by Bear Grylls
He handed over to the corporals, then turned and walked away.
No sooner was the briefing over, than the DS just turned and shouted at us to follow them.
They stormed ahead across the steep, marshy ‘moon-grass’, and within minutes they were what seemed like miles ahead of us all. They then stopped and waited – looking back, as we slowly reached them in a heaving gaggle spread out across the bogland.
We were all wet, muddy and looking like an utter shambles, heaving along under the weight of our packs.
In contrast, the DS looked crisp, fit and composed. They were never loud or aggressive, they were just indifferent. And they had been fast – very fast.
I had no idea how they had managed to cover almost a mile of steep, boggy ground in so little time – and look so unaffected.
They calmly told us that this was the sort of pace we would need to be doing as a ‘minimum’ speed later, during Selection. I tried not to think about that, but just told myself to keep up with them at all costs.
It was obvious that the gulf between a recruit and a badged SAS soldier was vast.
We started moving again and soon I began to feel stronger, as I got into my rhythm.
Under the DSs’ guidance, we practised crossing swollen streams with full kit, as well as carefully getting the feel of traversing the steep and exposed mountain faces with the weight of pack, webbing and rifle.
At 1.30 p.m. we had a short break to take on food and water, and we sat huddled in a group in a small gulley. But the stop didn’t last long, and soon we set off again for the next leg of the march, the final fifteen miles of the day.
As we headed up the next peak, I noticed all the other recruits alongside me: heads down, straining, with sweat pouring off their foreheads. No one spoke. We were all just busting our backsides to keep up the pace.
The last few miles along the ridge and down the other side of the mountain dragged on, until we finally reached the day-march’s end. We were told to rest up for an hour in the woods, check our feet, and take on board some food and water.
But this rest was made truly miserable by the swarms of summer midges that enveloped each of us.
I had never known them so thick in the air.
The army mosquito-repellent was utterly useless against them, and all it did was give the midges something to stick to, leaving you to wipe off swarms of them with your hands.
All we wanted now was to get marching again, and to get the wind through our hair and the midges off our backs.
We were soon lined up again on parade, in the woods, and told: ‘Stand still and do not move.’
The air was so thick with midges that each breath you took you inhaled a mouthful of the brutes. All you wanted to do was scratch and brush them away from your face, and standing there, immobile, enveloped in the swarms, was truly hellish.
‘Stop moving,’ shouted one of the DS, who we had unofficially named ‘Mr Nasty’.
He then proceeded to stand in front of us, covered in midges as well, and watch us – waiting for one of us to quit.
I kept blinking my eyes and twitching my nose in a futile attempt to deter the midges that circled relentlessly around our heads. It felt like some old form of medieval torture, and the seconds went by like hours.
It was morale-sapping and miserable, but eventually after about forty-five minutes of this head messing, we were stood down, to await orders for the night-march.
It had been a simple reminder that mental strength was something that had to accompany the physical. And the physical is always driven by the mental.
It was a lesson that every one of us on that God-forsaken, midge-infested forest track was taught that day.
CHAPTER 43
The DS came forward and told us that the night’s march ahead would be an ‘educational introduction’ to the infamous moon-grass. This consisted of bogland – riddled with mile-upon-mile of tufts of clumpy grass, and ankle-twisting divots, that made any sort of progress almost impossible.
Over the following months we would learn to dread and hate this moon-grass. (Or ‘baby-heads’, as many of the recruits called it, as it resembled millions of small heads sticking out of the ground.)
That night I expected the worst, and I wasn’t disappointed.
Wading across mile after mile of these melon-sized clumps of weed tussocks was hellish. It was made worse by the fact that, in the darkness, each step you placed was a lottery as to whether you tripped or not.
Add to this the fact that much of the moon-grass also had razor-sharp, chest-high reeds growing out of it, and you can see why all the soldiers learnt to hate it so much.
In the pitch black my legs buckled and twisted on each step, and occasionally I’d slip in up to my thighs in stinking black, oozing mud.
Finally, as we came off the high plateau, we arrived at the perimeter fence of a farm beneath us.
We were warned to stay silent – the farmer had been known to chase lads on Selection off his land with a shotgun. This all just added to the excitement as we skirted cautiously round his house and over the fence.
After a final, fast and furious speed-march along forestry tracks in the dark, we reached our destination at about 3 a.m.
Three hours of precious rest lay ahead of us now, huddled in the woods.
These times of sleepless, wet, cold, waiting constituted some of the worst parts of Selection for me.
Physically your body was in bits: your knees, and the soles of your feet, would be swollen and stiff, and your body would be crying out for decent rest. But we rarely got more than three hours in-between marches – and it was neither long enough to rest, nor short enough to stay fired up on that exercise-high.
Instead, you would just get cold and stiff, and even more sleep-deprived and exhausted – it was a killer combination.
The SAS directing staff knew this.
The self-will needed to get back up, time and time again, to keep slogging over the mountains in the dark, whilst being soaking wet and cold, was just what they were looking for.
