Another British Soldier has been…….

By Ken Lake Ex Royal Marine

A Pawn for the Queen

Ken Lake served 4 tours in Northern Ireland when the 'troubles' were at there peak. He professes to having matured on the streets of Belfast and learned responsibility and something about human nature.Having become a fitness instructor he turned to writing and found that the experiences he learned in Belfast nurtured a desire to express his frustrations at pointless war and conflict. His first book 'a pawn for the queen' was nominated by the national library of Malta for the international Impac Dublin literary award. These pages are excerpts from his phase one autobiography 'the trains, boats and bullets of a fitness instructor'. He has also just finished another book called 'the greatest sense,' which is a fiction work that also features a story line that is hewn from the troubles. A pawn for the queen can be ordered from www.concept2malta.com  or contact Britain's small wars. Please note that this web site receives no profit from the sale of this book.

A bitter north wind swept through the warren of narrow streets tossing foliage and other sundry scraps swirling into the air. The drainpipes and guttering attached to the red-bricked terraced tenements moaned and groaned as if in defiance to the wind. The wind played havoc with the gapping apertures in the derelict buildings that infested the area around the exposed junctions. Chips of broken roof slate and brick fragments crumbled to the ground liberally dusting the pavement before being blown away.

  Angry April skies hosting black swollen clouds threatened to burst before the morning was through. Other shaggy wisps of cloud blended with coal smoke twirled across the grey canvas. A dull, grey and cold day and the supreme artist certainly had his work cut out to brighten this dismal scene and in this particular place.

 The mid-morning streets were devoid of people, which was keenly noted because lack of life in this part of town wouldn’t be attributed to the miserable ambience or because the morning bingo followed by coffee offered alternative interest, some of these inhabitants had other dramatic items on their agenda.

Belfast, Northern Ireland, April 1973 and Tony Orlando and Dawn with ‘Tie a Yellow Ribbon’ was the current best selling record. Other unpleasant records were also being created and by the end of the year, that old misery, the Grim Reaper, would cackle contentedly as he pored over the encouraging statistics. Over 400 innocent civilians killed, nearly 300 British soldiers, RUC and part-time local soldiers murdered, along with 200 terrorists. A two-year orgy of violence beginning in 1971 and included the ‘bloody Sunday’ chapter had escalated the ‘troubles’ to new levels of fear and terror.

The ‘troubles’ had resurfaced yet again in 1969 into the haunting and beautiful green land where the word peace seemed a luxury word. Pictures, posters, paramilitaries and politicians pouting propaganda contributed in drawing new recruits and fresh blood into the soup of human suffering. Cocktails of emotions and angry minds battered reason and goodwill to a standstill, the only things moving up or forward were fast moving lumps of lead and exploding cars. TV and tabloids delivered pictures that told a thousand stories, riots, lifeless bodies and bloodstained carnage were the key ingredients fusing into the despair and sadness.
This was the venue of my finishing school, a place that might have been crafted as an education, an education that I had failed elsewhere.

Two gunmen in their middle 20s waited. They might have stood transfixed behind the net curtain furtively scanning the area in front of the small front window. The window dominated the small living room in a nondescript terraced council house in a street that had witnessed better and brighter days. The gunmen could have been scanning with nervous eyes and agitated fingers pulling cigarettes from tight, dry mouths. Adam’s apples might have bobbled excitedly with jets of smoke blasting out of thin lips. Elbows could have been crooked continuously while worried eyes glanced at watches as their insides squeezed into painful knots.
A gasp followed by a whispered profanity as the target came into sight and activated a surge in heart rate with the adrenaline spilling into the blood stream. A time for heroes, and a time to further the cause, the fight to free Ireland but now a time to move and kill an invader.

Away from the window, automatic drills would have taken over as the 6-man Royal Marine patrol came into view. The Marine patrol, 3-men in a staggered formation each side of the road moved past their hidey-hole moving briskly but carefully along the street looking alert and holding their 7.62mm rifles with purpose. They wore flak jackets, green denim trousers, black boots and their distinctive Green Berets; noticeable would have been the eyes darting everywhere as they worked their way up the street.
 The gunmen, armed with a .303 rifle and the other backing up with a Beretta pistol, waited until the patrol had well passed before slinking out of the house to cross the narrow street. Out of sight of the British patrol, nervous but committed, they waited for the lookout, covertly occupying an upstairs window 6 houses further along, to signal the plan into action. A quick flash of a fist and the gunmen moved off.

