The Crossroad

by Mark Donaldson, VC

  At the end, we had to stop still for ten minutes and be perfectly quiet. It’s pretty hard to walk through the bush without making a leaf rustle or a twig snap, and it went on until about three in the morning.

  We were now disoriented by cold, tiredness and overwhelming hunger. Once we lay down, everyone instantly fell asleep. The fatigue was so heavy, you’d even fall asleep while you were laying an ambush. When you woke up, you didn’t know if you’d been asleep five minutes, half an hour or two hours. You didn’t even know if everyone was still there. In another section, a guy got left behind and woke up to find himself in the middle of the bush in the dark on his own. Just as he was seriously panicking, he bumped into the back of his patrol. Pure luck.

  That night, they told us about the next morning’s scenario. We would have some wounded – stretchers with 80-kilo sandbag dummies on them. We had to bash through the bush from checkpoint to checkpoint in six hours, keeping security all around us the whole way. It was relatively straightforward, but the pressure was always on. If one of the team went down, we couldn’t just go every man for himself, we had to help him up. As an individual candidate you might gain strength when someone drops out, but when you’re in a section exercise you develop a bond with people you don’t know, and it’s camaraderie through hardship that brings you together. You do have to achieve a mission and work together. The DS were watching and taking notes the whole time. If they noticed something, they’d wander over in a sinister way and say, ‘Hey, candidate 23, what’s your name? Where are you from?’

  ‘Private Donaldson, 1RAR.’

  They had a blue pen and a red pen. They wrote something down. I saw the red pen – or were they just playing with my head? But let that get to you, and you can ruin your chances; you’re a nervous as well as physical wreck.

  At midday, we got a short break and then had to lug a big plastic container full of outboard motors for Zodiac boats. They were thrown together in an awkward box, which we had to carry with three metal poles of unequal length and ropes to tie them together. Once we’d contrived a carrying apparatus, we had to haul them for another six hours through unforgiving bush, while keeping our bearings and not getting lost on the way to the checkpoint.

  We came to a broken-down box trailer, with a separated axle and only one wheel. We had to get the outboard motors on top of it and transport them somewhere else. Another six hours and another task. This time the trailer waiting for us contained a big fuel bladder, full of fuel or water and quite heavy. We had to push the trailer up rutted dirt roads, still with two guys as security to the sides, and another up the front navigating. The one in command had to decide how to rotate resources. The DS were just looking for initiative and nous, who takes leadership, who works in a team. You don’t realise it so much when you’re one of the candidates, but there was always someone putting their hand up for the easiest jobs. There were those who would shirk altogether. There were also those who’d be happy to volunteer to carry stuff, but never wanted to contribute ideas or leadership towards solving a problem. The DS sat back and noticed everything.

  The physical ordeal throughout the day was tough, especially not eating. SAS soldiers are nicknamed ‘chicken stranglers’ for their ability to live off the land, but often it’s a matter of living with starvation. For the whole five days of Lucky Dip, we each had one 24-hour ration pack. I allocated one muesli bar as my food for one day, and three Arnott’s biscuits for the next. The packs contained two muesli bars, a pack of M&Ms, a small block of chocolate, a tin of cheese, a three-pack of biscuits, a little tin of two fruits, and some dehydes or dehydrated rations, which were either black bean beef or a disgusting seafood mixture. We couldn’t make a fire to cook, so if we wanted them we ate them raw. There was sugar, tea and coffee, but likewise, if you wanted them you just had to eat them. You always had to have two litres of emergency water on your webbing, which you didn’t drink from, plus 10 litres in your pack. You were pretty much living on water.

  We were being tested on how we worked and thought when we were feeling like absolute shit. The night-time was a respite, but they’d get us up to do one nebulous task after another. In our minds, we questioned what the hell we were doing. During the day, we had a purpose, and could concentrate on putting one foot in front of the other. But at night we had to build a platform out of gum-tree sticks that were lying on the ground, and it had to be three feet high. We had to fit all our packs and all of us on it. ‘Once you’ve achieved that,’ they said, ‘you can go to sleep.’ So everyone worked really hard to get this thing built, rummaging around, one guy maintaining security, everyone dragging big trees back. Then the DS came back and said, ‘Actually this is pretty good, but we’ve had some information from the locals that we’re in a creek line and there’s some rain coming, so it’ll get washed away. We have to move 30 metres over there, but we can’t take any of this with us. We have to build another one. And this time it has to have a roof on it.’

