Immediate Action (4 page)

    We seemed to have the culture of the seventies but the army of the fifties. It felt as if I were living in one of the black-and-white movies I sometimes used to watch on a Saturday afternoon. Each morning we had to drink a mugful of "screech," the old army word for powdered lime juice. The colonel must have been reading a book about Captain Cook and thought it would stop us from getting scurvy. I heard about an officer who joined the Irish Guards. The adjutant pulled him to one side and said, "As a young subaltern, these are the rules. One, never wear a brown suit. Two, always call the underground the underground and not the tube. Three, never travel on a red bus. Four, always wear a hat and have an umbrella, and five, never carry a brown paper parcel."

    Nothing about how to approach the soldiers he was going to have under his command.

    Gibraltar in the summertime was packed with tourists, and because we were doing all the ceremonial stuff, we were God's gift to a pretty girl who liked a uniform.

    That was my theory anyway, and I set off one afternoon for the main street, wearing civvies and in my own mind very much our man in Gibraltar. I found a place called the Capri bar, with plastic palm trees inside and semicircular booths with tables. All very dark and sophisticated, I thought. To be as suave as the surroundings demanded, I ordered a Southern Comfort and lemonade, a very international drink at the time.

    As I sat there listening to songs by the Stylistics and the Chi-Lites, I could see now and again blokes that I recognized from the battalion walking past, looking at me through the window.

    The fellow who owned the bar was a Brit. He came over to join me for a chat. He had perfect, graying hair that had been sprayed and looked to be in his forties but probably still thought he was seventeen. He was wearing a blue jumper with a big red star.

    "Hello," he said, sliding into the booth next to me.

    "What, are you in the navy?"

    "No, I'm with the battalion up the road."

    "Just got here?"

    "Yeah."

    It was all rather nice. We chatted away, and then this Chinese woman came in. She was absolutely stunning.

    Flared trousers, high heels, and my boy was off in raptures. She sat and joined us.

    "You in the navy?"

    "No, I'm with the battalion."

    After a drink or two she moved over a place, and I thought, I've cracked it, it must be the sight of my drink, a woman like this was bound to feel comfortable in the company of an international jet-setter. More people were coming in, and the bar started filling up. The jukebox started playing slow Donny Osmond numbers.

    I was slowly getting pissed, and I didn't really pay that much attention when my new friend said, "Call me Pierre."

    To me, Pierre was a French blokes name. I hadn't realized it was also a Chinese woman's. Then, very, very slowly, I started to get the picture.

    I looked around and realized that everybody in the bar was a bloke. I looked again at Pierre-and the awful truth sank in.

    "Just going to the toilet," I said, disentangling her hand from my thigh.

    I did a runner, haunted by the faces of all the blokes I'd seen looking at me through the windows. I was going around for days afterward laughing manically and saying, "They do the best Spanish omelet in Gibraltar down the Capri. It's full of dodgy character's, of course, but it's worth it for the food."

    The battalion were coming back to England in November and heading more or less straightaway for South Armagh. I would be too young to go with them immediately; you had to be eighteen, because years before there had been too many seventeen-year-olds getting shot. It was bad PR, so they'd upped the age limit. I'd have to wait until after my birthday.

    We went to Lydd and Hythe for infantry buildup training. We spent a lot of time on the M.U.F (marksmanship under fire) range and were trained in all the different scenarios we were likely to meet.

    "We are going to be based in South Armagh-bandit country," said our company commander, "and B Company are going to Crossmaglen, a town that makes the rest of bandit country look like Camberwick Green."

    We were issued with street maps and told to "learn" South Armagh.

    There was a shooting during the buildup training, and for the first time I started to read more of the newspaper than the TV page.

    Toward the end of the training we were issued with an optic sight for our weapons. I'd never seen this bit of kit before, but I knew that it existed. That was it; I thought I was the international sniper.

    In the infantry at that time all the clothing was incredibly basic. We had a uniform, but no effective waterproofs or warm clothing. If you wanted stuff like that, you had to buy your own. The most exotic item we were given to help us through the rigors ahead was a pair of thick arctic socks.

    I was eighteen years old. I'd already been in the army for coming up to two years, but this was 'my first operational tour. Everything was great. The way I looked at it was I was having a good experience, I was with the battalion, I thought I was hard as fuck, and I'd have enough money to buy a car and show Christine a good time when I got back.

    Crossmaglen, a cattle market town known to us as XMG, was right on the border. This meant the players could prepare in Dundalk on the other side, then pop over and shoot at us. There was a big square in the center, with a number of small buildings with metal railings in front to hold the livestock. It was overlooked by Baruki sangar, which was less than a hundred meters away from the security forces base that we lived in.

    Named after a paratrooper called Baruki who got blown up, the sangar was a big corrugated iron and steel structure. Inside were three GPMGs (general purpose machine guns), an M79 grenade launcher, smoke dischargers, radios, and, most important, flasks of tea and sandwiches, because we were up there forever. There was one electric heater. Stag duty in the sangar was incredibly cold and very, very boring. It had to be manned by two of us all the time. To get to it, there used to be this mad dash. The two men on duty in the sangar would man the guns; we'd go out and run down the road; the two we were replacing would get out and run back.

    I was in Baruki sangar one day with a lance cor oral p called Bob, short for Billy One Bollock, I never knew where the nickname came from because he looked as if he were complete. A foot patrol came out of the base, and after the usual pound of running feet, all I could hear was "click, click, click." What the hell is that? I wondered, and looked out of the side hole. Standing nearby was the smartest man alive, posing in front of a camera for the battalion magazine.

    "That's Johnny Two-Combs," Bob said. "Comes from the Midlands, loves football. Plays for the battalion. Looks good, doesn't he?"

