Eye of the Storm

by Peter Ratcliffe

  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.

  We left Hereford on a Sunday afternoon in a 3-ton truck. They dropped us off in four-man patrols in different areas and we were given a place at which we were to rendezvous – if we managed to escape detection and capture. The instructor gave me a dead squirrel, a few potatoes and an empty bean can with a length of string for a handle, in which we were supposed to boil any food. Which was, of course, nonsense, since we had no matches and, as usual, it was pouring with rain. Further-more, even if I had managed to light a fire in that countryside, the smoke would have been seen from miles away. I would have been found before I’d had time to get thoroughly wet.

  The hunters are looking for you right from the moment you get off the truck. But whether you stay undetected for as long as you are meant to, or get spotted and picked up earlier, you know you are going to face the Interrogation phase of the exercise.

  As a prisoner of war, the only pieces of information you are permitted to give your captors are the ‘Big Four’: your name, rank, army number and date of birth. We were taught never to say ‘Yes’ to anything, and never to say ‘No’, so that, in answer to the question ‘Is this your name?’, for instance, we would answer ‘That is my name’ or ‘That is not my name’. The reason for this is because an enemy can use your one-word affirmatives and negatives from a recorded interrogation in a remastered tape or video to make it appear that you are confessing to them.

  When it came to the Interrogation exercise, each of us was dragged into a room, stripped naked and blind-folded. Then the interrogating crew began to make remarks about the size of a man’s prick or the shape of his balls, or demanded to know whether he masturbated, the aim being to humiliate the prisoner. I found it curiously easy to ignore their gibes, simply by sticking to the Big Four in answer to any direct questions.

  After some time I was taken outside and made to lean against a wall at an angle of 45 degrees with my fingers spread wide against the bricks and my legs apart. Extra loud ‘white noise’ – electronically generated sounds resembling continuous hissing and humming – was then played through speakers at a very high volume, and a rubber pouch containing rancid, horribly stinking, tinned army-issue cheese was hung under my nose. I reckon I spent three hours at a time like that. From time to time they poured buckets of water over my head so that I was soaked and cold. If a man smoked, as I did at the time, they blew cigarette smoke in his face, in an attempt to weaken his resolve.

  Whatever the discomfort, however, the reality is that, unlike a genuine enemy, they can only hold you for twenty-four hours; more tellingly, they are only allowed to interrogate you for a total of eight hours out of the twenty-four. As would not be the case if you were captured by a real enemy, you know how long you will have to endure before it will all stop. Apart from that knowledge, the fear factor is the other main element missing from the Interrogation exercise, for the simple reason that you know that your ‘captors’ are not going to torture you as a genuine enemy might – and, in the case of several SAS soldiers captured during the Gulf War, did. You only have to remain calm and use your mind to shut out the insults and to overcome the cramp and the cold and the discomfort. In short, you can fool the interrogators. Besides, after all a man has been through during the rest of Selection, Interrogation is like a walk in the park.

  Throughout the exercise, you can’t help noticing a number of people wandering about wearing white armbands. These are genuine umpires, and you know that they are not out to trick you into giving away information; they will also give straight answers to direct questions. This useful piece of information was to stand me in good stead towards the end of Interrogation. I was being taken down from the wall at the finish when I noticed an officer with a white armband walking around drinking a cup of something steaming. So I asked him the time, and he told me, ‘Five to three – in the morning.’ I was then taken back to the interrogation room where I found waiting for me the Selection Officer – he of the disheartening speech of welcome – and a colonel from the Joint Services Intelligence Wing (JSIW). At their direction I sat on a hard chair, waiting to see what would happen. As it turned out, the first question the colonel asked me was what time I thought it was.

  ‘Five to three, sir!’ I shouted.

  He looked at the Selection Officer for a moment, and then said in wonderment, ‘Did you hear that? Bloody marvellous. Bloody marvellous. Well done.’ He must have thought that during the hours I’d spent leaning against that wall I had been counting off the seconds. Sadly, he didn’t think it was so bloody marvellous when I explained that I’d just asked the same question of one of the umpires.

