Life Under Fire

by Jason Fox

  That might help to explain some of what happened in Series Five when we introduced ‘the Marksmen Test’, a trial of wits designed to see which recruits could function most effectively and calmly under extreme pressure. The rules of engagement were fairly straightforward. On the night before the event, we informed those eighteen or so individuals still standing (roughly half were men, half were women) that they were now functioning on Card Alpha – a combat situation in which armed forces were allowed to engage in violence if they believed their lives, or the lives of others, were being threatened. The following day we took them to a firing range and performed a series of drills with a blank-firing AK-47. We then thrashed them in the hills with several endurance sessions so that everything they’d learned with the weapon quickly faded from memory. But as the work came to a close, the recruits were dragged to a nearby hill, before individually being pushed, pulled and hooded on their way to a tunnel. They became disorientated. Each recruit was a little panicked.

  Which was where the fun began.

  A smoke grenade exploded nearby. I let off a few rounds with the AK-47 and the barking sound of gunfire roared around the tunnel. Billy then yelled into their faces.

  ‘We’re under attack! What are you going to do? What the fuck are you going to do?’

  The hood was ripped off and the recruit was then shoved towards the darkness. Each time, the individual involved appeared visibly shocked, but our psychological assault was only the warm-up. At the other end of the tunnel, a man then jumped into view. He was running towards the recruit with an assault rifle, shouting and screaming. Another AK-47 was then handed over to the recruit.

  ‘What are you going to do?

  ‘What the fuck are you going to do?’

  In combat, this was a scenario that required icy calm. The individual running up the tunnel towards the recruit wasn’t yet confirmed as a threat under the Card Alpha rules of engagement, nor was his weapon raised, and an operator could only fire if they believed their life, or the lives of others, was under threat. In this case, the person running up the tunnel was a friendly force. As he approached, the Canadian flag on his uniform became visible in the gloom, but on the first occasion that the Marksmen Test was incorporated, all but one of the women remaining on the show reacted too quickly and opened fire immediately, without assessing the situation, while five out of the nine or so remaining blokes passed. Once the shooting had stopped, the approaching soldier stood silently in front of the recruit and pointed to his badge.

  Billy then increased the anxiety levels.

  ‘What the fuck are you doing?’ he shouted. ‘He’s one of ours! Why did you shoot him? Now you’ve got to explain to his wife and kids that he’s dead.’

  The mood was heavy. From the sidelines I noted every recruit’s reactions as the truth was revealed to them, and for the women on the show the impact was visibly upsetting. Some of them even started to cry. It was a real eye-opener: I realized that in scary situations, such as the Marksmen Test, the female recruits on SAS: Who Dares Wins became more emotionally driven than the men and allowed their feelings to take charge, while over fifty per cent of the blokes on the show were happy to wait it out. They paused and thought: Hang on, something’s not right. Most of the time they held off from pulling the trigger. (Though I wonder if the reaction would have been similar if a woman had been shouting the instructions rather than Billy. That would make for an interesting test.)

  The emotion flooding through the female recruits was an understandable reaction, not only given the scientific findings by the University of Basel, but due to the way society has been shaped through history. A man being approached by a shouting stranger in a tunnel is likely to think: What the fuck’s going on here? This is a bit sketchy … A woman will probably imagine the worst-case scenario: I’m about to get attacked. It’s unsurprising that they might feel more vulnerable as a result.

  Without exception, everybody – male and female – who endured the Marksmen Test was shocked by its emotional impact, probably because it delivered an insight into some of the more horrific realities of military operations. However, all of us have the potential to manage those unsettling emotions, with a little help from a technique I’ve called ‘the Cigar Moment’, which I illustrate in Phase Nine.

  MEN AND WOMEN: WHO HIDES BEHIND WHO?

  Without doubt, the levels of resilience and determination of the groups within SAS: Who Dares Wins diminish when the genders are mixed – the momentum drains away. That’s not to say it’s the fault of the female recruits or the males, but for some reason the mental grit of the collective seems to weaken. Some of the blokes become moody; they grumble and use the women around them as an excuse to put in less of a shift. Their response to sharing team tasks with members of the opposite sex often appears defeatist, the general attitude being: How the fuck are we supposed to complete this task when we’ve got to work with physically weaker women? Meanwhile, a number of women involved have happily lived up to a stereotypical position; they shy away from conflict and fail to impose themselves on tasks in a positive fashion. Their attitude appears to be: We’re physically weaker than these lads – what’s the point of putting up a fight? As a result, both groups become less productive.

  One example of this took place during Series Five, when we arranged for a CASEVAC drill in which two male recruits had been incapacitated. Two mixed groups, Team Alpha and Team Bravo, were tasked with carrying them away. That meant that every woman still remaining on the show had to help with the heavy lifting alongside the men, but rather than involving themselves aggressively, nearly all the females apart from one (Carla Devlin, who we’ll get on to later; interestingly she passed the Marksmen Test too) stood back and let the males take charge. Some of them started carrying their teammates’ bergens, rather than helping with the lifting or navigation – one of them even fainted as a result. Meanwhile, the blokes involved didn’t put in nearly as much legwork as they had in previous tests. In their heads, it was as if the women were giving them a ready-made excuse for failure, and their lack of positivity soon showed. From where I was standing they seemed sloppy and lazy.

