Fishers of Men - The Gripping True Story of a British Undercover Agent in Northern Ireland. Rob Lewis
in the local town, and we had free access to a wide range of pubs and clubs. A number of the lads played sports for the local rugby and hockey teams. This fraternisation did not extend to the Gaelic football or hurling teams, though. There was still a line to be drawn. The only major threat came from the Ulster Defence Regiment (UDR), whose younger male members were not too enthralled with the way their female population tended to ignore with some vigour their remonstrations against going off with ‘the Brits’. Fights in certain nightclubs in the town were commonplace. It was just like being back in Hohne again.
One Friday evening I was just lazing about in the accommodation block, doing nothing in particular, thinking about that night’s possible entertainment in town, when I was disturbed by my troop sergeant, a friend of mine. He came up to me and asked whether I would mind helping with the manpower required for the QRF (quick-reaction force). The duty of the force was to be on stand-by for any situation requiring extra manpower, to support troops on the ground and to react to incidents anywhere within our regiment’s area of responsibility. Every troop took its turn to complete a twenty-four-hour period, which mainly consisted of watching videos and sleeping until there was a call from the operation room to go out to an incident or to carry out a patrol in a particular area. The QRF on duty that day was short of a bloke for a routine helicopter patrol around the Carrickmore area, and the operations room had demanded a presence in the air over what used to be the old rectory, now a burnt-out shell of a building. This type of operation was usually referred to as a ‘top cover’, and was meant to act as deterrent to any possible terrorist attack being considered by active-service unit volunteers. In hot pursuit a helicopter is an extremely useful vehicle for tracking and following suspects, by both day and night.
It was my Friday off, the first one for ages, and I politely told him to fuck off. After a bit of bartering he told me that if I did him this favour I could pick any extra day off I wished the following week. It seemed like a pretty good idea to agree at the time, as the helicopter patrol was only likely to last a few hours and they were good fun anyway. I could still be back in camp before the pubs shut. I agreed. I made my way to the armoury and picked up my SLR, then I walked back across the helicopter landing pad to the troop’s accommodation and got my webbing and combat uniform sorted out, gave my rifle a quick clean and oiled the working parts, then it was down to the loading bay where a twenty-round magazine was fitted ready for the patrol. There were to be four of us in the chopper, a Scout, with two men sitting each side, facing out, with our legs dangling over the skids. We knelt down in pairs facing the cockpit of the Scout as the pilot finished his pre-flight checks, and after he had checked that everything was ready he gave us the thumbs-up. We dashed over to the helicopter, ducking as we approached the blades circling above our heads. The Scout lifted off, banking over towards the north, and then headed east towards Carrickmore. There was always a buzz to be had from this type of patrolling – the adrenalin rush as the helicopter banks over is a great experience. If it could be bottled and sold you could make a small fortune.
As we flew out of the Lisanelly Barracks area and headed away from camp I noticed a great number of RUC (Royal Ulster Constabulary) Land-Rover patrols moving along the road. In addition it struck me that they appeared to be escorting a large number of transporter-sized container trucks, all heading along the Drumnakilly Road away from the town. As well as the ground vehicles and foot patrols we were joined in the air by a number of other helicopters, a mixture of Wessex, Lynx and other Scouts, all generally moving towards the east. I had wondered what the hell was going on. I had the feeling I had been mugged into something that was going to last more than a few hours. It was a bit like a scene from the film Apocalypse Now; if some loudspeakers had burst into life with Wagner’s ‘Ride of the Valkyries’ the scene would have been set to perfection.
The convoy turned out to be the construction teams and their escorts moving into Carrickmore to set up the new police station, which was to be located where the remains of the old rectory were. We were part of the operation to give top cover to the whole show, or at least that’s how it appeared to me. I was sadly mistaken. On the way there we were told over the radio to deploy on the ground at the old rectory and meet up with other call signs from our regiment who were already in position. As we jumped off the Scout skids, members of our regiment’s close-observation troop took our places. They had been lying out at the rectory for a number of weeks, watching and securing the area, and were being relieved by us. As we changed over there was an exchange of the usual abusive banter, with them having the upper hand. As we covered their departure from the area their grins were certainly wider than ours.
We moved into the stables at the old rectory and set up our mini-cookers for a brew. We had no formal instructions for our deployment. Obviously the operations room back in Omagh had cuffed it a little by telling us to land, and I did not think they really knew what to do with us now we were there. There were enough police and troops around the place to start a mini-war, and so we thought if we kept out of sight and pretended to know what we were doing no one would bother us, and then we could catch the next helicopter back to camp. Unfortunately this was not to be the case. All we had with us were belt kits consisting of the bare essentials for either a short, or at the most an overnight patrol; no sleeping bags, no rations, just ammunition and brew kits with a snack-pack of biscuits and a few chocolate bars.
Billy, my troop sergeant, came back from the swiftly set up operations room and with rather a red face asked if we were all fine and enjoying ourselves; had we had a brew? The stables were quite good, weren’t they? His questions showed concern for our welfare previously unseen. I looked at him with a sly grin and ask the question on behalf of the other blokes in the troop. ‘Bill, get to the point. What the fuck is going on here?’ He replied that the operations room had informed him that we were to perform the task of base security for the new complex. We would carry out the anti-mortar baseplate patrols, man the operations room, carry out liaison with military and police search teams and general patrolling in the immediate area – all this on a packet of biscuits and a bar of chocolate! Six weeks later we headed back to camp. Six fucking weeks of Carrickmore! Believe you me; I was more than ready to go back to Omagh.
The weeks spent at Carrickmore on our prolonged visit actually turned out to be quite a good laugh on one or two occasions. One of these highlights was one evening when 2nd Troop from my squadron was tasked with the security of a grand house at Termon, on the outskirts of the village, belonging to a retired British Army officer. The owner was out of the country at the time. The retired colonel and his family had been there for years and had surprisingly remained untouched by the Troubles. However, because of the overnight arrival of a police station in the area, and the possibility of various backlashes by the local community, it was decided to provide cover and protection to this location, among a number of others. To this end, 2nd Troop were hiding up in the house during the day and then putting lads out in observation positions with night viewing aids during the hours of dark to defend the house against any attacks.
We decided to pay them a courtesy visit one evening while we were on a routine patrol, and informed them of our imminent arrival on the radio just as we were about a hundred metres away. As I spoke to the radio operator I could hear shrieks of laughter in the background. Billy and I looked at each other with some confusion as their radio operator, who was laughing hysterically as he spoke to me, told us to approach from the south as they had laid out trip flares on all routes into the house except from that direction. On entering the house it became apparent what they were all laughing about. One of the lads in the troop had been into the cellar of the house and had located a few bottles of the retired colonel’s vintage port and claret; other members had found a wardrobe upstairs containing a stack of old colonial-style uniforms, ball gowns, wigs and hats. The scene that lay before us was hilarious, the complete troop in fancy dress drinking port and toasting the regiment. Captain Chaos would surely have burst a blood vessel.
Overall, our tour in Omagh had been relatively quiet. We had been involved in a few minor scraps in Strabane and Carrickmore during the hunger strike period, but nothing compared to what various infantry battalions had been putting up with in Londonderry and Belfast over the same period. Those lads really had been earning their extra pay.
We were patrolling through Strabane one afternoon when two ‘Molotov cocktails’ came flying out of us from behind a six-foot wall on the ‘Head of Town’ estate.