PARA FOR THE COURSE

The conflict in the North is commonly analysed in terms of the kind of people involved in the violence. Paramilitaries, for example, are frequently explained, or explained away, as psychopaths or racketeers.
But recently, publicity surrounding a book by Vincent Bramley throws light on the kind of people involved in military, as opposed to paramilitary, groups.
Bramley was a corporal in the Third Battalion of the Parachute Regiment. His book, called "Excursion to Hell", is about what happened to him in the Falklands War. It has sparked controversy in Britain because of its account of how some men of 3 Para shot and bayoneted unarmed prisoners to death and cut off their ears as trophies during the taking of Mount Longdon. A World In Action programme the week before last gave a graphic account of some of the incidents.
Detectives from Scotland Yard have travelled to the Falklands to investigate, and are to visit Argentina to talk to a number of men taken prisoner on the Islands, including one who says that two members of 3 Para botched an attempt to murder him at a time when he was unarmed and posed no threat to them.
The controversy in Britain centres on whether the investigation should be underway at all. Many press commentators and MPs have argued that if some Paras lost the run of themselves in the afterglow of battle, so what? That's war. If a few did desperate things, they also did good soldiering. What's to be gained now from digging up the entrails of small atrocities and raking them over for inspection?

T here's a point here. All manner of appalling things happen in war. I once spent a couple of years transplanting trees in London with a team of ex-squaddies who would occasionally while away wet-time (when a cloud the size of a man's hand passed across the face of the sun we'd implement a union agreement that we didn't have to work in the rain) recalling their service in the Malayan "Emergency" when they'd cut the heads or smaller bits off "Chinese communists". I remember one fellow passing round creased pictures of himself and his mates holding their prizes aloft.
These were conscript soldiers, the last intake of National Servicemen, not professionals. Generally speaking, when you pressed them, they'd admit to shame at what they'd gotten up to, but also to a certain fascination with the fact that they'd had it in them to do it.
And they'd all tell you that, hell, they'd been pussy-cats when compared to the prestige outfits, the crack troops, the corps d'elite of the military machine, like the SAS, the marines, the Paras.
The Paras are regarded by all other regiments, and especially by themselves, as not just the cream but the crème de la crème. This view is implicit in the length and legendary toughness of the regiment's selection procedure, which discards a large majority of them who aspire to the famous red beret.
Bramley's book, and a number of feature articles about the book published in the last few weeks, provide a detailed and devastating account of the qualities which go to make a Para, and of the culture which all-pervades the regiment.
Bramley admits to having been a "problem child" and then a disturbed adolescent, into football hooliganism and generalised violence. By the age of sixteen he had a conviction for causing actual bodily harm. It was during a period spent in a detention centre that he discovered that he liked this life of short hair, rigid discipline and hard physical fitness. On release he applied to become a Para, and felt immediately among his own.
"Remember where your average Para comes from", the Independent on Sunday quotes a corporal from Bramley's battalion. "In my section there was me - and I'd been a foster child - and twelve men under me . . . There wasn't a single one of them who came from a normal family, who hadn't been in council care, in foster homes and the rest of it . . . The Para Reg., with its rules and regulations and discipline, became our family".
And family solidarity was the order of the day. As Bramley describes it, the life of the Para during peacetime was filled with togetherness, extreme drunkenness and constant violence. Many looked forward to being able to kill.
On World In Action one ex-Para recalled his reaction to the order to go into action on Mount Longdon: "To be given the order to fix bayonets, and just to fix my own bayonet, and to actually use it for the purpose it's designed for, to me it was a joy. It was a joy to fire a weapon for the first time, to kill someone, or do damage to someone".
Everyday violence was not just accepted, but celebrated. A sizeable number of Paras, regarding themselves as representative of the "true spirit" of the regiment, were devotees of tracts such as "Who's Who in Nazi Germany" and "Hitler's Teutonic Knights".
They would end boozy, brawling evenings with heartfelt renditions of "Lorelei" - the Nazi song featured in the film "Cabaret", which proclaims that "Tomorrow belongs to me" - or the SS marching son, "When We March on England", or "The Fallschirmiager Song", the anthem of the German airborne assault troops who spearheaded the blitzkrieg on the Western front in 1940. The Paras wanted to be seen as separate from, and threatening towards, the society around them.
They favoured rituals which celebrated their own relish of practices ordinary people would find disgusting. Consuming vomit, urine and excrement, for example.
Members of 3 Para found it irritating that it had been their colleagues of 1 Para who had shot dead thirteen Derry neighbours of mine in January 1972. They resented the taunt that, "We shot one, we shot two, we shot thirteen more than you". This appears to have been taken as a challenge to their honour.
In light of all this it's not surprising that members of 3 Para on Mount Langdon killed and mutilated prisoners. It was in character.
A former member of the battalion is quoted in the Independent on Sunday: "I remember one bloke, we'd overrun a bunker, and he bayoneted this Argy through the throat and as the guy fell back dead he grabbed him and sawed his ear off with the bayonet. 'Right', he said, 'I'll be having that', and it went into his pouch".
Another man from 3 Para, identified on World In Action as Stuart "Scouse" McLaughlin, was recommended for a posthumous decoration for bravery during the battle for Mount Longdon, but was turned down when it was discovered that his ammunition pouch had been filled with ears and other Argentine body parts.
Some say that McLaughlin should have received his award anyway, despite his trophy-bag of body-pieces. All who fought alongside him confirm that he displayed reckless disregard for his own safety on the freezing slopes of Mount Longdon, and contributed mightily to victory in the battle.

There's a point there, too. It makes no sense to see the Paras' readiness to make rubbish of ordinary rules of human decency as a blemish on their behaviour in battle. On the contrary, it is surely the fact that they find viciousness congenial which makes them such exceptional warriors.
They are selected, trained and equipped for the precise purpose of inflicting the maximum amount of physical damage on people identified as enemies by their political chiefs. How could they perform this function that they had been meticulously prepared for if they thought of the enemy as having rights, dignity, humanity of any sort?
Sawing the ears off an Argentine like he was an animal slaughtered in a blood sport must make perfect sense to the Para-military mind.
It's understandable that British true-Tories like Nicholas Fairbairn are contemptuous of the investigation of what happened on Mount Longdon, that they long for the return of Mrs. Thatcher, under whom, so they say, such holy-joe moralising wouldn't be tolerated for a minute.
In the meantime, let us note that it was 3 Para which won that other victory in the pubs of Coalisland last year.
And let's keep Corporal Bramley's book in mind the next time some Fianna Failer, Fine Gaeler, Labourite, PD or Democratic Leftist starts wittering on about what sort of savages there must be in the North to have such a high tolerance-level for violence.