A couple of times we passed through Checkpoint Charlie and visited East Berlin. We were obliged to do this in units of four, wearing our No. 2 Dress—uniform reserved for those occasions when you had to look supersmart. Back then you could get four East German Ostmarks for one West German Deutschmark, which meant that even we could afford to sit in the nicest restaurants eating the best food. But the atmosphere behind the wall was bleak. Everything seemed very Spartan, quieter, poorer, and more subdued—as if the citizens of East Berlin were afraid to be seen enjoying themselves. But that didn’t stop some of them trying to persuade us to take their money and buy things in the West for them that they could never get their hands on otherwise. One guy asked me to bring him over a saxophone—very difficult to buy in East Germany—which really underlined the difference between our two cultures.
One of my reasons for joining the Army was to see the world. I was certainly doing that, and my first tour in Berlin seemed to justify the choices I’d made. I was enjoying myself, proud to be a Para, and looking forward to the challenges that my career would hold. But, of course, we weren’t there just to go sightseeing. In fact we were worked very hard indeed. My mates and I were deployed all around the British sector of West Berlin, guarding bridges and other points of strategic importance, ready to defend them the best we could if things should kick off. Looking back, it seems rather comical. Nobody would like the odds of a few rookie paratroopers successfully defending an attack from all sides by the massed might of the Soviet Army. Even then, it all seemed like a bit of a joke. Me and my band of newly badged Toms never seriously thought the Russians were going to invade. We were just thrilled to have got through training and excited to have finally joined the battalion.
Once a month our platoon would be on standby, which meant being stationed at the British Army HQ ready to be deployed at two minutes’ notice. On other occasions we would be instructed to perform guard duty at Spandau prison. This famous jail was originally built to hold more than 100 prisoners. But after the Second World War, it played host to only seven—all of them Nazi war criminals sentenced to imprisonment after the Nuremberg Trials. By the time I arrived, six of them had been released, leaving only one: Rudolf Hess, Hitler’s deputy, whom I remember seeing from a distance as he strolled round the exercise yard. The prison no longer exists. After Hess’s death in 1987 it was totally destroyed to stop it becoming a Nazi shrine.
Our six months in Berlin was not solely given over to protecting the West from the supposed threat of a Russian incursion, or guarding Nazi war criminals. We still had to undergo our continuation training, because when a recruit leaves the Para depot his training is not finished: old skills need to be refreshed and new ones learned. So, one day, after we’d been in Berlin for a few weeks, the call went up: ‘Inter-company fifty-mile march!’
I turned to Jonesy. ‘Are they joking?’
They weren’t joking. An inter-company race. None of us had ever done a march that long before—not even during P Company—and this was to be done with personal weapon and belt-order—a solid reminder that, although we’d finished our training, life in the Parachute Regiment was no walk in the park.
There were some moments of real excitement. Gatow Airport, in south-west Berlin, was a major strategic location within the British sector. The RAF troops stationed there needed to know how to defend it should it come under attack. For its training exercises, the Parachute Regiment had to pretend to be invaders. This involved flying over in American Hueys—the iconic American chopper that you see in all the Vietnam movies—since we didn’t have any aircraft big enough for troop transportation on that scale. We wore helmets and gas masks, and sat with our feet on the skids as the choppers swooped in. The RAF boys were all dressed in their NBC (nuclear, biological, and chemical warfare) suits, and we staged a pitched battle on the grounds of the airport—thrilling stuff to me as a novice.
About halfway through our deployment, Prince Charles—who is the regiment’s Colonel-in-Chief—came to visit us. We performed a casualty evacuation exercise for him at one of the British training areas in the Grunewald Forest, and for the purposes of the exercise the officer in charge asked for a volunteer to be the casualty. This would mean being casevaced out in a Huey. I stuck my hand straight up and was given the role.
Five or six of us climbed into the back of an open-topped Land Rover and drove through the training area. I was operating the general-purpose machine-gun, and was scanning the horizon for potential threats. Suddenly there was an enormous bang from a thunderflash—a mock-up IED—and loads of smoke grenades started spewing out thick smoke. Within minutes the Huey was there. The medics moved me onto a stretcher and into the aircraft, and I was airlifted over the Grunewald.
My ears were ringing from the noise of the thunderflash. But otherwise I was entirely unscathed. It was just an exercise, after all. Back at base everyone talked about the novelty of it all. The exercise had been a bit different from our usual regime, and doing it in front of Prince Charles had been a bonus. In retrospect, it all seems so innocent, because real-life casevacs are very far from exciting. And I sometimes wonder what, if I could go back in time and talk to that teenage lad, I would say to him. Would I tell him that before the year was out, he and his mates would be trundling along a road in circumstances eerily similar to those of that exercise? Would I tell him that there would be no royalty on hand to clap, or beers in the mess with the lads at the end of the day? Would I tell him that a thunderflash and a few smoke grenades could never prepare him for what was to come?
Or would I say nothing, and let him enjoy those last few months of blissful ignorance of the brutal realities of war? Those last few months of being unscarred and unbroken. Of being ordinary.
Northern Ireland, where we would be deployed after my six-month tour of Berlin, would involve a kind of soldiering totally different from that for which we had trained. Normal soldiering generally meant being out in the countryside and in the woods; in the Province we’d be in the streets, in built-up areas and among civilians. This meant there were new techniques to be learned: dealing with riot situations and petrol bombs, evading snipers, and coping with an enemy in plain clothes who looked no different from any other man in the street.
We had to acquaint ourselves fully with the British Army’s Rules of Engagement. These are the strict guidelines set in place by the military that determine where, when, how and against whom force may or may not be used. The Rules of Engagement for Northern Ireland were particularly complicated. We were given a wad of cards that stated what we could and could not do in all kinds of situations, which we had to commit to memory. Of course, it wasn’t lost on any of us that the enemy we were up against—the IRA—had no rules of engagement of their own; or that as members of the military, with our uniforms and red berets, we would be prime targets for armed Republicans. But we paid close attention to the Rules of Engagement, because we’d heard stories of people breaching them in the heat of battle and ending up being court-martialled and imprisoned.
We were taught recognition techniques—how to recall and describe the dress and features of someone you’ve only glanced at for a split second, or how to remember the details and registration number of a suspicious car. We honed these techniques over and over again until they became almost instinctive. And we learned how to look out for anything unusual. Why is it quiet in the street today? Why is there nobody about? On the streets of Northern Ireland we would need to be constantly vigilant, and that fact was drummed into us during our tour of Berlin.
On deployment in the Province, everyone within the regiment would have a different role. You might be an anti-tank gunner, or a machine-gun operator, or in signals, or a medic. I was part of the search team. This meant our speciality would be to go into an area and search for anything unusual or, where a suspicious package had been reported, identify whether it was a bomb or an