euphemism!) Now it provided accommodation for the personnel from 14th Signal Regiment. The compound was surrounded by high walls and, thanks to Executive Outcomes, the building itself had bulletproof windows capable of stopping a 50mm round, and reinforced doors. Less comfortingly, though, the place was covered in signs of bullet and shell strikes; it had obviously been under attack at some point in the not-toodistant past.
We settled in nonetheless. Our operations room was located in the nearby SLA HQ building, a very nondescript room. Its main feature was the reinforced steel door with viewing hatch. Two SLA armed guards were permanently stationed at the door. Inside we scoured the airwaves in search of RUF transmissions, did our best to pinpoint their locations, and where necessary render their communications useless with jammers. My job was to keep all the equipment running with the limited tools and spares I had at my disposal. My partner in crime was a signaller known as Mule, and between us we managed to keep things ticking along nicely.
Everything was routine enough for a while. Then, on 25 August a patrol of twelve Royal Irish Ranger soldiers, led by Major Alan Marshall, ran into trouble. They were carrying out a routine inspection in the Occra Hills, when despite the concerns of the SLA liaison officer, Lieutenant Musa Bangura, Marshall ordered the patrol off the main route into an area known to be controlled by a group of rebels referred to as the West Side Boys. (Marshall believed that the West Side Boys might now be willing to disarm and become part of the peace accord.) The group of about 300 rebels was mainly composed of renegade soldiers from the failed coup of 1997 and they were notoriously unpredictable. Deep in their territory, the patrol was stopped by a truck, mounted with an anti-aircraft gun and quickly surrounded by a group of the West Side Boys. After several demands from the rebels to drop weapons, Marshall, against standing orders, ordered his men to do so. Of course, they were immediately overwhelmed and taken hostage.
They were brought to Gberi Bana where the West Side Boys, led by ‘Brigadier’ Foday Kallay, were based. Kallay realised immediately that he had a very valuable commodity, but worse still he recognised his old comrade from the SLA, Lieutenant Musa Bangura. Over the next two weeks, while all the hostages were subjected to beatings and repeated mock executions, Kallay saved his worst for Musa Bangura.
During face-to-face negotiations with the West Side Boys, the signals officer, Captain Flaherty, managed to pass on a map of the compound, including the location of where the hostages were being held, to our negotiating team. This was our first breakthrough. Then, a few days later, Kallay released five of the hostages in return for a satellite phone: a serious error on his part. While the satellite phone allowed Kallay to communicate with both the British military and the BBC about his demands for political recognition and an amnesty for the West Side Boys, it also allowed us to pinpoint his exact location.
As the safety of the hostages was made increasingly uncertain by the erratic behaviour of Kallay and his drug-fuelled troops (including demands of free passage to the UK and university places!), a decision was made in JTF-HQ in Freetown to carry out a rescue mission, codenamed Operation Barras, and Mule and I were ordered to gather as much intelligence as possible on the West Side Boys’ movements to help in the planning. When the Special Forces contingent from the SAS, SBS and the Parachute Regiment arrived, our little group took on an even more significant role in assisting them. With only six of us from the regiment deployed, it meant all hands to the pump.
SAS and SBS observation teams were in place for several days prior to the main attack and managed to pinpoint all enemy positions and the location of the hostages. The West Side Boys’ main camp had approximately 150 men, with a further 100 located on the other side of the river, Rokel Creek. The two locations were to be attacked simultaneously, with the SAS and SBS hitting Gberi Bana, where the hostages were held, and the Paras attacking Magbeni, the rebels’ other village on the opposite side of the creek, to prevent the rebels there from supporting Gberi Bana.
On the morning of 10 September at 0630, the rescue team, led by D Squadron of the SAS and supported by members of the SBS and 140 men from the Parachute Regiment, left their base at Hastings, thirty miles south of Freetown. The assault helicopters headed towards Rokel Creek, while the SAS/SBS observation teams opened fire on the base. The supporting attack helicopters laid down covering fire on both villages, while the SAS/SBS troops fast-roped from the Chinooks.
As is usually the case, this assault didn’t go entirely smoothly. The first setback occurred when the Paras dropped from the Chinook helicopters and found themselves chest-high in swamp that intelligence had failed to spot. As he hit the ground, SAS Trooper Bradley Tinnion was hit and, despite being medevac’ed to RFA Sir Percival, as we later discovered, died from his wounds. The second was that the rebels, spurred on by drink, drugs and the belief in voodoo magic, put up a much fiercer fight than anyone had expected.
For the rescue mission itself, which lasted less than thirty minutes, the official death toll for the rebels was twenty-eight killed and eighteen captured, including the leader, Foday Kallay. The assault force lost one man and had eleven others injured. However, the actual fighting continued long after the hostages had been freed, and according to the Paras and Special Forces we met after the attack, it was closer to 200 rebel forces killed and 150 captured. Clearly a message was being sent to other rebel groups that this was the British army in the field, not some rabble afraid to come after them. The message got through alright and it wasn’t long after Operation Barras that the RUF signed up to a peace accord.
On my return from Sierra Leone, and now a corporal, I had, thankfully, to wait only a few months before I was deployed again, this time to Oman on Operation Saif Sareea II, the largest deployment of British forces since the Falklands War. The entire regiment was there, with only a skeleton staff being left behind at Brawdy. I went as part of the jammer force and looked forward to another adventure in a place that was totally new to me.
We weren’t long in Oman when the attack on the Twin Towers in New York changed the security picture of the entire world. While it didn’t alter the training exercise that we were part of, it did put the wheels in motion for units of our regiment to deploy to Afghanistan. I wanted to be part of that and knew the LEWT was gearing up to be on the first assault. I headed to the tent that acted as 14th Signal’s HQ in the southern desert in Oman. I had only just entered when my squadron OC (Officer Commanding) spotted me.
‘Forget it, Hartnett, you’re not going. You’re needed here to look after the jammer vehicles. End of story.’
That was that. I would spend the next three months in Oman thinking mostly about my next posting and where I might go.
5 NORN IRON
We turned a corner and were suddenly met by an IRA checkpoint: four armed and masked men manning a makeshift barricade. Everything we had been taught said that I should reverse at speed while my passenger laid down covering fire.
I was having none of that. Instead, I approached the roadblock very confidently and lowered my window.
‘How a’ you?’ I enquired in my strongest Cork accent.
‘Where the fuck are you going?’ came the reply.
‘Just heading for Derry. Working on the Limavady by-pass,’ I replied very casually. The poor fella had no idea how to react and simply looked over at the instructor for directions. The instructor made his way to the checkpoint.
‘What are you playing at, Seán?’ he yelled, ‘that’s not how we practised it. You’d be dead by now.’ My reply was calm and measured.
‘I don’t think so. I have the right accent and a plausible story; much better than trying to reverse out of here or get involved in a firefight. I can talk the talk about anything they can bring up and get away with it.’ He stared at me for a couple of seconds, growled ‘Your funeral’, and walked off.
*
I was due a new posting that November and on my return from Oman I decided I’d like to go to Northern Ireland. It wasn’t that I’d had enough of overseas deployments and wanted to go home for good. Far from it. But I had just bought my first home in Norfolk and the extra money