Bomb Squad Men: The Long Walk

This programme contains scenes which some viewers may find upsetting.

In the white heat of the conflict in the early 1970s,

Northern Ireland was a laboratory

for bomb-making and bomb disposal technology.

The counter-measures developed then

help save lives in Afghanistan today,

as NATO forces fight the Taliban's deadly use

of improvised explosive devices, better known as IEDs.

The hard yards earned by those guys in Northern Ireland in the early '70s

have formed all the philosophy and principles that we have

for improvised explosive device disposal.

Remote means, the wearing of a bomb suit, electronic counter-measures,

all that experience has been learnt from Northern Ireland,

especially 321 Squadron, which was operating at that time.

David Greenaway, Paul Wharton and Dave Young

served as bomb disposal officers in 321 Squadron

at the height of the Northern Ireland conflict.

We lost 17 operators.

None of these guys, not one of them received a medal,

and I think that's wrong.

With limited training, ammunition technical officers,

better known as ATOs, were about to step into a conflict like no other.

The fact is that in the early '70s, they were ordinary men,

doing an extraordinary job.

And it was a job that many of them never expected to do,

but found themselves doing it in the teeth of the storm,

the like of which probably the world had never seen.

A bomb has an effect on the human body like no other weapon.

The shockwave alone detaches the limbs from the trunk.

It enters the mouth and blows off the top of the head.

It turns human tissue into vapour.

In some instances, all that remains is the spine.

The IRA planted their first bomb of the Troubles in 1969,

marking the start of a 30-year-long campaign.

An ATO's lonely approach to a suspect device

soon gained the fitting moniker,

the long walk.

I would put on a bomb suit, my number two would dress me,

and I'd be going through in my mind my plan of action.

People say

the only reason we wore the suits was to keep our bodies together.

If you're on top of a bomb, the chances are,

if it goes off, you're not going to live.

The last thing that goes on,

and it cuts you off from the rest of the world, is the helmet.

The visor comes down, away you go.

There's something inside of you saying,

walk slowly, and it'll take you longer,

or walk quickly, you're there quicker and get away quicker.

You're using all your senses. You were smelling, you were listening.

Your mind was working in overdrive, thinking about plan A.

You can feel your pulse quickening, you can feel your palms sweating.

As you walk, you know that there's nothing going to save you

if that device functions.

TICKING

When I was posted to Londonderry,

I always marched in front of the colonel,

and he laid the law down to me

that I was there to do the job as I was trained to do,

I wasn't there to be a hero,

and no-one during his tour of duty would be collecting medals.

Which was how it turned out.

I must say, the colonel did pick up an OBE when he left the province.

You know, I expected to see peace and normality,

but it's even more normal than I expected.

All the people just going about their everyday business.

No overt security measures anywhere.

The number of people actually on the streets has impressed me,

which I didn't expect to see.

It just shows how resilient people are, if you give them a chance.

It shows how our mindset is still back 30 or 40 years ago.

There's a danger of that, yeah.

'I always wanted to be a soldier.'

So as soon as I was old enough, which was 15, I went down and signed up.

Because I was a grammar school boy and done well in the aptitude tests,

they said I should become an ammunition technician.

Of course at that time,

nobody mentioned that part of the job involved bomb disposal.

The job is mainly around the inspection, repair,

storage and transport of the British Army's vast ammunition stocks.

You need to know the ins and outs

of all the different ammunition types,

natures and systems and so on.

We were basically ammunition examiners,

and then of course Northern Ireland kicked off, and then very quickly,

I realised what I'd got into,

as did others on the course.

But it was too late then.

'I was a young soldier,

'I hadn't seen really very much of life at all.

'We arrived on the ferry and I was amazed, really,

'the soldiers themselves, it looked like

'they haven't slept for three or four nights

'and their uniforms were tatty.

'Their weapons were wrapped in black masking tape,'

their vehicles were spattered in paint and battered and smashed.

That was my first impression of Northern Ireland.

Wherever you looked, it was sandbag bunkers,

machine guns, vehicles rolling up and down, blue lights flashing.

