The Regiment

by Rusty Firmin

  Lieutenant Colonel M came in with a plan to make changes in the Regiment and one of these was the idea of cross-posting between squadrons. He took the view that if a soldier stayed in the same troop in the same squadron throughout his career he became too entrenched and promotion became a system of filling ‘dead men’s shoes’. Instead, when a vacancy came up for a senior NCO in, say G Squadron, it might get filled by someone from A Squadron.

  To be fair, this is how much of the rest of the army operates, but the SAS is different. The nature of the work we do means that you have to have absolute trust and reliance on the men you’re working with, and you only develop that by working closely with them for long periods. If you’re hopping from squadron to squadron the whole time this isn’t going to happen. The careerists amongst the NCOs weren’t too worried by this: they would do what it took to move themselves up the ladder. But for those of us who came through under the old system, it was a seriously unwelcome development.

  By the time this happened I was a sergeant and I had high hopes of eventually being the 8 Troop staff sergeant. Unfortunately, that never happened. Just before my move to CRW Wing, a new troop commander had come in, a Para who was known to the lads as ‘ET’ because of his bulbous head, and I simply didn’t see eye to eye with him. His report on me was just about enough to throw a spanner in the works and ensure that, no matter how hard I tried, I wasn’t going to make it to the top of 8 Troop. The annoying thing was that he barely knew me, and vice versa. For most of the time he was in the troop, I was away with CRW Wing.

  Even so, I wasn’t exactly doing badly. As an instructor in CRW I was effectively earmarked as one of the small group of individuals who would be leading SAS training teams around the world. It was a high-profile role within the Regiment and I was pleased to have it.

  First things first, though. In 1985 it occurred to me that it would be a good idea to organise a reunion to celebrate the fifth anniversary of the Embassy Siege. We had a bit of a discussion within the squadron and everyone was very enthusiastic, so I then spoke to the landlord of the Booth Hotel in Hereford, who was very pro-SAS, and he agreed we could use the Booth as a venue. Next step was to find a celebrity to front it and do the entertainment and so I approached Jim Davidson, whom I’d met when he’d visited the Regiment a few years before. Jim was very pro-military and used to do charity appearances all over the place, working particularly with BLESMA.* He was still a big name as a comedian back then and, to my delight, he agreed like a shot. I suggested to him that we dress him up in my black assault gear and he could then drop down from the balcony, whip the respirator off and start his act. I asked Snapper to rig a small distraction charge to kick this off and on the night it went really well. Only me and Snapper knew it was Jim Davidson and after the charge had gone off and he’d ‘unmasked’, it all went down a storm. Late in the evening, I remember Snapper standing on the bar and dropping his trousers to show off the scars on his backside where he had been caned in Hong Kong a few years before. From the look of his arse, it must have really fucking hurt!

  *BLESMA = British Limbless Ex-Service Men’s Association (now known as Blesma, The Limbless Veterans); the national charity that supports servicemen and women who have, in serving their country, lost the use of their limbs or eyesight.

  My job in CRW was fairly straightforward. I was responsible for training selected members of the Regiment, along with police officers assigned to royalty protection duties, in bodyguarding techniques and drills, and for running live firing exercises for them. In addition to this, I was in charge of the supervision and management of the protective security cell; the design of bespoke training packages and courses in bodyguard techniques; and carrying out specific threat assessments and security surveys.

  Courses for the Regiment really relied on squadron availability. A course of this type usually ran over a six-week period and would involve 12 students, normally all from the same squadron. The number twelve was chosen because it was manageable from an instructional point of view but it also fitted in with the techniques and drills that we taught. On low-profile tasks, you probably only need one bodyguard, one VIP and one vehicle; for an intermediate-level task, you might have two vehicles and a four-man team; but a high-level task would normally require a ‘security advance party’ with a vehicle, and then a lead car, VIP car and back-up car with the principal which is, all told, a 12-man protective detail.

