Disclaimer: I have never been a member of the British Army’s Special Air Service — the SAS.

SAS – Motto: Who Dares Wins! (I did adopt the motto.)

The Special Air Service is a special forces unit of the British army. The unit undertakes a number of roles including covert reconnaissance, counter-terrorism, direct action and hostage rescue — Wikipedia

Re hostage rescue: think the dissident Iranian Arabs’ May 1980 siege of Iran’s British embassy with SAS members abseiling down from the roof. (On live television!)

SAS Wannabe

Back when luxury trans-oceanic passenger liners were in fact ships and not the now extant horizontal walls of sea going condos aka cruise ships, when long range airliners had navigators, engineers, paper charts and four engines and when the Beatles were just another new pop group, confident that no country in its right collective mind was likely to invade Britain any time soon, I decided to join the army and learn how to walk, how to operate a tea bag and how to set fire to a train. I am not making this up. 

My plan was to join Britain’s part-time (no full-time commitment for me) Territorial Army – since renamed the Army Reserve. I targeted (no pun intended) the SAS i.e. the Special Air Service, Britain’s storied rapid response take no prisoners super elite counter-terrorism, covert reconnaissance et al. regiment. This largely on the recommendation of my landlady. Yes, my landlady. At the time her son was a member of the regular as in full time SAS. Headquartered in Hereford in the West Midlands, the SAS then maintained a base in London located near Euston station conveniently just a few subway stops away from my ‘digs’ (full room and board seven days a week) which in turn was equally conveniently, sited within easy walking distance of a job I had newly acquired. The gas engineering laboratory technician position was with the North Thames Gas Board in Fulham. A fate, as it turned out, worse than death and hence the need for a significant one night a week and alternate weekends distraction only a few subway stops distant via the London Underground.

I had recently arrived in London from what used to be called and in some quarters no doubt still is and in a somewhat derogatory manner, ‘the provinces’ i.e. anywhere in Britain that wasn’t London and/or it’s close environs. In my case the point of departure was ‘up North’. A barely full witted twenty year old and career-wise having failed to encounter incipient or at a stretch potentially long term fortune in either Yorkshire, my place of birth, or North Lancashire (now Cumbria) where I was ‘dragged up’, I had decided the place to be was ‘the smoke’ by which dubious monicker London was then known, at least in my let’s say, limited social circles. It was 1963. Coal and its sidekick smoke were omnipresent along with the latter’s handmaiden dense fog.

Given that I had, and still have, a consuming interest in boats, I can’t for the life of me imagine why I didn’t consider the Special Boat Service. (Featured in the compelling movie Cockleshell Heroes q.v.) Certainly a major part of the appeal the SAS had for me was that they were big into parachuting albeit typically behind enemy lines. This to blow up bridges, trains, military bases, runways, etc. I was keen on the parachuting part without the behind enemy lines etc parts. Regardless I signed up given as stated, who was going to invade us anyway and I would get to jump out of airplanes. 

In case the job and/or the part-time army didn’t work out for me, I did establish what I thought was a viable, worst case scenario, backup plan. It was called Canada here I come. No foreign military invasion occurred, however neither did any improvement in my financial prospects. I did not see an affluent future for me in gas or, I also concluded, in the UK. It was to take four years to fully execute my plan however that is another if not several other stories.

No sooner had I signed up (the ink was barely dry) than I discovered that even at the part-time volunteer level, one doesn’t just show up and join the SAS. I was assigned to some other and nondescript Territorials regiment the name of which completely escapes me, under which authority I was to be enlisted as a trooper (SAS et al. usage for private) and seconded to receive initial training from SAS territorials and regulars. If the SAS was satisfied with my performance in pursuing their intensively physical and mental initial training, they would then allow me to take their four weeks long ‘selection course’ which, at that late hour I then discovered, had and still has, a 95% failure rate i.e. 1 in 20 passes! 

To say the initial training was extremely challenging doesn’t begin to describe the pain, the agony, the angst, the rigour, the fear (including of death) the sweat, etc, etc ad infinitum I and my fellow largely equally unsuspecting cohorts went through. This hyper-intense activity just to qualify for the opportunity to tackle the real SAS selection course with it’s mind bogglingly much greater physical challenges and daunting failure rate. The good news is that I was indeed to learn how to walk, how to operate a tea bag and how to set fire to a train long before I might (and it was a big might) at least qualify to take the selection course. Conceivably I mused, might I even be one of the 5% successfully completing it?

Along with the severe physical and mental challenges, there were however some benefits to the SAS pre-selection course training.  Subsidised beer in the mess, uniforms, not bad remuneration, camaraderie and free rides in the canvassed-in backs of army lorries. The latter roughly Ford F-150 equivalent pickup trucks without the beloved F-150’s capabilities and reliability. 

