During the past thirty years, the SAS has also placed an ever-increasing emphasis on anti-terrorist tactics. Today one squadron is always kept on standby in Britain for Counter-Revolutionary Warfare. At any one moment this is on call for immediate duty anywhere in the world. Indeed standby officers routinely listen to the news broadcasts each and every hour so that they can identify at the earliest moment a possible opportunity for the SAS. Quite often, as for example when the news broke that the Argentines had landed on the island of South Georgia, in the Falklands, in 1982, the senior SAS officer on duty with the standby squadron immediately phoned the Ministry of Defence, offering their services. They don’t like to wait to be asked but prefer to volunteer whenever there is the possibility of action.
Nearly all recruits begin their training with a feeling of confidence and excitement, even though they know the going will get tough. Most recruits even start off by admiring or liking the senior NCOs who will be their taskmasters for the next few months. But it doesn’t usually take long for those officers to be seen as pitiless, harsh, inflexible, ruthless bastards as, with never a smile crossing their lips, they put the recruits through their paces.
It is only later that the recruits come to realise that these senior NCOs are in fact their true friends, respect them as first-rate soldiers and admire them for their professionalism and integrity. At the end of most training schedules the recruits believe that the officers who have trained them are the greatest people they will ever know in the Special Forces. And they will thank them, time and again, for pushing them hard and teaching them how to react when things get really tough – in battle conditions.
Undeniably, these senior NCOs are the making of Special Forces recruits the world over. All have experienced Special Forces operations at the limit and they know and understand how tough life can be when under fire in conditions which favour the enemy and disadvantage their own unit. It is these experienced men who are the backbone of the elite forces and the better trained and more experienced they are the better Special Forces units will eventually operate in battle.
All those who undergo the training schedule in a Special Forces unit hear, along with the myths and legends, some true horror stories about mishaps suffered by trainees. These would turn any mother’s hair grey if her son had volunteered to join one of the elite forces.
The United States Marine Corps has earned itself a reputation for being tough on recruits. The examples are endless. One recruit was locked in his locker and lighter fuel poured through the vents and then set alight. Another was kept for three hours in freezing water. Yet another had a bayonet pushed through his biceps. One was made to run around the square with full pack until he collapsed from exhaustion. Another had his head repeatedly pushed into a bucket of ice water until he collapsed. Then there was one who was stripped naked and made to stay outside his billet in freezing conditions. Another poor soul had to continue press-ups until he collapsed. Yet there have been no reports of any volunteers dying while undergoing such punishments. Nevertheless, all recruits who witness or simply hear of such horrific events do realise how tough the training regime can be.
The US Ranger Department of the Infantry School at Fort Benning, Georgia, established in 1951, trained officers and NCOs initially in hard physical exercise but also in patrolling, ambushes, raids, airborne operations and leadership skills. Jungle and mountaineering training was also included. But the emphasis was changed to individual training. And a target was set: ‘To produce a hardened, competent, small-unit leader who is confident he can lead his unit into combat and overcome all obstacles to accomplish his mission by requiring them to perform effectively as small-unit leaders in tactically realistic environments.’
As one senior Ranger NCO put it: ‘When you’ve earned your Ranger tab [a curved yellow-on-black strip bearing the single word ‘Ranger’, worn on the left shoulder] you’ll know you’ll be able to do anything, even if it’s something you’ve never done before and know absolutely nothing about. That doesn’t matter. You’re a Ranger, you can do anything.’
The official history of the Rangers Brigade states:
To produce a realistic environment, the stress of combat is simulated by hunger, lack of sleep, constant pressure, and all in a gruelling physical setting. The long training day usually lasts from 0500 hours to 0200 hours, and because it is similar to battle conditions makes judgement difficult. The short rations – one or two small, processed meals a day – add further problems. The average weight loss per student is thirty pounds… At the end of the course the student is in the worst physical shape of his life.
The Ranger training programme differs in some points from that of the SAS. Ranger recruits are assigned buddies, the idea being that if one falls behind the other will help him. No Ranger does anything alone, for he and his buddy work as a team. The buddies stay together until they graduate, but often Ranger buddies remain friends for life, regardless of rank.
At the end of the training period a new phase was introduced in the 1990s, entitled Ranger Stakes. This provides a test of students’ abilities in eleven separate tasks in the areas of light infantry weapons and communications. The first three tests involve the M60 machine gun and include loading, range-finding and maintenance. Task number four is to set up an M181A1 Claymore mine and detonate it. Tasks five and six involve communications, sending radio messages and coding and decoding. Tasks seven, eight and nine involve everything a recruit must know about the US Army’s basic weapon, the famous M16 rifle, including maintenance, correcting malfunctions and cleaning. Task ten involves hand grenades and the final task is the maintenance and firing of an M203 grenade-launcher.
Perhaps the greatest difference between the SAS and the Ranger recruiting programmes is that when an SAS recruit is failed and RTU’d this is the end of his time with 22 SAS, whereas in the Ranger programme if any recruit fails a phase of training he can decide to re-enter the next training programme and have another try. The Rangers also employ specific and intense desert, mountain, jungle and swamp phases of training at various Ranger compounds – Fort Bliss in Texas, Dahlonga in Georgia and Elgin Air Force Base in Florida.
