Stand By, Stand By

TWO

Tony was due in from the SEAL base in Florida one evening towards the end of June. The US military flight was scheduled to arrive at RAF Lyneham at 1630, so I borrowed a car from the MT section and drove up the A40 to give him a lift to Hereford. When it turned out that the plane was an hour late, I sat around in the arrivals lounge and had plenty of time to reflect on our conversations in the Iraqi gaol.

Born in Puerto Rico, the son of an electrician, he had one brother. When he was five, his father had decided to take the family to America, in search of a better life for them all. As they were leaving, the father said they were going because America was the land of opportunity. But things didn’t work out well for them. They ended up living in a Hispanic area of New York, and after a couple of years Tony’s father died, so his mother was left to bring up the two boys on her own. By the time Tony left school he’d been stabbed twice and shot once, all in casual muggings. Prospects of civilian work were zero, so as soon as he was old enough he joined the US Marine Corps, and after two or maybe three years went on into the Navy SEALs.

In 1989 he’d taken part in Operation Just Cause, aimed at removing President Noriega from Panama. A team of four divers was to put explosive charges on Noriega’s 65-foot patrol boat, the Presidente Porras, so that the vessel couldn’t be used to escape. Having left their own ship in two Gemini inflatables, they slipped into the harbour in wetsuits with enough oxygen to give them four hours underwater. Once they’d identified the boat, they hung 24-lb timed charges of plastic explosive over the propellers before returning undetected to their mother ship.

As they were leaving, they heard the explosives go off, and knew the patrol boat was out of action for the duration, if not for ever. The success put them on a high as they flew off by helicopter for their second task — to capture Paitilla airfield, not far from Panama City, and to disable a Lear jet owned by Noriega.

The platoon were so confident about their plan that they saw no need to take heavy weapons; they thought they could accomplish the task by stealth — sneak in, take out a few guards, and have the airfield under their command. But as their choppers approached they started to take incoming fire. Too late they realized that the place was full of Noriega’s troops, armed with heavy weapons. The SEALs eventually managed to capture the field, but only at severe cost. In the firefights, which were fearsome, they suffered eleven casualties, four of them dead. Among those four were three of Tony’s good mates. And so he learnt how easily an operation can go tits-up, ending in a bag of shit.

At last the tannoy announced the arrival of the flight, and in came the C-141 from Florida. A few minutes later Tony burst out of the Customs exit, with a pack on his back and a big holdall in his left hand. When he saw me waiting, his face lit up. ‘Well, I’ll be damned!’ he exclaimed, hammering me on the shoulder with his free fist.

‘You’re looking good!’ I said.

‘You too.’

He’d put on weight — which was hardly a surprise, considering he’d been half-starved the last time I saw him. Now he was fit and bronzed, altogether in great shape. His tan accentuated the Puerto Rican elements in his appearance. With his jet-black hair and thick, arched eyebrows he was very dark anyway, almost swarthy; now his skin was even darker, and his teeth, when he grinned, shone even whiter. His hard New York accent was just as I remembered it: ‘work’ came out as ‘woik’, ‘person’ as ‘poyson’.

The OC had asked me to help him settle in, so on his first night I showed him round the camp before leaving him to have a shower and get his head down until the jetlag wore off. On the second evening I drove him out to Keeper’s Cottage, and on the way I decided to break the news about me and Kath. I could have kept up the pretence that she’d gone home to look after her mother, but I’d got to know Tony so well that I didn’t feel like trying to deceive him. Of course he’d never seen her, but I’d talked so much about her while we were guests of Saddam that he must have felt he knew her well.

‘Hey,’ he said when he heard. ‘That’s too bad. But you’ll get her back over.’

It was a statement, rather than a question.

‘Maybe,’ I said. ‘I’ve chilled out a good bit since she went away.’

‘You’ll want to see the kid, anyway.’

Again I knew he was right.

The rain was pissing down, so KC didn’t look its best, but Tony fell for it, drenched as it was. He kept saying, ‘This is real neat!’ and started on about the possibilities of hunting. He seemed surprised I hadn’t been out blasting the local wildlife. ‘Why, I bet you could hunt squirrels right in back here,’ he said, looking up at the oak spinney.

