Writing Worth Reading
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Writing Worth Reading
With this book, The Shooting Gallery is a nickname. He was in the Green Jackets when he was a young soldier and he was in Northern Ireland when things were pretty hot in the 1970s in Londonderry. Because they were always getting shot at they called their camp ‘the shooting gallery’. But he doesn’t just talk about Ireland; there are lots of other interesting things in the book as well.
You’ve just finished reading The Shooting Gallery by Gaz Hunter.
Yes, obviously Gaz Hunter is a pseudonym. I know the guy well, I know his name but I am not going to mention it here. He did quite a lot of service in the SAS, he’s very experienced. He was at the Waco Texas massacre where the cult leader held all those people and eventually they burnt the place down and killed about 100 of them. It was a terrible event and he was there as an adviser. He also left the SAS for a while and went to Afghanistan to train the Mujahideen and he ended up on the frontline with them fighting the Russians in the early 1980s.
So with this book, The Shooting Gallery is a nickname. He was in the Green Jackets when he was a young soldier and he was in Northern Ireland when things were pretty hot in the 1970s in Londonderry. Because they were always getting shot at they called their camp ‘the shooting gallery’. But he doesn’t just talk about Ireland; there are lots of other interesting things in the book as well.
With regards to espionage, he writes in detail about the regiment’s involvement in going over the East German border into the Russian-occupied East Germany and doing surveillance on Russian installations and spotting where equipment was being stored. So there was lots of covert driving about at night which makes it all very interesting stuff.
But is he giving secrets away, because I know that in your book, Soldier ‘I’, you are very conscious of not giving anything away and protecting your code of conduct?
I must admit I hadn’t read about that side of the regiment’s work in a book before this but then again the Berlin Wall has come down so he isn’t giving any active secrets away. This is about the past, things like looking at how they could spot equipment even though it was covered in tarpaulin.
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Pete Winner, codenamed Soldier ‘I’, spent 18 years in the SAS and survived the savage battle of Mirbat, parachuted into the icy depths of the South Atlantic at the height of the Falklands War, and stormed the Iranian Embassy in London during the hostage crisis 30 years ago. He says MI6 is for the public school boys, and the SAS is for men with an ordinary education who have the strength and determination to seek adventure, survive and come back smiling. He describes his work as involving no publicity, no media. ‘We move in silently, do our job, and melt away into the background.’
