Backbites:PARA-NOIA

Geoffrey Beattie meets a Falklands vet who's turned trauma into muscle

He was sitting hunched over his beer in the dark, dreary club on a Sunday afternoon, with his mates. He was wearing a sweatshirt and Wranglers. A broad, muscular back which was just a bit too muscular, the proportions evidently shaped and moulded by hard work in the gym, and steroids. The barman in the club looked a little wary. "I saw that lot in a restaurant one Sunday night. Three men came in with shotguns to shoot them. I couldn't believe it. There must have been an argument or something. So these guys levelled their shotguns at them and said `Get down on your knees. You're going to die.' One of the gang was in the toilet and he came out and saw what was going on. He punched one of the fellas. The rest jumped the other two. I heard afterwards that the police said it was this lot's fault anyway. They said that the men with the guns were scared of them because they were so big. The shotguns had been nicked, but they still only got 18 months."

The barman pulled the beer slowly. "I wouldn't fancy getting on the wrong side of them, would you?"

This was not at all what I wanted to hear. I was two hours late for my interview with John, an ex-Para, a Falklands vet, and a man, in his own words, on a very short fuse.

I asked John to tell me about his background. "I left school at 15 and was an apprentice butcher for a while. Then I went into the iron foundry, but it frightened me to death. Whenever they tapped the kilns out, you were always getting burned. The fumes were terrible. It was like Dante's Inferno. I didn't have any qualifications, so I joined the Army.

"It all seemed very glamorous. This was in the late-Seventies. I turned up at the depot in Aldershot wearing a Second World War flying jacket, a pair of loon pants I'd bought from Virgin and a pair of platform soles. When I was walking through the gates, this man said to me, `Where the fucking hell have you parked the Spitfire?' He gave me a bit of useful advice - `If you want to get anywhere in this life, lad, you'll buy yourself a pair of Wranglers, a pair of desert boots and a sweatshirt.' I did this immediately.

"I found the training hard. Nowadays, the training staff can't be brutal to men. But in my day, they could do what they liked to you. And I'm not talking about a little tap on the head either, I'm talking about a proper punch - on the back of the head, anywhere, to get you motivated. Now, it's the soft shoe shuffle. That's why the soldiers today aren't as good as they were. But we all suffered the same together. That was important. The section corporals beasted us. That's what they call it, `beasting'. But you need that to motivate you. There was one corporal in particular - if I saw him today, I'd kill him."

I wanted to point out that this was a little incongruous. After all, he had just praised the training methods of the Paras. But I kept quiet.

"They teach you everything in the Paras," continued John. "Even how to shower properly, because a lot of guys didn't really know how to wash. They were from the slums. They started with the basics, and then tried to weld you into a little team.

"My first posting in Northern Ireland was Crossmaglen. A right place - plenty of action. In those days, the IRA were pretty keen, so if you weren't keen you were going to get yourself dead. In 1976, a pal of mine from Sheffield took cover beside a bike and the frame was packed with plastic explosives. There wasn't a lot left of the man. All he got from the Army was a sanger, a fortified position, in Crossmaglen named after him. They send you out in a fire position after an explosion like that, but that's stupid. The man who did it is already gone. He's sitting on the other side of the border, drinking a cup of tea and having a sandwich. All you're left with are the bits of body to pick up. This was my initiation into the dirty war. I was a bit shell-shocked. They got us straight out again on patrol. Just like if you fall of a bike, you get straight back on again. That's what they did."

He leaned back in his chair. "Over the years, I lost quite a lot of friends in South Armagh. The IRA were dead keen, and very professional."

It was a curious word, "keen". Were the Argentinians as keen? John's eyes narrowed, until he was looking at me through two watery slits. "The Falklands was the coldest, most inhospitable place on this earth. In any month of the year, it can snow, rain and be sunny - one after the other. And there's always a wind. It's basically the arsehole of the world. In my opinion, it was not worth saving. Put that down - not worth saving. We only went there so that someone could win an election.

