by Rusty Firmin
In the third week we were consolidating what we had learned so far with a couple of mini-exercises: live firing, and live ambush and anti-ambush drills, together with a bit of tracking, navigation and close target reconnaissance (CTR), each of us taking it in turns to act as patrol commander. I remember one morning heading down to the river to fill up my water bottles, and while I was there an instructor with one of the other patrols came down to the opposite bank to do the same thing. He lobbed a stone at me to attract my attention and then shouted, ‘Oi, Firmin: why isn’t anyone watching your back? You shouldn’t be on your own.’
At this point, George F, who had come with me, stood up out of cover with his rifle and said, ‘Don’t worry Staff, I’ve got Rusty’s back.’
The instructor threw his hands up in mock exasperation and headed back to the DS area but it was good, it showed we were functioning as we’d been taught.
We had a day back in the base camp, much of which was now knee deep in mud, to get briefed and sorted out for the final exercise and then we were back out in the jungle again. The scheme for the exercise was that each patrol would head out in a different direction to perform a range of tasks, then we would meet up at an RV to do a close target reconnaissance on a makeshift enemy position, put together an attack and then take it out. There would be no return to the base camp for the whole week so we would have to carry everything we needed and leave the rest behind.
The march out onto the exercise was exhausting enough, but it was challenging and, once again, I was excited. Everything seemed to be going well until we stopped for a rest and a map check on a riverbank in between two RV points. I drank down one of my water bottles but, as I leant into the river to refill it, I was suddenly attacked by hornets. Fucking hell! It was like having red hot nails driven into my skin. I jumped into the water to get them off me, which worked, but the rest of the patrol didn’t have a clue what was happening. When I came up, Benny was there and I told him I’d been stung. I had no idea what it was at that point – I thought maybe bees – but Benny took one look at the rapidly swelling bumps on my face and body – I had a total of four stings – and told me, ‘Hornets, mate, you probably disturbed their nest.’
Benny got some powerful anti-histamine tablets out of his kit and gave me a couple which I swallowed down.
‘How are you feeling, mate?’
‘I’m fine,’ I told him, ‘ready to move on.’ In fact I felt suddenly, overwhelmingly tired but I wasn’t going to admit this. Meantime, George was in the river looking for my watch which had fallen off when I dived in so we had a bit of a delay. I was worried that we were losing time and told Benny it didn’t matter and we could leave the watch behind. More or less as I said this, George reappeared having found it. I noticed that Benny was giving me a slightly strange look.
‘You’ve been bitten by something else too, but a while back.’
He was looking at a pussy white lump on my neck which had two small dot-like marks in it.
‘Rusty, I think you’ve got a botfly in you.’
As I mentioned earlier, botflies bite you and then lay their eggs in your flesh and when these hatch out, a maggot crawls out and spends some time in there, feeding off you and growing inside an abscess before it eventually tunnels its way out. Not surprisingly, these bites can get really badly infected.
‘I can leave it in there or take it out now,’ he told me.
‘Shit, take it out now,’ I really didn’t like the idea of one of these bastards eating its way out of my neck.
Benny got his medical kit out and cleaned off the area on my neck, then took out a scalpel, made an incision into the lump and gently squeezed out a load of pus, together with the botfly larva. He put a dressing on the wound and then told me, ‘Drop your trousers.’
I leant against a nearby tree, trousers round my ankles, and he shot a big dose of antibiotics into my arse. ‘That’ll keep you going.’
I felt terrible but I was determined to keep going and I didn’t slow us down appreciably. We made the RV with the other patrols in good time and waited there while the close target recce (reconnaissance) team went out to recce the enemy base. They came back and briefed us on the outline plan for our attack. The instructors gave it the OK so we launched, won the firefight and the mission was a success. Good news!
The priority now was to head back to base camp and get packed up and sorted out for return to Airport Camp and then back to the UK. At this stage I had no idea if I’d passed. I did know that 12 guys had been sent back to Airport Camp already as unsuitable but there was no guarantee that any of the rest of us would get through and I was concerned that my hornet encounter was going to count against me. At base camp we had a debrief on the exercise but I knew the pass/ fail decision wasn’t going to be made until the instructors got back to Airport Camp which wouldn’t be until the next morning.
I was up before first light and got my kit sorted out and then we headed out to the helicopter landing site (HLS) to wait for the choppers to take us back to the relative civilisation of Airport Camp. We got there in the late morning and were straight into the routine of getting our kit and weapons thoroughly cleaned up and handed in to the stores while the instructors held a meeting to decide who had passed and who had failed. Late in the afternoon we were summoned to the briefing room and told. I’d passed and that was all I wanted to know.
Long is the way, and hard, that out of hell leads up to light. Especially if you want to join the SAS. Everyone there had worked their bollocks off to get to this point and it was a shame that some of us hadn’t made it. We went over to the NAAFI to buy beer and food and I remember sitting outside the basha until the early hours, chatting, drinking and eating, trying to put back on some of the large amount of weight we’d all lost over the past four weeks. The Guards officer from my patrol had been told he had failed and I did feel sorry for him, but the jungle had shown that he wasn’t really capable of managing both the physical side of it and performing as an officer and that’s what he would have to do if he got through. As Lofty Wiseman had said after selection, there’s no disgrace at all in having a go and giving it your best shot.
