I’d been through the training and flicked through the brochures lying around the mess hall, with their photos of smiling soldiers hoisting the British flag in newly secured compounds or posing with their weapons, but none of that prepares you for war. The IRA knew we were coming and wanted to welcome us with a bang. But when our squadron landed to take over from the Coldstream Guards, the place was already a mess. Someone from the IRA had driven into a vehicle checkpoint and detonated a 500-pound bomb. They thought the changeover had already taken place and the Royal Marines were manning the checkpoint. Fortunately for us boys, they’d got their intelligence wrong.
The compound had been blown to bits and the sky was thick with smoke. As we were picking through the wreckage, the sergeant in charge kicked a blackened helmet and said, ‘Right, lads, the first thing we need to do is see if we can find any more of these.’ At first, I didn’t know what he meant. But when I looked down at the helmet he’d kicked, I realised it still had a head strapped inside it. The sergeant had been in the Falklands and presumably seen a lot of bad things, which might explain his nonchalance. But for me, that was a big wake-up call. Military life had little to do with hoisting flags and posing for photos with smiles on your faces. This was war and it was time for me to grow up.
When people were at home watching the Troubles on TV, they only saw one side, which was the British Army on the streets. It’s not as if we were going at it with the IRA on a battlefield. That’s why people outside of the military often refer to the Troubles as an uprising or terrorist campaign. But to me and the rest of the British military, it was a war. And it was definitely a war to the IRA.
But while seeing things like a decapitated head in a helmet was a massive shock, people were always ready to make a joke out of any situation. You’d shut your experience in a box, lock it away, get shitfaced, forget about it and move on. It was almost as if it hadn’t happened. That’s not a good way of dealing with things long term. But what you’ve also got to bear in mind is that I wanted to see action every day. I was gagging for it. I wanted it to kick off, for us to be attacked and for us to attack them. That’s what I signed up for. I’d gone from boy to man in a heartbeat, it was an incredibly steep growth, but it was also incredibly exciting. This was the thrill I’d been chasing all my life.
We were attacked 19 times in six months, but not one of us got killed. One guy stepped on a pressure plate near an IED and was blown across a field. But while his weapon was bent, he was only slightly injured. One night, there was another attack as a Chinook helicopter was bringing in new troops for a changeover. The IRA had got their timings wrong again, which meant there were two sets of troops on the ground at the same time. It all went off and the lads ended up putting fire down into the local town. Unfortunately, I wasn’t there. I was listening to it from the operations room.
You might think it strange wanting to be there, but everyone felt like that, not just me. There is a strain of people in the world that thrives on that level of danger. People don’t join the Royal Marines to sit around in camp all day, they join for conflict. Maggie Thatcher came out with a great quote about the Marines after the Falklands, something along the lines of: ‘They need to be locked away in a container and brought out only in times of war.’ That’s just so true. Open up the container and we’d all come pouring out like gimps, waving our weapons and shouting, ‘Where’s the fucking battle?’ So, when we heard the contacts coming over the radio, thousands and thousands of rounds going down on the enemy, we were all sitting around thinking, ‘This is fucking brilliant – I wish I was there!’ And when I saw the lads coming back, I was just so jealous.
The police put in checkpoints all around the area, so that anyone trying to get out would have to pass through them. Bizarrely, they were stopping people who had been shot in their cars – IRA members who had obviously been involved in the contact – and letting them go. Either they had to get medical assistance or didn’t have any weapons on them. But I just couldn’t understand it. We had a hit list, we knew the terrorists’ faces, we were stopping them on a daily basis. I couldn’t get my head around the fact that we knew who the enemy was but often weren’t allowed to do anything about it.
Some lads became so frustrated they started pulling people out of cars and filling them in, but they got into big trouble for it. There were rules of engagement and rules of arrest, and one of the lads got sent away for a long time after getting carried away. If we didn’t have solid grounds to apprehend them, we had to bite our lips and let them go. Even if we did have something specific to pin on them, we’d still let them go, because the powers that be were waiting to build a bigger case that might bring more people down with them.
