SAS: Secret War in South East Asia

by Dickens, Peter;

  The wily seducer’s arguments were probably more forceful then than on an operation with important objectives and comrades depending on one for their lives. The deed was so easily done, merely by not forcing oneself to finish a march in the allotted time or, as Penny felt like doing, ‘throwing your bergen onto the truck and saying, “Damn it, that’s enough!” which is what the staff were watching for. Five minutes later with a cigarette and a brew of tea you wouldn’t have done it but that’s too late.’ Then the devil exults in his devilry; ‘You’re no good, you’ll always give in won’t you?’ The shock could be devastating, and when John Edwardes ran the course he made it his business to reassure the failures that they had not necessarily failed at all as individuals. They would more than likely fulfil themselves in some less crazy way of life where SAS qualities would be a positive disadvantage.

  Shock or not, Selection had to be. There was no instilling motivation where it did not exist and the only way to detect it was by putting it to the test. That established, brain as well as brawn were needed to reach the objective, do the job and get home under SAS operating conditions. Practical intelligence tests were therefore woven into the exercises. These were particularly hard for the officers, who were set complex military planning problems when it was as much as the dead-beat wretches could do to stay awake. All had to have the right qualities, or the advanced training and much else — lives perhaps — would be wasted.

  Those determined to succeed had much good advice to encourage them. The sage who advocated forgetting the mountain and thinking of sex for the honour of the Regiment offered other helpful precepts: ‘Don’t envy the physique and vast experience of the man who’s obviously going to pass, it’s such a disappointment when you have to carry his bergen back to the RV.’ ‘Don’t sit down half way up a hill but promise yourself a rest at the top, where the wind’s so damned unpleasant that you’re forced down to the next valley before pausing to get your bearings, which you’ll only find by climbing the next hill…’ ‘If you give up when you’re completely shattered, you’ll find out too late that the Regiment is mainly composed of men who were completely shattered.’ ‘Smile now and again; you won’t tire out the face muscles and might even fool the instructors into thinking you’re enjoying the course, which ought to make you laugh anyway.’ Just plodding along is not enough by itself; keen observation and hard thinking are needed to conserve energy by such means as eking out rations, choosing the best route, navigating accurately, and then being flexible enough to see and exploit new opportunities. Also, a constructively active mind has no room for thoughts of defeat, which quickly lead to being defeated.

  Only twenty men survived the first three weeks unbroken. Before they took their longed-for weekend leave, eight more were discarded for traits of character that the keen-eyed staff had already spotted. The thug or killer types are anathema both to the Regiment’s image and to its operations. Soldiers must fight and kill only when the task demands it or they will be more of a threat to their friends than the enemy; and it may be that the task is to make friends. An aggressively selfish man is obviously impossible in a four-man patrol; an introverted ‘loner’ too can be very difficult since his aim may be more to justify himself than to join with others in serving the cause; the ‘big-timer’s’ boasting probably conceals inadequacy; while the ‘prima donna’ type, however brilliant, flies into tantrums and cannot be relied upon.

  Thus was sought a disciplined will to do the right job in the right way. ‘Tanky’ Smith and his colleagues knew well what they were looking for. So did John Woodhouse who, although perturbed at the miserably low number of twelve passes when he had to find 66, was not even tempted to lower the standard. A man who had not proved himself so far as is possible without an enemy might return from patrol saying he had been to the objective but found nothing, when he had in fact ventured but a little way from the dropping-off point and passed his time in rest and quietness. The effect of such dereliction on a task linked to a major operation could be truly awful, but mere words were wholly inadequate to describe its impact on the Regiment’s honour should it become known.

  The twelve survivors were not yet admitted into the Regiment, and many more trials would have to be undergone before they were. They had, however, surmounted the toughest obstacle, for although what would follow might be even more gruelling they had proved their motivation and strength of will. But long before vanity could taint them they were swept into the never-ending pursuit of excellence, which would always make even self-satisfaction inadmissible. They could still be RTUd at any time, but then so could everyone, including the oldest and boldest; though from now on the chances of that happening diminished greatly and were largely forgotten in the intensity of Continuation Training.

  There was much ground to cover. Basic infantry skills must be taught. A higher standard was now required from everyone, with a greater variety of weapons (or without them), tactics and over any terrain. All had to become extremely proficient at crafts that they may never have tried before: demolition, radio, advanced first-aid, mountaineering, abseiling, boating, skiing, swimming and diving; though in ‘B’ Squadron some of these were postponed to allow rapid progress in jungle warfare. Parachuting, like jungle cookery, was regarded in the SAS as just another skill to be mastered. Then there was learning to live off the land, enemy land, and how to behave if you were caught: Combat Survival and Interrogation. A student had to be irrepressible to see anything light-hearted in this part of the course, which had to be essentially disagreeable to serve its life-saving purpose. It was not part of Selection but training.