In those few hours’ reprieve, I would busy myself, sorting out my blistered feet, eating some food and heating up a hot drink. But after that was done I could only lie there waiting – waiting for that dreaded call to muster on parade for morning battle PT.
Each weekend this battle PT got more and more unpleasant, and harder and harder.
The next morning, in full kit, we paraded in the pre-dawn light. Everyone was shuffling around with stiff aching legs, and we all looked drained and exhausted. In contrast, the instructors were pacing around us. Hungry for blood.
Then at 0555 on the dot, the order went out.
‘Follow us, and keep up. This weekend, your performance has been appalling, and now you will pay.’
The DS set off at a pace down one of the forestry tracks, and we pulled on our packs and set out after them. Then the pace quickened to a level where we had to run to keep up – but running under so much weight was near impossible.
Within twenty minutes each of us was gasping and pouring with sweat, as we fought to keep up. An hour and a half later, that pace hadn’t eased one notch.
We had become this long straggle of moaning, exhausted bodies – dishevelled, and in no order – with about a mile between the front and last man. It was now broad daylight, and each and every man was dead on their feet.
I dragged myself along the final track, and finished somewhere in the middle of the group. But I was completely spent. I had nothing more I could give. Nothing.
If you had asked me to walk another fifty yards I would have struggled to manage it.
As I stood there, my sweat-drenched body steaming, one of the recruits started cursing and muttering quietly to himself.
‘I’ve had enough of this shit,’ he grumbled under his breath. ‘It’s bollocks. This isn’t soldiering, it’s sadism.’
Then he looked at me. ‘No one should be made to do this,’ he continued. ‘We are treated like pack mules,
and even pack mules would eventually die under this workload.’
I told him to hang on in there, and that he would have forgotten about all this by the end of the day, when he was in a warm shower. He then turned and just stared at me.
‘You know the difference between you and me, Bear? You’re just dumber than me.’ And with that, he turned, dropped his pack in a heap, walked over to the DS and said he wanted out.
The DS quietly directed the guy towards the trucks.
The recruit climbed aboard one, and I never saw him again. That was how it always happened.
They beat you down by quietly raising the bar ever higher and higher, until either you snapped or you failed to make the time.
As they always told us: ‘We don’t fail you, you fail yourself. If you beat the clock, and keep going, you will pass.’
On the journey back, sat huddled in the four-tonner, I thought about what that recruit had said: ‘You’re just dumber than me.’
Maybe he had a point.
I mean, getting thrashed senseless did feel pretty dumb – and then getting paid only £27 a day for the privilege of being thrashed felt even dumber.
But, that guy who quit also missed the real point. Good things come through grit and hard work, and all things worthwhile have a cost.
In the case of the SAS, the cost was somewhere around a thousand barrels of sweat.
Was it a price I was prepared to pay?
It was a question that Selection would give me plenty of time to ask myself.
CHAPTER 44
Selection had seemed to take over my every waking moment.
I’d been told this would happen, and had never really believed it – but it was true. Something that you put so much effort and time into is hard to switch off from.
The excitement of what had passed, and the trepidation of what was to follow, consumed me in the days off we had in-between.
Trucker and I would return to our ‘student’ life in Bristol, where friends wandered casually between lectures and the canteen.
We would tag along, and hang with them, but we would also maintain a little distance.
We avoided the drunken late nights and long, lazy lie-ins that so many of our student buddies seem to enjoy. Instead we would be up early training or prepping kit for what was always looming ahead.
Simply put, we both had a different purpose in our lives.
Our next exercise was in the Black Mountains in Wales. For some reason the dreaded midges were not out, maybe the altitude and wind. Whatever the reason, it came as a great relief.
This, now, was to be our first march in pairs, and not as a group, and I made sure I got coupled with Trucker (by doing some nifty manoeuvring in the line-up).
Each pair was set off at timed intervals, and Trux and I got away early at 6.30 a.m.
The sun was out, the morning flew by, and we made fast, but hot, progress across the mountains. Visibility was good, which made navigation a breeze, and we were full of confidence.
We soon reached a dam and had to make a decision.
We knew it was forbidden to cross a dam, in the same way that it was forbidden ever to use a footpath or forestry track. (Unless it was part of the dreaded morning battle PT.)
This was a simple rule on Selection to make sure that you got used to navigating properly and that the going underfoot was always hard, which it inevitably always was. (In fact I, still to this day, feel a bit guilty if I go hiking on a footpath – old habits die hard.)
But not crossing the dam meant that we would have to drop down and up the other side of the four-hundred-foot ravine beneath the dam.
Are we being watched by a DS, or can we risk it?
In the regiment’s spirit of ‘Who Dares Wins’ and all that, we climbed carefully over the locked gate and ran across the two-hundred-metre dam at a sprint.
All clear.
We then set about climbing up the steep face up to the next DS checkpoint some seven miles away.
