by Andy McNab
I didn't find it funny. None of the married blokes did.
The army seemed to promote smoking and drinking because the only recreational facilities available were cheap fags and drink at the NAAFI and the company clubs. If weight-training facilities had been available, the lads would have used them-not because they thought that upper body strength would make them better soldiers but because of a reason far more fundamental to an eighteen-year-old: If you look fit, you'll pull more.
I felt my morale being slowly eroded. I sat down one day and asked myself: What am I going to do? Am I going to stay here or fuck off? I was doing pretty well, I was coming up toward platoon sergeant, but I felt compelled to make that decision. It was a right pain in the arse sweeping up unwanted puddles, painting grass that had been discolored by boxes, and maintaining vehicles that were falling apart.
By this time Debbie had got a job at the local military hospital.
She enjoyed it very much, but we really didn't get much time together.
If I had free time, I'd be training for Selection, coming home late at night. It just wasn't really happening between us. The social life was fine, and we had become good friends with Key and his wife.
He was in B Company and now a corporal. His wife worked in the same hospital as Debbie.
By now Dave was back in battalion after a posting and we'd all go out together. Key's idea of a good Saturday would be football and a few pints. He was a fair player himself and represented the battalion in the same team as Johnny Two-Combs. He'd joined the army when he was in his mid-twenties and had a flat, a car and a good j'oh. We thought he must have joined for a bet.
I became obsessed with getting into the Regiment. In the long term it would be beltter for our relationship because the Regiment was permanently based in Hereford. We'd be able to buy a house and settle down.
There would be continuity in Debbie's life, and she could get a decent job. That was how I rationalized it to her anyway. In reality I wanted it for me.
I filled in an application form and started really working on my fitness but at first didn't tell anyone but Key what I was up to.
"I was thinking about doing it myself," he said. "I'll join you.)) Then I talked to Dave, who said, "Yeah, fuck it, let's all do it."
We got our bergens on, did some running and circuit training.
Then Dave introduced us to a captain, a Canadian called Max, who wanted to throw in his lot with us as well. He'd been away to Oman for two years on secondment to the sultan's forces; he'd met some of the Regiment and had got a taste for it. His family owned farmland near Winnipeg, and he spoke with a distinctive twang. He planned to do the tour with the Regiment, go to Staff College, and carry on his career.
The ultimate aim was to go back to the farm. He was married and very down-to-earth, not' at all the officer type. The great thing from our point of view was that he'd have the authority to get us places.
We spoke to everybody we could think of who knew somebody who'd danced with somebody who'd done Selection. "What's the best stuff for hardening the feet?" we'd ask when we tracked them down. "Any hints on special food or drink?"
"I know somebody in Third Battalion who passed Selection and he swore by neat's-foot oil," was the furthest we got.
We tried it for two weeks, then switched back to meths.
Once the buzz started going around the battalion that there were people going for Selection, a fellow called Bob came forward. A bricklayer from London, he had joined the army late in life. He was five feet seven inches and strongly built; fitness seemed to come very naturally to him. Nothing fazed Bob; he laughed everything off.
"If I don't pass, I'll get out anyway," he said. "I've had enough; I'll go back on the sites."
Bob had a diary written by a fellow called Jeff, who had just passed Selection and at twenty-one was one of the youngest people ever to get into the Regiment. It contained details of routes used in the Brecon Beacons and became our bible.
The captain, having more money than we did, decided to buy a VW camper van so we could get over to the UK for training; we chipped in for petrol. We were helped enormously in our training program by Alex, the antitank platoon commander, who had been in the Regiment himself and was now back with the battalion. He organized a three-week exercise in Wales for us as an excuse for us to get up on the hills.
We drove through the night, caught the early-morning ferry, and reached one of the military transit camps near Brecon by breakfast the next day.
We met up with Johnny Two-Combs. He'd already done Selection at the same time as Jeff and had failed.
He'd made the commitment to go straight back and do the next Selection and was doing his own training. It was great; he had more information.
"Try witch hazel on the feet," he said. "And if you get blisters, sort them out with iodine."
It was all desperation stuff, trying to find some magic formula that would save our feet. Name the old wives' tale, we'd be trying it.
Some people, we heard, wrapped orthopedic tape around their heels and toes. anything was worth a try because if we started getting injuries, there wouldn't be time for them to heal. We'd just have to carry on day after day.
As we learned the hard way, bugger all worked. All it took was two pairs of socks and a decent pair of boots.
The inner sock was thin and the outer was a thick woolen one, and that stopped the friction rub.
Every day we were trying something different to make the bergen comfortable.
Johnny said, "Half a roll bed put down the back of the bergen works wonders."
I tried it, and it was just uncomfortable for me. I still got bergen sores, and they were really painful. They wore me down more and more each day. We tried other precautions, including bandages strapped around the chest to protect our backs. I had tried padding out the actual straps on the bergen, but that was no good; it just wore away and rode up the masking tape. I experimented with cutting up a bit of foam roll bed, but that just used to slip along the back of it. What I found was best was simply to leave the thing alone. At the end of the day what you've got is your world stuck on your back, two straps over your shoulders, and the thing digging in. You've just got to put up with it and crack on.
