would have been smiling all the way down – a great big carefree wolfish grin that stretched from ear to ear. 'Nothing else comes close to those first few seconds after leaving the plane,' he had written in his book, 'because once you take that last step there is no going back. A racing driver or a skier or a climber can pull over and stop, have a rest, but with parachuting, once you cross that threshold, you have to see it through.'
That night, I had a dream.
Nish, Frank and Al flew towards me, pushing out their legs to catch more air. Their three heads were so close together they were almost touching. Frank opened his mouth and let go of the orange he'd been holding between his teeth. It bounced about between them for three or four seconds before being catapulted out of the vortex. I did a forward roll, then a backward roll and banged out of it to stable-on-heading. Al did a forward flip that took him into a rapid descent. Frank turned, drew his arms back into a delta wing, and tracked across the sky. Nish gave me a big thumbs-up, back-flipped out and disappeared.
105
Oxford Crematorium
It was standing room only in the crematorium chapel. Those who hadn't been able to make it that far were packed shoulder to shoulder in the corridor, and still others spilled into the courtyard and onto the lawns outside. Nish had touched so many lives.
The Red Freds were out in force, as well as mates from his Para Regiment days and, of course, the Seven Troop lads, which now included Dinger. I even caught a glimpse of Nish's next-door neighbour. It wouldn't have surprised me to see the guy from the corner shop on the Ross road, and the nurse he'd taken a swing at.
Harry looked around at them all and choked halfway through the eulogy. There was no singing. Nish just wanted to be burnt and have the whole thing over and done with.
Afterwards, we moved off to the airfield he used to jump from. The clubhouse was as jam-packed as the chapel, but a lot noisier. This was a celebration, not a doom-and-gloom affair.
A lot of us hadn't seen each other for a while. Ken was over in one corner. Rumour had it he was running around with a bunch of Russians. People didn't ask; if he wanted you to know, he'd say. He was waffling to Saddlebags, poking his chest. He looked as though he was about to drop him. He was probably just telling him a joke.
Ken had been right about the strategic war in Northern Ire
land. Once peace negotiations were under way it had become very clear that our task had been to eliminate those who never intended to give up the gun. Martin McGuinness and Gerry Adams had wanted to get on with the politics, and we'd smoothed the path. Hard-liners who'd slipped through the net had resurfaced as the Real IRA.
Saddlebags now worked in the City as head of security for some financial institution, complete with Gucci car and even Guccier loft apartment.
Tiny was training to be a physics teacher. I wouldn't have wanted to be in his class. The kids would have nightmares.
Chris nursed a bottle of Pils. He was a pig farmer now. I thought that would suit him rather well. He didn't have to talk to them much; all he had to do was share a little grunt and a sniff with them from time to time.
Paul was on the Circuit, here, there and everywhere. Des Doom and Schwepsy were suited up and looked like moguls: they ran a security business and it was going strong. About a month ago I'd caught sight of Schwepsy from a taxi in the City. He was in a pin-stripe suit and carrying a briefcase, striding purposefully towards the entrance of an office block. Some poor fucker was about to be on the receiving end of an almighty bollocking. I leant out of the window and shouted, 'Oy, dickhead!' but he didn't look back. The insult couldn't possibly have been aimed at him.
Harry had stayed on in Chamonix, still soft in the head about climbing mountains. The hair had almost completely gone. It probably made him more streamlined at altitude.
As the shadows lengthened, the storytelling gathered pace and volume. We swapped memories of Nish's farts and bogeys and stitch-ups – just as he would have wanted – and also of his courage and skill, leadership and compassion, which we knew he would have hated.
I sat in the corner in the early hours and took a moment with my own thoughts. My dream replayed itself: the three of them freefalling like magicians just feet away from me. Their smiles widened in the slipstream as they watched the crap-hat new boy doing his best to keep stable.
I was the only one left alive.
Had Nish suffered from a chemical imbalance? Was it the cumulative effect of many episodes of hypoxia? Or was it PTSD? I knew he'd never really got over the deaths of Al and Hillbilly. Or, maybe, had he just thought, Fuck it, I've had enough, and jumped? There are some people who go for it full throttle, in life as well as death – and if things went on like this, the guy in the corner shop would be able to retire early.
I smiled. I knew Nish would have been laughing all the way down. He'd probably picked out the exact spot where he wanted to land and tracked towards it.
I now knew for sure he'd planned it all. It wasn't an impulse.
He'd given the others the same mobile-number story. It had been his excuse to call us to say goodbye, like Frank had done on the day of the party without me realizing it. Maybe that was where he'd got the idea. I remembered him telling me at Frank's funeral, 'It's only when you decide you will commit suicide that you can . . .'
