There were three vehicles that were to take A Company to Newry that day: two four-ton lorries and a Land Rover. Nowadays soldiers in war zones are—quite rightly—given vehicles that are specially designed to withstand the blast of an IED, but there was nothing unusually robust about these vehicles. And as my mates and I got ready to leave, we put on our flak vests, but we also donned our red berets rather than wearing helmets. Partly this was out of defiance, but there was another reason for us not to want to look too heavily armed. In the eyes of large parts of the population of Northern Ireland, we were an occupying force. We were all very mindful of the battle for hearts and minds, and we knew that if we appeared too aggressive it would make that battle harder to win.
‘Hurry up and wait!’ is an expression you hear a lot in the British Army, and there was a lot of hanging around that day, waiting to get the order to leave Ballykinler and set off for Newry. We were going to be stationed in the town for some time, so we had all our bags packed and ready to go, and I remember killing time in the little ‘choggy shop’, or café, at base, playing with the lads on the Space Invaders machine—the latest thing at the time. It was very hot and everyone was impatient to get off, as well as a little bit anxious about the dangers of heading down along the border. Finally we were ready to leave: Woody, Jonesy, Dylan and I climbed up into one of the four-tonners together, along with Tom Caughy, Private Gary Barnes, whom everyone called Barney, and one other guy from a different platoon. Corporal Johnny Giles was driving.
There were only eight of us in our vehicle, six in the back, two in the front, because we were also carrying the company ammunition—boxes of rifle rounds, mortar rounds, grenades, link for the machine-gun. It was mid-afternoon when we set off. I can’t remember who was sitting next to me, but I know that I was at the back of the lorry, on the tailgate, my rifle at the ready so I could keep a lookout for anything suspicious. Tom changed seats with Barney, a close friend of his who’d been with him in the junior company. Barney was a real character. Good fun. Solid. He was struggling with the exhaust fumes that were pumping into the lorry, so Tom offered to swap places. Our three-vehicle convoy trundled out of Ballykinler, and although we were just shooting the breeze in our usual way, we were all finding it unbearably hot and just wanted to get to our destination.
That is the last memory I have of the day that was to change so many people’s lives for ever. And it is the last memory six of my friends and colleagues in that truck would ever have.
I can only relate the horrors of the next few hours by piecing together what other people have told me.
It was a little before five o’clock when our platoon of approximately twenty-six soldiers approached Warrenpoint. Our convoy had reached the dual carriageway that ran alongside Narrow Water, and was passing a lay-by where a lorry loaded with bales of hay was parked up. The lorry contained an 800-pound fertilizer bomb, packed in beer kegs and attached to a radio-controlled detonator. As far as I know, the IRA had set up this roadside bomb in the hope of hitting one of the Marine patrols that used this road regularly. When they saw a company of red berets coming—the devils of Bloody Sunday—they must have been doing somersaults of joy at their luck.
The lorry in which my mates and I were travelling was the last one in the convoy. The first two passed the roadside bomb safely. It was as our vehicle drew alongside it that two Provos, safely hidden on the other side of the estuary, detonated the device.
The noise must have been enormous, but I have no memory of it, or of any of the events that followed.
Our truck was hurled onto its side and into the central reservation, its chassis ripped apart, a wrecked, mangled heap of burning metal. The ammunition that we were carrying started to ignite, causing hundreds of tiny explosions. Bodies were flung from the wreckage and into the road. Johnny Giles lay slumped across the steering wheel as if sleeping. He would never wake up. The air filled with the sound of the screams of the wounded and the smell of burning flesh, which most likely included mine. My body was on fire in the minutes after the explosion. I lay there unconscious in the searing heat while the skin on my face and arms charred and my legs burned to the bone.
As soon as the bomb exploded, the Land Rover in front crossed the central reservation of the A2 and spun round so that it was facing the way it came. The other lorry found cover under some nearby trees. Confusion was everywhere. The surviving members of A Company heard the sound of our ammo detonating and assumed that a sniper was firing on them. And so they fired back, aiming their rounds across the narrow estuary towards the Republic. In doing so, they killed one innocent civilian and injured another.
Our platoon commander desperately tried to raise HQ on the radio, but for some reason the radio communications were down. Fortunately a Wessex helicopter picked up the platoon commander’s call and relayed what had happened to HQ. The chopper was given the order to pick up a medical team and a quick-reaction force, then immediately return to Warrenpoint. Firefighters were on the scene in minutes to help put out the flames, including those that were eating up my own flesh.
As soon as word of the blast reached Newry, a quick-reaction force comprising two Land Rovers full of Paras was immediately dispatched to the site. In addition Lieutenant Colonel David Blair of the Queen’s Own Highlanders, who happened to be in the air in a small helicopter at the time, diverted to the scene.
In the Army there are standard operating procedures, or SOPs—instructions about what to do under certain circumstances—and these were followed to the letter. On the other side of the road, perhaps 150 metres on from the blast point, there was a granite gate-lodge opposite the entrance to Narrow Water Castle, a well-known beauty spot. As the quick-reaction force, Lieutenant Colonel Blair, and our OC, Major Fursman, congregated at the blast site, they set up an incident control point inside the gate-lodge. It was the sensible thing to do as it was close to where they needed to be and could be easily defended if necessary.
However, the IRA’s scouts had done their work well. They had studied the Army’s SOPs. They knew that the gate-lodge was the most likely place to set up an incident control point, and so they had planted a second device there, hidden in some innocuous-looking milk pails. In terms of loss of life, this bomb would prove to be even more devastating than the first. The bombers, hidden on the other side of the water, detonated the second device just as the gate-lodge was full of soldiers.
The whole building collapsed. Chunks of rock the size of footballs shot through the air and landed almost 100metres away. By this time I had been transferred to a Wessex. The chopper was just feet above the ground when its windows were blasted in as it attempted to casevac me and others to the safety of Musgrave Park Hospital in Belfast.
Nowadays we hear of bombings almost daily, of IEDs in Afghanistan or atrocities in Iraq. Perhaps we don’t stop to think about what it really means. Even I find it hard to imagine what the sight of that massacre at Warrenpoint must have looked like. Hard to imagine the horror and even now, so many years later, hard to recount what I’m told it looked like. A part of me feels reluctant to do so. Narrow Water is a beauty spot, but there was nothing beautiful about it that day. There were two enormous craters where the two bombs had been located. Horrifically wounded men were strewn around the road. But worst of all, the area was littered with human body parts. Gobbets of flesh hung from trees, so far up that even the firemen’s ladders were unable to reach them. Limbs lay in the grass verge and on the road. Entire torsos had been separated from legs. The same went for heads. The living were so appalled by the sight that many of them had to vomit into the bushes. And the blasts were so severe that some of the guys were never found. The epaulettes of his uniform were all that remained of Lieutenant Colonel David Blair; the rest of his body had been utterly destroyed. And when a dive team arrived, one of them made a gruesome discovery in the