0 comments/ 5926 views/ 0 favorites A Soldier's Tale Ch. 02 By: patrick2536 If you take the back road between Belfast and Londonderry, you will go though a small town called Glenshane pass. In that town lives a man with a very, very ugly scar. I know, because I gave him that scar. I had just returned from R and R (read A soldiers Tale -- Home on leave) and was waiting in Belfast Airport for some army transport to collect me. I was in plain clothes, jeans, doc martin boots, check shirt and a padded jacket to keep out the chill. I was sat near the door where I could also keep an eye on the windows as well, just to make sure nobody was watching me, or watching the car park. A Vauxhall Cavalier pulled up with two guys in the front seats. It was a fairly clean car, no stickers on it and with two young guys with short hair and both wearing ties. It screamed undercover car to me. I grabbed some old newspapers that had been left on the seats, along with some empty crisp packets and made my way towards the car. I walked along the driver's side, making sure that nobody was paying any undue attention to me or the car. I slid into the back seat, chucking the old papers onto the back window shelf along with the crisp packets; anything to make the car more lived in. Only the army cleaned their cars every day, and I wasn't going to make myself a target just to please some bloody sergeant from the motor pool. We set off and started making our way into the city centre. The young lad in the passenger seat who was doing escort duty tried to make small talk by asking how my leave had gone, but it wasn't a subject I really wanted to discuss and quickly changed the subject. We started to discuss what had been happening in the area and it seemed the troops had been pulling loads of extra duties; the escort had bags under his eyes and couldn't stop yawning. Not wanting to have my life resting on some guy only half awake, I suggested they roll down the window for a while, maybe the fresh air would wake them up. A nice idea. Except for the fact it was in Northern Ireland. Where it rains. A lot. Pretty soon the windows were rolled up tight and then the heater was switched on and the car started to get steamy and muggy. The escort was fighting hard to stay awake and we still had a couple of hours driving. I got the driver to pull over just on the outskirts of the city, and offered to let the escort have a sleep in the back and I would carry on with his job. He was out of his seat before I had finished suggesting it. He passed me his pistol. A walther ppk 7.65, made famous by James Bond, but actually quite a good gun for short range work. I cocked it, feeding a round into the chamber. The two guys looked shocked at that. "You shouldn't do that" the escort said. I just looked at him. "A gun is just a lump of metal unless you fire it, and if I need to fire it, I aint going to fuck around cocking it" As he slid into the back seat, I told them both to take off their ties. "Lets try and look like the natives around here" I said. Finally, we set off again and I pulled the map from under the seat, just to check on our route and distance to travel. I studied the map and found the two main routes. One was the long haul along the motorway, the other was much shorter but took us through Glenshane pass, a hard catholic area, not known for giving British troops a friendly greeting. "Anything been happening around the pass?" I asked the driver hoping he would be up to date on all the action. "Not a thing, its all fairly peaceful" We decided to take the shorter route, well, the driver and me did, the other guy was busy snoring his head off in the back. We came down the long hill into the town of Glenshane and headed towards the town square. The single road through the town narrows just before it turns left into the centre and then widens again as it leaves the town It's always a bottleneck. Today was no different. Except for the reason for the bottleneck. The Provisional I R A Every now and then they would stage a show of strength for the TV crews and the papers and they would parade through a town and conduct road blocks, just like the one in front of us. There were six men doing the checkpoint, four had armalite rifles, and the other two had pistols and were talking to the drivers of the cars before waving them though. The only good point in our favour was that they were pretty relaxed and were obviously just posing for pictures and not really concentrating on the cars. I checked the rear view mirror, there was a car close up behind us, no chance of reversing out, and we were too close to the car in front to try and speed up. The guy in the back of our was still sleeping, but seeing he had no weapon anyway, at least he wasn't panicking so I left him alone. I checked on the driver, I would be depending on him soon and I didn't want him buggering things up. Slipping the gun from under my thigh, I held it in my right hand, the hand nearest the door. "Do what I fucking tell you, when I fucking tell you....got that?" The driver looked at me. "Eh?" "Do what I fucking tell you, when I fucking tell you....ok?" This time he nodded. I told him to drive more slowly, opening up a gap between us and the car in front, at this moment we were four cars from the checkpoint. The guys with the pistols were laughing and joking with the occupants, hell, they probably knew each other, even though the gunmen had balaclavas on they would be from the same neighbourhood. That car was waved through, now it was just three in front of us. That car was quickly waved on, now we were getting closer, I slumped down a little more in my seat, giving my gun hand a quick wipe on my jeans and flicking the safety catch off. "Stall the car" I said....... Nothing........ "Stall the fucking car!!" This time he reacted and let the clutch up, stalling the car and making the gap even bigger. The gunmen had waved the final car in front of us and were now waiting for us to pull up along side them. But we were still twenty five yards away. "Try starting it, but stall it again" I muttered. This time he was listening and obeying and he twisted the ignition key but made sure the engine didn't catch. The gunman nearest us walked along the pavement, just as I had hoped he would. As he got closer, I wound down the window, and mimed looking embarrassed. As he got level, I told the driver to fire her up, but not to move yet. The gunman started to bend at the waist to look at us. He moved closer He bent over a little more. He saw a guy asleep in the back He saw a panicky looking driver staring straight ahead And he saw me....... That was the last thing he saw before I grabbed him by the collar and rammed the Walther up against his cheekbone, ripping into the balaclava and tearing open his skin. "Drive, drive, fucking drive" I shouted. He shot forward and I kept hold of the gunman forcing him to run along side the car, this stopped him shooting at us, and also provided a nice human shield. He was trying to pull away and I clubbed him again, ripping his cheekbone wide open, but hoping he would still remain upright, his dead weight would be too heavy for me. His blood spurted out all over my jacket, drenching my gun hand. We quickly shot past the other four guys, they were stunned by the quick turn of events and were far too slow to react. The gunman I had hold of was holding onto the door to try and keep his balance and I smashed the Walther down onto his fingers, hearing them crack as he was forced to let go, tumbling along the pavement before smashing into a doorway. We were now speeding away from the roadblock and luckily we hadn't attracted any rifle fire, but we weren't exactly hanging around for a chat anyway. We finally pulled into the barracks forty five minutes later, just as sleepy head in the back woke up. "Everything ok?" he asked "Everything fine" I replied as I dropped the blood stained pistol into his hand. A Soldier's Tale Ch. 03 It was approaching five o'clock at night on Friday 17th May. There was the normal crowd of drivers hanging around the duty clerk, pushing and shoving and I was just another one, hoping that I wouldn't be called upon for a last minute weekend duty. We were stationed just outside Londonderry, we were just over halfway through a two-year tour of duty and we were all dog-tired. The hours were long, and there was an intense amount of boredom that only got broken by sheer terror if things went wrong, as they often did. But if you can't take a joke, you shouldn't have joined up, right? The clerk finally finished trying out the duties and pinned the sheet to the notice board. I took one look and cursed the fact that me and the clerk had never really hit it off. My first weekend off in ages and I had been looking forward to staying in bed most of it, but now it was all ruined. I was down for a driving job the next day, taking three lads on a fishing competition, which was going to last two days. There was a note attached to the duty, telling me to see the MT sergeant. I knocked on his office door and walked inside to find out the full score. "All right paddy" he said "you have a right one here, its come down from the old man.. Some of the lads in the Battalion are keen fishers and there is a competition taking place over the weekend at Enniskillen" It was standing orders that only MT personnel could drive army vehicles, so these three were going to have a weekend fishing, and I was going to spend the weekend frigging babysitting them. We were all going to be in plain clothes, they were going to pose as English holiday makers over for the fishing in a mini bus, and I was going to have to look as if I was enjoying myself. Brilliant, frigging brilliant. I went over and checked out the vehicle, making sure it was full of fuel, the tyres were road legal and there was windscreen fluid in the washer bottle. Satisfied that things were ok, I made my way back to my quarters and had an early night. Six o'clock the next morning, I was driving the mini bus out of the MT yard and up towards the arms kote, were all the weapons were kept when not in use. As I was signing out my pistol, Mike Williams, a long time friend came up behind me to sign one out. "Fuck me, what's a remf like you doing, signing out a pistol? I asked him. He just laughed and winked at me. Going outside I saw two lads waiting by the bus, and the day just got worse. Short neat hair, very clean clothes, shiny shoes and clean shaven.....in the 1980's. They just looked like what they were, off duty army personnel. I was also in the army, but I made every effort to look badder than the bad guys. My normal outfit would consist of a black polo neck with a high collar, that way an army haircut didn't seem as bad. I wore a black leather jacket with poppers, not a zip, zips could get stuck and if you were trying to grab a pistol from a shoulder holster, a sticking zip is the last thing you want. I also had on flared jeans with doc martin