Sometimes it’s better to know who your enemy are and what they’re up to than to take them off the ground. But I joined the Royal Marines to fight an enemy. I was only 19, I’d never thought about why I was there. I was just proud to be representing the UK, in troubled lands that we were trying to control. And then I had an epiphany. We’d slept rough for the night, I was marching down the street and there was a guy in my patrol with the ECM (electronic countermeasure) equipment on his back, which is used to jam explosive signals. But when I looked at him more closely, I could see that his weapon was all over the place and his earpiece was swinging down by his knees. I thought, ‘What the fuck are you doing? That piece of equipment might save our lives.’ Then I thought, ‘All these missions they’re giving us – to check this and that out, find IEDs under bridges – we’re just being used as bait.’
I didn’t have proof, I just had this overwhelming feeling that we were being put on the ground so that we might get attacked and the intelligence services could then come and build a picture. Because if there was no activity from the military, there wouldn’t be any activity from the IRA. It was about knowing who the terrorists were but allowing them to do their thing. Because allowing them to do their thing – in other words, attack us – allowed the intelligence services to burrow down even further and possibly bust the whole operation. That’s still my belief today, that infantry were expendable.
I understood the thinking, but it shattered the dreams I’d been having for five years. I started wondering what I’d signed up for and why I was there. I was losing my motivation, because I wanted to be at the sharp end every day. There wasn’t enough going on, everything felt pointless. This was not what I’d day-dreamed about in maths class. I’d been inspired by what the lads had done in the Falklands, and this didn’t match up to it.
I kept my suspicions to myself, because I knew they would be met with scorn. As far as I knew, no one else thought we were there as bait. This is one of the problems of being a non-conformist in the military, you think too much. After I left the military, I’d bump into old colleagues who’d say to me, ‘I always remember you asking why.’ That open questioning would come later, when I was more experienced and more secure. But even at the age of 19, everything had to have a reason for being.
I had this sudden realisation that if I wanted to be stimulated, do real soldiering and have a real impact, I’d have to join the Special Forces. Not that joining the Special Forces was a realistic option. At 19, I didn’t think I was capable. I was leaning more towards leaving the military altogether. I was just so disillusioned with it all and I’d had enough of hoping it would get better.
After returning from that first tour, I went straight on leave. That was the part I enjoyed the most, letting my hair down and raising hell. I was in the pub with my old school mate and now fellow marine Mark Sherriff when Operation Desert Storm came on the news. Not long after that, my phone rang and I was on the train back to 45 Commando. Being recalled from leave was exactly what I needed. This was the real deal, exactly what I’d signed up for.
In Iraq, our task was to bring the Kurds down from the mountains, where they’d been driven by Saddam Hussein’s forces. Before we went in, we were given medical training – how to put drips in, that sort of thing. That was the first t
ime that had happened before an operation I’d been involved in, and it meant they were preparing us for casualties. There was a sense that this was a proper war and that we were going to face the enemy on the battlefield. It was a thrilling but scary thought.
I remember looking around and thinking, ‘Some of these boys won’t be coming back, and one of those boys might be me.’ As it turned out, there was no aggressive action and no major conflict. All was well. And that was highly disappointing, because conflict was exactly what we’d wanted.
Not that we didn’t see some horrible things in Iraq. In some of the villages, we found dead bodies with the limbs cut off and swapped over, so that the legs were coming out of the arm sockets and vice versa. It was a bizarre ritual and a barbarity and disrespect for fellow humans that was on a whole different level to anything we’d seen in Northern Ireland. As a recruit, you might prepare yourself for seeing dead soldiers, but you don’t really prepare yourself for seeing civilians mutilated in that way. It was a mindfuck, but there had been absolutely no psychological preparation. There just weren’t any mechanisms in place back then, pre- or post-war. You saw what you saw, did what you had to do, went on leave at the end of it and got drunk for a few weeks.
