Soldier Of The Queen

by Bernard O'Mahoney

  It was around this time that Nasty interfered with mourners heading for one of the hunger striker's funerals. I was not there and I never found out exactly what he did, but I heard it was something to do with a hearse. Whatever it was it outraged the mourners who were in several cars. They all got out and there was a scuffle. Soon afterwards we were told in briefings not to interfere in any way with mourners, especially those crossing the border. Everyone had to be waved through without being searched. This annoyed us, because whole coach-loads of people used to cross from the Republic on their way to hunger strikers' funerals. We thought that as soon as they realised they weren't going to be searched they would be filling the coaches with weaponry for their IRA friends in the north. For the rest of the tour we had to stand by while coaches drove past us filled with people holding up tricolours, making rude gestures and mouthing obscenities, their faces contorted with hatred. We assumed the non-intervention order had come about because of all the foreign journalists in the province. The army didn't want foreigners filming us harassing mourners. We might have appeared inhumane.

  After the death of a hunger striker local republicans would sometimes hold candlelit vigils outside army bases, usually one of the smaller and more vulnerable bases. I remember one at Rosslea when a crowd sat down in the road blocking the gates so that vehicles couldn't get in or out. They were sitting there with their black flags and candles. I was standing there next to an RUC man. I asked him why the RUC didn't drag them off the Queen's highway.

  He looked at me as if I were mad. "It's all right for you," he said, "you'll be gone from here in a few months. I'm going to have to live here."

  On patrol near the border you could not always be sure where the border was. At its clearest points there might be a bridge or a river or a sign, but in other places it would be marked only by a hedge or a stream or a white cross in the road. We had strict orders not to cross the border, but we often ignored them, especially in those areas where we could have claimed justifiably that we'd been lost or confused. Usually we did it as a dare when we knew we were being watched by citizens of the Republic. There might be a house with a large garden that we knew was in the Republic. We would cross into the garden and hang around for half an hour, stamping on rose bushes. The house's occupants would stare at us fearfully from the window, but they never came out to point out our error. Sensibly, they stayed where they were. They probably thought we were an SAS death squad. Some of them must have phoned the Irish police to complain, because sometimes back at camp we would be asked if we had crossed the border in such and such an area.

  "No, Sir. Not to our knowledge."

  However, our worst mischief was reserved for houses on the British side of the border. In the camp's ops room there used to be a board on which were listed the addresses of isolated houses whose occupants were away for whatever reason. The RUC used to encourage people to inform them if their houses were going to be empty for any long periods of time, so the security forces could keep an eye on them. Everyone benefited, supposedly: the owners could holiday happily knowing their houses were safe and we could be alert to those properties terrorists might use as vantage points for attacks.

  So before going out on patrol we would often check the board to see whose house was empty. Then we would go there and break in, usually by forcing the back window. We could only do this if officers weren't around and the patrol was being led by a corporal. The purpose was not to steal stuff, although we did occasionally pinch small items; it was really to have a place where we could put our feet up for a few hours and watch TV, instead of footslogging through the countryside. If there was any beer or food around, so much the better, but we'd be happy just to find a comfortable sitting room where we could lounge on the sofa monitoring daytime television. We would usually rummage through the other rooms to see what was there, but we wouldn't cause any damage. And most of the time there wasn't anything worth stealing anyway. If the owners had any money they didn't seem to spend it on possessions.

  There was one house in a nature reserve where we found fishing paraphernalia in the shed. We took it out and went down to the nearby river where we spent the day fishing. A few of us kept watch, but we had the river to ourselves. Someone even caught a trout. When it was time to go we put the fishing rods back where we found them. I remember another house where in the hallway there was a hat-stand covered with hats. We all put on various hats and sat in the front room watching TV, laughing and joking whilst doing impersonations of various people.