  The Directing Staff looked at one another in disbelief until, eventually, we decided to separate the sexes. Once everybody had been pooled into same-gender groups the work rate immediately improved. It was so weird. The women became stronger when lifting the injured recruits, as did the men’s team, suggesting that each gender group had hidden behind the other. With their excuses stripped away, the females suddenly realized they couldn’t hide behind the men and they imposed themselves on the test. Without a get-out-of-jail-free card to fall back on, the blokes stepped up to the plate with more aggression. Everybody improved as a result. The test became a race. The blokes finished first, but the women were only ninety seconds behind.

  These reactions might partly be due to genetics. The SRY gene, which directs male development, is believed to cause aggression and the ‘fight-or-flight’ response. In 2012, researchers from Melbourne’s Prince Henry’s Institute of Medical Research wanted to discover why men tended to adopt a more aggressive position when experiencing negative emotions, and why women took a ‘tend-and-befriend’ route, which was more passive. The SRY gene found in men, they explained, was a sex-determining gene which ‘secretes hormones that masculinise the developing body’. It’s been discovered that SRY also lives in some of the major organs, such as the brain, lungs and heart. Dr Joohyung Lee, who helped conduct the study, argued that SRY affects a bloke’s neural and cardio activity, which greatly influenced their response to stress. In other words, they either attacked or retreated.

  Meanwhile, many women tend to be calmed down by the production of oestrogen and ‘internal opiates’, both of which help them to keep any aggressive reactions at a simmer. (Though given the results of the Marksmen Test, I could argue that this response differs according to the risk involved.) The theory is that they naturally adopt a tend-and-befriend approach – they tend to their young and befr
iend others – because increasing the size of their social group like this increases their odds of survival in times of danger – the idea being that a predator will be less likely to attack a group than it would an individual. Could it be that genes dissuaded the female recruits from showing aggression during the CASEVAC test? Certainly it might explain why the women hiding behind the men didn’t challenge the decisions being made. Likewise, this scientific theory might also be the reason why the men behaved the way that they did – had the blokes hiding behind the women taken the ‘flight’ option in the fight-or-flight response?

  So what can men and women working together do to overcome these issues? The answer, as with most problems, lies in communication and commitment. If an individual (male or female) is clearly weaker than the rest of the group in some areas, they should look to involve themselves in positive ways rather than hanging back, or overloading themselves with their teammates’ equipment.

  A good way to start would be to accept the differences as a group and use them as an advantage. In the case of the CASEVAC exercise, the weaker recruits should have offered to guide the stronger team members as they moved; during rest periods they could also have held the stretcher in situ for thirty seconds while the stronger individuals took a quick breather. Those resting would have been able to push themselves harder in the knowledge that there would be periodic breaks. Confident that they were working with equally dynamic partners, they would also have felt less scared of failure.

  Too often in team events, individuals or small groups attempt to fit square pegs into round holes. They assign roles according to position and status rather than suitability. For example, the most senior member of a start-up company might be assigned the job of charming new investors at a conference, when it’s the second-in-command who’s actually the most engaging and articulate member of the group. In an elite military setting, however, everyone was put into operational teams according to their skill sets. The demolitions guy concentrated on his potentially lethal explosives; the radio operator concentrated on connecting all parties involved in the mission; the medic patched up the injured. There was no ego or rank, or disputes over who was best at what. Instead, the requirements for the mission were clinically assessed and a team of experts was put together according to suitability.

  It takes courage for a non-military group to get to that point, though. It’s hard for people to say, I can’t do this. The answer is to respond with a positive suggestion. But I can do that. Be bold. Commit. A team can only move as quickly as their slowest members, so work to turn those individuals into assets.

  THE SUBTLE ART OF IGNORING GENDER DISTRACTIONS

  If men and women are to work together in a Special Forces capacity then the disruptive issues that can potentially divide them will have to be overcome. In other words, they must shut out all the distractions.

  One female recruit to SAS: Who Dares Wins who managed this trick was Carla Devlin. A former Olympic rower and a mum of four, Carla arrived on the civilian version of the show in 2020 with something to prove: her profile had dropped a little since her appearance in Beijing 2008, and in 2018 she’d been diagnosed with breast cancer. Thankfully, she’d pulled through, but the worst-case scenario must have flashed through Carla’s mind when doctors had initially diagnosed her condition because her mum had died from the same illness and, by the sound of it, Carla had endured a rough ride in the fallout – and she was tough. For whatever reason, gender didn’t bother Carla and she wouldn’t allow the blokes in her group to intimidate her. She certainly wasn’t going to allow men to use her femininity as an excuse. She ignored the complicated relationships between the genders, borne out of genetics and centuries of real life, and thrived throughout the season.

