Break Point

by Matthew Ollerton

  Discovering you’re being observed and judged without you noticing can be very unnerving. But at least it flushes out some of the ‘DS watchers’, those recruits who look like Superman whenever the assessors are around but start to shirk whenever they’re not. I saw a lot of those guys during the Hills Phase. They tended not to last very long in the jungle, with its all-seeing eyes.

  Selection is about conquering your own mind. To do that, you have to learn to self-validate, which might simply mean telling yourself you’ve had a good day when you’ve got a bit of time on your hands. Because in a real combat situation, you’re not going to have someone patting you on the back and saying, ‘Well done! Great shooting. Would you like a hug?’

  One morning in the jungle, I was told to make my way to the helicopter landing site. When I got there, the training officer was standing in the middle. My immediate thought was, ‘Fuck. Is this the end? Have I failed again?’

  The officer said, ‘Do you know why you’re here?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Do you think you’ve done all right so far?’

  ‘Yeah, I think I’ve done everything I’ve been asked to do.’

  ‘Well done, we’ve seen enough.’

  That was that. I don’t think they were doing it out of the kindness of their hearts, I think they probably thought that because I’d been there before, I was being more helpful to my patrol than they were comfortable with.

  The helicopter came down, I jumped on to the outer skids and suddenly I was flying over the vast sea of broccoli, my whoops and hollers drowned out by the sound of the rotors. I spent the next two weeks sunbathing on the beach, catching stingray and supping beer. But not everyone had such a beautiful homecoming. Some were taken into a room and told that they’d failed. A lot of lads get binned at that point, which must be like making it through a 12-round title fight and losing on points. The bad news leaves a lot of very tough lads in floods of tears. But I wasn’t too worried. I had the widest smile of all.

  8

  SPECIAL, AT LAST

  Before I got to Hereford for my second round of skills training, I split up with Helen for a short while. So I was single, had nothing to worry about and was absolutely loving it. One Saturday, I decided to round the lads up for a night on the razzle. The plan was to get haircuts, buy some new clobber, have a bit of lunch, hit the town, sink some beers and hopefully still be able to talk to some women.

  Hair done, we headed to the shops. Most of the lads disappeared into Top Man or Next, but I was more into Armani and Gucci, so me and two lads called Zak and Chaz made our way to a boutique that sold all the top gear. I was flicking through the shirts, when all of a sudden I heard this scuffle. When I turned around, I saw the shop owner bent over and pulling up Chaz’s trouser leg, revealing a pair of jeans underneath. Ring any bells? Yep, this is exactly what I got nicked for when I was an out-of-control teenager. Back then, I thought I was a genius for thinking of it, as if I’d invented fire. Until the police told me it was one of the oldest tricks in the book and what an idiot I’d been.

  My mate managed to kick the shop owner off and legged it, before the shop owner closed the door, locked it and said to me, ‘You’re not going anywhere…’ I’d been minding my own business, so I wasn’t having any of it. But when I tried to walk past her, she started wrestling with me. Before I knew it, we’d toppled over, taken out a mannequin and fallen into the window. Imagine if you’d been window shopping in Hereford that day. And the town was mobbed with weekend shoppers.

  I managed to push her off and get through the door, before screaming down the street to the local car park. Heading back to Stirling Lines garrison, I couldn’t believe what had just happened. There was a helicopter buzzing overhead and I was thinking, ‘Fucking hell, they’ve scrambled a chopper to search for me.’ All sorts of crazy possibilities were going through my head. And the fact I’d done nothing wrong did nothing to allay my fears, because rolling about on the floor with a female shop owner and a mannequin is not a good look.

  I managed to get myself back to the garrison without being captured, and when I walked into the dorm, Zak and Chaz were sitting there smirking. Suffice to say, I didn’t find the situation as amusing as they did.

  ‘You fucking idiots! What the fuck have you just done?’

  ‘Oh, we’ll be all right. Who’s gonna find out?’

  As they were saying that, an MOD police car came down the drive.