It looked like some sort of insurrection was under way.

The earliest IRA devices were basic and unstable,

with timing mechanisms that differed little

from those used by Republicans in the 1880s.

The IRA was just learning its trade, but so too were the bomb squad.

A personal battle between IRA bomb designers

and the members of 321 EOD had begun.

The basic IED comprises very few components.

A power source, a battery,

some form of circuitry that links the battery to an initiator.

A switch of some description to arm the IED,

then you've got the main charge which is either military explosive,

a commercial explosive

or a home-made explosive of some description.

The training of today's ATOs is overseen by Colonel Gareth Collett,

who has the final say over who deploys on operations

in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Gareth served two tours in Northern Ireland.

One as an ATO in 1993.

Going right back to the start of it,

the types of IED that people may encounter would be victim-operated.

You have to stand on it or pull something for it to function.

Command, that could be command wire types of improvised explosive devices, or time.

During the early days of the campaign

in Northern Ireland, those three types of device developed

to the best advantage that the Provisional IRA could gain from them.

When Northern Ireland first started,

the tools of the trade were tin snips. Scissors.

We had no remote equipment, so a lot of the early devices

were cut into with a Stanley knife,

and wires cut with wire snips.

We never, ever cut wires unless we knew exactly what was there.

This business about walking up to a bomb

and cutting the red wire is pure Hollywood.

The only time I cut wires is if I'd split a device open

and it was all laid out and I knew exactly what I was dealing with.

You're looking to separate out the electrical circuit

and you're looking to separate out the explosive circuit.

If you can separate either of those two,

the device is well on its way to being rendered safe.

By 1972, the IRA seemed to be able to cause

civilian and military deaths at will

in cities and towns across Northern Ireland.

People just staggering around in all different directions.

Dust and muck in their eyes. Terrible.

I saw two people dead and there were at least three women with no legs.

Screaming...

Some in the British Army felt that,

in the difficult urban environment, they were losing the war.

In the urban environment, line of sight is difficult.

There's always the option for a shoot to be put up against you

and it's quite easy for the perpetrator of the IED to escape.

You have to go where the roads are, you have to negotiate yourself

through all the clutter that you find in that sort of environment.

You've got to get there as quickly as you possibly can

to try and mitigate the threat and bring the situation back to normal.

So this is Royal Avenue. And somewhere down here...

..was the Grand Central Hotel.

Behind which was the GPO sorting office.

Now, at the moment, I can't recognise anything at all,

so I guess we walk down here

and see if I can pick up a couple of the side streets.

My team and I were sent down into Belfast

to be located in the Grand Central Hotel,

which was being used as a barracks for the city centre regiment.

This is all that's left of Garfield Street, I think,

because I suspect there used to be a road here.

So the central door of the hotel was...

which we all poured out of... was somewhere around here.

But actually, all that has completely gone.

It's a very nice-looking Debenhams.

'Late morning, suddenly the bomb alarm went off in the building.'

And I said, "I'm an ATO, what do you want? What's going on?"

And he said, "There's a bomb in the sorting office,

"you need to evacuate now."

All arrived round the front of the Grand Central Hotel,

and I was trying to collect my thoughts.

It was full of people.

It was just teeming with noise and soldiers mixed up with civilians.

Suddenly there was a small explosion in the sorting office.

At which point a chap then came out of the sorting office,

which was about 50 yards away down this narrow alley,

and I said, "Is there anybody else in there?"

He said he was the boiler man and he didn't know, no-one had told him.

So I said, "Right, I'm just going to have a quick look inside,

"make sure there's nobody there."

So I ran into the building.

I went up to the mezzanine floor, and I looked through this door,

into this room full of smoke billowing out.

In the back of my mind was,

this is an unusual modus operandi for the IRA.

Small devices in this way

are not the way they attack the Grand Central Hotel.

And, er...

So I felt, well, I'd better leave here. I've done enough.

I left the room, got to the top of the stairs

and a second device detonated, I found out later,

above the doorway that I'd just walked out.

And the blast blew me down the stairs,

bits of plaster and rubble falling about me.

