Braver Men Walk Away Page 9

  To do the actual sweeping I used twenty or so locals equipped with mine-detectors; they would identify and mark a suspect location for me to clear later. The range of munitions recovered was extensive; their general condition was very good, as I discovered for myself.

  The tank was an Italian M40, a sun-bleached relic of war that shimmered amidst the desert sands. It had been hit by an armour-piercing round which had penetrated the hull then ricocheted around the interior, smashing everything it touched. The bodies of the crew had been removed but bone fragments remained in the debris together with at least one badly damaged shell. I didn’t consider it wise to clamber about inside, still less to attempt the removal of the remaining ammunition. The safest solution was to burn the thing out.

  I told my clearance crew to keep well back as I siphoned diesel from the tank and added a couple of gallons from our own petrol reserve. After dousing the interior, I laid a long train, set fire to it, then got back into one of the survey Land Rovers and joined the rest of the crew on a rocky hillock about 400 yards distant.

  We brewed up some tea and watched the smoke rising from the tank. The fire seemed to have taken very rapidly; the pops and bangs issuing from its interior meant that the burn-out was going well. But then came a different bang, much louder than anything before, and a shell suddenly whirred overhead and vanished into the desert behind us.

  It took a few moments to get over the shock and work out what had happened. The explanation, though incredible, was also simple: the main 47mm gun on the tank must have been loaded at the moment she was hit. The shell, which had lain in the chamber ever since, had cooked-off in the heat of my fire. Fourteen years after loading and aiming, the objective of a long-dead gunner had finally been accomplished.

  On the eve of my departure from Benghazi Oasis offered me a permanent job. The attractions were many, not least the money: I had already been paid the enormous sum of £90 a week for my three-week stint with the survey team. Yet the uncertainties seemed to outweigh the advantages: as Oasis pointed out, if oil was found within the specified exploration period, then I had a secure and highly paid future before me. But if oil wasn’t found, then Oasis, which existed only as a Libyan exploration arm, would close down; those who worked for it would have no claim on the parent company.

  I had made a lot of friends in the seismic crews so I asked them what, in their professional opinion, were the chances of finding oil. The answer was honest but discouraging: nothing had so far come to light that looked even interesting, never mind promising. Working for Oasis might be fun and well-paid, but it was still a gamble.

  I turned down the job offer and said farewell to my friends. A few months later the first oil gushed out of the Libyan desert. It presaged the birth of an industry which would, in a remarkably short time, bring in SI,000 million per year and transform an impoverished country into the richest in Africa.

  4

  The Growth of Terrorism

  When I arrived back in Britain in 1958 it seemed a very different place to the increasingly violent landscape of Libya and Egypt. It was not as well-ordered as in times past – but it was still a land where standards prevailed. Mugging was what people did when they needed to cram themselves with facts. Terrorism was something to do with foreigners in Palestine, Kenya, Cyprus or Aden. A bomber was either something on a fly-past through the sky above your head, or a cartoon figure dressed in black, not someone likely to crawl out from under your car. You could tell from what you read in the papers and heard in the pubs that the threshold of belief was universally higher; in England people did not go around making, placing, or throwing bombs.

  Things were soon to change; a change that occurred almost imperceptibly but one which would bring about an irrevocable shift in the life and outlook of society.

  I was working at Headquarters Ammunition Organization RAOC, Feltham, Middlesex, a place with army-wide responsibility for all technical matters relating to the storage, inspection, maintenance, disposal and proof of ammunition. It gathered in data and produced information and very soon I realized that I’d become a paper warrior.

  There were, however, compensations; after a short spell in tented accommodation in Benghazi, Daphne and I were now in a comfortable little semi-detached not far from HQ. Our daughter Vivienne had been born in October 1953, but I’d seen far less of her than I would have wished. Even when we were together in Libya, Vivienne hadn’t coped too well with the heat and so she and Daphne had continued to spend time away with Daphne’s parents. In February 1960 our second child, Timothy, arrived and our family was complete.

