Eye of the Storm

by Peter Ratcliffe

  We called South Armagh ‘bandit country’ because there were few places British soldiers could walk or army vehicles drive without the very real danger of being taken out, particularly around Crossmaglen, which sits only yards from the border with the Republic.

  The landscape is a sinister mix of rocky outcrops and hilly fields bordered by high hedgerows and deep ditches. Culverts, carrying streams and run-off water from the fields on either side, run beneath the roads and lanes. It was possible for terrorists to plant remote-controlled bombs in any one of these, detonating the device by radio signal from the safety of their hilltop hideouts. They could be away and over the border into the Irish Republic before the ambulances, coming to pick up the pieces, had even started their engines.

  Some British Army units patrolled those lanes – and did so to their cost. Not the Paras, however. We never walked the lanes. Instead, we went into the fields behind the ditches and hedges, planning our own routes over fences and streams as we went. Anywhere but along those potential death-traps of roads with their hedges and ditches which, apart from culvert bombs, were perfectly suited to terrorist ambushes.

  We rarely followed the same route twice, and worked out our every move. Furthermore, we tried to second-guess our enemy. On patrol in Northern Ireland we often parked ourselves somewhere near a police station or other likely IRA target. Then, when the terrorists attacked, we could rapidly move in and grab them.

  The emphasis was on grabbing them. There has been a great deal of rubbish written about the British government instituting a shoot-to-kill policy in Northern Ireland. The truth is self-evident, however. Had there been such a policy, allowing British soldiers or the RUC to kill known terrorists on sight, the IRA would not have lasted more than a few months. The truth is that, although they had some exceptionally good snipers, as well as skilful bomb-makers, the terrorists were up against superior fighting men – better trained, better disciplined, better armed and equipped, better supported, and often much more experienced. Like any fairly small, clandestine terrorist organization, the IRA does not like to get involved in a real firefight. Instead, its operatives seek to kill or injure as many people as they can with the bomb or the bullet and then get out as fast as possible. Many of those IRA ‘heroes’ who, without a second’s thought, would kill and maim innocent people, including women and children, would not hang around for a shoot-out with real soldiers.

  As for us, every soldier knew just how far he could go in retaliation. In his pocket, he carried with him at all times the famous ‘yellow card’ spelling out the Rules of Engagement (ROE). Although these ran to several paragraphs, what they said, in a nutshell, was that if you felt that your life or the lives of other security forces or civilians were in immediate danger, or that government property was in danger of being destroyed, you could open fire. It was all there in the rules, and everyone knew that failing to abide by them would bring severe consequences.

  When a civilian, even a known terrorist, was killed by the military, the Royal Ulster Constabulary would immediately launch an investigation. That is an under-statement, in fact – ‘crawl all over the soldier or soldiers who did the shooting’ would be a more accurate description.

  If a soldier had shot a civilian, however, as a result of what he had perceived to be a threat, and stuck to the truth as he knew it, simply telling his RUC questioners, ‘I thought the man was armed and that my life was endangered, so I shot him,’ then he would be in the clear. Even if it turned out that what the dead man had brandished or appeared to be carrying was not a gun, it was quite rightly reckoned that to have fired under those circumstances was not the soldier’s fault. That, though, is a very far cry from there having been an official shoot-to-kill policy. It was straight IRA propaganda, and they are very good at that.

  They were even better at it after Bloody Sunday. On 30 January 1972, the British army, and the Paras in particular, handed the terrorists material for the kind of propaganda coup they could only ever have dreamed of. Their dreams became our nightmares, however, all wrapped up in one terrible tragedy. When the firing stopped, twenty-six civil-rights marchers – not terrorists – had been shot. Thirteen of them were dead, and a woman would later die of her wounds in hospital.

  Even before these events, however, I had already decided to leave the Parachute Regiment, and to apply for selection by the SAS. True, I was proud of my regiment, and proud of what I had achieved in it, yet for all that I had become disillusioned with the red beret. There was too much bullshit for my liking. I wanted to join the SAS, where bullshit took a back seat to actual soldiering. The selection course is notoriously hard, but I intended to give it my very best shot. Beyond that, however, I had already decided that if the SAS wouldn’t have me, then I would quit the British Army.

  Because of the killings in Londonderry on that Sunday, some Paras were soon afterwards ordered home. As we left our barracks for the drive to the airport and the flight to the mainland, the cookhouse radio was playing Roy Orbison’s song ‘It’s Over’. But for the Paras – indeed, for all those involved – it was not over, and never will be. Bloody Sunday will always be there, haunting a great British regiment. For ever.

  Chapter Four

  IT was not the warmest welcoming speech that I had ever heard. But when the Selection Officer of 22 Special Air Service Regiment had finished speaking, none of us was in any doubt about where we stood.

  It was a sunny Monday morning in August 1972, and I was one of 120 servicemen who had signed up for Selection – the chance of winning a place in the SAS. We had all been waiting expectantly in the Blue Briefing Room at the Regiment’s headquarters, Bradbury Lines in Hereford,* when a giant of a man with thick red hair had suddenly swept into the room and bounded up on to the small stage that stood at one end. The Captain had arrived.

  ‘Welcome to Hereford’, he said. He spoke with an educated Highland accent. ‘It’s good to see that you’ve all arrived here.’ He paused, then added, ‘Take a good look at one another. Because, in most cases, it will be the last you ever see of each other.

  ‘I can assure you that, even though there are a hundred and twenty of you now, at the end of this Selection there will be no more than a handful left. And for those of you who are left, the Regiment takes you in, chews you up and spits you out.’

  Another pause for effect, before he added, ‘And we don’t give a fuck.’ Then he just walked off the stage and out of the room.

