I toppled out, trying not to think of all the things that could go wrong, and the world opened up below me. I felt the familiar sensation of leaving my stomach behind, but then, almost immediately, the static line kicked in and my canopy opened. I looked up and checked that all was as it should be. Was the canopy a good, round shape? Were there any holes or tears? Everything appeared to be fine, so I allowed myself to enjoy the trip back down to earth.
When I hit the ground after that first aircraft jump—knees together, elbows in, fall to the side, just like I’d been taught—I knew I’d been bitten by the bug. Despite the unpleasantness of being squashed up in the Hercules, despite the knowledge that things can, and do, go wrong when you’re jumping in a military environment, all I wanted to do was get back up in the air, to experience the adrenalin buzz all over again. I wasn’t alone, as there are very few people who decide, once they’ve done their first jump, that it isn’t for them, especially after all the months of hard work that have gone before.
All in all we did about eight jumps during our parachute training, including a night jump—enough to make us reasonably proficient. After that, we were told, there would be a refresher course every year or so, to keep our skills up. In the event, though, my next parachute drop would take place under very different circumstances.
I was not yet 18 when I received my wings at a Parachute Regiment Wings Parade. The Red Devils, the regimental parachute team, jumped in, and the regimental colonel was in attendance. It was an emotional moment, one I’d worked towards ever since the day I first became a junior soldier. I’d been imbued with the spirit of the regiment—that feeling that I was one of an elite band of soldiers. The best. I had my red beret, whereas everyone else, in the language of the Paras, was just a ‘crap hat’. I was part of the Maroon Machine, no longer a Crow, but a Tom. There was a lot of friendly rivalry between regiments, but it was encouraged and it all served a purpose: to give us confidence in our ability to do our job supremely well. Bullets, I thought, now that I was a member of the Parachute Regiment, would bounce off me.
There are some people who join the Army because they crave the excitement, and it’s true that there was a part of me—the part that as a boy loved war films and getting stuck in with the Army Cadets—that was looking forward to the thrill of belonging to the Parachute Regiment. After all, it’s not a unit you join if you’re after a cushy time. But that wasn’t the only reason. The truth was that I relished the idea of service. Maybe it was because I had grown up seeing my older brother serving in the police force and my sister working as a nurse. Maybe it was just something inside me. But I was attracted to the notion that I would be protecting the country. Caring for people and helping them. I was looking forward to it.
And I had my life all planned out. I had signed up to the Army for nine years and I was going to see that through. Then I’d spend some time travelling the world—maybe I’d go to Africa or somewhere else exotic and exciting. And then, when the time came, I wanted to become a fireman, because, just like being in the Army, it combined excitement and service.
The day I won my wings and donned the red beret, I was young and full of optimism. I was looking forward to a long and successful career with the Paras.
I could never have imagined how differently things would turn out.
Chapter Three Knowledge Dispels Fear
Now that I was a full-blown Para—to be precise, a member of 2nd Battalion, the Parachute Regiment, or 2 Para—I knew that at some point in the not-too-distant future I would be deployed to Northern Ireland. We all did—Woody, Jonesy and me. The Paras had been in the Province on and off ever since British armed forces moved in during the summer of 1969, under the umbrella of Operation Banner, which was to last until 2007, and they were preparing to return for another tour of duty. It was only a matter of time before we joined them.
First, however, we needed to undergo some pre-Northern Ireland training. In addition, the Parachute Regiment had responsibilities in parts of the world other than Northern Ireland. Once of these places was Berlin, and it was there that I was deployed in January 1979.
It’s easy, in the early part of the twenty-first century, to forget the tensions that seeped through Europe during the years of the Cold War. As a young man I was more concerned with soldiering than with international politics, but I took the time to acquaint myself with the history of that scarred city before I arrived.
Berlin had been under military occupation since the end of the Second World War. The victorious Allies had carved the city into Zones of Occupation at the Yalta Conference in 1945. There were British, American and French zones in the west, and in the east, bigger than any of these, the Russian zone. The idea was that Berlin should be governed equally by the four powers, but as the Cold War grew chillier the Russians excluded themselves from that joint administration.
For about fifteen years the citizens of Berlin were able to move fairly freely between the four zones. But as time went on, the inhabitants of the Russian sector grew dissatisfied with the communist regime. Increasingly large numbers of them started to migrate from the eastern part of the city to the western. So it was that in 1961, the year I was born, the Russians started to erect a wall. The Berlin Wall, and its infamous crossing point Checkpoint Charlie, became a symbol of the wider struggle between the rival political ideologies of the West and the East. Along sections of the wall were series of crosses commemorating those citizens shot by the East German border police while trying to escape into West Berlin.
If the wall symbolized communism’s stand against capitalism, the whole of West Berlin was the West’s rejoinder. Entirely surrounded by communist East Germany, it was situated more than 100 miles inside Soviet-occupied territory, a focal point for the Cold War. In 1948 the Soviets had blockaded all the roads and rail links into West Berlin in an attempt to literally starve the city, but the Allies managed to keep it going by means of a continuous airlift of supplies, and a year later the Soviets ended their blockade. Nevertheless, this situation had highlighted just how vulnerable West Berlin was. The threat from behind the Iron Curtain seemed very real indeed, and it was in no way fanciful to imagine that the Russians might make a nuclear strike against the West.
When I was sent to West Berlin, the city was crawling with soldiers. There were three Allied Infantry Brigades, which included the British Berlin Infantry Brigade, made up of three battalions, including 2 Para. Our reason, in principle, for being there was to halt the Russian hordes should the Soviet Union decide to invade Europe from the east. Of course, nobody was under any illusions about what that meant. If they did invade, we would be surrounded and vastly outnumbered. Our commanders clearly knew this too, and that was why the Berlin Infantry Brigade had been given the oldest tanks and other equipment. In truth the presence of so many Allied forces in Berlin was largely symbolic: an expression of the West’s refusal to surrender the city to the Soviets.
I’ll always remember arriving there on 1 January 1979, a fresh-faced Tom with my mates Woody and Jonesy. The temperatures were Arctic and the parade ground at our barracks was a mountain of snow because of the need to keep the paths around it clear. We arrived there carrying all our worldly goods, pleased to have joined the battalion, but a bit nervous too, and I’m sure we looked it. We were standing at the barrack gate when a corporal by the name of Norrie Porter approached us.
‘You lot new?’ he asked.
We nodded.
‘Got any German money?’
Of course, none of us had, so Norrie put his hand in his pocket and pulled out a few banknotes. ‘That’s all I’ve got,’ he said, and handed them round. ‘Go on. Go and settle in and get yourself down to the NAAFI for a coffee and some scoff.’
It was a small act of kindness—new recruits are generally the lowest of the low within a regiment, and given all the worst jobs to do—but it was typical of the group mentality of the Paras and it made us immediately feel as though we belonged.
Berlin was an amazing place to a teenager who’d never been abroad before. We worked hard, we partied hard, and