Shoot to Kill: From 2 Para to the SAS by Michael Asher

Author:Michael Asher [Asher, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Endeavour Press
Published: 2014-10-22T04:00:00+00:00

11 - Home from the Wars

The thing about fighting for a living is that it becomes a habit. While you are in the war you long for peace, but when peace comes you long for the intensity of life you experienced in the war. The army had raised us as a fighting elite, and many of us couldn’t settle down to living ordinary peace-time lives. As a unit we were fanatically xenophobic. We regarded anyone outside our ranks as an enemy. We had few friends among the craphats, because we looked down on them, and none of us respected the police because they represented an authority which hadn’t ‘proved itself’ the way we had.

Aldershot became the new battle-field. We roved it in groups, turning up uninvited to dances and discos held by the Royal Corps of Transport and almost inevitably beating the place up. There were no night-clubs in Aldershot. Someone had opened a night-club once, and the Paras had smashed it up on the opening night. The Naafi social club on the corner of Gun Hill was closed. It had been closed since the night some Paras threw the juke-box out of the first-floor window, closely followed by several craphats.

The Paras had their own games and amusements in Aldershot. A regular feature of a Paras ‘night out’ was suicidal boozing, followed by an event called the Dance of the Flaming Arseholes. During this feature, one of the group would dance on a pub table, while the others chanted a grunting song called ‘The Zulu Warrior’. The performer would remove his clothes garment by garment, throwing them into the audience. When he was completely naked, he would thrust a rolled-up newspaper into his anus, and someone would set light to it. The nearer the flame got to his anus before he removed it, the more ‘class’ he showed. None of the publicans ever stopped them doing it. If they made a complaint to the brigade, their pub would be put out of bounds to all Paras, and there were several thousand very thirsty Paras in Aldershot.

The Paras’ favourite enemies were the Hell’s Angels. They reserved for them the special hate that you feel for those like you but different. Despite their long hair, urine-stained jeans and motorcycles, they were curiously similar to the Paras. They were an aggressive male society with a penchant for violence. They had a ‘dare-devil’ attitude to life, celebrated by wild motorcycle-runs and fierce bacchanalian drinking sessions; they could attain their ‘wings’ only by performing certain acts of nameless obscenity, and they had absolute loyalty to their tribal ‘colours’. Yet they were so few in number that they stood little chance of holding their own. The Paras had but to glimpse Hell’s Angels in a pub to start on them, and the fight would continue outside the pub, with the Paras pulling their long hair and smashing up their motorcycles with iron bars. The one group the Paras never fought was the Gurkhas. They were silent, aloof men who were conspicuous by their old-fashioned smartness.

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