Showing any kind of negative emotion in the field simply wasn’t allowed. In a warzone, that can be a weakness and can leave you vulnerable. As a soldier, you have to be resilient, you have to be able to bounce back from whatever you see or do and be on point immediately. That’s an innate trait, dating back to when we lived in warring tribes, and when wallowing in grief simply wasn’t an option when you were under attack and trying to survive. So we laughed about what we saw instead.
Iraq turned out to be disappointingly uneventful. We went in at the back end of the war, when most of the heavy lifting had already been done. And when I returned home, things really started to unravel. While on leave, I met my future wife, Helen. For a while, our relationship was great. I was physically attracted to her, she was fun and we shared a love of partying, so whenever we could we’d dance and drink until the early hours. It was just natural that I’d end up in a relationship with someone from that world. But when the music stopped and I had to return to work, cracks started to appear. To be in the military for any length of time, you need a very selfless partner, and it takes a very special woman to support your vocation, rather than tolerate or incessantly moan about it. Supporting and tolerating are two very different things.
I hadn’t been in the Marines long before I started to seriously reconsider my future in the military. However, I decided to give things one last shot. So I thought I’d train myself up and prepare myself for Special Forces Selection in Poole. But I ended up doing menial soldiering duties on camp instead. It was mind-numbingly boring, I quickly lost interest and wound up putting in my notice to leave. This was only 1992, but it wasn’t meeting my needs and I’d had enough. Peacetime soldiering was too small and mundane, I couldn’t be doing with the petty bullshit: looking after my uniform, general duties, admin. That’s why I spent so much time drinking and partying, because I found it more exciting.
I’d done about a year of my 18-month notice period when my brother Justin, who had decided to become a helicopter pilot, had his pass-out parade in Dartmouth. It was there that I met my old Marines officer Baggsy Baker, who sounds like he’s stepped out of a Biggles story but was someone I greatly respected. We had a good chat about my time in Iraq and when he asked what my plans were, I told him I was leaving. He was taken aback. When I explained that I’d never found my feet in the military and nothing was meeting my needs, he replied, ‘Mate, do not leave. You’ve got what it takes to join the Special Forces. If you leave now, you’ll regret it for the rest of your life.’
His words started me thinking. As a kid, I’d been transfixed by TV images of the Iranian Embassy siege in London, when mysterious men in black balaclavas had abseiled down the building, smashed through windows and destroyed the terrorists. Those images were the greatest recruitment tool the Special Forces possessed. But they also had the opposite effect, in that they made joining the Special Forces feel like a pipe dream. In my mind, the Special Forces was a world inhabited by soldier-gods, James Bond types who jumped off cliffs and wrestled sharks just to deliver a box of Milk Tray. Consequently, I didn’t think I had it in me to pass the training. But someone I respected showing that kind of faith in me bolstered my confidence, made me feel that the impossible might be possible. It’s amazing how a chance meeting and a few short words can be so inspiring. Baggsy got in touch recently, and I told him that he set me on the path. If it hadn’t been for that conversation, I would never have done what I’ve done.
When I got back to Poole, I had a long, hard think and decided to go for it. The first thing I had to do was take out my notice to leave. To do so, I had to see the sergeant I was working for at the time, who was this big, fat knacker. I fucking hated him, and as far as he was concerned, I was the worst soldier he had, because I didn’t do as I was told.
When I walked into his office and told him I wanted to withdraw my notice and put in for Special Boat Service (SBS) Selection, he looked at me and burst out laughing.
‘I cannot believe this,’ he said. ‘This is fucking brilliant! It’s made my day! I’m definitely going to put you forward, because I can’t wait to see you back here in a few weeks’ time. This is going to be hilarious…’ What this officer didn’t know was that if you doubt me, I’ll do everything in my power to prove you wrong and make you look stupid.
