Declan Daly - Borderline - An Oral History of the Brexit Wars 2020-2022

The next problem for Starfort 4 was it’s role. Whereas Starfort 1 for example, near Dundalk sat on a hill looking over the M1 motorway, essentially functioning as an especially grand OP, Starfort 4 was a patrol base. The surrounding terrain meant that was very often foot patrols. The soldiers assigned to it went out each day and night in the Winter conditions to come back wet and cold and sleep in the muddy portacabins which sat inside earthern revetments. Most agreed that just existing there was hard enough before the first Covid-19 19 deaths in early December 2020, hot on the heels of the first two combat deaths due to mortar fire in November which were the third and fourth fatalities of the war for the Defence Forces.. The account below is based on interviews with Cpl Diane Keane whose mother served in Starfort 4.

Company Sergant (CS) Valerie Keane was a tough woman. A head taller than most of the soldiers she oversaw, the forty seven year old Cork woman had joined the Army in 1992 serving two trips in Lebanon in the early and mid nineties, another in Kosovo and one more in Syria in 2014. The last one had been the hardest, only because her daughter Diane was now old enough to understand what was actually going on when ‘Mam went to work for a longtime’. She had spent most of her time as a fitter having done an apprenticeship after recruit training, servicing vehicles but when the opportunity for promotion to Company Sergeant meant a change back into her infantry clothes, it hadn’t bothered her. Not much did. Working on the premise that if you’re going to be in charge, be in charge, those working around her quickly picked up on a few key points. Always have your act together, be on time and she was always ‘CS’. Not ‘Valerie’, not ‘Roy’ a recruit nickname based on her surname, temperment and Cork roots – ‘CS’. And you should probably be standing at something like attention when you say it.

Right now though it was back to her days in the workshop that her mind took her. She remembered a moment when the LTAVs (Light Tactical Armoured Vehicles) were brand new. A rep from the manufacturer was excitedly showing her pictures on an iPad of an oil sample they had sent them from a gear box on a broken down vehicle. The sample showed tiny sharp fragments of gear coating in precise detail much to the pride of the rep. He seemed less concerned that the gearboxes were eating themselves and the then Sergeant (Sgt) Keane had voiced her displeasure pointing out that they knew from the clogged filters and black sludge coming out of them that the machines were ‘pieces of shit that might as well have had cinder blocks instead of wheels because they never fucking moved’.

But that image of the oil sample, mysteriously plucked from her head from many years ago, summed up how she felt now. Her lungs were coated with hot oil run through with tiny fragments of razor sharp metal. Her heart was an engine revving itself to death trying to keep her lungs pumping in and out in search of unattainable oxygen. Every atom in her body felt like it was on fire and her vision was already tunneled. Sitting on the muddy camp bed outside the female shower block that served as a bench, she knew already what she had, she’d seen plenty with it here by now. But she was the CS, and that made the next bit harder even if the only extra thing to hurt was her pride.

The ambulance was only twenty metres away, sinking into the mud in the centre of the FOB.It was here to collect Private (Pte) Damien Morris, a big, cheeky young lad from Limerick who had come back from a morning patrol taken his helmet off complaining of a sudden severe headache and promptly collapsed, with loss of all movement on his left side. At that stage she’d only had a bit worse of a cough than yesterday. Three hours later though (the weather was apparently too bad for medevac by heli) and the ambulance might as well have been a marathon away. She’d better move quick all the same, she could see the crew were getting ready to move (she half grinned internally at what was going to happen when they tried to spin off in that mud with those road tyres). With as deep a breath as she could take in – an ineffectual one at that – she rocked back and then forward onto her shaky feet.

She felt like she was wading through tar to move herself towards the paramedics, who seemed less busy than they had. This registered but the sheer effort of walking stopped her working out why. One was inside and the other about to head to the cab to drive when she grabbed the back door for support. In between deeply laboured pants she spat out “ I think I should come too.” The two medics looked at her and then the strectcher where her eyes followed. Pte Morris was still laid out, she could see his eyes wide open, one pupil blown fully dilated, the other a pinprick. He didn’t blink and didn’t move. “Yeah, we’ll make room, we can come back for him later.’ It sounded cold coming from the paramedic changing his gloves in the back, but it was delivered as sympathetically as possible.

Like everyone else, she had heard of people going downhill fast, being ventilated and never waking up. She felt a rare moment of fear as she lay down on the cleared and cleaned stretcher a minute or two after the latest Covid-19 casualty had been removed. Was this it? Would she get up again under her own power? It seemed impossible to consider otherwise, but this morning she only felt like she had one of the constant colds that hung around this cursed place. As she shut her eyes she ehard the paramedic ask Sgt Andy Cunningham, who had just turned up, for her name. “It’s alright Valerie, we’ll look after you now, you just relax for the moment and breath.’ She managed a grimace at the familiarity in the paramedics use of her first name. As the lights went out in her mind, she heard Andy as if down a long tunnel, “shes a hard one this one, you’d better just stick with ‘CS’”.

Starfort 4 was built quickly and badly in early October 2020. It did not have to wait long to be tested. While other forts along the main Dublin Belfast road, for example, fairly effectively cut movement of insurgents and arms quite quickly, the more barren areas further into the rural heartland of the border region proved a physically harder but more reliable terrain over which to illicitly move people and things. From ‘hiking groups’ being tackled by 28 Battalion (Bn) troops in the mountains near Finner to the vehicle borne movements on the backroads further East, the Starforts very quickly grew in number and pace of activty. Patrolling from Starfort 4 was almost always on foot, although there was a small Quick Reaction Force (QRF) that had access to the Mowags that were allegedly there to use their optics as ISR equipment, but which everyone knew were really there for their Bushmaster cannons.

The immediate area was hills, woodlands, marshy swamps and general misery when it was cold and wet, as the Winter of 2020 notoriously was. While daytime activity was not out of the question, most of the illegal positioning of arms occured at night, being moved by road or by groups on foot. Initially, most of Starfort 4s patrols centred on putting up random roadblocks on the local roads crossing the border and this netted some succesful hauls, including a van full of mortar rounds. After the death on one of these checkpoints of Corporal (Cpl) Marty Andrews to sniper fire, the first death due to combat of an Irish soldier in the war, the patrol were either carried out less overtly or at much larger strength with either machine gun or sniper support or both for any checkpoint that might be required to linger in position. This was late October and the provision of mortar detachments, organic to the Starforts, had not yet been made.