I Thought the Worst Was Over
Bandit Country
One day we received word that a soldier on guard duty at a base down in Forkhill had fired off a round which struck a grandfather wheeling a pram. The RUC stated that the round had taken off the man’s two middle fingers, entered the pram and, luckily, missed the baby by inches.
In cases like this, the SIB interviews the soldier to establish the circumstances surrounding the discharge and collects the weapon to check for any defects which might have caused it to malfunction. I was given the job of going down there and doing just that.
The thing is, at that time, one didn’t simply drive down to Forkhill.
The village was in South Armagh, affectionately known as “Bandit Country”. Roadside bombs were common, and the IRA had a habit of setting them off if anything even vaguely resembling a police or military vehicle drove by.
On a side note, although we were dressed as civilians in suits and ties, for some reason the Army thought it wise to provide us with beige Minis or white Ford Escort estates as our “covert” vehicles, complete with a very obvious radio antenna.
The only way to travel to Forkhill was by helicopter.
Briefcase in hand, I boarded a Gazelle at the landing pad next to the playing field and off I went. The pilot, a Sergeant, wasn’t very talkative. He had bloodshot eyes and I suspected he was hungover. I just hoped he had sobered up.
Helicopters are not my favourite mode of travel. The military versions are not built for comfort.
It’s like sitting inside a very noisy vibrator.
I don’t remember much about the journey. We landed next to the base. I got out and stepped straight into a muddy puddle, much to the amusement of the smirking soldier holding a side door open.
I’m sure Forkhill is a very pretty village and the surrounding scenery is breathtaking, like much of Ireland. I spent as little time as I could sightseeing outside the corrugated walls of the base. The IRA were fond of taking pot shots at helicopters and their passengers.
I interviewed the lad who had fired off the round under caution. It was a typical case of “negligent discharge”. He was on duty in the guard tower, got bored and decided to reload and cock the belt fed GPMG, or “Gimpy”, that the tower was equipped with. He claimed he didn’t remember pulling the trigger and that the gun had “just gone off”. He signed a statement to that effect. He was eighteen or nineteen and had been on active duty for a whole six months. I went off to the armoury to collect the weapon.
By this time it was late afternoon and the weather had deteriorated and it had become foggy. No Army helicopters were flying so it looked like I was going to spend the night in one of the portakabins that acted as sleeping quarters with a bunch of smelly squaddies. Not something I was looking forward to.
As luck would have it the base was due for resupply that evening. A Sergeant told me not to worry as an RAF Wessex was going to make the supply drop and that the RAF were “fucking nutters” and would fly in any weather.
An hour later the Wessex appeared out of the mist with a large net full of supplies suspended beneath it. It dropped the net from a height of about six feet and clouds of flour flew everywhere.
“Cunts. They fucking do that on purpose,” said a lad standing next to me.
The helicopter disappeared back into the mist and circled around. It landed next to the pile of supplies.
I staggered out through the mud with my briefcase in one hand and the GPMG in the other. I clambered aboard and took a seat.
The Wessex is probably the worst form of transport ever invented, and by the time I got out I thought I would never recover my hearing.
They could not take me directly to Lisburn so I was dropped off at the Joint Army RUC base at Bessbrook. From there I got another Gazelle to Lisburn, which I had come to appreciate much more after my experience in the Wessex.
Back in Lisburn
By the time I got back to Lisburn, I thought the worst of the day was behind me.
I had been working for about twelve hours. All I needed to do was report in to the Ops Room, deliver the GPMG to the armoury, get a quick receipt from the armourer, and then head to the Company Mess for several well deserved pints.
Well, that was the plan.
Our Company offices were located within a fenced compound across the road from the Army’s HQ for Northern Ireland. There was a small gatehouse, but it was unmanned.
To get to the gate from the landing pad I walked along a narrow road, with the NAAFI building on the left and the fenced-in HQ on the right. As I passed the NAAFI I noticed a van parked up. I carried on and then heard it start behind me.
It came up slowly and, as it passed, brushed against me, nearly knocking me off balance. It continued down the road at a crawl and then ran straight into one of the gateposts.
He’s pissed, I thought immediately. There was no question of a medical emergency. This was Northern Ireland.
I was incensed.
