8
Give Peace A Chance
Life in Germany at Imphal Barracks in Osnabriick seemed carefree and enjoyable after my recent experiences. There was very little of the clockwork-soldier routine I loathed - the marching, the parades, the spit and polish. This was partly because we spent our days covered in oil and grime from our vehicles. Keeping your vehicle operational was regarded as far more important than having shiny boots. There was also a less rigidly enforced sense of hierarchy, because my immediate superior officer no more wanted to be in the army than I did. Over time I found out that he came from a wealthy and well-connected family. His father had made plain to him that he had to do a stint in "the cavalry" - or else be cut off financially. I discovered that the upper classes called tank regiments "the cavalry" - a reference to their historical origins. There are, of course, differences between horses and tanks, but I suppose that both enable an officer to ride into battle, rather than march vulgarly on foot. Once this particular officer had completed his stint he could look forward to a life cushioned by his father's money. Perhaps it was his daydreaming about this future that gave him an air of vague detachment from the military world: he was certainly a rather hopeless soldier, which made me like him even more. We nicknamed him "Major Disaster", even though major was not his rank. He had a good sense of humour, which in itself distinguished him from the other officers, and he would talk to us like we were friends. He seemed to want acceptance as an equal rather than deference as a superior, which was fine by me: I'd never liked calling officers "Sir" and I refused outright to call corporals "corporal". Some of us came to an agreement with Major Disaster that if we were on our own we'd call him by his first name, saving the use of "Sir" for when more senior officers or "proper soldiers" were nearby.
Social life in Germany mirrored the social life I'd led prior to enlistment - a cocktail of drinking and fighting. The main difference was that I now had a wage from the state to fund my socialising. I found a group of people I liked. Most were from cities, like Liverpool or Belfast, and we shared the same approach to life. Drinking was the main recreation — a hobby shared by almost everyone else in the regiment, which contained its share of full-blown alcoholics. I soon realised people could easily survive in the army as chronic alcoholics, so long as they didn't turn up late for morning parade. The only German word most soldiers learnt was "Bier". The squaddies' world revolved around beer. Sundays, especially, were heavy-drinking days. We would get up around 11 a.m., eat breakfast in the cookhouse, then spend the rest of the day in the Squadron Bar, which was only four doors down from our room. Each squadron had its own bar and each bar gave squaddies credit until pay-day at the end of the month.
One Sunday there was a group of us drinking in the Squadron Bar. An argument developed between two soldiers called Kevin and Jock. Both were pretty drunk. Kevin was slagging off the messy state of Jock's bed-space; this enraged Jock who responded with several mouthfuls of very personal abuse before staggering off to bed. At tea-time we decided to take a brief break from our drinking in order to get something to eat in the cookhouse. We sat down at a table, laughing and joking as we ate our food. The subject turned to Jock. Kevin suddenly got up and said he was going to bed. He lurched off drunkenly and we assumed he had just decided it was time to sleep off the booze. But about ten minutes later the cookhouse door flew open: Kevin stood there stripped to the waist with blood spattered over his hands, chest and face. He said calmly: "Somebody better come. I think I've hurt Jock." We all rushed to the block, leaving Kevin standing there. When we entered the room we found Jock hanging half in and half out of his bed. I could see two deep wounds on his head, one near his cheek, the other on his forehead. There was not much blood, but the blood that was there was deep red, almost black. He was alive, but unconscious and badly hurt. We put him in the recovery position and called out his name, but he didn't respond. On the floor near his head was a large adjustable spanner, smeared with blood. It looked as if Kevin had attacked him as he slept. The ambulance arrived and took Jock away. I never saw him again. Kevin was arrested and installed in the guardhouse. I saw him occasionally being marched at great speed to collect his meals from the cookhouse, but after a week or so he too disappeared, never to be seen again. Questions to sergeants or officers about either man were always met with the same answer: "Surplus to requirements. Forget him." I never did find out what happened to them.
Drinking outside the camp also inevitably led to fighting. Although we had many fights with German civilians and American servicemen, our most bitter battles were fought against British soldiers from rival regiments, especially infantry ones. They had two main reasons for resenting us. First, they knew we regarded them as "grunts" — a lower form of life grunting around the countryside with backpacks while the tracks of our regiment's tanks showered them with mud. Second, they didn't like Irish regiments because we didn't have to serve in Northern Ireland. They thought we were either war-dodging cowards or IRA sympathisers who had joined to get military experience to use against them.
Of course, there were still lots of petty rules that I was always running up against. The army thrived on total bullshit: it was smeared on everything you came into contact with. One rule was that you were not allowed outside the camp without a collar. So if you were caught wearing a t-shirt you were confined to camp for a period. I was always being confined to camp, although my punishment never made much difference to my movements. If I wanted to go out I just climbed over the fence, rather than sign out at the main gate. However, this behaviour once led to my arrest on suspicion of murder.