I had the distinct feeling that the hair on the back of my head

was just stood up rigid.

And then, five minutes, 10 minutes later, this massive explosion

from the GPA sorting office, just this whacking great ba-boom.

You can't help but reflect on it,

you have to think how close to death you've come.

Um...

All operators have these near-death experiences.

There's no doubt about it.

You don't do this job without near-death experiences.

Most people are lucky, one way and the other.

If you were to ask me, what would I rather be?

Er... A highly proficient operator or lucky?

I think I would rather be lucky.

The IRA had developed a sophisticated new device

containing two motion sensitive switches,

which functioned as an anti-handling device.

Suddenly, the ATO had become the target.

The first operator to be killed was Captain Stewardson.

Captain Stewardson was called

to the Castlerobin Orange Lodge near Belfast,

and he was faced with a wooden container,

and he was attempting to remove the lid off this device

when it functioned.

We had scientists in UK working round the clock

to produce things that could assist us,

and they came up with disruptors.

Disruptors were normally fired by explosive,

and sending something into the device so fast

that it would cut wires

quicker than the battery could send the power round to the detonator.

Once you've disrupted a device,

you would then put a hook and line on what was hopefully now

a scattered device to pull it to pieces.

You could then cut out the detonator and the battery,

provided it wasn't a complicated device.

But each of those is cat and mouse.

A type of device would be developed and used against us to good effect.

They would look at the equipment solutions that we'd brought in

to try and deal with that,

and they changed the way in which they employed the device

to their advantage.

I think in the early days in Northern Ireland,

we had a few fatalities,

and each one was investigated and gone into in great detail.

It was discovered that there might be the possibility

that some of the operators were ignoring

some of the newfangled devices that were coming in.

It was thought at the highest level that some people were perhaps

getting high on the adrenaline and taking unnecessary risks.

And they introduced psychometric testing

to try and weed out the traits in someone's personality,

where he might disregard safety procedures and take additional risks.

The first thing we had to do, was sit for about four hours

and go through four exam papers.

The questions were so loaded towards suicidal tendencies

that we knew what the aim of that questionnaire was.

But then we had others that would ask questions like,

would you like to wear pink furry slippers?

Do you like looking down railway lines that disappear into tunnels?

This sort of thing.

We couldn't understand why they were asking all these stupid questions.

None of us had any idea what the right answer was to these,

so it was quite random.

And then you would have an hour's interview with the Army psychiatrist.

He, in the end, would say whether you were fit to go

to Northern Ireland or not.

The IRA bombing campaign was in full swing in Derry,

where Dave Greenaway and Dave Young had been posted,

involving regular trips over the often treacherous Glenshane Pass.

Whenever we had to go down to Lisbon,

normally to change a bit of equipment that had broken down

or to collect a bit of equipment that had been developed,

we used to come over the Glenshane,

and we knew the baddies used this as a training area.

We often travelled in a covert car, a Q car.

We were always concerned that we might get stopped

by an illegal checkpoint.

There were two of you, you had pistols,

but you didn't have an escort or anything like that.

If you were jumped on, it was up to you to get yourself out of it.

Luckily, that never happened.

We were OK doing the things we were trained to do,

but the actual soldiering part of it,

we were slightly out of our comfort zone.

A bit foreign to us!

Although they always say,

you're a soldier first and a tradesman second. But, er...yeah.

In Londonderry, there were so many bombs being placed,

especially on the weekend.

Saturday, it was not unusual

to have 15 to 20 bombs in the city at one time.

The Diamond, Austin's chemist and Ferry Quay Street.

One of these must be... Is that Ferry Quay Street?

I always remember we went to the Little Diamond

and I was doing a job there and I shot a shotgun at the device

because it was behind barbed wire

and I wanted a bit of breathing space.

When I shot the shotgun, the crowd started singing, "Nice one, Cyril."

# Nice one, Cyril Nice one, son

# Nice one, Cyril Let's have another one. #

And then they'd go, "Whoo, whoo!"

It was just...