Then it came to drinking water. How were w'e going to get water down our necks? Did we want to have to stop every five minutes and take the bergen off? There were weird and wonderful devices coming out of people's bergens. Max was the Mr. Gadget Man. He had everything dangling off him. He'd worked out that water stops robbed us of a lot of time and turned up one day with a large water bottle of the kind that cyclists use, with a long tube coming out. He'd sellotaped the tube onto the straps of his bergen, so all he had to do was put the tube in his mouth and suck it. I had tried all that, and it was all a bag of shit: It would go wrong; the piping would break or pull out of the bottle. What it boiled down to was that you had water on your belt and some more in your bergen. You drank from your belt kit water bottle, stopped to fill it up from the kit in your bergen, and off you went.
None of the Heath Robinson kit worked-unfortunately.
Then there was the question, How were we going to carry our map?
Max had a plastic orienteering map case that hung around his neck.
I tried that and found that I spent most of my time with it blowing in my face or wrapped around my neck because it was so windy up there.
What was best was to put the map in a clear plastic bag and carry that in the map pocket on your leg.
We tried all the energy drinks, electrolytes and such that were starting to come in. People were buying Lucozade and natural body composite drinks as if they were going out of fashion, but at the end of the day I reckoned it didn't matter what you had, as long as you had fluids down you. I still drank gallons of Lucozade, however; I loved the taste.
The only thing everyone agreed on was painkillers, and plenty of Brufen to stop the swelling. I planned to throw them down my neck like a man possessed if I h
ad to. Get rid of the pain, get rid of the swelling, and carry on.
The weather was a mixture of rain, low cloud, and mist and always overcast. If the sun was out, it was cold; if it wasn't, it was raining. We were tabbing hard anyway, so we didn't need much clothing on. We were getting really fit and confident. I felt I had stamina now with the bergen, and I knew the ground. When I looked at the map, I had every feature imprinted in my mind: where all the little pathways were, what I could see from the high ground. I felt I wouldn't have to worry about the map reading. I could just concentrate on making the distance in the time allowed.
Time spent on reconnaissance is seldom wasted. We were sure that getting up on the Beacons had been a must. It gave us the time to tune in and know the ground, to feel more confident if the weather started to clag in. Before I went to Wales, I had looked on the map at Pen-y-Fan and Fan-Fawn the major features over the Beacons, and thought: Hmm, that's pretty steep. But until I got there and saw it for myself, I wouldn't have believed how vertical a hill could be.
Being there for three weeks got us over that initial shock, and we soon built up confidence. And despite the weather, we had a really good laugh. I knew the pubs in Brecon anyway from the course that I'd done down there. We met people that were on the junior and senior Brecon courses, and it was wonderful to be out of the battalion. I loved it.
Back in Germany, we spent every spare minute training. Passing Selection had become my complete and utter focus. I'd go to sleep at night thinking about Pen-yFan and all the other places that we'd gone to. When I woke up, my first thought was, What am I going to do if I fail? The more I thought about my life in the battalion, the more desperate I was to escape.
There was a massive ridge that ran all the way from Minden to Osnabriick. It was a really steep feature, and we used to get our arses up there nearly every day. As well as that, if another company were doing a BFT (basic fitness test), we'd turn up and do it with them. Then we'd go circuit training. Fitness was all; we knew that the first month of Selection was the killer, with 80 percent of candidates gone by the end of it.
I knew I was kidding myself when I told Debbie that it would be better for us in the long term if I could get into the Regiment. She was enjoying the existence in Germany. She had a good job, friends, and she was establishing herself. If I passed Selection, I would be away from her for at least seven months of the year.
And so it was that on a hot sunny day in July 1983 the four of us boarded the old camper van for what we hoped was the last time and set off for Hereford.
They didn't give us directions to Stirling Lines, for obvious reasons.
If you can't even find your way to the camp, it's going to be a waste of time trying to join Special Forces. We had made sure we knew where we were going, which was just as well. One or two blokes were late, having got off the train at Hereford station and asked the locals for directions. Nobody told them. Apparently the town was very security-conscious, and the police were always alerted if anyone was seen as suspicious.
We chugged up to the main gate on a Sunday. Apart from the high wire fence surrounding it and the military policemen at the gates, the camp looked like a deserted college campus. I'd expected to find a hive of activity but instead saw only one or two characters mooching around in tracksuit bottoms and T-shirts. They took no interest in us whatsoever.
We signed in and did a pile of documentation, all the usual stuff-name, date of birth, qualifications, rank.
We were then directed down to the stores to draw a bergen, sleeping bag, water bottles, twenty-four-hour rations, cookers, and a survival kit.
"When you're up in the hills," the quartermaster told us, "all the weight that's in your bergen must be weight that's usable-food, water, biwi bag, spare clothes. The days of carrying bricks for the sake of it are well gone.
"You are only allowed to wear an army-issue boot.