  ‘Whatever happens, I was not involved with this. You’d better tell the police the truth.’

  It transpired that Zak had told Chaz about this genius shoplifting trick and Chaz, thinking it was this brand-new wheeze, had gone and done what he was told. The fucking morons had been planning it the whole time, as if it was the Great Train Robbery and they were Ronnie Biggs and Buster Edwards.

  We were taken down to the police cells and it all erupted. I told the police that it was fuck all to do with me and suggested that they talk to the shop owner. Even that suggestion carried an element of risk, because even though it was true that I didn’t try to nick anything, I did end up wrestling with her and one of her mannequins in the shop window. Meanwhile, Chaz had confessed, but Zak had denied knowing anything about it.

  The rest of that weekend was hideous. Having been falsely accused of beating someone up, I now thought I was going to be binned because my mate had tried to nick a pair of jeans. As funny as it sounds, at the time I genuinely thought they were going to chuck me out in disgrace for a second time, never to return. On the Monday morning, the same DS who had thrown me off the first time popped up again to rip me a new arsehole. And the whole time he was bollocking me, I just felt so embarrassed. I knew exactly how pathetic the situation was, because I’d done it myself as a dumb 14-year-old kid.

  I pleaded with the DS to speak to the civilian police, but he wasn’t interested. As far as my bosses were concerned, an unsavoury incident had taken place and even if I had nothing to do with it, I was with the miscreants when it happened. As it turned out, Zak got away with it, but Chaz got dumped and sent back to the Marines. That was such a shame, because he was such a great bloke. I felt so sorry for him and I still speak to him today. For the rest of his life, he’ll have to tell people that he very nearly became a member of the Special Forces but got thrown out at the last minute for trying to lift a pair of jeans. As for me, I remained on the course by the skin of my teeth.

  Soldiers have a self-destructive streak, there is no doubt about it. Chaz had gone through months of hell, had one foot in the door of the most illustrious fighting force in the world, and he risked it all for a short-term thrill. No rational person would do that. A lot of soldiers tell me they want to tear their lives down and start again. Soldiers have this ordered world created for us and all we want to do is pull the pin, blow it apart and deal with the chaos.

  It sounds like madness, but it’s that borderline madness that gets soldiers into the Special Forces. And it also makes perfect sense, because soldiers sit happily amid chaos. It’s as natural as a bird sitting in a tree.

  After the Not-So-Great Boutique Robbery, there were all kinds of jokes going around: What’s the difference between the SBS and the SAS? It’s all in the jeans… I was just embarrassed that I’d been a part of it.

  Second time being hunted down on the hills was pretty much the same as before, except I was that little bit wiser. Before we were released, I got some 20-pound notes, screwed them up as tightly as possible, put them inside some condoms and swallowed them, knowing that in two or three days’ time I’d shit them out. And having advised the rest of the patrol to do the same, we’d be loaded. I’ve heard stories about people swallowing all sorts, even watches.

  Even after my experience the first time, I still believed in accessing barns and houses whenever we could. One day, we took shelter in this derelict house and shit out some money, like some weird, human ATMs. We had 40 quid between us, so the next step was to find a shop where we could spend it.

 
I discovered some workers’ clothes, put them on and hitchhiked to the local village, where I found a mini-mart. I filled a basket with Mars bars, crisps and cans of Coke and was dropping the basket on the counter when I heard someone say, ‘The boys have turned up.’ I looked to my right and saw a troop carrier from Hunter Force pulling up outside. Oh. My. Fucking. God.

  These boys had pictures of us, so I was shitting myself. They started filing into the shop and I was standing there with my 100 Mars bars trying not to talk, because I didn’t want anyone to know I was English. When the girl behind the counter asked how my day had been, I mumbled something incomprehensible under my breath.