 Further up the street, the Royal Marine patrol had reached a vulnerable stage as they prepared to cross a major junction in the estate where attack from 4 sides was a possibility, especially as the junction wasn’t symmetrical. The two front men came to their respective corners, knelt and looked through their rifle sights. The middlemen approached the front men.

“Go,” ordered the section commander. The section commander with his middle partner opposite him immediately sprinted across the void of the junction and quickly adopted a defensive position covering their arcs in the street opposite.

The section commander scanned the area expertly and with a barely discernable signal activated the next movement.
 The last men, or ‘tailend Charlies’, closed in on the beginning of the junction while the front men provided cover.

Junctions in this area were a nightmare and many nightmares no doubt were instigated by them and the threat they posed. Green people living in Green areas would fire from the junctions along the road into the Orange area. Other days or times, the Orange people at the other end of the road would fire their bullets at the Green people passing at the junctions. Subsequently junctions at both ends understandably became an unfavorable place to inhabit. Not many junction dwellers enjoyed fast-moving lumps of lead plowing into their outside brickwork and it wasn’t pleasant sticking your head out of the window for a gossip with a neighbor during the middle of a gun battle. These junction tenements became more unpopular than the plague and unsurprisingly locals quickly vacated them. This opened up realms of further opportunities for the Zapman, to ply his trade with bombs and booby traps on passing Brit patrols in the hulking empty houses. To prevent unnecessary danger, the derelicts were bricked up to stop illegal entry but not enough to prevent a determined player.

No wonder major junctions became unpopular; it was like entering a cemetery in Transylvania at night in a thunderstorm as you approached one. Fear of being exposed from so many sides, fear of passing a potential bomb or booby trap, or fear of getting lead poisoning from an M16 automatic rifle. Those damned derelicts should have been pulled down and the junctions rounded into bloody corners!

Patrols at junctions were vulnerable to the two most common methods of attack; one was from a sniper. The sniper would wait for the first men to cross and swiftly hoist the rifle to his shoulder. The next pair would cross and the sniper could draw his first bead and wait for the last pair to cross. Taking the first trigger pressure, exhaling gently before squeezing the trigger to release a projectile that would travel at 1,760 feet per second and easily pass through human flesh and bone. The other popular form of urban attack in built-up streets would be the ‘cowboy’ attack where a lookout(s) would signal the right moment and a gunman would stick his machinegun around a corner and blaze away and hope for a hit without even having to expose his own body.

 That particular grey and cold morning in 1973, the two gunmen used more daring tactics that also included some basic geometry; this meant shooting the last man of the Royal Marine patrol when the other members were angled out of sight. That last man crossing the junction was me.

The commander of my section signaled the last piece of the movement. With my ‘oppo,’ we raced across the junction. Satisfied, the section commander ordered the patrol to move on. Something made him hesitate, call it instinct, be fanciful and insert other unused senses but out of the corner of his left eye, he caught the blurred movement of a figure, a figure that his trained eye found odd. ‘Wrong, not a figure, ‘bloody hell, it was a gunman,’ a gunman bringing a rifle into his shoulder to point it at my exposed back. Something you are continually trained for but never really expect to see. There were two ways for the section commander to react; freeze and let the moment pass and create another news bulletin with the announcer stating, “Another British soldier has been……”
 Speedy natural reactions followed, and in one smooth movement the section commander shouldered his own rifle to engage the gunman and simultaneously screamed at me.

 “Take cover, Ken.”

I was 18, and in the sights of a killer who was prepared to make me another statistic in a sour campaign that the world would soon forget. The sacrifices of the fallen and damaged would eventually become meaningless. My life was about to change forever, one way or the other in the next second.

