Eye of the Storm (9 page)

By first light we were up again and marching over more hills. The SAS does not run, except when there is good reason to hurry – we march. And we march fast. So, to see if we had it in us, if we had the stamina and the willpower needed to make it through Selection, we marched and marched and marched, over or through any obstacle. We slithered through mud and stumbled over ankle-breaking rocks, climbed treacherous stone walls and risked tetanus, or worse, on rusty barbed wire. We waded, chest deep, through icy water. In the Brecon Beacons, where much of the course takes place, even August suns rarely last long enough to take the chill from the lakes and reservoirs. The water always seemed to be freezing to me. But I was damned if I was going to give in.

Sometimes we’d finish a march and find the trucks waiting for us. They looked incredibly inviting, with their big canvas canopies to keep out the wind and the almost constantly pouring rain. We would be told to get in and everybody would breathe a secret sigh of relief. The torture was over. We were getting a ride, back to camp, with luck – to warmth and light and hot food and, best of all, sleep.

But sometimes, too, an instructor would blow away our hopes. Once, just after we’d settled gratefully in the truck, one of the DS bellowed, ‘Right, everybody. Get back off the trucks. We’re going to march across the mountain for another twenty clicks [kilometres].’

Without a murmur, because you dared not let them see that they were getting to you, we shouldered our bergens. Then, grabbing our weapons, we climbed off the tailgate and back out into the pouring rain. We had only marched about two hundred yards when one of the guys said, ‘Shit to this. I’ve had enough.’ There and then he packed it in. Leaving him behind, we marched another couple of hundred yards. Then the instructor shouted, ‘OK, lads. Stop. You’ve finished. You can get back on to the trucks.’

We had been conned. The guy who had quit had only needed to walk for another two hundred yards and he’d have been OK. He didn’t know that, however, and had paid the price – instantly RTU-ed. As for the rest of us, we had shown that we had been willing to go on for 20 kilometres. The instructors’ had told them what they wanted to know: that the man who gave up was not the sort of soldier the Regiment wanted. What they were looking for was someone who could hack an arduous situation. So that if you were humping ammunition up steep hills or through thick jungle, and even though you were utterly exhausted or just thoroughly fed up, you could still handle it mentally as well as physically. They were not looking for supermen – just people whose minds could triumph over their flagging bodies, however tough the conditions.

I would be willing to bet, however, that instructors were meaner in my day than is the case now. They would, for instance, sometimes wake us at two o’clock in the morning, load us into trucks and dump us out on the Welsh mountains while they tried to break us. Relentlessly, they would march us for miles up and down hills. They would wait for us to climb back up some hill, then send us down again. ‘Do it again. Do it again,’ was all they said. That was all we heard, until we thought we’d go crazy. Which is precisely the idea. The instructors want you to quit. And they know from experience that if they ride men hard enough, most of them will say, ‘Stuff this for a game of soldiers. I’m chucking it in.’ These, of course, are not the men the SAS is looking for.

Furthermore, under the Selection rules anyone can quit, at any time. There is no stain on a man’s military record for his having failed. A candidate has only to say that he has had enough and there is always a truck near by, waiting to take him back to Hereford, from where he will make his way back to his unit to resume service where he left off. He will not be seen again by his fellow candidates when, eventually, they arrive themselves back at the barracks, for by then he will either be waiting for a train on Platform 2 at Hereford station, or already long gone.

As they marched us in the pouring rain, I kept thanking God that it was August and not January, when the Welsh hills would have been covered in snow. Not that the kinder weather hampered the instructors, for they delighted in breaking men individually. One corporal told me, ‘You’re going. You’re not going to pass.’ I pulled myself up from the mud and told him, ‘No I’m not. I’m staying.’ So it went on, as they tried again and again to grind us down.

Although, deep down, the instructors know whether or not they have a good squad, they still take bets on how many they will fail. Some guys on my Selection course had no chance, but, as arrogant as it may seem to say so, I knew my chances were better than even. I put my heart and soul into it. No bastard was going to grind me down. For me, failure was never an option, and I had a slight advantage in some respects – I had already been through Para training.