  I settled up, put my head down and waved some soldiers in as I left. When I walked past the troop carrier, they were all looking out of the back, looking hard as fuck and no doubt thinking, ‘Look at that soft civilian prick…’

  When I got back to the house, I was handing out the grub and telling the other lads about my close shave when someone shouted, ‘Fuck! There’s a patrol coming down the street!’ Most of the lads hid, but I was still in my overalls and by this time a couple of builders had turned up. So I said to them, ‘What can I do to help?’ When the soldiers arrived, looking menacing with their guns, I was shoveling cement into a mixer. I pushed it further and shouted in my best Welsh accent, ‘All right, boys?’ The soldiers smiled, waved back and off they trotted.

  Second time around, I made it through the escape exercises without being accused of punching a farmer. The end came after ten days on the run, when we reached an RV and people suddenly came at us from all angles. That was when we knew the ‘harshing’ had begun. We were bundled into a cattle truck, driven off to an unspecified destination and when we were bundled off again, there was a lot of jostling and screaming and shouting, as well as dogs roaming around us, growling and foaming at the mouth.

  As I stood there, two guys worked their way around me, prodding and poking and talking right in my ear. It was as if they were performing a weird comedy act, or they were grotesque clowns from a horror film. One of them kept pushing me and saying, ‘Look at him! Look at him!’ in this creepy high-pitched voice. It was very unsettling. Which, of course, it was meant to be.

  The clowns were the warm-up act for 36 hours of interrogation, which began with being hooded and led out onto a shale-covered area. Then they turned the stereo on. Unfortunately, the speakers weren’t playing my favourite tunes, they were pumping out this horrendous white noise. Imagine the sound you hear when you phone a fax machine by mistake, mingled with hundreds of nails being scraped down a blackboard, except 100 times louder, and you’ll get the idea. While they were attempting to make our ears bleed and our brains melt, they were putting us into various stress positions. Every time I lost my shape, someone would stick their knee between my shoulders or pull my elbows back. There always seemed to be a person hovering over me. This lasted for a good few hours, before they took us away for questioning.

  Having given me a boiler suit to wear, they pushed me into a room and stripped me naked. I still had my hood on but could feel someone moving around me. Without warning, the hood was removed to reveal three women sitting behind a desk. Suddenly, one of them started pointing at my cock and shouting, ‘What the fuck is that?’ For what seemed like hours, they were taking the piss out of me, telling me how pathetic I was and laughing. Between the abuse and the demoralisation, they kept asking me for my name, rank and number, the point being that I wasn’t allowed to give it to them. There is one thing I should say before we move on: it was very cold in that room…

  Suddenly, I was strapped naked to a pallet and they were hosing me down with freezing water. And the whole time that was happening, I wished I was back in interrogation. I just couldn’t wait for it to end. But when they started interrogating you again, you wished you were being hosed down with freezing water. In another room, there was this big bloke sitting behind a desk with a bag of sweets on it. Over and over again, he’d ask me for my name, rank and number, between popping sweets into his mouth. In another room, there was a really nice guy, whose whole purpose was to put you at ease and catch you off guard. You’ve got to avoid saying yes or no in interrogation, and the nice guy was the interrogator most likely to make you forget yourself.

  When you first go in for interrogation, you know you’ve got 36 hours of it. But you have to forget all about the goal and measure the time in seconds. You can almost feel your brain frying, so that sometimes you don’t know what you’re doing or saying. You just have to hope that while you’re on autopilot, you’re not doing or saying anything wrong. It’s full-on psychological warfare, the weirdest thing I’ve ever experienced. The games they play are vicious and cruel. It reminded me of that scene in the film A Clockwork Orange, when they clamp the main character’s eyes open, experiment on him and torture him with Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. And it certainly gave me an insight into how horrendous it must be for people who are taken hostage for real.

  Most make it through interrogation, but some people fall down the home straight. One of them was Zak, who was suddenly singing like a canary. He was telling his interrogators about security at our base, that he could get access to the CCTV systems, and just about everything else he shouldn’t have been. Afterwards, a rumour went round that he was given a truth serum. I’ve got no idea if that was true, but the story went that they wanted him off because of the incident with the jeans. And why on earth would he be telling them that stuff otherwise? It just didn’t make any sense. Either way, I didn’t give a fuck, given that he’d messed up everything for my mate Chaz.

