By Raffique Shah
September 06, 2025

I have remained fascinated for 50 years and more by how the story (or stories) of my exploits, whenever I’ve had cause to recall details, might help people who were born long after the Mutiny at Teteron Barracks to understand what it looked like.

I had that experience again last week when I was putting together some notes; memoirs to prepare my manuscript for publication. People who listen to the story of how two 24-year-young lieutenants trained at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst joined with their soldiers, leading the latter as we seized control of the barracks.

We succeeded to the extent that by 10 a.m. on April 21, 1970, we had control of the regiment’s biggest camp, Teteron Barracks. We had three companies of infantry men. At that stage, as the camp bristled with activities associated with a convoy of soldiers heading to the capital city of an eight-year-old independent nation, a handful of men from the Coast Guard, armed with two 40mm Bofors machine guns and some rifle fire, opened fire on us on the hillside.

We returned fire but never had any intention of killing the sailors or destroying their fast patrol boats, the HMS Trinity and HMS Courland Bay. At that stage, as I tell the story, we young officers had no intention to kill anyone.

We pulled aside the 20-odd vehicles in our possession and we mapped out how many ways we could get out of Teteron without having to slaughter the lambs.

Then Lt Comdr Mervyn Williams, who handled communications, sought to keep us talking while he negotiated terms for our agreement to remain in Teteron that day. Rex and I and our hastily-assembled command structure used reverse psychology on Commander Williams, who was like an uncle.

Knowing us the way he did, he clearly did not see us opening heavy fire on the handful of Coast Guard men who fit in the two boats that would be sitting ducks if a shoot-out occurred.

The Coast Guards’ fire power was no match for the Regiment’s. We carried about 20 GPMGs, ten anti-tank Carl Gustafs. Both had a range of more than one mile. Firing speed on the GPMGs was somewhere close to 1,500 rounds per minute.

On paper that fire power looked deadly. It was. But they needed operators who would think nothing of murdering dozens of Coast Guard men and whoever else tried to stop us at that point. We soldiers, now mutineers, faced the do-or-die question that all revolutionaries, mutineers and rebels faced: to kill or not to kill?

It hit us square between the eyes—we were prepared to die for the revolution but we could not kill for it. That was the decision that saw us withdrawing our troops back into Teteron to consider what other options we may have.

Comdr Williams sensed that we did not have the bloodlust that soldiers of other jurisdictions and other cultures did. However angry we may be, and whatever our political persuasions, we would never kill our own people in the name of revolution.

Thereafter, it was a case of who could negotiate better than whom. We may have lost another battle on the hillside, but we will have gained the respect of people who admired us, the youngest officers ever to make decisions that touched people’s lives.

It was also the question that showed how responsible we were as leaders and why we would never put the lives of our men and the freedom of our country ahead of any political gains.

Which is why, when I heard Prime Minister Kamla Persad-Bissessar leading a rant against yet-to-be-pirates and drug lords, saying, “Kill them all violently!”, I found it extremely irresponsible of her and reeking of a bloodlust that is uncharacteristic of the majority of our citizens.

Look, I could say that, fulminate, or just outright cuss them, because I am Citizen Shah. She is Prime Minister and she cannot descend into the murky depths that journalists and other high office-holders with little sense of responsibility can do.

Sadly, the PM has made an art of cussing, threatening and trashing lowlifes. Friends who have seen my manuscript, Mutiny in the Black Power Revolution, Trinidad and Tobago 1970, never fail to marvel at how young we were and how calm and respectful we remained at a time when other leaders descended into base behaviour.

That we were Sandhurst-trained counts for something. Yes, we were revolutionaries and mutineers, but we upheld our self-respect and respect for others.

I worked my way out of the badjohn image as a young man. Many women who move up to executive or other senior ranks in both public and private sector often revert to obscene language as their choice to impress others.

I am never impressed by such. I find it repugnant.