In the episode I express my anger over the treatment of Dennis Hutchings and detail what happens to every soldier that fires his weapon in Norther Ireland and what they have to go through.
Pre-Roll Post-Roll short version
Pre-Roll Post-Roll
In the episode I express my anger over the treatment of Dennis Hutchings and detail what happens to every soldier that fires his weapon in Norther Ireland and what they have to go through.
Pre-Roll Post-Roll short version
Pre-Roll Post-Roll
0 (1s):
The Tim Heale podcasts, ordinary people's extraordinary stories.
2 (17s):
Welcome to series four of The Tim Heale podcast in this series. It's Tim having to rent and he's me. So if you enjoy having a bit of a rant and going on about what's going on in today's society, stay tuned. If you go. When I listened to me rent, well, you can always turn. Welcome back to another Tim's rents this time. I'm just going to enlighten a few people on the situation of what happened last week. Dennis Hutchinson died.
2 (58s):
Now, if you don't know who Dennis <inaudible> was, he was a regimental corporal major in the cavalry, and he's been hounded for the last 50 years, bought a judicial system in Northern Ireland to try and bring about a vexatious claim that he'd killed somebody illegally in Northern Ireland. Now this has gone on for 50 years. They have no new evidence. What happens? I can tell you from experience when you discharged your firearm in Northern Ireland as a soldier, what happens when you come back in off your patrol, your weapon is taken off here and it goes away for forensic treatment.
2 (1m 48s):
They, they do all the forensics on it. They fire a bullet out of it. They mess that bullet to whatever they say. Confined. If my incident, I won't talk too much about it. However, our five more weapon off our two rounds. One of them took out a stained glass window of a church and the other one, well, when slightly, well let's say put it this way. They found a weapon that the God at Vida at us, we were fired upon. Anyway, I got back in off of this patrol. My weapon was taken off a mate.
2 (2m 30s):
I was taken down to ni Bosley police station and I was interviewed. It was more like an interrogation that lasted nine hours, or it's a detail. Every ESP aspect of that whole day. From the time I got up in the morning, what I for breakfast, what we did on the briefing for the patrol, what we did when we were out in a patrol and what happened during the incident, and then what happened after the incident. And this was all documented body SIB, which is a special investigations branch of the military police.
2 (3m 10s):
And this happens every single time that you discharge your weapon in Northern Ireland. And that happens to every single soldier on every single incident. The fact that they, they, you know, when we recovered the weapon that was fired at us, my session commander was hit and he was taken to hospital. Fortunately, he lived to tell the tale, but he was seriously injured and was taken out of the operations. And we never saw him again until we got back to the UK after the tour or back to England after the war, we lost a lot of guys on that.
2 (3m 53s):
So now some years ago that MP or prime minister we had, who sent us into Iraq, he also gave every single terrorist in Northern Ireland, a piece of paper saying that they're immune from prosecution. However, they are still chasing poor soldiers out there doing their duty. So acquainted country. Why, why are they still chasing people? When they go through this whole process of being cleared at the time, or in some cases, they were found to have broken the law.
2 (4m 41s):
And they were charged at the time. And I was charged under military law is just it's wrong. And the government need to sort it out. These vexatious claims against the British army. We operate under. We have a code of ethics that we live by. We have rules of engagement that we adhere to in every single operation that the British army takes, takes partying.
2 (5m 21s):
We have rules of engagement, and these are drilled into us. It's all part of our training. We don't fire upon anybody unless we're fired upon first in self-defense, unless we're on active war footing. Like we were in Afghanistan where we were going out, doing active patrols and being come under fire from the Taliban, or we've got intelligence that we can go and get these guys. And we used the absolute minimum force necessary to get the job done. We don't go over top ever.
2 (6m 1s):
It's in our training, we're trained and we try and, and we try and we train the training is normally a lot harder than the actual operations. And it's totally different when you're in an operation to when you're training the, we, we live by the, the, the sign trying hard fight easy. And that's what we do. And it's drilled into guys about rules of engagement, what you're doing in that conflict while you're there. And this goes on every single operation before a unit deploys out on an operation, they set, they stand up at least six months prior to that and start with a basic skills.
2 (6m 47s):
And they build up and build up and build up over a six month period, doing different exercises, building up the skill sets, covering all the aspects that they're going to encounter. What I want an operation. So why did the government find it so easy to let these vexatious claims against the British army hold? And he saw a water whatsoever when you're in an operation and you're in contact after that you come back and you're debriefed. And if there's any suspicion whatsoever that there's any illegal Ana to what's whatsoever, then that weapons taken is gone off a forensics.
2 (7m 34s):
And the soldier concerned is then interviewed or a Mike IC. It was an interrogation. If you don't interview somebody for over nine hours going over the same thing over and over again, trying to catch them out. No, it's, it's wrong. We try. And, and we are. It's the reason that we are the best in the world at what we do. And the fact that then is Hutchins had to go through this while he was seriously ill, seriously ill, just beggars belief and the Northern Ireland secretary, and the government need to do something about this because he's wrong.
2 (8m 26s):
Especially sees that they pardoned the real terrorists. The reason why we were there in the first place, we were there to aid to civil power in Northern Ireland to help out the police because the police were being overwhelmed by these terrorists at the time. And at the time it was the Protestants that were the problem. And we were, we went out there to help protect the Catholics. And then the Catholics turned on us and we spent the best part of 40 years in Northern Ireland or 30 years in Northern Ireland, trying to sort these problems out.
2 (9m 8s):
And in that time we lost many, many good blokes to these terrorists who have got a free pass. It makes me really, really angry. And if anybody has got any influence over the Northern Ireland secretary or the government to stop this vexatious factious, horrible chasing of British soldiers that have been out there doing their duty and trying to get them after so many years, then please, please use that influence to get this law changed.
2 (9m 53s):
Thank you for listening. Thanks for listening. I look forward to the next one. Thank you for listening to my podcasts. If you have enjoyed them and your podcast app allows, please leave a comment and share it with your friends. The reason I got into this podcast malarkey is so I could leave a legacy for my children and my grandchildren in the years to come. So they will know what I did with my life. I wish my grandparents had done the same for me. Unfortunately they didn't in my latest series on giving people the opportunity to leave their own legacy for their children and families for the future.
2 (10m 40s):
If you have any criticism, positive or negative, and you wish to get in touch with me direct, you can email me at timheale@hotmail.com. That's timheale@hotmail.com. I thank you for your time and thank you for listening.