Immediate Action

by Andy McNab

  We'd get a tray, go in and get four slices of bread, make big sandwiches and a mug of tea, and go and claim our places for the show.

  Blokes would be there straight from the shower, squashed up next to blokes in shit state straight from the field. Everybody would be getting stuck into a fistful of egg banjo. The room stank of cigarettes, sweat, mud, cowshit, and talcum powder.

  At the time, just after Christmas 1978, Debbie Harry and Kate Bush were on the same T.O.T.P. Debbie Harry was singing "Denis," and Kate Bush was doing "Wuthering Heights." When Kate Bush came on, the whole rifle company used to shout, "Burn the witch!" 'Then these blokes turned up as well, and I thought, They're only human after all because they've come in to watch Debbie Harry and Kate Bush.

  They didn't push in; they didn't get the prime spot; they just slotted in where they could; then pushed off again. Their behavior amazed me; they came in with respect.

  I envied them their apparent freedom to come and go as they pleased. I thought, it must be an amazing life, just flying in, doing the job, then going back to wherever they live.

  But there again, I thought, there was no chance whatsoever of a lowly rifleman like me making the grade, and that was that.

  There were eight infantry battalions at Tidworth, our new base in Wiltshire. The entertainment facilities in the town consisted of three pubs (one of which was out of bounds), two chip shops, a launderette, and a bank.

  The army spent all day teaching us to be aggressive, and then we'd go down to the town, get bored and drunk, and use our aggression against each other. We'd then get prosecuted severely as if we'd done something wrong.

  We did all the garrison sort of stuff like field firing exercises; then we started training again for Northern Ireland. The battalions wouldrotate, on average, one tour a year. I saw it as a great opportunity to save money. As a rifleman I could save a grand a tour because there was even less to do over the water than in Tidworth.

  There were three other bonuses. One, we got fifty pence extra pay per day, and two, we got soft toilet paper instead of the hard stuff in UK garrisons. It was actually dangled as a carrot during training:

  "Remember, it's soft toilet rolls over the water." And three, it was a pleasure to get away from Tidworth again. For the next three years the routine was going on exercises, get stinking drunk in Tidworth and Andover, and going over the water.

  People were coming back with their grand and getting ripped off buying cars that promptly fell apart. One bloke bought a hand-painted cream and chocolate brown Ford Capri for nine hundred pounds, and within two days things were falling off it. I looked at buying a Capri myself, but the insurance was more than the car was worth.

  I was still going out with Christine. She was living in Ashford, so I got down there weekends and whenever else I could. There was certainly no way she wanted to come and live in Tidworth. She had a job and still lived at home. We were in love-"we think"-and everything was coming up roses.

  There began to be talk of the battalion going to Germany for five years, and I knew this would present a problem for our relationship.

  If you were "wife of", accommodation was provided; if you were just "girlfriend of," then it was up to you to go rent a place downtown.

  We'd never be able to afford the German rents, so I thought, what the hell, let's do it, and that was us married. It was a white wedding; the plan was that she would stay in Ashford, and after the next Northern Ireland tour we could get a quarter in Tidworth.

  I got made up to lance corporal in time for the next tour. Still based in South Armagh, I was now a "brick" commander, in charge of a four-man patrol. As such, I had to write a short patrol report after each patrol: what we had seen, what we had done, what we would like to have done. While I was on my way to the operations room one night, three or four blokes turned up in a car with all their equipment. I saw on the map that certain areas had been put out of bounds; I knew these boys were going to go do some stuff. It made me think that as the infantry battalion we were working our arses off here, but these guys were working to a very different agenda. We used to come back from a patrol and think, We've done this and we've done that, tis really good stuff, but at the end of the day we were just walking Figures (standard target, depicting a charging enemy soldier). We were so isolated in our own little world.

  Seeing these guys suddenly made me think, Hey, what else is going on that we'll never get to hear about? I felt what was almost a pang of jealousy.

  I went into the briefing room to pick up a patrol report. There were masses of kit strewn everywhere on the floor. The thing that really struck me was an Armalite that was painted weird and wonderful camouflage colors, dappled with bits of black and green. In the infantry there was no way we could tamper with our weapons like that.

  Weapons were sacred; we could clean them, but that was about it.

  There was a torch mounted under the Armalite, held on with bits of masking tape on the furniture stock. I thought, That's quite Gucci; I wouldn't mind one of those.

  As I turned, I found myself face-to-face with one of the regiment blokes. Or rather, face to arse. He had no kit on, and all I could see was the crack of his bum as he was bending over to put his trousers on.

  I could see he had a fearsome suntan and had obviously been away somewhere nice before he'd come on this job.

  He turned around and said, "All right, mate?"

  I went, "Hello."

  He said, "You can go now if you like."

  I said, "Okay, I think it's time for me to go now."

  That was the last time I saw any of these particular S.A.S men.

  Again, I was surprised at how they looked.

  One of them was positively skeletal; he was the only man I'd ever seen with the veins on the outside of his body.