  I had been promoted to Staff Sergeant while in Libya. The rank lacked the resonance of the title given me by civilian staff at Benghazi: Hadji Gamfous, the first word meaning one who has been to Mecca, the second meaning hedgehog, thus ‘Hedgehog who has been on a pilgrimage’. Thanks to my spiky crew-cut, the hedgehog aspect was easily explained; the pilgrim element less so. I had never been to Mecca and my forays into the desert had always had more to do with war than worship.

  As time went by it became obvious that Feltham was not going to suit the Pilgrim Hedgehog; though the work was interesting, it was theory rather than practice. Still, the company was good: the avuncular Sam Birt, last seen in Bad Oeynhausen, was now at Feltham, as were three NCOs of kindred spirit: Ken Howorth, Roger Goad, and John Sheldrake. We worked out of the same office and shared the same interest in sport: Ken, a blunt but engaging Yorkshireman who had been in Tripoli while I was in Benghazi, was an excellent cricketer, Roger was a keen golfer and John a crack shot in small arms competitions. The camaraderie was strong and enduring.

  Between 1961 and 1964 I returned to Germany, this time with No. 1 Ammunition Inspection Unit, Herford, B AOR. Even though Britain had changed when I returned in 1964, there was still little hint of a darkening sky. The Swinging Sixties were under way, their early innocent momentum fuelled by the sound of the Beatles, the sight of the mini-skirt and the smell of new money. Britain in general and London in particular were in the glare of the centre-stage spotlight, a position desired by all performers even though it blinds them to what might be going on in the wings.

  I became senior instructor at the Army Apprentice College, Chepstow, in the department responsible for the training of ammunition technicians. It was, as ever, a British military world with British military preoccupations where skills were taught and learned and traditional codes of discipline and conformity maintained. As such it mirrored many of the civilian institutes of education, for the protest era was still in its infancy and the dawn of British urban violence not yet a glimmer.

  At Chepstow, as elsewhere in the country, the significance of events far beyond Europe passed almost unnoticed; the headlines of August 1964 referred to summer heat and summer fun while the foreign news rated only a few lines: 2 August – us DESTROYER ATTACKED BY NORTH VIETNAM TORPEDO BOATS; 5 August – PRESIDENT JOHNSON ORDERS THE FIRST AIR STRIKES ON NORTH VIETNAM. The world was changing in the small print but few recognized it.

  My first bombers on British soil were dangerous madmen who needed locking up. The appellation ‘guerrilla’ or ‘terrorist’ seemed inappropriate to their activities: Welsh nationalism was then more of an eccentricity than an emergency. Unfortunately, the perspective of the doer and the done by are very different; my new problem was the extremists’ old cause, and an apparently bizarre aberration was noted by a shadowy few for later emulation.

  I had gone to a quiet classroom in rural Gloucestershire to teach others the art and craft of the ammunition technician. It was not exactly dull but, equally, it was not exactly exciting. I was not to know that I had inadvertently gone to the one place in England where terrorists would strike.

  The call came through from the army base at Hereford. The problem, it was explained to me, was Welsh extremism. There was a feeling in Wales that it had for too long been under the yoke of the English and that now was the time for a change. None of this was news because the issue had long been chronic
led by the British Press. It didn’t amount to much more than the defacing of road signs. I still couldn’t see what it had to do with me.

  But then I was told that extremists had taken up the moderates’ cause, and had decided to blow up the new road crossing over the River Severn, then in the course of construction. One of the world’s longest suspension bridges, it was to most people a welcome link between England and South Wales. To the extremists, however, it signified the breaching of a natural barrier which could only lead to further anglicization.

  Bomb threats against the Severn Bridge came within Hereford’s area of responsibility; part of the Ammunition Inspectorate was actually based there. Unfortunately though, Hereford was a two-hour drive from the bridge; Chepstow was almost underneath it.

  So on several occasions I found myself back on EOD (Explosive Ordnance Disposal) work, this time high above the River Severn. That every bomb turned out to be a hoax was of little comfort: when you’re grappling with vertigo 300 feet above a raging river and the wind is trying to lift you from a perilous perch, there’s no joy in discovering that the suspect box actually contains a couple of candles and a bloody alarm clock.

