The Regiment

by Michael Asher

  Frequently they would arrive at a checkpoint to be given a task of mental arithmetic to solve, or a grid reference that had to be memorized: their last RV of the day might turn out to be that reference. Peter Ratcliffe recalled reaching the final RV of one trek in teeming rain, and climbing exhausted into a three-tonner. The moment the candidates had settled in, the DS ordered them to get off and hike another twenty klicks (kilometres). They had marched only about four hundred metres when the staff told them they’d been conned: the exercise really was over. By that time at least one of their number had dropped out, unable to face another twenty-kilometre tab.

  It was in the course of these marches, alone, cold, soaked through, desperately following a compass across streams, clambering up hillsides through fog or lashing winds, that the candidate discovered whether he really wanted to ‘be SAS’. ‘Operating at or beyond my normal limit,’ Peter de la Billière wrote, ‘I was plagued by the constant worry that in the rain, mist and darkness, I might not be able to find the next rendezvous … My morale sunk to its lowest ebb. I was on the verge of asking myself … whether this whole endeavour really was for me.’13 Ken Connor, whose navigation wasn’t his strongest point, suffered similar moments of doubt. ‘Often I thought that it was only me against the world,’ he said. ‘There were lots of times on the marches [when I thought] is this really worth the effort?’14

  The successive marches slowly took their toll – many candidates developed blisters; almost all had shoulder- and back-sores where the Bergen straps had cut into their flesh. The object was to wear them down gradually by attrition. For those who decided it was worth it, the last ‘Endurance March’, known as the ‘Long Drag’, was a killer. It was forty-six miles alone carrying a thirty-kilo pack, in perhaps twenty hours, starting at midnight. Candidates weren’t told the actual deadline, which the DS adjusted according to the season: there were two selections a year, summer and winter. ‘Winter Selection was … much harder than the summer course,’ wrote Robin Horsfall, ‘because of the terrible mountain weather.’15 Summer or winter, no one who survived the Long Drag ever remembered it as being a walkover: Peter Ratcliffe described it as ‘gut-twisting’, while another 22 SAS vet, Barry Davies, called it ‘a real bitch’. For most, it would remain a nodal point of their lives.

  Those who finished the Long Drag in time knew that they’d passed the test-phase – they were ‘almost’ in the Regiment. They still had to pass a combat survival and resistance to interrogation exercise. ‘Combat survival’ was preceded by training from SAS instructors, and civilians including gamekeepers and Home Office experts, on setting snares, rigging gill-nets, slaughtering and butchering animals and birds, starting fires and cooking in extreme conditions, and the identification of edible or useful plants. They were also given lectures on dog-evasion by Royal Army Veterinary Corps officers. Candidates were then strip-searched and sent off alone, at night, in a wilderness area in Wales, with orders to evade the infantry battalion sent to track them down – the hunters usually had tracker dogs. Most candidates were caught, tied up, blindfolded, thrown into a vehicle and dumped at an ‘interrogation centre’. The few that weren’t caught had orders to give themselves up at a certain time. The longer the candidate remained at large, the shorter his confinement in the ‘interrogation’ phase.

  This lasted up to forty-eight hours, and consisted mainly of long periods of sensory deprivation, standing against a wall in ‘maximum stress’ position, on fingertips and toes, with a sack over the head. Candidates were manhandled, kicked, rammed into walls and obstacles, humiliated by being urinated on, or even stripped naked in front of women and verbally abused. Occasionally there would be accidents, including broken bones, but some early ploys, including manacling candidates blindfold to a railway line in front of an apparently oncoming locomotive, were soon ruined when word of the bluff spread through the grapevine.

  Periodically, candidates would be marched into an interrogation room, where the sack would be whipped off their heads and they would be questioned by a man in a foreign army uniform – in actual fact an officer of the specialist Joint Services Interrogation Wing. A candidate was permitted to give his name, rank, number and date of birth. Any other utterance – even a simple ‘yes’ or ‘no’ – resulted in automatic failure.

  Some successful SAS-men thought the resistance to interrogation course unrealistic in the sense that it was only a pale imitation of the treatment an SAS soldier could expect as a real prisoner. This is undoubtedly the case, yet the RTI course, like Selection itself, had a function quite apart from the practical one – it was a unique initiation ritual, as vital and as life-changing as the Sun Dance Ceremony of the old plains Indians.