I raised my glass to him. I didn't know whether to feel sad or happy. I'd lost yet another mate, but he had died doing what he wanted to do – and how could you deny a friend that?
106
St Martin's Church, Hereford
January 2007
The guy behind the counter gave me a pitying glance when I bought a bottle of rum at ten in the morning. I was making a bit of a habit of this. I felt his eyes following me as I walked up the Ross road in the rain and nipped round to the back of the graveyard.
Frank got his first, not because he was the new boy but because his grave was on the way to the plot. I knew he'd never been that keen on the stuff, so I gave him a drop or two extra. He had some catching up to do.
I moved on, mouthing my thanks to Nish – this was a much better idea than flowers. I splashed Steve Lane's plaque, then walked through the lines of headstones. There had been a few new additions to the suicide club since Nish and Frank had set the thing up. One lad had left a complete order of service behind: which songs he wanted sung, where he wanted to be buried, even what flowers he preferred.
There were fresh flowers on Al's grave. I gave them a good sprinkle and moved on to Vince.
He got his ration next, and I spent a moment or two taking the piss out of him for stopping to help Nish on the Fan Dance. Then I poured the last of the black stuff over Bob and headed for a brew and a waffle with a couple of the lads in town.
I'd visited the troops in Afghanistan and Iraq and come across a lot of the guys who were now out on the Circuit, and there was no doubt in my mind that a couple of them should have been queuing up outside Gordon Turnbull's door. I still give myself a mental MOT every now and then to make sure I'm not behind them.
I'd met up with Snapper in Kabul in 2006. It was great to see him, even if he did make me pay for the tea. He was still as mad as a box of frogs, and had enough weapons and radios dangling off him to take on the Taliban on his own. He was one guy who would never suffer from PTSD. There was far too much going on in his head to leave room for anything else.
Epilogue
After the 2003 invasion, I went back to the place where I was captured in Iraq. The Regiment had erected a cairn on the banks of the Euphrates to commemorate Vince Phillips, Steve Lane and Bob Consiglio. The locals were told it was booby-trapped; that if they tried to pull it down, it would pull them down too.
I couldn't stick around. If you stood still anywhere in Iraq for more than ten minutes the militants would be on their way. But I was there long enough to absorb it all. I still didn't feel bitter, resentful, guilty, anxious or violent. I just felt lucky to have come out pretty much unscathed, and privileged to be standing there next to something that the guys had built during the war to celebrate the memory of some brave friends who'd died.
I smiled to myself. Camaraderie hadn't gone out of fashion. I realized that was what I missed most. It was what Frank and Nish had missed, too.
Afterword
Anyone can get hit by PTSD, but the fact remains that soldiers experience a lot more trauma than most, and over much longer periods of time. It's a chilling fact that more guys have killed themselves since returning from the Falklands than the 255 that were lost in action there.
Soldiers adopt a fuck-it attitude. If they didn't, they wouldn't be able to do the job in the first place. If they went around thinking, Woe is me, I'm going to die, they'd have to get themselves straight down to the job centre. Fuck-it has always been the best policy, but it can prevent you asking for help. It can also backfire if you're thinking of taking your own life – or someone else's.
Special Forces are never going to have an easy time of it in the real world. They just have to try to get on with it, and some do that better than others. Maybe that's why I still feel my pulse race when I visit the recruits in Catterick and the infantry battalions in Afghanistan and Iraq. Mates I joined up with as zit-faced kids are fighting out there as senior officers. I enjoy going back, and I enjoy being part of it again, however temporarily. I guess I feel just a little of what Frank felt when he was Padre Two Zero.
From what I've seen of them in contact, the infantry has never been in better shape. I joined a rifle company on a house assault in Basra last year, one of the most dangerous things a modern-day soldier can be asked to do. These lads were going in against armed insurgents who were ready and waiting. The first man through the door was a nineteen-year-old rifleman. Ten years ago, that would have been the job of Special Forces.
My first time in the Killing House with Hillbilly and Snapper, there were live bodies in the room. But they weren't firing back. When I did it for real in Colombia, they were. It doesn't come much worse than being number one through the door.
I've met an eighteen-year-old who only fired six rounds on his very first day in-country but killed three enemy insurgents. He hadn't yet had his first shave. I know a twenty-one-year-old sniper who killed three guys with four shots on his first job. When he got back, he had the piss taken out of him for wasting a round.
Those boys and their mates are going to see more shot and shell, and have more opportunity to kill the enemy, than their grandfathers did in the Second World War. Then, there was an army of more than a million, spread over several continents. Now a 'bayonet' (infantry soldier) has a contact every day and a half, often lasting for hours.