  Later, during a debriefing before we were taken away and given something to eat, they asked us what we had thought of the ordeal. I gave a diplomatic answer, but in fact I was perfectly well aware that Interrogation is not a tough test. If I had really been captured and interrogated by a genuine enemy, I would not have known what was coming next, and would almost certainly have been subjected to far more brutal physical abuse, possibly over a period of weeks. In an exercise, however, you know that the experts grilling you are not allowed to shoot you, or pull out your fingernails, or beat you up, or inject you with drugs, or any of the thousands of other hideous tortures of which so many regimes are capable. Indeed, sleep deprivation is probably the harshest thing you have to face during Interrogation.

  Yet you need to be subjected to that for far longer than they can manage before your mind starts slipping the clutch and you begin to hallucinate. Above all, as I have said, the fear factor, and especially the fear of the unknown, was missing – and it still is on the Selection exercises they do today.

  However necessary it may be to train soldiers to withstand an enemy’s attempts to extract information, I believe that the whole interrogation exercise is both antiquated and deeply flawed. We were trained using film shot during the Korean War, which had ended nearly twenty years earlier. Whatever the effectiveness of the mainly Chinese interrogators in their often brutal treatment of Allied PoWs during that war, the fact is that there are drugs available today that will make a prisoner tell his captors whatever they want to know a sight faster than if they were to gouge out his eyes. As a result, training men in ways of limiting the information they give an enemy while under the influence of drugs should be of paramount importance. It may be, of course, that for medical or scientific reasons this is not possible. Nevertheless, it should certainly be considered.

  All in all, I have to say that I regard the Interrogation part of Selection as little more than a farce. While it is moderately useful in preparing a soldier for some of the indignities he might suffer as a PoW, and in giving him some practice in answering direct questions with the Big Four, the fact that he knows he has only to hang on for, at most, twenty-four hours, and that the DS cannot subject him to the kind of physical torture an enemy might apply, severely limits its value.

  Interrogation ends Selection. Mine finish
ed in the early hours of Sunday. Monday morning saw the survivors – those who had passed – assembled in one room of the Training Wing building. We didn’t need to use the Blue Briefing Room. There were not enough of us left to have filled one corner.

  Once assembled, we were told we had passed and that the commanding officer of 22 SAS, the then Colonel Peter de la Billière, known throughout the Regiment as ‘DLB’, would be arriving shortly to present us with our berets. He walked into the room and we all stood. He then went to each of us, handing us our sand-coloured berets and shaking our hands with a brief ‘Well done’. He was not much of an orator. Only later would we learn that he was a great soldier, and a brilliant tactician with a superb military brain.

  One hundred and twenty men had started out on Selection back in August. Eleven of us had got through. And I was one of them. I was in the SAS. Although I was careful not to let anyone see it, it was the proudest moment of my life. It remains so to this day.

  There was an amusing sequel to my transfer from the Paras to the SAS. In June 1972, while still with 1 Para, I was stationed at Bruneval Barracks in Aldershot, and was spending a lot of my time training for SAS Selection, which I was due to attend in just two months. A Para instructor who was also going on Selection and who was based just down the road in Browning Barracks, told me that he had a spare Fablon-covered map of the Brecon Beacons, and offered to lend it to me. This was good news, since getting hold of a decent map in those days was extremely difficult, so I walked down to Browning Barracks during my NAAFI break to pick up the map.

  The Para battalions identify themselves from each other with different-coloured lanyards, which are wrapped around the left shoulder and have a knife attached to the free end, which is tucked into the tunic or shirt pocket. The colours are red, blue and green, representing 1, 2 and 3 Para respectively, while members of Depot Para wear a lanyard made up of all three colours. Having collected the map, I was just leaving Browning Barracks when a great booming voice roared at me, ‘Hey, you! Hey! YOU!’