Soldier Of The Queen

by Bernard O'Mahoney

  He would reply: "Pig, sergeant." "WHAT ARE YOU?" "I'M A PIG, SERGEANT."

  Sometimes, even within their earshot, I couldn't stop myself laughing, which used to get me into a lot of trouble. The instructor would shout: "O'Mahoney! What's so fucking funny?" I would go to talk and he would scream: "SHUUUTTT UP!!" As you marched - another thing I loathed - the instructor would measure your strides with his drill stick - a brass-capped cane — and if your steps were longer than was ordained in the regulations he would whack you over the head with the cane.

  Unsafe handling of weapons would always be dealt with viciously, although sometimes the instructors would set you up for a beating. One day they lined us up in the corridor. A corporal shouted at me to enter a particular room. I marched in to find an instructor sitting at a desk. I stood to attention and gave him my name, rank and number. He looked me up and down, then said: "Stand at ease." He appeared to return to what he had been doing. After a few seconds he said quietly: "Do us a favour. Pass that weapon to me." On the floor was a sub-machine-gun which looked as if it was in the middle of being cleaned. I bent to pick it up and, bang, I felt a punch in the back of my head. "What the fucking hell do you think you're doing?" he screamed. I remembered too late that the proper procedure when picking up a weapon was to put your foot on it, check to see if it was loaded and generally make sure it was safe before giving it to anyone. I must have been put off guard by the fact that he had spoken to me in a normal tone of voice, which he swiftly abandoned: "YOU FUCKING PIG! YOU FUCKING KILLED ME!" When I recovered from being punched around the room he pointed to Nobby and told me it was mine for a week. Nobby was an old dud shell with a woolly hat on. Anyone who made a mistake when handling a weapon had to carry Nobby around for a week. You had to take it everywhere - to the canteen, on runs, even to bed. They would check to make sure you were carrying it at all times. Nobby was often my companion. The other variation on this theme was the luminous orange hard-hat, which you had to wear at all times for a week if you failed to salute an officer when you passed him. At dinner time the canteen would be dotted with luminous orange hard-hats.

  The more efficient we became, the harder they treated us, pushing our minds and bodies to their limits - and beyond. Most recruits, especially those from normal loving backgrounds, could not overcome the shock of army life. They would crack under the bombardment of abuse. At night, people would be talking about running away — or even suicide. Around two-thirds of the recruits in my intake did not finish the course. It seemed to me that the whole selection process was designed to weed out normal people: only the disturbed survived.

  7

  A Mislaid Testicle

  The shock of constant exercise can do strange things to your body, so I wasn't too worried when after a few weeks' training I noticed a swelling on one of my testicles.

  At a routine army medical I showed a doctor, who said he wanted to send me for tests to the Duchess of Kent Military Hospital in Catterick. I was reluctant to go, mainly because I did not want to lose any training days: if you missed too many you faced being "back-squadded" - forced to start your training again with the new intake. Not only did back-squadders have to repeat the awfulness, they were also regarded as losers. The doctor assured me the tests would only take a day, so there was no need to fear being back-squadded. If I'd known what awaited me I would probably have deserted

  immediately and reported to the nearest prison. It was six months before I emerged from that hospital - minus a testicle.

  I remember that period as a blur of pain, boredom and bed sores. What unsettled me most was that throughout that time no-one told me what was wrong. In the army you are told things on a need-to-know basis, but no-one felt that Trooper 24516117 O'Mahoney needed to know anything about his condition. After a while I stopped asking. At first I was given lots of tablets and ordered to stay in bed. I was not allowed to walk anywhere, even to the toilet: I had to piss into a paper cup and shit into a shiny pan. After a few weeks a doctor told me they were going to try to drain off the fluid. This would involve a small operation to insert a tube as thick as a ballpoint pen. Under anaesthetic they inserted the tube into the testicle, then secured it with a small pin. Every time I moved I had the agonising feeling of a tube scraping around inside me. They left it there for weeks, supplementing the treatment only with injections - into my arm, mercifully.