Already tensed to a high level, and as the first syllable of the first word of warning was shouted, I reacted instantaneously and dropped onto a knee to make a smaller target. In a fraction of a second, I observed the aggressive movement of the section commander and swiveled to the direction he was looking and automatically tightened my finger around the trigger finger. I may well have analyzed in my hyped-up, super enhanced energy level that this particular moment was a long, long away from good old comfortable Bracknell town buried in good old safe Berkshire and that there just may have been easier ways of making a living. Maybe if I had of studied………

Tactically, the British Army was unprepared and sadly inadequate in dealing with urban guerrilla warfare at the start of the ‘troubles’, many mistakes were made. Any terror group usually has surprise in their corner, and having home advantage was distinctly tipping the balance. A new itinerary of terror was orchestrated in the streets of Ulster with devastating effect. British soldiers were being cut down with apparent ease after the first causality, Robert Curtis, shot dead by a sniper in the New Lodge estate in February 1971.  The training for riot control was antiquated; the square box method may have had its successes in previous campaigns but not in Northern Ireland. It was a case of trial and error at first, learning by the mistakes and these mistakes, unfortunately for the victim, usually required the service of oblong wooden boxes.

The car bomb was said to be initiated in the province by the then Belfast Brigade commander; Seamus Twomey. The car bomb became a devastating terror tactic and also killed many innocent civilians. Other terror tactics evolved, if it snowed, putting razor blades in snowballs and hurling them at squaddies on the streets sure put a new slant on the time honoured fun. Nails imbedded in lumps of gelignite, pipe bombs, blast bombs, the contribution made by Mr. Molotov,  the old favourite, the petrol bomb, all made regular appearances. Snipers would shoot through several sets of windows in adjacent houses just as a ‘Brit’ passed the furthest away window bearing a small marking cross made of tape at head height. The sniper would get a signal as the soldier passed the marker and fire. The soldier with half his head missing hadn’t yet hit the floor as the sniper made his escape.

 A gunman would loose off a magazine at a patrol, a back up would snatch the weapon and squirrel the weapon away. The gunman would enter an ‘open house’ pass through to the backyard out into an alleyway and into the opposite back yard through another house and keep on going until he was away. Sometimes a gunman would make his escape and enter an open ‘friend's’ house to tuck in to a ‘prepared’ half eaten meal. Another inventive idea that paid dividends on more than one occasion was to get a young good-looking girl to undress in a well-lit window in a notorious Republican area with the knowledge she would attract the attention of the Brit patrol as they patrolled through the shadows. Word spread back at the camp. Another night, another patrol another performance by the good-looking girl undressing by the window, by the time the girl had reached to unclip her bra. Bang! A sniper would cut short the performance and “another British soldier was shot dead in Belfast.” The newsreader went on. That phrase was repeated far too often during those fearful days and it seemed a daily occurrence that each news bulletin usually began with it.
 Hiding explosives in cycle frames, rubbish bins, prams, drain pipes, under pavements and when the Brit patrol passed by, fingers would depress the remote control button. Bang! “Another British soldier was killed by an explosive device today in Londonderry,” went on the dry voice.

 Bombs scare in a ratio of 20 scares to every real bomb could make cold, bored soldiers complacent, and complacency was not recommended as a patrol technique in those days. ‘Come ons’ were popular, luring British soldiers into the favoured ground of the terrorists was a popular tactic. Throw a petrol bomb in an empty street and a patrol might follow up and head straight into an ambush. Riots became a twin problem; never mind the bricks clonking against the plastic shields or the bottles splintering against the hard hat, listen to the whistle that would shrill loudly, watch the crowd dispel instantly, look out for the sniper's rifle barrel as he lined up his next victim.  Get a mob to suddenly close in on a patrol as they entered a street, the mob would bang dustbin lids and scream loud enough to burst the ear drums and this confusion, broke command and disorientated the patrol until the mob dispersed quickly and the gunman pulled his trigger.

String a length of near invisible wire across a street at a specific height, create an incident and wait for the Land Rover with Brit soldiers standing at the back on guard and see if the wire could cut a head off.

These tactics weren’t described in British Army training manuals, soldiers on the streets had to learn the hard way and the hard way involved closing your eyes for a very long time with arms crossed on your chest. The IRA were in a class of their own and they became masters of urban guerrilla warfare. If they had of played in a competition they would have won the world cup easily. In the middle 70’s the IRA were festooned with offers to teach their craft to other organisations in return for cash or arms.

