Speaker 1: Special Operations Cobert Spiona The Team House with your hosts
Speaker 1: Jack Murphy and David Park.
Speaker 2: Hey, everyone, this is episode three hundred and forty five
Speaker 2: of The Team House. I'm Jack Murphy and I'm here
Speaker 2: with our guest today, Kevin McDonald. He's the author of
Speaker 2: A Life Less Ordinary. Kevin served in the Irish Ranger
Speaker 2: Wing and then continued with his military career, involved in
Speaker 2: a lot of peacekeeping operations and the goal on Heights
Speaker 2: in Lebanon and then later in places in Africa, and
Speaker 2: he's joining us tonight from the warm Ish South Sudan. Yeah,
Speaker 2: so we you know, thank you for joining us.
Speaker 3: Kevin.
Speaker 2: You're the first Irish Ranger we've had on the show
Speaker 2: and I'm excited to do this interview with you.
Speaker 4: I'm glad to be here. Thanks for having me.
Speaker 3: Kevin.
Speaker 2: You'd mentioned that you'd like to throw out a little
Speaker 2: disclaimer before we get started.
Speaker 5: Yeah. I think it's important by nature of the fact
Speaker 5: that what would probably most like to be discussing it is,
Speaker 5: first of all, that I don't want anyone to think
Speaker 5: that any views I may express can be seen as
Speaker 5: the views of retired senior officer in the Irish Defense
Speaker 5: forces through my personal views, and likewise, any of the
Speaker 5: views I express cannot be construed or seen as the
Speaker 5: views of someone who's working in the United Nations. These
Speaker 5: are entirely my personal views, and you know, please take
Speaker 5: them at that value.
Speaker 3: Thank you, Kevin.
Speaker 2: So let's start off talking a little bit about growing
Speaker 2: up in Ireland. And you had some pretty amusing stories
Speaker 2: about being a young man and getting into some things,
Speaker 2: including the military, way younger than you should have.
Speaker 5: So yeah, in in the in the Irish Defense Forces,
Speaker 5: we have I think called the Army Reserve, which it's
Speaker 5: probably not anything like your National Guard work, but you
Speaker 5: will do maybe two or three weekends training a month
Speaker 5: and then every summer two or three week military training camp.
Speaker 4: And the town I grew up in there.
Speaker 5: Was a I suppose the equivalent of a National Guard barracks.
Speaker 5: So it wasn't it wasn't a permanent military post, but
Speaker 5: but there was. It was this place for for our reserve.
Speaker 5: And one of the units that was in it was
Speaker 5: a cavalry unit and they had armored cars, motorbikes and
Speaker 5: all that sort of stuff. And and to be a
Speaker 5: trooper in a cagory unit you had to be able
Speaker 5: to operate the radios of an armored car, drive an
Speaker 5: armor car, and operate the guns of an armored car.
Speaker 5: So when I was in school and there was a
Speaker 5: small range in the barracks and you could hear the gunfire,
Speaker 5: and then during the summer you see these guys going
Speaker 5: out on exercises, and it was the only place I
Speaker 5: wanted to be. So I let's just say I was
Speaker 5: creative with my birth certificate. Because we're supposed to be
Speaker 5: seventeen before you joined. I think I was just over fourteen,
Speaker 5: because I know I had a military license to drive
Speaker 5: land rovers, trucks and motorbikes before it was legally old
Speaker 5: enough to drive on the road. But it was Marcus,
Speaker 5: and you know, it was a great opportunity for young
Speaker 5: people like myself to get a sense of you know,
Speaker 5: duty responsibility. Plus we got paid when we're on our
Speaker 5: two week camp. But it was a nice, nice bit
Speaker 5: of money at the time. So I spent seven years
Speaker 5: with the Reserve before I joined the Permanent Defense Forces.
Speaker 2: The other thing that you had going on around this
Speaker 2: timeframe was you worked at a car dealership selling cars
Speaker 2: before you were old enough to drive.
Speaker 4: Well, I didn't exactly. Wasn't a salesman.
Speaker 5: What I did was would say, if you had bought
Speaker 5: a new forward and the shock ups orber went, you
Speaker 5: bring it back to the garage and then I would
Speaker 5: make it cleim on forard the for for this Ford
Speaker 5: garage to recoop the costs.
Speaker 4: So I was a warranty assessor in a four garage.
Speaker 5: But although I did manage to buy a few cars
Speaker 5: and sell them privately before it was old enough to
Speaker 5: drive and before I had insurance, But that was that
Speaker 5: was like a like a knicker, as we'd say in Ireland.
Speaker 4: That was like something on the side.
Speaker 2: And then I mean it sounds like you were, you know,
Speaker 2: getting into the army, having a hell of a lot
Speaker 2: of fun as a young guy. And you even got
Speaker 2: to play a soldier in a historical war film that
Speaker 2: was made you want to tell any amusing stories about that.
Speaker 2: You had a couple in there that I thought were
Speaker 2: pretty good.
Speaker 4: Yeah, so there was.
Speaker 5: There was a book written about the seventeen ninety eight
Speaker 5: I suppose French invasion of Ireland to support the Catholics
Speaker 5: against the excuse me, against the British army, and they
Speaker 5: landed in the West coast of Ireland at a very
Speaker 5: obscure spot, and then they were quite successful initially, and
Speaker 5: they were marching on the town where I was born,
Speaker 5: which is a town called castle Bar, and the British
Speaker 5: Army had deployed on the route they expected them to take,
Speaker 5: but the French and the Irish kind of come in
Speaker 5: from the flank and there was a bit of a
Speaker 5: route and the British soldiers ran away. Came known as
Speaker 5: the Races of Castle Bar, which was the last victory
Speaker 5: that the French and Irish had because a few weeks
Speaker 5: later they were destroyed in the Battle of Battle of
Speaker 5: Them Up. But anyway, our National TV company decided that
Speaker 5: they would make a film of this, and naturally enough,
Speaker 5: for all the military battles, it was much easier to
Speaker 5: use the likes of us and the reserve that at
Speaker 5: least knew how to march and carry a weapon and
Speaker 5: that sort of stuff. But they had contacted a crowd
Speaker 5: of re enactors from the UK and we were working
Speaker 5: with genuine muskets and genuine cannons.
Speaker 4: But the ironically the British Army units that.
Speaker 5: My guys, my friends of mine were tasked with being
Speaker 5: part of was a unit called Fraser's Fencibles, which was
Speaker 5: a Scottish regiend. So we had red coats and kills
Speaker 5: and for some reason I was put in charge so
Speaker 5: either sword and when we were filming the scene for
Speaker 5: the Races of Castle Bar, the idea was that there
Speaker 5: was like a valley like that and we would we're
Speaker 5: supposed to march down, line up in a straight line,
Speaker 5: and then over the following hill would come these hordes
Speaker 5: of Irish peasants and French soldiers. And I was to
Speaker 5: give the order to fire a volley and then slowly
Speaker 5: started cheating backwards. And this guy was to die here,
Speaker 5: and this guy was to die here, and and that
Speaker 5: was kind of the plan. And there was a small
Speaker 5: little railway for the TV camera which would be on
Speaker 5: my right hand side. So it kind of went started
Speaker 5: according to plan, as most things to do. But however,
Speaker 5: the the Irish peasants and the French soldiers were a
Speaker 5: bit more enthusiastic and attacking us than let's say, we
Speaker 5: weren't expecting. And one of the key characters in the
Speaker 5: film it was a famous Irish actor and he was
Speaker 5: playing the post the part of an Irish poet who
Speaker 5: had gathered a load of supporters to support the French.
Speaker 5: And he had a twelve foot pike with a big
Speaker 5: sharp pointed thing at the end, so he was full
Speaker 5: of the joys of getting into his role. And I'm
Speaker 5: here with like a three foot sword, and this wasn't scripted,
Speaker 5: This wasn't supposed to happen. But he started jabbing at
Speaker 5: me with the sword with the pike, and I was
Speaker 5: trying to sword fight with the pike with a three
Speaker 5: foot sword, which wasn't exactly a very even contest, but
Speaker 5: I was conscious of on my right was the camera
Speaker 5: on the little railway line film and all of this.
Speaker 5: So every time he jabbed me, I kind of put
Speaker 5: up my sword like that and I'd say, sorry, I
Speaker 5: don't know if I can use language like that, okay,
Speaker 5: But and he was like, this is going on for
Speaker 5: a good while, and eventually, will you stop where you're
Speaker 5: fucking killed me? So I had to die before it
Speaker 5: was actually killed. Was enthusiastic about it, but that that
Speaker 5: was great time because we were called up on military service,
Speaker 5: so we were getting paid by the army, and the
Speaker 5: film company was payless as well, so like and and
Speaker 5: the catering on the on the site was really good.
Speaker 5: Plus it was near an old town that had a
Speaker 5: few nice bars, so anytime there was a break in filming,
Speaker 5: you could have a British soldier, a French soldier, an
Speaker 5: Irish presidant and a Scottish soldier forcing get us into
Speaker 5: us and eventually the director come on quick, you're needed back.
Speaker 4: But it was great, it was really good.
Speaker 2: So then tell us about sort of your first exposure
Speaker 2: to the Irish Ranger Regiment and and kind of how
Speaker 2: this idea came to mind for you.
Speaker 5: Okay, so this this was unusual because in that reserve
Speaker 5: unit I was in for a short space of time
Speaker 5: or commanding officer, he was eventually moved to form the
Speaker 5: Army Range Wing, which is our for your visitor or
Speaker 5: for your listeners, this is our soft unit. And this
Speaker 5: would have been in nineteen three or eighty four or
Speaker 5: something like that. So the units had just been formed,
Speaker 5: and he decided he'd he'd run a course of experienced
Speaker 5: NCOs and officers that would be after the forward course
Speaker 5: would be judged suitable if they passed, to instruct on
Speaker 5: selection for special forces. So not too far away from
Speaker 5: from the town where I was living. It's one of
Speaker 5: there's a vast expanse of open moorland and mountains. It's
Speaker 5: probably the last place in Ireland that's still kind of
Speaker 5: really desolate and uninhabited. So he decided that he would
Speaker 5: use us our unit as the story that the scenario
Speaker 5: was that these would be range instructors were a sort
Speaker 5: of a breakaway unit from the Irish Army and they
Speaker 5: were operating independently and we had to go and find them.
Speaker 5: So we were patrolling by day and we had set
Speaker 5: up the sort of a base camp in the woods.
Speaker 4: You know, we hadn't a clue how.
Speaker 5: To set up a proper base camp, but we were
Speaker 5: looking for them and they were looking for us.
Speaker 4: And this went on for nearly a week.
Speaker 5: And we've been kind of brief that you know, nothing,
Speaker 5: nothing will happen to you naturally. And then one afternoon
Speaker 5: there was about six stun grenads can fly it into
Speaker 5: our little camp and we've never seen or heard stunge
Speaker 5: grenades before, and you know, they're quite impressive if they
Speaker 5: haven't experienced them. But I hid under the truck and
Speaker 5: all the guys were tied up and question and you know,
Speaker 5: and we were told you know, give your name, rank
Speaker 5: and serious number as usual, but of course these guys
Speaker 5: wanted a bit more information as to who we were
Speaker 5: and who was our boss.
Speaker 4: And all that kind of stuff.
Speaker 5: So I was trying to figure out the inner patrolling
Speaker 5: of these guys and how it could make my escape
Speaker 5: during darkness. And the next thing, my two legs were
Speaker 5: pulled out from from behind me, dragged out from one
Speaker 5: to the truck, thrown into a stream.
Speaker 4: And who are you and what are you doing?
Speaker 5: And blah blah blah. And then about maybe twenty minutes later,
Speaker 5: the commanding officer of the Army Arrangement came in and
Speaker 5: said index, and these guys changed from being like raven
Speaker 5: lunatics to hey, how's it going?
Speaker 4: It was amazing.
Speaker 5: But subsequently, when I joined the unit, I was on
Speaker 5: my own range instructor's course, and I remember going through
Speaker 5: the same forest at night. We were heading for a
Speaker 5: naval pickup off the coast, and I was going Jesus,
Speaker 5: only about four years I was here. I wasn't even
Speaker 5: I was in the reserve, and I'm on the same place,
Speaker 5: on the same type of course that we were interacting
Speaker 5: with back then. So yeah, that was that was a bit,
Speaker 5: and we were the first Irish Army unit, whether permanent
Speaker 5: or whatever, to train with the airw So it was,
Speaker 5: it was, it was a huge honor for us. And
Speaker 5: obviously after I having experienced that, there was only a
Speaker 5: month less I was going when I got a chance,
Speaker 5: and that was to go for selection.
Speaker 3: And correct me if I'm wrong.
Speaker 2: But before you went to selection, you did your first
Speaker 2: trip over to Lebanon right in eighty four.
Speaker 5: Yeah, so I you can't sort of enlist in special Forces,
Speaker 5: I'm sure like yourself, you have to kind of go
Speaker 5: through regular training and ideally have an overseas trip your
Speaker 5: under your belt.
Speaker 4: So I did.
Speaker 5: I joined an Infantsy battalion up on the border, and
Speaker 5: after basic training, which is six weeks, then there's two
Speaker 5: to three star training, which is like another eight weeks,
Speaker 5: you're like a fully qualified private. And I was assigned
Speaker 5: to support company and we had, you know, the fifty
Speaker 5: canals and eighty one millimeter marchers, and I remember before
Speaker 5: we get around to an overseas there's just a funny
Speaker 5: incident took place we were training before we fired live
Speaker 5: rounds from the eighty ones we were training, there was
Speaker 5: a big field in front of our base, and we
Speaker 5: had these inert rounds, but you still put the charges
Speaker 5: over the fins, so they go about three hundred feet
Speaker 5: in the year and maybe one hundred and fifty meters out.
Speaker 5: So we've fired maybe three bombs from two guns. But
Speaker 5: then you'll spend probably an hour trying to find because
Speaker 5: when they hit the ground, they got down about a foot.
Speaker 5: So at that time in Ireland there was a sort
Speaker 5: of a disciplined reaction called confined to barracks, so we
Speaker 5: say if you were laid for parade or whatever. So
Speaker 5: this guy was on what we call a CB, so
Speaker 5: therefore he's liable.
Speaker 4: To be tasked with anything.
Speaker 5: So one of our instructors, okay, private, come over here,
Speaker 5: get a few twigs, stand under that tree, and every
Speaker 5: time a bomb ron out and basically which you know,
Speaker 5: sounded great, And of course this guy started getting brave
Speaker 5: and at one stage, just as the bombs went off,
Speaker 5: he ran out into the field like that. The next thing,
Speaker 5: there's two eighty one minute meter bombs coming down. Not
Speaker 5: like he would have been killstone dead. Yeah, anyway, I digress,
Speaker 5: but yeah, I went overseas. I was bout a year
Speaker 5: in the army, went overseas as a private to Lebanon.
