The Regiment

by Rusty Firmin

  Some time in the early 1980s, an annual exercise programme was developed with the US Delta Force, which was known to us as a ‘Deltex’. At that time, it was basically a hard core ‘escape and evasion’ (‘E & E’) exercise in which an SAS squadron would go over to the US to act as evaders whilst being hunted by Delta; and the reverse the next year with a Delta Squadron coming over to the UK to be hunted down by us.

  I really enjoyed this kind of training because it was so realistic, and therefore genuinely testing. I knew people then who would have paid to take part in it. It was an opportunity to give full rein to our fitness and guile; left to our own devices but working within the regimental Standard Operating Procedures (SOP). It was a bit like a ramped-up version of the E & E we’d all done on selection: moving cross country in our patrols, meeting contacts to be passed from grid reference to grid reference. The big difference was that if you managed to stay out of the clutches of the hunter force – which was problematic as Delta Force are extremely sharp operators – then you didn’t get interrogated. Of course, if you were captured, it was the same drill: name, rank, number and date of birth; and nothing else whatsoever.

  I missed one of the B Squadron Deltexes in 1983 because I was working in the CRW Wing – sadly I couldn’t be in two places at once – but on the squadron’s return, it was clear that all was not well. It quickly emerged that one of the Mountain Troop patrols had been caught, almost literally, with their pants down. For some reason, perhaps over-confidence or that they were simply not taking the exercise seriously enough, they’d been caught by Delta, in a ‘lie-up’ in their sleeping bags, with their socks and personal kit hanging up to dry on the bushes. There was no way they were getting away from that.

  There were four of them in the patrol: a captain, a corporal, a lance corporal and a newly-badged trooper, and the captain, the corporal and the lance corporal were all immediately Returned to Unit, never to serve again in the SAS. The trooper was let off with a warning: as the new kid on the block it was accepted that he’d been led astray by his seniors and didn’t have a real say in what they did.

  This was embarrassing for both the squadron and the Regiment but it was a lesson for all of us: you can never afford to fuck around no matter how senior you are! In my entire fifteen years in the SAS, this was the only time I can think of that three members of a four-man patrol had ever been RTU’d together. You do your job as you’ve been taught it and you don’t cut corners. The SAS takes this seriously: during my time with the Regiment, the squadron sergeant majors of all four squadrons – A, B, D and G – were all removed from their posts at one time or another. So once you’ve earned that trust, you’ve still got to work hard to keep it.

  The next phase of the exercise was a combination of adventure training and fitness, involving some hard walking in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains. We hadn’t been there long when we saw our first bear, an absolutely huge grizzly which had wandered in between two of our groups of walkers. Brad, Mink and a couple of others were about 300–400 yards ahead of my group and hadn’t spotted it but we reckoned that if we spread out and started heading towards it, it would take off in their direction and that definitely had a few comedy possibilities. Sure enough, as we went towards the bear it took off at a lolloping run in the direction of the front group. None of them looked around for a while and when they eventually did, it was to see this massive beast bearing down on them. Not surprisingly, the mighty SAS warriors had a collective panic attack and bomb-burst in all directions while we all got a good laugh.

  With the adventure training over we headed back to Edmonton for a wash-up and a final piss-up with the Canadians to thank them for their hospitality, then it was back to the UK. As usual, we got a few days’ R & R to wind down before our flight. I decided to stay in Edmonton with a couple of others, but a few lads headed down to Calgary and went from there to an Indian reservation where one – a corporal who had better remain nameless – managed to return late having got very friendly indeed with one of the squaws.

  I’d been in the Regiment three years now and at some point, which nobody ever tells you, I’d got past the probationary period and was a fully accepted member of the SAS. Of course, there’s always a chance that you will fuck up and get RTU’d but there comes a point when they’re no longer watching for you to do so. I suppose it’s a question of trust.

  What this meant for me was that I would be selected for team jobs, training our overseas allies and the first one I got sent on, in 1980, was to go to Sri Lanka to work with their newly formed counter-terrorist unit.

  This is one of the tasks that the SAS do which looks, on the face of it, like military assistance but is really an aspect of British ‘soft power’. We generate a lot of good will by imparting useful skills and drills to foreign military units, we help to spread British influence by teaching them to operate as ‘democratic’ and accountable forces, and sometimes, when the countries in question can afford to pay for the training, like some of the Middle Eastern states, we bring in a sizeable amount of cash too.

  The Sri Lankans needed our help because of their growing problem with the so-called ‘Tamil Tigers’, a terrorist group which was seeking liberation for the sizeable Tamil minority within Sri Lanka and which were supposedly being covertly supported by the government of India.

  The training was all going to take place within Sri Lanka itself and we were given two months to get it done. The job was to teach them hostage rescue, and as part of their preparation they’d built a ‘killing house’ and mocked up an aircraft fuselage at their Special Forces base on the jungle fringes outside Colombo.

  We flew out and met the guys we were going to train. They were good people but not naturally aggressive and I could see that being a problem. To work well in an anti-terrorist role, you need a lot of controlled aggression if you’re going to get the job done and I was concerned they didn’t have it.