It is not surprising that the SAS draws 60 per cent of its men from the Parachute Regiment, for there is no doubt that being a Para gives a man a bit of an edge. Their own training has well fitted paratroopers to being pushed harder and harder, and as often as not when other men drop out, the Paras are still there, rock solid and reliable. Five other Paras came with me from Aldershot – and we all passed Selection.

When it came to the final part of Selection, Test Week – every SAS candidate’s greatest trial – we had six marches to complete, each of them with a heavy bergen on our backs as well as our weapons and belt kit. The bergen started at 35 pounds, and its weight was increased each day until, for the final endurance march, it was up to 60 pounds. The packs were weighed at the start of the march and weighed again at the end; sometimes, to surprise us, the instructors would weigh our packs in the middle of a march. And if a man’s bergen didn’t weigh as much as when he had started out – because he’d junked some of the make-weight rocks and bricks along the way – he was off Selection. Binned immediately.

I never used my water bottles. When I came to a stream, I found it easier to use the tin mug hanging on my belt to scoop up a cup or two of water. If I needed a piss, I would always do so away from the stream where I was, so as to be certain not to contaminate the water. I never ever suffered from drinking stream water, and certainly it was better than carrying all the extra weight of water bottles on my belt kit for miles and miles.

Selection rules were tough, as I’ve said, and never more so than during Test Week. No one cuts you any slack. You were, for instance, meant to complete each march within a set time. Being late, even by a few seconds, at the finish of any two of the marches meant automatic failure. What made this even more difficult was that no one told you how long each march was supposed to take. A few hours later, those candidates who had dropped out or been binned would be RTU-ed and left waiting for a train and a lonely return to their units. In their private den, the instructors would smile and run a red marker pen across the mugshot of the failed candidate pinned up on the office wall. Slip up on Selection and you were history – or rather, less than history, since nobody would even remember your name twelve hours later.

The worst marches both involved Pen-y-fan, a fearsome hill, rising to 2,908 feet and dominating the Brecon Beacons, the Welsh mountains where the SAS does much of its training, and which lie some thirty miles south-west of Hereford. The first march – deceptively christened the ‘Point-to-Point’ by gloating instructors – involved making three separate ascents from the base to the peak of Pen-y-fan, all this counting as one march. It was common knowledge that we were expected to complete the Point-to-Point in less than six hours.

The finale of the body-breaking six days that made up Test Week was a gut-twisting, 46-mile endurance march covering most of the ground we had become familiar with in the previous foot-slogging tests. Again, we knew that the time limit was twenty hours, which meant that on downhill stretches we had to maintain a sort of semitrot in order to beat the deadline. And with 60-pound bergens on our backs, pain and exhaustion soon dominated our days.

Indeed, pain was a constant companion during Selection, reaching new peaks during Test Week, so that if some part of your body stopped hurting, you wondered if it had dropped off. Each day the aches grew worse and the pain was no longer something that came in waves, but a continuous agony. Webbing cut deep grooves into the skin, and the canvas strap at the base of my bergen chafed until my back became one great joined-up bruise with patches of flesh rubbed raw and bleeding. Salty sweat ran down from my shoulder blades and into the wounds, leaving me feeling as though fire ants were stripping my flesh.

At night, we painted gentian violet on to our wounds, although that was not much more than a damage-limitation exercise. The sores and cuts never really had time to scab over properly before, next day, the crusts would be broken open and the suppurating flesh would begin to weep again. What was more, most of the wounds turned septic. But although the damage was painful, in your heart you knew that it wouldn’t kill you. So you forced yourself onward. Like the sound of a railway carriage crossing a set of points, one phrase tapped out a continuous rhythm in my head: ‘Never-give-up … never-give-up … never-give-up’, until I doubt whether I would have been able to stop before the finish even if I had been ordered to do so.