  When the 36 hours were up, I was taken into a room, my hood was removed and there was an officer standing in front of me. Without any fanfare, he said, ‘I am the umpire. You’ve passed. Congratulations.’ There was no cinematic moment where I was whooping and hollering and high-fiving the umpire, but it did feel like a boulder had just rolled off my shoulders. Out of 250 soldiers who began Selection, I was one of only seven who made it to the end. I was 23 years old and a member of the illustrious Special Boat Service. My old maths teacher might have been surprised if he ever found out. I wasn’t.

  9

  RATHER BEAUTIFUL

  Even to this day, my mum says to me: ‘I phone your brother, he tells me what’s going on with his life and I nod and say, “Oh, that’s very nice.” I phone your sister and it’s much the same. Then I phone you, you tell me what’s going on and when I put down the phone I think to myself, “That boy’s life…”’ The thought of my mum telling her friends what I’m up to makes me giggle, because I know they’ll be raising their eyebrows and scratching their heads.

  Whether it was fighting off apes in a circus, firing stolen shotguns over people’s heads, jumping off harbour walls at the age of three or abseiling down buildings, my life had always been a bit different. And I wouldn’t have it any other way. I see young lads setting off on their career path, which will involve sitting in an office for five days a week, for the next 40-odd years, and think: ‘Is that really what you’re going to do for the rest of your lives?’ They start earning decent money, get a mortgage and, before they know it, they’re stuck in a rut.

  Through my business, I meet older guys from the corporate world and they’ll say to me, ‘I can’t fucking believe I’m still doing the same job. I just feel so lost. But because it provides me and my family with a certain lifestyle, I can’t escape it.’ I don’t know how people exist like that, because it means they’re destined never to achieve anything that will give their lives meaning.

  The majority prefer to take the well-trodden path, rather than the path less travelled, because taking the path less travelled means having to hack your way through. That’s a difficult thing to do – or at least it seems difficult, when you’re standing staring at the overgrowth and you don’t even have a machete.

  Some people need to know exactly what their future will be and become lost in society’s perception of what happiness is supposed to look like. Owning n
ice houses and expensive cars and watches is a way of justifying their existence. But how many times does cooking in your 50-grand kitchen, climbing into your 100-grand Porsche or looking at your 10-grand Rolex watch actually make you happy? For the first week, maybe? After that, not much.

  Everyone is beset by fear and negativity. It’s fear and negativity that has kept us alive since the dawn of time. All of us are living in the repeat cycle of yesterday, our minds tailored to a survival pattern. That means doing the same today as we did yesterday and every day before that, because that’s what has kept us alive until now. It doesn’t matter if we’ve been sad and unfulfilled for as long as we can remember, all we focus on is the fact that we’re still here.

  That’s why people find it so difficult to break out of the cycle. And even if someone does manage to break out, their brain starts saying, ‘No, this is too scary, this is too difficult, you need to get back into your comfort zone.’ But the notion of comfort zones is contradictory. Living life in a comfort zone might feel comfortable, but it’s just existing. It’s like living your life in a trench. There might be water up to your knees and rats running around your ankles and you might be miserable as hell. But as soon as you pluck up the courage to stick your head over the top, bullets start firing and you think, ‘Fuck this, I’m getting back in…’ The mind is devious. Whether it’s thinking about going to the gym or quitting the job you hate, it will come up with all these different reasons why you’re better off where you are, back in that horrible trench.

  I hate social conformity with a passion. I see so many people conforming, people who don’t even know why they’re doing what they’re doing. If you asked them why, they wouldn’t have a clue. That’s such a waste. I was expected to conform, but I never did. I went the opposite way. So even when I went into the Special Forces, I knew that what I was doing wasn’t the norm. I was doing stuff that people would envy, but that a lot of people would hate to do. Some people just aren’t that way inclined. And I shouldn’t be smug, because after the numbness and elation associated with becoming a Special Forces soldier had worn off, I wasn’t entirely satisfied either.