  What makes a good assault team member? We use the acronym ‘SAS’, standing in this case for Speed, Aggression, Surprise, combined with controlled firepower and a thinking brain. The guys we were training had all the kit, but it was our job to teach them to make the best use of it.

  For the training, we broke them down into three groups. The two main elements were the assaulters and the snipers, but additionally they needed a ‘head shed’ control group which would consist of their commander, a communications specialist, a ‘sergeant major’ and an operations sergeant; and they needed to be taught how to run it all.

  Having identified who was to be in each group, we divided them up and got to work. The sniper group went with half of our instructors to do their thing, while I ran the team training the assaulters. One of the senior NCOs from the squadron decided that we would operate a ‘round robin’ training cycle. Thus one group would be doing, for example, dry training with the HK MP5 sub-machine gun and its variants; one group would be on a 5–10-metre range shooting pistols and MP5s; and one group would be working in the killing house, practising room scenarios with single and, later, multiple targets. This was to take place over several weeks as we developed their confidence and skills. One of the most important elements is safety. You can’t do this kind of thing if you’re worried that the man behind might shoot you and we had to teach them to be aware and weapon conscious at all times.

  Not long into the training there was an accident that could probably have been avoided. One of the guys we were training was tasked to move some targets from the range we were using to the killing house and consequently missed having his weapon cleared by the instructors. The guy who’d been moving the targets came back to the safe area at the range and joined the others who were stripping and cleaning their pistols. He sat down to start cleaning his weapon but for some reason completely forgot his basic drills, pulled the working parts of the weapon back with a magazine still inserted, and then let them go whilst he still had a finger on the trigger. Sod’s law was that there was still a round in the magazine and he shot the guy sitt
ing next to him in the head.

  Not surprisingly, panic ensued, and there were a number of bent and damaged needles littering the ground before I and the Sri Lankan doctor at the scene managed to get intravenous drips into the wounded man whose veins were rapidly collapsing. He was still alive when the casualty evacuation (casevac) helicopter took him to the hospital, but by the time a doctor got to see him there – and there was some delay at the hospital for unexplained reasons – he had died.

  The guy who pulled the trigger was taken off the team but, not surprisingly, morale took a nose dive. I talked to them about individual and team safety, explaining that it certainly wasn’t the first time that something like this had happened and it was unlikely to be the last. We needed a break and having chatted amongst ourselves, decided to take them all for a run to break the atmosphere. This seemed to work and they soon knuckled back down to the training.

  In the weeks following the accidental shooting everything went well and there were no more serious injuries. As their shooting skills improved, we began to integrate the training into exercise scenarios, bringing together the assaulters, snipers and head shed groups so that each could play their role in the various different options we were teaching them. These included things like building assault and clearance; aircraft assaults; bus assaults; dealing with booby traps; what to do with hostages after an incident; and a range of other procedures which all go together to give a comprehensive ability to deal with most conceivable terrorist incidents.

  From my point of view, the assault team reached a pretty high standard and the instructors with the snipers and head shed were very satisfied with the standard that their guys were reaching as well. From what we could see the Sri Lankans had faced up to the challenge we had set them and done themselves proud. They’d developed from a group of individuals with varying levels of training and skill into a well-integrated team capable of dealing with anything we could throw at them which, after all, was the aim of it all.

  When we’d finished the training, we got a visit from the Sri Lankan top brass who watched a demonstration of the team’s capabilities and pronounced themselves well satisfied: so much so, in fact, that we were given a couple of days off, all expenses paid, in a smart hotel in Colombo where we could let our hair down and go and see the sights. All in all, it was a very satisfying experience.

  CHAPTER NINE

  FIRST BLOOD

  The Iranian Embassy

  On Wednesday 30 April 1980 I was sitting at home in Hereford waiting for a phone call. B Squadron had recently taken over from D Squadron as the 22 SAS on-call counter-terrorist team and having finished our work-up training, we were due to conduct an exercise in Northumbria at some point over the coming Bank Holiday weekend. I’d been in the SAS for nearly three years by now and had reached the dizzy heights of lance corporal and I was now designated as one of the ‘Blue Team’ assaulters so I should have been feeling fairly pleased with myself, but I wasn’t.

  Gripe number one was with the whole idea of an exercise over the Bank Holiday when most sensible people would be celebrating the arrival of spring with barbecues and beer drinking. Gripe number two was more specific. I was due to play for Westfields Football Club in a cup final on Bank Holiday Monday and I had absolutely no idea whether I would be back from the exercise in time to play.

  I had made myself a cup of Nescafé and was sipping it as I read the morning paper when the phone rang. Here we go, I thought.

  I picked up the receiver to answer it.

  ‘Rusty?’ It was ‘Wing-Nut’, the squadron clerk.

  ‘Yes, speaking.’

  ‘You need to come into camp straight away for briefing.’

  ‘On my way,’ I told him. As I was talking, the bleeper I wore on my belt went off, signalling a message. This was normal: we were on 30 minutes standby so I was entitled to be at home, which was less than 500 yards from camp, but I might have been in the garden or sitting on the bog when the phone rang so they would bleep the whole team at the same time as they were calling round. It was a routine Standard Operating Procedure (SOP).

