The Fist of God

and been offered an interview that September at the depot in Aldershot. He had been regarded by his school as a moderate scholar but a superb athlete. That suited the Paras just fine. The boy was accepted and began training the same month, a grueling twenty-two weeks that brought the survivors of the course to April 1972.

First there had been four weeks of square-bashing, basic weapons handling, basic fieldcraft, and physical fitness; then two more of the same plus first aid, signals, and study of precautions against NBC—nuclear, bacteriological, and chemical warfare.

The seventh week was for more fitness training, getting harder all the time, but not as bad as weeks eight and nine—endurance marches through the Brecon range in Wales, where

strong and fit men have died of exposure, hypothermia, and exhaustion.

Week ten saw the course at Hythe, Kent, for shooting on the range, where Martin, just turned nineteen, rated as a marksman. Eleven and twelve were test weeks carried out in open country near Aldershot—just running up and down sandy hills carrying tree trunks in the mud, rain, and freezing hail of midwinter.

“Test weeks?” muttered Paxman, turning the page. “What the hell has the rest been?”

After the test weeks, the young men got their coveted red beret and paratrooper smocks before three more weeks in the Brecons for defense exercise, patrolling, and live firing exercise. By then—it was late January—the Brecons were utterly bleak and freezing. The men slept rough and wet without fires.

Weeks sixteen to nineteen were for the basic parachute course at RAF Abingdon, where a few more dropped out, and not just from the aircraft.

After two more weeks devoted to a field exercise called last fence and some polishing of parade-ground drill skills, week twenty-two saw Pass-out Parade, with proud parents at last allowed to see the youths who had left them six months earlier.

Private Mike Martin had long been earmarked as POM—potential officer material—and in May 1972

he went to Royal Military Academy Sandhurst, joining the one-year standard military course. In the spring of 1973, the new Lieutenant Martin went straight to Hythe to take over a platoon in preparatory training for Northern Ireland, and he commanded the platoon during twelve miserable weeks crouching in an observation post called Flax Mill that covered the ultra-Republican enclave of Ardoyne, Belfast. He had been assigned to the Third Battalion, known as Three Para, and after Belfast returned to the depot at Aldershot to command the recruit platoon, putting newcomers through the same purgatory he himself had endured. In the summer of 1977 he returned to Three Para, now based at Osnabrück as part of the British Army of the Rhine.

It was another miserable time. The Paras were assigned to “penguin mode,” meaning that for three years out of every nine, or one tour out of three, they were off parachuting and used as ordinary lorry-borne infantry. All Paras hate penguin mode. Morale was low, fights broke out between the Paras and the Infantry, and Martin had to punish men with whom he thoroughly sympathized. He stuck it out for nearly a year, then in November 1977 he volunteered for transfer to the SAS.

A good proportion of the SAS come from the Paras, perhaps because the training has similarities, though the SAS claim theirs is harder, that they take very fit men and then start to work on them.

Martin’s papers went through the regiment’s Records Office at Hereford, where his fluent Arabic was noted, and in the summer of 1978 Martin did the standard “initial” selection course of six weeks.

On the first day a smiling instructor told them all:

“On this course, we don’t try and train you. We try and kill you.”

They did too. Only ten percent pass the initial course into the SAS. It saves time later. Martin passed.

Then came continuation training, jungle training in Belize, and one extra month back in England devoted to resistance to interrogation. Resistance means trying to stay silent while some extremely unpleasant practices are inflicted. The good news is that both the regiment and the volunteer have the right every hour to insist on an RTU—return to unit—for the volunteer.

“They’re mad,” said Paxman, throwing down the file and helping himself to another coffee. “They’re all bloody mad.”

Laing grunted. He was engrossed in the second file; it was the man’s experience in Arabia that he needed for the mission he had in mind.

Martin had spent three years with the SAS on his first tour, with the rank of captain and role of troop commander. He had opted for A Squadron, the freefallers—the squadrons are A, B, C, and G—which was a natural choice for a man who had jumped while in the Paras with their high-altitude freefall display team, the Red Devils.

If the Paras had no cause to use his Arabic, the Regiment did. In the three years 1979-1981 he had served alongside the Sultan of Oman’s forces in western Dhofar, taught VIP protection in two Gulf emirates, taught the Saudi National Guard in Riyadh, and lectured the private bodyguards of Sheikh Isa of Bahrain. There were notations after these listings in his SAS file: that he had redeveloped a strong boyhood bond with Arab culture, that he spoke the language like no other officer in the regiment, and that he had a habit of going for long walks in the desert when he wanted to think a problem through, impervious to the heat and the flies.

The record showed he returned to the Paras after his three-year secondment to the SAS in the winter of

’81 and found to his joy that the Paras were taking part in Operation Rocky Lance during January and February 1982 in, of all places, Oman. So he came back to the Jebel Akdar for that period, before taking leave in March. In April he was hastily recalled—Argentina had invaded the Falklands. Paras Two and Three went to the South Atlantic. They sailed on the liner Canberra , which had been hastily converted for military troopship use, and went ashore at San Carlos Water. Three Para tabbed right across East Falkland in the sleet and rain toward Port Stanley. Tabbing meant force-marching in foul conditions while carrying 120 pounds of gear.

Three Para headquartered themselves at a lonely farm called Estancia House and prepared for the last assault on Port Stanley, which meant first taking the heavily defended Mount Longdon. It was in that vicious night of June 11 that Captain Mike Martin collected his bullet.

It started as a silent night attack on the Argentine positions and turned very noisy when Corporal Milne stepped on a mine that blew his foot off. The Argentine machine guns opened up, the flares lit the mountain like day, and Three Para could either run back to cover or into the fire and take Longdon. They took Longdon, with twenty-three dead and more than forty injured. One of these was Mike Martin, who nursed a slug through one leg and gave vent to a hissed stream of foul invective, fortunately in Arabic.

After most of the day on the mountainside, he was brought out to the advanced dressing station at Ajax Bay, patched up, and helicoptered to the hospital ship Uganda . The Uganda stopped in Montevideo, and Martin was among those fit enough to fly home by civilian airliner to Brize Norton. The Paras then gave him three weeks at Headley Court, Leather-head, for convalescence.

That was where he met the nurse, Lucinda, who was to become his wife after a brief courtship. Perhaps she liked the glamour of a husband in the Paras, but she was mistaken. They set up housekeeping in a cottage near Chobham, convenient for her job at Leatherhead and his at Aldershot. But after three years, having actually seen him for four and a half months, Lucinda quite properly put to him a choice: you can have the Paras and your bloody desert, or you can have me. He thought it over and chose the desert.

She was quite right to go. In the autumn of 1982 he had studied for Staff College, gateway to senior rank and a nice desk, perhaps in the Ministry. In February 1983 he fluffed the exam.

“He did it deliberately,” said Paxman. “His CO’s note here says he could have breezed through if he wanted.”