  The EOD operatives tasked to deal with the situation referred to the extremists as the ‘Viet Taff’, but we knew they were dangerous. They knew exactly what they were doing: the hoax calls disrupted and endangered lives, and the few bombs that actually did go off caused terror in the streets. But public opinion did not call them terrorists, though that is what they were, because terrorism didn’t happen in Britain. Besides, eyes were turned towards London where 1964’s images of Carnaby Street and the King’s Road had inexplicably been replaced by visions of anti-war protesters in violent running battles with the Metropolitan Police.

  And so 1966 dawned and the Welsh extremist campaign continued. To many it was still just a joke. On 5 March 1966 the Irish Republican Army blew up Nelson’s Pillar in the centre of Dublin. To many, that was just a joke as well.

  I left Gloucestershire the following year for the Ammunition Repair Methods Development Unit at Command Ammunition Depot, Bramley. It was a return to fondly remembered territory as well as an opportunity to satisfy my interest in both explosives and engineering, for the unit was responsible for the design, development and testing of tools for repairing, proving and destroying ammunition and explosives as well as the design and development of EOD and CMD (Conventional Munitions Disposal) equipment.

  Time passed quickly here, time spent in practical work on practical issues, with collective efforts that ranged from the sophisticated to the Heath Robinson, though all were underpinned with the same qualities of ingenuity and enthusiasm. As in 1950, so in 1967: Bramley was a place for learning and benefiting from others’ expertise and experience, a military world facing new challenges.

  But change was continuing outside. On 5 June 1967 the Six-Day War broke out in the Middle East. On 26 October anti-Vietnam war demonstrations erupted in Washington and London. Bloody war and violent protest were becoming the staple ingredients of newspapers and television alike. What had once seemed unthinkable in democratic societies were now increasingly commonplace: on 10 May 1968 Paris erupted in street warfare between students and police; on 5 October Londonderry burned itself into the headlines with the biggest civil disturbance yet seen in the province; on 27 October London was brought to a standstill by yet another anti-Vietnam war demonstration. The old battlefields had gone; the biggest war could now be fought inside the smallest street.

  On 21 April 1969 troops were sent to Northern Ireland to protect key installations against the threat of terrorism. Five years earlier, the very notion of UK soldiers being actively deployed on UK soil would have been unthinkable.

  That same year, 1969, I left Bramley for No. 1 Ammunition Inspection and Disposal Unit (AIDU) in Hounslow. I was now a senior ammunition technician with the rank of WO1 Conductor. (The first meant Warrant Office First Class, the second was a distinction dating far back into history, when the monarch would require the provinces to supply cannon and other munitions for war; the safe passage of these to the Royal Armouries was ensured by his Conductors of Ordnance.)

  No. 1 Ammunition Inspection and Disposal Unit was responsible for all ammunition matters outside service ammunition depots in the south of England; its duties included inspection of ammunition and ammunition storage sites, ammunition proofing, accident investigation, demolitions, EOD and CMD.

  Work was not confined to military locations, for reminders of the Second World War were still being unearthed on construction sites in and around the capital. Members of the public – including ex-Servicemen who should have known better – were still showing a frightening lack of awareness of the dangers of wartime souvenirs: the shell that Grandfather kept as a trophy could and sometimes did spell the death of a grandchild.

  The public tends to have a stereotyped image of what a bomb looks like: a big, black or iron-grey metal object, often with fins, and the word ‘bomb’ or some other identifying mark printed on the side. The stereotype was perpetuated by Danger: UXB, a television series shown a few years ago which starred Anthony Andrews as a bomb disposal man. The image may be correct for aircraft bombs but, in my experience, few bombs fall into this category. In fact, my duties fell into two distinct areas: CMD (Conventional Munitions Disposal) and IEDD (Improvised Explosive Device Disposal).

  Conventional munitions such as grenades, anti-aircraft shells, mortar bombs and aircraft bombs, are mass-produced to a known design or pattern. You can look them up in a book and discover the fuze mechanism, the amount of explosive and the hazards involved in their disposal.