  In my day, a guy called Pete, a policeman, ran the royalty protection bodyguard courses in conjunction with me and Charlie Cooke in Hereford. For the police we did two different types of course: the first was refresher training for established members of royal protection teams; the second was a kind of selection process looking to identify police officers of the right standard to join royal protection teams in the future. The police guys used to love coming to Hereford because we gave them realistic training, which they never got back with their own forces. We could take them out to our training areas and put them through anti-ambush drills with live rounds, improvised explosive device (IED) awareness training, a high standard of first aid training and everything else they needed, all within realistic training scenarios.

  One of the big frustrations for us and for the police was the weapons they were issued. They all carried five- or six-shot .38 Special revolvers which gave them nowhere near enough firepower in the event of a serious kidnap or assassination attempt. This had come about because of the attempted kidnapping of Princess Anne in the Mall in March 1974. Her bodyguard had drawn his Walther PPK but it had jammed and he was unable to clear it before he was shot by the kidnapper. This led the police to decide to stick with revolvers which some think, wrongly in my view, are more reliable. We had been recommending for years that they adopt the 9mm Browning Hi Power but they never did in my time.

  In 1986 my role in CRW Wing meant that I was to deploy out to Indonesia, with members of B Squadron, for a training task with the Indonesian Special Forces. To prepare me for this role, the powers that be decided that I would need to do a colloquial Malay course to help me to communicate with our students and, as with the Arabic course, this was to done in the education centre at Stirling Lines, so it was back to the books again.

  The odd thing was that despite having an Education Corps Malay language instructor, the Regiment decided to bring in Wally the Spoon – whom I first met when he was hawking in the cookhouse while I was doing selection – to instruct us. Now Wally must have been 50-ish by then and was a veteran of Malaya and Borneo, and he could speak Malay at ‘interpreter’ level. He was a seriously fit man still but he was lacking in one key aspect: a sense of humour; and he was going to have to develop one pretty quickly if he was going to instruct B Squadron.

  Wally lived out in the village of Credenhill, which was about six miles from camp, and he used to cycle in every morning to begin our lessons. There were more than a few occasions when we would be sitting in our classroom waiting for him to show up, only for the education officer to have to come in and fill in for him until he appeared.

  This came to a head one morning when, once again, Wally wasn’t there and the education officer had taken over. Suddenly the door flew open and Wally appeared, his schoolmasterly tweed jacket, skin-tight and complete with brown leather elbow patches, soaked in sweat and rain, covered in mud, tie over his shoulder and eyes wild. We all burst out with laughter and even more so when we found out what had happened. It seemed that Wally’s bike had got a puncture shortly after he’d left home, so he picked it up and ran in with it: it hadn’t occurred to him to go home and get his car, or phone the camp to tell someone. Wally was taken to one side for a quiet chat and the education officer finished the course for him.

  We flew out to Jakarta for what was supposedly a secret training mission with the ‘Komando Pasukan Khusus’ – the Indonesian Special Forces Commando. The weird thing was that there were still a few guys knocking around the Regiment who had fought against these guys in Borneo in the 1960s but, it appeared, nobody
was holding any grudges and they were very welcoming. Their actual headquarters was at Cijantung, near Jakarta, but they had a ‘Special Warfare School’ at Batu Jajar on West Java. The actual training area we would use was in what is called ‘moon country’. It was typical South-East Asian jungle but, because it was all between 4,000 and 6,000 feet in altitude, it got really cold at night, to the extent that there was sometimes frost on the trees in the morning. Then, during the day, it would warm up rapidly and by mid-afternoon the temperature was exactly what you would expect in the jungle.

  The plan on this occasion was to integrate B Squadron with the Indonesians and carry out a series of exercises so that they could learn from us, and it involved the usual range of skills: jungle patrolling; setting up ambushes; tracking; fire and movement; patrol medicine and lots and lots of jungle range work. Disappointingly, I didn’t get to speak much Malay as the Indonesians were very keen to practise their English and asked us to do all the training in the English language.