  Later, an extra phase of Selection was brought in for regular candidates – ‘Jungle Selection’ – in which potential SAS-men relived the Regiment’s experience in Malaya. This phase lasted five weeks, and usually took place in Belize or Brunei. After two weeks of lectures on jungle warfare and survival, followed by daily exercises, candidates were placed in four-man patrols and sent off into the bush. The jungle phase had a social aspect. ‘Most of the tests undertaken in the tropics were designed to put each small team under intense pressure,’ wrote Robin Horsfall; ‘staff could see whether students were able to control their tempers and do their share of the work.’16

  The emphasis on ‘personality and character’ in Selection started under the command of Peter de la Billière, who felt that the physical standards of Selection had become almost impossibly demanding, and that the procedure might exclude those who were not at their best under test conditions: ‘This is where the personal judgement … of a Commanding Officer can play an important role,’ he wrote.

  The danger of the personality-oriented approach was that it allowed a subjective element to creep back into what had originally been as objective a test as it was possible to design. Dare Newell had declared that Selection was ‘designed rather to find the individualist with a sense of self-discipline than the man who is primarily a good member of a team’.17 De la Billière’s ‘relaxation’ was a return to Paddy Mayne’s dictum that he ‘had a blueprint of the ideal SAS man in his head’. The ‘Commanding Officer’s judgement’ could only ever be subjective – de la Billière himself praised John Wood-house for his ability to perceive that ‘the judgement of personalities was subjective, and always needed a double check’.18 If Selection was subject ultimately to the ‘CO’s judgement’, then the inevitable outcome would be a unit consisting purely of men whom the Commanding Officer liked.

  This opened a dangerous avenue back to the old ‘people-like-us-he’s-a-good-chap’ type of elitism that had been the hallmark of the crack units of Victorian times. ‘They [the SAS] do not want people who are emotionally stable,’ wrote Peter Watson, author of the classic study of the psychological aspects of soldiering, War on the Mind. ‘Instead they want forthright individuals who are hard to fool and not dependent on orders.’19

  Despite carping from various sources that Selection standards have gone down or up since its inception, though, the pass-rate has remained fairly constant, at around ten per cent – both for TA and regular SAS. Following the publicity surrounding the Iranian Embassy siege, 21 SAS (Artists’) was inundated with candidates, so many of whom turned up armed with knives and other offensive weapons that the Regiment had to hire civilian security-men to frisk them. Of the one hundred and twenty volunteers who presented themselves at Chelsea Barracks in the weeks after the siege, most were blown off by a few circuits round the drill-square. Only eleven passed the course.

  This was exactly the same proportion who had passed Peter Ratcliffe’s regular course eight years ealier. ‘One hundred and twenty men had started out on Selection,’ he recalled. ‘Eleven of us had got through. And I was one of them. I was in the SAS. Although I was careful not to let anyone see it, it was the proudest moment of my life. It remains so to this day.’20

  75. ‘When fighting for your life, you’ve got to enjoy it’

>   At about 1100 hours on the morning of 30 April 1964, Major Peter de la Billière logged an urgent radio message in his ops tent at Thumier, sixty miles north of Aden, in south-western Arabia. It came from Captain Robin Edwards, whose nine-man patrol was scrimmed up in two stone sangars under the peak of Jebel Ashqab, about six miles to the north-east. Edwards’s patrol had just taken out an Arab goatherd of the Qutaybi tribe, who had wandered near their position. He’d been blotted with a single shot.

  Herders were a hazard that had plagued SAS ops in the desert ever since Bill Fraser’s patrol had gone for Ajadabiyya. One of the amazing things about Arabia, de la Billière commented, was that if you halted even for a few minutes in an apparently desolate spot, someone – usually a herder – would pop up. ‘It was simply not worth being spotted,’ he said.1 In the earlier case, Fraser had let the shepherd go. Edwards’s decision to shoot the tribesman was, said SAS vet Ken Connor, ‘questionable … from both a moral and a tactical point of view’.2

  The shot quickly roused armed warriors in the village of Shi’b Taym, a cluster of mud-brick buildings below them, only a thousand paces away. Soon a knot of bearded men in white dishdashas and looped headcloths, carrying .303 Lee-Enfields and curved daggers in their belts, gathered around the body. They evidently thought the goatherd had been killed by an accidental discharge. They were soon persuaded otherwise, when 7.62mm rounds started slatting down on them. Several took hits. The rest scattered into the rocks.

