The Green Platoon

by Martin Hand

  Sergeants O’Brien and Doyle were a good double act. They knew they were stuck in the Glen training ground for eight solid weeks. Solid was meant to mean 24/7. The sergeants had formed their own private pact. They would both be there during the day but would take alternate nights off for family time. This was the Irish Army after all, not the US Marines boot camp in Parris Island.

  The men ended every training day with a whiskey at six o’clock, to accompany their debriefing at which they discussed who was showing enough spirit to warrant their attention. Spirit had to be, if not broken, at least fashioned. If you had to order a soldier to attack a mortar position, the last thing you wanted was a spirited discussion: Why me? Why don’t you do it?

  These were dyed-in-the-wool army guys. They trained their troops hard by day, knowing they were doing them a favour. There was nothing to do at night in the bleakness of the remote Wicklow hills, so you may as well be exhausted and bed down.

  Eight weeks of basic training was enough to get a good read on the enlisted men under you. You had to know what personality type you could rely on. Sure, the training was designed to get the boys to take and obey orders. But also the question of who you would give a detail to, knowing that they could be relied upon, had to be answered.

  The sergeants took turns roaring at their soldiers during endless fitness and endurance drills in the mud. No exceptions were made for Martha, either. She could sink or swim. After four weeks it was clear what the group dynamic was.

  The lads from the country – Paul Devitt, Michael Moriarty and Larry Duffy – were tough, reliable sorts. Paul was from a military family anyway. The Dubliners were an assorted mix. Jake was the quiet man of the party. Taylor was a joker, but there was no malice in his foolery. Martha was a girl making her way in a man’s world. Joe and Fionn had history. They were thick and had every intention of looking out for each other. It was up to the sergeants to mould that bond to their advantage.

  Fionn had leadership written all over him. Simple things impressed the sergeants. He’d pick up on anyone who was struggling on a particular day and would stick close by, to shore them up. That was something O’Brien and Doyle knew could make the difference between losing your way as a trainee soldier and making it.

  Doyle and O’Brien were career soldiers. They knew they were alike in not always seeing eye to eye with the commissioned officers. No problem on this mission, so, as there were none. In their private conversations, though, they discussed something that was bugging them in relation to being chosen for a new type of mission. The secrecy was one thing. Their destination – Bethlehem, via Jordan – was top secret. Crossing swords with the Israeli military was courting trouble, as many Irish soldiers knew from their experiences in Lebanon. It was absolutely necessary to keep the wool pulled over their squad’s eyes while they could still communicate with their families.

  Then there was the squad, the platoon and its make-up. Had somebody thought this out? For all the world it looked too stupid to be incompetent. The sergeants knew full well that their older three privates had, let’s say, reputations that preceded them. On top of that there were the kids, eight of them, one of them a female private heading to a Muslim country. In the sergeant’s eyes something wasn’t adding up. But orders are orders and egos are egos. If the two men could pull off this mission, they would be applauded by the entire Irish military family and beyond.

  Chapter Four

  It had been a God-sent misty day in the hills of the platoon’s training camp. The group were together but would be sergeant-less for the training exercise ahead. All the remaining eleven were charged with orienteering so that they would avoid enemy contact. The enemy in this case being a team of experienced army rangers from Camp Imaal. What the sergeants were hoping for was that the platoon would route in an exaggerated fashion to avoid the enemy. Better still if they lost the light, and a further bonus if they had to spend the night in the mountains. Now that would sort the men from the boys and girl, O’Brien thought. He had seen it before with the new breed of youngsters signing up. They tackled compass work with the idea that they’d always have their smartphones for back-up.

  ‘Not if it runs out of signal, ye won’t,’ he told them.

  ‘Did it before,’ piped up Private Pete.

  The new recruits had met Peter, Mark and Seamus just three days previously. At least Pete was up for it. All Mark and Seamus had prattled on about since they’d met was how long they’d been in. Fourteen years in one case and twelve in the other, and how long they had to go till pension, twenty-one years’ service. Funnily enough, though, none of the three had seen peacekeeping duty before.