It was a bit surreal because you had this real party atmosphere

and there's a massive great device there in the corner.

It was good.

One night I was called to Austins in the very centre of Londonderry,

a multiple story department store.

The alarm had gone off

and terrorists had been seen going into the building.

The policeman said,

"We were here within minutes of the alarm going off

"and a terrorist might still be in the building."

He said, "if I were you,

"I'd keep your eyes peeled and take a weapon."

I cocked my nine millimetre pistol as well.

I went into the building and I found two devices on the landing,

blast devices, high explosives in them,

and I shotgunned one of them and destroyed the disruptor,

neutralised it and used the disruptor on the other timing powered mechanism

and neutralised that one.

I started to walk round the store to see if there were any more

and I bumped into a counter.

On the other end of the counter, a tailor's dummy fell over

and I spun around and I saw this body flash past my line of sight

and I put three rounds in it before it hit the ground.

I felt rather stupid

when I saw this tailor's dummy with its head all smashed open.

Then I walked around the store and I found four more devices,

so there were six bombs in the store.

I didn't think they'd put any more there to do the job they wanted to do.

I was quite proud of the fact

that I saved the lovely old building, and it's still here today.

I found Londonderry quite a surprising place

because I'd never experienced the sectarianism

and the divided communities.

When I was taken around, and someone said, "This is the Catholic estate, this is the Protestant estate."

It's something I'd never experienced before.

I was up-to-date with current affairs and I did realise

that certain sectors of the community were disadvantaged,

but I didn't see the reason for the violence and the bombs.

In my eyes, there were things that were wrong socially

and they should've been put right

without resorting to violence and lawbreaking.

I remember there was a festival of Derry

and they had a display of model aircraft.

We got our kit out and we were practising with it.

We set our electronic countermeasure equipment to active from passive,

so it swamped the frequencies.

A lot of the model aircraft plunged into The Foyle.

The boss came down screaming, "Shut it off, shut it off!"

I think the radio control model club had quite a few baddies as members.

They used that as a way of acquiring the radio control electronics

that they used in some of the devices we had to deal with.

The technology battle between the IRA and the ATO intensified

as the IRA's bomb-making capability advanced.

They began to develop electro magnetic technology.

Radio controlled bombs.

I was called to the Killea border post,

which was a caravan.

Two or three men had arrived,

placed a cardboard box

inside the caravan,

and then stuck a wire onto the door.

That information led me to presume

that it must have been

a radio controlled device,

because if it was a booby trap, the slamming

of the door would've activated whatever it was supposed to do.

Therefore, the only reason for the wire to be stuck to the door

was that it was an aerial.

I reckon the caravan was just about here.

Yeah.

I remember that field. I don't know if the shrubbery was there then.

I don't think it was. We went into the open field.

But it's, er...

Except for the housing, it's just certainly very familiar. Yeah.

Because it was a custom's post, of course it was on the border.

The terrorist, we found out later on,

was actually situated the other side of the border

in a house not too far distant, waiting for me

to walk up to the caravan.

In those days,

we had very new ECM equipment.

Electronic Counter Measures.

As it was very new,

no-one really knew what it actually did.

So I said to the operator

that I'll dummy an approach

and see what happens.

I'd only gone ten or 15 yards

when he got a signal,

which confirmed that there was a radio controlled device in the area.

The terrorists, wherever we went,

there was always someone there watching us.

We knew that and what they were doing was watching

what we were doing.

Luckily, we had another piece of equipment which allowed me

to set off the device remotely

and therefore we lost a caravan, but we didn't lose a life.

You have to respect the capabilities of your opponent.

If you don't respect him, he'll kill you.

You need to know what his capabilities are,

and by understanding that, you can work out the limitations.

If you look at Provisional IRA in Northern Ireland,

the IEDs range from simple devices

to very complex devices.

You could generally work out from your threat assessment that

if there was no obvious target, it was probably you.

The introduction of the car bomb was a major development by the IRA.

It meant the bomber could conceal the device from the ATO.

He would have to open both car doors and the boot

to locate the bomb so that it could be worked on,

each action providing the opportunity for a booby trap.

