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James Deegan in silhouette
‘You are not going to get any closer to reality than what you have got in that book’ ... James Deegan. Photograph: Harper Collins
‘You are not going to get any closer to reality than what you have got in that book’ ... James Deegan. Photograph: Harper Collins

SAS fighter turned writer James Deegan: ‘I have come close to death’

This article is more than 6 years old

In the Parachute Regiment and then the SAS, the Scot saw action in hotspots from Northern Ireland to Afghanistan. Now his debut novel mines that gritty, messy reality

There is a quote popular in military circles: “We sleep safely in our beds because rough men stand ready in the night to visit violence on those who would harm us.” The origin of the quote is in doubt – it is variously attributed to Orwell, Churchill and Edmund Burke – but what is not in doubt is that James Deegan is one of those “rough men”, required, by his government, to visit violence on others.

Deegan (a pseudonym) was, until he retired about a decade ago, one of the most operationally experienced members of Britain’s elite force, the Special Air Service. Before the SAS, he served in the Parachute Regiment, and saw service in, among other places, Northern Ireland, Bosnia, Kosovo, Sierra Leone, Iraq and Afghanistan. He was among the first troops over the border into Iraq in the first Gulf war and then again in 2003. He was awarded the Military Cross for gallantry in Iraq.

For a supposedly secret organisation, the SAS has probably had more books written about it than any other unit in recent British military history. There are scores of them, from an SAS survival guide to personal accounts of specific operations. Deegan is the latest to join them, with a thriller based in part on his experiences in Northern Ireland, Once a Pilgrim. The first in what he hopes will be a series (the second is already written and a third under way), it deals with British soldiers, including the main character John Carr, who was involved in killing, during the Troubles, three IRA members in Belfast, one of them the brother of an IRA leader. In the uneasy peace that followed the end of the Troubles, the IRA leader seeks revenge, sending a team to England to deal with Carr, who in turn is forced to return to Northern Ireland to confront the IRA. The title is inspired by another quote – a line from James Elroy Flecker’s The Golden Journey to Samarkand, which is inscribed on the clock tower at SAS headquarters in Hereford: We are the Pilgrims, master; we shall go / Always a little further; it may be / Beyond that last blue mountain barred with snow / Across that angry or that glimmering sea.”.

The SAS, formed during the second world war to operate behind enemy lines in North Africa, mostly remained out of public view until 1980, when members stormed the Iranian embassy in London to end a hostage siege, and the action was caught on television. After the first Gulf war, several books were published about an SAS operation behind Iraqi lines, including Bravo Two Zero, one of the bestselling military books of all time, by Andy McNab, and The One That Got Away, by Chris Ryan, both pseudonyms. Channel 4 is currently airing a series called SAS: Who Dares Wins.

British soldiers in the Falls Road, Belfast in 1969 ... Deegan’s thriller is partly based on his experiences in Northern Ireland. Photograph: Popperfoto/Getty Images

There are strict rules about what can be said, and much of what the SAS does and has done remains hidden, but what most of these books and films have in common is a vivid sense of what it is like to fight in a war – and not just in a war, but in covert, often hand-to-hand combat. In Deegan’s case, this means that he has a certain edge over other thriller writers, a difference reminiscent of the impact Daniel Craig had in his first Bond movie, Casino Royale, in 2006. Instead of the sanitised violence of Bond outings up to that point, a fight in a toilet had a gritty, messy realism to it. So, when Deegan describes a character lying unobserved for days on end, “shitting in a bag, living off cold rations”, watching and waiting for suspect IRA members, there is good reason to believe he is writing from experience.

The same might be true of the brutality and cruelty of his confrontations with Irish Republicans. “I worked in Northern Ireland in different shapes and forms. I was a paratrooper out there. I did work as an undercover soldier. It feels authentic because it is authentic,” he says, sitting in the office of his publishers, HarperCollins. There is nothing in his appearance that hints at a capacity for violence. On the contrary, he is relaxed and relatively open. He makes eye contact from the outset and retains it throughout. He answers almost all questions, except those – as demanded by the Ministry of Defence – that might involve details of SAS numbers and capabilities and might thus compromise future operations. “The book has been written with a lot of knowledge and a lot of experience,” he says, “so you are not going to get any closer to reality than what you have got in that book.”