  Larry, Michael and Paul had formed a little company within the platoon. They had the common bond of being from the country – Donegal, Tralee and Athlone respectively.

  Paul’s father had been a sergeant serving out of Athlone Barracks. He had seen UN service himself in the seventies, which now seemed like a lifetime ago. Even further back was his grandad, a soldier in the fifties. Paul’s dad, another Paul, used to refer to it as ‘back in old God’s time’. Young Paul, through his dad, knew a lot more than the other kids about soldiering. More to the point, he had the inside track on what to expect from the older enlisted men. Sergeant Paul was an older father, a much older one who had Paul junior after he married a woman thirty years younger than him. He was a product of love, nonetheless, and Paul wanted to do well for his mam and dad.

  Young Paul had been warned off the Three Stooges, as his father had referred to the older privates. They were career good-for-nothings, to be avoided, according to his father. ‘Those three being allowed to influence young soldiers is the epitome of an army regime gone mad. Why in my day …’ etc., etc. He had earned the right. He had seen life-and-death soldiering.

  Paul junior, not surprisingly for a twenty-two-year-old, was happy to use his own judgement. He thought Private Pete was at least worth giving a chance to. Pete was from Mullingar, another midlands man.

  ‘Listen, lads,’ Peter had advised the platoon in advance of their orienteering hike, ‘the one thing we want to avoid is running into the rangers. They’re tough bastards, the elite and all that. They’d do a week’s training and then follow up with a triathlon at the weekend.’

  ‘Yeah, bastards all right,’ Private Mark pitched in. ‘Those feckers will end up clogging up the medical system in years to come with their bad knees and matching bad backs.’

  ‘Why should we be bothered, though?’ asked Private Jake.

  ‘Because their instructions are to rough us up if they catch us in the hills. And I mean a good hiding,’ Mark said.

  ‘And by the way, Miss Martha, they won’t be making any allowance for sex, not before they give ye a couple of pucks in the mouth.’

  Martha was ready to tough it out. ‘Yeah, but not before I stick one of them with a good kick in the bollix,’ she said.

  Peter, Mark and Seamus were revelling in the conversation, in being shown a bit of respect and being listened to. Private Seamus was next to row in: ‘Fair enough, Martha, but Mark is right – we’re better off giving the rangers a wide berth. We’ve done these hikes before. The weight of the boots on your feet is leaden with the caked-on muck. Ye might be struggling to walk with the exhaustion of it, never mind raising your leg for a kung fu kick.’

  Suited and booted and laden down with full packs, off the gang of eleven went into the darkness of the Wicklow hills, at 7 a.m., on into the mist of a crisp late October morning.

  ‘Jaysus, why all the extra rations of food?’ was Martha’s last comment as the sergeant-less squad started its walk and ended its debate.

  Peter replied in a conciliatory tone of voice: ‘You’re still not following the plot, girl. They’re hoping to feck that we are out all night.’

  It was the week before Halloween. There’s always an atmosphere about Halloween in the countryside and towns of Celtic countr
ies. The changing of the seasons, the Ka of the dark spirits and the mischief of the otherworld is all around.

  Heading uphill into thickening fog lent itself to the edgy atmosphere. Visibility was down to about fifty metres. The compensation was that at least a ranger was unlikely to frighten the shite out of you by jumping out of nowhere. Simply because, if you were silent, he wasn’t going to find you.

  Private Pete, assuming command, sent out a whispered message to be passed along through each soldier in the diagonally arranged platoon: ‘No loud voices. Sound carries in the fog and that’s the only way the rangers can catch ye.’

  The group, although not carrying rifles, were proceeding in battle formation. Ten metres apart, up and down dale. It was bloody tiring, and all the time building to a crunch point when the tension of the exercise would be overtaken by fatigue.