The British nation became exasperated as yet another young British soldier was cut down on a regular basis. The politicians moved in slow motion. Peaceful solutions couldn’t be found so they resorted to plan B, find ways of combating a first class terrorist organisation. Pictures and reports of 18 year old British soldiers dying hideous deaths lost precious votes, and something had to be done.

 The internal security training camp was located at Lydd in Kent where simulated Northern Irish streets and other training devices were constructed. We would patrol down these streets in tactical section movements and mechanical figures would appear in the windows, sometimes they were armed and sometimes they were just innocent housewives. Armed with 2.2 rifles, we had split seconds to shoot or be ‘killed.’

The window would open, a dummy could be seen, and it would rotate toward you accompanied by a crazy whirling noise holding something in its hands. Decision time, quickly recall a conversation from another Marine that patrolled this street an hour before.
“Yeah, this dummy twirls round making this silly noise holding a Thompson submachine gun. I gave it a double tap, no sweat.”
 Action! Bang, bang, the .22 bullets travelled toward the target.

“You idiot,” an instructor dressed in the guise of an RUC policeman yelled. “You’ve just shot an innocent housewife and worse still she had a young baby in her arms.”  He’d mark his paper with a shake of his head and a coy smile playing on his lips. They’d changed the routine to catch us out.

Other times, fellow Marines or other regiments at the camp would act as rioters and chuck bricks and bottles at us, but some of them took the task too seriously and we had the cuts and bruises to prove it. Naturally we promised to get them back when it was their time to play the part of peacekeepers and we did so with interest.

Other drills and situations were practiced. Firing at moving targets, demonstrations on guerrilla weapons, tactical movement, radio procedure, first aid, riot control, how to follow up, how to fire an FRG, arresting procedures, body searches, car searches, and yellow cards, it went on.

We’d put the shields out as per the latest instructions and the crowd would hurl bricks and stones at us. Then to spice up matters petrol bombs would be chucked.

“That one was close,” laughed the guy next to me before I noticed his boots and denims on fire. We were being trained the hard way.

  We were learning the new ways to try and combat urban guerrilla warfare and overall, working the streets in Lydd certainly brought home the danger and the realisations of the conflict in Northern Ireland and at the end of the time and thinking of the 4-months tour ahead of us, sombre reality sunk in. We would still become targets, one time or another it would become inevitable that troops in hot areas would be called upon to deal with life-threatening situations and maybe situations not yet thought about. We thought it very likely one of us would make those ‘another British soldier has been…’ headlines again.

  Meanwhile, just past the junction, the compromised gunmen opted to flee back down the street rather than face a likely fatal shoot out. I took cover and brought my rifle to bear though I couldn’t see the target but immediately adopted the automatic drills for following up after an attack.

“Move,” the section commander ordered. At the front I raced along the street with the section commander, ready to engage the gunmen but after sprinting back across the junction nothing was seen or heard until a slamming of a door further down the street spurred us on. Using a sublime sense of skill and judgment, we nodded at each other and kicked open the door thought to be the one that had slammed and rushed inside the living room. Two men were in the process of escaping through the back of the house and out through the backyard.

“Stop,” we both shouted out. The men carried on for a few steps until I clicked my safety catch and shouted, “Or I’ll open fire.” Both men instantly halted. They turned and put their hands above their heads to show they weren’t armed. A frightened and elderly couple, also in the room, stood wringing their hands with worry, evident that they were innocent victims of a house jack. Holding my rifle tightly and finger ready to squeeze the trigger, I approached the men and searched them but somehow they’d hidden, or lost their weapons. I ordered the men to keep their hands up and lean against the wall to lessen the chance of escape. The section commander took me to one side and said. “Take charge of the house search, Ken, whilst I call for immediate back up. Then I’ll question these two,” he whispered and then added. “Where are those damned weapons? Without them…” His voice trailed off.
The section commander spoke on the radio while the rest of the section awaited orders, I put three men on guard outside the house just in case a hostile mob ‘gate crashed’ the house in an attempt to smuggle away the gunmen and their weapons. Another Marine checked out the backyard but nothing was found. The elderly lady tenant accompanied me up the stairs to the bedrooms where I started working in the usual search procedure, cautiously checking through the obvious hiding places just in case other backup gunmen lurked. Naturally, the gunmen wouldn’t have had time to hide the weapons anywhere else but the sitting room where they were apprehended, so I mounted a cursory search before beginning a more thorough search of the living room. I also though of other implications especially if the gunmen had backup and because we had lost sight of the gunmen for a few seconds there was every chance that the weapons had been ghosted away out of the back of the house by the waiting accomplices.