  A man was not therefore plunged into the final vexatious exercise without thorough instruction in arts and skills fundamental to this role of operating beyond the frontier. Some toadstools are edible; eat them. There is a vine in the jungle which when cut drips the purest water, and another, not dissimilar, which is poisonous. Rabbits and scaly anteaters are nutritious; right, first catch your scaly anteater, then what? Lillico is an expert: ‘If you’re really on your uppers, cut the jugular and drink the blood, which puts pure energy into you (together with all the bacteria and viruses) and then eat the lights and liver raw. Now some officers are repelled by this, not done at public schools, but if they have to do it the sooner it’s got over with the better, if you take my meaning? The rest must be cooked; no batman, so they’ve just got to learn.’ There was, of course, much else, notably mitigating the potentially lethal effects of exposure, hiding, laying false! trails, evading or killing tracker dogs.

  Then came the exercise: five days alone, inadequately clothed, without food, inexorably pursued by large numbers of troops from other units. Although ultimate capture was assured, it was important to do well and husband one’s strength in the first phase. Apart from actual survival being at risk in really severe conditions, a starved and exhausted man would be less resistant to the continued physical and intense mental pressures of interrogation, in which to let slip the least information meant instant RTU. The experience is best illustrated by those who know it from both sides.

  Mike Wingate-Gray: The SAS are not trained as interrogators but it’s very important for them to know what happens; they are more likely to be captured and have more to reveal than other soldiers so they are liable to be interrogated severely. Very unpleasant; deprivation, noise, light, silence, discomfort; even pain in those days before questions were asked in Parliament, because the Russians would undoubtedly use it, although our own skilled interrogators are convinced that brutality can be counter productive and subtlety pays much better. Frightened, helpless in a hostile environment and disoriented, you hang onto the thought that it’s only an exercise, but even so you begin to think, where the hell am I? Who am I? Damn it I’ll tell them and they’ll stop it; but you don’t because of your motivation, group psychology, ego, or whatever. If you can stand each successive stage, you can probably stand the next one, and you know that sometime they’ll come to the end of their repertoire … Mind you, if t
he Russians pull out all the stops, they can probably break anyone, especially with modern drugs which put you out of control so that it’s not you talking at all, they’ve taken over your subconscious and that’s a horrible thought, isn’t it? But even though you’d know it wasn’t an exercise and that they need never stop, training helps because you learn how an interrogator’s mind works; and if you can convince him he’s never going to get anything out of you, he may let up.’

  Lawrence Smith: ‘I was involved in an exercise with an RAF aircrew who had no idea it was going to happen. Brought the aircraft down somewhere they weren’t expecting and took the whole crew into custody; bags over their heads, driven about 200 miles in the back of a truck, cold, miserable, not a word spoken. At the Interrogation Centre they were put in a cell, bugged of course and with all the usual disorienting techniques, which is quite frightening; then when the bags were taken off after about ten hours they were surrounded by people in strange uniforms speaking what could be Russian, only the interrogators spoke English. They were kept awake, that’s the big secret of interrogation; after about 72 hours everyone starts deteriorating and then the questions start being asked, first the nice kind chap and then the harsh one. By the end some of the crew literally didn’t know where they were, thought they might have been in Russia despite knowing they’d come down on a British airfield. You can imagine letting things slip unintentionally but that’s the idea of the course, to teach. From the subject’s point of view, once you’ve done one you’ve done them all; a lot of exercises end with interrogation. You know you’ve got four or five cold, wet, tired, miserable days and switch your mind off; that’s one of the techniques, mind over matter, and it does work. There are two schools of thought, whether to answer negatively or say nothing at all, remembering that the interrogator’s first aim is to get you talking about anything, whatever it is you like, say football; then it becomes a psychological game for him to find out your weak points and work on them to break you. In ten days I think the body might break, but the mind certainly wouldn’t break before the body; I’ve never got to such a state myself, but I do believe I could hold out.’

  John Edwardes: ‘There’s only one answer and that’s to say absolutely nothing; if you even reply “Yes” to a perfectly innocent question they can put it on tape and use it for propaganda … The more sensitive you are, the worse; we persuaded one visitor to have a go and he convinced himself he was really being tortured by the Russians and completely broke down; took a whole bottle of whisky to get him straight.’ Mrs. John Edwardes: ‘Everyone in the SAS goes a little odd after a bit; I suppose it’s natural; John did.’

  At last the twelve were in and John Woodhouse gave them their winged dagger badges. Friends of the SAS may wish that another symbol had been chosen. A dagger is traditionally a thug’s weapon and does less than nothing to free the SAS from an image that they so bitterly resent, and which those who know them realize to be untrue. But to the initiates it meant much because they had joined a very exclusive club after paying an appropriately high entrance fee. The SAS was no longer mysterious, daunting and forbidding, but offered them their greatest opportunity for fulfilment. They felt welcome and secure in an environment of perpetual and sought-after insecurity.

  The Regiment, having taken them to the threshold of hell, now demanded their all. The more they gave, the more they loved it, so that there was no longer any difficulty in identifying motivation; it was it. Ask anyone, from trooper to colonel, and he will tell you so quite simply, surprised that you need to ask. Fred Marafono, a gentle and intrepid warrior from Fiji, joined ‘B’ Squadron soon after Penny and was put into 6 (Boat) Troop because he had grown up in canoes among the islands. Many years later, in the damp chill of a Northern Irish winter, still in 6 Troop but now sergeant of it, Marafono pinpointed the allegiance which evoked his enthusiastic acceptance of extreme hardship and danger in aid of a people so far from his home.

