Free Eye of the Storm by Peter Ratcliffe

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