At the completion of training less than thirty per cent of those who began the training course pass out as full members of the US Rangers and only fifty per cent of the intake will have managed to get halfway through the course.
The SAS are looked up to by many armies across the world as the epitome of Special Forces units, occupying a position which all should strive to emulate. However, the SAS believes that the toughest Special Forces training is undertaken by the US Navy SEALs. In contrast to Air Force and Army Special Forces in the Rangers Regiment and Special Forces groups, SEALs are ‘generalists’, meaning that although each will have a speciality in intelligence, submarine operations, weapons, engineering or communications, as soon as a SEAL unit goes off to war every man has to be capable of doing the job of anyone else in the unit.
To earn SEAL flippers takes twenty-six weeks of exhaustive training which is described as ‘the most challenging and brutal learning experiences anybody can ever have’. And it’s true.
The official title – Basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL programme, or BUDS – conceals a selection and training format designed to weed out people who simply don’t belong. And that usually ends up meaning the vast majority. The recruits, who must be under twenty-eight years old, are eliminated by the instructors as they slowly but inexorably increase the pressure on each candidate to make sure only the strongest survive. So tough is the regime that sometimes it results in nearly every candidate failing. It is a deliberately brutal experience that is not pretty to watch and pushes its victims to the limits of their physical and emotional endurance, and beyond. Injuries are routine and deaths in training sometimes occur.
SEAL instructors are adamant that it isn’t brute strength that is required to survive the training course but an attitude of mind, a strength of character, a kind of internal motivation rather than pu
re physical strength. They maintain that if a recruit has the mental strength to work through the discomfort, the fatigue and the humiliation, he can usually develop the physical strength necessary. The head is the hard part.
Although the BUDS training takes half a year, it is only one part of the learning process of becoming a full qualified SEAL. For a start, the medical is daunting. Eyesight must be 20/40 in one eye and 20/20 in the other, with no colour blindness. More importantly, the recruit must pass the physical fitness tests. These include swimming five hundred yards in less than twelve and a half minutes; resting for ten minutes and then carrying out at least forty-two press-ups in two minutes, fifty sit-ups in two minutes, eight pull-ups, and then running a mile in boots and pants in eleven and a half minutes – all in less than one hour. In addition, high scores must be achieved on military written tests.
New arrivals spend the first seven weeks enduring a programme of indoctrination and physical preconditioning, with long hours of classes, running, swimming, sit-ups, press-ups and gymnastics before they start the three-phase BUDS course.
Phase One lasts nine weeks and features almost non-stop swimming, running and tackling assault courses. Every trainee is required to put maximum effort into every test on every occasion. The minimum score is raised after every discipline is completed and every trainee has to better his previous score. As the instructors never tire of telling the recruits, ‘The only easy day was yesterday.’
One of the toughest challenges is the obstacle course, which looks like a giant sandpit with telephone poles assembled in a wide variety of structures. Once a week for an hour or two the recruits are ordered to dash around the pre-ordained circuit, which demands much running, jumping, net-climbing, crawling under barbed wire, hopping from pole to pole and hauling the body up and over high wooden walls. And every week every recruit must better his previous time.
The recruits spend much of their day in the water, generally the Pacific Ocean, which for most of the year is cold, sometimes so cold that recruits suffer hypothermia. Then the recruit must stand in the chill wind on the beach, shivering from the cold. Some have died.
And after five weeks of that comes what is aptly named ‘Hell Week’. This begins shortly after midnight, when instructors wake up recruits with their own alarm, firing M60 blanks and artillery simulators, creating a deafening noise designed to temporarily traumatise the recruits. For the following six days the recruits are allowed twenty minutes’ sleep a day, and have to move from one discipline to another all the time. They will run on the beach, carry out boat drills, do PT, swim and then start again.
As the US Special Forces handbook states:
One day melts into another without rest. There is no alternative but to tough it out, drive through the fatigue and keep doing what they tell you to do. It is a test of mental toughness as much as the powers of physical endurance. After four days or so people start to hallucinate. And some people start to quit. Hell Week is the most important week of the whole BUDS training programme, a physical and mental challenge that is intended to put the trainees under stress that is supposed to approach that of actual combat.
Phase Two teaches recruits everything there is to know about diving operations, including scuba diving, closed-circuit rebreathing systems and the physiology of diving. They learn how to deal with equipment failures, lost regulators and the hazards of nitrogen narcosis. In Phase Three the recruits learn the art of underwater demolition, land navigation, explosives, small unit tactics, abseiling and the use of SEAL weapons.
At any time during the six-month course any recruit can quit voluntarily, but anyone who does so must face great humiliation. The recruit stands on green-painted frog footprints in the main gymnastics area, holds the lanyard of a ship’s bell and rings the bell three times. He then turns, places his green helmet liner on the pile of liners of other ‘quitters’ and marches off.