Speaker 5: In nineteen eighty four. I was promoted acting corporate after
Speaker 5: the month stage the the Israelis we were withdrawing from
Speaker 5: their siege of Rouge, so it was it was tense enough.
Speaker 5: There was a lot of stuff happening. And remember we
Speaker 5: we would monitor all their patrols, which we were obliged
Speaker 5: to do, and.
Speaker 4: Some of us got the great idea that we would
Speaker 4: we would talk in.
Speaker 5: Gaelic like would say on on on the on the radio,
Speaker 5: fake side in the side, jurish in or take bal
Speaker 5: like look at those soldiers beside the town.
Speaker 4: And we thought this was great. You know. To the
Speaker 4: one stage, this this.
Speaker 5: Broad Irish accident came up on the net and I
Speaker 5: didn't recognize it and it goes bucally a via so
Speaker 5: lads don't be talking Irish. So it was an Irish
Speaker 5: Jew who was doing his national service in Israel monitoring
Speaker 5: the communications of the Irish. We thought this was well,
Speaker 5: could kind of understand it. But I remember talking to
Speaker 5: a few Swedes and Finns and they were experiencing the
Speaker 5: same thing. It was finished shows and Norwegian Jews specifically
Speaker 5: listening on the communication shatter. So yeah, that was yeah,
Speaker 5: that was kind of interesting.
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Speaker 2: So talk to us about, you know, getting back home
Speaker 2: and applying for the Irish Ranger Wing and what the
Speaker 2: selection process was like.
Speaker 4: Well, actually I should have said before I went overseas.
Speaker 5: At that stage, each each brigade, although they were known
Speaker 5: as commands at the time, but each brigade was entitled
Speaker 5: to run what they call a basic Ranger course. So
Speaker 5: it's four weeks and if you pass it, you can
Speaker 5: wear the Ranger tab. But we'll say if you're in
Speaker 5: the universe, there's a Ranger tab with a red background.
Speaker 5: This was just like a standard Ranger tab. So I
Speaker 5: had actually I had completed that before I went overseas,
Speaker 5: so I had some idea of a what to expect
Speaker 5: and be what my.
Speaker 4: Capabilities were.
Speaker 5: So I went down on selection, and at the time
Speaker 5: not every commanding officer would recommend you for selection because
Speaker 5: generally the guys going for selection were probably some of
Speaker 5: his best troops and he was being left with the
Speaker 5: problem children, shall we say.
Speaker 4: So?
Speaker 5: The Chief of Staff issuld have directed that anyone that
Speaker 5: applied for selection, their application had to reach the OC
Speaker 5: Army range Wing. Even if it was a non recommendation,
Speaker 5: he still had to get it and he would just
Speaker 5: pull them in. So I went to you. We started
Speaker 5: on a Sunday afternoon with about fifty eight guys. It
Speaker 5: was eleven gone by the next morning, and four weeks
Speaker 5: later we finished with I think we finished with twelve,
Speaker 5: of which ten of us were taken in, so fairly
Speaker 5: high attrition rate.
Speaker 4: But it was great. I spent four very good.
Speaker 5: Very interesting, very tough years there and I'm still friends with,
Speaker 5: you know, the guys that I had trained with and
Speaker 5: guys I subsequently trained.
Speaker 2: The selection course must have been and I just imagined
Speaker 2: the weather in Ireland, especially during the winter, does that
Speaker 2: have any sort of impact on that attrition rate?
Speaker 5: It does, you And certainly the standard equipment that we
Speaker 5: were issued with at the time was really bad, Like
Speaker 5: you know, that the kind of plastic rain gear that
Speaker 5: squeaks and it has no breed ability.
Speaker 4: We'd standard issue boots.
Speaker 5: It was not like an intervie unit that I started
Speaker 5: wording Gartex rain gear and Gartex boots and stuff like that.
Speaker 5: But and plus we were using at that stage the
Speaker 5: I don't know if you're familiar with the British webbing,
Speaker 5: but there's I think called the fifty eight nineteen fifty
Speaker 5: eight pattern webbing. And your pack was about sort of
Speaker 5: that size. By that and into that you had to
Speaker 5: put everything you know you did then pourchas for magazines
Speaker 5: and all, but they certainly weren't designed for holding a
Speaker 5: lot of gear for was a week out in the
Speaker 5: mountains or whatever. But I know it was good. It
Speaker 5: was physically very tough. But what I found, and subsequhen
Speaker 5: I started to instruct on selection courses myself that if
Speaker 5: you're not prepared mentally, it doesn't matter how fit you are.
Speaker 5: If if if your head starts going, then it's very
Speaker 5: easy to start coming up with with injuries, if you
Speaker 5: know what I mean, Because I know certainly when subsequently
Speaker 5: when I used to instruct on courses, I tended to
Speaker 5: be the guy that didn't shout too much, but when
Speaker 5: I did to kind of knew it was a series.
Speaker 4: But I often found.
Speaker 5: You know, if if you if there was what you
Speaker 5: said it was an inspection and you came up behind
Speaker 5: someone and you just whispered in his ear should I
Speaker 5: be seeing this ship? That sometimes had a more devastating
Speaker 5: effect than if I stood in front of him and
Speaker 5: did a complete ballakan of them.
Speaker 4: You know it, and you know yourself.
Speaker 5: We play with people's minds when we're there suitability for
Speaker 5: for SEFF.
Speaker 4: So yeah, it was good.
Speaker 2: And then there was a pretty extensive training course after
Speaker 2: you finished selection, both doing the sub surface stuff and
Speaker 2: parachute course all that. I mean, can you talk us
Speaker 2: through a little bit of that?
Speaker 5: Okay, So first of all, everyone in the unit has
Speaker 5: to be jump qualified, started line qualified, and so when
Speaker 5: the course came up, the next course that came up,
Speaker 5: which I would have been going on, I was on
Speaker 5: leave when it was started. It was a three week course.
Speaker 5: It was the two week or three weeks relatively short.
Speaker 5: But I came back and I had already privately done
Speaker 5: a jump in the UK, so they recognized some experience.
Speaker 5: So I was brought in for the last week of
Speaker 5: the course and you have to five jumps to get
Speaker 5: your your your wings. So I did the first three
Speaker 5: or four jumps, and there was two expressions that the
Speaker 5: that the jump master. Essentially it was an assess in
Speaker 5: the plane and you had to sit in the doorway
Speaker 5: and then when the pilot throttled back a bit, you
Speaker 5: reached out onto the strut and grabbed the handle and
Speaker 5: then stood out onto a plate above the wheel, and
Speaker 5: then off he went. But the jump masters they had
Speaker 5: two terms which I became quite familiar with. One was
Speaker 5: AOT arse over tit and the other was BOS about
Speaker 5: a shite. So the wings ceremony was on a Friday
Speaker 5: at lunchtime and the wings had picked up. So the
Speaker 5: chief instructor said to one of the jump masters, they said,
Speaker 5: what's what's Mark like when he's jumping, And he said
Speaker 5: he's either AOT or bos exiting the plane. But Kenny
Speaker 5: land on chees You can land, no no problem. So anyway,
Speaker 5: the small little military airstrip was not alone beside the
Speaker 5: main Dublin Belfast railway line, but on the other side
Speaker 5: of the main Dublin Belfast railway line.
Speaker 4: It was the sea.
Speaker 5: Anyway, they took a chance, and because I was the
Speaker 5: only one to get that needed the fifth jump to
Speaker 5: have the graduation ceremony, so they dropped me.
Speaker 4: I'm not sure how far over the sea. So I'm
Speaker 4: sort of running.
Speaker 5: With the wind, and then in the middle of this
Speaker 5: huge grass airfield, there was obviously the the tarmac had
Speaker 5: a runway, and the next thing, I thought, right, I'm
Speaker 5: going to hit the run by. So I turned back
Speaker 5: into the wind, then ran with the wind and ended
Speaker 5: up on the ground like a bag of cement. And
Speaker 5: I'm lying on the ground going yes, yes, I got
Speaker 5: my wings out. The shoot inflated. I'm being pulled down
Speaker 5: the field. I took it up and run around and
Speaker 5: jump on it. I didn't mind. I got my wings
Speaker 5: and never darkened the door of parachuting again. Because my
Speaker 5: speciality was was diving and fast boats and ribs and
Speaker 5: stuff like that. But it was well, I didn't have
Speaker 5: a choice. Everyone had to do it, so I didn't
Speaker 5: have a choice. But yeah, my home was underwater rather
Speaker 5: than any place else.
Speaker 2: It's the uh yeah, the dive course that you went
Speaker 2: through sounded pretty hillacious. You're talking about how like you
Speaker 2: guys had to like pull yourselves over a guide rope
Speaker 2: at the bottom of this.
Speaker 5: The We were trained by the Irish Navy and they
Speaker 5: trained their divers in six weeks and they have to
Speaker 5: have three and a half thousand minutes down. But they
Speaker 5: decided that they would train us in three weeks. But
Speaker 5: we still have tod three and a half minutes down.
Speaker 5: So we used to start in the morning. There's an
Speaker 5: Irish Navy term called an awkward, which essentially is a
Speaker 5: fast stress. So we say, if if something wraps around
Speaker 5: the ships prop and you have to get in the
Speaker 5: water quickly, So what about seven o'clock on a winter's morning.
Speaker 5: We'd be in the little dives bit with just our
Speaker 5: summoned out and all your gear laid out, and the
Speaker 5: guy would blow the whistle and we'd two and a
Speaker 5: half minutes had everything. And this was all like neoprene
Speaker 5: long John's neoprene top, neopren boogies, all that kind of stuff.
Speaker 5: And there was I think eight of us on the course,
Speaker 5: and invariably someone would miss the two and a half
Speaker 5: minute test time, so we would have to get out,
Speaker 5: run to the end of a fifty meter pier, jump
Speaker 5: into the tide and swim back.
Speaker 4: This is like seven thirty of winter's.
Speaker 5: Morning into the Irish Sea or the Atlantic, I should say.
Speaker 5: But it certainly did wonderus for your front crawl, I
Speaker 5: can tell you that. But to build up what they
Speaker 5: call your insurance, in other words, the amount of time
Speaker 5: that you can get from a single what we was
Speaker 5: to call a set, but like a bottle, we had
Speaker 5: to do these circuits and what was known as a jackstay.
Speaker 5: So it's a hawser cable and it might go out
Speaker 5: for I don't know, one hundred and fifty meters and
Speaker 5: then it would hit a kind of a weight, and
Speaker 5: then you go this way and then come back.
Speaker 4: And all at.
Speaker 5: The time, all navy diving, you weren't just buddied, but
Speaker 5: you were physically buddied. So on my right arm, i'd
Speaker 5: have a thing tied on and I'd have a meter
Speaker 5: of cord with a clip, and my body on his
Speaker 5: left arm would have the same, so that even if
Speaker 5: you're in black visibility excuse me, you can send signals
Speaker 5: through tugs and pulls, given a rough idea of what
Speaker 5: was going on. And of course, because we were soft,
Speaker 5: they wouldn't let us wear neoprene gloves.
Speaker 4: So generally what had.
Speaker 5: Happened is one guy would be on the jackstay and
Speaker 5: the other guy would be two meters above, still connected.
Speaker 5: Because when you're on the jack stade you can see
Speaker 5: nothing because you're you're you're stirring up all this muck
Speaker 5: and stuff, and because it's an iron has cable, because
Speaker 5: I was bits of wire sticking out, so you'd end up. Now.
Speaker 5: Of course you wouldn't feel it when you're underwater because
Speaker 5: your hands are nearly numb. But after one particular storm,
Speaker 5: we went out and I was on I was on
Speaker 5: the jackstay, and my body was, as I said, probably
Speaker 5: two meters above me. And as I was coming to
Speaker 5: where the where I knew there was an anchor to
Speaker 5: join to the next cable, I noticed the cable started
Speaker 5: rising and I thought, that's a bit secking strange. So
Speaker 5: the next thing, my cable, my personal cord got caught
Speaker 5: in a kink in the the iron cable, and I'm
Speaker 5: trying to get my knife out of my leg to
Speaker 5: cut it, even though cutting cutting your body card is
Speaker 5: is very frowned upon in the Navy. So my body
Speaker 5: comes down and he was kind of going, what's going on?
Speaker 5: And I showed him where the card was stuck and
Speaker 5: I was explaining, I can't move my fingers, so that
Speaker 5: the next thing, he shows me his contents gauge, which
Speaker 5: was nearly in the red, and I held up mine
Speaker 5: and I looked at it and I was in the red.
Speaker 5: So with no choice, so he cut the cable, cut
Speaker 5: the cord and grabbed me and he came up and
Speaker 5: it was like Excalibur. The first thing that broke the
Speaker 5: surface was a hand with the tiger. Needless to say,
Speaker 5: or naval structures weren't too impressed. But one of the
Speaker 5: things that one of the do or die things that
Speaker 5: we had to do in that course was the naval
Speaker 5: base is on an island and there's a huge bridge
Speaker 5: connecting the mainland to the island. So at low tide
Speaker 5: you had to jump off this bridge. And I remember
Speaker 5: before I started the course, I was talking to a
Speaker 5: mat of mine who would completed the previous one, and
Speaker 5: I said, what's the jump off the bridge like? And
Speaker 5: this guy had a very broad Dublin accent, and he goes, jaesus,
Speaker 5: you will fuc and jump and you still full and scream,
Speaker 5: and halfway down you will take a breath and you
Speaker 5: sill full and scream again and kind of was like that.
Speaker 4: It was, it was, it was, it was.
Speaker 5: It was really really big, and you were in your
Speaker 5: wetsuit and your fins tucked under your arm, but you
Speaker 5: had to kind of enter with your feet tuck together,
Speaker 5: slightly bent arms in like that. And no more than
Speaker 5: my exit from from the Cessna, my exit from the
Speaker 5: top of the bridge wasn't exactly.
Speaker 4: Core inverb behind my hands out like that.
Speaker 5: But at the end of the evening you have bruises
Speaker 5: through the knee, prim you'd be all bruised. Well, I
Speaker 5: would because I kind of wasn't doing it technically that right.
Speaker 5: But the way it was good and I thoroughly enjoyed.
Speaker 5: And of course with fast boats as well, which kind
Speaker 5: of added to the to the to the whole of it.