  One time we almost got caught. We had forced the back window of an isolated bungalow. We wandered through the bedrooms. I found myself in what seemed to be a teenage girl's bedroom - posters of pretty-boy pop stars, furry toys, and chocolate wrappers in the bin. She had a cassette player and a small collection of pop tapes. I decided it was time to get a replacement for the Phil Collins tape that had been playing non-stop in our sleeping quarters for almost two months. Unfortunately, almost all her cassettes were home-made, songs taped from Radio One's Top 40 programme. There was only one professionally-produced album by Rickie Lee Jones who had had a hit called "Chuck E's in Love". I wouldn't have bought it myself, but I felt I could have tolerated anything that replaced the Phil Collins tape. I pocketed the tape.

  Other soldiers had settled down in front of the television. I went into the kitchen and opened the fridge. There was a huge, untouched cooked salmon on a plate. I took a chunk out of it and brought it into the sitting room to share with the others. But before they could get their teeth into it we heard the sound of a car's tyres on the gravel driveway outside.

  Everyone jumped up. I said: "Out the back!" Someone turned off the TV and we ran out the way we came. I put the salmon back in the fridge. A middle-aged couple and their teenage daughter came around the back to find us wandering round the garden, pretending to check the place out. We must have given a good impression of soldiers doing their duty, because they were really pleased to see us. They even invited us in for a cup of tea. We declined politely. I was closest to the back door and, looking in, I could see our boot marks all over the kitchen's tiled floor.

  Then, to my horror, the mother said: "Well, if you won't have a cup of tea, would you like a salmon sandwich, lads?"

  I didn't want her to open the fridge in our presence. "No, no, no," I said. "We've just had our rations. We've got to get off."

  No-one ever complained about these break-ins, probably because no-one ever thought it was us. Even if the owners had caught us in their house we could easily have explained ourselves. We were the law. And most of them wouldn't have minded anyway: Protestants in rural areas used to glow with delight when they saw us. In urban areas Protestant teenagers used frequently to sit near checkpoints identifying Catholics for us: "He's up to this. He's up to that." Quite blatant they were. My main regret was stealing the Rickie Lee Jones tape. It ended up being played all the time in our Portakabin and I grew to hate it even more than the Phil Collins.

  I've spoken to other soldiers who've served in Northern Ireland, especially in Belfast. Several told me how they used to get on the radio to make bogus reports of suspicious packages in shops. They would clear all the shops in a street so the "package" could be checked out. Then they would go into the shops and steal what they wanted.

  In the last month of the tour I found myself on a patrol that came under rifle fire. We were moving through lush countryside on one of those rare sun-filled days when Fermanagh could seem like the most beautiful place in the world. We could see no-one. I felt we were out of place, like blots on the landscape, particularly as Nasty was with us. We crossed a field and moved onto a road skirted by a raised hedge. Suddenly - PHEWW! PHEWW! PHEWW! - bullets came tearing through the hedge just above our heads. Everyone dived to the ground.

  I flattened myself into the grass verge and held the rifle to my shoulder, ready for firing. I had a special sight on my rifle which improved my vision no end. I looked around. Everyone's eyes were wide with fear. The radio o
perator was shouting down the line to base: "CONTACT! CONTACT! CONTACT!" Fortunately, we were being led by a corporal I rated highly. A few more bullets came through the hedge and then silence.

  The corporal took the initiative. He said we were on low ground and had to get onto high ground to outflank the sniper. The hedge was easier to get through further down the road. The corporal shouted: "Go! Go! Go!"

  I think there's a key point in moments of danger when you must force yourself to act, almost without thinking, otherwise fear will paralyse you. A Welsh soldier near me got up and started running. I got up on wobbly legs and followed him. The others were more hesitant: Nasty in particular wasn't moving. He seemed rooted to the spot in shock. So much for his wanting to get at the Fenians. The Welsh soldier and I passed through the hedge and ran straight up the hill from which the shots must have come. I half expected a bullet to crash into me, but the adrenaline had taken over now. The corporal was behind us. I had heard him shouting orders at the others, who had started to emerge from behind the hedge.

