LITMIR.BIZ

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compensate, Jerry took on a poorly paid paper round, before discovering that thieving paid better. At night he would slip off, do a burglary and then sell the proceeds.

      Living in Devon also sparked another passion in Jerry: sea fishing. Sometimes he would spend all night fishing in Ilfracombe Bay – an activity frowned upon by the local social services department. ‘Time and again the nosy bastards summoned us to their offices and said I was disorderly because I chose to fish all night. I never skipped school to go fishing. Their attitude really annoyed me.’

      By the time he was fifteen Jerry had had enough of life in Devon and decided to join the Army. The Parachute Regiment was the place for him, he decided, because another of his hobbies was making model soldiers and he liked the ones of the Paras! He sailed through the tests at the local recruiting office and was sent to the reception centre at Sutton Coldfield, Warwickshire. Shortly after arriving he was interviewed by another recruiting officer, who had seen his test results and tried to persuade him to join another arm of the service.

      ‘My mind was made up even more firmly as the interview began because a Para officer walked past. There was something different about him. The red beret was the first thing to catch my eye, but it was the way he walked: so confident, so macho. Give the recruiting officer his due: he tried for over an hour to get me to change my mind, but it was made up.’

      Jerry returned home to await the summons to Browning Barracks, Aldershot, to join the Paras. When it came he packed his belongings – including some stolen goods – into a holdall and set off. He had just arrived at the camp and was being allocated his accommodation when the police arrived and arrested him. A court sent him to a detention centre and he did five weeks’ ‘hard labour’ on a farm. Again his life was in ruins, but, like many a veteran fallen on hard times, he insists: ‘The Parachute Regiment is the toughest, but the most forgiving unit in the British Army.’

      As soon as he had served his sentence the Paras accepted him back. It had all happened before he joined and as far as they were concerned he had repaid his debt to society. Now he was about to risk his life for his country and if he was prepared to do that he could hold his head up.

      In 1975, at the age of sixteen, he joined the Junior Parachute Regiment, the toughest junior soldiering in Britain. ‘For eighteen months I had the shit kicked out of me. They trained me and made me into a professional soldier. They won because I wanted to be won.’

      He was sent to 2 Platoon, A Company, 3 Para, based in Osnabruck, West Germany, and realized right away that the hard training in Junior Para was only a preparation for life with the seniors at battalion level.

      ‘It was a hard, hard, hard way of life. Those guys in my first platoon were hard bastards and, being a ‘crow’, I was always being picked on for the dirty jobs. That’s the way it is. It happens to everybody. But I couldn’t imagine that the so-called hardest prisons could hold harder men than the ones I was serving with. I remember reflecting back on my life… In Singapore we had had two servants, then no father, then poverty and now this. Jesus. But I’ll tell you something: 3 Para gave me a family back. At first I was a loner, but I soon made friends and established very strong bonds with other guys who came from a similar back ground to me.

      ‘The next two years just flew by. Militarily, the training was hard because that is the only way to be professional: train hard and fight hard. Paras always train hard and fight even bloody harder because that’s the way we are. Socially, it was different. Jesus, did we have some scraps with the craphats in any pub or disco anywhere in Germany we could find them. Some had balls and scrapped back, good hard fist fights nearly every weekend. The Paras trained me correctly – play hard, work hard – and moulded me. The only thing they have failed to do is mould the rest of the world yet, but hopefully that will come!’

      During this time Jerry also did a tour of duty in Northern Ireland, but because he was still seventeen he was not allowed to patrol the streets until he was eighteen. When he was allowed out on to the hostile streets he found the whole thing frustrating and boring. A lot of the work was ineffective because of what he regarded as flaws in the command structure. Remember, Jerry Phillips had been marked down right from the beginning as a bright boy and the recruiting officers had wanted to steer him away from the infantry towards what they regarded as ‘more brain-taxing’ soldiering. The only way to change things was to go for promotion.

      Back in Osnabruck, Jerry’s platoon commander singled out the young soldier for a promotion course which he passed at the same time as he swept the board in every race he entered during the battalion’s sports week. Then he was sent on a physical training instructors’ course which, again, he passed and was posted to D Company, the specialist long-range patrolling and behind-enemy lines surveillance experts. This was the big league, the company where only the best and most experienced soldiers served. Jerry was thrilled, learning new skills and having more freedom to develop his own techniques. At nineteen he was a full corporal, one of the youngest around, a tribute to his old platoon commander’s vision. More courses followed, all ending in passes, including one of the most demanding of all, the LRRP (Long Range Reconnaissance Patrol) course in Germany run by the SAS. Here special forces soldiers from all of NATO come to test their skills. To Jerry Phillips and every other Para who ever attended the course the others were all there to be beaten: Paras come second to no one. He was quietly taken aside by a man in the distinctive sand-coloured beret with its coveted winged-dagger badge and told to go for SAS selection as soon as possible. He was the type of soldier they wanted.

      Jerry was proud he had been approached to join the ‘Ultimate Soldiers’, but another Northern Ireland tour was on the cards, with a chance of some action, and that had to come first. At the end of 1981 he applied to go on SAS selection and was accepted. All he had to do now was wait for a slot on the first available course. To while away the time he went on a sniper course at Warminster in Wiltshire, the home of the School of Infantry, and regarded by many as the finest sniper course in the world. Some of the finest marksmen in the British Army form the instruction cadre and pass on the skills, learned over many years, of concealment, movement, marksmanship and target identification. As soon as Jerry became familiar with the L-42 bolt-action 7.62mm sniper rifle it became a part of him. Every time he squeezed the trigger the target fell or had a hole in it. He drank in everything they had to teach him, every little hint a man must absorb to be a professional sniper. He passed, of course, and returned to the battalion, now based in Tidworth, to await the next challenge: SAS selection.

      But it wasn’t to be. General Galtieri saw to that by invading the Falklands.

      ‘I couldn’t believe it,’ Jerry says. ‘I had just travelled all the way from Tidworth to Cambridge, where my mum had settled, to see her for Easter when there was a news flash on TV and film showing the notice-boards at the stations saying all 3 Para personnel had to return to camp. I managed to get a lift, travelling most of the night, and when I got back the atmosphere was so unreal, so quiet. There were just a couple of guys walking about. There was no war-in-the-air feeling or any of the hurry-up-and-wait syndrome.’

      As the Canberra slipped her moorings in Southampton, Jerry had a deep inner glow. He couldn’t help but feel that for once in his life he was in the right job, in the right place at the right time. As for everyone else aboard, it was his first experience of sailing to war and the dedicated, professional soldier in him didn’t like a lot of what was going on around him.

      ‘The routine on the ship wasn’t like anything I would have expected and there was too much bickering. Units were bickering over who was in charge and there was bickering in almost every company, platoon and section over training, over equipment and over personnel. Senior personnel in our own company picked the people they wanted and it finished up, as far as I’m concerned, a divided company. Allocated weapons were changed around. I loved the GPMG, and that was taken from me because of battalion shortages. I was really pissed off no end about that, but I did accept that as I was one of the few trained snipers in the battalion I could undertake that role. We had what I labelled senior call-signs and junior call-signs and I was one of the latter.

      ‘We had been briefed that our objective on landing was to be Port San Carlos. As D Company our role would be long-range patrols deep into enemy territory, observation posts and

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