Speaker 5: We we initially had twin yam had fifties and these
Speaker 5: were five points for meters or ribs, and them has
Speaker 5: worn't great, so we decided that we would purchase a
Speaker 5: single one twenty Johnson one twenty for each boat, and
Speaker 5: I to see always asking me, he said, Mark, how
Speaker 5: do you want to test these new engines? And I said,
Speaker 5: let's try them to the UK. I didn't really know,
Speaker 5: but I thought it'd be something interesting to do. And
Speaker 5: of course he said, do you not think the British
Speaker 5: military might have a certain view of other special forces
Speaker 5: entering their territorial waters.
Speaker 4: I said, okay, So we tested them another way.
Speaker 5: But every year the units would have what was known
Speaker 5: as a summer camp where we'd kind of go away
Speaker 5: and mask some someplace and it was like.
Speaker 4: To be We.
Speaker 5: Say, if you weren't a diver, you could you could
Speaker 5: try out diving, you could rock climb and whatever. But
Speaker 5: the adjacent to this place, and some of the high
Speaker 5: highest sea cliffs in Europe called the Cliffs of More
Speaker 5: really really dramatic. So the CEO said, can we go
Speaker 5: over and drive over and kind of look at the
Speaker 5: bottom of them? So we had two boats and we
Speaker 5: had about biting maybe eight guys in each boat, and
Speaker 5: the rape I had it's just kind of a straddle sea,
Speaker 5: so you're sitting and the steered middle is kind of
Speaker 5: down nearly at your knees and the SEO was sitting
Speaker 5: behind me. So we drove around and the sea was
Speaker 5: nice and calm, and I literally popped the bow of
Speaker 5: the rip against the base of the cliffs are over
Speaker 5: and you could just look up for three or four
Speaker 5: hundred feet.
Speaker 4: It's really impressive.
Speaker 5: But I kind of started feeling the swell building up,
Speaker 5: so I said to the other cocks, I said, let's
Speaker 5: let's go, because you could see like it wasn't huge
Speaker 5: ways at that stage, but you could tell by the
Speaker 5: way they were building that was going get worse. So
Speaker 5: we had started heading back towards where we thought we
Speaker 5: could recover the boats, and the waves were getting really
Speaker 5: big at this stage. So I looked to my right,
Speaker 5: and the next thing he went off. A wave went
Speaker 5: up and pirouetted and fell, and the boat came down
Speaker 5: upside on and all eight guys into the tide. So
Speaker 5: I decided I wasn't going to try and go for
Speaker 5: a harbor. I was going to beat it because the
Speaker 5: next wave was coming from me. So I said to
Speaker 5: everyone hold on, and I went gunning for the beach.
Speaker 5: And we had a tilt mechanism where we could tilt
Speaker 5: the engine if we're coming into shallow water. So I
Speaker 5: was getting ready to do that and there was an
Speaker 5: almighty crash and I thought I just flipped the boat
Speaker 5: as well. There was that much water had come down
Speaker 5: on us, but the wave crashed over us. So about
Speaker 5: three seconds spun the boat around and headed for the sea,
Speaker 5: shouting at forward the lads to run up onto the bow.
Speaker 5: So we hit the next way and the boat went
Speaker 5: up vertical. So I'm holding the steering will this way.
Speaker 5: The commanding officer is holding onto my chest with his
Speaker 5: legs hanging in the wind. And as I went up,
Speaker 5: I thought, Jesus, I'm going to kill people here. And
Speaker 5: then as I'm coming down, I'm thinking, I have a
Speaker 5: new Johnson one twenty horsepower engine on the back that's
Speaker 5: two weeks old. I'm going to bury it into the sand.
Speaker 5: But I didn't, and I managed to get the boat out.
Speaker 5: But leaders to say that the other cocks got a
Speaker 5: fair amount of abuse. I heard that for having flipped
Speaker 5: the boat. But we recovered that one as well.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, I'm amazed you guys all made it
Speaker 2: out of that are alive?
Speaker 4: Oh well we did, Yeah, yeah we did.
Speaker 5: There was a few coats and bruises, but you know,
Speaker 5: we're sort of used to that.
Speaker 2: This would actually be a good time to ask you,
Speaker 2: you know, what is the mission of the Irish Rangers.
Speaker 2: You're kind of taking us through this training and some
Speaker 2: of these capabilities, but at this time, what was the
Speaker 2: unit's actual purpose?
Speaker 5: Okay, So, like like most soft units, we had a
Speaker 5: green roll and a black roll. So black role will
Speaker 5: be counter terrorism, dealing with hijacking of planes and trains
Speaker 5: and and and and buildings. And then the green roll
Speaker 5: will be your standard of military sniping, long range patrols, ambushing,
Speaker 5: that kind of stuff. And we because the unit was
Speaker 5: only founded in in the early eighties, so this this
Speaker 5: was still in the eighties, so we were in a
Speaker 5: lot of cases, we were we were finding our way.
Speaker 5: Like certainly the the initial instructors had trained in the US,
Speaker 5: but a lot of the stuff like tech for instance,
Speaker 5: we had gas rigs, and we had to develop our
Speaker 5: own concepts on and how to take a rig. And
Speaker 5: certainly you know, like we say do in combat swims
Speaker 5: for mile out, hitting the hitting the rig, which is
Speaker 5: difficult enough at night, let me tell you, and then
Speaker 5: setting up a line between two legs so you could
Speaker 5: hook your stuff on and then go up the legs
Speaker 5: of the rig and carry out whatever you're supposed to do.
Speaker 5: And in high seas, you know, like on the legs
Speaker 5: of these rigs that there was.
Speaker 4: Like whole holes.
Speaker 5: I suppose we.
Speaker 4: Want a better word, but sometimes the word in there.
Speaker 5: And you know, you could get hit by a wave
Speaker 5: and then when the wave recedes, you could be three
Speaker 5: meters off the tide. So a lot of the stuff
Speaker 5: we had to kind of supposed figure out for ourselves
Speaker 5: the most efficient way of doing it. And I like
Speaker 5: the guys there, well, those those two rigs are not
Speaker 5: alonger with us, but in terms of you know, doing
Speaker 5: assaults on moving ships and all the kind of stuff,
Speaker 5: the guys they are now extremely skilled and you know
Speaker 5: that they're they've gone onto rebreathes and stuff like that,
Speaker 5: which we never had at the time. But it was
Speaker 5: very much It was the kind of units and I'm
Speaker 5: sure it's the same one with you guys as well,
Speaker 5: that if you had an idea, everyone was open to
Speaker 5: hearing about it. It wasn't that you know, you know,
Speaker 5: if you're a young corporate how could you have an idea.
Speaker 5: Everyone who had thought about a particular thing, whether it
Speaker 5: was a house assault, whether it was a train assault,
Speaker 5: whether it was the rigs, whether whatever, people.
Speaker 4: Would listen to you.
Speaker 5: And you know, if if if if everyone thought, well
Speaker 5: let's try that. So it was. I found it was
Speaker 5: a very good place where where people could express themselves.
Speaker 5: And I don't know, like at one stage there's a
Speaker 5: there's a special rig for the h K, but I
Speaker 5: remember like sometimes it didn't suit, especially with with with assaulting.
Speaker 5: It neither be too loose or or whatever. But this
Speaker 5: guy got the bright idea. He dispensed with the official
Speaker 5: Heckler and Cock rig and he used the bungee card
Speaker 5: on either either side of the MP five so when
Speaker 5: you needed your hands free, it was tight against your
Speaker 5: chest and when you need to move, you just pulled
Speaker 5: it out and then it came back in again. And
Speaker 5: I thought that was completely great innovation.
Speaker 4: It was. It was amazing. And I know at the time.
Speaker 5: We were supposed to be the best in the Irish
Speaker 5: Defense Forces at navigation, and at the time we were
Speaker 5: using half inch to one mile maps, which are not
Speaker 5: the easiest maps to navigate on. And I would say privately,
Speaker 5: I went off and I did a certificate in an
Speaker 5: adventure education because I was I was passionate.
Speaker 4: About mountaineering and stuff like that.
Speaker 5: And I remember the boss saying to me one day,
Speaker 5: he said, Mac, what are the cities like in the Hills,
Speaker 5: and I said, my opinion, most of the city's ideal
Speaker 5: was their navigation will be at least as good as
Speaker 5: fifty percent of this unit, and way better than the
Speaker 5: rest of the army. And I remember one day I
Speaker 5: was taking it up a navigation class for our own guys,
Speaker 5: and we're up in the hills in a kind of
Speaker 5: a long valley with steep sides on either side, and
Speaker 5: I was saying to the guys, I said, okay, right,
Speaker 5: we'll just say that the mist comes down slash and rain.
Speaker 5: You know you're in a valley, but and you know
Speaker 5: you're facing a side. How will you figure out which
Speaker 5: side you're on? Because maybe if you up the south
Speaker 5: southern side, there's crags at the top and you could
Speaker 5: fall off. And I said, just basic equipment that you
Speaker 5: had with see what what's what can you do? And
Speaker 5: they were kind of going, I don't really know. And
Speaker 5: I said, look, take out your compass, take it bearing
Speaker 5: up that slope, transfer to the map, and then that
Speaker 5: will tell you whether it's the north, south east side.
Speaker 5: And these guys, these are hard rangers. And the thought
Speaker 5: I was a god because I was bringing in different
Speaker 5: techniques from civilian mountaineering and especially with setting up be
Speaker 5: lays and climbing, like at the time, I don't know
Speaker 5: if you're familiar with with climbing, presume your are at
Speaker 5: the time. Well, okay, so at the time, if you're
Speaker 5: setting up a three point bla, you tie a figure
Speaker 5: of eight in the row, you'd bring it out, then
Speaker 5: you'd bring it back to the second point, another figure
Speaker 5: of eight, then bring it out, bring it back to
Speaker 5: the third, another figure of eight, and then a massive
Speaker 5: big figure of.
Speaker 4: Eight to equalize the three points.
Speaker 5: At which stage Europe was nearly gone and I was
Speaker 5: just bringing back in new techniques that just made it
Speaker 5: much more simpler to set up bliz.
Speaker 4: And be much more efficient.
Speaker 5: And the unit was very open to that, and it
Speaker 5: was like a lot of geist went off and did
Speaker 5: kind of did extra freefall in their own time with
Speaker 5: civilian clubs, and they were bringing back techniques for for
Speaker 5: parachuting as well. So it was very much you know,
Speaker 5: if you've got an idea, let's hear us and let's
Speaker 5: see if it's any good, which was, which was, which
Speaker 5: was great.
Speaker 2: And the other interesting thing before we get into some
Speaker 2: of the overseas stuff is. You guys did operations domestically
Speaker 2: in Ireland. This was during the troubles. I could tell
Speaker 2: us a little bit about that. About the wrecky missions
Speaker 2: and counter terrorism missions that you guys did.
Speaker 4: We did. We did a few, I know one of them.
Speaker 5: We there was fairly credible information that an IRA training
Speaker 5: camp would be would take part in a certain part
Speaker 5: of the wood in a certain part of the northern
Speaker 5: part of our country, shall we say.
Speaker 4: And I remember doing the initially close target wrecking on it.
Speaker 5: And finding a few AK forty seven casings, so we.
Speaker 4: Knew it had this clearing had been used before.
Speaker 5: I also noted that whenever they had finished firing, they
Speaker 5: turned around did the three sixty into the woods, because
Speaker 5: I could see where the where branches have been chipped away,
Speaker 5: which tends to focus the brain when you're when you're
Speaker 5: putting in a few ops on that on that site. Now,
Speaker 5: nothing really happened on that particular one. But there was
Speaker 5: another case where again similar kind of credible information, where
Speaker 5: a meeting was to take place at a certain track
Speaker 5: junction in a forest and from there they would proceed
Speaker 5: on to do whatever they were going to do. So
Speaker 5: we had and if you can imagine a forest track
Speaker 5: kind of comes up pill this way and then takes
Speaker 5: a sharp bend and goes back that way.
Speaker 4: So we had three teams watching the.
Speaker 5: Displace and eventually, after about i know, seven red days,
Speaker 5: we were getting pulled out.
Speaker 4: Nothing had happened.
Speaker 5: And on the last day we were just getting ready
Speaker 5: to sort of pack up, you know, when it was
Speaker 5: getting dusk, this car comes flying in on the lower road,
Speaker 5: kind of screeches around the corner and goes up those
Speaker 5: two people in it, goes up the top road, disappears
Speaker 5: around the bend, and then the door was opening and closing,
Speaker 5: and there's a bit of shouting, and then the car
Speaker 5: comes slowly back down the way to Cain.
Speaker 4: And it was driven by a female.
Speaker 5: So she came down to the bend, turns around and
Speaker 5: was going down on the lower road. And the next
Speaker 5: thing you're, a man that had been in the car
Speaker 5: starts running from we'll see the upper road to the
Speaker 5: lower road through the forest. He had stepped on two
Speaker 5: of our guys, and it was only when he stepped
Speaker 5: on the balls of the third guy that the forest rupped.
Speaker 5: So we called it the police because they're the ones
Speaker 5: that have to make a rest and all that kind
Speaker 5: of stuff. But it turned out that this guy was
Speaker 5: teaching his girlfriend to drive and he was explaining an
Speaker 5: emergency stop and he said, you drive down slowly and
Speaker 5: at some stage I jump out in front of you.
Speaker 5: And he didn't expect a lot of soft guys covered
Speaker 5: in the black and green pen to be.
Speaker 4: But yeah, we did.
Speaker 5: We did a few and then then like one of
Speaker 5: the bigger ones, one of the notorious terrorists at the time,
Speaker 5: O Hair here, we were involved in in in in
Speaker 5: in that we we're very close in the forest that
Speaker 5: we'd say the bends were still warm when when we
Speaker 5: came in, but they got out the other side and
Speaker 5: he was subsequently caught in a in a checkpoint down
Speaker 5: near near Kenny. So yeah, that that that was that
Speaker 5: was interesting, and you know it it sort of makes you,
Speaker 5: it makes you think. It's it's certainly it's it's Unlikeael
Speaker 5: would say overseas service when when when you're looking at
Speaker 5: hard and criminals that weren't a play of shooting an
Speaker 5: Irish policeman or kill an Irish policeman and Irish soldiers.
Speaker 4: It does certainly make you.
Speaker 5: Make make you think all the more about about your
Speaker 5: your your skills and your drills and and and and
Speaker 5: how to react to any any given situation.
Speaker 2: During that manhunt, if I recall, right, you guys lost
Speaker 2: a unit member, didn't you.
Speaker 5: We did, Yeah, yeaht poor Kevin Mayne got dress him.