  We were patrolling one Saturday evening as a multipletwo four-man patrols. The multiple commander was Dave, a corporal, and I was the 2 i/c (second-in-command), in command of the other brick.

  I had first met Dave in XMG but didn't have too much to do with him as he was in another platoon. On promotion I was sent to 6 Platoon and became his 2 i/c.

  Dave was known as a maverick and was always on the edge of being demoted or fined. He came from the East End of London and kept very close contact with his family and friends. He was in his mid-twenties, and his arms were covered in tattoos. He had a girlfriend back in London, but the more I got to know him, the more I saw him as single for the rest of his life, wrecking any car that he had after two months and having dealings with dodgy people from the Mile End Road. We got on very well, and he became a close friend.

  We were going out at six o'clock in the evening and assembled for a quick five-minute brief. Dave told us the direction we were going to go out, whether we were going to use the front gate or the back gate, information on any activity in the town, anything that we needed to know from the patrol that had just come in.

  "There seem to be a lot more people running around the community center than usual," he said. "And perhaps some activity in the derelict house on the corner of Liam Gardens. We'll check it out as we pass."

  Derelicts were usually to be avoided since they were natural draw points for booby traps. Something had looked different in that house to the last patrol; it could be just an old druggle in there, or it could be something put in as a come-on.

  We loaded our weapons in the loading bay and stood behind the main gate, waiting for the order to go. It was a lazy, hot summer evening, not much traffic, and the birds were singing. We listened on the net to the'other patrol who were in the town, speaking in code words and numbers because our comms were not secure and the players had scanners.

  You don't saunter out of a security forces station; you bomb-bust out-which means that you run like a fucking idiot for about twenty-five meters to get out of the immediate vicinity, before regrouping. If they were going to put a shoot in on it or had a bomb rigged up, the one place they definitely knew soldiers were going to be was near the
gates as they started a patrol.

  We all bomb-burst out. Rather than go directly into the town, we'd decided to take a route around the edge of it, in waste ground.

  We wanted to use the ground as much as possible to keep us away from the eyes of dickers (IRA observers) in case they had something for us.

  We didn't go through obvious features like holes in hedge lines or natural crossing points, which could be targeted and used to place bombs. We'd never touch anything military-looking either, like a shiny bit of kit that was out on the ground. Soldiers had been blown up picking up a water bottle, thinking that another patrol had lost it and they'd do them a favor by retrieving it.

  We came to a small river that we had to cross. No problems, we patrolled through that. Then we started to come up onto the waste ground just short of a housing estate. This was right on the edge of town, and from there it was cuds all the way down to a place called Castle Blaney on the other side of the border.

  At that time of a Saturday night the streets were full of coaches that had come up to the estate to pick up the locals and take them down to Castle Blaney for "the crack." They'd go for a night out, then come rolling back at two o'clock in the morning. And quite rightly so; if I were stuck in Keady on a Saturday night, I'd want to put the kit on and go over there on the piss.

  We were patrolling along in dead ground. They couldn't see us, and we couldn't see them, but I was expecting that once we got nearer the housing estate, I'd see a few people. We'd leave them alone. It was pointless going through crowds because it just incited them. Our intention was to go around them, have a quick mooch around the housing estate, and see what was going on.

  More information was picked up when a patrol was stood still than when it was on the move. It was called lurking; we'd get to a position and just stop. It might be in somebody's backyard on a housing estate; we'd stop, get in the shadows, wait and listen, and see what was going on. It used to be great entertainment for the squaddies; we'd watch everything from domestic rows in kitchens to young couples groping in the mother's front room.

  Dave's patrol was to the right of me, about 150 meters away, and he was in dead ground to us. There. was no need to talk on the radio. We'd been out there quite a few months already now, and we were working really well together, supporting each other.

  Once we came near the estate, we were hidden from view by a row of three or four shops-houses, basically, but with shop fronts. We turned right and went along the back of the buildings until we came to the fence line and the gate. By now the waste ground was more like disused farmland; there were old wrecked cars on it, tin cans, bags of garbage.

  There were goats and horses running around all over the place, so the ground was gungy and churned up. It was summer, but we still had rain at least once a week, and the ground was wet. There were large puddles everywhere.

  We got to the fence line, and I got lazy. If I crossed the fence, there would be all this car wreckage and rubbish in the way, and I didn't want to negotiate that. So I took the easy route.

  As I started to come through the gate, I came into view of the people in the street. I heard hollering and shouting and screaming all over the place, which was unusual. Normally there would just have been talking and lots of laughing, from groups of people smelling of Brut and hair spray, the girls in sharply ironed blouses.

  As I looked up at the crowd, I realized that everybody was shouting, grabbing hold of kids, pulling them out of the way.

  Something was up, but I didn't know what. I started to pan around to have a look. Still there was chaos; there must have been maybe 120 people there waiting for the coaches, and they all were reacting to my presence. I looked directly over the road, and as I then started to an left toward the shops, crossing the road, p again there was just the normal group of vehicles-three or four saloon cars and a cattle truck, which was not unusual in the area.