Terrorists started making homemade explosives,

and these were less powerful than commercial explosives,

and so they often had to increase the weight of the explosives.

A very convenient way of delivering a bomb to an urban area

would be to put it in a vehicle.

The terrorists also worked out

that if we were given too long to deal with them,

we would be successful in dealing with a car bomb.

And so they used the technique of making shorter

and shorter time delays before the car bomb went off.

Mounting casualties within the bomb squad led commanding officer

Lieutenant Colonel George Styles to ask,

"With men having landed on the moon,

"how come bomb disposal officers have to walk up to a device

"and attach a string to it?"

He and a colleague dreamed up a remote vehicle that could

tow a bomb into a workable space.

Later, it could be used to carry other vital devices

such as disrupters and cameras.

The Wheelbarrow, as it quickly became known,

was a game changer in favour of the ATO.

It often meant the difference

between life and death.

The early, early attempts

at remote controlled vehicles were very crude.

When I was using it, it still had limitations

of not being able to go through doorways and upstairs

and that sort of thing, or cross country.

But the development of the techniques

and the equipment was very, very rapid at that time.

We found that if we were able to put a small charge into the car

to blow the doors and the windows open, quite often this disrupted

the link between the timing mechanism and the main charge.

We often were pushing this equipment to its limits,

and while we were working on the ground, we were also feeding

back information to help develop new bits of equipment.

We were improvising as we went along.

Some of the disruptive equipment that we would use on our devices

were quite violent.

I had an anti-tank gun which we carried in the bag.

An 84mm Carl Gustav anti-tank gun, which we would fire from a stand.

Again, the intention is to disrupt

whatever the target is, so that's quite violent.

Part of the equipment that was developed in the early '70s

was the protective clothing that we wore, called the bomb suit.

This was very, very heavy.

We joked about the bomb suit and said, "What use is this?

"If we're blown up, we're going to be blown to pieces and that's it."

But it was pointed out that while we were making our approach

to a device, should it function, the bomb suit may well save our lives.

Oh, this is very familiar. Yeah.

The middle of one night, I was called out to a suspect car bomb

in Custom House Street, just around the corner from the Guild Hall.

I understand the Guild Hall had been caught in what's known as the binman bomb.

The stained glass windows had been destroyed.

A lot of work was going on to restore the Guild Hall

back to its former glory.

I understand the stained glass windows had just been replaced.

We were at Fort George

and we came down round the back of the Guild Hall.

We parked our vehicle and I set my remote vehicle,

came up this road and down here,

and carried out a controlled explosion.

This is where we set up our incident control point.

I decided after I'd carried out the first controlled explosion,

I had to suit up at this point and walk down the road here,

carrying a weapon just in case I needed it.

You know, a disrupter.

I was thinking about what I planned to do next.

I was hoping the controlled explosion had done the job.

And I got to this point here and I could see the car.

It was just down there by that red letter box.

I realised once I'd turned the corner,

I was in danger from the car if it went up.

I stood at this point here.

I looked into the boot of the car

and I could see two milk churns in the boot.

I could see that all the detonating cords and the power unit

had been disrupted by the controlled explosion, so I thought

the only job that was left to do

was to get the milk churns out of the boot.

CLOCK TICKS

The Wheelbarrow wasn't capable of getting the milk churns out,

but we had a sort of heavy duty, what we called an Eager Beaver,

which is a cross country capability remote control vehicle.

As soon as it touched the vehicle, there was an almighty explosion.

As soon as we heard the blast, we dived underneath the vehicles

and some bits started landing around us.

The two milk churns that had been disconnected from the timing

and power unit, they were expelled and rolled down the road here

and they didn't explode.

We surmised that a third milk churn on the backseat had exploded,

and after putting the front seats together,

we reckoned that it had been booby trapped,

maybe even aimed at someone like myself.

I don't think my bosses were too pleased

because one of the remote control vehicles

had been destroyed in the explosion.

I don't think the people in Londonderry were very pleased

because the stained glass windows were blown in again.