Speaker 5: Which was like we were a small unit and we
Speaker 5: had never ren reached our full effective strength because there's
Speaker 5: no point in sacrifice and quality for quantity. So when
Speaker 5: this this was like a nationwide manhunt. So we had
Speaker 5: basically a platoon plus deployed up towards the border and
Speaker 5: another platoon plus further south. And yeah, Kevin was killed
Speaker 5: tragically in an accident in the military base in the car.
Speaker 5: And of course when we got this news, because obviously
Speaker 5: you know yourself, soft hunits tend to be fairly tight
Speaker 5: with each other, it was a big blow. But we
Speaker 5: still had to kind of stick with the mission and
Speaker 5: trying to kind of compart compartmentalized degree there was a
Speaker 5: to do it.
Speaker 2: On a lighter note, Let's talk a little bit about
Speaker 2: your interest in mountaineering, because your book is not just
Speaker 2: soldier stories, although there's a lot of those. Also, you
Speaker 2: talk about your experience in mountaineering archaeology and things like that.
Speaker 2: You mentioned that this was a passion for you. I mean,
Speaker 2: how did you get into climbing?
Speaker 4: And I suppose.
Speaker 5: When I mentioned earlier that I did this certificate in
Speaker 5: adventure education, so I under spend a lot of time
Speaker 5: with civilians who were into all sorts of adventure sports,
Speaker 5: whether it's rock climb and mountaineering, canoeing, diving, that that
Speaker 5: sort of stuff. And no, obviously I've been in the unity.
Speaker 5: I had to be very qualified in upseiling and setting
Speaker 5: up a sales and row access and that kind of stuff.
Speaker 4: Climbing not so much. So I ended up being.
Speaker 5: Extremely passionate, not just about with the classical mountaineering, but
Speaker 5: in in full on rock climbing where and I suppose
Speaker 5: maybe for your your listeners that maybe don't have never
Speaker 5: tried rock climb in it. The best way I can
Speaker 5: describe it is if you're we say, playing soccer for
Speaker 5: your local town team, and you score the winning goal
Speaker 5: in the local cup. It's a great achievement, but we'll
Speaker 5: say it's not we say, the same as scoring the
Speaker 5: winning goal in i suppose your state championship, and it's
Speaker 5: certainly not the same as scoring the winning goal for
Speaker 5: America in the World Cup. You know, there are different
Speaker 5: levels of kind of achievement. But if you take something
Speaker 5: like rock climbing, and you have a cliff that's one
Speaker 5: hundred yards wide and a one hundred feet tall, and
Speaker 5: on the right hand side of the cliff is the
Speaker 5: hardest clime in the world, and on the left hand
Speaker 5: side of the cliff is probab the easiest climb in
Speaker 5: the world. If a beginner starting here, if the best
Speaker 5: climb in the world's starting there. As they're climbing, they're
Speaker 5: both placing protection and clipping the rope in. They're both
Speaker 5: coming through the exact same feelings of fear and anxiety,
Speaker 5: and when the two of them get to the top,
Speaker 5: it's the exact same feeling of exhilaration that you get.
Speaker 5: So no matter what stage you participate in rock climbing,
Speaker 5: the the trills and the dangers are the exact same.
Speaker 5: So therefore the sense of achievement when you get there,
Speaker 5: I've always found or the exact same.
Speaker 2: That's interesting. I never heard anyone put it that way before.
Speaker 4: It's the Irish ra explaining it.
Speaker 3: No, that's a great way to explain it.
Speaker 2: And you got to did you get the name a
Speaker 2: peak or a climb after yours because you were the
Speaker 2: first one to do it.
Speaker 5: Okay, So in rock climbing, I ended up being quite
Speaker 5: friendly with one of the best rock climbers at the time.
Speaker 5: I'm a guy called Tom Ryan who passed away subsequently
Speaker 5: got rested. But we used to go to the Sea
Speaker 5: cliffs on on the west coast of Mayo, which kind
Speaker 5: of on the central part of the of the country.
Speaker 5: So if if you find a route and lead it,
Speaker 5: you decide the grade and you give it a name,
Speaker 5: and then kind of henceforth the name will be First
Speaker 5: Ascent Kevin McDonald with Tom Ryan or vice versa or whatever,
Speaker 5: and the name is whatever. And when you look at
Speaker 5: a rock climbing guide, it will tell you that this
Speaker 5: climb is graded at this difficulty. First Ascent was made
Speaker 5: by Kevin McDonald and Tom Ryan and the name of
Speaker 5: all of it.
Speaker 4: So, yeah, that's that's kind of another interesting about rock climbing.
Speaker 5: Your your name kind of lives on if you're the
Speaker 5: first person to make that particular climb.
Speaker 2: I and then you went to the dark side and
Speaker 2: became an officer.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I did.
Speaker 5: It's it's it's it's it's kind of strange. So when
Speaker 5: when I spent five years in the SF, I was
Speaker 5: getting tired of of sort of living out of the
Speaker 5: bag essentially, and I didn't want to go to a
Speaker 5: standard unit where I knew i'd get flat because of
Speaker 5: all the courses I had done. And an opportunity came
Speaker 5: up in the unit I originally was in as a reserve.
Speaker 5: There was an opportunity for the training stargeant, and I thought, right,
Speaker 5: I'll applied for that, and that will give me great
Speaker 5: scope to really get into high level mountaineering, because I
Speaker 5: knew I wouldn't be that challenged look at after a
Speaker 5: bunch of eager reserves. So I did, and I have
Speaker 5: to say after about a year, I was beginning to
Speaker 5: get a bit twitchy. And then the Irish Defense Force
Speaker 5: has decided that they would run a course to commission
Speaker 5: suitable qualified NCOs from the ranks.
Speaker 4: And this doesn't happen that often.
Speaker 5: So this was in nineteen ninety one, and this would
Speaker 5: have been the seventh potential office of course ran in
Speaker 5: the Defense Forces since the Army was founded in nineteen
Speaker 5: twenty one. And the difference for this one, which kind
Speaker 5: of made it appeal to me was the previous six
Speaker 5: was they selected people with skills in A and Q
Speaker 5: and they kind of put them in as adjudants and
Speaker 5: battalion qms and stuff like that, and more or less
Speaker 5: specifically not given them operational rules where we were told
Speaker 5: we would be standard platoon commanders. So yeah, yeah, I jumped.
Speaker 4: Into the dark side and it was good. It was interesting.
Speaker 5: I ended up in a lot more places than I
Speaker 5: would have ended up in as a as an NCO
Speaker 5: one into thing sorry one, no, go ahead, Kevin, Okay, Well,
Speaker 5: I was just just going to tell you the story
Speaker 5: that just because I went to the dark side, I
Speaker 5: didn't lose my mad streak. There's the high there's the
Speaker 5: high security prison in Ireland called port Leage, and the
Speaker 5: inner part of the prison is the old British prison
Speaker 5: from when when they were running the country, and this
Speaker 5: is where they generally. We had two platoons in at
Speaker 5: the time, so you would do a three day stint
Speaker 5: nine hours, nine hours off, nine on, nine off for
Speaker 5: three days and then go out for three back in
Speaker 5: for three and you would do three months of that.
Speaker 5: So I was a platoon commander for the battalion that
Speaker 5: was in and normally I don't know if if you
Speaker 5: have something similar in in the US Army, but before
Speaker 5: you go on and we say guard duty, you have
Speaker 5: to be what's known as mounted. So in other words,
Speaker 5: you line up, the officer checks that, then there's nothing
Speaker 5: in the breach, and then you fit a charge magazine.
Speaker 5: And it's kind of it's kind of a bit bit
Speaker 5: of an old habit. So anyway, I was waiting for
Speaker 5: my platoon to form up, and I was looking at
Speaker 5: the at the wall, the original wall of the of
Speaker 5: the prison, which was made up of limestone, and I
Speaker 5: was kind of looking at it, thinking I wonder I
Speaker 5: could I could I climb that? So one of the
Speaker 5: one of the privates that knew me from my sporting
Speaker 5: experience with the with the Pentacleon team, he said.
Speaker 4: So come away from it.
Speaker 5: You wouldn't even get off the ground, because he knew
Speaker 5: I was a rock climber, and he had the whole
Speaker 5: platoon listening to him. And I said, all right, would
Speaker 5: you like to put a little wager on that? He said,
Speaker 5: I'll bet you wouldn't get three meters off the ground.
Speaker 5: And the whole thing was probably it was at least
Speaker 5: ten meters, probably twelve meters was tall. One. I said, right,
Speaker 5: I'll double your bet and I'll get to within three
Speaker 5: meters at the top. So of course he's gone.
Speaker 4: I have him. I have the officer.
Speaker 5: The next time I came back, I brought him by
Speaker 5: rock climbing shoes and chalk because when you're when you're
Speaker 5: climbing on small holes, your your fingers get very sort
Speaker 5: of sweating. So after a nine hour shift, I'd spent
Speaker 5: about forty minutes on the wall trying to perfect these
Speaker 5: little holes where the mortar.
Speaker 4: Had had come up.
Speaker 5: When i'd get my fingers in and after like forty minutes,
Speaker 5: as much as you could do because you're kind of
Speaker 5: hanging balancing on the tips of your chosen on the
Speaker 5: tips of your fingers, but i'd always leave a little
Speaker 5: chalk mark to show that the high point. And of
Speaker 5: course the lads to be saying to this guy, he's
Speaker 5: getting higher, you know, he's getting hot. So anyway that
Speaker 5: I thought I'd figured out how I could do this
Speaker 5: kind of rising traverse, and I went past three meters
Speaker 5: new and won the better I want past two meters,
Speaker 5: and I knew I could make a lunch to the top,
Speaker 5: but I couldn't reverse it, so I'd have to kind
Speaker 5: of crawl along the top of the wall to get
Speaker 5: into one of the guard posts, and.
Speaker 4: Everyone was going to know about what was going on.
Speaker 5: So I I had this conversation between the mad side
Speaker 5: of my brain and the camp side of my brain
Speaker 5: about twenty feet off the ground and hanging like this.
Speaker 5: So then I reversed the climb and talk no more
Speaker 5: about it. And about three months later I was in
Speaker 5: a different barracks and I was in the Austras mess
Speaker 5: having a beer and a few other guys came in
Speaker 5: and I was introduced to myself and well, you're from
Speaker 5: the West, I said, yeah, who's that guy that climbed
Speaker 5: up the wall in Portish prison, climbed down the fire side,
Speaker 5: went into town, bought a pack of cigarettes and came
Speaker 5: up and reversed it.
Speaker 4: And I said, but it wasn't quite like that.
Speaker 5: Now, see, Kevin, that's.
Speaker 3: Where that's where you screwed up.
Speaker 2: You were supposed to look him then the eye and
Speaker 2: say that's exactly.
Speaker 3: How it happened.
Speaker 4: But yeah, that was interesting.
Speaker 2: And then nineteen ninety three you go back to Lebanon,
Speaker 2: this time as an officer m.
Speaker 4: And that was.
Speaker 5: Interesting because I was in charge of Recie section, so
Speaker 5: we had we had two big seize armored cars which
Speaker 5: I had to be qualified in as well. So I
Speaker 5: was out and about a lot. But it also coincided
Speaker 5: with a major seven day war between Israel and I
Speaker 5: suppose that the people of Lebanon, and at that stage
Speaker 5: the Israelis had kind of withdrawn to what they call
Speaker 5: the securities on, which was essentially a ten kilometer deep
Speaker 5: strip inside in Lebanon, and they had fortified positions on
Speaker 5: all the all the high ground. Plus they had the
Speaker 5: services of what we call the DFF, the de Factor Forces,
Speaker 5: and they called the South Lebanese Army, So these were
Speaker 5: Lebanese that were armed in uniformed by the Israelis. And
Speaker 5: every fortnight, I suppose Hesbola would attack the Israelis, but
Speaker 5: they had they were effective enough, I have to say,
Speaker 5: and at one case there was there was an idea
Speaker 5: of blue and blue and I think there was about
Speaker 5: four people full idea of killed. So then they launched
Speaker 5: what they called Operational Accountability, which was a seven day
Speaker 5: A seven day war essentially was standoff. It was planes
Speaker 5: and tanks and artillery and naval gunships and stuff like that.
Speaker 5: But their stated aim was to create a huge refugee
Speaker 5: problem that might force the Lebanese government to take on
Speaker 5: hes bullet, and of course it didn't. It sort of
Speaker 5: drove people more into the arms of the extreme. But
Speaker 5: I remember at one stage I was on the roof
Speaker 5: of a three story building which was our company in quarters,
Speaker 5: and there was one five five artillery landing all over
Speaker 5: the place, and of course each one of them is
Speaker 5: a violation, just as Catosha is going into Israel as
Speaker 5: a violation, and.
Speaker 4: We had to kind of record the locations of them all.
Speaker 5: And I saw this shell hit the village about a
Speaker 5: kilometer away, and it didn't explode.
Speaker 4: It it ricocheted, and I could see it.
Speaker 5: Coming in my general direction, so I kind of threw
Speaker 5: myself down on the roof and then forgot about it
Speaker 5: because there was ship flying all over the place.
Speaker 4: And then we used to for.
Speaker 5: Internal communications within the camp with these old dial up phones,
Speaker 5: you know, the field telephone where yeah, yeah, So I
Speaker 5: go roof and this guy goes, sir, have you looked
Speaker 5: at your accommodation? So I looked over the roof and
Speaker 5: there's a big hole in the roof and the door
Speaker 5: was blown out. So I thought, okay, that's where the
Speaker 5: land it talk no more about it. So then five
Speaker 5: minutes later roof, sorry, you better look at the canteen.
Speaker 5: So I'm looking over and here at the steps of
Speaker 5: the canteen as an unexploded one five to five shell.
Speaker 5: So I contact the battalion. They contact the idea if
Speaker 5: there's a liaison branch in UNIFIL that kind of does
Speaker 5: that stuff. So they agreed not to shell the road
Speaker 5: from the battalion headquarters or to where we were for
Speaker 5: three hours to allow for one of our EOD guys
Speaker 5: to come out and deal with the with the unexploded shell.
Speaker 5: So anyway, the this this Captain Ryman, He said, kat,
Speaker 5: can you get about twenty or thirty sandbags or as
Speaker 5: many as you can because obviously when I when I
Speaker 5: blow this, it'll do a bit of damage. And I
Speaker 5: have this marvelous picture of about six guys in flag
Speaker 5: jackets and helmets furrian sandbags towards the shell, and then
Speaker 5: across from them there's another six guys with jackets and helmets,
Speaker 5: furry and all the beer out of the canteen, because
Speaker 5: the canteen will be destroyed when your man blew that
Speaker 5: blew the shell, which which you kind of was. So
Speaker 5: we subsequently, when the war was over, we renamed it
Speaker 5: the one five five Club. But the day after the ceasefire,
Speaker 5: I was going up to the village of Branshes with
Speaker 5: the name of the village to do a sort of
Speaker 5: a wreckie. And because there was so many unexploded shells.