The BUDS training schedule has been criticised for unnecessary extremes; the injuries, the high levels of stress and the humiliation are all far more than anyone in civilian life ever endures. And yet the recruits are pushed to these extremes so that when they actually face action they have the mental and physical strengths to survive.
If and when the recruit passes those tough tests he moves to Fort Benning, in Georgia, for the five-week Basic Airborne Course, in order to become a fully qualified paratrooper. Compared to BUDS, the parachute course is a doddle.
And when this is completed the recruit is put on probation for six months, during which time he can still be failed if his team mates find he isn’t up to scratch. At the end of this period a few young men will be entitled to pin the big, gold symbol of Naval Special Warfare on their chests and finally call themselves SEALs.
Despite the explosion of Special Forces soldiers the world over, there is still the big question which soldiers everywhere talk about, argue about and want an answer to: ‘What makes a Special Forces soldier?’
The answers come thick and fast from various sources. Robin Neillands, in his book In The Combat Zone, sums up the view of many when he says:
In my opinion there are some folks who are just instinctive warriors. Combine that instinct with the pioneering spirit … and the titillating rush of a little or a lot of danger and you get the special soldier. Maybe it is someone who just wants to be different, for whom the commonplace, the safe and the banal is simply not enough. Someone who wants to look back at their life and believe that they did something to change the course of history.
The Special Forces calls a category of its operations DAs – Direct Actions – and maybe therein lies the clue. Forget all the complications of bureaucratic soldiering, just point us at the bad guys and let ’er rip. Those of us who are the breed know one another … a few words of conversation and the ‘duffers’ are separated from the long-ball hitters. It doesn’t take a ton of words from a Special Soldier’s mouth to let another Special Soldier know that they are warrior kin.
Finally, many senior NCOs involved in training would-be Special Forces soldiers have identified another important reason why young men, despite knowing that the rejection rate is very high and the course unbelievably demanding, want to join these elite forces. They believe that what initially motivates these young men – mostly in their mid-to late twenties – to join is simply an addiction to adrenalin. Such a man is seeking to gain respect and to prove himself among young men he already respects, to achieve an ambition which the world respects and admires, and to prove to himself that he is one of the few, the select, the best.
APPENDIX 1
THE WORLD’S LEADING SPECIAL FORCES
United States
US Army: 75th Ranger Regiment; 160th Special Operations Aviation
Regiment (Airborne); US Army Special Operations Command (USASOC)
US Navy: Sea, Air, Land Forces (SEALs)
US Air Force: Special Operations Squadrons
Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC)
United Kingdom
16 Air Assault Brigade, including HQ and Signal Squadron; Pathfinder
Platoon, Army Air Corps; 7th Para RHA; 21st Defence Battery, RA;
9th Parachute Squadron RE; RAF Support Helicopter Force;
47 Air Despatch Squadron
Parachute Regiment
Royal Marines
Special Air Service (SAS)
Special Boat Service (SBS)
Gurkha Regiment
France
Commandement des opérations spéciales (COS)
1 Régiment parachutiste d’infanterie de marine (I RPIMa)
Détachement aérien des opérations spéciales (DAOS)
Groupement spécial autonome (GSA)
Commandement des fusiliers marins commandos (COFUSCO)
Commando parachutiste de l’air no. 10 (CPA 10)
Escadrille des hélicoptères spéciaux (EHS)
Division des opérations spéciales (DOS)
Germany
Gebirgsjäger (Mountain Infantry Di
vision)
Fallschirmjäger (Parachute Infantry Brigade)
Kommando Spezialkrafte (Commando Brigade)
Russia
Spetsnaz (Spetsialnoje Naznachenie – forces of Special Designation)
Razvedchiki (Long-range and airborne operations)
Naval Spetsnaz (Amphibious reconnaissance and operations)
Morskaya Pekhota (Marine Commandos)
Belgium
Paratroop Commando Brigade
1st Battalion (Paratroopers and commandos)
Frogmen (Trained on lines of Britain’s Special Boat Service)
Italy
Alpini Brigades (Mountain fighters)
Raggruppamento Anfibio San Marco (Rapid intervention force)
Commando Raggruppamento Subacqui ed Incursori (Comsubin)
(Assault divers)
Gruppo Operativo Incursori (GOI) (Includes combat divers, parachutists, helicopter-borne commandos)
Netherlands
Nederlands Korps Mariniers (KNKM) (Special amphibious force)
1st Marine Battalion and 7 Troop SBS (Amphibious force capable of operating worldwide)
Bijzondere Bijstands Eenheid (BBE) (Counter-terrorist unit)
Korps Commandotroepen (KCT) (Commandos)
108 Special Forces Company (Commando special operations)
11th Air Mobile Brigade (Rapid-deployment airborne special forces)
Spain
Fuerzo de Acción Rápido (FAR) (Rapid-reaction force)
Brigada Paracaidista (BRIPAC) (Parachute Brigade)
Unidad Especial de Buceadores de Combate (UEBC) (Water-borne special forces)
Death Before Dishonour - True Stories of The Special Forces Heroes Who Fight Global Terror Page 24
