Fishers of Men - The Gripping True Story of a British Undercover Agent in Northern Ireland. Rob Lewis
as to which troop I wished to join. The following week saw me in the French sunshine with 3rd Troop for two weeks. The canoes appeared once for the obligatory photograph for the regimental journal and were never seen again until we returned to Hohne.
Exercises came and went. I enjoyed being out of camp with my new troop on these various military schemes and found myself starting to want to progress within my squadron. I had managed to convince my troop leader to give me the chance of moving out of the driver’s seat into the turret and becoming a radio operator. I quickly learnt that if you wanted to get noticed and promoted you had to be seen and heard. Staying cooped up in the driver’s seat of an armoured vehicle is not the best place to be for this. Range periods came and went as well, and I found that gunnery was enjoyable as well as being a necessary requirement for gaining promotion. I was determined to get on the first rung of the ladder. I was promoted to lance-corporal, and soon after, in my usual style, I was reduced in rank back to trooper. Our troop had been laid up for the night and we had worked out a rota for radio watch during the small hours. I was due to be on duty from four in the morning until five, and so got my head down for the night. The bloke I would be taking over from would give me a shout just prior to me taking over radio watch. The wake-up call did not come; the bloke concerned had fallen asleep during his stag. We had a visit from one of the exercise-directing staff at half-past four and yours truly was fast asleep inside a lovely warm sleeping bag. On return to camp I was marched in front of the commanding officer, bollocked, fined, reduced in rank and marched out. Easy as that. No explanation was offered by me as it was bound to fall on stony ground. The fat bastard who failed to stay awake for his duty said nothing.
True to form and with a macabre sense of humour found only in the forces, I was greeted by a mate of mine walking down the corridor after I had just been marched out by the RSM (Regimental Sergeant-Major). As we approached each other he burst into song. The song was ‘Another One Bites the Dust’ previously performed in far better style by the group Queen. We both burst out laughing. What else was there to do? He, like me, was to be reduced to trooper within the next ten minutes. The sight of him in the NAAFI later that afternoon was the immediate cue for me to reciprocate his earlier serenade with a rendition of ‘Yesterday’, with apologies to Paul McCartney for my strained attempt.
During mid-1979 knowing whispers were busily relayed around the regiment that we were to be posted as a unit to Northern Ireland. It started in the wives’ club, and soon after the commanding officer was formally told about the deployment. It is a strange and quaint military system, really, where the regimental wives started packing their boxes to move and the soldiers of the regiment have not been properly informed of anything regarding the posting. Some days later we were gathered in the cinema in Hohne for a commanding officer’s address. Rumours were correct. Omagh, County Tyrone, Northern Ireland, was to be work, rest and play for the next two years, from late 1980 till 1982, in an infantry role. What a bummer.
I knew nothing about Omagh other than for soldiers it was considered to be a fairly safe posting, if there was such a thing in Northern Ireland. Families were to accompany the regiment on this two-year tour. It was bad enough for some of the blokes to face up to the prospect of the posting; for the wives and children who knew even less than us the next few months would be a very trying time. There were to be over six hundred shooting incidents, four hundred explosions and a total of over seventy deaths in 1980 alone. Of these deaths eight were soldiers, most of whom were based in the major cities of Belfast and Londonderry. However tragic and pointless their deaths were, it was more or less expected that someone would be killed during tours in these parts of the Province. We hoped for a better deal.
Throughout late 1979 and into 1980 the hunger strike was to manoeuvre itself into a higher media profile. Various requests were made for the so-called five demands to be granted to prisoners by high-ranking republican figures. It was a serious time in the Province, and we were due to arrive there right in the middle of the situation. The IRA had extended their murderous activities to include prison officers working at locations where republican prisoners were held, and during one of their attacks they had killed the wife of one of these men. Not exactly the type of news to be welcomed by wives of soldiers due to arrive in the Province within the next few weeks.
The demands being made by the prisoners were the right to wear their own clothes, the right to refuse to work, the right to associate with other prisoners, the right to recreation and education, and the right to their remission being restored. It was to be the hunger strike which was to dominate the two years of my time in the Province. The terrorist threat from the IRA still loomed, the killings were still going on, but in comparison with previous years the number of soldiers killed had decreased dramatically for some unknown reason.
My Northern Ireland training began. I was to be initiated into the art of being an infantry soldier, a different world from the one I had been used to over the previous few years. I had become accustomed to the ‘cavalry’ way of doing things, which was always a very comfortable way of dealing with life in the army, especially when we were away from camp on military exercises all over the country. Even on large NATO exercises in Germany it was not unknown for us to hide away our troop’s armoured vehicles in large barns, leave one man on radio watch and another on guard stag, while the remainder of the troop would stroll into the local village and spend the evening in the local guest-house. They were always great places for some hot food and a few beers on cold winter nights. Reality hit me straight between the eyes when we were all called, by troop, to the regimental quartermaster’s department. I was issued with new patrol boots, which were higher than the normal issue we wore for work on the tank park. These gave the calf muscles extra support and they were a hell of a lot lighter and ideal for running in. We were given a new style of black padded gloves which were warm and comfortable, in complete contrast to the normal green woollen issue which some civil servant in the procurement department must have been given a serious back-hander to take on as a job lot from some supplier. These were just a few of the ‘goodies’ that were now on our signatures, and they were all welcome improvements. The other items of equipment we were given were the ones to set my mind thinking about the next few years ahead of us – riot helmet, flak jackets, extra first-field wound dressing and morphine ampoules.
Our training had begun.
NORTHERN IRELAND: THE FIRST TIME
For me the beginning of August 1980 was a very trying time. I had transferred to the Royal Armoured Corps to start a new career that I hoped would culminate in commanding armoured vehicles on exercises in Germany, never really expecting to go to war, and reaping the benefits of duty-free living with perhaps the occasional trip to Canada and Cyprus thrown in for good measure. It never really dawned on me that I might have to go to Northern Ireland as an infantryman. In all honesty the thought worried me, and I am sure I was not the only soldier involved in the training to have similar misgivings about our new role.
Sennelager, which was quite often referred to by British soldiers as ‘the world’s worst lager’, was going to be our squadron home for the next two weeks. We were located at the somewhat corny but aptly named training camp known as ‘Fort-Nite’, a name that some senior officer must have spent ages thinking up. Prior to the entire squadron deploying to this infantry training establishment we undertook our own internal troop training in the general area of Hohne Garrison, running around the place in heavy flak jackets and riot helmets, attending numerous lectures on the complexities of the Province, and generally pretending to know what we were doing in all matters relating to infantry patrol techniques and internal security measures.
Most of the internal security instruction carried out during this run-up phase was given by our own regimental instructors. The regiment itself had carried out a number of emergency tours in Northern Ireland as a complete unit, in 1974, when they were deployed to Londonderry for a four-month tour, and then again in 1976, this time covering the area around Armagh and East Tyrone. In between