War casualty and hero drew a longer fight at home

Press, 29 June 1988, Page 17

War casualty and hero drew a longer fight at home

DAVID LEWIN

writes from London about a severely wounded British

Army officer who discovered he was an embarrassment to service peers at home.

The motto of the Scots Guards in which Lieutenant Robert Lawrence, M.C., served with distinction is Nemo Impune Lacessit, which they translate as “Let no-one wound me with impunity.” Robert Lawrence, who had half his head blown away by an Argentinian bullet leading an attack at the end of the Falklands Campaign, never forgot that motto.

Not when he was a jungle warfare instructor in Brunei.

Not when he patrolled the streets in Belfast and worked in Intelligence. Not when he led his platoon against an Argentinian machine-gun post for which he was awarded the Military Cross, or when he was in the final assault on Mount Tumbledown where he was wounded.

Or indeed any day since when he has had to fight the Whitehall warriors and the brigade of bureaucrats who wanted him shut away out of sight, a cripple in a wheel-chair.

The story of Robert Lawrence is dramatised in a remarkable new 8.8. C. film called simply “Tumbledown.”

It is moving, funny and effective. I know: I have seen it. Contrary to the view of those who haven’t, it is not really about the war. It is about how one man had to fight back “and do something on my own two feet.”

Robert Lawrence is aged 27 now, and his hair is blond and grown long over the plate in his head. He is paralysed down his left side, but he has learned to tie his own boot laces and drives a car with panache. He is married to Christina, who did not know him “when I was whole,” and they have a baby son, Conrad, aged 4i/ 2 months.

Two days before he landed in the Falklands with the Second Battalion Scots Guards he made a pact with a fellow officer and close friend. “If I am wounded,” Lawrence said to him, “then finish me off and I’ll do the same for you.” Robert Lawrence said to me: “For a soldier the idea of dying isn’t as terrifying as being maimed. And I lived in fear of being maimed. “The pact was special to me because my qualifications were not so much for quick wit but on the rugby field. So therefore the fear of not being able to move physically was terrifying. The idea of being maimed for life was almost beyond comprehension.

“But I decided pretty early on after it happened that I didn’t want to be a cripple — and that is an attitude of mind. You either have it or you haven’t.

“Physically, I am a cripple but so are lots of other people. But I didn’t want to have a crippled attitude. I didn’t want the wheelchair or the special seat on the bus or the Tube.

“I also wanted people to know that although I had an injury, I was no less a person than I have been, and maybe even a bigger

or a better person because of it. I had to get them to realise my determination.”

That is the spirit that Robert Lawrence still has today, nearly six years after he was hit. That is why he wanted his story to be dramatised: to demonstrate what could be done.

“When I got back to England, it was the bureaucracy I had to fight,” he said. “Their attitude was that you show victors, not victims, and they wanted to keep me out of sight, even preventing me from wearing my uniform at the St Paul’s memorial service.

“I was brought up the public school way and the services way. I was bred as part of the establishment and the system. “What I have discovered is that loyalty is a one-way street whereas I was brought up to believe it was a two-way street. “If I had to through all this with my background, with a brother in the Army and my father and my grandfather in the R.A.F., then what chance in hell does a Glaswegian Guardsman

who is limbless and with a father out of work stand?” When Robert Lawrence was in a hospital back home, the officials actually lost his papers. A squadron leader ordered Lawrence to address him as "sir.” “In the Household Division, we don’t call your rank ‘sir’,” Lawrence told him.

The squadron leader, a nonflyer, persisted, and Lawrence said to him: “Test this fist. It is about go give you your first flying lesson.” You need to be very sure of your background and of yourself to say that, especially when you are "a dribbling incontinent” with part of your brain exposed. He also fought against the doctors who discussed his case as though he wasn’t there in front i of them in his bed. The medical men wondered, without asking him, what sort of bullet could have caused such an injury?

Robert Lawrence informed them with some asperity: “Belgian F.N. Seven point six-two

travelling at 40,000 feet per second.

“For God’s sake talk to me if you want to know anything. It’s my job.”

He was termed VSI which is service “speak” for vefy seriously ill. “It means you are very lucky to live and more than likely to die,” he says. Back in England a year after the Falklands he was mugged at night by some yobbos on a railway bridge at Guildford station. The steel plate was not yet in his head. "I wore a trilby hat over the hole in my skull and a suit, and I limped, and one of them — there were two young men and a girl — picked the hat off my head and put it on his,” he says.

“I screamed at him and he scrunched it up and threw it at me. Then he started laying into me. I fell to the ground and they starting kicking me and my head, which was unprotected. “He could have killed me. If I had had a knife I could have taken him out which is what I

was trained to do. And now instead of sitting here with you, I’d have been serving a prison sentence.”

Did he see the irony that some young thugs could have done what the Argentinians failed to do?

“I understood that kind of violence because of serving in Belfast for a year before going to the Falklands. As a soldier there the prospect of being mugged is not quite as traumatic,” he says. “So I wasn’t in fear of my life that night on the railway bridge. I was more outraged than angry and you do realise, that however great the recovery, you can’t look after yourself any more.” I suggest that what keeps him going is being bloody minded — the same spirit which imbued the “Guinea Pigs,” the R.A.F. men who were fried and maimed in the Second World War. Robert Lawrence and his wife, Christina, agree. He had met a "Guinea Pig” after he got back — Jimmy Wright, a flyer who

was blinded and is now a documentary film-maker. If Wright could do that without sight, then Lawrence certainly could. He worked for Jimmy Wright as “a runner with a limp” training to be a film producer, which he wants to be now.

Lawrence has no doubts about the validity of the war in the Falklands. “By the time I went in with Five Brigade it was a necessary war,” he says. “The people on the islands were under lock and key with 11,500 Argentinian soldiers telling them what to do. They deserved and had the right to be protected.

“Whether we should have allowed it to get to that situation is another matter. But it was a war that had to be fought. “And when you lead an attack against a machine-gun post, you do what is required, which is to silence that machine-gun before it silences you. And you have to do it from the front, leading your troops. There is no other way.” Would he try now to stop his son, Conrad, joining the Army later, if he wished to? “There is absolutely nothing wrong with him going to war,” Robert Lawrence says. "What there is something wrong with, is his going to war and people not realising what they are doing sending him to war. “I never felt there was anything to be ashamed of in my condition after the bullet ripped into my skull.

“What I couldn’t understand was that other people in the services were ashamed of my condition and didn’t want me on parades or wearing uniform. I was an embarrassment to them and I couldn’t understand that.

“I had been brought up, perhaps naively, to believe that fighting for your country was one of the greatest things you could do. But having done that I became an issue of embarrassment and that shattered me. “I am not bitter about the war and I am not bitter about my injury. I am bitter about the attitudes which have been shown to me since.”

Robert Lawrence can joke, he can work, he can function, and he has a wife with whom he can discuss everything. Before I left him, I asked whether he considered himself to be a hero — which I defined as doing something over and above the call of duty? “It was my duty,” he replies instantly. The way in which I did it — leading the attack on the machine-gun post and the assault on Mount Tumbledown — was how I was trained: to get stuck in at whatever cost.

“The only way I could be called heroic I suppose, being honest, is in my recovery. I didn’t have to recover in the way I did. I could have lain down in a bed and said ‘look after me, I’m disabled.’ “But I couldn’t have done that. What my story is about is coming out of the war — and still having to fight.” Nemo Impune Lacessit DUO Copyright