  Pete took up the central position in the formation, with Seamus and Mark at the lead and end flanks. They could both see Pete but not each other, and it seemed a good idea to keep the youngsters in between them. The group had so far only stopped for one break – water, tea flask and high-energy bars at noon. You could see the shape of the heatless sun above the fog. Fionn and Joe used the break to chatter away with Martha. She had aligned herself more with the two boys as the training had progressed. Martha liked the way Fionn stayed quiet until he had something to say. It was almost as if he was conserving energy. Joe was more inclined to feel awkward with silence and to fill the space with chit chat.

  Pete had insisted that the boys didn’t start fucking around with maps and compasses. ‘We know the route the rangers will take. They’ll go around the Glen, jogging in a circumference. We’ll go over the top of Imaal. They are banking on staying on the lower ground and spotting or hearing us with the better visibility lower down.’

  The Glen of Imaal was, apart from being the Irish Army’s training ground, a lonely parcel of boggy hills that made up part of the Wicklow Mountains. If you got lost and isolated, you’d be in trouble quicker than you expected.

  By four-thirty in the afternoon, with the sky not looking so bright, Pete was feeling uneasy in the way that you give half your senses over to feeling queer and the other half over to telling yourself that everything will be all right. He was still convincing himself that they were taking the right route. After all, they had been heading downhill for the last forty-five minutes. He couldn’t communicate with Mark or Seamus without giving his hand away. Pete’s unease was over whether they had taken a wrong turn or not. To console himself further he was thinking, I won’t be talking flak from any fuckers who wouldn’t take the lead if their life depended on it.

  While Pete was stuck in his reverie, the silent drudgery was broken by a high-pitched moan that he determined to have come from close to his left.

  ‘Oh, please God, please God, tell me no, tell me no.’

  Pete broke formation and moved quickly twenty metres to his left, passing Jake. ‘What the fuck is up with you?’ he said.

  ‘It was just there, the red tip, the red tip,’ said Paul.

  ‘What red tip?’ asked Pete as the rest of the platoon joined them, initially glad of the diversion.

  ‘A fucking shell, a fucking shell, a fucking shell, a fucking shell,’ Paul shouted as if they were the only words he knew or could say.

  ‘Jesus, Mary and Joseph,’ Mark screeched. He was already involuntarily backing down the hill away from the ad-hoc circle that had formed around the commotion. ‘The one fucking thing you eejits are told, the one fucking thing, is that you steer a mile clear of unexploded ordinance. It’s the only fucking rule of the training ground.’ Mark was now fifteen metres away and still slowly backing away. He was close enough to hear Paul’s stammering response to his accusation.

  ‘You’re looking down, always looking for a solid foothold in the muck. You see something that looks solid to stand on it, that’s all. A fucking shell.’ The colour had drained from Paul’s cheeks and beads of sweat were visible on his forehead. His blood pressure would be dropping now as shock set in. His brain was trying to glue together a justification for the mistake. He couldn’t just take his foot off the shell tip. It was flight or fright, and this was definitely fright. By now his foot had sunk a good three inches into the muck and would take a fair effort to extract.

  Fionn took a step forward towards Pete and Paul. Joe took half a step in solidarity. The rest were in stupor mode except for the ever-retreating Mark who was now thirty-five metres down the hill.

  Fionn looked directly at Pete and asked, ‘What’s going on?’

  ‘Nothing fucking good.’

  ‘Pete, come on, I need you to be thinking clearly.’ Fionn’s authoritative tone seemed to have the desired effect.

  ‘Once there is pressure applied to a shell head, it will blow.’

  ‘I need you to tell me what that means here, for us.’

  ‘Look, if he is standing on a live shell head, the pressure is already releasing a phosphorous charge into the detonation chamber. So it’s going to blow anyway. The more pressure the quicker the bang.’

  ‘Then why don’t we pull his leg out and run?’ Fionn asked.

  ‘For fuck’s sake, Fionn, that shell hit the ground spinning. Some small defect in the casing. God knows what condition it’s in. That’s if it is a shell. Maybe the idiot stood on a flattened Coke can or something red.’

  At least now the gang had something hopeful to cling on to, but the faces in the ten-metre-wide circle were still ashen.