  I was receiving so many injections that they began to mess up my veins. In the end they attached a little plastic bin to a vein so that the drugs could be whooshed into me without the nurses having to find an unpunctured spot in my pin-cushion arms. After another long while they thought the tube had become blocked with congealed fluid. They said they were going to clean it by moving it to a new position. I thought this would involve another operation under anaesthetic, but the next morning the nurse said she was going to carry out the procedure on the spot without anaesthetic. I asked her if she was sure. She said yes and drew the curtains. She told me to hold on to the bed as the procedure might hurt a little. She took the pin out, which did not hurt too much. She pulled the tube down, which also did not hurt too much. I thought: "This isn't going to be too bad." I felt her doing something with the tube. She said: "I'm just going to re-insert the pin now." She pushed in the pin and I screamed in a way I had never screamed before - or since. It made me ill for days: the memory of pain can be as bad as the pain itself.

  At least once a fortnight they did something horrendous to me. One time they injected me with fluid that had me pissing all over the floor; every now and again they would carry out an exploratory operation, cutting open my groin, pulling everything out and having a look at it, before shoving it back in. They never told me the result of these explorations. There was something inhuman about the way they treated patients in that military environment. When the doctors, who all had military rank, did the rounds the nurses would rush around saying: "Lie neatly in your beds." You would have to lie to attention with the covers folded in the regulation way. The ward sister even threatened to report me for insubordination, because she didn't like the way I spoke to her when she did things that caused me pain. At those times I would shout out: "Oh, you bastard!" I suppose the correct form of address should have been: "Oh, please don't do that, Ma'am. Oh that hurts, Ma'am." Once I asked her if she had ever worked for the Gestapo: she certainly had the personality. Some of the nurses were all right, but in general everyone treated us as if we were just numbers, army property to do with as they saw fit, not living creatures. A few of the staff were so cold and primitive that some nights I half feared I'd wake to find leeches attached to my bollock.

  I started to think they were just experimenting on me: perhaps I was some sort of guinea pig? There was no other soldier in there suffering from my ailment — whatever it was. Perhaps they had not seen anything like it before and just wanted to play with it for as long as they could? My testicle — a marvel to military medicine. Of course, in hospital, no matter how ill you are, there's always someone worse off than you. Some of the other soldiers were in a bad way, although they all came and went. Several of them had been injured in Northern Ireland — run over by joyriders or smashed on the head with bricks or blown up or shot. I felt relieved that at least I would never have to serve in the land of my fathers.

  I began to get severely depressed. I hadn't wanted to tell my family where I was, so apart from an occasional visit from the Catholic chaplain the only person who came to see me was Alan, my Rhodesian friend. During one visit he suddenly started crying. I knew that something catastrophic must have happened for him to break down like that. I asked him what was wrong. He said that "the kaffirs" had taken over Rhodesia and were going to call it Zimbabwe. He was devastated: his family owned a big farm and he was worried that the blacks would seize it. He was also upset that the struggle had ended before he could get back there with his bayonet. The only good news in his life was that he had got on so well in basic training that the army wanted to make him an officer. They felt he had
the qualities to make him a leader of men. He ended up being sent to the officer training-school, the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst.

  He came to see me after an exploratory operation during which I'd been given morphine. I was still a little woozy and my grasp on reality had slipped a little. I said I wanted to escape and needed him to help me. He didn't think this was a good idea. I said I was going to go whether he helped me or not. He tried to dissuade me, but in the end he agreed to take me out, albeit only for a drink in a local pub. He got a wheelchair - there were always lots of them lying around for the many broken soldiers who needed them - and phoned a cab. He made me put on a dressing gown over my pyjamas and told the nurses he wanted to wheel me around the grounds for an hour. In the pub he bought me a pint of lager. I drank it greedily and the world around me began to spin. Dribble cascaded over my lips and my head collapsed onto my chest. I could feel myself drifting off into slumberland. A sergeant I knew came up to me: "What the fuck are you doing here, O'Mahoney?" I couldn't answer: I thought I was going to die. Every now and again I would pull my head up and look around me. Alan, his face lined with worry, was saying things to me, but I couldn't hear him. Finally, he wheeled me out and phoned another cab to take me back to the hospital. By the time we arrived I was making a weird groaning noise. Alan left me in reception - gaga with lolling head - to be found by some nurses I liked. They took me back to my ward and put me in a side room, drawing the curtains around the bed. When the ward sister did her rounds I heard her asking: "What's O'Mahoney doing like that?" The nurses said I'd had a really bad night and had only just got off to sleep, so they had left me there. Behind the curtains I was lying covered in dribble and stinking of drink. Thankfully the ward sister did not check on me.

