The Nemesis File - The True Story of an SAS Execution Squad

by Paul Bruce

  That night, having watched innumerable nude shows and dirty films and enjoyed as many tarts as we could handle, we slept off the gallons of beer in the car. The next morning, tired, hungover but happy, we would go swimming at the local baths, clean up, have a shave and a shower and go for a good meal. By six o’clock we were ready for another night of sex, drinking and full-blooded, debauched German entertainment. It seemed like seventh heaven.

  Somehow, though, there always seems to be some stupid bastard who wants to spoil life and I met such a person on camp at Bielefeld after I had been there a few months. He was a Regimental Police NCO who seemed to have a giant chip on his shoulder. He seemed determined to make everyone’s life a misery. For some reason, he took a dislike to the REME soldiers and would pick on us at every possible opportunity. He seemed to take a particular dislike to me. He would watch us day and night and discipline us for the most petty misdemeanours, such as having a button undone, smoking without permission or walking instead of marching around the camp.

  The animosity between him and me built up over a couple of weeks. Every time I walked out of my billet or out of the workshop, he was there, waiting to pick me up for whatever petty reason he could. He couldn’t put me on a charge but he could send in a complaint to the officer in charge of the REME workshop and he did just that a number of times. The officer, however, suggested we just ‘humour the little shit’.

  We tried but it became most difficult. One particular morning I had been awake most of the night with toothache and was late for the workshop muster. As a result, I left the billet without all my buttons done up and the RP NCO bawled at me, ‘Hey, you, come here!’

  ‘I can’t stop, I’ll be late,’ I explained, and hurried off.

  He ran after me, grabbed my arm and started to bawl me out. I turned round and landed him one, smack on the side of the face. He went down. I left him and ran to the workshop, leaving him sitting on the ground.

  ‘I’ll fucking get you,’ he screamed as he struggled to his feet but I took no notice.

  Within minutes the Regimental Police arrived at the workshop and marched me to the guard room. Two hours later I was standing in front of the RCT commanding officer, charged with assaulting an NCO. He told me he had no option but to court martial me. I was flabbergasted.

  Three weeks later, I faced a court martial held inside the barracks. I pleaded guilty and claimed mitigating circumstances. My defending officer told the court that the NCO had been picking on REME soldiers over the previous weeks and pointed out my blameless record and good conduct since the day I had joined the army. Despite that, I was given six months’ detention at Colchester, the Military Corrective Training Centre. When the CO read out the sentence, I could have killed the little shit who had put me behind bars for six months.

  During the next two weeks, I was put through hell while waiting to be transported to Colchester. My provo sergeant weight-training mate was put in charge of me for that fortnight. Every day he had me up at 6am. He would inspect my kit which had to be immaculate otherwise he would throw it back at me and tell me to start again. All my kit and bedding would have to be laid out perfectly and I would be dressed in full combat kit with a full pack on my back. For the next hour, he would make me double all round the barracks, square-bashing on my own, never giving me a moment’s respite.

  After breakfast, my hours would be spent in polishing the guard-room floor on all fours, heavy-duty gardening and cleaning the cookhouse pots and pans. Some evenings he would take me out again and give me more strenuous double-time work with a full pack. All my spare time was taken up in polishing my kit. I was shattered and angry. I felt that the army and my provo sergeant were being unfair to me.

  The provo sergeant never told me why he was being so hard on me. I wondered why he acted so tough towards me when he had previously shown me nothing but friendship. Only after arriving at Colchester did I realise that he had been bloody kind in preparing me for the tough Colchester regime.

  Colchester seemed like a mad house. On arrival, the NCOs, who would rule our lives with a rod of iron, were waiting to welcome us. And what a welcome. From the moment of being handed over by the two MPs who had escorted me from Germany to Colchester, the shouting and screaming began. Ordered into a small hall, we were told to lay out all our kit and then take off all our clothes and lay them on the floor.