  ‘OK,’ said Fionn, ‘so here’s how we go. I need one pair of additional hands to help and I need those hands to be nimble.’

  He was looking at Martha. Her lips, which were slightly parted, emitted a dry sound that could be interpreted as a ‘yeah’.

  ‘Pete, you and the lads back away to a safe distance.’

  The circle was now growing in a gentle radius of retreat. Some heading up, some down. Pete, who was not willing to desert his command without some form of mock protest, asked, ‘What’s the plan?’

  Fionn demonstrated: ‘I’m going to hold Paul’s boot firmly down, applying pressure, like this, while Martha gently digs out the muck around the boot.’

  Pete had only been asking for an explanation, not a demonstration He was glad when Fionn repeated, ‘Go on, Pete, move them back.’

  Now there were three. Paul was shaking slightly, with shock. Only he was in a position to see the retreating figures turn into ghostlike shapes in the fog and gathering murky darkness.

  ‘Martha, dig away with those gentle hands and keep the heavy muck together. I’ll keep the pressure on, and when I can pull Paul’s foot out, you’ll replace it with the muck, right into the boot. All good?’

  ‘Me dad is going to kill me if I get blown up,’ Paul said.

  Martha was looking at Fionn and could have sworn she caught him smiling at the unintentional black humour. It lightened her mood enough for her to say, ‘Maybe it is just a Coke can.’

  ‘Yeah, maybe,’ Fionn said.

  Paul was crying gently now, still shivering. Four minutes of gingerly executed work gave them a good pile of heavy Wicklow muck. Fionn used his left hand to press down on Paul’s uncovered boot.

  ‘Martha, undo the laces.’

  Their heads were in danger of clashing as they both worked at Paul’s feet. Fionn used his right hand and arm to lift out Paul’s stockinged foot.

  ‘Right, my man, you’re free. Off you go.’

  By this stage Paul was incapable of talking. Lazarus-like, he walked off down the hill, with one stockinged foot squelching, to join the ghosts.

  The dull orange flash stunned everyone. Stones and muck landed on and about them. They were all on the ground suddenly, not knowing if they were there because of a voluntary or involuntary action. The noise of the blast seemed to send the fog down the mountain in an avalanche that culminated in total
silence. Then the dawning realisation: I might be alive, but life will never be the same. I was there when soldiers in my platoon died, were maimed, were not whole, were brave, were stupid, were on the nine o’clock news.

  Oh my fucking God, oh God, Pete was thinking, delaying the decision to move to the blast site. There was some kind on movement up ahead.

  Seamus bellowed, ‘Get up here, all of ye, quick!’

  The circle converged in the gloom.

  ‘Jaysus, that’s what I’d call a hole, all right,’ said Taylor, maybe not knowing what else to say.

  ‘It’s called a crater,’ Pete said angrily, wondering why nobody was trying to solve the bloody mystery of the missing bodies.

  The faces around the blast site were stupefied.

  Not put off by Pete’s abruptness, Taylor couldn’t help himself. ‘Were they blown to bits?’

  Pete had had enough and gave him a full force thump in the arm. Taylor let out a moan, as the group tried to process the tragedy. Could it be that there was nothing left of them? How would anyone know? They were soldiers, mostly kids, and all of them got their knowledge of wounds and bombs from Hollywood.

  Pete tried to think, but his brain was fried by what had just taken place. Was it appropriate to even be thinking?

  ‘A dead soldier girl will be a hard story for the army to sell.’

  Joe had tears in his eyes. He had moved on to a scene, in his head, where he was standing in front of Fionn’s mother.

  The stupor ended kind of gently. Fionn was standing directly behind Pete now. Pete had only been alerted to this by the lads, and particularly Seamus, who were standing upslope on the hill directly across from the crater. Seamus was wide-eyed. This was noticeable even in the growing darkness because of the way the whites of eyes always stand out when faces have camouflage polish smeared across them. That was the first thing Pete noticed when he turned to face Fionn. Both his and Martha’s faces were clean.