I shook my head at the section commander in a negative gesture as I re-entered the living room. Moving quickly to keep the momentum going, I pushed back the settee and other furniture but found nothing. A cupboard under the stairs caught my eye, on opening it, I peered into the darkness and flicked a switch to turn on the light, but it didn’t work. Shining my torch onto some shelves, excitement gripped me as I saw a tube that looked like a rifle barrel. Hardly containing my satisfaction, I leaned closer for a better inspection, but disappointment enveloped me as I realised that the rifle barrel was only a loose metal chair leg.

 Supposing we found nothing, it was easy to envisage those same weapons being used to shoot down a fellow soldier. With no tangible evidence these so-called gunmen would soon be free and could try again. Frustration and an anti climax set in after the sharp dosage of danger. Where had the weapons got to, had we failed? I shone my torch to the back of the cupboard and there they were, a .303 Lee Enfield rifle with a sniper's scope and a Beretta pistol lying together where they had been hastily shoved. I exited the cupboard and bumped my eyes into the section commander’s vision that dissected mine like a laser beam.

“Anything?” He anxiously snapped with an expression that mirrored my own.

I couldn’t help glancing over to the two men guarded by another Marine as they sat on the settee; they looked at me with large petrified eyes holding expressions that understood that I’d found the weapons. Something made me look at their hands, their fingers, fingers that would have pulled the trigger and created another funeral, maybe mine.

“Well?” The section commander asked again.

“Not much!” I answered flatly. “Only a rifle and a pistol,” I said with a straight face. His expression changed to relief. This wasn’t showoff time; this was our little contribution in a struggle that might have saved a mother, a father, a wife, a girlfriend, a brother, or perhaps my own relatives a bucket load of tears and grief.

   Word spread and another section of back up Marines burst into the house just as a large and disorderly crowd, as expected, congregated outside the house.

 I returned to the cupboard and took the weapons out carefully to avoid fingerprints as the section commander’s body threatened to flatten me against the woodwork in his eagerness to see the cache.

 “Yes, well done Ken.”

“No, well done you.” I replied and looked into the eyes of the guy who’d’ once given me the machine gun in training and ordered me to lie in a freezing puddle, the same guy that had now saved my life.

“Thank you,” I said and meant it and gripped his hand.

A moment passed before he spoke. “You’re fully involved with this. Now, I want you to arrest those gunmen and finish this job,” he said. I arrested the nervous gunmen and when the back up vehicle had furrowed a path through the baying crowd, I accompanied the gunmen down to North Queen Street police station. During the journey and the waiting period at the station, neither man looked nor spoke to me throughout, both seemed resigned to their fate.

Later, I spoke to the section commander and he said with an ironic smile “By a whisker, that small,” he pinched his fingers together until they practically closed. Our friendship and respect was sealed for eternity.

 Later, during my summer leave, I was recalled to Belfast to act as a witness in the attempted murder trial alongside the section commander. Our testimonies weren’t required, however, because both men pleaded guilty and they received a paltry two years imprisonment. An open and shut case in desperate times with desperate action, but the killing went on.

 Looking back at that action, I take some pride at the magnificent part the entire section had played in keeping our casualty rate to a minimum and keeping two more gunmen off of the streets. We’d handled the problem professionally without bloodshed and without damaging the old couple’s house apart from the door that was patched up within an hour.

Another cold, grey day had come to a close and the wind bustled though the streets and punished the derelicts at the junction. The junction watched the sun go down on another bitter day. The news reader spoke crisply. “Another British soldier has been……..”

© 2004 Ken Lake