boots, the flared jeans also meant that if I was sitting in a car I could place the pistol inside my doc martins and it would still be fairly near my hand. I also wore sunglasses, strictly against army rules, but I pretended they were prescription ones, so far nobody had bothered to look through them. I was just looking at them and their pile of fishing gear when I heard a voice behind me. "Welcome to the remf special" Turning around, I saw Mike smiling at me. Now it was all sinking in, Mike was also one of the fishing guys and that's why he had drawn out a pistol. I opened the doors and started to help the guys pack their fishing stuff inside. Talking to Mike, I started to get the full monty on what was happening. We were due to book in at the hotel near the lodge where the competition was being held. There would be heats held on the Saturday and the winners would fish again on Sunday to find an overall winner. The lads climbed in, got comfortable and I set off driving towards the camp entrance. As we approached the barrier, I flashed the headlamps, normally the sentry would just lift up the barrier and we would even have to stop, but this time he was on the phone and waved me to a standstill. As I sat there looking at him, he waved the phone at me, making sure I understood it was for me. I switched off the engine and went inside the sentry box. "Paddy" the voice said "Its me, Joe, fancy giving me that job you are on"? "Say again" I replied. "I have just checked with the sergeant, he said if its ok with you, its ok with him and I can do the driving job cause I like fishing anyway" I slammed the phone down, did the quickest three point turn in army history and sped back down to the MT lines, ignoring all the questions the guys where shouting to me. As I pulled up, Joe was waiting, he had his own fishing gear with him, so this would be a working holiday for him, and I wouldn't be babysitting anyone. He signed over the mini bus from me, waved goodbye and set off. Meanwhile I went home and went to bed. Later that night, I walked down to the naafi, since Joe had taken that duty, I was free all weekend, and just needed to stay clear of anyone who looked like they needed a driver. I could see there were quite a few guys heading for the naafi then remembered that there was a wrestling match on that night. Looking forward to a good night, I headed for the bar and grabbed a pint. The wrestlers were every bit as bad as I expected them to be, but being so bad made it more fun actually, the punches were fake and were so easy to spot coming, and yet they still managed to connect by accident. Halfway through the second bout the duty Major came in, along with the RSM. I knew the major, had worked with him a lot and something told me it was bad. Very bad. The RSM walked towards the ring and told the wrestlers to stop. The Major climbed in the ring, the lights went brighter and he started to speak. "I regret to inform you, an explosion took place in Enniskillen this afternoon. Members of the Battalion were involved. There have been two fatalities, and one serious injury." "You may now carry on" As the Major left the naafi, I went outside and caught him up. "Who was it?" I asked. He looked at a piece of paper in his hand, " Joseph Roberts, Michael Williams, both dead and Kevin Rowland seriously injured. Michael Williams, Mike, the guy I had joined up with and trained with and got steaming drunk with and just talked with a few hours ago. Joseph Roberts, Joe, the guy I had swapped duties with. The guy who died doing my job. The Major looked at me "I am going up to the hospital, if you are sober, you can be my driver if you like? I just nodded and ran off to go and grab a car. We drove along in the dusk towards the hospital and I asked the Major if they knew what had happened? "Seems the mini bus got booby trapped. The IRA figured out the lads were in the army, planted a bomb under the bus and when the ignition was turned on......" My mind flashed back to how the lads looked when I saw them, shiny shoes, neat short hair, clean shaven, tidy clothes. Shit! Shit! Shit! We pulled up outside the hospital, made our way inside, identified ourselves to the armed sentries and made our way towards the operating room area. As we got there, the sentry told us one of the lads was being worked on. At that moment, the doors swung open and a nurse in blood stained clothing walked past carrying a tray. With two legs on it. The Doctors battled all night, they kept him alive. Until five months later, when he decided to finish off what the bombers had started. What was that about not being able to take a joke? A Soldier's Tale Ch. 04 We were part of a four man brick, which is what the Army call a four-man foot patrol, and we were walking the streets of a hard republican area called Ballymurphy. The local nickname was the bullring. It was named this for two reasons, firstly the streets were all built in a circular fashion, so you were for ever going around in circles, and the second, more sinister reason was that just like a normal bullring, you were never sure if you were going to exit in the same state you entered. Our Army base from which we conducted the patrols was in a loyalist area and over looked the bullring. We would normally exit the base from one of the many rear exits and patrol though the friendly loyalist areas before suddenly running across the wide main road that separated the two sides and try and catch then bad guys out. Sometimes