  I glanced down at the little LCD screen on the bleeper and was surprised to see that it read ‘9999’ which was the code for a live operation, rather than ‘1111’ which signalled the start of an exercise. Someone’s getting over-excited, I thought.

  My overnight kit was already packed in a bag by the front door so I picked it up, went out, locking the door behind me, and jogged down to camp. I was in no particular hurry as I assumed that it was just the start of the exercise and that the operational code was a mistake but I was still there within six or seven minutes of the call going out.

  I arrived on camp at about the same time as Gerry, Minky and Johnny Mac and we hung around, chatting about this and that, waiting for the rest of the squadron to arrive. By now we’d picked up on the rumour that there was actually a live incident going on in London and it seemed likely that the planned exercise was binned, or at least postponed, until the head shed found out what was happening.

  With most of the team assembled, Officer Commanding B Squadron, Major G, gave us a quick briefing. He confirmed that there was an incident taking place at the Iranian Embassy in London and that the exercise was off for the time being until we knew what was going on and whether we were likely to be involved. As was usual, all of our operational kit was already packed and ready to go, so there wasn’t any real preparation for us to do and it became the usual army game of ‘hurry up and wait’, sitting around drinking coffee and shooting the shit with each other.

  Some time after the briefing it was confirmed that the exercise was definitely cancelled and I thought: Great! With any luck we have a live operation and I get to play in the cup final on Monday.

  Mid-afternoon the squadron headquarters team began their move down to London and we were briefed that we would be following them down later on. We basically had two options for this. The first was a fast road move as a squadron with a police escort. That would get us to London quickly – probably in about two hours – but it would attract a lot of unwanted attention. The second option was for the squadron to quietly move down in small packets of two or three vehicles which would most likely go unnoticed. That was the option the head shed went for.

  The plan was that our fleet of Range Rovers, transit vans and the pantechnicon with the heavy kit would leave quietly in twos and threes and head for an RV at the Army School of Languages just off the M40 at Beaconsfield on the outskirts of London. There we would get a meal and an update briefing, and then carry on into town in the same inconspicuous manner.

  By now we had an idea about what was going on from listening to the news on the radio. It appeared that a group of apparently armed men had attacked the Iranian Embassy on Prince’s Gate, next to Hyde Park, and were holding hostages, thought to include several Brits. From our point of view, it sounded promising: something for us to get our teeth into.

  We started setting off at about 7.30pm and took the drive down to Beaconsfield at a steady pace. Stu McVicar was in the lead Range Rover and as we crossed into each new police area, he updated their area controller on the police radio which every vehicle was fitted with.

  We arrived at Beaconsfield a bit after 10pm and, once we were all there, headed for the cookhouse. There we hit a snag. Although they’d been told we were coming, the duty slop jockey* had knocked off and gone off to get pissed in the sergeants’ mess. He was eventually tracked down and summoned to the kitchen but when he arrived he was belligerent and aggressive and hadn’t got a clue who this odd bunch of blokes with long hair and droopy moustaches were. He certainly wasn’t going to cook for us.

  *Slop jockey = Army chef

  Tak asked him politely again, telling him that we were on an operation and needed to be fed but he wasn’t having it. Things seemed to have reached an impasse until a couple of the lads hopped over the counter, grabbed him by his arms and held his hands down on the hotplate. It wasn’t hot enough to do any damage but it conc
entrated his mind and he sulkily got down to making some food.

  Once we were all fed and watered, we got an update brief. We were told that at about 11.30am the Iranian Embassy had been taken over by armed men and hostages had been taken. For the time being we would move forwards to a holding area at Regent’s Park Barracks (RPB), about three miles by road from the Embassy, where we would be on call to assist the Metropolitan Police who were currently dealing with the situation. If it escalated and the police were unable to control it, we would be called in to mount a military option.

  That was fair enough: it was exactly what we were trained to do. With the briefing over, we resumed our move down to London, still travelling in the same quiet, covert manner, making as little fuss as possible and by the early hours of the morning we were all in place at RPB and the vehicles were parked up. As far as we could tell, there had been no compromise.

  Once we were all at RPB, the process was set in motion to move Red Team to another holding area closer to the Embassy, in this case at 14 and 15 Prince’s Gate, the headquarters of the Royal College of General Practitioners (RCGP). As the counter-terrorist (or ‘special projects’) team, we had a full squadron, and were able to break it down into two sub-teams – Red and Blue – each with an assault and sniper capability, as well as the headquarters group focused on the officer commanding, Major G. This meant that there would always be a reasonably fresh, fully equipped team ready to go at short notice if something unexpected happened, while both teams would combine for a deliberate option if it came to it. Red Team were the first to move forwards as they were there complete, while Blue Team, which I was in, had several personnel away on team jobs so we’d had to draft in members of A and D Squadrons to fill the gaps.

  Once Red Team were in position, they would quickly put together an ‘immediate action’ (IA) plan which would be a rough and ready assault if it all kicked off. We had little illusion that if either team did have to go in, more or less blind, at this stage of the operation, it was likely to be bloody but that was what we were there for.