Speaker 5: In fact, it was a policy of the idea to
Speaker 5: fire one five five artillery shells without fuses, and they
Speaker 5: did more damage. So we say, if one five five,
Speaker 5: as you probably know yourself, one of one five five
Speaker 5: shell goes off.
Speaker 4: As a creator maybe a meter wide and half a meter.
Speaker 5: Deep and loads of shrapling, But if it doesn't explode,
Speaker 5: it could come down through a three story concrete house,
Speaker 5: went to the garden and come up and land in
Speaker 5: the second story of the house next door. So you
Speaker 5: have destroyed one house, and if you do what you're
Speaker 5: supposed to do, which is blow the shell in situe,
Speaker 5: you've destroyed a second house. And this particular day, myself
Speaker 5: and this Swedish leftenant was a bombs bottle of guide.
Speaker 5: We carried I think ten unexploded one five to five
Speaker 5: out of the houses, and we had a small jeep
Speaker 5: and a trailer. So when we had I think twelve shells,
Speaker 5: we contacted battalion and said, right, we're going down to
Speaker 5: this boddy and we're going to blow them at this
Speaker 5: time because these rails had to be informed because if
Speaker 5: they hurd an explosion, then I think it's a break
Speaker 5: down of the Seaspire. So we're rattling down this narrow
Speaker 5: lane and this lady comes screaming out of a house
Speaker 5: and on the roof of her house was an unexploded shell,
Speaker 5: but this one had a fuse on it and it
Speaker 5: will bounced I don't nowhere and kind of land. So
Speaker 5: the tools got up and looked at it, and I said,
Speaker 5: you know what, let's put two loops on a piece
Speaker 5: of rope, bring them together. We'll go over and get
Speaker 5: down behind the wall and pull and so like as
Speaker 5: it's rolling. If it goes off, it won't go off
Speaker 5: near us. So as as we're getting ready to pull
Speaker 5: on the rope, he said, you know, in Sweden, if
Speaker 5: my commanding officer sees this, I will be a civilian.
Speaker 4: I said, if my commanding officer. Here's of this. I'll
Speaker 4: be a civilian too. We didn't have a choice.
Speaker 5: So when when it when it rolled up to the
Speaker 5: edge of the roof and it was only like six
Speaker 5: feet from us, he goes up and he grabs it,
Speaker 5: and I I take off my flat jacket and I'll
Speaker 5: wrap it around the shell as if that's going as
Speaker 5: if that's going to make anything difference.
Speaker 4: It just it seems the right thing to do with it. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 4: And so I was back.
Speaker 5: There in ninety six for another seven war operation Grapes
Speaker 5: of Wrath, and then I was there in two thousand
Speaker 5: and six with my family as an unarmed Diminity observer
Speaker 5: and I was there for thirty four days of complete
Speaker 5: vichery and we had our unit of unarmed observers were
Speaker 5: the strength of fifty two. And it was a family
Speaker 5: mission at the time. So my wife and kids were
Speaker 5: with me in the Jerusalem right. No, we were in
Speaker 5: tier in Lebanon. We had been living in Tiberias when
Speaker 5: I was waiting on the goal, but then I was
Speaker 5: transferred to Lebanon. So the kids were five and seven,
Speaker 5: going to a local Aims speaking school.
Speaker 4: Everything was great.
Speaker 5: We had them in Beru Damascus, A man like Lebanon
Speaker 5: was happening at the time, and out of the blue,
Speaker 5: I went off. I used to do a seven day
Speaker 5: patrol and come back for three or four days. So
Speaker 5: I went off and choose the morning for a seven
Speaker 5: day patrol, telling my wife Claire, you know, I'll see
Speaker 5: in seven days. And the next day the war kicked
Speaker 5: off and it took to you, I think, two and
Speaker 5: a half weeks to evacuate the families we had. We
Speaker 5: had four bases along the frontier with Israel, and when
Speaker 5: they had agreed that, they basically hired a cruise liner
Speaker 5: from Cyprus and got it to come over and stand
Speaker 5: off shore and send in lifeboats. So when this has
Speaker 5: been planned, any of the guys up on the patrol
Speaker 5: bases that had family, they were trying to prioritize an
Speaker 5: armored escort to get them down to say goodbye. But
Speaker 5: we were I was. We were getting hammered with tank
Speaker 5: and artillery fire. Not direct, but like within fifteen twenty.
Speaker 3: Meters that's pretty direct, well.
Speaker 4: For tanks it is yet yeah, yeah.
Speaker 3: Horseshoes and hand grenades that's pretty close.
Speaker 5: Yeah, So I couldn't get out, so when my wife
Speaker 5: and two kids were getting into the lifeboat to bring
Speaker 5: them out to the cruise ship, I rang around the
Speaker 5: phone and I said, I'll see you when I see it,
Speaker 5: which is not a great way now, is to end
Speaker 5: the family mission to the Middle East. Let me tell
Speaker 5: you the along with with Claire, there was a Canadian captain.
Speaker 4: She had her back broken when her armored car was shelled.
Speaker 5: And then in the next three days we lost over
Speaker 5: ten percent of strength. We had another captain shot in
Speaker 5: the back. He's non a wheel chair. And then the
Speaker 5: Israelis dropped the Jada into the post, just up for me,
Speaker 5: killing for very good friends of mine. And when you
Speaker 5: pick up, as you probably know yourself, when you pick
Speaker 5: up a friend of yours with no arms, no legs,
Speaker 5: and a head and you're trying to figure out which
Speaker 5: one it is, it gives you certain feelings about certain things.
Speaker 5: I suppose, but.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, that'll stick with you.
Speaker 4: Two thousand and six was a wee bit rough, I
Speaker 4: have to say.
Speaker 5: And then actually during the during the ceasefire, we were
Speaker 5: out in Buttow and we're going through this village and
Speaker 5: I saw one.
Speaker 4: Of the houses had the whole gable wall blown off.
Speaker 5: So for some reason I stopped and went in, and
Speaker 5: in the sitting room there's like a five hundred pound
Speaker 5: bomb landed against the corner. So that obviously had landed
Speaker 5: simplest ricocheted, blew through the wall and the snow in
Speaker 5: someone's sitting room. And so I went in, took up
Speaker 5: my notebook and I was taken down the serial number
Speaker 5: of the of the bomb American Maid actually, and.
Speaker 4: When I was taking it down, the next thing I.
Speaker 5: Heard is and I went, fuck, it was the clock
Speaker 5: that had fallen off the water, because I know bombs
Speaker 5: don't take like your brains.
Speaker 2: Yeah, you've seen enough cartoons that you can't take the chance.
Speaker 4: Yeah, that was That was a Yeah, two thousand and
Speaker 4: six was interesting.
Speaker 5: You.
Speaker 2: I'd like to ask you a little bit more about,
Speaker 2: you know, the U and these peacekeeping missions that you
Speaker 2: were part of. Not only are you placing yourself between
Speaker 2: the two belligerents and these conflicts, and you spend time
Speaker 2: in the goal on heights also so between Syria and Israel,
Speaker 2: or between Lebanon and Israel, or maybe Hezbola in Israel
Speaker 2: is more accurately said. But and then at the same
Speaker 2: time you were also in a multinational force. I mean
Speaker 2: you talked about there were Chinese soldiers, there were Swedish soldiers,
Speaker 2: there were New Zealanders, I mean all these different people.
Speaker 2: I'm just curious that you could talk about like sort
Speaker 2: of how that mission works.
Speaker 5: My four friends that were killed in KM one was Canadian,
Speaker 5: one was Austrian, one was finished, and one was Chinese,
Speaker 5: which kind of adds to your point of yeah, it's
Speaker 5: a multi multinational, multicultural.
Speaker 4: Organization. But yeah, so does.
Speaker 5: What people aren't aware of, I suppose is the different
Speaker 5: UH levels of peacekeeping and peace enforcement. So you'd say
Speaker 5: the difference to the mission in Lebanon is peacekeeping, and
Speaker 5: that's there with the consent of both parties, i e.
Speaker 5: The Lebanese government and the Israeli government. Now, sometimes did
Speaker 5: I want you to do things? And sometimes they do,
Speaker 5: and sometimes they'll stop you doing things and then blame
Speaker 5: you for not doing what they stopping you from doing.
Speaker 4: But then you go up to peace enforcement.
Speaker 5: So the mainly the missions in Africa are are peace enforcement.
Speaker 4: So some of the ones I've been in, like.
Speaker 5: Central African Republic, Chad, Democratic Republic, at the Congo, they're
Speaker 5: all all peace enforcement. And about two years ago, I
Speaker 5: decided I do a master's in Peace and conflict studies,
Speaker 5: and my initial thought was, if you start off with
Speaker 5: lightly armed peacekeeping, there's a steady progression from peacekeeping to
Speaker 5: peace enforcement, and then you end up with a situation
Speaker 5: like the mission in the Congo where they introduced an
Speaker 5: offensive capability into the mandate of the mission. So they
Speaker 5: formed this force intervention brigade to after the M twenty
Speaker 5: three rebels, which are kind of in the news at
Speaker 5: the moment in the two keypers on the eastern part
Speaker 5: of the d RC. And I thought, right, if you
Speaker 5: take that to its next logical step, it's war fighting. Yeah,
Speaker 5: And I thought this would be a great thing for
Speaker 5: a thesis until I started doing a bit of research.
Speaker 4: And the first U in operation career war was war fighting.
Speaker 4: Not many people know.
Speaker 5: Not many people mentioned that one when when I bring
Speaker 5: it up, and then they go to the Congo where
Speaker 5: it was kind of war certain with the Irish.
Speaker 4: I either know if you've seen the film The Siege.
Speaker 3: Of Janitor, Oh, yeah, that's a great, great movie.
Speaker 5: That's war fighting as well. And then we go to UNIFILM,
Speaker 5: which is peacekeeping through the light armed with the concept
Speaker 5: of content of both parties. So the people will talk
Speaker 5: a lot about UNIFIL being unable to fulfill its mandate,
Speaker 5: and in certain.
Speaker 4: Cases it is.
Speaker 5: But UNIFIL is the first and only UN mission that
Speaker 5: successfully oversaw the maritime agreement of a maritime sea boundary
Speaker 5: between two countries who were still at war, which is
Speaker 5: Lebanon and Israel. There's still at war since nineteen forty
Speaker 5: eight officially, but UNIFIL managed to get both sides to
Speaker 5: agree on their maritime boundary.
Speaker 4: They haven't agreed on the land boundary just yet, but.
Speaker 5: It was significant because of the western coast of northern
Speaker 5: Israel and the southwestern coast of Lebanon. There's huge gas reserves,
Speaker 5: so I suppose money talks, but you know, they've certainly
Speaker 5: been successful in that regard.
Speaker 2: The were you there in the goal on Heights when
Speaker 2: I guess it was like twenty fourteen, twenty fifteen, there's
Speaker 2: this incident where Isis came across the border and the
Speaker 2: Filipinos blew off that what they consider an illegal order
Speaker 2: when the UN commander told them they surrender.
Speaker 5: No, I was in Jerusalem at that time. Sorry, that
Speaker 5: was twenty fourteen.
Speaker 2: It might have been it had to have been earlier
Speaker 2: on in the Syria War, like fourteen.
Speaker 5: I went back, so I did two years from two
Speaker 5: thousand and five to the thousand and seven, and then
Speaker 5: so and then another two years from fourteen to fifteen.
Speaker 5: But no, I'm aware of that incident, and there was
Speaker 5: a few more. I know the Irish went in and
Speaker 5: rescued a few un troops as well.
Speaker 4: Oh really, yeah, that would have been in.
Speaker 5: I think twenty twelve, twenty thirteen or something like that,
Speaker 5: because the Irish had a unit with undoff with which
Speaker 5: is the u N peacekeeping force between Syria and Israel,
Speaker 5: and on the occupied Goal and so.
Speaker 4: Yeah, but that.
Speaker 5: Was getting because I know colleagues of mine that were
Speaker 5: as unarmed military observers on the weld. Say, I don't
Speaker 5: know if you're familiar with with how things are on
Speaker 5: the goal, but there's a buffer zone and there's the
Speaker 5: Alpha side on the occupator's really side, the Bravo side,
Speaker 5: and he said Syria property. But the the ops on
Speaker 5: the Bravo side generally ervent in a compound there. You know,
Speaker 5: they might have a fence, but when when Isis was
Speaker 5: was walking around, the guys would often see them walking
Speaker 5: with heads and pointing up your next so eventually that
Speaker 5: they were eventually with dron Thanks God, because what's an
Speaker 5: unarmed observer going to do with someone with a carrying
Speaker 5: a head?
Speaker 4: You know?
Speaker 2: Yeah, I I heard it from the from the Filipinos
Speaker 2: told me about it. And this incident where the isis
Speaker 2: dudes came across the border and I think they got
Speaker 2: the Fijians. They captured some Fijian soldiers. Yeah, and uh,
Speaker 2: and then they came to and try to surround the
Speaker 2: Filipino compound and said like, hey, surrender your arms and
Speaker 2: surrender yourself. And they radioed back and the un commander
Speaker 2: told them to surrender, and the Filipinos blew off that
Speaker 2: order and they started talking to Manila instead. They're like,
Speaker 2: we're putting ourselves back under Filipino military control because this
Speaker 2: is nuts.
Speaker 5: Yeah, they I won't go into it too much, but
Speaker 5: certainly in some missions the opposite is the effect when
Speaker 5: truths are trolled to do something. Sometimes they'll ring home
Speaker 5: and home will say no, and that unfortunately has has
Speaker 5: has a card, So it can happen both ways.
Speaker 3: Right, I can see it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And I mean there's also like incentives for some
Speaker 2: of these militaries to be a part of the u
Speaker 2: N and their soldiers get paid to go on these missions.
Speaker 3: So yeah, it goes both ways, but.
Speaker 4: The government gets paid as well.
Speaker 5: Every piece of equipment they bring with them there's a
Speaker 5: sort of a monetary value attached to us. So when
Speaker 5: they bring all their arm with karens and vehicles and
Speaker 5: stuff like that, there's there's a set monetary value for
Speaker 5: each thing, which we see the UN rents from from
Speaker 5: the TCCs, which is the truth countrip in the countries.
Speaker 5: So yeah, it's for for a lot of certainly a
Speaker 5: lot of the poorer countries are a lot of the
Speaker 5: biggest contributors to UN missions, and that's one of the
Speaker 5: reasons why.