"We did our main action on a place called Mount Longden. We went in for a silent attack. But that all fucked up - big style. A pal of mine stood on a mine that blew his foot off. The next thing we knew, this mountain was just ringed with fire by these Argentinian conscripts and the 501 Bouzo Tactico [sic], their equivalent of our SAS. The whole mountain lit up. We were frightened to death. We were tramping up this hillside thinking, `There's nobody fucking here', then all of a sudden, bang! It's when you grow up real quick. People were crying, people were screaming. That's what it was like. People say to me, `War is all about Queen and country', but that's a load of shite. You are fighting for yourself and your mates."

He took a long, hard swig of his lager. "You know something, in proper war, you end up on your own. You've lost the rest of your section, and you meet other people who have lost their section. You go forward with them for a bit, then you have a cup of tea, with these mortars screaming past you. You keep moving forward, because you know that the only way home is through the top of this mountain.

"The Argentinians were well-armed and well-fed, contrary to what people have said in the past. They had brilliant clothing. We ended up wearing their boots, because ours were crap. We ended up using their rifles, because ours fucked up. We used their grenades. Ours were good, but we couldn't get enough on the mountain, so we used theirs. Their special forces were very good. They were taking out people from 800 metres with one-shot kills. They were well-trained men and brave, but they died like all the rest. Some of the conscripts weren't very brave. We found some conscripts cowering in a hole, but we killed them anyway. We killed whatever we could."

When people re-live events, their eyes sometimes have a faraway look, the pupils darting this way and that. "It went silent on the mountain, and you could hear somebody shouting in English, `Fix bayonets!' and all you could hear was bayonets being fitted to rifles. We did the last bayonet charge the British Army has ever done." John's eyes were miles away.

"The thing about war is that all the things you can't do in this life, you can do. I had nightmares about it for years. My mum came in and disturbed me in bed and I nearly killed her. It was like in the films - when they have flashbacks to 'Nam. It's a right old cliche, but it's true. Every night I was under artillery bombardment. I can't tell you how frightening that sound is - when it's whistling in and you know that it's coming for you. You can make yourself so small, when you try. You can get into any tiny little gap.

"We came back from the Falklands and after two days were sent home on leave. We were all totally fucked up in the head. After the Gulf War, they gave people counselling, but not after the Falklands. It would have been too expensive. They sent 600 madmen back to this country from my battalion. A lot of guys got locked up because of excess aggression. The public thought we were rowdies, but we weren't, we were just fucked up. I'll fight at a moment's notice. I can kick out at anything. I once punched a guy in for putting `Don't Cry For Me, Argentina' on the jukebox. It was only when they introduced the words `Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder' that I realised what was wrong with me."

John bought himself out of the Paras a year after the Falklands. "I got a job as a hod carrier in 1983. It was then that I took up weight training. I saw really big men walking around town and working on doors, and I thought they looked really good. They were all on steroids, of course. There's no way eating chicken breasts can make you that big. But you have to know what you're doing. I eventually found a doctor who gave me good advice. Although I'm only 5ft8, I went from 11 stone to 15 stone seven pounds through taking steroids. I've been 17 stone, but that was too big - I got nose bleeds. I worked on doors, but I was never a thug. I never had really bad `roid rage'."

John told me that he felt he was calming down - he hadn't been in a fight for nearly two weeks. "My wife has helped me enormously. She wants to listen to what I've been through. The last time I kicked off was in a club. A man started to chat me up. He asked me to guess how old he was. I didn't want to kick off, because I thought I might have misinterpreted what he was saying. The following week, he came up to the club again and said, `Oh, it's cold. Does anybody want warming up?' My head came off then. So I walked him down the street, and then I punched him.

"You see, the thing is that I'd much rather not fight. I like a peaceful life. But I won't be fucked about and I won't suffer fools. I don't throw myself about to get people to have a pop at me. There are certain people who have positive presence and people who have negative presence. Some people have `victim' stamped all over them. You think, `look at this dork here, he's just asking to be rolled'. I've got positive presence. I've never been mugged. I never will be."

He looked me straight in the eyes. "Would you tackle me?"

I had answered his question before he had managed to enunciate the last syllable.