‘Oh, yeah. There’s plenty of them. Rabbits too.’

‘Who’s the gardener?’ he asked, surveying the unkempt forest of vegetables.

‘Kath. I haven’t a clue. Every time we speak on the phone she tells me to do this or that — earth up the spuds or thin out the lettuces — but I just don’t have the time.’

Indoors, the first thing Tony saw was a photo of her and Tim, taken recently in fine weather on the shore of Strangford Lough, with a background of water and smooth green islands. Kath was wearing a blue check dress and Tim, in a pale blue T-shirt and grey shorts, was standing on a stone wall, so his head was nearly level with hers. The picture had arrived only the day before, and I’d stuck it on the mantelpiece in the living room.

‘But she’s beautiful!’ said Tony. ‘And so’s he. Some kid, that. What is he now? Three?’

‘And a bit.’

‘You sure must be proud of them.’

I made some noncommittal noise and went into the kitchen to open a window. The whole cottage smelt stuffy. Tony realized the place was in a mess — I watched his dark eyes checking things, saw him run a finger through the dust on the table-top — but he was too tactful to say anything about it. I poured a couple of Scotches and we settled down for some crack.

‘So how’s things?’ he asked.

‘Improving. I had a low patch when I couldn’t get myself together at all. I was getting bad headaches and recurring nightmares about Iraq. I went on the piss — but I was so zonked I couldn’t even bring myself to go downtown with the guys. Instead I was buying cans of Stella, twenty-four at a time, and drinking them here on my own with Scotches in between. But I’m over that now. No more headaches. Nightmares gone. Everything’s fine, except for this damned course.’

‘What’s that?’

‘This language course. There’s a possibility of a team job in Colombia, so there’s ten of us learning Spanish.’

‘No kidding! You realize Spanish is my first language?’

‘I knew you spoke it.’

‘Sure do. My mom and dad always talked Spanish at home, and I grew up with it. I expect it would sound like shit to people in Madrid, but it’s Spanish all the same.’

Looking out of the window, he fired off a rapid sentence. ‘Get that?’

‘Only that it was something about the weather.’

‘Correct. I asked if it always pisses with rain during the British summer.’

‘¡Siempre!’ I had to think. ‘¡Sin falta!’

‘Boy! You got it!’

‘I fucking haven’t, Tony. That’s the trouble. I’m finding it a real hassle. Our final tests are coming up in a couple of weeks, too.’

‘Well. You just gotta fight and get through them. I guess I’ve been fighting to survive ever since I was a kid.’

Soon we made a plan. Tony was already very fit; on the initial stages of the selection course, over the Welsh mountains, he would have little trouble in purely physical terms. But I knew what a help it would be to him if he learnt the routes over the Brecon Beacons in advance: that way, he would have a big advantage if the weather turned bad or fog came down. So I offered to walk some of the ground with him, and in return, while we were tabbing, he would give me informal Spanish lessons, to increase my fluency and confidence. The deal suited us both.

We were still talking as dusk set in, and I began to wish I’d done something about supper. Over the past few weeks I’d been picking up takeaways on my run home, or else making do with a jacket potato baked in the microwave. Now I remembered that in Iraq, as we ate shitty rice and lusted after our favourite dishes, Tony had described how he liked to cook.

‘You hungry?’ I asked.

‘Sure.’

‘Want to try your hand in the kitchen? I don’t know what there is, but have a look.’

A search in the cupboards revealed nothing but a few tins of baked beans and a packet of spaghetti. Fuelled by the Scotch, Tony launched a tirade against my housekeeping.

‘Jesus!’ he exclaimed. ‘There ain’t enough here to feed a goddam mouse! You can’t have been shopping in decades. No garlic. No tomato paste. No chilli. No nothing.’

Our prospects improved when he found a bottle of olive oil and a tin of anchovies in the larder. He went into the garden with a torch and returned with a bucket full of spinach, the dark green leaves glistening with rain. Soon we were eating fishy, oily, peppery spaghetti, which we pretended was a traditional Puerto Rican recipe, and spinach pureed with butter, salt and pepper, which I had to admit was outstanding. Tomorrow, Tony promised, we would pay a joint visit to the supermarket and put the kitchen in order.