    Indeed he did. No one wore rank in XMG, and everyone normally looked like a bag of shit, wet, cold, and covered in mud. But this guy was wearing corporal's stripes, and his uniform was immaculate. He was about five feet ten inches, with blue eyes and perfect teeth, and not a single blond hair out of place.

    "He was playing in an army cup match, and the battalion started throwing combs'onto the pitch," Bob went on. "He picked one up and used it, asked if he was looking good, then carried on. I think he scored the winning goal."

    I watched as Johnny carried on posing, winning the war on his own for the camera. "The thing is," Bob said, "he is really switched on.

    You're looking at a future RSM there."

    The rifle company lived in "submarines" in the security forces base, long corridors three beds high but without lockers. Where you were, that was your space: You put your kit on your bed or under the bottom bed. I shared an area with Reggie, a corporal and my patrol commander, and Gar, a newly married rifleman who kept his photo album under his pillow.

    Reggie was twenty-five and rati the company seven-aside rugby team. He was tall and well built; his "egs were so large he walked like a bodybuilder. He had black, curly hair and the world's biggest arse and bad breath that he was forever making excuses about.

    Gar was aged about twenty. If he hadn't been in the army, he would have been a male model. He was very fit and had a perfect body.

    His ambition was to become a P.T.I (physical training instructor); every morning he would jump out of his bunk and shout, "Twice round my beautiful body-go!"

    The security forces base was laid out in a spider configuration, with submarines coming off a central area.

    All the support troops, plus any of the rifle company who couldn't fit in the submarines, lived in garden sheds in the compound, linked by duckboards over the mud that was ankle-deep. The whole compound looked like a building site, which it was, covered by antimortar mesh.

    The atmosphere inside the main base was very smoky, and at any time of night or day I could smell the odor of egg banjos (fried egg sandwiches) and chips coming from the cookhouse. There was a permanent smell, too, of damp clothing and wet floors. The heating didn't work very well, so it was either very hot or very cold.

    There were no windows.

    In the late seventies it was very much a foot-soldiering conflict in South Armagh. If we weren't in the town patrolling, we'd be in the cuds (countryside) patrolling, just us and the mud and the rain, our rifles and our bergens (back packs), out for however many days the task took.

    Being the rug (new boy), I had to carry the GPMG.

    For the first month or so I was quite switched on by it all. Then it started to get very boring. I didn't feel I was achieving anything because nothing ever happened. I'd just done all this training where every time you take a footstep something happens and you've got to react to it, but now that we were here nothing seemed to be happening.

    We patrolled, watched, stopped cars, put protection out at VCPs (vehicle checkpoints), and carried out house searches, and that was it.

    We used to go out on patrol in the cuds with welly boots on because of the mud. There was a four-day routine. We'd be picked up by helicopter and taken out for four days, living in the field. Then we'd have four days on town patrol, wearing boots rather than wellies.

    This was a twenty-four-hour presence; there were always three patrols in the town. Then we'd do four days in sangars, doing cookhouse fatigues, cleaning the bogs Out, and doing the area cleaning, a military term meaning work for work's sake. On one memorable occasion the ser eant major ordered me: "McNab, you are to go out and sweep up all unwanted puddles."

    Everything we needed had to come in by helicopter: food, ammunition, letters, people. The helipad was a structure of wooden slats outside the camp; when a helicopter was due, sangars had to stand to, and the aircraft would swoop in quickly. There was a housing estate next door and the boys used to take pops at anything that moved.

    The navy crews were the best, in their Wessexes; they were more daring and always on time, which was important after a long patrol, when you were waiting to be extracted.

    I was the doorman in the sangar one day; that meant that as people jumped from the helicopter and ran toward the door, I'd open it just wide enough for them to run inside. I didn't have a clue who the character was that was running toward me. All I could see was a figure bent double, with a pile of paperwork in a wicker shopping bag with a handle like the ones grannies do their shopping with.

    "Who are you?" he said.

    "McNab, sir."

    "I'm Corden-Lloyd." He beamed as he shook my hand. Then, in a brilliant piss-take of the sort of bone questions senior officers seem to need to ask squaddies when they visit, he said, "Enjoying yourself?

    Mail getting through? Food all right? Any problems?"

    This was great, a colonel shaking my hand, taking the piss out of himself, asking me how I was, what platoon I was in.

    There were no military vehicles in the cuds to back up patrols because too many had been taken out by culvert bombs. However, there were two Saracen armored vehicles that stayed in the town. They had antiarmor metal mesh over them to stop RPGs (rocket-propelled grenades) penetrating; the mesh would initiate the rocket before it penetrated the armor. They were called cans, and they never went outside the town. We could move from position to position around the town in them, which was great, especially when it was pissing down.

    The can crews themselves had a pretty shifty job. They just sat, and the gunners just stood. The cans were essentially firm firebases for when we had big contacts, with a turret-mounted machine gun. Their most useful feature, however, was secured to the rear. It was a thing called a Norwegian container, which held about two gallons of tea, with a plastic mug hanging off. The can drivers used to fill them up before a patrol, so we could go around the back for a brew. After about two hours it was lukewarm, stewy stuff, but in the early hours of the morning it was nectar.

    I was on foot patrol in Crossmaglen in the early spring of 1978, at a time when the policy was to pull down any republican tricolors we saw.

    It wasn't a question of just going up and lifting it. It had to be done carefully, because there was always a possibility that it might be a come-on or it could be a booby trap.

    One had been put up on the Newry road leading out of Crossmagien by the church, right on the edge of town, at the start of the cuds. It was a typical rural scene of undulating fields and hedgerows. The road was lined by telephone poles, from one of which hung a tricolor.

    There were four patrols out from my platoon. On the net the commander said, "When we get the changeover, one patrol will take down the tricolor and we'll carry on patrolling."