Next morning, after a huge breakfast, we were taken back to the airport and loaded onto another VC10 for the flight back to Brize Norton. I slept almost the whole way.
In Bradbury Lines, once I’d got my kit squared away, I bumped into DJ.
‘How did it go?’ he asked.
‘All right, I think. I passed anyway,’ I told him.
‘I knew you would.’ He looked at the prominent hornet stings on my face and the dressing on my neck and asked what had happened, so I told him.
‘Didn’t stop you though, did it?’ he said, ‘Not long now and we can get out for a few beers.’
There’s no rest for the wicked and without any significant time off we were about to start the next big phase of continuation training: combat survival. There are three parts to the combat survival course: the training package, the escape and evasion exercise and the resistance to interrogation exercise. We were joined for this by volunteers from other parts of the British Armed Forces and NATO* countries who wanted to be combat survival instructors but for them it was a learning course; for us it was part of the selection process with a big possible fail at the end of it.
*NATO = North Atlantic Treaty Organization.
The training was interesting enough but we knew the real test would be the two exercises. For the escape and evasion we were to be paired off and sent out into a remote part of Wales, where we would march between a series of RVs relying on only a rough sketch map and directions from the ‘agents’ at each RV, while being hunted by a ‘hunter force’ of regular infantry soldiers aided by war dogs – huge fierce German Shepherds – and helicopters. We would be equipped with nothing more than the clothes we stood up in, and they weren’t good clothes either. I had my own underwear, socks and boots but over that a pair of ancient battledress trousers from the 1950s, held up with bailer twine
, a wool ‘Hairy Mary’ shirt and an old greatcoat, coming apart at the seams and with most of the buttons missing. This little ensemble was tastefully accessorised with a wool ‘cap, comforter’, a kind of wool tube, sewn up at both ends, which you can use as a scarf or fold into a hat. We were allowed to carry two ten pence pieces for use if we needed to make an emergency phone call but no watch or compass, and we were thoroughly searched to make sure that we had no other contraband.
I’d decided to take a chance. Before we were searched, we’d seen the trucks pull up outside Training Wing and I took the opportunity to put my watch on the roof of one of them in the hope I could retrieve it before we set off for the training area. Some of the others had decided to conceal standard issue survival button compasses up their arses. When the time came, and I’d been paired with Geordie D, one of the other SAS hopefuls, I managed to grab the watch without anyone noticing which gave me a minor feeling of triumph, I suppose.
It was like being back on selection. We had a two- or three-hour drive, slumped in the back of the three-tonners as we headed out to the hills. Plenty of time to think about what was ahead. Once again I was keyed up and excited. I suppose it’s slightly odd but despite the huge physical and mental effort involved in the process, and the sheer discomfort of a lot of it, I really enjoyed the whole thing. I suppose you have to really, or you would just give up.
Each pair was dropped off at a different place on the training area and given an RV to head for. As the truck drove away, I said, ‘Geordie mate, I managed to keep my watch.’
‘And I’ve got a compass,’ he told me, pulling a face as he rummaged around in his own arse.
We made the decision that we would only move by night. We didn’t want to make it too easy for the hunter force. By day we would find a lie-up in a farm building, or something similar. The problem with this was that the local farmers had all been briefed on what was happening and asked to call in any sightings of us, in return for which they got an invite to a big Christmas piss-up back in Hereford as a thank you, so we had to be careful, and on several occasions we wound up spending the day roughing it under gorse bushes, as the November rain pissed down on us. We were cold and wet but never miserable: you need a sense of humour for this kind of thing and both of us had it in abundance. Geordie was a top lad.
So the next seven days were spent creeping around in the dark, occasionally meeting ‘agents’ at RVs who would give us information and directions for our next destination. Some of them gave us food too but never very much: the odd sandwich or biscuit, just to keep us moving. On about the third day we found a chicken strutting around outside a farm. Geordie threw a stone at it which knocked it over and I grabbed it and broke its neck but we never got round to cooking or eating it and we were getting pretty hungry.
The only time we ever saw any of our fellow evaders was once when we lay up in a hay barn and found two more in there, sheltering from the rain the same as us, but we often saw the hunter force and came close to being trapped and picked up on several occasions.
On day five, Geordie began to feel really ill. I don’t know what it was: possibly something he had picked up in the jungle but it was clear to both of us that it wasn’t safe for him to continue and we decided to initiate the emergency procedure. We could see a farm from where we were lying up and headed for it. I rang the doorbell and explained to the farmer what had happened and asked if there was a telephone box nearby. They pointed one out in a village about half a mile away but offered to let us use their home phone. I refused: we’d been told only to call from phone boxes in an emergency and I wasn’t going to fail at this stage for getting the procedure wrong. We walked down to the village and I called the emergency number to let them know what the problem was. They told us to stay put and about half an hour later a Landrover turned up with a couple of the Training Wing DS. Geordie was taken off the exercise and I was dropped at one of the RV points to be teamed up with another pair who were due to arrive there soon. It didn’t seem to matter that there were now three of us but I was told I might be teamed with another individual runner at a later RV. I didn’t know it but there were now only 36 hours to go.
