I've left the Army but I won't stop fighting

FORMER Army captain Tam Henderson is ready for the fight of his life as he takes on the might of the Military of Defence.

FORMER Army captain Tam Henderson is ready for the fight of his life as he takes on the might of the Military of Defence.

He claims the MoD is risking lives to avoid paying millions of pounds in repair costs on a malfunctioning machine-gun on Warrior tanks.

Springburn-born Tam is a force to be reckoned with. He has seen action in Northern Ireland, the Balkans and Iraq.

Tam, 41, has blown the whistle on the illegal practice of hooding' captives in his explosive book, Warrior, published this month.

He refused to take the rap when a military tribunal held in Saddam Hussein's palace in Basra found him guilty of negligent discharge of a Warrior chain gun, which seriously injured a colleague.

Determined to clear his name, Tam took the case to appeal and a civilian judge found him not guilty.

But now he is preparing to take on the might of the MoD again.

This week he received an anonymous e-mail addressed to him on a soldiers' forum website.

It told him that more than six months after he won his appeal in 2004, a secret board of inquiry had been held into the case in early 2005 and once more found him guilty.

It came as a bombshell.

"I have confirmed from current serving colleagues that a secret board of inquiry without witnesses was held at 7 Armoured Brigade HQ in Bergen Hohne in Germany," says Tam.

But they don't mess with Tam Henderson, as the MoD is finding to its cost.

He's ready for another battle'

NIGHT AFTER night, Tam's partner, Julie Watt, would be woken as he sprung out of bed, convinced someone was in the room.

"He had emotional baggage and a recurring dream of giving the body of one of the boys who died in Iraq back to his wife," she says.

Julie, a former Signaller in the Royal Signals, served in Afghanistan and Iraq but has blocked out her own terrifying experiences, supported Tam throughout his appeal.

"But I just thought, right or wrong, there's no way he is going to win," she sighed. "Now it looks like he's ready for another fight."

Both had found in the Army the family they longed for.

Julie admits that she wanted a better life than she foresaw for herself growing up in Bridgeton but decided to leave the Army after Holly was born.

"I was told I would still have to go on operational tours. I loved the Army but I couldn't have left her for six months at a time."

The Army had given Tam the stability he had longed for in a difficult childhood.

His natural mum, Anne, had been persuaded to give him up.

"She was put into care and didn't have the easiest of upbringings," he says understandingly. "When she married, she tried to find me, but I was made a ward of court and adopted."

He was grown up before they found each other and built a relationship.

Tam was adopted by Jessie and Patrick Henderson and brought up initially in Whifflet, near Coatbridge. But after his adoptive father left when he was three, the family moved to Birmingham and Tam spent the rest of his childhood there before joining the Army at 16.

HE FOUGHT the fiercest battle of his life for his reputation once - and he has no qualms about doing it again.

"I have ordered a copy of the board of inquiry through the Freedom of Information Act. The MoD have agreed and it will be with me in 20 days," he says.

Today, Tam is a happy family man. He and his partner, Julie Watt, 31, herself a former soldier, have two daughters - Holly, 3, and two-month-old Isla - and he regularly sees his eldest daughter, Hannah, 9, from his former marriage.

The scene in the large dining area of the family's rented home in Burnside is a world away from the chaos and terror of war.

Tam runs the Castlemoil Restaurant and King Haakon Bar in Skye and travels to the island every week, where his dream is to set up a diving school.

But his focus is now once more on the incident that tarnished an otherwise brilliant army career, which saw him rise through the ranks to captain.

A Warrant Officer in the Black Watch at the time of the incident, Tam was the gunner on a Warrior tank leading C Company into battle at Az Zubayr in Iraq on March 22, 2003.

He claims the chain gun failed time and again and as they returned to base on the night of March 24 to recover the body of a colleague, it fired without warning, seriously injuring Sergeant Albert Thomson, who lost a leg.

Tam says: "I was charged several months later. The sad thing was that it was a kangaroo court, what was called a summary dealing. All they took was documentary evidence - not witnesses.