  As I stood to attention, stark bollock naked, one sergeant came up to me and said, ‘So, you’re the one who likes taking a swing at NCOs? Do you want to take a swing at me?’

  ‘No, Sergeant,’ I replied.

  ‘You don’t call me sergeant,’ he screamed at me. ‘From now on, throughout the entire time you are in this establishment, you will call me and everyone else “staff ”. Do you understand?’

  ‘Yes, staff,’ I replied.

  ‘And don’t you ever forget it or you will be for the high jump.’

  We were ordered to pack all our clothes into our kit bags and issued with the regulation Colchester uniform, a rough KF shirt, dark-green denims and a dark-green jacket. At the double we were ordered to run to our new billet, a Nissen hut, which was to be my home for the next six months.

  After tea we were locked in our hut and told to make our kit ready for morning inspection. The next morning the Colchester regime hit us like a tidal wave. The relentless round of drilling, running, harsh discipline, hourly inspections and forbidding, screaming, shouting NCOs would not cease until we left the jail.

  I knew that I had to survive the first few weeks, no matter what happened. I knew that I had to tough it out to show that I could take whatever the screws threw at me. My training had helped, in some funny way my father’s treatment of me had helped and my provo sergeant in Germany had helped. In many ways, I was already conditioned to take the toughest discipline the army could hand out. Somehow, after the first couple of weeks, I actually began to rather enjoy Colchester.

  After the first month of hell, those deemed to have earned a good behaviour stripe were granted small favours. We were permitted an hour’s TV a night and the door to the Nissen hut was not locked at lights out. We were also given more army training and permitted to use live ammunition on the rifle range. To me it seemed rather strange that soldiers incarcerated in a high-security jail should be allowed to use live ammunition. When I raised this point with one of the screws, he explained that we were not, in fact, in jail but only attending a corrective training establishment. They could have fooled me.

  After four months came a moment of absolute bliss. Marched before the adjutant one morning, I was told that I had earned two months’ remission for good behaviour.

  When I finally left Colchester, I realised I had never been so fit in my life. I could run five miles without even feeling puffed and I could strip a rifle, a sub-machine gun or an LMG blindfold. My shooting had improved out of all measure. I had also learned my lesson. Never again would I step out of line, nor would I let any other little runt so antagonise me that I would lose control.

  I was posted to 10 Field Workshop at Tidworth on Salisbury Plain for a couple of months, working on major repairs before being sent back to Borden for a new six-week course on the repair and maintenance of Chieftain tanks and armoured personnel carriers. The work was interesting and enjoyable but at the back of my mind I knew that repairing vehicles would never satisfy my urge to become a real soldier. To me, that meant joining the SAS. Not for one moment did I forget my principal objective.

  A few months later, I was asked whether I wanted to become part of a forward repair team whose job in wartime would be working close to the front line, repairing vehicles in double-quick time, sometimes under fire. The work was tough and challenging but we won respect from those we worked with. They knew the pressure we were put under, sometimes working all night making sure vehicles, tanks, APCs or whatever were roadworthy before first light. It came as quite a shock to find sergeant-majors coming to visit us in our makeshift workshops, bringing tea and bacon sandwiches.
They would treat us with respect at all times, the first time that had happened since I had joined the army.

  A year after my posting to Tidworth, I summoned up the courage to try, once again, for a posting to the SAS. I filled out another application form and again I waited, wondering why on earth no one contacted me. I heard nothing.

  Nonetheless, I was enjoying myself. Tidworth was a town full of pretty girls and most of them seemed to want to be involved with the army. During the twelve months I spent thereI think I dated eight different girls, all of them great fun and wanting to enjoy life to the full.

  Perhaps the most beautiful girl was the daughter of a Maltese mother and English father, aged about eighteen, who I fell in love with instantly. We dated, we went out to the pictures, we drank, we went for walks in the woods, we partied. She allowed me to kiss her but would allow nothing more whatsoever. I tried everything I had learned, from gentle persuasion to non-stop passion, but not once would she permit anything more than kissing. I hated it but secretly admired her.

