First Into Action: Dramatic Personal Account of Life Inside the SBS Page 2

  That night he was supposed to come to the farmhouse. It was one of the places he used to rest up and meet colleagues. I did not dare move a muscle in case he was out there, at the edge of my hearing range, watching the house, which is what he would do for at least half an hour before moving forward. I had been there for several hours and knew all the sounds around me. Keeping still throughout the night was going to be difficult, especially for someone as young and energetic as I was. I decided ambushes like this were better suited to old soldiers.

  We knew that O’Sally was coming home one night that week with another member of his Active Service Unit (ASU). We knew because a third member of the same ASU was a tout, a snitch, and was being paid well for the information.

  My backside ached against the cold earth, the damp seeping through my camouflaged pants and thermals. No matter where I sat on this mound a root would dig into me. If I had been more experienced I would have brought a small piece of neoprene rubber to sit on, and worn swimming trunks instead of underpants because they dry out quicker, but I did not know about little tricks like that yet. As long as I kept perfectly still I would remain invisible, to anyone without a thermal image detector that is, and the IRA did not have any of those.

  My body heat had dried out the black cam-cream on my face and hands. It felt like old mud and it cracked and aggravated me when I moved my mouth and cheeks. I contorted my face in the hope that the more annoying flakes would fall off. Only when it became a distraction would I risk lifting my hand away from my gun to pick at it. The black cream was designed to take the shine off your face – even black soldiers wore black cam-cream. In training I used to apply it as thinly as possible because it was laborious to wash off afterwards. That night I had spread it on like butter.

  It started to rain halfway through the night. I was not wearing waterproofs, just regular camouflage clothing. No one had yet invented a camouflage waterproof that did not make even the slightest noise when you moved. It might not sound loud in the daytime, but at night, in these graveyard conditions, it would be like a crisp packet being opened in a dark movie theatre. My nose started to run. I let it. A sniff carried a long way at night, and it sounded like a sniff. I was a little cold, but I didn’t care.

  ‘If you can’t ignore being cold and wet, don’t join the SBS,’ an instructor’s voice echoed in my mind – words we were told the first day of the SBS selection course. Truer words were never spoken.

  O’Sally and his partner would not move across country in the daylight hours, so I would stay in this spot waiting to kill them until just before dawn. If they did not show, my SAS partner and I would sneak off and spend the daylight in a hide about a mile away, then be back before dark the following day. O’Sally would be home one night this week for sure, and I would be waiting to greet him. As I hunched under the tree, listening to every sound, the rain trickled through my short hair, down my face, following the cracks in the cam-cream and off my chin on to my gun. There was nothing else to do at times like this but think. I could drift away a little. My ears would instantly warn me of the slightest change in the routine sounds around. I had been in the SBS only a few months but my senses were already razor-sharp. There’s nothing like a live ambush to bring out those old animal survival instincts we depended on so long ago to get through every day. I was virile and unpolluted.

  I was the youngest and least experienced man in British special forces at that time, and that’s why I was here – getting experience. I was alone, in the dark and rain, waiting for my first kill and when I thought about it, it amazed me. I was nineteen years old when I passed my special forces selection course, eleven months after joining the Royal Marines from civvy street. It is unlikely that the unusual circumstances that led me to be accepted when so young and inexperienced will be repeated.

  As a boy, I thought the only special forces in the world were the US Green Berets, but that was because of a John Wayne Vietnam war movie playing in the cinemas at the time. Years later, when I was passing through Fort Bragg (a huge US Army camp in North Carolina) I walked by the Green Berets’ headquarters and could not believe my eyes. Right outside the building’s front doors was a larger than life-sized bronze statue of John Wayne dressed as a Green Beret. He had never been in special forces. I wondered if they had to get permission from Hollywood to build it.

  I had no military ambitions when I was a kid other than playing war-games with Airfix tanks and soldiers on my bedroom floor. I enjoyed military history, mostly of the Second World War, and knew most of the major events of that war, but I knew nothing about the modern military and its equipment, even though the Vietnam War was often in the newspapers. I lived in Battersea with my father in a flat on the eighth floor of a council block that overlooked London. We were close to the railways that passed through Clapham Junction. A train rattled by at least once a minute, hardly noticed after a while unless there was a tense, silent moment in a TV drama. Up until moving to Battersea I had spent the first ten years of my life in a Roman Catholic orphanage run by nuns in Mill Hill in north London. My mother had died a few months after I was born. My father wanted to get away from everything that reminded him of her and so he placed me in the orphanage and took a job aboard a merchant ship bound for Australia. He had been with my mother for ten years, meeting her not long after losing all his wealth, which was rumoured to have been a considerable amount of money, in a business venture. He never told me much about her, or about any other of my relatives I had never seen. All he ever did say was that he was simply a peasant who worked hard for what he had made for himself, and that my mother was the illegitimate daughter of a Welsh nobleman. That has always been the source of some curiosity for me, wondering who my grandfather was. My mother was a beautiful woman and in her photographs with me looks composed and dignified, if a little sad. Perhaps she knew she was dying.