I had been confined to camp for a week for an offence so trivial that I've forgotten what it was. One night I decided to jump over the fence to go into town. While there I got involved in a mass brawl at a concert by German punks and my shirt got stained with someone's blood. On the same night in another part of town a German woman had been beaten to death with a spanner. The last person she had been seen talking to was believed to have been a British soldier. After a search the next day my blood-stained shirt was found in the wash-basket. When I was first questioned by the German police in the presence of British Military Police I didn't know that someone had been murdered. All that was on my mind was the desire to avoid punishment for having jumped over the fence. So when they asked me about my movements the night before I said I'd been watching television in the camp. They soon established I was lying - and told me about the murder. I felt I had landed myself in one of those nightmarish thrillers in which an innocent man finds himself the prime suspect -and everything he does to show his innocence merely enhances his captors' belief in his guilt. I was held for two days before suddenly being released: a soldier from another regiment had confessed to the murder. He was later given a life sentence. As punishment for jumping the fence I was confined to barracks for another week.
The experience did at least reassure me that the army didn't care about my criminal past. Given that I was held for two days as a murder suspect I felt sure that, as a matter of routine, a check would have been made to see whether I had previous form. I was sure this information would have been passed to the Military Police. Yet no-one said anything. I had been a little worried about my past catching up on me since my appearance in court the previous year over the incident at Southport Football Club. But the officer who had heard my previous convictions being read out had obviously not done anything about them; or, if he had, the army had ignored his information. All these details taken together made me feel confident that my undisclosed criminal past was not something the army cared about - or would ever now act upon.
My two best friends were Paul and Lofty. Both of them hated the army. Paul wanted to be an actor or comedian. He used to stand on the table in the Squadron Bar singing Beach Boys songs, telling jokes and mimicking people. He would often walk around the camp with his beret back to front or pulled down over his ears, marching crab-like, right arm and right leg together, left arm and left leg together. The proper sol
diers used to loathe him. Lofty was an even more unlikely recruit. He was extremely laid back, smoking dope and strumming a guitar in his room, the walls of which were covered in Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and anti-war posters, including the one which said: "Join the army, get a trade, travel to exotic locations, meet interesting people - and kill them." He worked as a clerk in the HQ offices, because he didn't like guns. The real soldiers may have loathed Paul, but they hated Lofty. It must have been one of them who reported his dope-smoking to the Military Police, who raided his room one day looking for evidence. Fortunately, Lofty had smoked everything the night before and got rid of the evidence. The police had to be content with confiscating some of his revolutionary posters, including one featuring the Cuban guerrilla leader, Che Guevara, and another advertising the Paul McCartney record, "Give Ireland Back to the Irish". No-one knew what to make of him. When you asked him why he had joined the army he would say: "It's something I ask myself every day." Like a lot of squaddies he was probably escaping from something worse. He had a days-to-do chart on the inside of his wardrobe door which he ticked off every day. He was one soldier who never got into fights and even went out of his way to get on with the Germans, which really marked him out as a freak. If we were with him we would often get into places from which soldiers were normally barred.
So 1980 drifted past quite pleasantly. I was arrested by the police a few more times over minor incidents, but was never charged: I stole a bike once when I was drunk and didn't have enough money to get a taxi back to barracks; I also stole a taxi-driver's wallet from the jacket he foolishly left on the back seat. The money in it paid for the evening's drinking - but I tipped him well when I got out of the car. In December Paul, a Liverpudlian, ran into my room one morning to tell me that the ex-Beatle John Lennon had been murdered in America. The murder outraged a lot of people in the regiment — many of them were from Liverpool - and that night a huge gang of us went down to an American bar in the town seeking revenge. We beat up every American we could find. I can't remember if any of us were singing the Lennon classic "Give Peace a Chance" at the time.