Three days later we drove out to the Beacons. In his regular training Tony had started to hump loads in his bergen: he hadn’t been used to it, but I told him it was essential to build up slowly to the 55 lbs that he would have to carry during the four weeks of hill-walking which formed the first part of the selection course. For our first recce, however, we took only light day-sacks containing a couple of sandwiches and a water bottle apiece.

Needless to say, rain was falling, and the clouds were touching the tops of the mountains. I parked the car in a lay-by on the B-road that runs along the side of the Talybont reservoir, so that we could get a look at the map while we were still in the dry. Tony had a hell of a pair of boots — high-leg, black leather Matterhorns lined with Goretex — and as he was lacing them up I twisted the map round until it was aligned with the compass.

‘On test week you’ll be walking all round this area,’ I told him, pointing with the blade of my clasp-knife. ‘We’ll start off up the side of the wood here, and get on to these ridges. This is the first part of the Endurance route, and you do it at night, starting out at 0300. Once you get on to the high ground the going’s easy. It’s just a matter of snaking round the ridges. You’re aiming for the summit of Pen-y-Fan… here. Highest point in the Beacons, and the centre of our universe. It’s said that every guy in the Regiment has the outline of the Fan graven on his heart.

‘What we’ll do is come round the ridge here, across the feature known as the Windy Gap, then up a horrendous climb known as Jacob’s Ladder. You almost have to use your hands to go up. The path’s been eroded out of the clay and you’re on the edge of some jagged rocks, which fall away to your right. On Endurance you’re supposed to average four ks an hour, but on the ladder you come to a grinding halt. That’s why you have to run down the hills. In fact, the guys start jogging the moment they get on to any downward slope.

‘Anyway, the ladder takes us up the back of the Fan to the summit. Then we drop down here, skirt round the flank of Corn Du and head for the obelisk… here. After that we swing away on this path, and come down to the Storey Arms on the main road. Used to be a pub, but now it’s an outdoor education centre. Cross the road, and we’ll climb up on to Fan Fawr. The spot height there’s one of your check-points, and it’s quite difficult to find. The course then takes you right away to the Cray Reservoir, in the distance to the west, but we haven’t got time for that today.

‘This last stretch before the Cray is bloody horrible. First there’s miles of moon grass, all tussocks. Then there’s this sod of a wood.’ I pointed to a triangular plantation cradled in a bowl of steep slopes. ‘It’s a hell of a long way round the wood, but going through it’s a bugger because of all the drainage ditches. So either way you’re in the shit. But, as I say, we won’t get that far today. What we’ll do is cross the road again at the AA box, here, and climb back over. Then we’ll go down through the woods to the reservoir, and the dam on which the route ends.’

‘Looks like some hike,’ said Tony.

‘It is. Even with our light loads it’ll take all day.’

We sorted our gear, locked the car and set off. As I expected, Tony moved easily, economically. He could have left me on the climbs, but that day we weren’t racing. Going up the steep lower flank of the Fan, we had no breath to spare for talking; Tony’s only utterance was one sudden, good-humoured outburst: ‘Nothing but rain, stone walls and goddam sheep!’

But then, as we came out on to the ridges, the weather began to break. The rain stopped, the clouds parted, and we started to see great green slopes sweeping away below us on either side. Our spirits lifted, and Tony set in to talk Spanish, slowly and methodically, asking questions about the landscape, describing things we could see. To my surprise, I found I could understand him pretty well, and answers came more easily than I’d expected. Alone with a good friend, and having no reason to feel embarrassed, I found that my confidence built quickly. All the lessons of the past few weeks began to fall into place, and at last the language was making sense. More than that, I found it a pleasure to use.