  De la Billière hadn’t seen Edwards’s lying-up place, but was aware it was wide open. He kicked himself for not having spent time helping the troop officer to select a better one before the op. To the patrol, the place had looked good in darkness, but first light had revealed that it was ten metres below the highest ridge on the jebel, and within easy small-arms range. Both de la Billière and Edwards knew that once the Arabs got up to the ridge, they could drop fire down into the sangars. It would be as easy as potting ducks on a pond. De la Billière also knew that Edwards was out of range of the Royal Horse Artillery battery near his post. After considering it for a minute, he phoned the RAF Air Support Officer, Squadron Leader Roy Bowie, and asked for a team of Hawker Hunter fighter-bombers, based at Aden, to be put on stand-by.

  Edwards’s patrol had ducked out of Saracen armoured-personnel carriers three miles inside enemy territory not long after last light the previous day. The APCs had been shot up on the way, and had kept enemy heads down with .50 Brownings mounted on their turrets. The SAS had piled out unnoticed under covering fire. Their mission was to tab into the Radfan hills, sixty miles north of Aden city, and reach a position in the Wadi Taym, codenamed ‘Rice Bowl’. The SAS half troop were pathfinding for an op by the Paras and Royal Marines, whose target was the Danaba basin, a cultivated area in the Wadi Taym. At Rice Bowl they would secure a DZ for a drop by a Para company, and mark it with an Aldis lamp.

  The march in, up the Wadi Thabwa, had looked easy enough, but given the conditions the target was probably too far for the patrol to have made comfortably by first light. That was the first mistake. The situation had been made worse, though, by the fact that Tpr. Nick Warburton, the patrol signaller, was suffering from food poisoning. Warburton, an energetic ex-National Service Sapper, had been OK before the op. He tramped on doggedly with severe stomach-cramps, lugging his twenty-kilo A41 voice-radio, but was soon left behind. The patrol had to stop twice to let him catch up.

  Though the Wadi Thabwa cut directly through the hills to the target area, Edwards had decided to slog up its sides and broach the four-thousand-foot Jebel Ashqab, a diamond-faceted hogsback dominating the south side of the wadi. From here, in daylight, ‘Rice Bowl’ and an adjacent feature, ‘Cap Badge’, would be clearly visible. Hitting a ridge at 0200 hours, Edwards located two ancient stone sangars that seemed like an ideal defensive position. These sangars were testimony to the tribal wars and vendettas that had raged across these hills since time immemorial. It probably seemed to the patrol unlikely that the hillmen, skilled in the use of ground, would have sited them in a place open to dropping fire from above. This was the second mistake.

  Edwards, ex-Somerset & Cornwall Light Infantry, a broad-shouldered, good-natured Cornishman from Padstow, was on his first mission with the Regiment. He was legendary, though, for having fought his way back to fitness after a bout of polio that had struck him immediately after he’d passed Selection. He was a close friend of de la Billière, who’d been back with 22 SAS since January as A Squadron boss, after his stint as adjutant, 21 SAS, and a two-year tour in Aden attached to the Federal Regular Army.

  Trouble in south-western Arabia had flared up in 1962, when a Soviet-backed military coup toppled the traditional ruler of North Yemen, the Imam al-Badr. The revolutionary government was aided by the USSR’s proxy, the nationalist Egyptian president, Gamal ‘Abd an-Nasser. Egyptian troops and aircraft had been deployed. Since then, the Imam’s supporters had been waging a guerrilla campaign, funded by the Saudis, abetted by a certain Major Johnny Cooper, ex-Sultan of Oman’s Armed Forces, and a group of serving and ex-SAS-men. This ‘blanket’ campaign was organized by no less a personage than David Stirling, and coordinated by Lt.Col. Jim Johnson, commanding officer, 21 SAS.

  Aden was one of Britain’s oldest colonies. Adopted in 1839 as a coaling-station on the sea-lane to India, it was also of strategic importance on the Babal-Mandab – the ‘door’ to the Red Sea. In the early sixties Britain had stitched together a Federation of more than two dozen Sheikhdoms extending inland over an area of about a hundred thousand square miles of mountain and desert. The Arab nationalists in North Yemen, though, were intent on exporting the civil war to the British-controlled Federation, both through the hill tribes of the Radfan, and the folk of Aden city itself. An emergency had been declared that December, but Britain had lost the ‘hearts and minds’ of the locals from the start by announcing that she would vacate the area within two years. The hill tribes could hardly be expected to show loyalty to a power that was soon to abandon them.

