Episode 3 Life in a Hedge

For days at a time, SAS operatives lay hidden in freezing hedgerows and fields, watching and waiting. Discovery could mean capture – or death. In this episode of SAS: The Shadow War, The Independent’s world affairs editor Sam Kiley enters the covert surveillance war between British Special Forces and the Provisional IRA. One former soldier recalls a terrifying encounter in South Armagh, when a farmer soaked his hiding place in petrol and told his young son to strike a match. As the IRA adapted its tactics and the conflict intensified, the dangers extended far beyond the men concealed in the undergrowth. Through first-hand accounts, Kiley reveals the risks of a war fought largely out of sight – and the toll it took on those caught up in it. Subscribe to The Independent All Access Membership https://www.independent.co.uk/Subscribeand unlock all eight episodes for just £1 Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

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• 1:04Speaker 03

  At first, it looks like a traditional Irish scene, a small village set in rolling green country. It's when you get closer, you start to spot the difference. On the edge of the town, an army post, looking exactly as any schoolboy would expect a frontier fort to look.

• 1:27Sam Kiley?

  I remember this vivid memory of walking down to the Rodney St. James over the Falls Road on a damp autumn day, looking out over that, sort of over where the motorway comes into Belfast, and looking out over the rooftops, and thinking, this is really weird. I mean, I'm not a policeman. Here I am in one multiple of three, and we're walking down this street with rifles. We were wearing berets, but it was, it was just, it felt really odd to be in the United Kingdom,

• 2:06Sam Kiley?

  being expected to be a policeman, but with people who wanted to kill you. That was General Sir Nick Parker. He was the last general officer who commanded British forces in Northern Ireland. But he began his career in the 1970s as a junior officer during the troubles. I'm Sam Kiley, world affairs editor of The Independent, and you are listening to SAS: The Shadow War.

• 2:43Sam Kiley?

  In this series, special forces are breaking cover for the first time to reveal their secret world in their own words. In this episode, we'll explore the challenges of keeping up with and then getting ahead of the IRA.

• 3:00Speaker 03

  This is where information about the presence of an army patrol is passed from mouth to mouth by the Catholics, and where even a herd of cows can give away the hiding place of a soldier who wants to observe without being seen himself.

• 3:12Sam Kiley?

  Reconnaissance is never wasted in any war, and success depends on who has the best intelligence. Spying is a skill that needs constant refinement. The IRA evolved and adapted fast into a highly organized and smart insurgent force, supported by overseas weapons and money. The IRA reorganized their military wing in Northern Ireland, basing it on a so-called cell structure. A cell is believed to be composed of up to six people with specialist skills. This constant adaptation made close observation by British specialists one of the most dangerous jobs in the province, as we'll hear from surveillance operators, the SAS,

• 3:57Sam Kiley?

  and the police force, staying that one step ahead was always dangerous. And any soldier caught, risked execution.

• 4:12Speaker 03

  The atmosphere is unmistakable. The soldiers watch and check the locals. The locals look on the soldiers by and large as an alien force.

• 4:21Sam Kiley?

  There were contacts going on, there were shootings going on periodically, and you knew that it was, there was a clear and present danger. So you, you know, when you moved your firing position as you came to the corner of a street, you were doing it seriously because you knew somebody might be taking a bead on you. It was hostile to you. You'd walk down the street, and these bunches of women and children would stand on the street corner with their dustbin lids, bashing them on the floor as you came up, and, you know, using some fairly choice language, and you were not welcome. The British Army soon discovered that conventional soldiering wouldn't work on the streets of Northern Ireland. This was a war unlike anything they'd experienced before.

• 5:05Sam Kiley?

  The IRA didn't wear uniforms or occupy territory. It lived among the people. But special forces tours of 12 months meant that British soldiers often knew who they were dealing with. SAS troop commander Aldwin was in charge of 16 to 20 soldiers based out of the palace barracks in Belfast during the 1980s. They talk about, you know, as it were, the fish in the sea and the terrorists and the population. But they're the guys, you can see them daily. You can see them crossing the road, you can stop the car and talk with them and stuff. And they are absolutely 100% frontline terrorists who've shot people. It's quite an extraordinary campaign.