But having said that, if I hadn't removed those two milk churns

from the boot, I think the Guild Hall might've been destroyed.

I did suspect that it might've been booby trapped,

but it was sobering

to think that I'd been stood alongside this car

and a couple of minutes later, there was a big hole in the ground

and the largest part of the car that I could find

was no bigger than a grapefruit.

This is were I could've died.

But I survived.

It's a funny feeling, it's quite emotional.

Yeah, quite emotional.

The provisional IRA had moved beyond simple devices.

They'd moved beyond

electrical engineering-type components and devices.

By then, they'd sort of settled into stuff that worked.

They'd moved very, very rapidly to a point

that really did stretch us, I would say.

In a very small number of years,

they developed very sophisticated tactics.

We very much had to respond to what they were doing,

so they would be ahead of the game.

They put in anti-handling devices, anti-lift switches,

radio controlled devices, trembler devices.

The trouble with those devices, of course,

is they're more difficult to make,

and we had intelligence that some bomb makers were killing themselves

trying to make these devices,

and quite often they would chose a young lad to go

and lay the device and occasionally they would get killed

because when they pulled the pin out like they were told to,

the device was not safe and went up in their faces.

Now the IRA, often acting in their own backyard of South Armagh,

could afford to be cunning,

luring army vehicles into the killing zone.

Unlike in the city, the bomber could have a vantage point

where they were unlikely to be disturbed, and could detonate

the device by command wire, ensuring maximum effect.

In the real environment,

you've got to be able to what we call rehearse planned operations.

If there's an IED in a rural area, why is it there?

What's the purpose of that device being laid?

What's the likely target?

Generally they are large, buried,

probably command initiated to some degree.

You can bet your bottom dollar that they are trying to force you

to use roads or something along those lines

to try and bring you into a killing area.

Got a telephone call to report to the operations room at Bessbrook.

There was a civilian being talked to by the police in the operations staff

and he was water board work

and he'd been checking various coverts in the Chancellors Road.

And he was saying there was a couple of milk churns in this covert well.

You know, a couple of milk churns tells us one thing.

It's an ambush device.

None of that was here.

That house wasn't here, this house wasn't here.

But what is unmistakeable is this wall.

This is it.

This is our covert.

I mean, your nerves are absolutely stretched

and every sense that you have is on guard.

So you're trying to look everywhere at once,

you're looking, especially, where you're putting your feet.

You're looking where you put your hands,

you're looking for anything out of the ordinary

that you might not expect to see down there.

And, to my surprise, there wasn't two milk churns,

there was seven milk churns,

although I couldn't see that at this point.

There were so many, you couldn't count them.

We're talking about a quarter of a tonne of high explosives.

A device of that nature is going to create a crater

which is probably 10 feet deep, about 20 or 30 feet diameter.

It's a bloody great hole in the ground.

So any vehicle passing over it at the time, you know,

could be blown bits of it - up to a quarter of a mile away.

You've got this sense of foreboding as you approach the blooming thing.

As you can appreciate, you know, you're...

Well, you're scared.

These devices then to be detonated one of two ways -

either by remote control, radio control, or it would be by command wire.

This particular device was a command wire device,

so it had a 500 metre wire running up the side of a hill.

Now, the Royal Engineers had tracked for us the command wire,

which was laid running along the hedge, all the way up to the firing point.

And one of the engineers had spotted a blue battery pack.

And I approached the battery pack with the intention of, um...

moving it, hook and lining it,

cos you never know, these things are booby-trapped.

The ground had been trampled with cows -

I was really pleased about that, because it wasn't going to be a pressure mat or anything -

but as I was about to put the line around the battery pack,

I noticed this very fine fishing wire.

Following the fishing wire into the long grass,

there was another device there.

The idea is the terrorist would have detonated the device

under a police or military vehicle on this road.

They would have hoped that the Army, in hot pursuit,

would have pulled the battery pack and set off that secondary device,

which was about eight pounds of home-made explosives.

It's a case now, then, of dragging these milk churns

out into the open where you can get to them,

and once it's all dismantled, it's a case of then withdrawing

out of the place and the country will be put back to normal.

