Free Eye of the Storm by Peter Ratcliffe Page B

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 precisely 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.
    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