In February I returned to Codsall for a few days' leave. I learned that my one-time gang had been having trouble with bouncers at the local disco. I decided the bouncers needed to be taught a lesson. I hatched a plan: one of us would go up to the disco on his own; the bouncers would inevitably refuse to let him in; he would then offer to fight the bouncers, who would take the bait and chase him into the car park - where about 15 of us would be waiting behind a fence armed with knives, spanners, metal bars and whatever other implements we could find. Everything went to plan. As soon as the bouncers chased our friend into the car park we laid into them. There was a brief vicious struggle before they ran back to the safety of the disco and slammed the doors shut. However, in their haste to escape they left behind one of their mates. I and another slammed into him with lumps of wood. He was screaming desperately: "Let me in! Let me in!" Eventually they opened the door and let him in, fighting us back from the entrance. They managed again to slam shut the studded doors. We went around to the side where there were huge earthen plant pots. We picked these up and started hurling them through the disco's windows. The sounds of breaking glass and women screaming mingled with the disco beat. When we ran out of earthen pots we threw in everything else we had -bricks, bottles, bits of wood. The disco was full - probably about 500 people — and we could hear the DJ making an urgent appeal to the crowd: "Help the doormen! Help the doormen!" Suddenly the doors burst open and a swarm of angry people flew out after us. We were heavily outnumbered - there must have been about 100 of them - but we stood and fought. Some of them had armed themselves with plates from the kitchen which they threw at us. The fight spilled from the car park onto the nearby estate. When the police finally arrived we were fighting in people's gardens. There were bodies everywhere, lying among the debris of glass and plates. Not surprisingly, the police knew who to arrest and, naturally, I was among them. I spent the night in custody before being released. The police told me the court case would not be for a few months. By this stage I wasn't too worried about notching up yet another conviction for violence. I hardly thought it would jeopardise my army career. Indeed, I'd found that contempt for civilians was one of the hallmarks of army life, so I felt confident that a conviction for bashing a few despised civvies wouldn't count against me. And, anyway, I knew by now that my status as a soldier would ensure lenient treatment from the magistrates.
I flew back to Germany and into a barracks whispering with rumours. The main rumour was that the Ministry of Defence was considering abandoning the policy of not sending Irish regiments to Northern Ireland. The question was: which of us war-dodgers would be the first to go? Everyone thought they would send the Irish Guards because they were foot-soldiers armed with the standard Self-Loading Rifle (SLR). Most of us had not even seen an SLR, let alone fired one. As members of a tank regiment we used sub-machine-guns. But we should have had enough experience of military logic by then to know that the army would not do what was rational and sensible. Within a fortnight the news landed like a mortar among us: the 5th Royal Inniskilling Dragoon Guards were going to be given the privilege of being the first Irish regiment to be sent to the six counties. Our four and a half month tour of duty would start on 10 April 1981. What was more, we'd be going to the historical recruitment base of our regiment - Enniskillen in County Fermanagh. Depression followed the panic which followed the shock. I realised that for many the derogatory nickname "war-dodgers" had been neither unkind nor inaccurate. It became apparent that a lot of people had genuinely joined the regiment in the belief they would never have to serve in Northern Ireland. The only ones who seemed enthusiastic were a handful of Fermanagh Protestants. The regiment still attracted a lot of people from the Enniskillen area, all Protestants. Some of them had left the area because the safety of their families had been compromised through links with the Crown. A lot of them had relations in the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) or the Ulster Defence Regiment (UDR). The idea of returning to patrol their own streets appealed greatly to the staunch loyalists: some of them made it plain they had scores to settle with the Catholic population. I imagined how I might behave if sent back to patrol Codsall with a rifle.
I felt strangely neutral about the prospective tour. I had been in the army for two years by then and Germany had begun to bore me. I was not raring to go, but half of me felt quite excited by the idea. Then just as the regiment absorbed the fact that they were going, another piece of news caused further anxiety. The IRA prisoner Bobby Sands started a hunger strike on 1 March; other IRA and Irish National Liberation Army (INLA) prisoners were ready to join the hunger strike. The television news bulletins became the most popular programmes, and suddenly everyone seemed to be discussing the politics of Northern Ireland, with special reference to the hunger strike. The most common feeling among the lower ranks was that Mrs Thatcher should have given the IRA prisoners what they wanted, namely, status as political prisoners, rather than have them treated as ordinary criminals. Our reasoning was that under the Geneva Convention those Provos already in custody would then be prisoners of war with no release date, no trials and no appeals; and, most importantly, we'd then be allowed to execute summarily any of their comrades we subsequently caught not wearing uniform "on active service".
Each night on the news we would watch tensions rising in Northern Ireland. Soldiers started getting more army barmy -the barracks suddenly seemed full of fitness fanatics. I had to go back into hospital for a few weeks and so missed the week of special training at the Sennelager base - known as Tin City - where soldiers were sent to sharpen up their urban warfare skills prior to going to Ireland. I heard the week had been a fiasco: their trainers had not been impressed with their military skills. But what could they expect? We were a tank regiment; we weren't trained as foot-soldiers.
When I got back to base in late March I was told to report to a major's office in the main administrative blo
ck. The major said he knew my parents were Irish Catholics and that I had relations living near the border. He said if I strongly objected to going to Northern Ireland I would not have to go. I said I wanted to go, although I didn't explain why. My desire had nothing to do with going to fight for Queen and country. It was far more basic and simple than that: I just wanted to be with my friends. My loyalty was to them - and I had no intention of being the one waving at the gate as they left. To me it was like they were going out for a fight in the car park and I was going to join them.
Soldier Of The Queen Page 8