I got through. I survived Test Week, which meant that there was a fair chance that I would succeed in passing Selection. But though my determination was stronger than ever, I knew that I would only have to fall foul of an instructor who needed to win a bet to be slung out on my ear. The failure rate in Test Week had been 90 per cent. Of the original 120 candidates, there was only a handful of us left. Those of us who had made it were given forty-eight hours’ leave and told to report back to Hereford for first parade on the Monday morning, when we would start fourteen weeks’ Continuation training. The Regiment was not ready to take us in yet. Not by a long chalk.

While it is easy for an instructor to see when a guy can’t hack it during Test Week and the gruelling run-up to it, during Continuation they really have to watch everyone even more closely. For the next fourteen weeks, they have to work out whether a man can really think under pressure, whether he can fit in effectively in a four-man team (the four-man patrol is the basic unit around which the SAS is structured, unlike the rest of the army), or whether he’s a loner who might – indeed, almost certainly will – become a hazard to the rest of his team. Perhaps most important, they have to decide whether that smile on his face is real, or whether there lurks beneath it a chronically miserable misfit. The reason is simple: a sense of humour can be a priceless asset when the odds are stacked against you

Continuation winds up with training in survival techniques and in undergoing interrogation. For Survival, soldiers are not even allowed so much as a penknife, and before the start we were strip-searched in the Blue Room. The instructors were determined that we would not have anything with us that might increase our chances of surviving undetected in the wilds. During these exercises, half a battalion of infantry and fifty off-duty policemen, some with dogs, are searching for you – and if they don’t find you, the helicopters will. The odds are heavily stacked against evading capture for more than an hour or two, but sometimes all you need to stay free that bit longer than the rest is the sense to rely on human nature and on people not spotting the obvious.

I remember, while on Selection, being put into a fenced area near Hereford that was no more than a mile square. We were told that we were on the run, and that though we had to stay within the fences we were to evade capture for twenty-four hours. Four of us found a man-made hide that had been used by an SAS team for training purposes prior to being sent into no man’s land in Eastern Europe to spy on Russian troop movements. The hide was about eight feet square by six feet deep, and had, concealed in its roof, a viewing point into which, if you had one, you could insert a long periscope, allowing you to look out without being seen by anyone outside.

The four of us went inside the hole and closed the camouflaged hatch in the roof. In time, however, the searchers located it, and a soldier with a torch dropped through the hatch and landed on the earth floor. He shone the light in our faces and counted us out loud. ‘One, two, three, four. Out!’ he ordered. Outside, an Alsatian dog was barking madly as the three men I was with climbed out of the hole, followed by the soldier who’d found us.

But in one wall of the hide there was a small recess, used as a lavatory by soldiers hiding there, the resultant waste then being collected in a polythene bag for disposal later. So, instead of climbing out with the others, I took a chance and slipped into the recess. Above me, I could hear the hunters arguing about how many men had been in the hole. The dog was still barking, and one of the men said, ‘But where’s the other chap? I’m sure there were four.’ He climbed back into the hole and shone his torch around the walls, but in the deep shadows thrown by the torchlight he failed to spot the recess, and so couldn’t see me. Climbing back out, he closed the hatch and I heard him say, ‘God, that’s funny. I could have sworn there were four of them.’ He was right, of course. The fourth was still there, and I stayed in that hide for the rest of the twenty-four hours without anyone finding me again. I learned a valuable lesson, too: given nerve and luck, you really can get away with anything.

On the whole, though, those instructors on Survival didn’t miss a trick. Every scrap of our clothing was searched for anything we might use to help us – money, matches, even knives. They peered into our ears and our hair, and even looked up our backsides – which is, I suppose, one of the penalties of being an instructor. Satisfied that we had nothing going for us, they issued us with heavy old Second World War battledress for the exercise. Our footwear was carefully scrutinized because, in the past, people had been known to hide money in recesses they had cut in the soles or heels of their boots. And, since there were shops in the area of Wales where they were going to dump us, if we’d had money we could have bought materials to help us evade capture – like food, for instance.