  I was thinking, Fuck this shit. By the time we’ve got this built, the sun will be up and we’ll be sent on a new six-hour daytime task.

  There’s a lot of psychology behind selection, but I think the quality they were testing, above the physical and mental and teamwork and all the rest of it, was simply our desire. I had the advantage of being totally pig-headed. I wanted to see what happened at the end. Why would I come all this way and not see what happens at the end? If I was going to remove myself from this course, it would have to be through a broken leg. I didn’t want to give up just because I started doubting my own ability and confidence. Looking back, it’s a really hard thing to push through. I thought, I’m not gunna let that beat me. I’d rather break down physically than say, ‘That’s it, I’m done.’ It was always tempting to give up, but I knew I’d hate myself two hours later when I was sitting there thinking, I let building a stick hut beat me. I’d only be thinking of that, not the accumulation of things that had led up to it. I thought, It’s not going to last forever. I just have to not give up. If they don’t remove me, I’m doing all right. If they take me out at the end or not, that’s irrelevant, I have to get there.

  I had another advantage, in a perverse way. I had no warm, cosy family nest to go back to. I wasn’t yearning for that, because it wasn’t there. No girlfriend or wife, no parents, no family home to lure my mind away. It helped me not to have anyone or anything to go back to. I’m not saying there’s nothing else I could have done with my life, but I wasn’t wondering what my wife and kids were doing, what my mates were doing at the pub. There wasn’t some beautiful world I was missing. I had left myself with only one way to go.

  *

  On the third day of Lucky Dip, we had to carry a baby goat in a crate. It got weird. The goat was called Bung, after a character in the Vietnam War film The Odd Angry Shot. We had to have a shrine and a prayer for Bung, and a teepee to put everyone under in the middle of the night. We were absolutely falling over we were so tired and hungry, and then we’d be told to get down on our knees in front of this goat and chant a prayer. It was almost enjoyable; it was so ridiculous I had to laugh, like I was delirious. And it still wasn’t easy to make the teepee. By the end of the night, we’d built three half-made teepees and had fully finished one, and even then, when we were lying under it trying to get one hour’s sleep at best, I remember looking up and thinking, If this thing falls it’s going to crush all of us.

  They were seriously messing with our minds now. The next task, carrying a fully inflated Zodiac with all its boards in, was all about frustrating us and seeing who would crack. The boat weighed about 120 kilos, which is not a lot, but we were so tired, and with guys of different heights throwing the boat out of balance so it never sat right on our packs and shoulders, trying to get it fast through bush that snagged and blocked it drove us crazy. We then had to get it across a dry riverbed on a pulley system, but fast, with a lot of random restrictions. I don’t remember our patrol achieving any of the n
ebulous tasks properly, but that wasn’t the point. They were watching how we behaved in the patrol group. Guys snapped, threw tantrums, burst into tears. One had a UD, or unlawful discharge, of his weapon. We were walking along and – Bang! – a round went off. They were only blanks, but it was a big deal. Everyone stopped. ‘Who was that?’ The DS all rushed over. It’s a massive thing in the army to fire your weapon negligently anywhere, let alone on an SAS selection course. You’d be seen as lacking competence. It should never happen. The DS didn’t do anything about it until that night, when they slipped in and quietly removed that candidate.

  In the final part, it got more interactive, with scenarios involving conflict. We were in an ‘enemy guerrilla camp’, and were accused of hitting on the guerrilla chief’s wife. In five minutes, we had to write a poem and deliver it to a woman in a veil. Mine went something like, ‘Roses are red, violets are blue, if I had a wife like you, I’d be happy too.’ My poetic creativity was never very high at the best of times.

  They had us on the go all night. We did drill on the road: about turn, left turn, right turn, marching up and down. The bizarreness of it really challenged me. I was wanting to laugh like a madman. Then they’d tell us to build a chicken pen. We scrambled around, got the pen built. Then they told us to remove it and build it again a few metres away. This kind of thing went on all night.