• 5:48Sam Kiley?

  I don't think any other country had run anything like that. British soldiers disappeared into fields, farm buildings, and hedgerows, sometimes for weeks at a time. And that was a big part of the special forces' job, as John explains. Can you describe to me what the role was of an SAS soldier through that period? Because obviously, it would have evolved and also involved some quite unglamorous activities. It was primarily information gathering intelligence. You know, we were who's who, who's where, who goes to see who.

• 6:28Sam Kiley?

  And we set up our methodology, it was these observation posts, and we observed people. I mean, it was pretty, how would I describe it? It was very, very tiring, very exhausting work. John was only 22 years old and fresh from SAS selection when he started his first tour in Northern Ireland in the 1970s. It was a period in which violence was escalating, and the regiment was new in the region. It'd usually be two of you, two hours on, two hours off shift, and you'd be there two, three, four days. And in the winter, you know, it got very cold, very wet, and even one of my friends got trench footed. It was that sort of level of, sort of, physical misery.

• 7:11Sam Kiley?

  It was, it was a very, it was, the early days were very tough, very physical. There was a chronic shortage of accommodation. As I, we'd come in after three or four days, you'd get into a bed, someone had slept in, you'd sleep in that bed, and you'd get out of it, and someone else would get into the bed. And you'd just about have time to dry your kit, and you'd be off back out again. And can you describe what, what you, what life was like, if you like, operationally or tactically? What did you have to do when you were on an OP, an observation, for example, post? Well, you'd have a place that you were watching, you know, it could be a house, it could be a farm. Usually in South Armagh, then they were farms, and you were watching a farm,

• 7:53Sam Kiley?

  and you were looking for who was arriving, who was leaving, what was going on. And, you know, so you'd be there in, in, in a sort of hedgerow, camouflaged, hidden away, and you'd have a pair of field binoculars and a notebook, and you would record what you saw and what you observed. And you'd have a radio set just to sort of keep proof of life going, and that wouldn't, that would just be sort of clicks or something like that, just to establish that you were there and you were well. Wow, so you couldn't, so you're not exactly lying in the hedgerow chatting, discussing football? Oh, no, no, no, I mean, it's, well, it is, and it was a very tough, demanding gig.

• 8:38Sam Kiley?

  And you develop a sort of sixth sense with the people you're there with. You don't need to speak, you know exactly what each other are doing. You're probably doing two hours of watching, two hours of resting, two hours of watching, two hours of resting. It's very demanding on the second and the third day because you haven't slept properly. But, you know, that was, that was what we were, and that's what we did. Once you've got yourself in somewhere, you can't very well wander off because, you know, you might get found, you might get shot, you might give away your position. So the grubby reality was that, you know, we sat there in front of each other and pooed in a polythene bag, and then we weeded in a lemonade bottle. And when somebody went out at night to bring in another couple of thermoses and some sandwiches,

• 9:20Sam Kiley?

  they would take out that and bring you back in some more polythene bags. So it wasn't for the shy and the retiring. For those in uniform, fighting nationalists and republican militants was deadly, and it was serious. As regular forces were more often targeted, so special forces were more often called in. When I was a uniform sergeant, this is the, sort of, late 1980s, I was working down on the Fermanagh County Cavan border. So my place station was Newton Butler, which was about three miles from the border.

• 10:00Sam Kiley?

  It looked like it's just an ordinary little hamlet anywhere in, you know, in the United Kingdom, but it was, you know, three miles from a land border. CID police officer Roy's job was public and dangerous because police were top of the IRA target list. We had to do policing, but with a very heavy slant to almost military-type training. So we were doing a lot of foot patrols that were really the, the skill set of soldiers. We would do that both with or sometimes without military, military escorts. So we were trained, we were equipped with, with skills that, you know, are not Dixon of Doc Green policing. We were really...

• 10:45Sam Kiley?

  Heavily armed rifles, you know, carrying flares and automatic weapons. And it was just, it was a different type of policing.

• 10:55Sam Kiley?