"I had witnesses who saw me standing on the seat in the commander's position at the time."

TAM says the fire switch for the chamber is foot-operated and you have to be seated to fire it. "Witnesses had also seen me switch it off."

He had previously been told by his commanding officer that if he accepted the charge of negligent discharge of the weapon, it wouldn't affect his career.

But Tam couldn't live with that. More important than the stain on his record, he felt, was the risk the same thing could happen again.

The chain gun should be on trial, not him, he insists, yet there was no recommendation that it be investigated.

Tam claims the tribunal was not aware of other incidents involving the gun chamber.

"On June 14, 2003, they found me guilty of negligently discharging a warrior chain gun.

"On June 20, a week before my regiment left, I was sent from my regiment to another post in England. Essentially, I was removed in disgrace.

"But over the following year, I was able to submit an appeal through a much more robust judicial system, involving a civil judge with a jury.

"It was a long year. Nobody would take the case up. Nobody thought I could win against the MoD.

"I think the MoD thought I would never come back to bite their ankles, but I did - thanks to Christopher Hill, my solicitor, and Warren Lister, an independent expert witness in engineering.

"The multi-million pound arms companies, who built the Warrior and designed the gun, all had legal representation and expert witnesses against me."

They denied there were any faults with the tank or its weapons.

"But Warren Lister, an expert on these vehicles, stated that the fault was electrical because the chain gun is on an electrically-operated system. And I was cleared."

Lister estimated it would cost around £13million to fix the alleged fault.

HE SAYS Sgt Thomson was refused compensation pre-appeal, but was given a settlement of £1.37m before the secret board of inquiry was held.

Tam says that if the MoD had been forced to admit it sent troops into Iraq with known dangerous weapons, coupled with the cost of rectifying the problem with the chain gun, it would be "pretty catastrophic".

He adds: "I have documentary evidence - an MoD report in 2004 that admitted that an Iraqi male was killed and an Iraqi female was seriously injured in Basra because of the undemanded firing of the chamber (the technical term used when it operates without any human contact)."

He remains concerned that the weapons system that controls the machine gun is unsafe.

"Troops are being sent into battle with what has been described as the most dangerous machine gun in the world," Tam says.

"I have been banging this drum since 2003 and yet the Government is not interested in listening.

"I can only assume that the loss of face would be pretty catastrophic to Gordon Brown and company.

"But at the end of the day, where lives are concerned, it's time to put your hands up and rectify it."

AN ARMY spokesman said: "The Warrior armoured personnel carrier is an efficient piece of equipment and has been used by the Army for a number of years.

"As Mr Henderson left the Army in 2007, he is not qualified to speak on any improvements made to the Warrior."

Meanwhile, Tam has been contacted by one of the top human rights lawyers in the country, Phil Shiner, of Public Interest Lawyers, and asked to give evidence at a public inquiry in December investigating the torture of prisoners of war.

In his book Warrior, Tam reveals how soldiers were routinely taught to hood' their prisoners of war with sandbags and kneel them in blazing temperatures for hours - despite the fact the practice was outlawed by Ted Heath's Tory Government in 1972.

"I can categorically state that we were taught that and for Des Browne (Defence Secretary) and Adam Ingram (former Armed Forces Minister) to state publicly in Parliament that it was a rogue element of British forces that carried out this is a disgrace.

"None of us was aware that hooding was banned.

"Yet again, this is an example of abandoning troops to their own fate by denying things that were officially sanctioned.

"I personally would never have taught it, would never have initiated it or allowed it to happen if I didn't think it was legal."

Despite having moved on with his life, he cannot let go and still harbours resentment for being expelled from the regiment he loved and branded a criminal because he refused to admit to something he hadn't done.

"But I had to change focus and I was invited to join the Royal Army Medical Corps and received my commission as captain on April 1, 2005."

There were two further tours of Iraq, in 2005 and 2006.

Tam resigned his commission on May 27, 2007.

"As quartermaster, I just saw too many examples of poorly equipped, badly trained soldiers and I felt I was fighting an uphill struggle to get what they deserved," he says.