Speaker 2: So in the midst of all this, you went back
Speaker 2: to university and you've got your degree in archaeology, right,
Speaker 2: English and archaeology.
Speaker 5: Yeah, And it's it's strange because we say, if if
Speaker 5: I come through.
Speaker 4: The normal officer.
Speaker 5: School, when you get commissioned, you automatically go to university
Speaker 5: and you kind of go back to the military during
Speaker 5: your time off from university. So because I came up
Speaker 5: through the ranks, I decided I'd look for the same
Speaker 5: rights and entitlements and took a bit of a battle,
Speaker 5: but I had fought my battle and doing a language
Speaker 5: based arts degree and in the main training center in
Speaker 5: the Cara, we had a language school and we also
Speaker 5: had a un training school. Excuse me, So in Ireland,
Speaker 5: in first year arts you do four subjects. So I
Speaker 5: was doing French English geography and I kind of wanted
Speaker 5: to do philosophy because it sounded interesting because at that
Speaker 5: stage I was thirty six, Like people were saying that
Speaker 5: you should do an IT degree. Who's going to hired
Speaker 5: a thirty six year old married guy with a basic
Speaker 5: IT degree? But I couldn't do for last of what
Speaker 5: I did archaeology, and I kind of fell into archaeology.
Speaker 5: I never had to study because even to this day
Speaker 5: I'd read passionately about archaeology. But the when I was
Speaker 5: selected for university, I was in Lebanon, and so I
Speaker 5: think I was three weeks later starting university and in
Speaker 5: the French department you had to have a proven knowledge
Speaker 5: of French before you could be accepted. So I went
Speaker 5: in a uniform and I met the two I see
Speaker 5: in the French department, and I had rehearsed a kind
Speaker 5: of a small speech in French about Lebanon. So we
Speaker 5: spent about ten minutes talking about Lebanon in English, and
Speaker 5: then he switched to Irish Gaelic to say if I
Speaker 5: approached the language from a different perspective, it might be easier.
Speaker 5: And then he said, look, the assessment for first year
Speaker 5: French is on in ten minutes. Go down and do
Speaker 5: it and we'll discuss afterwards. So I went down and
Speaker 5: I was hoping it'll be a translation from French into
Speaker 5: English where you could make a good guess, but no,
Speaker 5: it was a translation from English into French. And it
Speaker 5: wasn't just we' say, normal English. It was Jane Eyre,
Speaker 5: which is sort of, you know, eighteenth century, nineteenth century
Speaker 5: kind of stilted English. This was a Friday, so I
Speaker 5: submitted it, and that evening I got a message on
Speaker 5: the phone saying that it'd be delighted to have me
Speaker 5: in the French department, and I thought I.
Speaker 4: Didn't do that good.
Speaker 5: So on Monday morning he was correcting it in the
Speaker 5: class and I was looking at the corrections, thinking there's
Speaker 5: no way I could have passed this, And then he
Speaker 5: handed out or papers with the corrections on it. And
Speaker 5: I was looking at and he had written a sentence
Speaker 5: at the end, and I couldn't understand it. So I
Speaker 5: wait until everyone else went and I said, excuse me, doctor,
Speaker 5: I can't understand what you've written there, and he goes quevering,
Speaker 5: which is the Irish for kevin Cleeven you're a ma
Speaker 5: Oman and you can't understand your native language, that's that's
Speaker 5: go war g or, which in Irish is may God
Speaker 5: help us. Because sometimes when I'm correcting, words just failed me.
Speaker 5: So I ended up doing my language based arts. Agree
Speaker 5: with the degree in English and archaeology.
Speaker 2: And you are an interest I kind of took away
Speaker 2: from the book. Is primarily like Paleolithic, you know, Stone Age.
Speaker 4: Not Paleolithic. It's an Ealothic.
Speaker 5: It's a very little evidence for Paleolithic in Ur the Mesolythic,
Speaker 5: which is the Middlestone Age, which in Ireland kind of
Speaker 5: you're looking at about just over seven thousand BC, and
Speaker 5: then the Neolithic from about four thousand BC, so that
Speaker 5: that kind of prehistory would be more of what I'm into,
Speaker 5: medieval stuff or anything like that. But yeah, it's it's
Speaker 5: it's always since then, it's been a passion and you know,
Speaker 5: even when I'm out driving, you know, my wife would
Speaker 5: hit me because I'd be looking, why what is that
Speaker 5: hump doing in that field? And you know, and I've
Speaker 5: been lucky, you know. I found loads of stuff, unrecorded
Speaker 5: stuff in Ireland, in Lebanon, in Israel, Chad, in Mali. Actually,
Speaker 5: when when I was in Mali with the European Union,
Speaker 5: there's this place west of the capital. It's a huge
Speaker 5: natural rock art called it like thirty meters quite impressive,
Speaker 5: called the art of Camisan. And at weekends I became
Speaker 5: a kind of a subject matter expert on it. So
Speaker 5: I would bring people out on a Sunday and explain
Speaker 5: the mythology and the archaeology and the geology. But the
Speaker 5: first day I was there, I was finding these little
Speaker 5: balls of metal, which is called slag.
Speaker 4: So say, if you're pouring molten metal.
Speaker 5: Into a I think to make a blade, right the
Speaker 5: molti metal kind of spills out as balls and it's
Speaker 5: it's basically it's evidence of metal working. So I started
Speaker 5: researching the archaeology of Mali and the world expert on
Speaker 5: the archaeology of Mali is the professor naturally Kevin McDonald,
Speaker 5: And I said jeez, I don't believe this. So he's
Speaker 5: in the University of Glasgow, I think. So I sent
Speaker 5: him an email said I'm also Kevin McDonald, I'm be
Speaker 5: an archaeologist and yeah, he yead to get it. So
Speaker 5: we ended up meeting in the capital Bamaco for a
Speaker 5: month later, which was which was kind of interesting.
Speaker 2: Well let's start getting into that a little bit because
Speaker 2: during the two thousands you started these deployments to Africa.
Speaker 2: The first one you thought you were going to Kosovo,
Speaker 2: but they sent you to Chad.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 5: Yeah, yeah, someone in HR within the Irish evense Force
Speaker 5: has had a maybe a funny sense of humor because yeah,
Speaker 5: I'd been asked for a company to Kosovo and then
Speaker 5: Chad had that. The guys had been there nearly a
Speaker 5: year and it was the third rotation coming up, and
Speaker 5: it was the Eastern Brigade was the lead brigade, so
Speaker 5: they were supposed to supply all the main appointments and
Speaker 5: for some reason they couldn't. They couldn't fill in a
Speaker 5: Rekie company commander and like normally started with at that
Speaker 5: time in the Irish Defense Forces, to have operational command
Speaker 5: of a company overseas, especially in a challenging environment like
Speaker 5: Chad is seen as a good chick on the box.
Speaker 5: But for some reason they didn't or they couldn't, so
Speaker 5: I was instead of going to Kosovo, I ended up
Speaker 5: going to Chad. And when we were doing our pre
Speaker 5: and that's when I was selected from my two I
Speaker 5: see down to number of riflemen out of one hundred
Speaker 5: and I think twenty troops, I knew one person, wow,
Speaker 5: which is kind of crazy.
Speaker 2: Because the Irish military, I think you point out, it
Speaker 2: was like three brigades and then it went down in
Speaker 2: two yeah.
Speaker 4: Then I went down to two. Yeah.
Speaker 5: So like like even today, I think it's like eight
Speaker 5: thousand dolls in Army, Navy, air Force, so it's it's
Speaker 5: small and generally people would would know or know of
Speaker 5: each other. But Chad was I have to say, I
Speaker 5: wasn't really looking forward to it, but I thoroughly enjoyed it.
Speaker 5: Like myself and the other operational company commander one week
Speaker 5: once for seven days, one of us would be the
Speaker 5: let's say, the guard force for our main camp and
Speaker 5: the other company would do all the patrolling either one day,
Speaker 5: two day, three day, four day patrols, whatever it was required,
Speaker 5: and we used to rotate it and it was great.
Speaker 5: Lost a lot of weight out there, but you know,
Speaker 5: that was the nature of the business, I suppose. But
Speaker 5: at one stage on a Friday evening, I was in
Speaker 5: the camp in our tent. I sort of felt bloated
Speaker 5: and I went down to the medical eight post and
Speaker 5: the medic he was saying, I think your your appendix
Speaker 5: has swollen. So he brought the doctor in and to
Speaker 5: put me on a drip, and about an hour later
Speaker 5: we had a like a big large ten color rubhole
Speaker 5: and we were getting rugby matches sort of sling shotted
Speaker 5: from South Africa up to where we were. So I
Speaker 5: took my drip and went out the back door and
Speaker 5: went down to see one of our rugby teams playing
Speaker 5: against the French team holding my drip, and like all
Speaker 5: my troops were from inner city Dublin and they thought
Speaker 5: I was a looper altogether. But anyway, the next morning
Speaker 5: the doc comes in and he said, I think your
Speaker 5: appendix is going to burst. I'm going to met a
Speaker 5: vacuu to the three hospital up in a Bete and
Speaker 5: I said, okay. So at half six we we the
Speaker 5: an my chapper based with us at half six, he said,
Speaker 5: fly the chapper at half aged.
Speaker 4: The chief financial.
Speaker 5: Officer said, fly the chapper, which kind which kind of
Speaker 5: says a lot. But the Level three hospital, it was
Speaker 5: attempted hospital and was ran by Norwegian, so it was really, really,
Speaker 5: really good. So I wheeled into the well, say, the
Speaker 5: admissions area, and this surgeon comes over and he goes, yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 5: we're going to remove your appendix. And I said, can
Speaker 5: I get a phone call or the phone and ring
Speaker 5: my wife because she knew I was in the in
Speaker 5: the medical aid post in gods Bider and now I'm
Speaker 5: up in the main hospital. So I rang her anyway,
Speaker 5: and she was kind of going, only you. So while
Speaker 5: I'm lying on stretcher, the surgeon is behind me talking
Speaker 5: to the anesthetist who's Slovakian, and he said, okay, so
Speaker 5: we're agreed. We're going to carry out this procedure according
Speaker 5: to the WHO guidelines. And I said what And then
Speaker 5: he comes around he said, I'm terribly sorry. I shouldn't
Speaker 5: talk behind your back. I've discussed with my colleague. We're
Speaker 5: going to carry out this procedure according to the World
Speaker 5: Health Organization guidelines. And I said, was this some other
Speaker 5: way you were thinking of doing. Then into the operat
Speaker 5: from ten to ten nine eighth. Next thing you wake
Speaker 5: up with the two guys are at the end of
Speaker 5: the bed and your man goes, Kevin, how are you feeling?
Speaker 5: And I said, I'm grand, you're irish. You'll have a
Speaker 5: beer now. We were strictly dry in Chad. You couldn't
Speaker 5: take outcome. But of course I think I'm in lalla
Speaker 5: Land with the anesthetic and Sai yes, second right, a
Speaker 5: bit of a beer. And he goes back with a
Speaker 5: can of beer. And of course I things up my
Speaker 5: nose and up the chest and whatever. And I said,
Speaker 5: look in my bag there there's a camera. Would you
Speaker 5: mind ever taking a picture me? Because no one in
Speaker 5: Ireland will ever believe that the minute I can run
Speaker 5: from surgery in Africa, I was handled a beer, but
Speaker 5: I have to say it was quite nice. And then
Speaker 5: it was a sharifs the next day at theay In hospital.
Speaker 5: There's getting me appendix of you know, all this reminded me.
Speaker 2: I mean, there's a there's a digression here that I
Speaker 2: forgot about, just just remembered that I got to ask
Speaker 2: you about because it was such a funny part of
Speaker 2: your book, tell us about becoming a care bear.
Speaker 5: Okay, So I don't know if you have something similar
Speaker 5: in in the US, But in the Irish Defense Forces,
Speaker 5: every barracks has an n c O whose full time
Speaker 5: job is to provide counseling, grief counseling, addiction counseling, financial counseling,
Speaker 5: all that.
Speaker 4: Kind of stuff.
Speaker 5: Like they're essentially a social worker and they're affectionately known
Speaker 5: as the care bears.
Speaker 4: So anyway, the the officer in charge.
Speaker 5: Of all the care bearers in the brigade was retiring
Speaker 5: and he approached me and he said, Kevin, the GOC,
Speaker 5: the General Officer commanding brigade commander, has asked me. He
Speaker 5: knows I'm retired, and he's asked me to think of
Speaker 5: someone that might be suitable. And I'm going, you're not
Speaker 5: thinking to me, are you, Because you know SF and
Speaker 5: all that kind of crazy stuff. I'm not exactly a
Speaker 5: tree hugger. And he said, yeah, but people might sort of,
Speaker 5: I suppose resonate with you. And I said, I don't
Speaker 5: think someone and he said, well, he said, if there
Speaker 5: was a league table for the amount of subsistence you
Speaker 5: can claim. In other words, if you're away for nine hours,
Speaker 5: you get X amount of euros. He said, if there
Speaker 5: was a leade table, you'd be probably on the top
Speaker 5: of the lead table. Plus you'll get paid as a
Speaker 5: lieutnant colonel. I said, okay, right, I'll give it a go.
Speaker 5: And you had to get you had to have a
Speaker 5: sort of diploma to be in this, which meant every month.
Speaker 5: I think it was two three days in the university
Speaker 5: in Dublin. And after my first three days away I
Speaker 5: came back and the kids were probably eight and ten
Speaker 5: or something like that, and.
Speaker 4: The baiting the head off each other. So I came
Speaker 4: in with all guns blazing.
Speaker 5: You if you ever kicked your sister, and you if
Speaker 5: you ever bite your brother, blah blah blah.
Speaker 4: And my son said.
Speaker 5: Dad, that care bears course doesn't have much of an
Speaker 5: effect on you, which I thought was fairly sharp from
Speaker 5: from from him.
Speaker 4: Yeah, that I lasked.
Speaker 5: It probably a year before went overseas again.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I was, I was laughing reading that part of
Speaker 3: the book. That's great.
Speaker 5: Actually one of my last when when we were restructured
Speaker 5: from three brigades down to two, the the brigade commander
Speaker 5: was it was an interesting guy, tough guy, but I
Speaker 5: got on well with him. But I come up to
Speaker 5: brief him about something and he was getting into his
Speaker 5: best uniform and he told me he was going over
Speaker 5: to the dis barracks that was being closed as parts
Speaker 5: the restructuring, and he was going to attend the last
Speaker 5: Mass in the Garrison Church. And without even thinking, I
Speaker 5: just said, we can.