Weekday evenings once a week at the Euston facility, we were put through all kinds of training including intensive gymnasium exercises. I played soccer and squash once a week so I thought I was in great shape. Our sergeant, clearly an aspiring regimental sergeant major, thought otherwise. It was kind of like the boy scouts gone mad. I did however very much enjoy some races we had in the gym. Formed into teams, one at a time we had to run the considerable length of the gym to a vintage WW11 .303 Royal Enfield rifle. Once there we had to completely dismantle it (no ammunition involved of course) and then run back to the starting point. The next man would then run to the rifle, reassemble it and run back at which point the next man would run, dismantle and so on. You might like to try this at home should you by chance own a vintage .303 or robust facsimile thereof.

In addition to one evening a week at Euston, we were required to commit every second weekend to the training. This is where the army lorries came in. With the canvases closed so we could not see out, we would be transported to somewhere outside of London in the countryside (to no surprise quite a distance out). Solo, and with a one inch to the mile Ordinance Survey map (and maps do not get any better than these) and compass in hand, we would each firstly have to figure out where we were and then hike as quickly as possible to a position for which, after we had fixed our starting point, we were given the co-ordinates. (GPS of course did not then exist, not that it would have been allowed in any case.) 

Many of these events were timed so it would be dark long before we reached our destination – some required even an overnight bivouac to cover the distance – and in the process learn how to build a shelter using a small tarp, branches, whatever was to hand. We carried large and quite heavy packs filled with among other things a sleeping bag, a stove, rations, the tarp, water, flashlight, etc, etc. We had to make it to the destination within an elapsed time deadline. To do this we had to walk quickly using an ‘SAS stride’ this being the ‘learning how to walk part’. Try it! Take a stride then take a bigger one. Keep doing this extending the stride each time until your stride is maxed out and you are in pain at every step. Then back off very slightly. Now walk for hours using that penultimate stride length. It works. One can cover more distance in a given time than with a regular stride at the same RPM so to speak.

It was after my first overnight sojourn that I discovered something new to me. On returning to base the next day one of my buddies asked if I had enjoyed the food such as it was – mostly in cans. “Yes I said it was fine but I had an amazingly difficult time getting the tea out of those little bags it came in”. “You opened the bag?” he asked. “Well yes of course” I replied. “How could I brew the tea without getting it out of the bag?” There was a fairly long silence so I then added. “The bag it came in didn’t want to open, I finally took a knife to it”. Tea bags were recently on the scene at that time. I guess they hadn’t made it yet to my perch in the ‘provinces’ from which I had so recently escaped. 

On one of the night time sorties, we were instructed to not take any short cuts on established cleared trails which happened to be en-route. We were to travel through a densely forested area compass in hand — in North American terms to bushwhack. With no moon out it was very dark. I figured they would never know the difference so I hit the trails. Just as I was about to go into the trees and pretend on exit that I had followed the rules, a regular SAS soldier appeared (clearly part of our test) and spotted me. I ran about 50 metres back into the darkness of the woods then followed a drainage ditch another 50 metres before diving into it. I figured I was home free. He wouldn’t give up and I heard him closing in on me. I held my breath. My heart was pounding as I thought about WW11 and escaped prisoners being hunted down and shot. What must it have been like? I presumed he would not harm me but perhaps doing so was within the rules. He caught me and took my name. He knew of course that my rank was trooper, and that as neophytes we did not have serial numbers. He told me to carry on, this time obeying the rules which I did. In my defense I have to add that most all of us tried (and failed) to pull off this stunt!

After a couple of months of weekly gym training and weekend orienteering excursions close to London, the weekend jaunts were to more distant and less familiar territory in and around the South Downs close to the South coast. On one such excursion just after Britain’s infamous ‘Great Train Robbery’ the word was that the robbers had hidden a lot of their huge cash haul (2.6 million pounds in1963 . About 55 million pounds in today’s money or $CDN 94,000,000!) in and around the Downs. We all became very ‘eagle eyed’ but to no avail. Had it proven otherwise, would I put it in writing? Think about it.

After several weeks of South Downs weekend day and overnight training, those of us still considered to have at least an element of SAS potential were then subjected to a series of weekend long training sessions in the mountainous Brecon Beacons national park area of South Wales. It was during the first of these excursions that I was to learn how to set fire to a train. The latter was pulled (slowly) by a barely post steam age engine. It was already dark when we left London not long after most of us had just got off work. Hence we had not eaten but we of course had rations in our packs and a solid fuel stove.

The ancient railway carriages were of such absurd design that they lacked a corridor connecting all the compartments and thus giving access to what passed for a toilet at one end of the carriage. Once in one of the compartments, there was nowhere to move to while the train was in motion. Good luck if one needed that toilet! However, the isolation of each compartment probably saved us and especially me from what would have been severe reprimands and likely dismissal from the Territorial Army. I decided to light my stove.

