I went back to lie on my bed, thinking Shaun would forget all about it – he was after all looking a bit dazed. I was wrong. Half an hour later, the Colonel marched in. Without a moment’s hesitation, Shaun leapt to his feet, roaring, ‘Ward! Ward! Shun!’
As one man, all the alkies shot to attention with a stiff salute and stood there rigid. The Colonel, an astonished look on his face, was rendered nearly speechless. ‘Er… Oh. Very good, chaps. Very good. Carry on.’
You didn’t need a sense of humour for the videos they showed us, they were funny enough in themselves. They were meant to convey the evils of drink and inspire us to mend our ways. It was difficult taking them seriously. There was the Jimmy Greaves’ story – a famous footballer hits the net, then hits the bottle. Then the Glasgow rubber men – drunks staggering down Buchanan Street in broad daylight. When this particular one was shown I used to play ‘Spot the Jock’. Jimmy the Jock who’d saved Ginge on the death march claimed that he had a leading role in one of the street scenes. And finally, the third video, the main attraction, the X Certificate horror film: cirrhosis! Full technicolour close-ups and cross-sections of gory livers – dark red healthy ones wobbling on mortuary slabs and then alcohol-sodden ones looking like jellies at a kids’ party that someone had been sick over. Aversion therapy, they called it – just like a scene from A Clockwork Orange. Or it would have been if anyone paid any attention.
‘The liver becomes congested with blood, first grows very large, and then begins to shrink and harden…’
The film quality was poor – the soundtrack scratchy, the pictures flickering and popping.
‘Haemorrhage from the stomach may arise, the blood being vomited or passed through the bowel…’
It was like an out-of-date training film for student doctors, the medical equivalent of Mrs Beeton’s cookbook.
‘The urine becomes scanty and turbid. Ascites or dropsy of the peritoneal cavity is very often present…’
I looked around the room at the other half-dozen lads in the audience. Two were asleep, one was staring out of the window, one was reading a magazine and the other two were watching the film with dramatic indifference.
Phase two of the treatment was nearing its end: ten days of lectures, videos and interviews, and an LFT count every morning. The results of the count were transferred to a graph. If the line dropped below the critical threshold and stayed below, they considered you fit enough for release – physically fit, that is. If any psychological stress fractures were detected, that was an altogether different matter. And they were clever. They shifted, prodded, probed, searched the defences, sought the chink in the mental armour, X-rayed the brain for hairline cracks. If any cracks were found and they were serious enough, the brain would be stamped ‘Rejected’ and cast down the chute into the Stygian depths of Ward 5 below.
Twelve per cent of casualties in any major battle are psychiatric cases, soldiers suffering from combat stress. For many, the symptoms are temporary and manageable. The rest are the ones with unseen wounds. You can see an arm in a sling, a leg in plaster, but you can’t see their wounds. They are shunned by society with even greater revulsion than those who have obviously horrific wounds – severed limbs, faces grossly disfigured by burns, sightless eyes. The ones with the mental wounds are often the ones who have done and seen things that the ordinary man in the street couldn’t even begin to conceive of, in order to safeguard the well-being of that same man and to allow him to continue walking down that same street in freedom. Their reward is to be entombed in their own minds, like a dead Pharaoh’s followers doomed to remain in their master’s burial chamber, deep in the centre of a pyramid, listening in horror as the sand that held the great building blocks in check trickles away and the stones come crashing down to seal off the passageways to the world outside.
Some of the characters in Ward 11 looked like prime candidates for demotion to Ward 5, first-class specimens just waiting to slide down the chute. One of them had built up an irrational grudge against his orderly officer. One day, while the officer was doing his regular rounds, he’d jumped on top of him out of a two-storey window and broken his collarbone. Another character was worse still. He’d attempted suicide by slashing his wrists. He’d been in Northern Ireland and couldn’t stand the stress. The crazy thing was, when I questioned him further, I discovered he hadn’t even been on the streets: he was a mechanic with the REME! Yet a third bloke, only about twenty-three years old, had a severe case of the DTs. He had to be kept locked away. He was only ever let out to go to the toilet, when two orderlies would march him through the ward, his feet dragging along the floor, his body shaking like a leaf.
My case seemed minor compared to these people’s. I should never have been there in the first place. I’d already proved I was physically fitter than the rest. I now had to prove I was mentally fit. Tomorrow, I would face the big one. My interview and assessment with the chief psychiatrist. It all now depended on one man.
13
The Embassy Siege
The interview was preying on my mind. I’d tossed and turned all night, and now a fog of tiredness clouded my brain. I took some deep breaths of air to try to clear my thoughts. When I reached the office I knocked on the door sharply and confidently, just once, summoning up some strength by doing so, letting the person inside know I was a force to be reckoned with.
‘Enter.’ It was more formal, more authoritative than the polite, ‘Come in’.
I went inside. The owner of the voice was speaking on the telephone. I looked at the chair. He caught my glance and gestured to me to remain standing exactly where I was. That was ominous. He continued with the seemingly leisurely conversation on the phone. Delaying tactics. Power games. I’d seen it all before. They try to belittle you by showing who’s in control. The big desk, the impressive chair, your small chair, lower than his – it’s all part of the strategy.
The conversation finished and the Colonel put the phone down. He paused for a moment, then picked up a thick sheaf of papers from his desk and waved them furiously in the air. ‘Look at these, Sergeant! These signals from Hong Kong, they’re all about you!’ As he spoke the word ‘you’ his voice rose several decibels. He flung the signals towards the rear of the room. They hit the back wall with a crash and fluttered to the floor in an untidy heap. ‘We are the people who go into these places, do the job, keep quiet about the job, and at the end we leave the job silently, and we return to the UK as if nothing has happened. What do you have to say in your defence?’
I launched into my plea of mitigation modelled on the one in Kowloon Court, focusing on the self-defence angle and ending with, ‘You don’t have to go to the jungles of Malaya to find a jungle.’
The Colonel pondered for a while, then said, ‘Well, Sergeant. You should not have been there in the first place. But there are certain mitigating circumstances surrounding this case. Therefore, although I could RTU you for life and you would never return to the SAS, I am going to RTU you for only eighteen months.’
So it was back to the Royal Engineers, back to Southwood Camp.
I decided to start off as I meant to go on. I would seize the psychological initiative and gain the upper hand. I knew the very first thing they would do would be to order me to get a short back and sides. This was their way of humiliating people, suppressing the individuality. I beat them to it by having my hair shaved virtually down to the wood before I left Hereford.