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been an American football team for all I knew.
        If I'd waited three months until I was 17, I could have joined the Green Jackets as an adult recruit, but like an idiot I wanted to get stuck straight in. I arrived at the Infantry Junior Leaders battalion in Shorncliffe, Kent, in September 1976 and hated it. The place was run by Guardsmen, and the course was nothing but bullshit and regimentation.
        You couldn't wear jeans, and had to go around with a bonehead haircut.
        You weren't even allowed the whole weekend off, which made visiting my old Peckham haunts a real pain in the arse. I landed in trouble once just for missing the bus in Folkestone and being ten minutes late reporting back. Shorncliffe was a nightmare, but I learned to play the game. I had to-there was nothing else for me. The passing-out parade was in May. I had detested every single minute of my time there but had learned to use the system and for some reason had been promoted to junior sergeant and won the Light Division sword for most promising soldier.
        I now had a period at the Rifle Depot in Winchester, where us junior soldiers joined the last six weeks of a training platoon, learning Light Division drill. This was much more grown-up and relaxed, compared with Shorncliffe.
        In July 1977 I was posted to 2nd Battalion, Royal Green Jackets, based for the time being in Gibraltar. To me, this was what the army was all about-warm climates, good mates, exotic women, and even more exotic VD.
        Sadly, the battalion returned to the UK just four months later.
        In December 1977 I did my first tour in Northern Ireland. So many young soldiers had been killed in the early years of the Ulster emergency that you had to be 18 before you could serve there. So although the battalion left on December 6, I couldn't join them until my birthday at the end of the month.
        There must have been something about the IRA and young squad dies because I was soon in my first contact. A Saracen armored car had got bogged down in the curls (countryside) near Crossmaglen, and my mate and I were put on stag (sentry duty) to guard it. In the early hours of the morning, as I scanned the countryside through the night sight on my rifle, I saw two characters coming towards us, hugging the hedgerow.
        They got closer and I could clearly see that one of them was carrying a rifle. We didn't have a radio so I couldn't call for assistance. There wasn't much I could do except issue a challenge. The characters ran for it, and we fired off half a dozen rounds. Unfortunately, there was a shortage of night sights at the time so the same weapon used to get handed on at the end of each stag. The night sight on the rifle I was using was zeroed in for somebody else's eye, and only one of my rounds found its target. There was a follow-up with dogs, but nothing was found. Two days later, however, a well-known player (member of the Provisional IRA) turned up at a hospital just over the border with a 7.62 round in his leg. It had been the first contact for our company, and everybody was sparked up. My mate and I felt right little heroes, and both of us claimed the hit.
        The rest of our time in Ireland was less busy but more sad. The battalion took some injuries during a mortar attack on a position at Forkhill, and one of the members of my platoon was killed by a booby trap bomb in Crossmaglen. Later, our colonel was killed when the Gazelle helicopter he was traveling in was shot down. Then it was back to normal battalion shit at Tidworth, and the only event worth mentioning during the next year was that, aged all of 18, I got married.
        The following year we were back in South Armagh. I was now a lance corporal and in charge of a brick (four-man patrol). One Saturday night in July our company was patrolling in the border town of Keady. As usual for a Saturday night the streets were packed with locals. They used to bus it to