We neutralised that device

and later in the year, at the end of my tour, actually,

I decided we would have a photograph of all the people I had worked with.

And, as we were putting the chairs away,

suddenly this "bu-boom" echoed all the way round the hills.

It was quite clear what had happened,

a large device had gone off somewhere not too far away.

One of their patrols had been ambushed on the Chancellor's Road,

two vehicles, two Saracens, and the second vehicle had been taken out.

So I went, got in a helicopter, had a look round the site,

and there was just this massive hole.

The vehicle had effectively disintegrated.

The soldiers had been killed instantaneously,

but not blown to pieces -

their bodies had been kept together by the webbing and all the rest of it,

but the skeletons would be shattered.

And that was a very sad day.

That was the other end of the Chancellor's Road,

whereas, earlier in the year, we'd had exactly the same sized device.

Hm.

The bomb maker, as far as I was concerned,

I didn't see them, really, as a personal enemy.

In the most part they weren't out to get me,

occasionally they were.

We didn't think too much about the terrorists we were up against.

We were more involved in the intricacies of the devices they were planting,

and I considered that it was a privilege to do that job.

It was a job where you were the man on the ground,

the only one that could really sort out the problem.

But, you did have to have respect for the fact that they

were obviously very, very intelligent people.

The electrical engineering on a lot of their devices

was absolutely outstanding.

We weren't interested in the politics of the bombers.

In fact, you had bombers from both sides -

the Catholic, or nationalists, and the Protestants.

There was no enquiry as to who'd actually laid it

or why it was laid, we were there just to get rid of the thing.

The enemy in these circumstances is completely anonymous.

You don't see the enemy, you don't know who they are.

What I do know is that they were highly professional in what they did.

They rewrote the Anarchist's Cookbook, frankly.

Most terrorist organisations today will have learned

from the tactics they used against us.

But, you know, they are absolutely ruthless,

and without pity.

And their campaign was against innocent women and children.

And I've seen the results, so, in a sense, they're anonymous,

and I don't have any feelings for them one way or the other, um...

321 EOD were a very tight-knit squadron, and by the end of 1974

the death toll amongst their ranks had reached 14.

The pressure on ATOs starting a new tour became greater,

as did the anxiety felt by their families back home in England.

I didn't go for my first tour until 1973,

but the year before that

I lost two or three, or maybe four, very good friends,

and I suddenly realised that, you know, this was quite serious.

I always remember coming back to Northern Ireland

with Ron Beckett on the ferry, and within three or four days

of us being on the ferry together, he was dead.

A very unfortunate situation where he went in to the shop

after laying a disruptor, and as he walked in

a tile fell off the roof and hit the bomb and set it off and killed him.

Just plain bad luck.

When we went to Northern Ireland to do this job,

we were very much involved in what we were doing,

and you didn't really have time to think about

what was going on at home with your wife,

and I had a wife and a young baby, a two-year-old.

But if there was an explosion and an operator was injured or anything like that,

we were to ring home to say, "It's not us,

"I'm safe, don't worry," that sort of thing.

But they didn't worry, and in many ways it was worse for them,

because they didn't really know what we were dealing with.

I mean, I used to phone my wife and she'd say, "Have you been busy?"

"No, no, no." So you would play down what you were doing.

When I went back at the end of the tour

and she found out some of the stuff I'd been doing, she said,

"But you told me you were doing nothing."

I said, "Well, that was just to keep you unworried."

But I think the wives of ATOs and ATs are a special kind, anyway,

because to be married to a bloke who's always at risk,

even in his normal job, of possibly getting injured or killed,

takes some special woman.

At the end of my tour of duty, I was replaced by another warrant officer,

Warrant Officer Michael O'Neil.

I'd known Mick for some time, we'd served together before,

and he took over my team and I left the province.

I left on the Monday, and it was the following Sunday.

My father-in-law said to me, "There's a soldier been killed in Ireland in Newry."

And I said to my wife, "I've got a bad feeling about this."