  After six months I was desperate to get out. One day as a doctor examined me I said: "Look, I'm not being funny, but I just want you to cut the thing off." He said it was an option. I said I had been there six months and they could not or would not tell me what was wrong with me: "So just do it." He conferred with his colleagues, then returned: "All right, we'll do it." In normal circumstances you might expect a young man to feel reluctant to have one of his testicles cut off, but by that stage I would have been willing to let them cut off anything and everything if it meant getting out of there. The loss of my testicle seemed a price worth paying. A few days later they came and drew a big red arrow on my right leg - to make sure they did not cut off the wrong one. I had the operation and felt relief more than anything. I'd been told that it would not affect my sexual performance or hinder my chances of fathering children. Apparently, nature equips men with two testicles just in case they mislay one of them in a military hospital.

  They gave me a week's sick leave and I went home to Codsall. The only benefit of being in a military hospital was that I had managed to use my ill-health to postpone going to court for the outstanding offences of assault, theft, threatening behaviour and possessing an offensive weapon which I'd committed before joining the army. However, during that week's leave the case was finally heard by Seisdon magistrates. I pleaded guilty. My solicitor said I had since joined the army and had spent the last few months in a military hospital. He said I had put my criminal past behind me and was now determined to contribute something to society by serving my country as a soldier. The magistrate commended my civic spirit and gave me a small fine, £105 with £25 costs. I suspected that my being a soldier had helped secure this leniency.

  I had been given a letter to show to my doctor in Codsall. I made an appointment to see him. He read the letter and said: "Ah, testicular cancer." I almost fell off the chair: I had had cancer and no-one had bothered to tell me. My GP said it was the most common cancer among young men. 1 left the surgery in a daze and spent the rest of the day contemplating an early death. I could think of nothing else. I wandered the streets aimlessly all day, trying to come to terms with the GP's words.

  That night I bumped into an old school friend who suggested we went for a drink. Although I'd been told to avoid alcohol because of my medication I didn't think a pint would kill me after all I had endured. The landlord was calling last orders when we arrived, so we ordered two pints each. I drank the first in one go, but as I started on the second I began to feel ill. I told my friend I had to go home and asked him to walk with me. About ten yards from the pub I vomited a spew of water mixed with blood. I fell to the floor. My friend saw all the blood, vomited himself and ran off. Once again I had cause to regret my choice of company. A passerby on the way to Damascus saw me and phoned an ambulance. The ambulance men thought I was drunk. During the journey they lectured me about the crisis in the National Health Service and slagged me off for wasting ambulance time. I was too ill to answer back. They kept me in overnight and released me the next day, warning me not to drink any more alcohol.

  Towards the end of my leave I went up to Southport, near Liverpool, to visit my brother Jerry. He took me down to his local pub that lunchtime and bought me a lemonade after I'd told him I couldn't drink. After half an hour of watching my brother drinking his Guinness I decided to join him on the black stuff. I had never drunk it before, but remembered the saying, "Guinness is good for you." I reasoned that it couldn't do me any more harm than the Army Medical Corps. I found that the Guinness didn't make me vomit - it just sent me off my head. We ended up in the bar of Southport Football Club, playing pool with two Liverpudlians. For some reason I got into an argument with them over the game of pool. Things simmered for a little while, but then as one of them leant over the table like a professional to take his shot I clasped my cue in both hands and whacked him over the head with it. The other locals regarded this as a hostile act and the place blew up. I remember standing by the door throwing pool balls at people coming towards me. I don't think I hit anyone because I had triple vision at the time. They managed to push us out into the car park and lock the door, which was made up of little square glass panels. I launched a flying two-legged kick at the door and both feet went straight through the glass panels. I found myself wedged there, hanging upside down, until the police arrived to arrest me. My brother had driven off in the car when he saw the police. A mile down the road he crashed into another car at a set of traffic lights and ended up being done for drink driving.