4
SHOTGUN WILLY
It’s too easy to pinpoint one specific event and say, ‘That’s why I am who I am.’ It wasn’t just being attacked by a chimpanzee that turned me loopy. I’d always been a loose cannon, always felt the need to put myself into dangerous situations in order to feel alive. But there is no doubt that the chimp attack, combined with my father upping and leaving, amplified things, right up to 11.
I went at life hell for leather, constantly searching for extreme experiences and chasing threats, because the alternative seemed mediocre and boring. I think that came from coming so close to losing my life. I was an angry little kid, would snap in a heartbeat. I knew that wasn’t normal, I knew that made me different from most other kids. I wasn’t outwardly that way, not so that people would be wary around me. But there was this turbulent anger swirling around inside me, like a silent storm. My brother and sister were the opposite, especially Justin, who seemed to have achieved amazing things quite effortlessly. The only reason I can think of for why I’m the way I am and they’re the way they are is that neither Justin nor Ashley were attacked by an angry chimp.
There wasn’t an immediate reaction to the attack, but it didn’t take me long to start getting up to no good. I was always the one who would push things to the limit, whose mates would be saying, ‘Really? Are you sure you want to do that?’ Some of the stuff I got up to was just ridiculous. I bought a crossbow and would fire bolts into the sky, in the direction of my brother and his mates at the other end of the field. I thought it was hilarious, watching them scattering and running away, not sparing a thought about what might happen if a bolt landed on one of their heads. There was also an incident where I burnt down a barn. The barn was next to our house and full of hay. I found some matches, started messing about with them and skulked off. The next thing I knew, the barn was up in flames and billowing smoke. In no time at all, it had been razed to the ground and there were fire engines everywhere. My dad knew I had been up there, but I never put my hand up and said it was me.
I had no value for life or concept of how my actions might have terrible consequences for somebody else. I had no empathy, was almost emotionless in terms of the effect my behaviour was having on the people around me.
One day at school, one of my mates said, ‘Lads, I’ve got the keys to the doctor’s house across the road from where I live…’ It transpired he’d done some baby-sitting and never given the keys back. It was this beautiful country house
and he’d already been in a few times to nick food, rifle through drawers and generally mooch around. When he asked me to join him on a raid, it felt like I was being invited into the inner circle.
We rode up to the house on our bikes, let ourselves in, ransacked the fridge, stole a bit of change out of the fruit basket and ran riot all over the rooms. I was only 14, it was naughty and we shouldn’t have been doing it, but it was nothing too sinister or malicious. Around the same time, I’d started shoplifting, not for the financial reward, just for the buzz. This was the same. The buzz didn’t come from stealing food or the odd quid here and there, it came from the possibility of being caught, because we knew the doctor and his family could return home at any time.
The following afternoon, we pushed a little bit further. It was a massive house and easy to get lost in, and I found myself alone in the master bedroom. Sensing there might be something interesting under the bed, I got down on my hands and knees, lifted the valance and stuck my head underneath. And there it was: an antique shotgun, one of the loveliest things I’d ever laid eyes on.
I’d always loved weapons, whether it was axes or penknives or catapults. And the less interested I became in schoolwork, the more I just wanted to be out in nature, handling tools and running wild. When other kids were reading the Beano, I was reading Combat and Survival. I loved playing in the woods and was in the Scouts and Adventure Club, before I got kicked out for making a clay cock and showing it to all the girls.
So when I clapped eyes on this beautiful gun, my head started spinning. It was like that scene from Pulp Fiction, when John Travolta opens the briefcase, his mouth falls open and it looks like he might faint. I shoved the shotgun back under the bed and thought, ‘My God, what have I found?’ I was smitten, but I was also scared, because I knew that handling guns usually didn’t end well.
Break Point Page 4