By the time we’d scrabbled our way up Jacob’s Ladder and reached the summit of the Fan the sun had come out, so we sat by the trig stone to eat our sandwiches. When Tony described the scenery as ‘real pretty’ I didn’t argue. I realized that, to him, used to the huge open spaces of America, the whole environment seemed dinky and small-scale — and on that hazy summer’s day the Brecons were looking their most serene. This, the highest point, might be only 3,000 feet above sea-level, but I knew what the hills could be like when they showed their teeth in the wind and sleet of a winter night. ‘The obelisk’s a memorial to a little boy who died up there one August,’ I said. ‘It was in 1900, and he was trying to cross from one farm to another when the fog came down. Tommy Jones, he was called. It was twenty-nine days before they found him, curled up in a hollow where the pillar now stands.’

From our vantage-point I explained how important it was to try to maintain our height on the way back across Fan Fawr, before the inevitable steep descent to the checkpoint by the AA box on the main road. ‘Thereafter, the route to trig-point 642 is really tough, an absolute ball-breaker: whichever way you go, you can’t avoid fierce climbs and drops.’

We could just make out 642 in the distance to the south. I told Tony that the stone bears a brass plaque in memory of Tony Swerzy, a member of the SAS killed on the Everest expedition of 1984.

And so we went on again, and kept going for the rest of that hazy summer afternoon.

Tony had been allotted a room in camp, but I suggested he might like to spend some nights in the cottage — an offer which he took up with alacrity. Apart from providing cheerful company, he raised culinary standards no end, as baked beans on toast gave way to steaming paella and chilli con carne. He had a heavy hand with the Tabasco, but that suited me fine, and one evening I was inspired to retaliate with the one sure weapon in my armoury, a curry as hot as Hades.

We went up to the Brecons several more times, and spent a couple of weekends walking some of the other routes, including Point-to-Point and Pipeline. We also went over the course for the Heavy Carry day — and with every outing I was improving my fluency in conversational Spanish.

The language course was a tough one, especially for guys like us who were used to a mainly physical existence. Our facilities were good — we had videos, audio-tapes and a separate audio-lab for making tapes of our own if we wanted — but the hours were long, and the lessons demanded a high level of concentration. We kicked off at 9.00 a.m., with the desks in the classroom set out in a horseshoe shape. Round the walls were big posters illustrating various weapons and armoured vehicles, with captions and statistics in Spanish. The poncified major in the Education Corps taught us grammar, and later in the mornings a Colombian professor would come up from Cardiff University to give us conversation. She’d chat to each of us in turn, starting off with ‘Buenos dios. ¿Tiene hora?’ and we’d answer, ‘Si, señora, son las doce menos cuatro,’ or whatever. The woman was a fearsome age, and knee-high to a piss-pot, but she had a great sense of humour, and generally turned the conversation into areas of interest to us: ‘¿Hay un bar por aquí?’ and so on.

By 12.30 everyone would be desperate to clear their heads, so it was into shorts, singlets and trainers and away for a run, five or six miles round the lanes at the back of the camp. On wet days some of the guys preferred a session on the weights in the gym. Then a quick shower, into DPMs again, and a dash down to the NAAFI for a sandwich or a pie, before being back into the classroom for 2 o’clock. By about 3.30 I’d see some of the guys dozing off. They’d have their heads propped in their hands, ostensibly concentrating like hell on their books, but then suddenly a hand would slip and a head would lurch downwards, and the owner would wake up with a start. By the time classes ended at 4.30, we’d all had enough — but then we had a pile of homework to take back with us.

Several months previously I’d applied to go on the Northern Ireland course, and now, one morning after Prayers in the Squadron Interest Room, the SSM said, ‘Right, as soon as we’re finished here, I want to see the following in my office.’ He read out a list of names, and mine was on it.

In we went, one at a time. Tom was sitting at his desk in one corner of the little room, and the squadron clerk was pattering away at his word-processor in the other.

‘OK, Geordie,’ the SSM began. ‘You want to go to the NI Troop?’

‘Right.’

‘We’ve got you down for troop training, starting July twentieth. You OK with that?’

‘Yep. That’s fine.’

‘Good. You want to get yourself down to see Johnny Hopton, who’s running the course. Find out if there’s any particular preparation you can do beforehand. Are you happy with that?’

‘That’s fine.’

‘Right, then. You start on the twentieth.’