  On one particular evening in the wintertime, we were appointed to go and do some particular night time training in a military camp, many, many miles away from, from, from our base. So we put in a sort of a skeleton crew to look after the police station that we were sent off to do this training. And along this border, you had a number of permanent vehicle checkpoints that were manned by, by the military. And they, they managed the, the vehicle movements across the border on the main roads. And there was one particular checkpoint called Dariad. And Dariad was, I mean, it was a, a townland. It was a very small area. It had

• 11:35Sam Kiley?

  a military checkpoint with, I think, 12 soldiers, very, very heavily protected. And on the night that we were doing the, the training in, in this military camps, many, many miles away, the provision IRA attacked the permanent checkpoint.

• 11:52Sam Kiley?

  And let me describe the attack. They arrived with a, a, a, a heavy vehicle, a heavy goods vehicle that would carry stones from a quarry that was fitted with an anti-aircraft weapon. The types of guns you would see the, you know, the, the Taliban using to shoot down Dushka, was it? The Dushka. It was a big, the Dushka, the 12.7 Dushka that rounds that had, you know, like the length of your arm. And they had bolted that onto the back of the, the, the lorry. 12, 14 heavily armed IRA terrorists drove into the checkpoint with explosives,

• 12:35Sam Kiley?

  with the Dushka, with AK-47s. And the purpose was to literally wipe out the, the checkpoint.

• 12:49Sam Kiley?

  And had we not been on the training, we would have had to race to, to that camp as police officers, which we were really not qualified to do, but you would still have done it because you were the nearest assistance to our military colleagues. My friends and colleagues in Rossleigh did respond and, you know, by their mere presence and by their response, and by the courage of the military who survived the initial attack. And two soldiers were killed. They, they expelled the, the IRA terrorists. But that was the level of, of, of, of violence that the IRA were prepared to bring against the, the military in County

• 13:29Sam Kiley?

  Fermanagh. That was an exceptional attack, but that was the sort of expectations that we had to live with in those days. Now, if you were to lift that and put that into England and say, well, that's the type of attack that ISIS might do in Manchester and Birmingham and London and Liverpool. I mean, this would be quite rightly a national horror. And there would be all manners of public inquiries, all manners of, you know, how did this get to happen? Northern Ireland in the 1980s routinely had attacks, not quite of that severity, but the attacks were constant. They were violent. There were multiple incidents happening.

• 14:11Sam Kiley?

  And, and it was very often rarely making the use in, in, across the IRA seat because there was a level of violence that was almost accepted. The weapons used in that attack on the checkpoint at County Fermanagh were brought across the border by the IRA from the Republic of Ireland. The IRA had supporters and benefactors from Southern Ireland, as well as overseas, like Republican Irish groups in America, and Libya's dictator Muammar Gaddafi. And as IRA power grew, so did its criminality. My personal characterization of the organization is it lost its way many, many

• 14:52Sam Kiley?

  years ago. And it became what was essentially an organized crime gang, using the banner of Republicanism to actually extort money from the civil community and to brutalize the civil population. This is Bob, an operator with 14 Intelligence Company. What's the phrase that people use? One man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter. It's a bit of a cliche. But you could actually say that, well, okay, a freedom fighter then, what are they fighting against? Well, they're fighting against the crown. They're fighting against the instruments of power of the crown. So their targets should be limited to the soldiers, the policemen, maybe the politicians, stretching it, perhaps

• 15:34Sam Kiley?

  the judiciary. They're the instruments of, of power. But to brutalize the civil population, including their own people, the indiscriminate bombings of pubs, of memorial parades, the, the killing of children, and then actually through your robbery squad, moving to leverage money from the civil population, through coercion, through protection rackets, to line your own back pockets, and also, of course, you know, to get a hold of weapons, et cetera, for the, for the campaign. You have lost the moral high ground. You're no longer a freedom fighter. You are a terrorist. And you could actually structure quite a

• 16:19Sam Kiley?

  strong argument that the point of departure for the freedom fighter is when they begin to brutalize the civil population and indeed brutalize the very people that they purport to represent.

• 16:31Sam Kiley?