Speaker 4: Do a lot of things.
Speaker 3: Well, the thing it's audio.
Speaker 5: Good glasses like that should have measure coming to be
Speaker 5: talking to which thing like that?
Speaker 4: He saw the funny side of it.
Speaker 2: Sorry, your your audio cut out there for just one second, Kevin,
Speaker 2: could could you just say that part again?
Speaker 3: He asked about going to last mass.
Speaker 5: Yeah, so he was going to the last Mass in
Speaker 5: the Garrison Church, in the barracks that was being closed
Speaker 5: as part of restructuring.
Speaker 4: And that's what he told me.
Speaker 5: And without even thinking I said to him, I said, sir,
Speaker 5: in the care bears, we can do a lot of things,
Speaker 5: but saving your soul is in one of them. And
Speaker 5: then you could see him looking at me like that
Speaker 5: over the glasses, and I thought, I have I pushed
Speaker 5: it too far, but then he kind of started laughing
Speaker 5: a bit, So yes, it's not exactly how a major
Speaker 5: should invest in general.
Speaker 3: And then you end up in Western Sahara.
Speaker 2: This was another interesting sort of like peacekeeping or peace
Speaker 2: enforcement operation that I've never really neither neither.
Speaker 5: The mission in Western Sahara is the only UN mission
Speaker 5: whose sole purpose is to organize a referendum. So a
Speaker 5: bit of background Western Sahara the Morocco and to the
Speaker 5: south Mauritanian and to the east Algeria. And so when
Speaker 5: the Spanish withdrew in seventy eight something like that, the
Speaker 5: Moroccans invaded from the north, and the Mauritanians in the south,
Speaker 5: and the local Satarawi people were kind of caught in
Speaker 5: the middle, and they developed a sort of an insurgent
Speaker 5: group called the Polisario and they were extremely effective hit
Speaker 5: and run tactic against the Moroccans. They even drove down
Speaker 5: to lucashot In in Mauritanian shot up the capital of Mauritanian.
Speaker 5: And after that the Mauritanians like, we're out of here.
Speaker 5: But so effective they were that the Jordanian army started
Speaker 5: building what is today the most the most longest modern
Speaker 5: construction in the world. The built was known as the Burn,
Speaker 5: which kind of starts two hundred miles inside in Morocco
Speaker 5: and goes diagonally across the country to the southeast southwestern border,
Speaker 5: with Tenure effectively claiming I suppose two thirds of the territory.
Speaker 5: And it's it's like something from you know, First World War.
Speaker 5: I these ditches and burns and platoon positions and company positions,
Speaker 5: and but what was what was interesting? And of course
Speaker 5: the biggest fisheries off Western Africa, off the shore, six
Speaker 5: largest potash deposits in the world. But yeah, the sole
Speaker 5: purpose was to have a referendum to decide on nationally suppose.
Speaker 5: And of course the problem is that the Satawi people
Speaker 5: aren't that many and it's been colonized by by people
Speaker 5: from Morocco, so I can't see a referendum anytime soon.
Speaker 5: But from an archaeological point of view, it was like heaven.
Speaker 5: I could drive for three hours in any direction, stop,
Speaker 5: get out of the car, and the main the area
Speaker 5: that we were mainly operating is called Hamada, which is
Speaker 5: like a rocket desert. It's not like all the big sandals.
Speaker 5: But I could stop and pick up flint darrowheads. I
Speaker 5: was finding prehistoric tunes. Yeah, it was western Sahara was
Speaker 5: it was a pretty amazing place.
Speaker 3: And then you also did Mali.
Speaker 4: I did Mali.
Speaker 5: Yeah, Maley was the only non UN mission I've done,
Speaker 5: which is it was the European Union Training Mission.
Speaker 4: And I was working in the headquarters. Actually an interesting,
Speaker 4: interesting story.
Speaker 5: My my boss was a British left in colonel and
Speaker 5: we actually became we said, are very good friends. But
Speaker 5: he said to me one day, he said, mac, dear boy,
Speaker 5: have you heard I've challenged the hun to a shoot competition. No,
Speaker 5: the hunt is a drogatory word for for the for
Speaker 5: the Germans. And I said, I did jab with this
Speaker 5: the six German offices's only four of v And he said, oh,
Speaker 5: dear boy, one will shoot with us one one. And
Speaker 5: I said, I've been my country has been oppressed by
Speaker 5: ye guys for eight hundred years. Do you not think
Speaker 5: I'd have a subtle interest in seeing you're getting your
Speaker 5: arses whooped by the Germans?
Speaker 4: And he said there's more, And I said, I know,
Speaker 4: I know there's more.
Speaker 5: So when he challenged the German saying your officer to
Speaker 5: a shooting competition, he decided that the outcome of the
Speaker 5: shooting competition would determine the outcome of World War one,
Speaker 5: World War two and the nineteen sixty six World Cup
Speaker 5: were England that Germany. Anyway, I decided I'd rejoin the
Speaker 5: comment and shot with him and we won. But this
Speaker 5: guy was such a character. There's a picture taken afterwards
Speaker 5: and there's six of us standing like that in uniform,
Speaker 5: and in front of us six German seating them. You know,
Speaker 5: can you imagine that when viral It didn't put it,
Speaker 5: but he was that kind of a guy that people
Speaker 5: just grab It was like an extremely, extremely great character.
Speaker 5: And it was also great that this was the first
Speaker 5: time that the Irish Army and the British Army deplied together.
Speaker 5: Interesting and it was really good, I have to say,
Speaker 5: great to see that we kind of moved past all
Speaker 5: that sort of stuff.
Speaker 2: And tell us a little bit about you know, you
Speaker 2: retire from the military, you hit like your mandatory retirement
Speaker 2: age and start working for the un like as an
Speaker 2: actual job.
Speaker 5: Yeah, so in the Irish Defense Forces, as as a major,
Speaker 5: you have to retire at fifty six. And obviously because
Speaker 5: I took the Scenic group to getting commissioned, I didn't
Speaker 5: really have the opportunity to go much higher. But yeah,
Speaker 5: I kind of knew I was never going to take
Speaker 5: up golf, and I eventually before I finished in Jerusalem,
Speaker 5: I knew I had an offer of them. Just what
Speaker 5: I been in.
Speaker 4: Sorry.
Speaker 5: I retired officially at the end of November in twenty sixteen,
Speaker 5: and I had a three month contract lined up as
Speaker 5: Chief Close Protection with the mission in the Central African Republic,
Speaker 5: and then I did about a month of that, and
Speaker 5: then I went in as Chief Security Operations and I
Speaker 5: got an extra three month extension, and that was going
Speaker 5: to be it because the UN doesn't like these small contracts.
Speaker 5: And then actually an American guy who was the regional
Speaker 5: security officer in SECTORIST went home and leave and said,
Speaker 5: thank you, you went, I'm not going back.
Speaker 4: So I get a phone call that said would'd be interested.
Speaker 5: In going to Debrien as a regional security officer And
Speaker 5: I said, look, if it's only for a week or two,
Speaker 5: I said, I'm not really because you have to be
Speaker 5: in a mission thirty days before you leave. And I
Speaker 5: paid my thirty days rent in the capitol, and I said,
Speaker 5: would what about six months? So I went and six
Speaker 5: months became eighteen months and two years is the most
Speaker 5: you can do? As a we said, a temporary, full
Speaker 5: time employee. So then I left in twenty nine to nineteen,
Speaker 5: and then a few months later they rang and said
Speaker 5: would I come back again?
Speaker 4: And I've got another two.
Speaker 5: Months, which was which is, But Karl was full on,
Speaker 5: like oh, I saw more violence in Kara than I
Speaker 5: did in nearly any other place when when I went
Speaker 5: up as the regional security officer to an area spigger
Speaker 5: than Ireland, I suppose, but I was there on my
Speaker 5: own and as a would say security advisor, I was
Speaker 5: responsible for giving security advice to the international Civilian staff,
Speaker 5: the National Civilian Staff what we call the MSOs, the
Speaker 5: military service officers that are working in the headquarters, the
Speaker 5: UN Police, essentially any one that that you weren't part
Speaker 5: of the battalions like the TCCs. So in my first week,
Speaker 5: one ethnic group attacked another ethnic group and in three hours,
Speaker 5: those ninety five people killed and not just killed the group.
Speaker 5: So yeah, And in the base that that I was
Speaker 5: living in, in front of the base, we had partly
Speaker 5: three thousand idp's and sometimes the likeness and sometimes they didn't,
Speaker 5: and if they didn't, you could get grenades coming in,
Speaker 5: you get bodies coming over the wall. Yeah, brio was
Speaker 5: was The first two years were were sort of were interesting.
Speaker 5: And then when I came back, I was in Sector
Speaker 5: West near the Cameroonian border, and for Asian once it
Speaker 5: was sleepy valley, nothing like crickets sort of thing. And
Speaker 5: then as the elections were coming close, Yes, a disparate
Speaker 5: group of rebel groups who normally will be fighting each
Speaker 5: other kind of came together and they started advancing on
Speaker 5: would say, the city that I was. We were just
Speaker 5: at the edge of it with and this straddles the
Speaker 5: main highway from Cameroon into the capital, Banging and everything
Speaker 5: that that kind of is sold in Bangy comes along
Speaker 5: that highway. And I remember as a as a as
Speaker 5: a kid reading the word yeah ask I suppose, but
Speaker 5: reading these sort of news reports, rebels advanced on the
Speaker 5: strategic city of Black and I often wondered what it'd
Speaker 5: be like to be in that strategic city when the
Speaker 5: rebels are advancing. I found out very quickly not particularly
Speaker 5: pleasant experience. But I know at one stage I went
Speaker 5: in with the the senior civilian administrator for the u
Speaker 5: N and the senior military officer and that the rebels
Speaker 5: are taking the city at this stage, so a lot
Speaker 5: of the locals were in. There were IDPs in the
Speaker 5: schools and hospitals, so we went in to assess the situation.
Speaker 5: And as we're coming back up this main road, I
Speaker 5: counted about and twenty rebels walking out either side of
Speaker 5: the road with aka's mmgs orpgs, and at the end
Speaker 5: of the we'd say the city our base is on
Speaker 5: the left, and just beyond it was an army base.
Speaker 5: So we swung off into our base. I immediately went
Speaker 5: to the radio room to tell them to broadcast on
Speaker 5: the loudspeaker. Everyone go immediately to the bunkers, and sure enough,
Speaker 5: ten minutes later, boom, boom boom. And in the space
Speaker 5: of about an hour and a half, I counted about
Speaker 5: thirty five orpgs being fired from both sides and then no,
Speaker 5: we weren't being targeted. We were just getting caught from
Speaker 5: the cross fire. So we had two.
Speaker 4: Attack helicopters, so the decision was.
Speaker 5: Made that we launched them to push the rebels away
Speaker 5: from our base because we were getting the crossfire coming
Speaker 5: from the facta from the from the army, and that
Speaker 5: that in itself getting the mount of our base to
Speaker 5: the HELI paddles was kind of we have been interesting,
Speaker 5: and they fired about twenty rockets. And also inside in
Speaker 5: our base we had a French army detachment who were
Speaker 5: with the EU training parts of the government the army.
Speaker 4: And because they were they were.
Speaker 5: I had told them privately, if we get attacked, I
Speaker 5: gladly take your support. But I couldn't. I couldn't officially,
Speaker 5: but they were under our support. But I was down
Speaker 5: checking on in the middle of the battle, because I
Speaker 5: kept going around, checking the bunkers and checking the main
Speaker 5: gate and checking this the usual stuff. And I was
Speaker 5: speaking to the French commander and they said, given, you
Speaker 5: will hear something in the next few minutes. In about
Speaker 5: five minutes, two mirages came from charge, so.
Speaker 4: About one hundred feet.
Speaker 5: The noise was incredible, and I think there was just
Speaker 5: a show of force to the rebels. I don't think.
Speaker 5: I don't think I made a blind bit of difference
Speaker 5: to them. Yeah, and then eventually the Russians got involved Wagner,
Speaker 5: and that kind of pushed them back. Actually, when I
Speaker 5: was when I was in Brea, Wagner arrived and because
Speaker 5: they were a player, I went out and they were
Speaker 5: built in them they were building a field hospital, but
Speaker 5: it wasn't a field hospital with a small military detachment.
Speaker 5: It was a big military base with a small field hospital,
Speaker 5: so subtle difference. But I the their their chief security
Speaker 5: guy in car was organizing the set up with this.
Speaker 5: So I rocked up to the gate and did an
Speaker 5: interpret there and went in and I met him and
Speaker 5: he had a big long respute and beard, so and
Speaker 5: like he was, he was tough for so I just
Speaker 5: said a SPADs net and he kind of so I
Speaker 5: take out my phone and I show him a picture
Speaker 5: of me back in the day with the diving gear
Speaker 5: and the h K fifty three, and I said, I'm
Speaker 5: ex Irish spetsnet. Then he takes out his phone and
Speaker 5: he shows me a picture of him in Syria with
Speaker 5: some of the really really incredible stuff. But I probably
Speaker 5: want that base has been set up because there's a
Speaker 5: lot of other rebel groups in the area, so I
Speaker 5: wanted to kind of make sure he knew who's the
Speaker 5: players in each one of them. And so I met
Speaker 5: him anyway, and on my camp I had the ranger tab,
Speaker 5: which is the Irish means worrior of the fen, and
Speaker 5: I could see him looking at it, and so eventually
Speaker 5: he takes off his hat and he gives me a
Speaker 5: spets Netz tab. So of course I had to give
Speaker 5: him tab. And he used to wear it on the
Speaker 5: back of his of his of his speaker, and I
Speaker 5: would often think that if he's down in BANGI and
Speaker 5: some of your guys are kind of trying to figure
Speaker 5: out who's who in and taking pictures of Wagner guys
Speaker 5: and to see an Irish Special Forces tab on his
Speaker 5: head that he wondered how how it got there?
Speaker 2: Yeah, the the We did an interview a few like
Speaker 2: maybe two months ago now with John Leckner, who just
Speaker 2: wrote that book that is our business about the Yeah,
Speaker 2: oh yeah really, yeah, people if they want to we
Speaker 2: talk all about this subject in that interview of course,
Speaker 2: if people want to go check that out. And so
Speaker 2: this brings us sort of like today, Uh, you're now
Speaker 2: in South Sudan. How did you wind up there?
Speaker 5: Well, my my employment in Kara was coming to a
Speaker 5: close and I had applied for the position here and
Speaker 5: I managed to get it.
Speaker 4: But it's kind of strange.