  The three of us got to the top of the hill. We looked down and there in front of us, quite a distance away but clearly visible, were two male figures, both running, one of them carrying a rifle. We pointed our rifles at them.

  Through my special sight I could see as clearly as anything. The sight was an image intensifier, battery operated, and it made a little whining noise as you turned it on. It was designed mainly for night use when you could look through the green haze and pick out heat-sensitive objects. People would come up as shadows. The word was that you could make men sterile by pointing it at their privates, but that was probably a myth. Sometimes at checkpoints we would sit there pointing it at the genitals of motorists who were being searched. Now for the first time I was pointing it at two terrorists who had just opened fire on us.

  Even though I was a bad shot I felt I couldn't miss at that range and with that sight. But in that second when I took in the whole scene there was one slight detail that made me think,

  "This isn't right." It was a dog: there was a dog running beside the two figures.

  The corporal started shouting: "Halt or I fire! Halt or I fire!" But the figures kept running.

  I was disappointed he didn't fire. I felt I couldn't pull the trigger until he had. The others from the patrol were now quite a few yards behind us. The corporal shouted back to the radio operator to tell base we'd spotted two suspects. The helicopter carrying the Quick Reaction Force would already have been in the air. The news that there were two running targets would have created great excitement: everyone would have been geared up for a fox hunt. The RUC would probably have been begging to get involved on the ground. We ran after the two figures. I badly wanted to shoot, but I knew something was wrong. The black-and-white collie dog made me know in my heart we were not dealing with terrorists.

  I couldn't help myself, though: I still wanted to shoot them. I kept shouting to the corporal: "I can see them. I can see them."

  He kept shouting back: "Don't shoot! Don't shoot!"

  We must have chased them across three fields. They were clear targets all the time. My urge to shoot almost overwhelmed me and I resented the corporal's caution. He kept telling us to keep following them and not to shoot. As I got to the top of another hillock and watched the two figures running towards a farm I looked through my sight again. I felt real yearning as my finger tensed on the trigger. A little squeeze and they would have been gone.

  Within seconds I had lost the opportunity: the figures disappeared into the farm, which consisted of a house, a barn and a small shed. By now the helicopter was hovering above us.

  The corporal was on the radio. I heard him say we were going to go into the farmyard. The rest of the patrol had caught up with us. We moved in zig-zags into the farmyard, covering each other. There was a car outside the house. On the back seat was the dog: it was panting madly and its coat was wet.

  We kicked open the back door of the house and there, sitting in the kitchen, were two boys, no older than 15.1 asked them if they had seen anyone run through the farm. They said they hadn't. "Don't fucking lie to me," I said. "It was you."

  The slightly older one said no, but his mate started crying.

  I said again: "It was you."

  But the older one said: "No, no, no. It wasn't me."

  I asked him whether the dog in the car was his. He said it was. I said: "Well, why's your fucking dog panting? It's you, you cunt." He looked down at the ground and said yes.

  His mate, who was still crying, said: "What are you after us for?"

  They told us what had happened. They were brothers. Their mother was dead and they lived alone with their father, who had gone into town to get some false teeth fitted. They knew he was going to be away for a while, so they had taken out his legally-held rifle and gone into the fields for some target practice. They said they had never seen soldiers in that area and they hadn't seen us until we had started chasing them. When the older one had finished talking I slapped him across the face with the back of my hand. It was a mixture of relief and anger, like the way a mother hits her child when he turns up after she's been worried about him.

  "You stupid little cunt," I said, "I could have fucking shot you." The police arrived and we left.