  As it went into the last days, the pace accelerated. In the morning, on no sleep, we had to carry some heavy weapons for six hours. Halfway there, we realised we hadn’t remembered the yoke, a kind of support part on the tripod for the gun. So we had to carry all this stuff back to the beginning. It’s awkward enough carrying the weapons in pieces down these dirt tracks, without having to do it twice. The frustration drove us spare.

  Then we had to be inspected by the ‘general’ of the guerrilla camp. He had cardboard cut-outs on his shoulders and ridiculous tassels, like an Iraqi general under Saddam. We had to do slow marching past him, very slow, kicking our toes forward, eyes to the side, struggling to stay on balance with the heavy weapons on our shoulders.

  For the next task, the nine or ten of us remaining in our section had to carry sixteen full water jerries to a dam, trudging through the bush. At the dam there were 44-gallon drums and ropes to make a raft out of, and we had to carry the water jerries and the DS across the dam without anything getting wet. I think our raft sank halfway across.

  Throughout all of this was the constant hunger and tiredness, and getting bollocked by the DS. Amid the tasks, there was always something trivial to slow us down. If someone’s pouches were open, they made him stand there while everyone else in the section did twenty push-ups. One of the blokes had lost his hat. The DS said, ‘Right, that’s it! You can’t go anywhere until he gets a hat!’

  We were saying, ‘Nobody’s got a spare hat.’

  ‘Figure it out! Come up with something!’

  We had little square bright-blue foam mats that we slept on. The hatless guy cut a hole in that and stuck it over his head. He walked along with his head sticking out of this blue square. The staff were pissing themselves, and so were we. Having a laugh was like getting a shot of some magic medicine, briefly.

  It was getting dark on what we hoped was the last night, though we didn’t trust them. They took us down the road and told the section commander to come over. A lot of hotboxes had been left there.

  ‘Tell everyone to get their cups canteens out, there’s some food for yous.’

  In one container was half-cooked rice. We were allowed one spoonful each in the bottom of our cups canteens – the metal cup around our water bottle. The other box contained a boiled pig’s head. The only meat on it was the cheeks and snout, and the ears. There were a lot of hairs on its head. We didn’t care. I took the head out and put it on the lid and started cutting strips of meat off it. We were all tearing it apart. I put the snout aside for myself. It was fatty and rubbery but seemed like one of the best feeds I’d had in my life. I was still picking pig’s hairs out of my teeth a while later.

  When we’d finished, they lined us up and said, ‘We’re going to give you two items. Each individual has to eat them one at a time.’

  They came along and put two sheep’s eyeballs into each person’s cups canteen. They stood and watched us eat them. We had to bite it and chew it and swallow it. Sheep’s eyeballs explode in your mouth. I was that hungry, I didn’t give a toss. I gagged a little bit, but wasn’t going to throw up. The explosion in my mouth of all that warm blood was pretty disgusting. One guy couldn’t hold it in – all this black blood and bits of eyeball were oozing out of his mouth and the DS were saying, ‘Don’t you dare throw up or you’ll be off this course!’

  They left us for an hour, and everyone lay around aching and sick. We’d devoured so much fat in a frenzy after not eating a thing that our bodies shut down, lacking the energy to digest it. We’d thought they were testing our ability to stomach something so disgusting, but maybe they’d been testing our ability to restrain ourselves.

  We were sat in a big circle, and this bloke came in and spoke in a boring monotone, dead flat, no breaks between the sentences. He made a big pot of tea. It was hard to tell what he was about. He asked, ‘If-you-could-be-anywhere-right-now-where-would-you-rather-be?’ Everyone else said they’d like to be in a pub having a counter meal. I said I’d like to have a swim in the ocean – and then have a counter meal.

  He droned, ‘Righto-now-it’s-time-to-get-back-to-work.’

  We had to bury some 44-gallon drums as a cache in earth that was so hard-packed it was like rock. The DS said, ‘You figure it out. Aren’t you supposed to be able to use your initiative?’