  But then, just as I passed that, I saw a group of characters with masks on and weapons. The one that I really latched on to was a,boy with his fist in the air, doing aChe Guevara with his Armalite, chanting away. I couldn't have been more than twenty meters away from him. I saw his eyes open wide with alarm inside his mask.

  He started to shout and fumbled with his weapon. I also shouted, fumbled for mine, and cocked it. His weapon was already cocked, so he just started blatting like an idiot. I blatted back, getting the rounds down at him and the other masked people. Another fellow came up from behind the wagon and started to fire down in my general direction.

  They were flapping as much as I was, in a frenzy to get into the cattle truck and get away.

  One of the boys got into the back of the wagon and started firing, and the others clambered in. I got rounds into one of them. He was screaming like a pig as he went over the other side. Then there was lots of screaming coming from inside the vehicle, where other people were also taking rounds.

  By this time Scouse, another fellow from the patrol, had come up from the dead ground but couldn't get over the fence because of the firing.

  So he was firing from that side of the fence. The other two were down in the dead ground, totally confused about what was going on.

  It had all happened so quickly.

  Lots of firing was going down. Everybody was screaming and shouting; I was kneeling and firing away.

  In my twenty-round magazines I always made sure that the top two were tracer. I worked on the theory that when we were in the cuds, I could use my tracer to identify targets for other people. I had another tracer halfway down the magazine, so when that went off, I'd know I'd fired ten rounds. The last two of the magazine were tracer again; when the fourth tracer fired off, I'd know I'd fired my second-to-last round and the working parts had come back and picked up the last round. I'd take the magazine off, put on another one, and that would be my reloading drill done. Time and time again I'd practiced all this, until I could almost do it blindfolded. Come the day, it all went to ratshit.

  For one thing, I was far too close for the tracer to ignite. And I certainly wasn't counting the rounds. I was just firing like a man possessed.

  Then: bang, bang, bang, click. The dead man's click.

  The working parts still worked, but there wasn't a round in the chamber to fire. I was flapping like fuck. I got on the floor, screaming my head off: "Stoppage!

  Stoppage!" to let everyone else know I wasn't hit but unable to fire. I could hear the different noises of the weapons: The SLR mode a loud, bass sound as it fired;.the Armalite was not as loud, and they were firing bursts.

  I tried to get hold of another magazine out of my pouches, and everything seemed sort of slow and deliberate. It wasn't; it was all really fast, but it was as if I were outside myself, watching myself going through the drills.

  I knew what to do, but the faster I was trying to do it, the faster I was fucking up. I had that feeling I'd had when the kid fell through the roof: I wanted to pull the covers over my head and wait for it all to go away. I concentrated on my mags; I didn't want to look up and see what was going on. If I didn't look, maybe I'd be all right.

  What I should have been doing was getting into a position where I could look at the enemy; I was supposed to be so good at changing mags that there was no need to look at what I was doing. But I wasn't. I couldn't get the pouch opened up, I was fumbling inside getting my magazine out. It was the wrong way around.

  I had to turn it around, put it in, cock my weapon. It was all done in a matter of seconds, but it felt like forever. I could hear some firing, I heard shouting, but loudest of all was the sound of me hollering and shouting inside my head: "I don't like this! I know I've got to do it!"

  I knew if I just lay there, twenty meters from him, the chances were that I'd be killed; as long as I was firing, things would be okay.

  My chest was heaving up and down. I knew I had to do it. I knew I couldn't just lie there.

  I rolled over and started firing again. The stoppage had taken me out of action for no more than thr
ee to five seconds.

  Twenty rounds later, bang, bang, bang, click.

  The vehicle was moving, and by this time Scouse was firing into the cab area of the wagon, hoping to drop the driver. But these cattle trucks were armored. They were sandbagged up with steel plates welded in to give them some form of protection.

  I was still the only one that side of the fence. As the vehicle started to move off, I got up and ran forward, past the shop.

  I didn't know if there was anybody left outside the wagon who'd done a runner. Had they run into the housing estate? Had they run into the shops? Had they run down to the junction, which was only about ten meters away, and turned left? Or turned right, up an old disused railway line? Who knew? I had no idea what was going on.

  In my peripheral vision I saw a group of people on the floor of the shop, cowering. A man stood up quickly. As far as I was concerned, he could have a gun. I turned around and gave it a couple high through the window so he got the message. The glass caved in, and the bloke threw himself to the floor.

  "And stay down!" I shouted. I didn't know who was more scared, the people in the shop or me. It was a stupid, bone reaction of mine to shoot through the glass, but I didn't know what else to do; I was so hyped up that anything that moved was a threat.

  I ran up to a left-hand junction about ten meters away from the point of the contact. Time and time again during the buildup training we'd practiced two ways of looking around corners. You can get very low and look around, close up to it, or, better still, you can move away from the corner and then gradually bring yourself around so you present less of a target. It was all very well in training because I knew there was nobody around the other side with an Armalite aimed at me. But here there could be. I took a deep breath, got down on my belly with the weapon ready to swing around, and had a quick squint.

  There was nobody there. I brought myself around and followed on down the road a bit, just to check that there weren't any runners that way.