we caught them and sometimes they caught us. We were patrolling the loyalist side, just mentally switching on and cursing the fact that the whole civilian world would be settling down to watch live aid and we would just be doing the same thing as we did yesterday, and the day before, and the day before. We were spread out, two men on each side of the street, the guys at the rear taking it in turns to walk backwards, sometimes it felt like you had spent months walking backwards, but today I was lucky, I was front man along with Billy, and my mind was already planning things. As we came level with a shop, a little girl aged about seven or eight ran out and bumped right into Billy, dropping her bag of sweets. As Billy bent down to help her pick them up, the guys at the rear started jeering him "wow, going for the young ones now Billy?" I waited to see if Billy would respond, but he pretended not to hear and carried on talking to the little girl before moving onwards. We came to the end of the safe area and got ready, crouching down behind gates and garden walls.. We watched the traffic, looking for any gaps, because we weren't going to be doing any green cross codes. "Go for it" Billy shouted and we all ran like hell across the road, some cars beeped their horns, some swerved to avoid us, but we were all across the road and in the hard area, the traffic was the least of our problems now, for the next three hours it would be petrol bombs, street riots and snipers we would have to think about. The traffic could wait, well until it was time to cross back over again anyway. We moved deeper into the bullring. It was pretty quiet at the moment, maybe Live Aid was keeping them all inside, all the better for us if it was. "Time for a VCP" said Billy, meaning it was time for us to conduct a quick vehicle check point on any local traffic, stopping cars, finding out the identity of the driver, any passengers and where they were going. It was all good information that could help us plot the habits of the locals. As the brick commander, Billy had the radio, which meant I would flag down the cars, the other two would cover me while I checked the identity, and Billy would radio in to the base camp with the registration plate. It was my job to try and spot any dodgy looking cars or occupants and flag them down. Well, that was my job with any other brick commander. Not with Billy. Billy was special. I waved the first couple of cars though, they weren't suitable, but the third car certainly was. I stepped out into the road, making sure the driver saw me and waved him down to the side. Billy stepped forward to read the number plate before sending it to Alpha, the base camp. "Th Th Three Th Three Charlie to Alpha, car check, reg number Tw Tw Two Tw tw two seven, T T Tango whisky mike Yep, billy had the worst stutter I had ever heard, and we all picked out cars that had number plates he would struggle over. Silly bugger never did realise it either. Still, if you cant take a joke, you shouldn't have signed up. After five minutes, it was time to move on, the word would soon get around that we were conducting check points and either the kids would come out to hurl abuse and stones, or the gunmen might decide to make things a little bit hot for us. "Want to make this the last one?" I shouted across to Billy as a car came closer. There wasn't any answer, and so I shouted again, keeping an eye on the car that was almost upon us. Still no answer. I looked across and saw Billy slowly fall to his knees. I hadn't heard a shot, not distinctive crack of the bullet passing close by, nothing at all. Running across to Billy whilst shouting to the other two guys to cover me, I grabbed my by the collar of his combat jacket and dragged him behind a garden wall. It would give us cover for a little while, until I sorted things out. I quickly looked him over, looking for gun shots wounds, signs of bleeding but found nothing, and then when I realised he was choking, his face was red, he was scrabbling at his throat and his eyes had started bulging. I quickly got behind him and started to hammer on his back, but his flak jacket, designed to save his life from shrapnel was now absorbing all my blows. I tried to undo his jacket so I could squeeze him, anything to try and dislodge the blockage, but again, all the bulky equipment that we carried was making it more and more likely he was going to die in my arms. I remember thinking that a choking person could only survive three minutes without oxygen before becoming brain dead, and with Billy coming from Newcastle, it would probably be less. I called Alpha up on the radio, informing them of our location, the situation and the fact we needed a trained medic. Alpha informed us they would be on scene as soon as possible, but couldn't give us a time. By now, Billy only had a minute left, maybe less. I shouted across to one of the other lads and he ran across the road to join me. Cars were slowing down now, drivers with thick local accents were shouting that they hoped Billy would die. As the lad joined me, I told him to grab Billy's hands and hold on tight. I pulled out my bayonet and grabbed a ball point pen, all standard issue kit, and quickly sharpened a point on the pen. Finding the Adams apple on Billy's throat was easy, then I felt the smaller bump just below it. The gap in the middle was what I was aiming for. I sliced in an up and downwards motion trying to avoid the blood vessels; I didn't want even more