Fishers of Men - The Gripping True Story of a British Undercover Agent in Northern Ireland. Rob Lewis
impending two-year tour various troops had seen service in the Province, individually attached to a number of infantry battalions as part of our battle group commitment within 1BR Corps in Germany. Some of these troops had completed short tours in the city of Belfast some months previously, and were quite up to speed with the internal security tactics required and the generalities of what was going on in Northern Ireland. Most of the initial training we received was based on their experiences. There was also an NCO presence from one of the infantry regiments based in Celle, a large town only a short distance from our garrison. These guys were well up to date and were extremely good instructors who assisted enormously with our training in camp prior to us going to Sennelager. Some of their older blokes had carried out eight or nine tours in the Province.
The initial training concentrated on the improvement of our general fitness. The physical training instructors had their hands full turning the ‘fat tankies’ into a bunch of Seb Coe racing snakes. Daily runs and gymnasium sessions became the order of the day, and we carried out extensive weapons handling with the 7.62mm SLR (self-loading rifle), which would be our personal weapon for the tour. First-aid lessons took on a more serious role, with particular attention being paid to the treatment of gunshot wounds and trauma. We also spent long periods practising a variety of other skills such as map-reading and infantry patrol fire and movement, sessions held by both day and night. As we were an armoured reconnaissance regiment, map reading was second nature to the majority of us, the only difference being that it was now carried out on foot as opposed to on top of a Scimitar or Scorpion light tank. As someone who had transferred to the regiment with the intention of commanding tracked armoured vehicles, this new side to my army life came as a major culture shock, but I, along with my fellow cavalry soldiers, soon got the hang of it, and towards the latter part of the training I actually began to enjoy it, with only certain reservations.
We moved lock, stock and barrel as a squadron to the Northern Ireland Training and Tactics school at Sennelager to be greeted by a rather well-built, gruff-voiced infantry officer who was immediately christened ‘Captain Chaos’. His modus operandi, along with his directing staff (DS), was to saturate us with criticism about all the bad drills we had carried out during the various internal security exercises and realistic scenarios, and on more than one occasion he insisted that most of the squadron would surely be wiped out by a terrorist attack en masse if we were to carry out our patrolling techniques in the style we had acquired.
One of the more novel ways of debriefing he used was to run video recordings at the end of the day showing various members of the squadron in a multitude of highly embarrassing situations that they had been caught in during their day inside the training area. My troop sergeant and I had been caught by the short and curlies one day lying up in an observation post. We had been lying there slagging off the squadron leader in no uncertain terms. In the evening, just as the debrief was due to start, it became apparent exactly which video Captain Chaos was going to be playing to the attentive audience. The other guilty party and I just glanced at each other. I had a quick laugh to myself. After all, he was the senior rank and was likely to be in more shit than me, and luckily enough he had done most of the talking while the tape had been running. His face and neck went bright red in anticipation of the situation we were about to face. At the crucial point, where the barrage of our verbal abuse was just getting around to the question of the officer commanding’s parenthood and the fact that we both assumed that his right hand was used more than his wife for sexual satisfaction, the video player broke down. Thank Christ for that. Lesson learnt again. If there is a video about, keep your trap well and truly shut.
My troop corporal had an equally embarrassing situation broadcast to the entire squadron the following evening, but gained a bit of respect back for the way in which he dealt with it. He had been involved in a scenario where a ‘pretend’ member of the public had approached him and had informed him that he believed there was a bomb in the street the patrol were in. The corporal concerned looked at his aide-memoire and carried out the confirm, clear, cordon, control routine while the video rolled. Unfortunately for him he had done the clearing before the confirming and had established his incident control point in the doorway of a betting shop before finding out where the device was actually located. The video continued to roll. As the situation developed, Captain Chaos started talking to the NCO, asking him questions about the problem he had encountered and the actions he had taken. As the corporal knelt down, using an old jerry-can for support, and began to reel off a highly acceptable appraisal of the situation, Captain Chaos asked him if he had confirmed where the suspect device was located. With bluff and bluster, our troop corporal pointed up the street to the area of the baker’s shop and with a fair degree of certainty explained that it was in the doorway some hundred metres away from the control point.
After Captain Chaos had milked the situation as far as he could, he told the bloke to look under his arse. There for the entire world to see was a block of plastic explosive, a battery pack and a jerry-can full of petrol. Steve, the troop corporal, looked at the smug face of the infantry captain and grinned while remarking on the fact that he carried out this action purposely to test the observation skills of the younger soldiers in the troop and that they obviously had a lot of training to go through yet. As he walked away from the makeshift explosive device he sarcastically bollocked all the troopers for not picking him up on the mistake he had made to test them.
The exhaustive final exercise eventually came and went. The squadron had somehow managed to get through, and the next time we would be trudging around on patrol it would be in the Province for real. The thought of this really did nothing for me at all. I pined for the warmth and dryness of my tank turret. In October 1980 my troop arrived in Lisanelly Barracks, which had been a British Army camp for years, situated on the northern outskirts of Omagh, County Tyrone. In the middle of the night we took over our accommodation from the outgoing regiment. The following day was spent having a multitude of intelligence briefs, updates on the movements of known or suspected terrorists and general orientation lectures on the area we were to cover. In total the regimental responsibility was to cover 784 square miles of the Province, including over fifty miles of the border area with Eire. Along this border area there was in excess of thirty crossing points, of which only one was approved by the authorities; the others had all been cratered by explosives laid by the Royal Engineers to try to stop smuggling activities by the locals, and also to cause problems for terrorists looking for a quick getaway across to the South after they had carried out an attack. It was a joke. One day the illegal crossing would be impassable, the next day the locals would clear an area around the craters with their tractors or fill them in and carry on their routine as normal. My troop’s area of responsibility covered quite a large expanse. In particular we had a patrol commitment to a small republican town about sixteen kilometres to the east of Omagh called Termon Rock, more commonly known as Carrickmore.
This little town harboured a hive of hardliners and was to take up more of our patrol time than anywhere else. It was to be the first place I had bricks thrown at me by the local schoolkids, the first place I saw a petrol bomb thrown, and the first place I witnessed a rubber bullet or baton gun being fired. Love at first sight, as they say. The locals made no bones about their support of the republican movement, which encouraged terrorism, and everyone who lived there despised us. Exactly one year prior to our arrival the Provisional IRA had virtually sent an open invitation out to journalists, including a film crew from the Panorama television programme. The invitation was allegedly telephoned to their hotel in Eire, and informed them that if they wanted to see how the Provisionals were controlling republican areas they should go to Carrickmore. What the television team found was an organised patrol of black-hooded and heavily armed ‘volunteers’ from the Provisional IRA running their own illegal vehicle checkpoints in the area just outside the town in broad daylight. This was some distance away from the border areas, where this type of activity could be expected, and the whole escapade showed that the people we were likely to be up against were in no way afraid to show their strength in public, and in the worst-case scenario they would obviously be prepared to take us on face to face if they so wished. These were professional, dedicated and capable soldiers.
Life in the Province somehow went on as usual. Daily patrols became normal and there was even a decent social life. Omagh was considered to be a fairly safe place for a regimental two-year residential tour. The married soldiers’ wives took shopping trips to Belfast and other large towns