Immediate Action by Andy McNab

up whatever was going to get dropped and then run back into the camp. I picked up two black plastic bags.
        Both contained what felt like Armalites. Then four or five blokes jumped from the helicopter. They had long curly hair and sideburns that came down and nearly met at the c ' bin like the lead singer of Slade, and they were wearing duvet jackets, jeans, and dessies (desert boots).
        Basically the donkeys, which was us, picked the kit up and legged it in with them. We were told not to speak to these people, just to let them get on with what they were doing. Not that any of us wanted to speak to them anyway; we didn't know how they'd react. All we knew was that they were the Special Air Service, big hard bastards, and they were going to fill us in. Me, the eighteen-year-old, I wasn't going to say jack shit.
        There was only one TV in the whole camp, and that was in a room full of lockers and bits and pieces of shit all over the place. So everybody used to get in really early and book a place, sitting on top of lockers and hanging off chairs, getting on wall units and all this, to watch.
        Even if blokes were asleep, you'd wake them up for Top of the Pops.
        The cookhouse was no bigger than a room in an ordinary house, and that- included the cooking facilities.
        We'd get a tray, go in and get four slices of bread, make big sandwiches and a mug of tea, and go and claim our places for the show.
        Blokes would be there straight from the shower, squashed up next to blokes in shit state straight from the field. Everybody would be getting stuck into a fistful of egg banjo. The room stank of cigarettes, sweat, mud, cowshit, and talcum powder.
        At the time, just after Christmas 1978, Debbie Harry and Kate Bush were on the same T.O.T.P. Debbie Harry was singing "Denis," and Kate Bush was doing "Wuthering Heights." When Kate Bush came on, the whole rifle company used to shout, "Burn the witch!" 'Then these blokes turned up as well, and I thought, They're only human after all because they've come in to watch Debbie Harry and Kate Bush.
        They didn't push in; they didn't get the prime spot; they just slotted in where they could; then pushed off again. Their behavior amazed me; they came in with respect.
        I envied them their apparent freedom to come and go as they pleased. I thought, it must be an amazing life, just flying in, doing the job, then going back to wherever they live.
        But there again, I thought, there was no chance whatsoever of a lowly rifleman like me making the grade, and that was that.
        There were eight infantry battalions at Tidworth, our new base in Wiltshire. The entertainment facilities in the town consisted of three pubs (one of which was out of bounds), two chip shops, a launderette, and a bank.
        The army spent all day teaching us to be aggressive, and then we'd go down to the town, get bored and drunk, and use our aggression against each other. We'd then get prosecuted severely as if we'd done something wrong.
        We did all the garrison sort of stuff like field firing exercises; then we started training again for Northern Ireland. The battalions wouldrotate, on average, one tour a year. I saw it as a great opportunity to save money. As a rifleman I could save a grand a tour because there was even less to do over the water than in Tidworth.
        There were three other bonuses. One, we got fifty pence extra pay per day, and two, we got soft toilet paper instead of the hard stuff in UK garrisons. It was actually dangled as a carrot during training:
        "Remember, it's soft toilet rolls over the water." And three, it was a pleasure to get away from Tidworth again. For the next three years the routine was going on exercises, get stinking drunk in Tidworth and Andover, and going over the water.
        People were coming back with their grand and getting ripped off buying cars that promptly fell apart. One