Foreword:
This is an obligatory message to let you all know that this is not my story per se, it is a story of my grandfather’s from his time with the British Army during the 1980s in Northern Ireland. I have his full permission to post it here so long as I tell you all as such. I’ll now tell it to you the way he’s told it to me for the thirteenth time this year.
—BREAK—
It had been a bog standard weekend back at Hollywood Barracks. Sitting in the guardroom drinking cup after cup of tea waiting for the relief shift to come. There wasn’t much on the television, really it was the same boring dribble that was usually on at 5 o’clock in the evening, but I still held out watching it as it was the only thing occupying me and the lad, Sarkhill, I was posted with other than the clock on the wall. Eventually the evening news came on and we saw more reports of unrest in the usual areas and a bombing by the Republicans at a rural PVC (Permanent Vehicle Checkpoint) three of our lot were dead, five republicans were assumed dead and another two of ours were severely injured. We didn’t really think on it too much as you tend to do in theatre how that could have easily been you so we shrugged it off.
It wasn’t until two days following that we got the news that our section and another section in our platoon were deploying elsewhere whilst the remainder of our company deployed to a patrol base in a nearby town. We were assigned to a place called PVC Charlie Mike One Four. The name rang a bell but I didn’t remember why until we got there and met with what was left of the place that I had realised where we were.
The drive there was horrendous, the rain was coming down so hard that with every bump the pools of water that rested on the land-rover’s canvas roof above trickled down onto us, by the time we got there us in the back were bloody soaked. The section lead, a Sergeant by the name of Gardner, ordered us out of the vehicles and to advance in a haphazard staggered patrol formation towards the checkpoint on foot. I soon learned that the Sergeant had been trying to raise the section we were relieving on the radio once we had gotten in range but for some reason no one was answering the designated frequency. But yet again we met no one. We were ordered to split up into pairs to search the small outpost.
Sarkhill and I headed towards the sangars a little way away from the temporary tin huts and that’s where we found them. The nervous trooper nearest the entrance almost blew my lungs out but luckily he didn’t, else this would’ve been a really short story. All together there were six of them: Three troopers, a lance-corporal, a corporal and their sergeant, all were as white as sheets. It took us a few minutes to coax them out and to assure them that we were not the enemy or ghouls come to feast on them.
They had come back up the little incline from the sangar to the main PVC, like the lost little lambs they were that we had later joked, and their sergeant and ours were comparing notes inside the central hut. They began to tell us of the story of bombing and the even stranger stories of the things that had been happening around the post whilst they’d been here. I didn’t quite understand the young lad who was babbling these tales at us but I got the gist of it. One month prior one of their now deceased enlisted men had shot and killed a 18 year old girl thinking that she was driving a car bomb into the checkpoint when in reality she had only that day passed her driving examination. Since then they had been experiencing noises, missing kit and figures in the night moving around the checkpoint. What really took the cake was the reason that we could not raise them.
Their sergeant had come up from the sangar to the hut they were using as their radio operator’s room to attempt to make contact with us as he had been informed of the general time we would be arriving. It was there that he said that he saw that a soldier was sitting infront of the radio motionless. He had called out to this man, no response, so he came up to see what was going on with this young soldier when he turned around in the chair and smiled ‘unnaturally’. The man’s legs were missing at the knee, his face was barely recognisable from explosive damage and there were burns all over the flak jacket he was wearing. He reported it to be one of their confirmed dead killed in the bombing. Every man on the post had decided that enough was enough and that they were getting out of there tonight so they would wait for us as far away from the main PVC as possible without a desertion charge.
We of course laughed that off as the sergeant going crazy after being in the middle of nowhere for so long. And so they left, telling us that we would see. We never found out until years later that they never made it back to Holywood, the Corporal driving failed to brake for a corner and rolled their remaining land-rover into a ditch. Five of them were killed instantly and the remaining, the lance-corporal, was comatose and died later in hospital. It was blamed on bad road conditions.
We settled in for the night. Setting up our own radio equipment, laying out our wet kit to dry, digging into the rations and dossing down in our drys. It was another quiet boring night. But I had to get up for my watch eventually. Me and another man, Lance-Corporal Greene, were to man the inner sangar until first light. I hated night watch but I also enjoyed extremely long cigarette-fuelled chats me and Greene would have. But that night something was slightly off, there was something colder about the air. It was as if we were being stalked by someone or sonething. Then we both saw it.
There was a shape of what looked like a man running through the treeline to our direct East. The embankment that way gave excellent cover to anyone trying to circumvent the PVC. But as the shape warped into the swaying of the trees we just laughed it off again as our paranoia since after the last attack there was razor wire strung up at knee height there, anything running about blind up there would get a sharp suprise. We settled back into the watch again but something kept nagging at us, like we should check on what we saw but we knew at the same time that it was unsafe to go wandering in the middle of nowhere at night.
Then there was a noise. Footsteps. Unfamilar kit rattling. The sound of someone taking a puff on a cigarette that you can only hear in complete silence. The smell of a cigarette that neither of us were smoking or had smoked in over an hour. We called halt and it persisted. We called that we were about to fire a warning shot and yet it still persisted. It persisted for two seconds longer and then vanished. No bootprints in the dusty gravel, no trace of anything being there.
“That was the first night on Charlie Mike One Four, I will never forget it as the 10th scariest night of my life.” - Granddad Olympus