  Guys were racing around looking for star pickets or anything to dig with, but it basically came down to digging with our knives and cups canteens. All through the night we were lying on our sides, digging and scratching. All I could hear was Tink! Tink! At times we got swapped out to sit in the dark and do sentry. It was like a last act of inhumanity, putting us through something like we were old-time prisoners of war.

  In the morning, that monotonous man was completely different, all bubbly and full of life, like he had bipolar. ‘Come on, let’s go for a run! Let’s do some push-ups, sit-ups, get us moving in the morning!’ Needless to say, it was the last thing we wanted to do. We came to a Land Rover that was weighed down with a load of heavy APC tracks. We had to push it for six or seven kilometres: up and down hills, on dirt tracks. It was another really tough task, and the DS capped it off after several hours by telling us to sit down. He jumped into the Rover and drove it off. That was demoralising.

  Some Mogs drove up, and we were told to get on. Everyone just sat there, not trusting them.

  ‘Come on, what are you doing?’

  I didn’t trust them either. Were they for real, or were the trucks going to drive off just before we got to them?

  We got on. There were only eight left in our section of twelve. We were haggard and hollow-eyed, looking at each other thinking, Is this the end of it? One guy was saying, ‘Nah, they’re taking us to the next thing.’

  We hit a tarred road. Were we done? I almost couldn’t believe the possibility that we were at the finish line. A ration pack was sitting in the Mog. We started ripping it apart, hooking in. The bloke with the foam hat was hoeing into a pack of wet food, squeezing the last drops from above his head into his mouth. A filthy stench filled the cabin, and then he started vomiting out the back. The ration pack had been left in the sun, obviously, and this fish-flavoured feed had had a hole in it. I reckoned it was a set-up.

  We got to the hangar at Bindoon, where we’d been standing nude three weeks before, and lined up behind another patrol. The DS started calling candidates out for a two- or three-minute chat.

  ‘Private Donaldson. What’s your cover story?’

  Shit. I was trying to remember something I’d read for five minutes three weeks ago. I h
ad remembered most of it, luckily. It was another nasty thing to do, make us feel comfortable and relieved about finishing, and then challenge our memory by taking us back to what seemed the least important thing in the whole course.

  Of the original 120 to 140 candidates, about forty had made it to Lucky Dip. Now, we were down to twenty-eight. There was no fanfare or even a word of congratulation. The DS just said, matter-of-factly, ‘Righto, fellas, stand up, there’s a feed on over there, you’re at the end of the selection course.’

  They didn’t tell us if we’d passed or failed. It was simply the end. They told us to shower and get some clean cams on. It wasn’t exhilarating; it was weird, awkward. We were wondering if it wasn’t just another trick. We loaded up the trucks. No one talked to us or said, ‘Good on you.’ Just, ‘Get on the buses and go back to Swanbourne [Campbell Barracks].’ On the way back, most slept. Some were cracking tired jokes. I managed to squeeze a bit of sleep in and mostly wondered if I’d done enough to be selected. At Swanbourne we had to clean up our stuff, go to our rooms, have dinner and be back at the DS office by eight o’clock the next morning. The emotional flatness of it all was unnerving, like they wanted to puncture any sense of achievement.

  I phoned Brent and said, ‘Yeah, I’ve finished it, but I don’t know if I’ve been selected or not.’ I rang Margaret and Ross and Val. I think they were pretty proud. I told them I’d lost six kilos. Some had lost up to 12 or 15 kilos. We were walking around like emaciated ghosts. We gorged ourselves in the mess and some of us were sick again that night. Blokes’ feet had swollen up and they couldn’t walk for a couple of days. My toes were numb for four or five weeks. I had a hell of a lot of chafing on my back, but overall suffered from soreness rather than injuries.

  It’s only been recently, when I’ve worked as DS, that I’ve seen how scientific it is behind the scenes. Every activity has a thorough briefing on what the Regiment wants to see in terms of initiative, teamwork, aggression, weapon handling and other attributes. The DS make notes on a slip in red or blue pen, with the reasons why, and the slips go into a big bin to be sorted out at the end, when the DS convene to talk about what was good, what was bad, should they keep or lose this candidate. It’s very rigorous, but even then, they don’t always get it right.