  When my father returned from his travels he got a job working nights as a waiter in a hotel on Park Lane. When I came to live with him at age ten, he kept the same job and so I never saw much of him. He usually came home in the early hours, often a little drunk, and went into his room. I got myself up in the mornings, made myself breakfast and ironed my school clothes. When I came home in the evenings he had usually already gone to work. I would make myself supper if he had not left some out for me, which he often did. I would watch TV after homework then put myself to bed. That was my routine for many of my school years. There was a bad patch when I would head out on to the streets at night to get up to no good with school friends – bunking into the pictures or hanging around amusement arcades to fiddle money out of the machines. When I was fifteen I crept into Battersea Park late one night with four friends. Each of us had a brand new air pistol. While we were assassinating passing umbrellas from behind the park fence and coldly executing tramps, someone called the police and reported that there were ‘men with pistols’ in the park. Things were just beginning to heat up in Northern Ireland at that time with the introduction of Internment, the first British soldier had been killed (by a Protestant), the IRA had begun a serious bombing campaign and had also taken to shooting off-duty soldiers out on the town getting drunk. But I was oblivious to all that. I was also unaware that the police had arrived in force and were lying in wait for us at various points outside the park. As we jumped the fence to go home they sprang at us from all directions. They must have been wearing bullet-proof jackets under their coats because they looked heavy and cumbersome as they charged us, caps in one hand and radios in the other. I was swift and reckless in my efforts to avoid being caught and ran blindly across a busy road to escape, sprinting through the familiar back-streets, pausing to make sure I was not followed, before finally going home. I was the only one to escape.

  However, I was grassed on by one of the others and picked up by the police as I arrived at school the following day. I spent half that day in a cell waiting for my father to come and get me. He was not all that angry and most of his lecturing was done at the police station fo
r the benefit of the police. Not that he didn’t mean every word of it. He knew I was not a bad kid at heart. Petty things seemed to upset him more, like making holes in the knees of my trousers. After I did that to my first new pair within a few days of having them, it was all second-hand clothes from then on. The air pistol incident put an end to my night activities and, although I had lied to the police that I had ditched it as I ran from them, I threw it away the next day anyway. I could not have imagined that only a few years later I would embark on a career that would see me operating mostly in the dark hours and carrying weapons many times more lethal than that air pistol.

  I stayed at home in the evenings after that. I had few friends anyway and no money. I went to an all-boys’ school, William Blake Secondary Modern, which was only a mile and a half from my home. I was not into football – I have never liked crowds – and I could not afford to keep up with clothing fashions which seemed to be the main interests of most of the boys in my year: Ben Sherman button-down collar shirts, stay-pressed, two-tone trousers and tasselled loafers. The group I hung out with most were five Jamaicans. It probably appeared to others, the white boys in my school in particular, that what I had in common with them was a lack of money. The truth was the six of us shared a pleasure for extreme mischievousness.

  Our everyday aim was to get one another into trouble, and the deeper and more serious the better. While passing through shops one of us might slip something into another’s bag or pocket in the hope they would be caught by the store detective for shoplifting. On one occasion we were having lunch in a pizza restaurant and, after the meal, I collected all the money we had between us and went to pay the bill. Moments later they saw me outside, across the street, waving and holding up the money with a sadistic grin. Naturally, on my way out I had told the lady at the cash register that the others did not have any money and she should warn the manager. It was entertaining watching them scramble out of the place, under and over tables while dodging the manager and staff. When we travelled on the underground, none of us would buy a ticket. On reaching our destination, when the automatic tube doors opened, there was a frantic, jungle-rules sprint from the platform, up the escalators and along the crowded corridors. Just before the ticket collector, the leaders slowed to a walk so as not to attract undue attention then jostled for position to get through the gate.

  The first through the narrow opening would indicate the one behind, saying, ‘He’s got the tickets.’

  The following person would say the same, and so on, until the ticket collector cottoned on and made a grab for us. The first three usually had the best chance of getting through. If you had not passed through the gate by the time the game was rumbled, you had to run back down and take a train to the next station and try again. If you were caught, it meant being taken to the station office and your parents or the school were contacted. I was blessed with a set of powerful legs and always managed to be one of the first to the ticket collector and was never caught.

  In the five years I spent at that school, apart from an Irish and a Polish boy I was friends with, the Jamaicans were the only boys who invited me to their homes for supper with their families. They also liked to come around to my house for a bite to eat because of the food I always had available. At that time, I thought most people, except my poorer friends, ate smoked salmon, pheasant, and rump steak – food my father always brought home from the fine hotel kitchens.

  I did not know a single girl by name during my school years. I had not even spoken to one until my last year and that was a few fumbled sentences after she was introduced to me by her brother outside school one day. They were alien to me and gorgeous and I watched them from afar. In that last year, I had the confidence to be head boy of the school but not enough to walk up to a girl and introduce myself.