  The Indonesian second-in-command asked me if I would help him to put on a snake demonstration with our guys and I was happy to help out. We went out into the jungle with some sacks and started looking for live snakes. This didn’t take long as the cold made them very docile, and within an hour and a half we had 30 or 40 of various types bagged up to take back to camp.

  We headed back to the B Squadron base camp in the jungle and rousted the guys out of their bashas and into a clearing where the water bowser was parked. We told the lads to stand still and then tipped the snakes out onto the ground amongst them. Some of the snakes were still quiet and groggy from the cold, others were somewhat more fired up from having been lugged around in sacks and they took off in various different directions. Some of the snakes disappeared off into the jungle, some wriggled around between our feet. It was interesting to watch the reactions of the guys. Some clearly didn’t mind the snakes at all whilst others really had the wind up.

  The idea of the demonstration was to build confidence amongst our guys who were generally not used to dealing with snakes. Nine times out of ten in the jungle, if you come across a snake it will bugger off in the opposite direction as fast as it can without you having to do anything about it at all. The only problem we had on this occasion was with a spitting cobra which decided to slither into the water bowser trailer and wouldn’t come out. The Indonesian snake expert eventually got pissed off with it, grabbed it by the tail and hauled it out, holding it up to show everyone that he’d got it. At this point it did what spitting cobras do and spat a load of venom which hit one of the guys on the shoulder. This was a close call: if the venom from the snake hits you in the eyes, it can cause blindness. For me, the upshot of this demo was that for the rest of the training, the Indonesians referred to me as ‘Orang Ular’ or ‘Snake Man’.

  My next team task, also with B Squadron, was to go to Nepal to train the Nepalese Special Forces. This was a small specialised team of about ten or twelve guys going to give the Nepalese some specific skills. My role was to train their counter-terrorist snipers.

  Before we left Hereford we got the usual brief about what we would be doing, where we would be going and so on, but for some reason we were specifically warned to be on our best behaviour on this trip. I was old enough by now to have learned my lesson. The higher you get in rank, the more is expected of you, and as a sergeant I couldn’t afford to fuck up at all. In fact, while I won’t say that my riotous days were entirely behind me, I was 37 years old by now and you do tend to take your foot off the hooliganism pedal.

  We flew out to Kathmandu in business class on a Boeing 747, scattered around the cabin so that we didn’t look too much like what we were. It’s a marathon flight, about ten hours if I remember rightly, and the opportunity to get extremely bored is always there but, as a good NCO, I settled down to watch the movies they were showing on the big screen at the front of the cabin, eat my airline food and not draw attention to myself.

  The cabin was no more than half full and for some reason an idiot civilian decided that now was his opportunity to act the twat. This involved moving around the cabin, talking loudly, lying across two or three seats at once, sitting in front of people to block their view and generally being an arsehole. God knows why: maybe he needed the attention? At one point, while they were showing one of the movies, he came and sat in front of Scobie who was the team leader, deliberately blocking his view of the film. Scobie leaned forwards and said something; I’m not quite sure what it was but from the look on the guy’s face he wasn’t asking if he could be his special friend. After a couple more seconds, Scobie stood up and slapped him really hard across the back of the head, with a big, audible ‘CRACK!’ Shit! We hadn’t even got to Nepal and already we had an incident brewing. Looking around, I could see that most of the team had seen what happened. Not good!

  The stewardess walked over to Scobie to find out what was wrong and, to my horror, I saw that the guy he’d hit was actually crying. Oh dear. But despite my fears, nothing happened. The duty idiot went back to his own seat and sulked for the rest of the flight and nothing more was said.

  In Kathmandu the Nepalese government had put us up in a smart hotel and on the first evening we got together for a couple of quiet beers. Someone mentioned that there was a casino in the hotel, the only one in the country apparently, so a few of us decided to head down there for a quick flutter. It was a slightly odd place, supposedly built to accommodate Indian gamblers who couldn’t, at that time, gamble in their own country.