  De la Billière had arrived in Aden in April to conduct a recce for A Squadron, which was earmarked for a desert training exercise there. On discovering that a combined group of British and Federation forces – Radforce – was about to launch an op against dissident tribesmen in the Radfan, though, de la Billière importuned the local C-in-C, Lt. Gen. Sir Charles Harington, to give the SAS a part in it. Radforce included 3 Para and 45 Commando, but had no deep-penetration troops. De la Billière suggested deploying SAS patrols to secure DZs, vector in air-strikes, direct artillery-fire, and supply intel on enemy movements.

  Harington leapt at the chance. All that was left was for de la Billière to persuade his commanding officer, Lt. Col. John Woodhouse, who had taken over the hot-seat in 22 SAS a year earlier, that the training ex should be scrapped in favour of a live operation. Woodhouse didn’t need much persuading. He was constantly on the alert for new jobs. A Squadron arrived on 22 April and was at the forward operating base at Thumier within eighteen hours.

  This was de la Billière’s first op as squadron commander, and he found it unexpectedly frustrating. He saw his tours with 22 SAS as a chance to get to the sharp end, but as officer commanding, his task was to coordinate patrols from the forward operating base rather than leading from the front. He confessed that this presented him with a dilemma. ‘I hated sending other people into danger while I sat back in relative comfort and safety,’ he wrote.3 It was only when the Regiment’s 2IC, forty-one-year-old Second World War vet Major Mike Wingate-Gray, Black Watch, arrived at Thumier that de la Billière had felt justified in heading patrols.

  Patrols went out for four to five days. Conditions were even harsher than de la Billière remembered from his time on the Jebel Akhdar five years earlier, and certainly much worse than in Malaya. In daytime, the sun napalmed them. Air temperatures often clocked fifty Celsius, and the naked rocks mopped up heat, nudging the surface up to eighty Celsius – hot enough to scorch bare flesh or fry an egg. There was no ope
n water, and SAS-men carried only two litres each, plus a plastic container with an extra four litres per patrol. That gave the men a total of three litres for the entire period, when the minimum body requirement in these climes was at least eight litres daily. ‘Even with every precaution taken,’ de la Billière admitted, ‘we finished patrols in a state of utter exhaustion.’4

  Now, de la Billière was back behind a radio set in the ops centre, grokking the situation in the jebel. Within two hours of the first shot, Qutaybi tribesmen had crawled up to the ridge overlooking the sangars and located the SAS position. They’d started wellying pot-shots at the patrol; .303 rounds droned, whining off rock, grooving stone. Every time an SAS-man poked his nose out, a slug fractured granite, spattering fragments in his face. Almost everyone had been jagged, but as yet there weren’t any serious wounds. The SAS replied only when they clocked a good target. They carried a hundred and twenty rounds apiece, and two hundred for the Bren, and were trained to scrooge their ammo. The Arabs fired and dodged, using the ground expertly. It was hard to get a clear shot.

  De la Billière knew that these Arabs were hard fighters. Like the Jebel Akhdar folk, they’d been raised in a milieu of constant eye-for-an-eye feuds. In Arab culture there were two kinds of tribes: ‘warrior’ tribes (Qabayil) and ‘weak’ tribes (Du’af). The Qutaybi were Qabayil, and proud of it – to them, courage and endurance were cardinal virtues. De la Billière knew they would close in on the nine-man patrol sooner or later, and when they did there’d be a massacre. He decided to call in the Hunters.

  Eight minutes later, Edwards and his men scoped the aircraft trail-blazing vapour fumes. Signaller Nick Warburton was patched through to Roy Bowie at Thumier, who was talking the pilots in. The patrol watched rockets reefing down into the ridge, erupting in splatters of white smoke and debris. The sharp tang of cordite pillioned the scorched-stone smell of the hills. The Hunters worked in duck-and-drake pairs, fastballing over the position for fifteen or twenty minutes at a time. They plunged into strafing mode. 20mm cannon zipped ladders of dirt and rock splinters across the hills. Flint-dust whiffled up and drifted. The planes skimmed in so low that their 20mm brass shell-cases creased the boys’ heads. When they peeled off, heading back to Aden, they’d be replaced by another pair. Between noon and sunset successive pairs whammed off a hundred and twenty-seven rockets, and scattergunned seven thousand rounds of twenty-mil.