  There were two reasons why one day, at eighteen years old, I decided to catch a bus to Kilburn and London’s military careers offices. Firstly, the two dust-men who collected the rubbish from my council estate had engineering degrees and could not get better paying jobs, which made college seem a waste of time to me. Secondly, my relationship with my father was deteriorating and I felt I could no longer live at home. By that time I had finally lost my virginity to a girl from Tooting Bec who had picked me up off a street in France, which perhaps helped make me feel a bit more manly. That trip was my first time abroad. I was sixteen and with my Irish friend, Patrick. He was an artist, sensitive, somewhat frail, though by no means a wimp, and as penniless as I was. We owned bicycles we had built out of second-hand parts and had scraped up enough money, or so we thought, whilst working over the first part of the school holidays, for a two-week cycling trip across western Europe. We visited First and Second World War battlefields in Belgium and France, with a brief stop at Waterloo. By the time we reached Strasbourg we were very short of money, though that didn’t faze us. I suppose it was because we were always short of money. To add to our problems, our bikes were vandalised by the Alsatian French. Patrick had covered both our bicycles in detailed miniatures of his favourite subject, the World War Two German war machine, which included details of its hardware and emblems of some of its infamous fighting divisions. Not very smart, but then we did not really understand what that war had meant to so many people. We did a bit of shoplifting for food, feeling a little justified since it was the locals who had wrecked our transport. Our luck changed when we were picked up by a couple of English girls in a car on their way back to London having just toured France themselves. The driver fancied Patrick, which left me in the back seat with the girl from Tooting Bec who was slight and pretty. In such close proximity, wedged between baggage and blankets for many hours, I discovered that women could bring out the very best of my wit and entertainment, and that there were heavenly rewards for making them laugh.

  I stepped off the bus in Kilburn and headed for the RAF Careers Office. I fancied myself as a fighter pilot after reading a RAF newspaper advertisement and discovering that I had the minimum educational requirements to join, but as I walked around the elaborate showroom nothing sparked in me and my interest dwindled. I left the building and headed down the street wondering ‘What now?’ Then I saw the little Royal Marines Careers Office.

  I stopped at the window to stare at the action-packed posters. I had heard the Marines were some of the toughest and most highly trained soldiers in the world – that was all I knew about them. I began to wonder, if I could get through the training, whether it might do me some good and I could see the world for a few years, after which things might be a little better on the home front. Curiosity nudged me forward and I stepped into the building to look around. The marketing frills were nowhere near as elaborate as in the RAF office. Perhaps that’s why I felt more comfortable there. A pleasant old Marine in uniform – a sergeant – approached me and began to chat with me about the job. Before long, I was sitting opposite him at his desk filling out an application form. It was a spontaneous move and I felt strangely free from any doubt. The size of the step I was taking had little effect on me. I would have put more time and consideration into buying a new pair of running shoes.

  One of the last things he asked me was, ‘Do you think you’re fit, lad?’

  I had a green belt in judo by then and attended regular classes. When I answered yes he chuckled, as if he knew something I did not. It was a long time before a Royal Marine sergeant was to be quite so pleasant and cordial to me again.

  There was one thing that worried me about joining the Marines, and it was not a small problem either. I thought of myself as something of a coward. There was no one I could discuss it with, nor did I want to. I would get scared before a fight, and when I dreamed of being in one I moved as if knee-deep in mud while the other person pounded me relentlessly. Dare-devil stunts didn’t worry me as long as I did not pause to think about them. I once somersaulted from the highest diving board in Crystal Palace without any coaching (I landed badly and burst an eardrum that day) and I performed mindless Evil Knievel-style
jumps and crashes on my bike, but the threat of a fist-fight made me go shamefully weak. My strength would drain before it began.

  One day at school, my cowardice became public knowledge when I lost control when confronted by a class-mate and I ran away. I didn’t stop and continued out through the school gates and down the street. By the time I slowed to a walk I hated myself completely. I could never go back. It was the worst feeling I had ever experienced. As I walked the streets the self-loathing got a desperate hold of me. I have never felt more alone in the world than on that day. What was wrong with me, I wondered? What exactly was I afraid of? I knew so many boys who seemed completely fearless when it came to fighting. How had I ended up with this disability? I had other fears, normal ones it seemed, such as fear of the dark and close confinement. I knew I had to do something about this one though, but what? How do you deal with cowardice?

  I took a long and different route home that afternoon while I thought about it. My route led me past a rival school which was emptying out for the day. I was wearing my school blazer and it was not long before I heard a shout, ‘There’s a Bill Blakey.’

  I instantly knew this meant trouble, but something kept me from running. I don’t remember making a conscious decision to stay. They were far enough away at first for me to get away. But I walked on, aware they were running towards my back. Perhaps I wanted to punish myself. I had run away enough that day.

  They soon arrived and quickly crowded around me, six or seven boys of about my own age, pushing and shoving me between them. I did not say a word. The first punch came and then it quickly escalated into a frenzy of kicks, punches and karate techniques learned from movies. I tried to cover myself as the blows rained down. It seemed to go on for a long time, but it was probably less than a minute.