  Trouble was now looming. In the casino, drinks were free if you were gambling and this was a red rag to a bull for some of the team. One of the lads got somewhat the worse for wear and was sent to the casino’s sin bin where no alcohol was allowed until he’d calmed down and, of course, those of us who were still drinking managed to continue taunting him for the rest of the night. For some reason, my luck was in and I won an absolute fortune. For me the evening finished in a suite being used by a Lufthansa crew who were overnighting. They invited me back for a few drinks and I eventually stumbled back to my own room in the early hours.

  The next day we met up with the Nepalese Special Forces and they turned out to be a great bunch. Small in stature but with hearts as big as lions’.

  The first stage of the training was, as usual, working on individual skills. I had a group of eight snipers to train and for this we went off to a bog-standard 600-metre range with the standard L42 sniper rifle we used back then. The L42 was a good weapon: it was basically a Lee-Enfield actioned rifle in 7.62mm calibre with a scope attached and it did the job, though it’s nowhere near as good as some of the sniper rifles available these days.

  I started off with the theory of using a sniper rifle. This puzzled some of the Nepalis who assumed that you just put the aiming post on the target and fired, but fortunately the officer in charge of them spoke good English and was on my wavelength. We worked through how the vertical and horizontal scope adjustment worked – and why you had to do it – and they soon got the message that it wasn’t quite as straightforward as they’d thought, particularly in windy conditions.

  With the theory explained, we moved on to shooting. Once I got my weapon zeroed, I wanted to demonstrate what we expected from them. I’m a good shot, though I say so myself, and I thought that if I showed them what I could achieve, it would encourage them. I set up two standard ‘Figure 11’ targets and then moved back to the 300-metre point where I fired five rounds. We then moved back to the 600-metre point and I fired a further five rounds. Then we moved back down to inspect my targets. Phew. I’d managed a two-inch group in the 300-metre target and a five-inch group at 600 metres. I couldn’t have shot better even if I’d wanted to.

  Now it was their turn. They fired hundreds of rounds a day over the next week, in all kinds of different weather conditions, and by the end of it, most were managing consistent six- to seven-inch groups at 600 metres. Only one guy failed. He simply didn’t have the technique and, after a long discussion w
ith the Nepalese officer, we took him off the course.

  The next part of the training was due to take place at a location high in the mountains above Kathmandu and the plan was to march there to give us all a bit of a workout. Unfortunately I never made it. On the way up, Johnnie ‘Two-Combs’ Howard got appendicitis and, as the team medic, I spent the rest of the deployment looking after him, as I’ve already described.* I didn’t begrudge this. If I hadn’t been there, he wouldn’t have made it. He got his nickname because of his vanity: there was never a hair out of place and his uniform and clothes were always immaculate, but it’s fair to say he was looking pretty rough throughout this period and I think he was pleased that there was only me there to see him.

  *See Chapter 7.

  Having finished my time in the CRW Wing, I returned to the familiar environment of 8 Troop. Our boss now was a Parachute Regiment officer called Major S who was a real contrast with ET. When I rejoined the troop he took me to one side for a chat and told me that ET had briefed him that I was a problem character but that he had been keeping his eye on me as a result and couldn’t see what he was on about. Major S was a no-nonsense guy in the best traditions of the SAS and had been a platoon commander in 3 Para in the Falklands. I liked him because he was trustworthy and reliable. In later years, like ET, he became a senior general in the army but, unlike ET, I felt that this guy deserved it.

  It was still all go. Having returned to B Squadron, we were sent off on a team task to work with the President of Nigeria’s personal bodyguard. Ibrahim Babangida had become President of Nigeria after launching a military coup in 1985 with the supposed intent of ending human rights abuses and ushering in a civilian government. In consequence, Margaret Thatcher’s government had sent an SAS training team out to train his bodyguards so that he could finish this task. By 1987, when we were due to go, the patience of the British government was wearing thin. Babangida hadn’t made much effort to institute reforms and there were serious rumours of yet another coup attempt in the offing. Our mission was effectively a last chance. We would be going to train bodyguard instructors – using the best of the bodyguards we’d previously trained – so that they would have no further need to rely on British help: effectively, they could sink or swim.