I ran up to the driver’s door, put down my briefcase and the gun, and opened it. The driver was slumped in his seat and stank of alcohol. I grabbed him by the front of his shirt and hauled him out. I had a few words to say, most of them beginning with eff. He just mumbled and could barely stand.
I decided to take him to the Ops Room and sort it out there.
I tucked my briefcase under my left arm, picked up the gun, and held the man by the scruff of his neck with my right hand as I marched him towards the office. He staggered all over the place, but I managed to get him inside and to the bottom of the stairs leading up to the second floor, where he collapsed and refused to move.
I left him there and went upstairs to the Ops Room, where I think it was Phil Reade on duty. I told him what had happened and asked him to go and check on the bloke while I rang the RUC to get them to pick him up.
Phil went off and I started trying to find the number. This was long before the digital age and nothing was quick. While I was still looking, I heard Phil running back along the corridor.
“Murf,” he said, “he’s fallen over the fucking bannister.”
When Phil opened the stairwell door, all he saw was a pair of legs disappearing over the bannister. When he looked down, the bloke was lying in a heap at the bottom. He had fallen about ten or fifteen feet.
So there I was, telephone in one hand, a gun I needed to secure in the other, and a possibly seriously injured drunken Irishman lying at the bottom of a flight of stairs.
It had been a long day.
The Ambulance
To cut a long story short, we secured the GPMG and I asked Phil to call out the duty officer and a medic.
The duty officer, a captain, was generally considered to be a bit of a twat, so I knew my day was not going to end well.
Little did I know.
I went to check on the bloke. He appeared to be unconscious. I put him in the recovery position in case he was sick and waited.
The captain and the army ambulance turned up at about the same time. The ambulance looked like it was from the 1950s. The driver, it turned out, was not a medic, just a driver from the RCT.
I asked where the medic was. “Dunno,” was the answer. The captain had a fit. “Get him in the ambulance,” he ordered. “Can’t, sir,” said the driver.
It turned out that only a medic could decide whether a patient should be placed in an ambulance.
The captain went ballistic and threatened to lock the poor lad up. The driver and I went to the back of the ambulance, opened it up and, sure enough, there was no stretcher.
The captain, who was orbiting Mars by that point, eventually ordered the driver to go and get one, so off he went.
He drove out of the gate and down the road and, just after he left, a bloke dressed in white appeared dragging a large box behind him. This was the medic. The box contained all the emergency gear that should have been in the ambulance.
We pointed him towards the patient and he started examining him. As he was doing that, the ambulance returned.
The medic took the man’s blood pressure, went a bit pale and started shouting, “Get him in the ambulance.”
We got him onto the stretcher and into the back. The captain told me to go with them, so off we went to Lisburn General Hospital.
The medic told the driver to put the siren on. At that time the sirens on ambulances and police cars went EEE AW, EEE AW.
What followed was something else entirely.
The siren went EEE… pause… EEE… pause.
At that point I put my head in my hands and started laughing, even though the bloke might well have been dead.
We got to the hospital and, as they were wheeling him in, he suddenly came back to life. Like Lazarus, or more accurately like a very drunk man who had simply needed a nap.
They examined him, gave him a clean bill of health, and handed him back to us.
Which left me with the problem of what the fuck I was supposed to do with him.
Not Quite the End
I persuaded the medic and driver to take us to the RUC station. I explained the situation, but they wanted nothing to do with it or him. As far as they were concerned, no offence had been committed. It had all happened on military property.
They suggested calling a taxi to take him home, except the bloke could not say where he lived.
So there I was, standing on the pavement with this drunken fool, when a higher power finally took pity on me and a passing car stopped. The driver rolled down his window and said, “Hey Johnny, what’s the craic?” To cut a long story short, he knew the drunk and offered to take him home.
End of story.
Not quite.
By this point I was mentally and physically exhausted. I was starving and desperate for a pint.
I got back to the Ops Room and waiting for me was the captain.
“I want a report on my desk tomorrow morning at 09.00.”
I spent the next few hours taking witness statements and typing up the report. I used gallons of Tipp-Ex as the mistakes piled up.
I finally got to bed, still starving, just before dawn.
I took the report to the captain’s office at 09.00 and was told he was having the day off.
Did I mention he was a bit of a twat?