Anyway, the news came on the radio,

and suddenly, "The soldier killed in Ireland this morning

"has been named as Warrant Officer Michael O'Neil."

And, you know, I felt like I'd been hit in the stomach.

I just sat down, and my wife burst into tears.

You know, it was...

All I could think of was the boy's family, really.

Mick was called to a car that had been used

in the shooting of a police officer at Whitecross,

and the car was parked just here on the crossroads there.

Now, clearly, the car had been used in a murder,

and Mick would have wanted as much forensic evidence to be collected as possible,

so he took it easy working on the car.

Our modus operandi on a car was often to burn them out and blow them up,

but Mick decided not to do that and, over the next hour or so,

two hours perhaps, he worked to clear that car.

We don't know what happened after that,

because unfortunately his number two had been asked

to get some equipment from the rear of the vehicle and didn't even know

that Mick had gone back down to the car,

and suddenly there was the quack of an explosion,

and everybody realised that Mick wasn't around.

There are two types of operators -

those that are lucky and those that are unlucky.

Mick O'Neill was very unlucky.

You know, you could put yourself in my position to know that

you could have done it similarly to Mick,

and if I had, you know, it would have been me.

And that's the way it works in this job.

You know...

Just a lonely crossroads.

And people drive past here every day and no-one knows what happened here.

And I guess that's the way it is.

You still hear them talking. You can still see their faces.

They're always going to be with you for the rest of your life.

And, yeah, maybe you forget about it for so long,

and then something happens and it brings it back.

It's the same with all soldiers,

you don't forget your friends and colleagues who didn't make it.

You're there, you've made it, there but for the grace of God...

People have asked me on a few occasions, "What makes a good EOD Operator?

It's very difficult to determine,

because we're all completely different people.

Courage is particularly important.

Courage not least to walk up to something that has a good chance

of killing you if you get something wrong.

Selfless commitment, I think, is the second important attribute,

because you're working as part of a team and you're prepared to put your life down for that team,

regardless of what life you have back anywhere else.

Clarity of thought if you don't get your threat assessment right

and you don't respect your opponent, well, you're in trouble.

So, if you've got all those attributes together,

you're probably going to survive the long walk.

If you look back on the Northern Ireland conflict,

which is pretty much over now, we lost 17 operators.

Three quarters of those who died were killed by the end of 1974.

That was a time when everything was most volatile.

The IRA were rolling out new tactics all the time.

Our equipment and our render-safe procedures were relatively immature.

When you consider that these men were, for the most part,

ammunition examiners, that when the campaign broke out

there was no pool of hired specialists to do this job...

These were ordinary men being asked to do

what many would consider is an extraordinary job.

It's not simply about recognition to me,

it's about appreciation, you know.

Have these men, what they did, under these circumstances,

have they really been appreciated?

Because I don't think they have.

Those guys from the early '70s, in particular between 1971

and '75, paid with their lives, ultimately,

and, if we hadn't taken those casualties at that time in Northern Ireland

in those early days, we probably wouldn't have the robust system

which has developed over 40 years that we have now.

The thing I remember most about Northern Ireland

is the success that we had, the excitement that we felt

when we prevented people being injured or we saved someone's property or his business.

That gave me a great deal of satisfaction.

Look at this, like at this now. This is fantastic.

'People say, "You're a hero for what you did,"

'and I don't consider we're heroes at all.

'We did what we were trained to do.'

We did the job we were trained to do.

Quite often I'll be walking along and suddenly, you know,

Northern Ireland will pop into my head,

and quite often I think of, "Nice one, Cyril."

Especially, it was played on the radio the other day whilst I was out walking,

and I just chuckled to myself and it took me back

to little Lymon and all these people singing, "Nice one, Cyril."

People say, "Were are all these people's deaths worth it?"

I don't think it was worth it.

All life that was lost has been wasted.

But I think the current situation in Northern Ireland,

where they were to where they are today,

it's been a long and torturous thing,

but it's a fantastic thing that peace reigns now.

We've just got to hope it does not stumble back into the anarchy of yesterday.

And I don't think it will.

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