  Former Northern Ireland BBC security correspondent Brian Rowan explains how the IRA was organized. I'll, I'll talk about the general structure of the organization. So I, I read a document just recently, a document prepared by the special branch. And, and you see within it, Sam, the military structure of that organization. So it's army council leadership. It's, it's war leadership, if you like. It has a northern command and a southern command on, on, on the, the different sides of the, of the border. There's a general headquarters staff and within it, you, you know, many departments, procurement, quartermaster, adjutant general,

• 17:13Sam Kiley?

  engineering, training, finance, those responsible for, for overseas and, and mainland operations, explosives officers, the intelligence department, the active service units within the various IRA brigades. And when you look at that structure, when you think about an engineering department, a training department, and explosives officers, that's how expertise and knowledge is passed down then through, through the organization. But weren't these sort of grandiose, I mean, children, child soldiers call themselves brigadiers. I mean, was this grandiose or were they, were they actually, did their grand sounding titles reflected in real talents and skills?

• 17:58Sam Kiley?

  Well, ask soldiers or, or police officers on the other end of an IRA mortar bomb, was it a toy army they were fighting? Or was it something more dangerous than that? I, I think you know the answer to that and, and I know the answer to it. So if you look at the IRA organization, they were able to sustain this for 30 years. Within that period, there are multiple variations of the, of the mortar bomb as their, as their engineering capability grows and, and develops, including the mortar bombs fired at Downing Street in the, in the early 1990s. Ask John Major, was it a toy bomb that was being fired at

• 18:41Sam Kiley?

  them or something that posed a real threat? You then think about the things that we called the coffee jar bomb. So Semtex explosive in a coffee jar, the drug bomb, Semtex explosive in a tin. And, and I think as we get to the 1980s and beyond, what we're seeing, Sam, is a marrying of the IRA's engineering capacity and capability alongside the weapons that have been supplied by, by Libya, which, which give much more punch and, and weight to, to the IRA campaign. To the point then, when we get into the peace process, and there's the whole argument about decommissioning, you have a chief constable in that period,

• 19:25Sam Kiley?

  Sir Ronnie Flanagan, who makes the point that what you have to do is decommission the IRA's will to fight a conflict, because you cannot decommission their engineering knowledge. So that engineering knowledge, that engineering capacity is learned both at home, I assume, in that relationship with Libya and in relationships with others. So we see over, over a period of some decades, that that threat from, from the IRA organization grows, and it grows because of that very significant weapon supply from Libya, but also their own enhanced and increased engineering capability.

• 20:08Sam Kiley?

  And did they also have increased sort of military skills? I mean, when it came to a confrontation, you know, with the most elite unit in the British Army, what were the, what were the, what were the Brits up against? A similarly skilled IRA? Well, I, I, I can, I can remember an incident where the IRA tried to get a bomb, I think weighing 8,000 pounds of explosives. So a lot of it will be fertilizer with a, with a Semtex charge within it. And they were trying to get it to a military checkpoint. And, and the, the bomb sank in, in, in the ground of a field, basically. But, but you know, there were other occasions when they confronted military checkpoints with flamethrowers,

• 20:53Sam Kiley?

  with RPG-7 rockets, with, with assault rifles. And, you know, I can remember speaking with an army general in the early 90s, where he talked about IRA units, maybe of some 20 or 30 people on the move at a particular, at a particular time. So, so the, the army knew and the police knew the, the threat that they were, they were facing. And for many police officers in, in the Northern Ireland situation, the daily task was how you get to work without being killed and how you get home from work without being killed. And then how do you stay alive when you're home because of the booby trap bomb that might be under your car the, the next morning? So, so look, the, the threat was

• 21:36Sam Kiley?

  real. The fact that it was sustained for, for 30 years, I think, says all that, that needs to be said.

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• 22:56Sam Kiley?

  So this wasn't a handful of gunmen operating on instinct. By the 1980s, the provisional IRA had become a disciplined, adaptive organization with engineers, intelligence officers, and access to increasingly sophisticated weapons. The better the IRA became, the more the British needed live intelligence. Northern Ireland was never simply a war between the British state and the IRA. Loyalist paramilitary groups such as the UDA were also carrying out murders. There was also around that time, the Glenan gang. Are you familiar with them? Journalist Mary Kelly.

