A Fighting Spirit. Paul Burns
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the paper cover to cover. So when the time came for me to leave, no big fuss was made. I hugged my mum and my sisters, shook my brother by the hand and made my way to the station, where I caught a train to Liverpool. It was great to meet up with the lads again and take a ferry across the water. We were all looking forward to putting our training into action, and ready for our next adventure.
The battalion was stationed in Ballykinler, a small village on the coast in County Down. It’s the most breathtaking location—three miles of desolate beach, with the granite peaks of the Mountains of Mourne in the background. Very out of the way, but that suited me fine. Ballykinler was home to an old army camp that had a long history. It had been a training camp during both World Wars, and during the Irish War of Independence it was controversially used as an internment camp. In 1974 the Provisional IRA planted a 300-pound bomb on the site, killing two soldiers and destroying some of the buildings.
From Ballykinler, we would be deployed down into ‘Bandit Country’. This was the nickname given to the southern part of County Armagh. To look at it, you would never think this was one of the most dangerous postings in the world for a British soldier. It’s a beautiful place: lush green fields, rugged moorland, rolling hills, and impressive mountains. There were no big cities in South Armagh—just small villages that felt as if they hadn’t changed much in recent times. It’s no wonder the people who live there are so fiercely protective of their homeland.
But the peace and gentleness of the landscape were deceptive. Nestled against the border with the Republic, this part of Northern Ireland had always been proudly Republican. It was a hotbed of IRA activity and a front line in the battle between them and the security forces. In the winding lanes of South Armagh, we could expect to be shot at, mortared, bombed. The area close to the border became known as the ‘Murder Circle’, because during the Troubles nearly 400 people lost their lives in this dangerous stretch of country. And of all the British soldiers killed by the IRA during the first ten years of the Troubles, nearly half died in South Armagh.
The role of the British Army in Bandit Country was to back up the police force and to be a visible sign of the rule of law. The duties of 2 Para were varied, and we rotated between different roles. We would be deployed to various fortifications and watchtowers down on the border; we would man vehicle checkpoints; we’d do escort duties and training exercises; and we’d perform patrols. Most of our patrolling was done on foot. This was for a good reason. The South Armagh branch of the IRA were specialists in roadside bomb ambushes. From my training in West Berlin I knew that to create a devastating bomb was alarmingly simple. The IRA knew that too. They placed their bombs in locations that they knew British soldiers were likely to pass, and they employed special scouts to record the security forces’ regular activities, so they knew where we were likely to be, and when. So travelling by vehicle was particularly dangerous. To the IRA it was simplicity itself to put a bomb in a culvert under the road or in a roadside ditch, where it could remain for weeks without being noticed. It became so dangerous to travel overland through South Armagh that most Army deliveries were made by helicopter into an airfield that had been set up in the small village of Bessbrook. And it was because vehicle travel was so hazardous that we tended to patrol more often on foot. There was still a risk of sniper fire, but it meant that we could vary our routes more easily and not fall prey to the Provos’ booby-traps.
During our training we had been shown a book that contained gruesome pictures of injured men. There was blood and gore everywhere, and bodies halfway between life and death. I remember looking at an image of a guy with a gunshot wound to the head and averting my eyes in disgust. My friends did the same. Revolted though we were by these pictures, we didn’t allow ourselves to be worried by them. Traumas like that had nothing to do with us. They were the kind of thing you would have expected to see in Vietnam, where there had been a real war. But in the UK? No way.
Looking back, it seems naive, but although we all knew that South Armagh was a potentially dangerous place to be, I don’t think any of us seriously thought we’d come to harm in Northern Ireland. Or if we did, we certainly never talked about it. Even the medical staff in the battalion, and the training NCOs who’d served previous tours in the Province, tended not to speak about the possibility of injury. It was taboo, off limits, something you just didn’t discuss back then. When a soldier goes on active duty, he doesn’t allow thoughts of what the enemy might do to him to prey on his mind. He can’t. Otherwise he’d never do anything.
We weren’t stupid. We knew there was the potential for rounds to be flying. We knew there was a likelihood of explosive devices—we’d been trained to search for them, after all. But for the first couple of months of our deployment in South Armagh everything seemed remarkably calm. No rounds were fired in anger; there were no bombs; we didn’t even have exposure to any anti-British feeling, and as far as I knew, that was true for the whole of 2 Para. All the little jobs I went on ran smoothly.
It seems strange to say it now, but I enjoyed myself during those first two months. I remembered the motto of No.1 Parachute Training School—‘Knowledge Dispels Fear’—and it was true. I felt that I’d been equipped with the right knowledge to counter anything that might come along, and I was too young—too green, I suppose—to worry about death or injury.
Some events cannot be predicted. Some horrors are too dreadful to imagine. They come without warning, out of the blue, when you’re looking the other way. And it doesn’t matter how long life has been uneventful. It doesn’t matter how prepared you are, or confident in your abilities. Sometimes it only takes a moment for life to change beyond recognition.
Knowledge might well dispel fear. But had I known that what was around the corner would be worse than any of the gory images of wounded soldiers we had been shown, I don’t doubt that I would have been filled with the kind of fear that no knowledge in the world could ever dispel.
Monday, 27 August 1979 was a hot, sunny bank holiday. The kind of day that would, in other circumstances, make you glad to be near the sea. Perhaps if it had been overcast, Earl Mountbatten of Burma, one of the Royal Navy’s most prestigious officers, might not have decided to go fishing.
Lord Mountbatten had a holiday home in Mullaghmore, County Sligo, on the north-west coast of Ireland. He had a 30-foot boat, the Shadow V, moored unguarded in the harbour of that small seaside village, and it was his custom to go lobster-potting in Donegal Bay. The Irish police warned him not to go out on his boat that day, but he decided it would be safe. He was wrong. The previous night a member of the IRA had slipped on board the boat and planted a fifty-pound bomb with a remote-control detonator. The following day, together with members of his family and a small crew, Mountbatten set off looking for lobsters.
He never found them. As the Shadow V headed for Donegal Bay, a second IRA man detonated the device. Mountbatten wasn’t killed instantly: he was severely wounded and perished soon after by drowning. Three others were killed in the blast: his 14-year-old grandson, his daughter’s mother-in-law, and a 15-year-old crew member. It was a terrible atrocity, and would have been enough for that bank holiday Monday to go down as one of the darkest days of the Troubles. But it wasn’t over yet.
As part of A Company, my mates and I were due to relieve 2 Para’s Support Company at the town of Newry in County Down, just near the county border with Armagh. The Troubles had hit Newry hard, with several fatalities over the previous few years, and the Paras’ role there was to reinforce the police presence. As far as we were concerned, it was just another day on rotation, and we spent the morning in camp at Ballykinler, preparing to be transported down to Newry.
It was the habit of our commanders at Ballykinler to work out different possible routes between two points. That way we could select routes at random and increase our chances of thwarting the IRA scouts that we knew were trying to identify which roads we were most likely to use, and when. The route that was selected for our journey that day was to take us south on the A2, along the coast, before heading west along the estuary of Carling-ford Lough, through the town of Warrenpoint, and up into Newry. Of all the routes we could take, this was possibly the most dangerous, because just above Warrenpoint