When I say stove, that would be an exaggeration. What we each had to hand was a device one step down from a Molotov cocktail, not something controllable such as for example a Primus stove or a Coleman stove. The ‘stoves’ were basically a cylinder of highly flammable solid fuel stuffed inside a very thin metal can with a wick protruding from a small metal ring on the top.

With the wick ignited and in the absence of a saucepan, I put an opened can of an unidentifiable quasi foodstuff on the metal ring and waited. I didn’t have to wait long. The stove base very quickly set fire to the carriage floor a significant section of which being rapidly engulfed in dancing flames. In the absence of a fire extinguisher in our isolated carriage and no way out to search for one, we stamped out the flames with our army boots but not before there was extensive and very obvious fire damage to the floor.

Luckily for us and making it impossible to know who started the fire, arrangements had been made for our squad to leave the train not at a station, but in the middle of nowhere. This we did the instant the train halted, all of us stumbling in almost complete darkness into a farmer’s field. Our sergeant knew his stuff and we were soon on a nearby trail which became steeper it seemed with every step. Eventually there was a moon which helped although initially we were in deep and very dark forest. 

My strongest memory from this part of the exercise is of hearing unseen people (my cohorts) vomiting with great vigour. It turned out quite a few of us would-be elite soldiers had brought beer to drink on the train. The combination of too many beers, a 60 degree wooded slope and a determined and ambitious sergeant was never going to end in any positive way for the participants. Neither my compartment colleagues nor I had brought any beer. Had we had some we could with great reluctance have used it to put the fire out sooner! We had water but we knew enough to know we would need it big time on the trail and indeed we did.

The steep woodland trail led us to another which climbed above the tree line and led us to one of the many Brecon Beacons’ mountain peaks. (A mountain being typically over 300 metres at least in Brit parlance.) We bivouacked near the base of it inside a sheep pen. It had a partial roof so we had good shelter in case it rained. It didn’t. We were all assigned to do thirty minutes each on guard duty starting at 11pm. Mine was at 3am. Raised from deep sleep I stood my watch armed to the teeth with a flash light. Nobody attacked us. This time. Not even a sheep. 

The next weekend long challenge involved climbing two mountains in North Wales, Snowdon at 1,085 metres the highest in Wales and the 918 metres Tryfan, also a part of the Snowdonia range. The two peaks and our attempts on them would it transpired, sort out the men from the boys. We climbed Tryfan the first day. All the many routes are rock scrambles i.e. one uses hands and feet most of the time. Guide books suggest the climbs will take four to five hours. We did ours in about three. The easiest route (which we did not take) is listed as hard and “should only be attempted by experienced climbers and mountaineers”. I had considerable experience in the English Lake District but as a hiker not a technical rock climber per se. I had however done many scrambles there.

I don’t recall which route we travelled but certainly it was difficult especially since we were loaded down as usual with heavy packs. There were many places with considerable exposure (i.e., a wrong move and a potentially fatal fall could quickly become a strong possibility). As is generally the case on steep mountains, descending was more challenging and dangerous than ascending. We all made it in more or less the same time and were able to stay together as a group in spite of the pace set by our mentors.

The following day Snowdon was our target. Less steep and rocky than Tryfan, it even has a rack and pinion railway all the way to the top. Needless to say we were not to avail ourselves of it. By my terms of reference we more or less ran up this the highest mountain in Wales, as usual fully kitted out with heavy packs. Again I do not recall the specific route but it was by no means easy and in many places very steep with periodic difficult scrambles. Well into the climb some of our trainee squad began having problems continuing. First one would slow to a halt then others. Our leaders were quick to respond. Among them were quite a few regular i.e. full time SAS members.

At the first sign of a trooper’s difficulty, these regulars seemed to appear out of nowhere. They would take the pack of the trainee in difficulty, somehow attach it to their own and then stay with him as they continued the climb at a slightly slower pace than the main group of us. There could be no turning back as the quickest way down after the summit was in fact in the direction we were headed. 

I was doing OK at this point however the reality of SAS physical requirements was gradually dawning on me. More individuals were stopping and catching their breath. Quite a few already had a regular SAS soldier accompanying them and carrying their pack. (along as stated with their own of course). I was determined that at the very least I would not yield my pack to anyone. I would reach the summit and complete the climb down come what may. I am pleased to report that I did so.

Once we were safely off the mountain I figured a general reckoning would ensue. Our sergeant who for all his ambition we all very much liked, at one point came over to me and engaged in light conversation about the weekend’s event’s then he said something I have remembered with pride and always will. He said “You know Barry, your heart’s in the right place”. He paused and continued “but your *ucking legs are just too short”. He was right of course. It wasn’t that I lacked the will, I lacked the wherewithal in the hind quarters so to speak. Surprisingly and by SAS standards he wasn’t that much taller than me. I guess his *ucking legs were just long enough.