• 23:40Sam Kiley?

  She was born and brought up in Northern Ireland. She reported for the Belfast Telegraph during the troubles, and she saw firsthand the contradictions at the heart of the sectarian nightmare. The Glenan gang were a group who were involved in a lot of murders of Catholics. And they were loyalist paramilitaries who were involved. And some members also of the Ulster Defence Regiment. There were links to the security forces. And they had been carrying out quite a lot of incidents in the area as well. That group were believed to have carried out something like 120 murders over a period.

• 24:24Sam Kiley?

  This is always the thing, the IRA are the enemy of the British security forces. If loyalist paramilitaries are also the enemy, it's like my enemy's enemy, you know. So they were never going to come across, you know, security force taking them out in the same way as IRA people obviously would be. If you've got the Glenan gang and there are multiple serial killer operators prosecuting what by any definition would be an ethnic war, and you know they're going to go on an offensive, who's deciding, in your view, where is the decision, if there has been a decision, not to act against them taken?

• 25:08Sam Kiley?

  I don't, I think a lot of it would have been generally informal. I'm not sure that there would have been high-ups saying, this is what we need to do. But it was useful. It was always useful to the security forces to have local information. And local information was going to come from people on the ground. Either informants on the Republican side, you know, that they had placed, or more likely, people on the loyalist side who would know X, Y, and Z. Or maybe suspected that somebody was a provo, whether they were or were not is another matter.

• 25:50Sam Kiley?

  But it was, it was obviously a different scenario for people on the loyalist side. They were on the same side as the British Army. It was, that was what was useful. Going back to the 70s, there was, you know, some of the files, the British military files and things that have, that have since come to light. There was, there was an understanding in higher military circles that, for example, the UDA, the Ulster Defence Association, they, they would have been in cahoots with the Ulster Defence Regiment in many respects. And that was understood.

• 26:32Sam Kiley?

  There was an MOD letter that, you know, where it said, well, you would expect that partisan paramilitaries would have the same, the same outlook towards the IRA as the UDR would, because they would see them as, as the enemy. Amid the scheming and the murder, special forces veterans insist that they were strictly governed. SAS soldier Tony H.

• 27:00Speaker 05

  Of course, we worked entirely to special branch. You know, if special branch didn't know it, we, we wouldn't know it. But we'd have an LO.

• 27:09Sam Kiley?

  A liaison officer.

• 27:10Speaker 05

  Permanently attached, who when there was a tasking would go to Armagh, receive a briefing, come back. And the troop commander or troop sergeant was always in station. And whatever relevant team leader, we'd then get briefed in, we would then give orders to the team for that particular conduct of whatever operation it was.

• 27:33Sam Kiley?

  And were the order, what were the orders? Kill or capture? Were you given a choice? What was the, how was it prioritized?

• 27:39Speaker 05

  Arrest.

• 27:43Sam Kiley?

  SAS officer Aldwin explains how so often the IRA had the edge. So South Armagh was badlands. There had been OPs, as it were, four man patrols who were doing surveillance, shot up because the opposition are very well aware of it. They can smell and feel on their turf, because they know their turf intimately, what's going on. You, you have to make judgments on whether you've been compromised or not, which can be difficult to make. You can be in a hedge row and somebody beats the hedge row. I mean, literally as close as we are, and I've got to make a judgment call on it. Because if you didn't get that right, you're done.

• 28:22Sam Kiley?

  But you talked there about the threat, and I think that's, that's a really important aspect of this for people who weren't around in those days to understand the nature of the danger that people were in. I mean, what, there you are, you're in an OP, you're hiding in a hole in the ground under a hedge. What would have happened if you had been seen, or what the military call compromised? A paranoia was them, them opening up on you from somewhere around you. Another sort of paranoia was that you might go somewhere that, to be quite frank, was a well-established place, and somebody might as well put a bomb underneath it.

• 29:05Sam Kiley?