  Fortunately for me, there were others who needed no persuasion or passion but wanted sex as much as, if not more than, I did. I had great fun.

  Little did I realise it at the time but during my time at Tidworth I would meet a girl who would have a profound influence on my life and would, literally, save my sanity.

  Maria would pop into the Victory cafe in Tidworth High Street for tea and a cake in the afternoons and, on occasion, I had seen this good-looking girl leaving the cafe and had noted her long, shining, dark hair, which reached down to the middle of her back, and her legs which were long and near perfect. She always seemed to have a spring in her step.

  I had no idea, of course, who she was or what she did for a living. Nor did I believe that we would ever meet because whenever I saw her I was in an army Land Rover in my REME uniform driving to or from camp. Whenever I drove past that cafe, I would slow down and look to see whether she was there. What I would have done if she had been I don’t know but I thought of her frequently.

  Then, suddenly, one day she appeared, as if by magic, only a few feet away from me. We were both attending the weekly disco held above the NAAFI at the 14th Hussars camp at Tidworth. At first I wasn’t sure it was the same girl. She was wearing a black leather mini-skirt with metal studs down the front and a white blouse and, to my delight, she was standing alone.

  The more I studied her, the more convinced I became that she was the same girl who frequented the Victory cafe. I had a quick pint of Tartan bitter to give me courage and then asked her to dance. I had to know, of course, whether she was the same girl so I asked her about the Victory cafe. She told me she often popped in in the afternoon and I confessed to her that, for weeks, I had been her secret admirer. I felt a little miffed when she told me she had never noticed me.

  I have never forgotten the music for that first dance with Maria. ‘Yellow River’ became our song and, when arguments later arose between us, we only had to hear that tune to forget the problem and realise that we loved one another.

  For the rest of that night, we danced all the slow, smoochy, romantic tunes together and had a couple of drinks whenever the music became wild. We both sensed that we wanted to be together, to learn more about each other rather than dancing to rock’n’roll.

  Maria lived about three miles from Tidworth. She was the daughter of a steeplejack, an ex-soldier who had met her mother while he was stationed at Tidworth twenty years before. I hoped she would stay longer at the dance but at 10.30 she had to leave as she had booked a taxi to take her home from the barracks. We made a date for the next week.

  We met the following week at the Victory cafe. I could tell from the first moment our eyes met that evening that we both felt the same about each other. She looked beautiful and seemed as happy as I felt.

  We talked and talked. I discovered that she worked at Tidworth Post Office, a ten-minute walk from the cafe. I learned about her parents and that she was the eldest child. There were also twins, a brother and sister aged five, and her sister Janet, twelve. I was surprised when Maria confessed to me that she was only sixteen for she had led me to believe she was eighteen.

  I somehow knew that Maria would be someone very special in my life because I felt differently towards her. Unlike some of my previous girlfriends, I didn’t want simply to race her off to have sex. I wanted to get to know her, to talk to her, to kiss and hug her. It seemed strange to me for I had never felt like that before about any girl. It gave me a warm feeling.

  Of course, sex did play a major role in our life together. After dating for a couple of weeks, we were holding hands, kissing and smooching in the back row of the Tidworth cinema, hardly watching the films at all. Afterwards, we went for a stroll in the woods at the top end of the village. It was August and the weather was lovely and warm. We made love under a tall umbrella pine tree.

  Within a few weeks, Maria’s parents invited me for the proverbial Sunday lunch. From his own experience of army life, her father naturally knew the type of existence I enjoyed in camp and took pity on me. He also knew how soldiers love a home-cooked meal. From the beginning Maria’s parents made me feel at home. They showed me nothing but kindness and generosity.