  ‘The cause.’

  ‘And what is that? Law and order? Freedom? Democracy? Peace?’

  ‘The Regiment.’

  Slightly chilling? Especially from one who can entertainingly discuss his cannibal ancestors of not so many generations back and spark a flash of savage but quickly-suppressed pleasure at the image of the IRA in a stewpot. Unease stems from wondering whether this loyalty is directed at anything but itself.

  ‘What if you’re ordered to do something you think would not be a credit to the Regiment?’

  ‘I can always leave.’

  It was said with a merry laugh because the possibility was absurd; the Regiment, to which he had given his heart, existed only to do good, so if it were to do evil it would no longer be the Regiment and he would leave, even though his heart would break. Greater loyalties are scarcely mentioned, but only because the Regiment would be nothing if it did not subscribe to them. If a cynic is to sneer at such Boy Scout devotion he should reflect that it includes willing self-sacrifice to the point of death itself; though to understand fully is granted only to those who give themselves completely to the ideal of service. If he should, rashly, wish to rile the SAS, he should try calling them ‘The Special Air Services’ as though they dispensed high-grade maintenance and piping-hot meals.

  Next came specialist training, every man having to be either a signaller, linguist or, like Penny and Marafono, a medic. They did not make a vocation of it – one’s priorities have to be nicely graded if one has to kill some people and cure others – but they studied intensively. This they needed to do, because the syllabus was formidable and far exceeded what is usually understood by first-aid. ‘Survival in different terrains, natural history and treatment of major endemic diseases; surgical emergencies such as maintenance of breathing in the unconscious by high tracheotomy, or completion of traumatic amputation; management of all types of injuries and wounds including treatment for shock and pain.’ All those were to be expected, but they also had to deal with ‘psychiatric casualties, dental care, ulcers, acute medical conditions, viral infections, paediatric emergencies, midwifery with complications, elementary pharmacology.’ There was a great deal more, slanted, of course, to likely SAS operating conditions; for instance, the treatment of blowpipe wounds.

  Penny and Fred Marafono were greatly helped by a month in the casualty department of Paddington hospital where, providentially but sadly, some inhabitants of Notting Hill and Kilburn offered plentiful and varied opportunities to treat wounds resulting from armed and unarmed combat.

  The last major obstacle for some individuals was the jungle. Most preferred it to the desert or anywhere else; it was cooler, kinder and they felt more secure and effective in it, but that depended entirely on their mastery of its ways which in turn derived from an affinity with it that led them to observe and side with nature rather than hopelessly to fight its immensity. Taught by ‘old Malayan Sergeants’, the recruit soon learned to feel at home, unless he was handicapped by an instinctive aversion such as many people have for snakes and submarines. Such men are overwhelmed by the close confinement, where the very trees are hostile and seem to reach for them with arthritic, clutching hands. Indeed, the ubiquitous rotan, whose stalk becomes the universally valued cane, has at its forward end filaments several yards long, so fine as to be easily unnoticed but immensely strong and equipped with backward-pointing thorns with which it clings either to branches for support or the passing tenderfoot for sheer devilment. It is called ‘Wait-Awhile’ because disengagement is not to be achieved by panic wrenching but dfelicately, prick by prick. The misfit stumbles blindly on he knows not whither, and is not to be convinced that there is any means of knowing. Wild and surely dangerous animals crash in the undergrowth or shriek from the tree-tops, serpents slither, clothes rot in the dank gloom, companions grate on jangled nerves; and if all that were not enough, the deadliest enemy of all, a human one, may be watching him from as close as five yards at any time. Strong men who have beaten Selection and all else have been floored by the forest; but Penny and Marafono
loved it. Penny then stayed on in the East to take a Malay language course, which showed that he was fully seized with the SAS principle of always doing a little more.

  Now, in the summer of 1964, adequate numbers had joined and ‘B’ Squadron took its final shape. All its troopers were new and the rest of the recruits went to ‘A’ and ‘D’ in exchange for NCOs of all grades. Group training in patrols, troops and as a squadron superseded individual; though if each individual had not continued to strive for perfection with all his time, effort and creative thought, filling the unforgiving minute with ‘something constructive like demolition’, the units would have stopped short of excellence.

  Major Johnny Watts joined and set his mark on the Squadron. A non-deleter of expletives, he would bellow across the square, “Tanky”, you bastard, come and have a drink’; and it would not be long before another foreigner from ‘A’ became reconciled to ‘B’. But no one ever accused Watts of insincerity; the idea was laughable to men from whom he could not hide that he cared for them from the depths of his generous nature; whom he trained to be as tough and enterprising as befitted the best squadron there ever was – which they were in no doubt would be the case – and then could scarcely bear to commit them to the hazards against which he had done so. ‘Mother hen’, says Penny; though that did not preclude a sharp peck when stimulation was indicated.