  SAS soldier John came close to compromise, but he survived. Others did not. But I suppose for a lot of us, and you know, I was in South Armagh, and there was a chap called Captain Bob Nyack, quite famous in the intelligence world, nothing to do with us, but he was working in intelligence. And he went to the, a pub called The Three Steps at Drum and Tea, and he was abducted in the car park outside. And I think a lot of, you know, probably for most of us, it was being snatched was the thing. Because unless you're Mike Tyson, you're not going to mix it with a couple of burly Irishmen, who are going to put a bag over your head and put you in the boot of a car. So I suppose most of us, the one thing that, I usually never talk about it with each other,

• 29:48Sam Kiley?

  but I think for most of us, being snatched was the thing, because you knew, you could live with being shot or blown up, but you knew that if you got snatched, there was no good ending coming to you by, if you were snatched. So you could, in theory, I mean, you could wake, you could be there one day and find six gunmen around you, and they would try and abduct you. But generally speaking, you know, the, it was, they would want to engage you from a distance. They wouldn't particularly want to engage you close to, because you might come out of it better. John and his comrade had the closest of calls.

• 30:25Sam Kiley?

  I suppose one of the incidents I was involved in, we were watching a farm, and there were three sides of the field had hedge row. And we were directly opposite the farmhouse. There was a hedge on our left, hedge on our right, with a track coming up to the, up to the farm. Now, the guy clearly was up to something, because he kept on looking, there were two of us there, and he kept on looking for us. Each day he'd come out, now he didn't have a dog, but he was out and generally, they get a big stick, and what they're looking for is to poke it through the bushes, and they hope to catch you and get a scream out of you, and then you'd obviously got to leg it away. So this chap, in a couple of days, he'd been going around these three hedge rows, obviously thinking there might be somebody there.

• 31:09Sam Kiley?

  And then on about the third day, he came out one of the outbuildings with half a dozen jerry cans. Now, if you're in the farming business, there's a lot of people buying dodgy diesel fuel, agricultural diesel fuel's got a special color and it's sold cheaper. So initially, we thought the guy had brought out these diesel cans, or these petrol cans for getting somebody who's going to drop him off some, you know, illicit fuel. And then suddenly, we noticed he picked up two of them, and he went to the hedge row on our right, and sort of flicked this stuff all over the hedge row. We were thinking, this is like weird stuff, what's, what's going on here? And then he went back, took the two empty ones back, picked up two more, and came to the hedge row we're in.

• 31:54Sam Kiley?

  And then he just walked along in front of us and covered the hedge row in what was now obviously petrol, because we're sitting there, and this petrol's running down our face, it's all over us. And we're thinking, this is going to get quite ugly. He takes the two cans back, he goes back down, picks up the last two tins, and he goes down the hedge row on the left-hand side of us. Now, as he goes back, we've radioed that this is going to start to look ugly, and we're probably going to have to move out and, and request some backup. But then you're in a, in a sort of gambling situation where you're looking at, what are your options? Now, if he thinks we're there, the chances are, he thinks we'll go out to the back. And of course, if they know we're there, then what they're going to do is they'll ambush us at the back.

• 32:37Sam Kiley?

  So we're sitting there, two of us are sitting there thinking, well, what are we going to do? What are we going to do? Because he goes in the house to have a cup of tea, to obviously see if we're going to break cover. He probably thinks we're somewhere, but he can't find us. So he's gone off to have a cup of tea. So we're going through our options, and just trying to decide what we're going to do. So the guy appears back out, and this time, he's got a young lad with him, you know, difficult to put an age on him from the distance we were away, but somewhere between about 10, 14, 15 now. And I'm assuming- It's his son. I mean, this shows you the mindset of, I can't say the guy was a member of the provisional IRA, but their supporters was that he, what he probably realised was

• 33:21Sam Kiley?

  if he set fire, because it's obvious now what's going to happen, going to be set on fire. So obviously, he's, he knows the yellow card. So what he's thinking is if I set fire to the hedge, we could sort of say our life was under imminent danger and we could have shot him. So he's, he's not going down that route. So what he, what he does, and this is the cynicism is, is quite mind boggling. He gets his lad and he goes, you can see the two in the conversation and his lad throws the match into the hedge on our right. Bang, you know, this thing, the whole thing literally is exploding in a matter of a few seconds. And we packed up all of our stuff. So then our, obviously, we weren't going