The final stage of the exercise was pretty gruelling. We were all exhausted from the physical effort and lack of sleep and food but we had to stay sharp and focused. On two occasions we were actually physically chased by the hunter force, but both times managed to get away, although I’m not sure we would have if they’d had the dogs with them.
Eventually we reached an RV and, after I’d completed the drill with the agent, he gave me a bag of sandwiches for all three of us and told me that this was the last RV and we had successfully evaded, but that now we were going to be handed over to the hunter force and taken away for interrogation.
We ate the sandwiches and were then blindfolded, cuffed and placed in the back of a truck. I think the journey was about two hours but I can’t be sure as I was sparked out asleep for most of it.
I was woken by the shouts of members of the hunter force as we were bundled out of the truck. I had no idea at all where we were but it felt and sounded like the countryside. I was placed leaning against a wall or fence with my legs apart, tired, blindfolded but alive. It was all quiet but every time I tried to move to relieve the ache in my arms and legs, I would hear footsteps behind me and be roughly pushed back into position.
This lasted some time before I was grabbed by the shoulders and led away to my first interrogation. The blindfold was pulled off and I was in some kind of building, blinking in the light. The first interrogator was a man, trying to be ‘Mr Nice’. He could give me food, a shower and a comfortable bed and all I would have to do was answer a few questions about who I was, what I was doing, where I came from. It had been drummed into us during the training that the only thing we could tell interrogators was our name, rank, number and date of birth – they call it the ‘Big 4’ – and that was what I stuck to. I was starving and exhausted but I wasn’t going to throw it away now. After a while he lost interest, and I was taken back to stand against the wall.
A few hours later I was dragged away to a different room. This time it was a woman but I couldn’t see her as I was still wearing the blindfold. She started asking questions like was I queer? Did I have a small cock? Then she started telling me what she might do for me if I gave her some information. I responded by giving her my name, rank, number and date of birth, but focused on a fantasy about what she looked like and what she might conceivably be wearing – you don’t want to know the details – which kept me amused. Eventually she also lost interest and I was taken away.
It was hard to tell how long it lasted as I had completely lost track of time – and each interrogation I went through was a different approach, culminating with a screaming, shouting ‘Mr Nasty’ right in my face. This always looks unpleasant but by now it was water off a duck’s back. I was more focused on the interrogator’s rank, tobacco-smelling breath than anything he was threatening me with.
Sometime after this, my blindfold was lifted and one of the instructors was stood there, in uniform and wearing an armband. I started to give him my name rank number and date of birth but he stopped me: ‘No mate, that’s it: endex*; finished; noduff.’
*Endex = ‘End of Exercise’
He took me outside and I could see we were on the SAS training area, which I knew well by now, not far outside Hereford. The exercise was still going on for some but I was taken over to the cookhouse for a big breakfast and plenty of tea and, when enough of us were there, we were loaded into yet another truck and driven back to Bradbury Lines.
Once again, the big question in my mind was had I passed? I hadn’t been captured, I’d followed the correct procedure when Geordie got sick, I hadn’t talked during the interrogation. If I’d been marking it, I would have given me ten out of ten but, of course, I wasn’t and there was every chance the DS were looking for something I hadn’t thought about. Not that it really mattered, it was out of my hands now anyway.
Back at camp it was the usual routine: sort out any blisters, get my kit cleaned up and everything else squared away. As we were doing that, the stories started. I couldn’t believe that a friend from 7 RHA had failed and been taken off the exercise for playing chess with one of the interrogators; others had piled in for chatting with them, or accepting cups of coffee. This was daft: we all knew that all you had to tell them was the Big 4. I suppose exhaustion had got the better of them and they weren’t thinking straight but it seemed a shame to throw it all away like that.
When we were all squared away it was back over to the Training Wing for a debrief. The instructors sat us down and read out a list of those who had passed. My name was on it and I was over the moon. I hadn’t just passed combat survival but the whole selection process. I’d made it.
When I passed the Commando course, we’d had a parade and a formal presentation of our green berets but the SAS doesn’t do it like that. Those of us who were already parachute trained were told that we should head over to the quartermaster’s store to collect our SAS beret and wings when we were ready and to move our kit from the training wing accommodation to our squadron bashas over the weekend. Those who hadn’t done the parachuting course were heading off to Brize Norton to start on Monday. I’d asked to go to B Squadron – Big B – where my mates DJ and Stu McVicar were, and that’s what I got, along with Gerry Bonner and the Mink. I was walking on air.
We hadn’t had a serious weekend on the beer since before the jungle but that’s what we got now. It was the first time for six months that I felt that I didn’t have the Training Wing DS looking over my shoulder and we let rip. I must have drunk bucketfuls. It seemed like a happy weekend for the girls of Hereford too: they were always on the lookout for new SAS soldiers and this selection had had a high pass rate so there was plenty of new blood to go round.