  From the off, I was inspired by Carla. She’d achieved so much in life. Rising up to a physical or emotional challenge was easy for her, so much so that at one point I thought she wasn’t taking the show seriously. Mentally she seemed to find every situation a breeze, no doubt because she was used to being thrashed as part of her Olympic training. I’d even dragged her in for questioning because her attitude had annoyed me. We’d been forcing the recruits into a position of physical fatigue by working them in the freezing cold, but Carla had shrugged off the stress. She had a look that said, ‘Oh yeah? You’re going to order me to run up this hill again, are you? No problem …’ Carla had realized it was all a game, like most soldiers do when they become a little longer in the tooth. And she didn’t want to play in the same way as the others. Instead, she cracked on and shut out all the distractions: discomfort, the cold, fear, and men and women living and working together. None of it was a problem.

  ‘You’re too clever for this shit,’ I said to her. ‘You don’t want to be doing this and I can see it.’

  Carla became defensive. ‘No, I really want to be here.’

  ‘This is not me having a go at you. I’m giving you a compliment.’

  I couldn’t get my head around her being there. Carla had beaten cancer. She had four kids at home. She was an Olympian. Why would she give a shit about being on SAS: Who Dares Wins? At that point I’d wanted to bin her off, but I was wrong about her commitment. Against all expectations, Carla made it to the final four of Season Five. She was forty. A recruit has to be pretty special to make it through to the last day, and not too many people of that age can make the distance. At the very end, the test that broke her was another physical thrashing. We’d pushed the recruits through the capture-and-interrogation process, which was usually the last challenge of the show, but rather than ending the work there we’d decided to maintain the element of shock. Just when the final four started to believe their suffering was over, another challenge was thrown in – an event we referred to as a ‘false ending’. The physical beastings started up again, and it was rough. In the end, the situation broke Carla and her armband, the identification number worn by every recruit, had to be taken away. She’d never have given it up on her own.

  When the show was finished, a bottle of gin arrived for every member of the DS, accompanied by a handwritten note. It was from Carla, which further underlined how wrong I’d been about her attitude. She was a better person than we were. On mine it read: ‘I know you thought I didn’t want to be there, but I did. I wasn’t too long in the tooth. I was finding out new things about myself.’

  It served as an inspirational lesson. Carla Devlin possessed the right mentality; she carried exactly the type of personality for a unique set of circumstances and would have probably thrived in a mixed environment within the military elite. The key, as she had discovered, was to shut out all distractions, which is a skill we can all lean in to when becoming more resilient in a team environment.

  But how can we do this?

  The answer is to focus on the endgame: What is it we’re trying to achieve? There’s usually a lot of external noise going on during the challenges we might be involved in, sometimes literally. Professional footballers have to deal with the pressure of playing before huge crowds of screaming fans and a lot of them are yelling abuse. To fret about the personal insults would be to fail, because any distractions at that level can make the difference between winning and losing. Those who go on to be great players are often the ones with the ability to tune out the distractions around them.

  It’s a skill I’ve often relied upon. While filming Season Five of SAS: Who Dares Wins, the recruits were ordered to perform a drown-proofing test in a natural pool. One by one, we tied their hands together and ordered them to take a deep breath before dropping to the bottom, then springing back up as soon as their feet touched the bed. There were tonnes of distracting factors. The camera crew was moving around me and the conditions were grim: the water was brutally cold. I know because I remained in the pool for the duration of the test as a safety supervisor and my head ached every time I dipped under the water. It was as if somebody had slapped me around the skull, and when I looked up I noticed snow at the top of the nearby mountains. But I stayed switc
hed on. I wasn’t bothered by the presence of a camera crew; I knew that if I did my job and the crew did theirs, everything would go according to plan. Instead, I focused on the safety of the recruits, ensuring the test was conducted exactly as it should have been. The distractions soon faded away.

  This same attitude has to be implemented in men and women when operating together in military situations. Any discomfort is an irrelevance; all efforts should be focused on the mission and how best to execute the established plan. If a woman is to make it into the military elite, it will only happen if everyone working around her can overcome the subtle and not-so-subtle differences between genders. The reality is this: in war there’s no time for niceties; there’s very little room for being squeamish or feeling uncomfortable in front of members of the opposite sex. Everybody has to be treated the same, regardless of gender. The only people that can operate in a hostile environment successfully are the Right People. And if that means a mixture of men and women working effectively and powerfully at the sharp end of military life, getting the job done, then who cares about the gender of the individuals in the group?

  OPERATIONAL DEBRIEF

  ❱❱ Gender is irrelevant when it comes to resilience. I know women who are as tough as nails and blokes who shrink at the first sign of a battle. Generally, there are two types of people when it comes to resilience: those that have it and those that haven’t yet found it.