Six hours into the march, though, we were both starting to wane.
The heat had been relentless, and when you are burning through six thousand calories a day, carrying a heavy pack, belt kit and rifle up and down steep mountains, then you need to make sure you are drinking enough.
We hadn’t been.
We had both been in that zone where we were moving well, feeling good and probably got a little over-confident. That would nearly cost us our chance of passing Selection.
We had one last climb up over a two-thousand-foot ridge before dropping down to the final checkpoint. But already I was struggling. I wasn’t sweating any longer, despite the heat and the exertion. That was a bad sign.
Each step up that steep face felt like I was carrying the world on my back. I felt dizzy, I felt delirious, and I had to keep sitting down.
In short, I had heat exhaustion.
I had never experienced this deliriousness and weakness before. The feeling of semi-consciousness, as if in a drunken stupor – and time and time again, I kept falling to my knees.
All you want to do is to stop and lie down, somewhere dark, quiet and cool. But you can’t. You have to drink, then get on and get moving – and hope the rehydration will take effect.
Eventually I crawled over the summit and let my body tumble down the other side towards the final RV. I checked in and then collapsed in the woods with the other recruits.
I had a screaming, migraine headache, and felt nauseous and light-headed. I needed to start rehydrating and getting a grip of myself, and fast.
Meanwhile, five other recruits had failed to complete the route, and two others had been picked up, all suffering from heatstroke. All were removed from the course.
Part of me envied them as I saw them sprawled in the medic’s truck, being well looked-after. It looked like welcome relief from what I was feeling.
But I knew that all I had to do was hang on in there. By this time the next day, it would be another test down and another step closer to my goal.
So I sat down and started to brew myself some warm, sweet tea, and hoped I would soon be able to open both eyes beyond a squint.
Before the night-march started, we were all called on parade early. This boded badly.
As we stood there, two recruits’ names were read out, and the individuals were called forward.
These two guys had been spotted crossing the dam earlier on in the day, and they were both quietly, and without fuss, RTU’d – or in our language, binned.
Trucker and I had got lucky, but we had also learnt another valuable lesson: if you are going to risk it all on an act of daring, then pick your moment, and don’t get caught.
By the time that we both set off for the night-march I was feeling a little stronger. I still had a headache, but I could stand without feeling faint. This was progress at least.
Trucker was also feeling like death, which was some consolation.
Luckily the route was relatively straightforward, and finally, at 3 a.m., and with a growing sense of strength (and also pride, that I had come through this and was feeling stronger again), I arrived back at our base camp in the woods.
I lay back and rested, awaiting the battle PT at 5.55 a.m.
The battle PT started out relatively straightforward – a three-mile pack run down a track along the valley floor.
Once again the group spread out, as the DS set a blistering pace, but we soon reached the end of the track where all the trucks were waiting for us.
I was feeling strong again now, and was almost enjoying the fact that I was managing to keep up, whereas almost everyone else was dragging behind.
At the point where I reckoned the DS should turn left towards the waiting four-tonner wagons, I saw the DS turn hard right and head straight up the sheer thousand-foot face to the ridge line.
It was then that the shouting really began, and this had hardly ever happened before.
CHAPTER 45
The DS always prided themselves on the fact that they neve
r needed to shout. Selection was hard enough as it was.
They were there, as they often told us, simply to run the course and observe.
But suddenly there had been a tempo change, and the shouting was now firm, directed and serious.
‘Move. Now,’ the DS shouted. ‘If we see any one of you walking, you are out, get it? This hill is to be run up.’
I did as I was told, turned away from the enticing trucks, and headed up the steep hill, following in the DS’s footsteps. I had to pace myself, I knew that.
This was a big hill, and with the weight of a heavy pack, it was going to be near impossible to run up it all the way.
I just had to make sure that I was not the first to be seen to slow. I dug in and started to breathe harder and harder.
Halfway up, the DS stopped, turned and watched us. I determined to keep running, however slowly, until I reached him, whatever the fatigue I felt.
Finally I reached him, somewhere in the middle of the group. My legs and shoulders felt like they were on fire, and my heart and lungs felt as if they would explode.
I looked down beneath us, to see the last few stragglers pulling themselves up the hill towards us. Two guys had been reduced to only a slow shuffle. I knew they were in trouble.
The DS had told us the parameters – run, you pass; walk, you fail.
‘Right, you lot, get back down to the track and into the four-tonners. And you,’ he barked, pointing at the last two men, ‘you follow me.’ Back at the track, as we all piled into the wagons in the muddy car park, relief swept over me. I watched out of the back of my Bedford truck as these two recruits who had faltered were led off to another truck.
That was the way it worked: once someone was failed they were kept apart from the rest of us. It helped build us together into a team, and it gave those of us still hanging on in there a certain pride that we were still in the right truck.
It wasn’t much, but it meant a lot to us.
For the next three weekends, the pace continued to build: the distances got longer, the weights got heavier and the pressure mounted.
