The Shooting Gallery

"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. 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."