My covert SAS life: I was hiding in a hedge as an Irish farmer covered me in petrol

The two SAS soldiers had been peed on before. But petrol being poured onto the hedge they were hiding in and now running down their faces was a new and dangerous low.

For days they had barely moved. Now the farmer they had been secretly watching had an inkling that someone was watching. He was systematically soaking the vegetation around them with fuel.

John, then a young SAS soldier serving in South Armagh, remembers sitting absolutely still as the liquid soaked through his camouflage uniform.

“We’re sitting there and his petrol was running down our faces,” he recalls. “It’s all over us and we’re thinking, this is going to get quite ugly.”

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For much of the SAS’s secret war in Northern Ireland, this was what soldiering looked like. Not black-clad men abseiling through windows or dramatic gun battles, but two exhausted men, buried inside a wet hedge, staring through binoculars at a farmhouse and trying desperately not to be discovered.

They called it an OP — an observation post. The job was simple to describe, difficult to do.

“You’d have a place that you were watching,” John says. In South Armagh, it was often a farm. The soldiers recorded who arrived, who left, which vehicles appeared and who spoke to whom.

They were building up profiles of suspects, looking for “patterns of life” that might indicate militant activity – and sources of finance for violent groups like the Irish Republican Army.

Telling the inside story of a routine operation for the special forces on SAS: The Shadow War, an eight-part audio podcast series from Aurra and Independent Studios – John reveals the everyday reality of what serving in Northern Ireland is like.

Their equipment was basic. Binoculars, notebook and radio. The radio was barely used. A couple of clicks at predetermined intervals, “proof of life”, to the operations room. Otherwise – silence.

OPs could take days and stretch to weeks of sleep deprivation and indignity. Discovery, known as “compromise” could be fatal – or worse.

Winter brought cold, mud and water. Sleep came in fragments. Men got trench foot.

“Once you’ve got yourself in somewhere, you can’t very well wander off,” John says. “You might get found, you might get shot, you might give away your position.”

So the men urinated into lemonade bottles and defecated into plastic bags while sitting shoulder-to-shoulder.

“It wasn’t for the shy and retiring,” he adds.

But discomfort was incidental. The real danger was a single movement, sound or piece of bad luck that told somebody the hedge was occupied.

A dog could end an operation.

“If the dogs found you, then it was game over,” John says. If locals suspected surveillance, he says, they might begin deliberately searching hedgerows, sometimes thrusting a stick through the vegetation in the hope of hitting a hidden soldier and forcing a reaction.

On one operation, John and his partner were concealed near the door of a farmhouse when the owner returned from the pub. The man stopped at precisely their hiding place to pee.

“You’re just sitting there,” John remembers, “with wee running down your face and over your clothes.”

“This isn’t very glamorous,” he thought.

The comedy could slide to tragedy in a heartbeat.

“Paranoia was them opening up on you from somewhere around you,” he says.

But death in a bomb blast or a blizzard of bullets was preferable to what all SAS and other special forces operators most feared – capture.

“You knew you could live with being shot and blown up,” he says. But if you were abducted, “there was no good ending coming to you”.

The image that haunted him was brutally simple: several men suddenly appearing, a bag pulled over the soldier’s head, then being shoved into the boot of a car. Days, perhaps weeks of torture and interrogation would be followed by murder and an unknown grave.

The SAS team didn’t know if the farmer they were watching was in the IRA or not. But he was deeply suspicious of being watched.

For a couple of days the farmer walked around the three hedges in the field where John and his partner were hiding.

On the third day, he emerged from an outbuilding carrying half a dozen jerry cans.

Then he took two cans to the hedge and began splashing their contents over it. He then fetched two more. This time he came towards John.

“He just walked along in front of us and covered the hedgerow in what was now obviously petrol.”

The soldiers radioed a warning. They might have to break cover. Backup might be needed.

But how to escape?

If the farmer knew where they were, perhaps others did too. And the obvious escape route — backwards through the hedge — was exactly where John imagined an IRA gun team would be waiting.

“You’re in a sort of gambling situation,” he recalls. “What are your options now?”

The farmer went indoors. John assumed he was waiting to see whether the soldiers would panic and run.

The two men stayed where they were, soaked in petrol, discussing their choices in whispers.

Then the farmer emerged from his house. He had a boy with him, a young teenager – maybe even just 10 years old. John watched the two talk.

Then the youngster struck a match and threw it into the hedge.

“Bang! The whole thing literally is exploding in a matter of a few seconds,” says John.

The hidden OP had become an inferno. The OP team could not run to the rear for fear of an IRA ambush.

The two heavily armed, smoke-blackened men suddenly erupted from a hedge that had appeared empty seconds earlier, “shouting and hollering like a couple of banshees,” John says.

The farmer and boy were terrified. The soldiers ran straight past them. Then they kept running down the farm track until a vehicle reached them farther along the road.

Nobody fired.

“Everything out there is a gamble,” he says. “On that day, we called it correctly, but equally, we could have called it another way.”

“The margin,” he says, was desperately small.

Listen to the first three instalments of SAS: The Shadow War now, or become an Independent Member for exclusive early access to the entire series. Available on Apple Podcasts and Spotify