we are fucking mega. They hate us for the way we act, the way we walk and hold our heads high.’
To be an elite requires someone else to be crap. In the eyes of the ultras of the Parachute Regiment, such as McKinley, that designation applies to everyone else in uniform. The phrase ‘crap hat’ is used for all who do not belong to the Parachute Regiment. No one knows where it comes from. It is usually abbreviated to just ‘Hat’. Nick French’s mobile phone tone is a recording of an old-fashioned voice declaring, ‘Paras believe in themselves and each other – everyone else is a crap hat,’ lifted from a 1980s documentary.
Para pride was on full display one wintry night at Colchester Barracks in 2007 when the 3 Para boxing team was taking on 2 Battalion, The Yorkshire Regiment – the Green Howards – in the semi-finals of an army boxing contest. On one side of the ring sat the ‘Toms’, as the foot soldiers of the Parachute Regiment call themselves. On the other were the Green Howard ‘Hats’. The officers of the two battalions, poured into scarlet bum-freezer mess jackets and tight black trousers, sat facing each other across the canvas. It was a late Victorian scene with only a pall of cigar smoke hanging from the rafters missing from the picture. ‘Drop the Hat! Drop the Hat!’ yelled the Toms. 3 Para’s fighters obliged, winning all but one of the bouts. In the seventh fight, a spectacular knockout within twenty seconds of the first round brought every Para in the hall leaping and cheering to his feet. At the end of the evening the Green Howards trudged out into the dank Essex night where coaches were waiting to trundle them off on a joyless three-hour journey home. The Paras streamed away to the messes for a night of drinking and revelry.
A sense of fun and outrage forms a structural part of the Paras’ image. In this too they regard themselves as superior to the rest. Their attitude is illustrated in a series of cartoons stuck on the wall of a senior NCO’s office in Catterick. The first shows the contrast between a Tom and a Hat in their off-duty down time.
The Tom has a shaven head (‘deters pubic lice’) and is wearing an old bomber jacket and jeans, the knees of which are heavy with grass stains from an illicit, al fresco bunk-up. He clutches a foaming beer bottle in one hand. The Hat is primly attired in a blazer with a bowls club-type crest on the breast pocket. He sports a gelled, tinted and highlighted ‘Take That’ haircut and is wearing ‘gay’ socks. He too is drinking – a bottle of low-alcohol gnat’s piss.
The message is that the Paras are desperadoes, real men in an age of wimps and wusses. They care little about their appearance and detest bullshit. But when it comes to the battlefield the roles are reversed. In the cartoons that follow, the Tom is in immaculate battledress, his gleaming weapon lovingly maintained. Here, clearly, is a man who is overjoyed to be where he is. The Hat, on the other hand, is a shambles. His uniform is wrinkled, his rifle is dirty and his expression suggests he would rather be out clubbing.
The cartoons are, of course, a gross libel on non-Paras. But there is some truth in the picture of the Tom. It is certainly how some of them like to portray themselves to the outside world – that is, in the worst possible light. Some members of 3 Para were well known to the Colchester constabulary. The Toms’ favourite boozer was the Fox and Fiddler, their favourite drink a Cheeky Vimto, an appalling concoction made up of one bottle of Blue WKD with two shots of port and plenty of ice. It could be a recipe for trouble when the pub closed.
‘You will find there is very much a live today, die tomorrow attitude among the blokes,’ said Nick French. ‘They blow their wages, get up to all sorts of antics in town with people they shouldn’t.’ But the fun is rationed. The cartoons are accurate. To the Para mentality, it is the battlefield that matters and everything, ultimately, is subordinate to preparing for it.
Despite the shared beliefs and characteristics, the men who went to Helmand were a diverse bunch. Membership of an elite also implies tolerance towards fellow members of the club. Individualism, the courage to be yourself, was regarded as a Para virtue.
All military units are shaped to some degree by the personality of their commanders. In Stuart Tootal, 3 Para had a leader who was complex and reflective, but also assured and determined to succeed. He took over command in October 2005 from Lieutenant Colonel Matt Lowe, described by one of his officers as a ‘good old-fashioned CO … rather aloof’. Another regarded the two men as ‘two different beasts. Matt Lowe was more considered in his outlook. Stuart is probably a bit more intuitive, instinctive, more aggressive.’
Tootal was forty-one at the time of the Helmand deployment. He arrived relatively late to the Parachute Regiment, and adopted its ways with all the zeal of the convert. He came from a strong military background. His grandfather was in Bomber Command and was killed over Germany. His father, Patrick, was a career RAF officer who ended his service as a group captain. Tootal went through a statutory rebel phase as a teenager. His father remembers him turning up to meet him at the Ministry of Defence building in Whitehall wearing a Greenpeace T-shirt. But he had taken to heart Samuel Johnson’s maxim that every man thinks less of himself for not having been a soldier. He joined his school’s Combined Cadet Force and after studying history and politics at London University went to Sandhurst. He was commissioned in 1988 and joined the Queen’s Own Highlanders. He served in Northern Ireland and was in the desert for the first and second Gulf Wars. On the way to his command he studied for a master’s degree in international relations at St John’s College, Cambridge, and an MA in war studies at King’s College London, where he later spent six months on a visiting defence research fellowship. This made him a very well-educated officer, even in the modern British military, where academic achievement is admired. His main area of expertise was counterinsurgency. He had had a chance to study it first-hand when he went to southern Iraq in 2003 as second-in-command of 1 Para.
At the time of the Helmand deployment Tootal was a bachelor with no family distractions to blunt his appetite for work. He expected the same degree of dedication from his men and worked those under him hard. Yet no one doubted his commitment to his men. ‘When Colonel Tootal came in it was quite clear that he had a human side,’ said one of his platoon commanders. ‘His heart was very much in the right place. He cares a lot about the blokes and their welfare and he wants to look after them. We instantly respected him because he had the right priorities. He didn’t treat the blokes like assets.’
Tootal was supported by a second-in-command who was not afraid to challenge his boss’s thinking. The phlegmatic approach of Major Huw Williams was much appreciated in the many moments of crisis. ‘Huw was a great foil to Stuart,’ said one officer. ‘When he came up with a proposal he would say to him, “Yes, this is plausible, no, that is not.”’ They made a good team and won the confidence of those who had to execute their orders ‘We were all happy with what was coming down from above,’ said one platoon commander. ‘I never heard anyone say, “This is fucking stupid, this is madness.” [They] just came up with good sensible plans … you can’t ask for more than that.’
During the Helmand campaign Tootal would come to rely greatly on the support of his regimental sergeant majors. Nigel Bishop was his RSM for the first three months until he moved on to another posting. He was replaced by John Hardy, a twenty-year veteran known as ‘the Razman’ to the troops, who regarded him as a surrogate father. His relationship with Tootal was a vital element in the battalion’s human chemistry. Tootal was the senior officer. Hardy was the senior soldier. As such, they had a bond that transcended the vertical hierarchy. ‘I bark to one man and that is the CO,’ Hardy said. ‘I don’t wag my tail for anyone else.’ Hardy had many responsibilities. The most important, though, was to act as a conduit between the blokes and the boss – ‘telling the CO how it was’.
3 Para, like all infantry battalions, is configured in tiers. At the top is the CO (commanding officer) and his headquarters staff, who manage and direct the battalion. The fighting soldiers are formed into companies. Each company is divided into two or three platoons and each platoon into sections. The number of men in a company varies, but it can be as many as a hundred or