  The army sent an officer to represent me at North Sefton Magistrates' Court, where I was charged with criminal damage. I got my solicitor to blame the incident on the aggressive locals who had provoked the fight. He said I'd flung myself at the door only because I'd feared that my brother was trapped inside the pub. Then the lieutenant stood up to say I was a good soldier who had a fine career ahead of me: my behaviour was completely out of character. He said I had been drinking a drink I did not normally drink and this might have affected my judgement. I was given a conditional discharge, but had to pay £10 compensation with £16 costs. I was pleased with the result. In my eyes it underlined that my status as a soldier offered me a degree of protection from the potential harshness of the law. My only worry was that my previous convictions - the ones I had neglected to declare to the army — had been read out in open court in front of the lieutenant. I was worried he might say something about them when he got back to camp, but after everything else that had happened in recent months I didn't lose any sleep over it.

  After recovering from my medical treatment I returned to start my basic training again. Nothing much had changed: the instructors had not become noticeably more compassionate in my absence: I was once more a "pig ". Moreover, I was now a pig who had been "living it up skiving in hospital." However, I think they respected me for having put myself back into their care when I could easily have got a medical discharge. Not that they spared me anything as a result. If anything I was subjected to more verbal abuse than the other recruits. The instructors knew me well and knew that their ranting did little more than amuse me. So a sort of reasonably friendly rivalry developed. Towards the end of the seven weeks we had to do an exercise called "Escape and Evasion". This involved
being dumped on the Yorkshire Moors for three days with only a compass and map. You had to get from A to B without being caught by the instructors whose job was to hunt you down. One instructor's last words to me were: "We're going to fucking get you, O'Mahoney." Apart from evading capture you had to live off the land. I was determined not to be caught. On the third day, as I neared my destination, I felt pleased that I'd apparently succeeded. The finishing point was in a valley. When I got to the top of the hill overlooking it I saw a Land Rover full of instructors at the pick-up point. They had obviously not even bothered to look for me: they had simply driven there to await my inevitable arrival. I sat at the top of the hill for an hour, hoping vainly that they might drive away. But they weren't going anywhere. They knew I could not finish the exercise until I had reached that point. In the end I just got up and started walking down the hill. As soon as they saw me they jumped out and ran towards me, whooping with joy. The four of them grabbed hold of me and pulled off my shirt. In training we had been taught that if CS gas ever got on our skin we were not to try to wash it off with water, as this would cause severe irritation. They dragged me to a stream, took out a CS gas tablet, and lit it in front of my face so that the gas almost choked me. Then, with CS gas particles covering my naked upper body, they dragged me through the stream. Perhaps they'd just wanted to show they cared.

  Towards the end of my basic training the army chaplain stopped me one day to ask my how I was getting on. We had come to know each other quite well during my stay in hospital. I told him I was fine, but was anxious to leave Catterick. He said he would see what he could do. The following day I was called in to the Squadron Office and told that, if I wished, I could go on an HGV driving course instead of hanging around longer to do my tank training. I would then be a lorry driver rather than a tank gunner. The officer said I'd be posted to Germany straight after the two-week course. I reasoned that in civilian life an HGV licence would be of more use to me than the ability to fire the gun of a Chieftain tank, so I agreed. Within three weeks I was sitting on a plane bound for my regiment in Germany. But before I left we had the passing-out parade. I was surprised at how proud I felt that day. I had not wanted to join the army and in many ways I loathed it, yet I felt I had achieved something by completing the course. So many people had laughed when I'd said I was joining the army: they all thought I wouldn't last a week because of the discipline. I had not realised until that day how strong had been my desire to prove them wrong. The need to save face had helped me through. I could not contemplate the shame of going home having failed. I suppose I also felt a sense of achievement because my medical problems meant I'd had to endure more than the other recruits. We marched out onto the parade ground where three rows of proud parents sat watching. I had invited my mother, but she'd told me she wouldn't be able to attend, so I was surprised and pleased to see her standing there with my brothers Michael and jerry. I found myself filling with emotion. Strange, but true.