  In the following days I felt sick with myself. Even today I find myself sweating when I think of what almost happened. That incident disturbed me more than anything else I did in Northern Ireland, perhaps more than anything else I've done in my life. Why? Because I felt I had met full-on a real badness within myself. I had desperately wanted to kill those boys. I had known instinctively as soon as I had seen them properly that they were not terrorists. We all had: that was why the corporal kept telling us not to shoot. Yet I had wanted to kill them. I had wanted to pull that trigger and blow them away; and I'd wanted to do it not because they were Irish but because I knew I could have got away with it. Under the army's rules of engagement I knew I could have shot both boys dead with no recriminations. We had come under fire and, after shouting a warning to two armed fugitives who refused to stop, we had returned fire. It would have been a tragic misadventure. The only glimmer of comfort I got from encountering my own darkness was the knowledge that I wouldn't have been able to live with myself if I'd done what I'd wanted to do.

  That experience knocked out of me a lot of my new-found soldierly cockiness. It made me feel strange inside. I felt at times as if the badness within me would bring badness upon me. I wondered seriously if I would get out of Northern Ireland alive, even though we had entered the last three weeks of the tour.

  On 1 August another hunger striker died, 2 5-year-old INLA member Kevin Lynch, after 71 days. The next day an IRA hunger striker died, also aged 25. Kieran Doherty had fasted for 73 days and during that time had been elected to the Irish parliament.

  Throughout the tour I had been travelling regularly in the covert car to the military dental centre in Omagh where I was being fitted with two new front teeth to replace the originals that had been knocked out at a nightclub. On the day Doherty died the IRA blew up an unmarked police car just outside Omagh, killing two policemen. On the same day in Belfast the IRA fired a rocket at an army Land Rover. A 21-year-old soldier had to have both legs amputated below the knee. I remember watching the news and thinking, "21 - my age -and a cripple." Over the next few days there were concentrated car-bomb and incendiary attacks all over the north and at the end of the week the ninth hunger striker died, 23-year-old IRA man Thomas McElwee. Over that weekend more than 1,000 petrol bombs were thrown at the security forces. The whole place seemed about to go up in flames. My feelings of guilt diminished, my hatred for the terrorists returned. I was soon back to my old self.

  With less than two weeks to go everyone was nervous. We had often been told we were most likely to be hit either in the first few weeks when we were "green" or in the last few weeks when we were preoccupied with thoughts of home. The fields around permanent checkpoints became at night a real dang
er zone for animals. They would walk into the trip wires, setting off flares. At other times they might have escaped with their lives, but we were all so jumpy that if a flare went off we tended to open fire. I only ever saw sheep shot, but others had tales of foxes, rabbits and even the odd cow, being slaughtered. When a flare went off someone had to go out into the darkness amongst the bushes and re-set it. This often led to arguments.

  It s your turn.

  "No, it's not. It's yours."

  "Fuck off. I'm not going."

  One night I was off-duty and sleeping at a permanent checkpoint. Mac was there. There was no electricity or running water. We used to use paraffin-fuelled storm-lamps for light. They looked like those old miners' lanterns. You had to put the fuel in, pump a small handle and light the wick. So long as the air pressure was kept up by pumping the handle they gave off light. While we were sleeping another soldier filled the lamp and began pumping madly. Suddenly it exploded, bursting into a ball of flame. We found out later that he had filled it with petrol by mistake. His lower leg caught fire and he began screaming as his lightweight green nylon combat trousers melted onto his leg. He threw himself to the ground and began rolling around and kicking his legs and arms, screaming for help. Mac and I jumped up, saw the flames and assumed we'd been petrol-bombed. I ran to hold our mate to stop him moving around in case he set something else on fire, and Mac grabbed a huge water pot which we used to heat water for washing. The soldier was still screaming as Mac ran over and threw the contents of the pot over his leg.

  The soldier's screams intensified, "ARGH! ARGH! ARGH!" and he was obviously in greater pain.

  Mac looked at the pot and said: "Shit. That was boiling water."

  Our friend was whisked off to hospital. Later we got word that the burns to his legs from the boiling water were far more serious than those caused by the petrol.