The discovery of a covert OP is almost an everyday event in Northern Ireland. It is often a farmer’s dog or children playing who find the soldiers. Words may be exchanged between the civilians and the camouflaged soldiers whom they inadvertently encounter, but the soldiers will normally radio for transport to remove them from the scene as quickly as possible. Sometimes they are barracked by local people.
A one-time member of 14 Intelligence Company describes the strain and the humour which resulted from long hours in covert OPs in constant fear of discovery:
The unit ran on a sense of humour. Someone got pissed on by a passer-by – it actually happened. Cows started to eat things you didn’t want them to eat. A period of high tension could be followed by unstoppable laughter, you know how it is when you try to stop yourself but that makes it worse.
The OP teams had their own term for coming close to discovery and getting away with it – the ‘adrenalin kick’.
When the Dunloy IRA unit discovered the presence of the OP they meant not to embarrass the soldiers, but to kill them. Henry Hogan and Declan Martin, an eighteen-year-old from another part of Dunloy, produced a plan to attack the OP. According to the IRA there was a third member of the ambush party. The security forces said three weapons – an Armalite, a sub-machine-gun and a shotgun – were recovered from the scene, but they maintained that only two IRA members were involved in the assault.
At about 8 p.m. on 21 February the IRA members set out to mount their attack. Like the soldiers they chose to approach the OP from behind, across the field. This is probably why they were not seen. The Provisionals came close to the soldiers before opening fire on them. One of the soldiers, realizing what was happening, radioed for help. But it was too late for Sergeant Oram and the other soldier, who were hit many times. Sergeant Oram died of his wounds but the other man, although seriously injured and left for dead by the IRA, made a recovery.
The events which followed remain highly confused. There was gunfire, possibly from a third member of the OP, as the IRA members tried to flee across the field. Two unmarked cars arrived on the scene very quickly. Their speed indicates that they were a back-up team already deployed on the ground rather than the QRF. The special forces soldier quoted above says they were not SAS but fellow members of Sergeant Oram’s surveillance detachment.
A neighbour heard one of the soldiers shouting, ‘Get the hell out of the way!’ as he ran towards the scene. It was not known whether he was shouting at a bystander or possibly a surviving member of the OP team. There was more firing at the end of which Hogan and Martin were dead. The IRA maintains a third volunteer escaped.
Local people said that they had heard an injured IRA man calling for help before being “finished off’ and the IRA claimed the men had been ‘surrounded by the SAS’ before being shot. The allegations highlight the problem of trying to separate the truth about such an incident from the rhetoric generated by the strong passions which are aroused when local people die, almost literally on the doorstep of a republican area.
However, it is certain – even one of the soldiers who arrived on the scene later admitted it in a statement at an inquest – that the IRA men were killed as they lay injured in the field. The soldier said he had approached the men and that one had made a movement which he felt endangered his life, so he fired into Martin and Hogan.
Considerations about whether the soldiers had been on a mission to ambush the IRA do not arise. It was the Provisionals who fired the first shots – an attack which culminated in death for their own men. Dunloy had been a routine surveillance mission which had gone disastrously wrong for 14 Intelligence Company. The only legal question surrounded the issue of whether the back-up soldiers might, in ‘hot blood’ at the loss of their comrade, have shot men whom they could otherwise have taken prisoner.
After its initial cry of ‘foul’, Sinn Fein chose not to make propaganda capital out of the incident. The men had died, in the words of the IRA statement, ‘in action against enemy occupation forces’. This had an heroic appeal to many republicans. When the inquest into the deaths came up in May 1986 Sinn Fein made little fuss about it. The Hogan and Martin families did not have legal representation and the hearing was hardly reported. Both sides drew their lessons from the deaths of three young men in Dunloy.
A curious postscript to the incident involves the reports of Sergeant Oram’s death which appeared in some newspapers. A few days after the shooting The Times ran a story headlined, ‘SAS Man’s Courage Was Kept Secret.’ It did not carry a journalist’s by-line but said that Sergeant Oram had been the soldier who had killed George McBrearty and Charles Maguire in the shoot-out in Londonderry during the 1981 hunger strikes (see chapter fifteen). It added that the young NCO had been decorated with the Military Medal for this feat.
The article contained several inaccuracies. Sergeant Oram was not an SAS man – his own regimental journal had listed his assignment as ‘Int and Sy Gp (NI)’, whereas research shows that SAS members of this unit would more normally be listed