The argument is, you can wear a pair of Gucci walking boots now, but what happens if you've been in the jungle for three months and your boots start to rot and fall off? When you get a resupply parachuted into the jungle, they're sure as hell not going to be size eight and one-half in your favorite 'Go-faster Guccis." Our names were on a board in alphabetical order, and we were allocated to eight-man rooms.
The Green Jackets were split up, and we wandered off with a casual "See you later."
Another couple of guys had already arrived in my room; we nodded a greeting to one another but not much more. As I unpacked the kit I'd brought with me, I cast a quick eye over what gear of theirs I could see. I wasn't the only one with boxes of electrolyte drinks, bottles of neat's-foot oil just in case, strapping for my legs, and a party pack of Brufen.
I wandered off to find the others. Everybody was doing his own thing, sorting himself out, then perhaps, like me, going to see a mate who was in another room.
There were one or two radios on.
It seemed everybody was among strangers, from different units.
People were saying hello but not really chatting to one another.
There wasn't that friendly room thing that there usually was when soldiers got together on a course. There were little mumblings going on of "All right, mate, how you going?" but the atmosphere felt rather tense.
Naturally it would take awhile to know each other, as in any group, but I sensed there was more to it than that. The slightly furtive unpacking and guarded responses reminded me of boxers in a shared changing room before a bout. Polite but wary. I thought it was rather odd. As far as I was concerned, the only person I was competing against was myself.
First thing Monday morning, all 180 of us assembled in the gym.
Before the course even started, we had to do the army's BFT, a three-mile run in boots and clothing.
"You've got fifteen minutes to do the first mile and a half," the DS (directing staff) said. "The rest is up to you. Don't be last man home."
We set off at a fastish pace. However, without kit it was a piece of cake. A reasonable jogger wouldn't have broken out in a sweat. I couldn't believe it when I saw people falling by the wayside, holding their sides and fighting for breath. I'd seen old ladies who were fitter.
Yet the basic fitness test was a basic requirement throughout the army; in theory, even the plumpest pastry cook should have passed. As the cripples limped in, the DS took their names and told them to go and get changed. They had been binned on the spot, even before the start of Selection proper. They'd obviously been reading too many James Bond books: by the looks on their faces the three miles had come as quite a shock to them.
For the next couple of days we did basic map-reading revision.
"If you can't read a map and you're stuck on top of the hill, the weather comes down and it's freezing, you're going to die," the DS said.
"We don't want you dying: number one because of the expense of putting people on Selection, and number two, we don't want the inconvenience of having to ask the standby squadron to get their arses up trying to look for bodies-and three, it isn't good for you as you'll have failed Selection."
Unbelievably, some people had turned up just about knowing the difference between north and south. Part of this map-reading refresher was orienteering with the bergens ' on, which was prepping us for the time in the mountains. I was amazed at how many people were starting to get fed up with it already. Whatever their idea of what Selection was, it wasn't this.
I didn't see much of Key and the others, except in passing. The occasional quick chat at mealtimes, however, revealed that everybody was doing fine.
We did quite a lot of running, five-milers mostly, in groups of twenty to thirty. We'd do a map-reading class, then be sent off for a run; the people who had just come in off a run, leaking (sweating) and panting, would then do map reading. There were still people binning it and getting binned after these runs.
They got progressively more arduous: five or seven miles in boots, followed by sit-ups and press-ups, then hundred meter piggyback races and fireman'
s carries up hills. More people jacked. I reckoned the DS were weeding out the people who wouldn't be capable of doing the first real test at the end of the week, the Fan Dance.
Another of the regular runs was an eight-miler in boots in hilly country, to be done in under an hour. I reasoned that as long as I stayed tucked in behind the DS, I'd be fine, but for reasons best known to him everybody else seemed to want to be up the front. I couldn't see that it mattered.
We did more orienteering, this time carrying bergens.
I got to one checkpoint and sat by the wagons, having a brew. One of the DS was sitting nearby, watching the rest of the gang stagger in.
One of them, a tall, smartlooking bloke I knew to be a cavalry officer, was wearing sweatbands on his wrists, a bandanna around his head, and, to top it all, a cravat. He looked as if he was going off for a game of squash. The DS got up and went and talked to other members of the training wing. They were all having a look at this boy and obviously discussing him. The thought struck me then that this was about being a gray man; getting noticed, I guessed, was probably only a few steps away from getting binned.
The Fan Dance is a twenty-four-kilometer run with bergens, done with DS in groups of about thirty, with no map-reading requirement. It starts at the bottom of Peny-Fan, goes up onto the hill, and right to the top, which is the highest point in that part of the country. Then it's back down, around another mountain called the Crib, and along the Roman road, a rubbly old track, then down to a checkpoint at a place called Torpanto. Then it's the whole lot again, in reverse.
One group started at Torpanto, mine at the Storey Arms mountain rescue center at the base of the Fan, and in theory we crossed over at the top.
The bergen weighed thirty-five pounds. We didn't know the cutoff time, but the DS did."The only advice we were given was "If you keep with us, you're all right.