• 34:04Sam Kiley?

  to shoot the lad, you know, we, we'd seen that it was laid by his father, we weren't going to shoot him. So as these, as this, we're literally making decisions in a nanosecond. So we decided not to go out the back because we think if they know we're there, they'll have some gunman at the back and they'll shoot us as we come out the back. So what we decided to do was actually to run at them on the basis that it would surprise them, which it certainly did. But secondly, if there was anybody there, they probably wouldn't risk opening up on us because they'd shoot the farmer and his son. So it's a sort of almost a, a sort of Keystone Cops type thing. There's two of us coming out the bush, sort of banging away at the smoke coming off our stuff, shouting and hollering like a couple

• 34:45Sam Kiley?

  of banshee. Because we frighten the life out of them. But it worked. I mean, we just ran straight through them and then we ran on down the track and we got picked up down the road. So, um, yeah, that, that was, that was, that was quite an extreme case, that one. Very extreme. I mean, you know, you had no way of knowing that there wasn't a team behind the house or on the, on the road either. Well, you don't. I mean, it, it is, everything out there is a gamble and you're making split second decisions. And you know, on that day, we called it correctly, but equally, we could have called it another way. And then who knows what might have happened to us. So you're, you know, the, the margin, I mean, we, we used to have a saying, it's a thin

• 35:28Sam Kiley?

  thread by which we hang. Because, yeah, while I was in, about 30 guys were killed in operations, you know, in Northern Ireland and overseas. We did very intensive training. People were killed parachuting, rock climbing, road traffic accidents. They were shot by accident. And you know, it's a, it is a, it is a tough, I'm not saying we're tough like the Foreign Legion, but it's a tough gig that you're in. A lot of people are killed. While I was in, four men were paralysed from the waist down and spent the rest of their life in wheelchairs. And even when it's over, it's not over. Four of the men I served, at least four, I don't quite know the exact number, but at least four men I was in with, um,

• 36:11Sam Kiley?

  committed suicide after they'd served in the regiment. So it's nothing that we take lightly. You know, if you're in it, you pay quite a heavy price for being in it. And you know, we lost a lot of good friends in the time I was in. Northern Ireland was always such a particular campaign. Former General Officer Commanding Northern Ireland, Sir Nick Parker. Because you'd then come home after your operation and you'd go shopping in the waterside with charming people who were no threat at all. So there was, I don't think there was particularly a sense of demonising the enemy. They were the enemy and they would

• 36:56Sam Kiley?

  get you if they could. But I don't think we, I don't, I certainly don't remember anything where one, one started to sort of demonise them and, and, and emotionally become too sort of committed to them, to killing them or anything like that. It was not an issue as far as we were concerned. The IRA was well armed. It had good intelligence and it was increasingly ruthless. If it captured a British soldier, the outcome would be a bullet to the back of the head. To stay alive, soldiers needed experience, expertise and luck.

• 37:40Speaker 03

  The whole road was blocked with, you know, beer barrels, you know, anything they could grab hold of.

• 37:48Sam Kiley?

  In the next episode of The Shadow War, we go to the streets of Belfast and the deadly world of urban surveillance.

• 37:57Speaker 03

  Now, they were far, far, far more intimidating than they were before.

• 38:07Sam Kiley?

  The Shadow War is an Aura Studios production for The Independent, hosted by me, the world affairs editor, Sam Kiley. It was produced by Will Aslett, edited and sound designed by Keith English, and the line producer was Claire Cotrell. Executive producers were Mark Popkovitz for Aura Studios and Olivia Foster and Rod Ardhali for The Independent Studio. Thanks for listening to this episode of SAS The Shadow War. Want to hear all the episodes without waiting? Then join Independent membership today for just a pound for your

• 38:50Sam Kiley?

  first six months. To join, head to independent.co.uk forward slash subscribe.

• 38:57Speaker 00

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