problems. Once I had cut into him, his breathing eased, the oxygen was getting into his lungs below whatever was causing the obstruction. I slid the ball point pen in to keep the airway open and told the guy with me to watch for the ambulance and medic. Four minutes later the medic arrived on the scene, Billy still couldn't talk but his breathing was a lot better even though the object was still there. The medic pulled out some forceps and probed deep in Bill's throat before pulling them out with a small red circular object gripped by them. My mind flashed back to the little girl and I burst out laughing. "Fuck me Billy, only you could come to Belfast and nearly get killed by a fucking gobstopper." A Soldier's Tale Ch. 05 Some people say having sex is intimate, well that's bollocks. How many sex partners have you had? 10? 15? 20? Maybe you are some sort of sexual athlete and you have had score of partners? You want intimate? Try killing a guy. Let's face it, that's as intimate as it ever gets because no one else is ever going to kill him again are they? And if you want that closeness multiplied till it's as deep as it can get, just don't kill a guy, but do it face to face, do it with a knife. That wasn't going to be my chosen method, it's far too messy and can be too chancy and I am not in the business of giving chances to anyone, but sometimes you just have to adopt to survive. It was dark and it was pissing down, but there again it was Londonderry so that wasn't anything new. We used to reckon it rained for nine months of the years, and for the other three months, the water dripped from the trees, but whatever the reason it always seemed wet. And the dark? Well, the bad guys only do their business in the dark, so if you aim to catch them, its going to be at night time, stands to reason. One of the big money earners for the IRA was running illegal taxi services all over Belfast and Londonderry, no tax, no insurance and stolen petrol made for pretty low overheads and massive profits. They quite often hijacked petrol tankers and would quite openly park them up outside their houses before driving off to refill the fleet of taxis. We had been keeping an eye on a stolen petrol tanker and we were just waiting for the two thieves to come back. Eight of us had staked the tanker out and we were hidden in various bushes and dips in the waste ground, shivering in the wet and the dark. The tanker was parked up on a large patch of waste ground facing the main road and we figured that a small path near the rear of the tanker that led to a housing estate was the most likely route for the guys to come back. It was around three a.m. and the false dawn was just starting when a black taxi came belting along the road. Before we had time to react, it had screeched to a halt beside the tanker and two guys had climbed out. Sodding typical, half of us were facing the wrong bloody way and far too spread out to pass the word along. We had to act before they climbed into the cab; there would be no way of stopping the tanker once it was on the move. I started to rise up and my partner Pete started to rise up along side me. Unfortunately, at that moment the taxi driver started to swing his taxi around, and the headlights caught me and Pete full on lighting us up as plain as day, and leaving us feeling horribly exposed. The driver couldn't miss us and he didn't. Pressing on his horn, the noise split the night, that and his headlamps really caused things to go haywire. The tanker driver and his mate both split, running into the darkness where we couldn't see them because of the headlamps shining in our eyes. Pete took a quick snap shot at the taxi and a lucky shot took one headlamp out. That was enough for the taxi driver and he quickly pulled a u-turn and sped away. That left the rest of us trying to hunt down the two guys who had done the runner, but as we didn't know if they were armed and didn't fancy switching on torches that could be used as aiming points, we were reduced to peering around in the dark. We were left with no option but to carry out just a brief search before deciding if we should go stay there till daybreak. We decided to pull out, but it went against the grain to leave the tanker there, so we thought we would screw things up for them. We decided to cut the brake pipes leaving the brake fluid to empty out and freeze the brakes up. I pulled out my bayonet, handed Pete my weapon and as the others started to move away I dropped to my knees and then my belly and crawled under the tanker. I had just crawled into the pitch darkness when a hand grabbed my wrist and a fist hammered against my face. Shit, one of the guys was under the tanker! I tried lashing out with my boot, but couldn't get enough force going and again I got a fist in the face. He grabbed for my throat, anything to stop me shouting out for help. I managed to break my hand free and stabbed forward with my bayonet. The bayonet sank deep into him. I felt the blood spurt over my hand, drenching it; a foul smell came up from his ruptured belly as I ripped the knife sideways, cutting like mad and his guts slid out. I pulled the bayonet out, lashing and kicking out at him, even as I felt his dying breath on my face. "Hurry up for christs sake" whispered Pete. "Are you having a wank or something under there?" I rolled out from under the tanker, almost loosing my footing as I slipped on the guys intestines. "Sometimes Pete, your frigging humour really really stinks"