A voice shouted: "QRF! QRF! Heli-pad now!" Bunk-beds creaked in unison as I and the other uniformed soldiers sprang to life from our half-sleep. As part of that night's QRF - Quick Reaction Force — we had to be on the helicopter and away within three minutes of getting the call. We rarely knew where we were going until we were airborne. All we ever knew for sure was that someone somewhere urgently needed our help. And in Northern Ireland's so-called Bandit Country with republican prisoners dying on hunger strike we always expected the worst - a mortar attack, a riot, a bloodied body dumped at the side of a road. I grabbed my Self-Loading Rifle and used its strap to lash it to my wrist. That was something all of us did to stop people snatching weapons from our grasp and turning them against us in the pell-mell of our frequent violent confrontations. It was the early hours of 9 July 1981 at our base on a disused airfield near Enniskillen in County Fermanagh. Another IRA hunger striker, Joe McDonnell, had died the previous day after 61 days of fasting.