  Around the briefing room, half-baked grins disappeared from several faces, and candidates slyly looked at each other, trying to weigh their own and each other’s chances of surviving the world’s toughest military testing ground.

  I had left the Parachute Regiment depot in Aldershot the previous week with the farewell words of the company sergeant-major still rattling around in my head. He was a man who had seen too many trained paratroopers leave for SAS Selection. He didn’t like Selection, and he didn’t like the SAS because they took his men. Above all, he didn’t like me, because I had applied to win a place in the Regiment.

  ‘If you mess up, don’t bother coming back here,’ he had shouted at me as I left for Hereford. Thanks a lot, I’d thought. As it happened, I had no intention of going back to the Parachute Regiment because, no matter what they threw at me, I was determined that I was going to pass Selection. So far as I was concerned, the CSM could go and screw himself.

  After the Selection Officer’s precipitate departure, his place on the Blue Room stage was taken, in rapid succession, by the various instructors from the Regiment’s Training Wing. They made it abundantly clear that they were going to be watching our performance like ravening wolves circling a potential victim, maintaining a never-ending lookout for the slightest sign of weakness.

  On our arrival at Bradbury Lines, we had been accommodated in four wooden huts, and had spent an anxious night wondering what the next day would bring. We found out soon enough. Immediately after those Monday morning briefings, we were all split into different groups
. Our weapon-handling capabilities were assessed. Regardless of a candidate’s soldiering experience or his weapons skills, the instructors ran their own rule over them to assess their usefulness according to the dictates of the SAS – not those of any other regiment.

  What this meant in practice is that they were a good deal more critical than instructors in other units. None the less, if they felt that a man could be trained, then he would get the finest possible tuition in weaponry, navigation and map reading, sabotage and demolition, intelligence-gathering, and learning how to work in four-man patrols deep behind enemy lines. Above all, he would be taught to survive against enormous odds.

  After that first morning, we were put into squads for the Selection process. The candidates were mainly from the Paras or the infantry. As with any such group, there were all sorts of guys trying to pass for all sorts of reasons, but the common denominator was that we all ended up with 55-pound bergens on our backs while the instructors tried to break us.

  Because, between application and final Selection, there is a long slog ahead, most of it uphill, literally as well as metaphorically. By the end, you feel as though you have walked every inch wearing chains. After two weeks of a gruelling regime, which begins with a standard battle-fitness test and ends with seemingly endless ascents and descents of rugged Welsh mountains in all sorts of weather, we had lost half the hopefuls – and we were not even halfway through the course.

  Any man aged between twenty-one and thirty-two and serving in the British armed forces or one of the two Territorial Army units of the SAS, is eligible to apply to the Regiment for Selection. If he meets those criteria, the sole remaining proviso is that he must have at least thirty-six months still to serve. Once accepted, all he has to do then is pass the course, although that is a great deal easier said than done. Even so, there has been a great deal of rubbish written about Selection, much of it by people who passed and want to make themselves out, wrongly, to be supermen. For although it is the toughest human proving ground in the world, Selection is not just about muscle and brawn, or even sheer endurance. It is a battle for a man’s mind, and a test of his will to win.

  On one occasion during Exercise Sickener – so called because it is designed to make candidates sick – we had spent the day going up and down those Welsh hills like yo-yos. Having arrived at the top of one, we were then ordered to go down again carrying a five-gallon jerry can, which we were to fill with water from a river at the foot of the hill. I had a tin mug hooked on my webbing belt, and I used this to fill the jerry can, since it’s impossible to fill one in the shallow, fast-flowing Welsh streams by immersing it. It’s a slow and laborious process. When full, the can weighs around 50 pounds. I lugged it back up the hill, still carrying my weapon – a self-loading rifle (SLR), the standard British Army infantry weapon of the day – and with the weight of the bergen on my back. At the top of the hill the instructors were waiting. ‘Now empty it out and go back and do it again,’ they said. I watched guys hand in their jerry cans after the first run, saying they’d had enough. We never saw them again. They were immediately ‘RTU-ed’ (returned to unit), catching the next train out from the now famous Platform 2 at Hereford station.

  When we started Selection there were twenty men in each squad. The instructors make bets with each other as to how many men they can get rid of in three days. They stick with you, trying to rattle you, telling you that you have no chance of passing the course. Why not pack it in now, they say, because they are going to see to it that you fail.

  Once they have cracked a man and he’s quit trying and shuffled off to the truck, the first stage of his ignominious departure back to his unit, they move on to their next target and start work on him. One of them told me, ‘Right, Ratcliffe, you’re next to fail.’ To some candidates, however, the instructors don’t even have to say a word. These just quit of their own accord. Whatever they may have thought Selection was going to be like, it has turned out to be immeasurably worse. They don’t want to know any more, with the result that they come to view the initials ‘RTU’ with something approaching relief.

  So the thinning-out process continued relentlessly. On one occasion our instructors deliberately deprived us of sleep for three days and nights. They had us pitch our bivouac tents at the base of the great concrete spillways of a huge dam in the remote Elan Valley in mid-Wales, some 45 miles north-west of Hereford. Water thundered incessantly down the channels, and it was nearly impossible to sleep because of the constant roar of the torrent. As exhausted and battered as we were from all the frigging around during the day, we eventually dozed off, only to be awakened in the middle of the night. Over the roar of the dam run-off, the instructors shouted, ‘OK! Get your kit on. Let’s go, let’s go!’ And we were off on a fast march over the hill and back again, returning wearily to our bivouac area. Then, when they decided that we’d settled down, they woke us again and sent us out on a march like the one we’d just finished.

  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 precis
ely 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.