  With an IED you can’t know any of this until after you have defuzed it. IEDs do not conform to any set pattern; if you gave a hundred people the same basic components to make an IED, they would construct a hundred different bombs.

  Since every IED is different, there can be no prescribed render-safe procedure. Today X-ray machines can reveal some of the mysteries of the bomb’s interior but you can still never be sure that you, or the X-ray, haven’t missed something until after you have dealt with it.

  Conventional munitions are seldom designed to kill the person who is trying to defuze them. Nor are they usually fitted with time fuzes so it does not matter how long your approach takes – if it has been happily lying there for fifty years, it is not likely to explode the very moment you walk up to it. On the other hand, IEDs very often have both these ploys: time fuzes and a variety of anti-handlers or booby-trap mechanisms.

  I would not wish to denigrate CMD – after all, I spent half my career working with conventional munitions – but the challenge of the IEDD provides a greater sense of achievement, as well as the reward of knowing that you have helped to save lives or, in some cases, to convict the terrorists who planted the bomb. And, of course, the ‘buzz’ is better – the more dangerous the situation, the faster the adrenalin flows.

  We were not the only agency to be operating in the London area: the Metropolitan Police Explosives Office was also active. Originally set up in response to an epidemic of safe-blowing (often by ex-National Servicemen using their military skills to personal advantage), the work of the Explosives Office had expanded from the early days when one of its biggest headaches was caused by incompetent burglars who shoved explosive into a safe’s lock only for the stuff to fall uselessly inside.

  No. 1 AIDU worked with the Metropolitan Police and the Met’s Explosives Office as and when required; as a result, Hounslow increasingly found itself dealing with incidents of criminal intent. On 11 December 1969 I responded to such a call. We made it from Hounslow to the Greek Embassy at a speed that is only attainable when you have blue flashing lights and a very loud two-tone horn. Bill Banfield, one of the staff sergeants at the Unit, was driving; the Austin 1800 saloon positively rocketed into the West End.

  A senior police officer was waiting for me at the cordon, fifty metres from the embassy. I’d already had the details in the original call to Hounslow
but it was wise to go through it again: not only could messages get garbled; during my journey the situation could easily have changed. When dealing with bombs of any kind you always moved at two different rates: high speed to the scene, and circumspectly thereafter.

  ‘Looks like a live one,’ said the officer. He nodded towards the embassy building, a bright oasis that spilled its light on to the deserted expanse of street. ‘They were holding a reception and dance. Security checked the bag of a young man as he came in. They found two bombs.’

  ‘What makes them think they’re bombs?’

  ‘There’s wires sticking out all over the place and some sort of timing mechanism.’ A wry smile. ‘Dancing shoes they aren’t.’

  The bombs had been taken outside and placed in a dustbin prior to the evacuation of the building. Those who had come in search of entertainment had now found drama. I moved off down the side of the embassy. The background noise would have diminished anyway as mute expectancy replaced speculation, but this time the effect was all the more marked because of the sense of sudden isolation.

  For the first time I was conscious of the loneliness of the long walk to the bomb, the journey an operator makes from the cordon to a bomb or suspect device. Though the distance is usually only about 150 yards, it can seem a very long walk indeed …

  Nowadays, it begins with the donning of protective clothing, unavailable in 1969. There is a specially designed bomb jacket and helmet with a combined weight of 22 pounds as well as a full bomb suit and helmet which, at 52 pounds, is even more awkward and restrictive.

  The bomb helmet is probably the most important item of an operator’s protective clothing: it’s one of those curious facts that although the head represents around 14 per cent of body volume, 86 per cent of fatal injuries to bomb men are to the head. The visor allows a forward view only; worse, when helmet, collar and bomb jacket are all in place the weight is such as to prevent free movement of the head, so that tunnel vision results. In most situations this is more an irritant than an impediment, but in others – for example, where an operator has to negotiate a flight of steps – great care has to be taken not to stumble or fall.