Speaker 5: For the four years in Car, I was like at
Speaker 5: the point the end of the spear and no one
Speaker 5: as we say in the Arish, I'm in the rear
Speaker 5: with the gear, I'm in the head gorgeous, So it's
Speaker 5: it's uh, it's different, it's different. I haven't I haven't
Speaker 5: really heard gunfire and fear, which there's no bad thing either.
Speaker 4: Yeah, irishire the second time in November this year.
Speaker 5: Wow, And unless I get some contract work. But my
Speaker 5: my fallback is I'm going to start doing archaeological tours
Speaker 5: really where yeah, because in probably in Ireland, but it depends.
Speaker 5: Like when when I was living in in Tier in Lebanon,
Speaker 5: I used to give tours nearly every weekend because the
Speaker 5: the second largest hippodrome of Roman racing cherries racing arena
Speaker 5: in the world is in Tier. Actually that's where the
Speaker 5: film the film then hurt or you're probably have an
Speaker 5: age that you probably don't know.
Speaker 2: I do remember, but yeah, that that's of course.
Speaker 4: I might's write another book as well.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I was gonna say, Kevin, like, you don't really
Speaker 2: strike me as the type of guy that's a retiree,
Speaker 2: Like I don't.
Speaker 3: I don't know if I.
Speaker 2: Think you even say in the book like I'm not
Speaker 2: the type of person to just sit on the beach
Speaker 2: and relax.
Speaker 4: No, I I never was either. You know, I always have.
Speaker 5: To be doing something, so I definitely, I definitely have
Speaker 5: to do something because I've refused to take up golf
Speaker 5: and I'm still have that frame of mind that I
Speaker 5: don't intend to.
Speaker 3: I think we have one viewer question for you, Kevin.
Speaker 3: What do we got d from Corbyn?
Speaker 6: Did your background make operating for the UN in Central
Speaker 6: Africa more problematic than it usually is?
Speaker 4: No? No, absolutely not.
Speaker 5: One of the benefits about being Irish is that we
Speaker 5: have no colonial baggage, and carr is a it's a
Speaker 5: Francophone country. But one of the things that I will say,
Speaker 5: and this is common to a lot of countries in Africa,
Speaker 5: is that you can't blame colonial baggage for everything.
Speaker 4: Here here in Southilan, the sixty.
Speaker 5: Four main ethnic groups all with their own language, customers, beliefs,
Speaker 5: and they generally don't like each other.
Speaker 4: In car it was the same thing. But I also
Speaker 4: find that.
Speaker 5: Not everything is depending on how you approach people. Like
Speaker 5: so when when I was in care, as I said,
Speaker 5: it's a Frankophone country, I had to make sure I
Speaker 5: had sufficient French to at least explain myself but the
Speaker 5: main other language is Zongo.
Speaker 4: So I felt because I was regardless of.
Speaker 5: What you think of these countries, if you're a guest
Speaker 5: in anyone's country, and I did this in Lebanon and
Speaker 5: in Israel as well, you should be able to say
Speaker 5: how are you? Please, thank you? Where is goodbye? At
Speaker 5: a minimum? So I could do it in Zongo. So
Speaker 5: we'll say in Zongo Tonguana is how are you? And
Speaker 5: the response is yaki. That the next ethnic language is
Speaker 5: Bandit and how are you with Ambretta and the responses
Speaker 5: are MANI so completely different. But we used to have
Speaker 5: local security guards doing kind of access control at the gates.
Speaker 5: So every morning before I went to the office, i'd
Speaker 5: go to the gate and I would address security guys French,
Speaker 5: Zogo and Bandit.
Speaker 4: But if they didn't reply to me in Gaelic, because I.
Speaker 5: Taught them how to say hello, how are you, I'm
Speaker 5: fine in Gaelic. If they didn't reply, I'd give them
Speaker 5: ten push ups.
Speaker 4: And it was good.
Speaker 5: You see, like local contractors coming in, like maybe plumbers
Speaker 5: or something like that, and to see this Irish guy
Speaker 5: not just talking French, not just talking the main dialect,
Speaker 5: but talking the second one as well, and then they'd
Speaker 5: see their neighbors responding in a language at the head
Speaker 5: and effect and clue what it was which But it's
Speaker 5: a kind of it's a mark of respect to them
Speaker 5: and every place I went, and you know, I've been
Speaker 5: on patrols to the middle of Weird and Mone for
Speaker 5: places where the locals may not be that friendly, or
Speaker 5: rebel groups as well. But would say to address some
Speaker 5: of the the the Arab rebel groups in Arabic, well,
Speaker 5: I bet Keith, and then going to Zango, suddenly you
Speaker 5: sort of you're showing them respect that the villagers can
Speaker 5: see that I botheredly asked to learn a bit of
Speaker 5: the local language. And I think it's it's it can
Speaker 5: be a game changer, and it's just a market respect,
Speaker 5: that's it. But but to go back to to to
Speaker 5: your your callers question, certainly, I've never found my background
Speaker 5: being a hindrance too many and your question about the
Speaker 5: care Bears, even though my background is SF and a
Speaker 5: lot of people sort of figured out, well, if I
Speaker 5: said something that had to be true and and he
Speaker 5: knows what he's talking about kind of thing.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that the Irish, the Canadians, few other nationals are
Speaker 2: kind of neutral international They don't have the sort of
Speaker 2: baggage that the United States or Russia or one of
Speaker 2: these countries might come with.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 5: So, and you know, I've seen it certainly in Lebanon,
Speaker 5: where often you end up with disputes about who should
Speaker 5: get into a checkpoint first, and and and and some nationalities,
Speaker 5: some armies, will say, would immediately go into the defensive position,
Speaker 5: you know, like I'm in charge kind of thing, whereas
Speaker 5: the Irish would be kindly going, let's come on, what
Speaker 5: do you what are you doing? Let's you sit there,
Speaker 5: you sit there, and you know, and and you know,
Speaker 5: take off the sunglasses, take off the helmet and look
Speaker 5: someone straight in the eye. So yeah, I think the
Speaker 5: Irish always had a good reputation for peacekeeping. As I said,
Speaker 5: many we never colonized anyone, while we did a bit
Speaker 5: of England at one stage.
Speaker 4: That's a long time ago.
Speaker 5: We don't talk about that. But yeah, as I said,
Speaker 5: and it's it's it's human nature as well. It's it's
Speaker 5: if you treat people respect, you know, you will get
Speaker 5: back much more than what you give. And I used
Speaker 5: often say to people it's as easy to be a
Speaker 5: prick as it is to be a nice guy. It
Speaker 5: takes the same amount of energy from from you as
Speaker 5: a person, but you get so much more back by
Speaker 5: showing respect. And I suppose you know, no, sometimes you
Speaker 5: have to be a prick, but not always.
Speaker 2: The book I whope people will go and look for
Speaker 2: is A Lifeless Ordinary by Kevin McDonald. Kevin, any final thoughts,
Speaker 2: anything that I didn't cover that you'd like to get
Speaker 2: out there before we go to that.
Speaker 5: Well, on one big story you didn't cover. I'm surprised
Speaker 5: you didn't, given things that were going on at the moment.
Speaker 5: I'm one of the few people that single handedly stopped
Speaker 5: an army in its tracks.
Speaker 3: Oh, in the Israel Lebanon War.
Speaker 5: Yeah. Yeah, So if you have time, my teller, Yeah,
Speaker 5: go for it.
Speaker 3: Go for it, Kevin.
Speaker 4: Well, So, during the seasfire.
Speaker 5: And as part of the ceasefire, it meant that the
Speaker 5: Lebanese army had to deploy to the south, which that
Speaker 5: happened before.
Speaker 4: So the idea was that as as the idef.
Speaker 5: Started with drawn back to the frontier, the Lebanese army
Speaker 5: would come southwards. But between the Lebanese Army and the idea,
Speaker 5: if there had to be a uniform force, so there'll
Speaker 5: be no kind of engagement. Now that the base I
Speaker 5: was in was on the top of the hill, and
Speaker 5: four hundred meters down this side was a temporary IDF base,
Speaker 5: and everywhere they went to Lebanon, the first vehicle was
Speaker 5: a D nine bulldozer because that could go over something
Speaker 5: that would take out from our canval and whenever they stopped,
Speaker 5: it would throw up like four earthen rampant parts to
Speaker 5: stop direct fire. So every night during the seasfire, these
Speaker 5: guys would go out in darkness that kind of come
Speaker 5: up the hill and that and that passes, and of
Speaker 5: course we'd be looking at them with the night vision
Speaker 5: and the gunner would lay us with the laser range finder,
Speaker 5: which is a weapon in itself. And in fact, most
Speaker 5: of our nd had black spots on them from being
Speaker 5: lais by the Israelis. This particular night they went out,
Speaker 5: they came back at first light. So the next morning,
Speaker 5: myself and this Russian major we went out and before
Speaker 5: we picked up our liaisons system to go patrolling, I said,
Speaker 5: let's go down and see where the IDEF stopped last night.
Speaker 5: So we're talking about two or four hundred meters and
Speaker 5: there was a small road junction and they had set
Speaker 5: up a position there. We said okay, went off dinner patrolling,
Speaker 5: and when we came back, I said to you man,
Speaker 5: let's just check that that crossroads. So the Lebanese army
Speaker 5: had arrived with a company of Mike Bowan threes and
Speaker 5: there's no uniforit. So Lebanes are here, we're here, and
Speaker 5: the ide effort here, and there's no UNIFIL in between.
Speaker 5: So I rang our operations and I said, look, you
Speaker 5: need to get UNIFIL to place themselves between the laugh
Speaker 5: the Lemanies, arner forces and the IDEA.
Speaker 4: So he said, why.
Speaker 5: Don't you go down to talk to the idea if
Speaker 5: I said okay, why not? So I asked my Russian colleague,
Speaker 5: I said, are you okay with this?
Speaker 4: He said yeah.
Speaker 5: So I followed the Kava tank tracks up down the
Speaker 5: fire side, and when I got to the base of
Speaker 5: their position, there was no one around. So I thought
Speaker 5: this is a bit dodgy. I slammed the character shut
Speaker 5: and I'm climbing up the rampart chill on, chill on,
Speaker 5: National Mark, National Mark, National Car, Sorry to a maid.
Speaker 5: And when I get to the top of the rampart
Speaker 5: there's a young IDF guy half asleep, and he kind
Speaker 5: of goes and I said to him, I don't know
Speaker 5: if you have the same signal, but generally, like we
Speaker 5: see in the Irish Army, if you go like that,
Speaker 5: you want to see the commander, the guy with the pips.
Speaker 5: And I could see him sitting on a carve it
Speaker 5: as this young guy kind of looking at me, so
Speaker 5: that the guy that was beside me goes blah blah
Speaker 5: blah to obviously the patun commander, and he basically said
Speaker 5: tell him to fuck off. I could see his actions.
Speaker 5: So I let fly on this young soldier. I said, look,
Speaker 5: I know where he went last night. I don't give
Speaker 5: a flying for where you go tonight. I couldn't give
Speaker 5: a shit, but I'm telling you officially that the Lebanese
Speaker 5: Army is part of the ceasefire agreement has now deployed
Speaker 5: to that location. So take that information and do what
Speaker 5: you operate. Stormed off. So then I rang our operations
Speaker 5: and they said they were trying to get the liaison
Speaker 5: officer from UNIFIL to officially inform the Israelis. So I said, okay,
Speaker 5: So out of my hands. But the last thing I
Speaker 5: wanted was a shooting match with us in the middle.
Speaker 5: And so then the chief liaison officer for you if
Speaker 5: it was French, and he wrings me and he says, given,
Speaker 5: you will find the Indian battalion and placed. I said,
Speaker 5: so I'm on. So I have no command responsibility with you.
Speaker 5: I can't tell uniform what to do with their troops.
Speaker 5: It's up to uniform to contact their troops and do it.
Speaker 5: I'm nothing to do with the UNIFIL apartment give them advice.
Speaker 5: So then the Lebanese battalion commander rang me to say
Speaker 5: when of the Israeli is going to attack? And I said, look,
Speaker 5: I'm trying to stop all this, but you know, I
Speaker 5: just you can see they were there last night. I
Speaker 5: spoke with them. I don't know if they're going there tonight.
Speaker 5: You wouldn't tell me. So then there was an Irish
Speaker 5: lefting colonel in the liaison branch and about an hour
Speaker 5: later he rang me and he said, he said, Kevin,
Speaker 5: do you want the good news with the bad news?
Speaker 5: I said, give me the bad news first. He said,
Speaker 5: you are probably the most hated you an officer with
Speaker 5: the Irish with the Israeli Defense Forces at the moment.
Speaker 5: And I said, sir, I'll take that as a badge
Speaker 5: of honor. I said, what's the good news? He said,
Speaker 5: the divisional commander, because he heard one of his guys
Speaker 5: wouldn't talk to you, and after who was trying to
Speaker 5: de escalate a situation, cancel all operations for twenty four
Speaker 5: hours until they could sort out things visibly, unifil.
Speaker 4: And the laugh and all that.
Speaker 5: So, yeah, that's my great claim to him stopping an army.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean it would have been a mess if
Speaker 2: the Israelis went up there and you know, confront.
Speaker 5: Them, if there was no uniform there, like they could
Speaker 5: have engaged in you know. But yeah, that's how things happened.
Speaker 5: You know, when when when on both sides don't have
Speaker 5: the full picture. But thankfully is yeah, thankfully it all
Speaker 5: it all got sorted out.
Speaker 2: And guys will have some links down the description of
Speaker 2: this podcast where you can find Kevin's book. It's a
Speaker 2: lot of fun, a lot of great stories in there.
Speaker 2: I hope you guys will go check it out. Kevin,
Speaker 2: thank you for joining us tonight, especially making the extra
Speaker 2: effort with the time zone difference and everything really appreciate it.
Speaker 5: Man. No, it was a good shot because I think
Speaker 5: all soldiers kind of.
Speaker 4: Like to shoot the breeze.
Speaker 2: Yes, well, hopefully we link up and do it the
Speaker 2: right way over a beer one day.
Speaker 5: Yeah yeah, yeah, and I'm just cigar as well.
Speaker 3: Yes, hell, yes, absolutely so.
Speaker 4: This is Jackie.
Speaker 5: Thanks, thanks, thanks for having me, and I think I've
Speaker 5: given you the link for Amazon if you want to
Speaker 5: include that.
Speaker 2: Yeah, we got it in there, and so everyone else
Speaker 2: out there. We will see you guys next week. Thanks
Speaker 2: for joining us.
Speaker 4: Thanks, thanks for having me.
Speaker 2: Hey, guys, it's jack I just want to talk to
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