I went out feeling chuffed to bollocks. Everyone wanted to get on the NI course, because a posting to Ulster meant live operations, rather than the endless training which otherwise was the Regiment’s lot in peacetime. Ulster meant danger, excitement and the chance to take on a real enemy. I knew that the posting was partly a question of seniority — the head-shed probably needed a couple of sergeants on the course — but I also knew they must have got together and talked about possible candidates, and I was glad to know they hadn’t been put off by my low patch after the Gulf.

The idea of a tour in Northern Ireland naturally made me think more than ever of Kath and Tim. What would happen if they were in Belfast and I got posted there? Would I be able to go and visit them, or would they be out of bounds? The possibility was way off, but I checked — and the answer was that, yes; guys in the troop were allowed to make social visits, provided the area was safe.

The training course would last four months. As I thought of my family, that suddenly began to seem a long time. I found I was missing them, and began to wonder if I should ask Kath to come back. Her mother had had her hip operation in the Musgrave, and it had been a success. The hospital had sent her home after only a week, and Kath’s presence had turned out to be a bit of a godsend. But now that Meg was almost fully mobile again, and out of pain, there was no reason from her point of view why Kath shouldn’t come home.

I would have to admit to everyone — Kath, her parents, and above all myself — that I’d made a big mistake. It wasn’t exactly a question of swallowing my pride; I didn’t feel proud at all — anything but. Rather, it was a question of being certain that I wasn’t going to make things worse by dragging Kath and Tim home. If they did come back, and I got posted across the water, we’d be separated again anyway for the whole year of the tour… The permutations went round and round in my mind. Take action? Or wait some more?

When we sat our final test on the Spanish course, my confidence had built up to a new high, largely because of Tony. Thanks to our conversations, not even the prospect of giving a lecture to the rest of the course could faze me. I stood up and talked for three minutes about the relative merits of Real Madrid and Arsenal as if I was the greatest soccer pundit on the Costa. Besides the talk, we had to answer questions about a video we’d been shown, act as interpreter in a conversation between a Colombian woman and a third party, and write a description of our favourite holiday resort. I chose Corfu, and gave it the works. Next morning, I was amazed to see my name at the top of the list of passes.

That night I phoned Kath and told her the news. She sounded bright and lively, full of the joys of summer. They’d been out somewhere along the coast, and Tim had been paddling in the sea. He was talking a lot now, and he’d been asking where his dad was.

As she talked, the idea I’d been holding back for weeks swept over me. On impulse I said, ‘Listen, Kath. How about coming back?’

I heard her draw in her breath. There was a pause.

‘Why not try it?’ I urged.

Then she said, ‘Geordie! You mean it?’

‘Of course. I’m a whole lot better. I’m back to normal. Off the booze altogether. Things don’t seem right without you.’

She must have burst into tears. Half a minute passed, and I could hear snuffling sounds.

‘Kath — are you there?’

‘Yes. Geordie?’

‘What?’

‘I’m dying to see you.’

‘Great! Come on over, then.’

‘Of course I’ll come. But listen.’

‘What?’

I heard her blow her nose. ‘Mum’s had to go back into hospital. She’s been getting pain down her leg. We’re hoping it’s nothing serious, but the implant could have shifted, and they want her in for a few days’ observation. I’ve told her I’ll be here to look after her when she comes out. I won’t be able to make it for a couple of weeks.’

‘Not to worry. I can wait. As long as I know you’re on your way.’

‘Have you pinched the tops off the beans yet?’

‘Yes,’ I said, telling a white lie. ‘I did that.’

‘Brilliant,’ she said. ‘Lots of love, Geordie.’

‘Same to you.’

As soon as I put the phone down, I whipped out into the vegetable patch. Jesus, I thought, I’ve boobed here. The fucking beans were nearly up to my shoulder and covered with big white flowers! The smell was enough to stop you in your tracks. What was I supposed to do? Pick the flowers off? No — that would take forever. ‘Pinch the tops off,’ she’d said. But where did the top begin? What was top and what was stalk? There seemed to be bunches of buds all the way up. In the end I thought, To hell with it, and went along the rows nipping four or five inches off the top of each plant, and hoping the damn things would survive.