I was halfway through my pint when I spotted the infamous Lynda. She had become almost as much a part of the Regiment as the clock tower itself. The night I’d seen her all those years before, tumbling in the sheets with Geordie before Sickener 1, had not been her first visit to camp, nor her last. She’d had as many willing partners as there are daisies on an uncut lawn. Now in her mid-thirties, the passions of youth tempered by the pummellings of experience, she had acquired a hard, no-nonsense manner which on the few occasions when I now saw her I found an irresistible challenge.
I gave her a wave and she breezed over, exclaiming jauntily, ‘Hi, soldier. How’re you keeping? I haven’t seen you in ages. Where’ve you been?’
‘I’ve just returned from down south – training exercise, that sort of thing. What are you doing with yourself these days, Lynda?’
‘I’m training to be a psychiatric nurse.’
‘A psychiatric nurse! I know all about them. They’re all as mad as hatters. What made you choose that career?’
‘It’s a case of if you can’t beat them, join them.’
‘When you qualify, you should set up a therapy clinic on camp.’
She completely missed the veiled reference to her erstwhile penchant for helping the lads release the tensions of Army life. ‘Why? Are you all screwball down there?’
‘Yeah! Didn’t you know there’s a chopper on constant hover 500 feet above the camp to make sure no one escapes?’
‘I can believe it.’
‘If you opened a clinic, they’d be queuing up at the door to see you – especially if you had your black stockings on!’
‘Oh yeah, and my whip?’ A hint of anger was creeping into her voice. She was beginning to take me too seriously.
‘Why not? I had the whip in Hong Kong. It didn’t do me any lasting harm.’
‘Physically or psychologically?’
‘Physically. You’ll have to analyse me to see if I suffered any brain damage or not! I’ll be your first patient if you’ll have me.’
‘Sure, I’m game.’
‘I’ve no doubt you are! I look forward to meeting you on the couch then, Lynda.’
By now she’d cottoned on to the doubles entendres, so I drained my Guinness and beat a hasty retreat. I didn’t want to tangle with her newfound temper. She’d recently gone over onto the loony fringe of the women’s lib movement. And that was even more dangerous than the loony fringe of the socialist movement!
As I walked through the main gate of the barracks, the tension began to crawl through my muscles. I felt nervous and apprehensive. I wondered what the chain-smoking shrink had written about me. I wondered whether fifteen years’ drama-filled service in the SAS was about to end in an ignominious anticlimax, a definitive RTU. The mod plod on the gate gave me a friendly wave. That was reassuring – no urgent call to the telephone, no clipped voice ordering me to the CO’s office to be hit by the report.
I pushed through the main door of the headquarters block and turned right into the orderly room. A large oil painting of David Stirling, the driving force behind the foundation of the SAS, hung on the far wall and dominated the office. The clerks looked indifferent. No arrangements had been made. There was no memo ordering me to attend a CO’s interview. The chief clerk shrugged his shoulders and looked blank. I closed the door on the paper factory and headed for the operational research department to try my luck there. Still nothing doing. From there I was redirected to admin wing, the last refuge of the Regimental bad boys. At this rate, I thought, I’m going to end up in the stores blanket-stacking.
Just when I was fearing the worst, just when I thought the system had finally caught up with me, the message came down the line: a clean bill of health! The shrinks had given me a clean bill of health! I was elated. The gamble had paid off! Once more I’d brazened my way out of a tight corner. I was back in business with a vengeance. They were going to put my operational expertise to the best possible use: I was to be an instructor in the counter-revolutionary warfare wing. From trainee to tutor, after fifteen years my career in the SAS had come full circle. Being no longer in the field, exposed to the life-threatening situations, I had not only beaten the system, but I had now well and truly beaten the clock. I’d ridden the death-or-glory course and made it to the finishing post.
As the weeks went by, I threw myself wholeheartedly into the job in hand, counter-terrorism team training. As I did so, the realization dawned: I must be well and truly A1 and fit for service. There was no way the Head Shed would risk a training compromise. What was required of troops for these types of operations – even above and beyond all specialist skills – was a cool head, a clear mind and a rock-solid temperament. If the trainer was unstable, what hope for the trainees?
But before I was to close the door on CRW wing for the last time, before I was to face my next big battle – civvy life – I still had a significant contribution to make to the Regiment. I was about to train an SAS team from Northern Ireland whose ‘spectacular’ would set in motion events that would eventually force the IRA to the negotiation table.
On Friday 8 May 1987, eight IRA men were killed in a gun battle in the village of Loughgall, Co. Armagh. They were members of the lethal East Tyrone Brigade, and had tried to attack the local RUC station with a hijacked JCB digger, loaded with beer kegs containing 500lb of explosives. It was part of an ongoing campaign of intimidation against the RUC, and it was ambushed with deadly effect by the SAS team. One senior policeman said, ‘We really needed a victory. It will do wonders for the morale of our men.’
It was a good way to end.
18
When the Camp Gates Close
On 31 December 1987 I retired from the Regiment.
Once that camp gate swings closed behind you for the last time and you stand there in Civvy Street you are on your own. You are Mr Nobody. All you come out with, believe it or not, is a reference – a few pieces of paper in exchange for twenty-six years of risking your life on an almost daily basis. I was shell-shocked. The days of taking part in high-drama, headline-grabbing operations were gone. The indescribable highs and mind-numbing lows, the despair and depression, the exhilaration, the pride, the intense camaraderie, the frustration, the boredom, all the achingly intense emotions that are the daily reality of a soldier’s life suddenly drain away and leave you emptier than you’ve ever felt in your whole life.
A Roman general once talked of a soldier as one who ‘knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, and spends himself in a worthy cause’. Well, when the cause itself is spent what’s left? I sat in my armchair at home staring into empty space. How can anything prepare you for civilian life after twenty-six years in the Army, eighteen of those years with the SAS? ‘The culture here is selfdiscipline, self-motivation. You can use that attitude. It means you can adjust when you come out.’ That was the gist of the demob briefing when I left the SAS.
What they really mean is you’re on your own. Self-discipline? The only discipline I’d ever known was fire discipline – counting your rounds and making sure every shot counts – and water discipline – metering your water out into the cap of your water bottle so you know not only how much water you have drunk per hour but how much you have left. Crucial survival skills in the Army, but they weren’t going to help me now.
When you leave the SAS you’re out on a limb, isolated. All you’ve got is cold turkey withdrawal symptoms after years of mainlining on adrenaline. It’s always the same. It’s always after the battle that the shock and the sorrow and the trauma of it all comes pouring out, when the adrenaline and fear have gone. It’s the eerie silence after a battle. It’s as if you’ve just opened your eyes for the first time in hours and you’re suddenly surveying a scene of devastation. Roads, trees, houses, animals all completely blasted. All you’re left with is the sad, quiet debris of conflict lying everywhere: abandoned weapons, bits of clothing and webbing, mangled vehicles, the bodies of the dead, the slow, agonized writhing of the dying, pools of blood getting ever bigger. It’s desolate and it’s forlorn.