Though there is also, of course, much that is made up, and part of the fun is trying work out which is which. One incident mentioned in the book, in which the IRA killed three members of the Parachute Regiment in a bomb explosion at Mayobridge near the Irish border in 1989, is a historical fact. Another event, in which members of the SAS push an unsuspecting IRA member overboard on the Stranraer-Larne ferry, is fiction, otherwise the Public Prosecution Service would be opening an investigation.

It is incidents in between that can be harder to work out, and are deliberately designed to leave a reader wondering. “I want someone to read the book and think, ‘Is this true? This sounds plausible. This sounds real’,” says Deegan.

He predicts that Sinn Fein, and especially Republicans from that era, will read it in this spirit. In IRA circles, the SAS were among the most hated and feared of British soldiers, not least because of their alleged involvement in “shoot-to-kill” operations. The Parachute Regiment, in which Deegan served before joining the SAS, comes a close second, and not just for the 1972 Bloody Sunday killings.

SAS members storm the Iranian embassy in 1980.
Photograph: Sipa Press/Rex/Shutterstock

From an early age, Deegan wanted to be in the military. He played soldiers as a child growing up in Niddrie, on the outskirts of Edinburgh, and heard about the service from friends and relatives. He was familiar with violence, he says, though “I don’t have a sob story. My mum and dad were hardworking. The tipping point for Niddrie was heroin. A lot of people I started off with were sniffing glue, marijuana, and then they were into heroin before people knew HIV was being spread through needle usage. Loads of my contemporaries have been dead 30-odd years and some of them were murdered.”

When he came of age to join up, however, he changed his mind, opting instead, surprisingly, for the civil service, but he only lasted there for a few years. He was attracted to the Parachute Regiment because of its involvement in the 1982 Falklands war. “My friend’s brother was with 2 Para and fought in the Falklands at Goose Green. It was all over the TV. I had not thought about specific units but once I saw that, the Parachute Regiment was a unit I wanted to go into.”

Selection for the SAS is notoriously tough. The final march was 60km over the mountains of South Wales and had to be completed within a fixed time, carrying 60lbs, plus food, water and weapon. Of the roughly 200 who turned up for the selection course on the same day as Deegan, only 15 passed.

At one point in the novel, Carr, armed with a Kalashnikov rifle, circles a farmhouse, ready to engage with members of the IRA. “Adrenal glands pumping, every hair on his body standing on end, but he loves this shit, would have done it for nothing. Would have paid to do it.” “I was one of those ‘rough men’ sent into action while people were asleep in their beds,” Deegan says. “I do not regret it. I am proud. I served with good men. I have never done anything that is morally wrong. I chose to [be in the SAS]. I understood that I might have to kill someone and that they might kill me.”

In his experience, what people struggle to understand is that it is just a job – “I have done a lot of things I would not have wanted my mother to see but I have not done anything she would be ashamed of” – and while he is aware of the impact of post-traumatic stress on soldiers, he insists that being sent to fight and kill for his country, in conditions tougher than even many regular soldiers experience, has not had any lasting mental effects. “I have not suffered any trauma. I have done things the average civilian person does not do. I have come close to death. There is two-way traffic in a firefight. I have had close calls. I have never suffered any consequences. I have no issues.”

Near the beginning of Once a Pilgrim is a quote that sounds historical, like the “rough men” quote, as if it is lifted from somewhere at SAS HQ. The source is not identified, but it is in fact Deegan: “To all the brave men I have known who will not see old age. They accepted the risks, stepped into the breach and paid the ultimate price.”

Once a Pilgrim by James Deegan is published by HQ (£12.99). To order a copy for £11.04 go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99

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