  A few doors from Maria’s home, a young couple had set up home with their baby and we offered to babysit. The couple spent at least two nights a week attending dinners and other functions and we gladly cared for their young child. Within minutes of them driving off, we would be making love on the pile carpet in front of the gas fire. We would spend three or four hours lying there naked, talking, making love, having a drink and then making love again. It was wonderful. I had fallen in love.

  However, the army conspired to make sure we were soon parted. I was detailed to visit Kenya with the Airportable Platoon, a quick-response light aid detachment, trained to fly anywhere within 24 hours, At the end of September, we were despatched to service and maintain vehicles the Royal Engineers were using to construct a major new road from Nairobi to Lake Ngooro. We stayed for eight weeks, alternating between two weeks in the bush and two weeks back at base in Nairobi.

  Some of the lads went wild in Nairobi. Every night they would go to the famous Starlight nightclub. They could not believe there were so many beautiful girls in one place and most of the girls were available, as well as being great fun. The lads would tease me no end because all I wanted to do was have a quiet drink and the occasional dance. They persuaded some of the girls to try to seduce me but I didn’t want to know. They thought I was mad.

  When I returned to Tidworth, I knew immediately I set eyes on Maria that I was absolutely right to have shied away from the temptations of Nairobi. She looked happy and excited and sexy. We spent Christmas together at her parents’ house. It felt as if we were on honeymoon save for the fact that her parents were at home over most of Christmas.

  Throughout the last months of 1969 and the first few of 1970, the television news would focus on the troubles in Northern Ireland which, at that time, seemed to be little more than a genuine civil rights movement, with the minority Catholics demanding more equality in jobs and housing. The British Army had been called in to separate the warring factions and were welcomed as heroes by the Catholics who treated them as saviours. That would not last.

  The cheers, cups of hot tea and sticky buns which greeted the first British soldiers were soon forgotten as the Catholics became suspicious of the army. In a matter of only a few months, they became openly hostile towards them; the problems of Northern Ireland were fast escalating from a minor civil rights political irritation to a major confrontation between the Catholics and the British Army.

  At the beginning of February 1970, we were informed that two platoons of 10 Field Workshop would be despatched to Belfast for a four-month tour of duty. We were warned that we would have a dual role, working as REME technicians and also doubling as infantrymen, taking our turn patrolling the streets of Belfast with the infantry. We had no idea what to expect but we would soon learn
.

  A traditional Belfast welcome awaited us. Cold, driving rain swept in from the sea as we drove the vehicles off the ferry and made our way down grim, rain-drenched streets to a warehouse in Victoria Docks. The brick-built warehouse, with corrugated roofing, concrete floor and a damp, cold atmosphere, would be our home for the next four months. We looked around our desolate billet, wondering how on earth we would find anything to enjoy in what seemed a God-forsaken hole. Yet I sensed a tinge of excitement in the air. I would not be disappointed. We would spend much of our time repairing vehicles and fitting the Land Rovers with metal shields to protect the windscreens from the stone-throwing rioters. At other times, we, too, were out on the streets, along with the infantry regiments, trying to contain the never-ending round of riots which took place virtually every night. At that time, the gunmen had not begun targeting soldiers and the only trouble would come from rioters throwing petrol bombs and stones which were easily fended off with shields. Containing the rioters provided excitement and was far more interesting than repairing vehicles back at base.

  On occasions we would be facing a hundred or more rioters chanting anti-British slogans and throwing petrol bombs at us for maybe three hours. Within minutes of them going home, however, we could walk down the same street to buy a packet of fish and chips with no one taking the slightest notice of us. We appreciated that. The rioters were bombing and stoning us because we were the only available target for their pent-up frustration and anger at the way they, the Catholic minority, had been treated in the north for so many years.

  Before our tour of duty ended, however, the Catholics and Protestants had begun the occasional gun battle, although their weapons at that stage were only handguns. One day we were sent down to a flashpoint, where the Protestant and Catholic communities faced each other just outside Belfast city centre. We arrived to the sound of revolvers going off and clambered gingerly out of the vehicles to see if we could stop the shooting.