Break Point

by Matthew Ollerton

  On completing Selection, I was so proud to make that phone call to Mum, and she was over the moon that her son was in the SBS. I got to wear the fabled blue tracksuit in camp, which gave me a lot of kudos. I felt cool as anything, walking into the mess hall in that tracksuit. Girls would nudge each other and whisper behind their hands: ‘Look, SBS…’ I also got to walk past the office of my old sergeant, the guy who told me how overjoyed he would be when I failed. I gave him a big smile, a little wave and a thumbs-up, and he completely ignored me. But the reality was a bit more complicated.

  I had bust a gut to get into the Special Forces and it was a case of, ‘Really? Is this it?’ Weirdly, I liked being pushed to the absolute limit. So having only recently passed Selection, I was already missing it. There was always pressure to perform on Selection. I missed the competition, testing myself against others. Maybe that’s not surprising, considering how much time I spent doing it.

  After summer leave, I joined up with my troop and did lots of different courses to bring me up to speed with the rest of the team. We were sent on a combat dive course straightaway, because the SBS have a commitment to protect all British maritime assets as their primary role, which requires water-borne insertion techniques. Some people do that dive course and realise it’s not for them – they can’t clear their ears or they encounter other issues – and switch to the SAS. You’re only diving to three metres, it’s just a means of transit, but so much can still go wrong in the pitch black of the night, usually after you’ve gone to target and removed your breathing set.

  It’s dangerous work in the Special Forces and accidents happen. But that’s what you sign up for. There was one exercise, which I wasn’t on, that involved the lads chucking their MIBs (Military Inflatable Boats) out of the helicopter, parachuting after them, inflating the MIBs, jumping in, firing up the engines, chasing down the destroyer and inserting. They were about to get on the destroyer when the skipper realised he was getting too close to the shore and whacked it into reverse. The MIBs got pulled under and the lads got sucked into the destroyer’s propellers. Luckily they missed the props but one guy was almost snapped in half on the rudder and broke both his femurs. Another time, a guy was sitting on top of a submersible insertion craft, doing what he had to do, and there was a massive swell, which crushed his head between the insertion craft and a helicopter above.

  Just before I joined, a good mate of mine died doing some freefall jumping out in the States. He had a parachute malfunction, and the drill when that happens is to cut away your main to release the reserve. But his main got caught on the buckle of his dummy weapon, which should have been removed, and then went straight into his reserve. He fell 25,000 feet and ended up a pile of mush in the middle of the desert. He was a great guy who never let go of his friends from his previous career in the Marines, which some people in the service disliked him for. Later I found his grave where he died and painted his faded name back into the stone.

  All the time I was training – a lot of which took place on oil rigs, practising counter-terrorism and the release of hostages – we were on call with 30 minutes notice to move. About seven or eight months after I joined my team, I was mooching around Poole one weekend when my pager went off. My first thought was, ‘This must be a drill.’ Then I saw the code and knew it was real. It is difficult to describe the excitement I felt, but just imagine it: one minute you’re doing a bit of shopping, the next you’re being asked to pull on the black gear and go into action. I guess there is something of the Superhero about it.

  I rushed back to camp, where all my kit was already stowed and ready to go, and straight into an in-brief. We were told there was a ship coming into British waters loaded with drugs, and that intelligence had reason to believe they were armed and dangerous. Luckily, so were we, which is why they’d called us. It was our job to intercept the ship, take down anyone on board and hand the ship over to the authorities. But not one bit of me was scared, because this is what I’d joined for and I was ready for anything.

  Our whole troop was put on a frigate out at sea, where we had to wait. That was desperately frustrating for all of us. There were 16 highly trained soldiers, raring to get on that ship and do our thing, the testosterone was pumping, the anxiety was building, and the whole time we knew that the job could be called off at any moment. Not that we were sitting around playing cards. For weeks, we ran mock-ups, planned and briefed until we could visualise exactly what might happen when – or if – the time came to execute. And because no plan survives first contact, a lot of what we did was contingency planning – or planning for any plans we’d made that might not go to plan.

  Eventually, and to my relief, the call came for us to go. Seconds later, I was sitting on the boat, making its way to target under the cover of night – dressed head to toe in black, including the balaclava, and holding my assault weapon with the laser-dot sight – and it was everything I thought it would be when I was a kid; the kind of thing my careers officer would have laughed at had I suggested it.

  But just as I was thinking, ‘This. Is. Fucking. Amazing’, the engine on my boat started spluttering. Suddenly I was thinking, ‘Fuck, no! Please don’t do this to me!’ My world was falling apart. The other boat was fine and heading off into the distance, and we knew that if our engine didn’t spring back to life, they’d have to go on without us. All that planning, all those rehearsals, possibly for nothing… and then the engine kicked in again.

  In the Special Forces, we always have two plans. One is when the shit hits the fan and you just have to go in hard and hope everything goes well, the other is the plan of your choosing, when you have more time to dictate the outcome.

  Usual protocol is to hit the target at dawn, so that by the time we’ve taken the target, we have the benefit of daylight to handover and extract. This was the case with my first job. The transit was quite a long one, but eventually I could make out the target in the gloom. It was a big, long sailing boat with masts, which had been anchored out at sea for a few weeks. There had been a massive exchange, the contraband was on board and we hoped that the enemy – or X-Rays, as we call them in the Special Forces – were tucked up in bed and fast asleep.

  When I heard, ‘Stand by, two minutes’, I knew it was almost on, which is when the negative feelings and thoughts started flooding in: what if we board the boat and there are gunmen waiting for us? What if I get shot? I had to wrestle with that fear, pin it down and incapacitate it in order to focus on the mission, which was such a leap from anything I’d done in the ‘green’ Army.

  Mine was the first boat to the target and I was the first man in. That’s not to say I was the best or the bravest. I was pushed forward simply because I was the new boy, the least experienced and therefore the most expendable. The team leader is the guy with the most experience, the one who has the most to offer the group, but he’s never going to be at the front of the pack. Command and control does not usually come from the front, because when it comes to the crunch and people could get shot, you have to protect your best asset.

  The engines on MIBs aren’t particularly noisy, so we were able to get straight into the hold of the ship without being detected. We headed for the sleeping quarters, kicked open the door, threw in a flash-crash grenade, which is just meant to disorientate rather than maim or kill, and started clearing our objective. All the X-Rays had been asleep, and when my target opened his eyes, he was looking at a man dressed all in black, wearing a balaclava and pointing a machine gun at his face. What a thing to wake up to.

  As strange as it might sound, I felt sorry for him. He had been out on this ship for so long, done this huge deal and would have been imagining a better future. Now he had a laser dot between his eyes, I could see the fear, panic and loss and his world falling apart. I was only 24 years old and this guy had scars all over his face and looked nasty as hell. I stood there thinking, ‘If this was down the pub, he’d probably give me a run for my money.’ But the fact that he wasn’t in a position to do so
gave me such a massive feeling of power.

  They were hardened criminals, had all probably done time, but we could smell the piss and the shit immediately. I don’t blame them, because they had no idea who we were. We could have been members of a rival drug cartel, about to kill the lot of them. Luckily, we’d hit them by stealth and there were no rounds fired. If someone had been having a fag up on deck and spotted us coming, we’d have had to do things differently. They might have put their hands up, but they might have grabbed their weapons and started firing. You can have all the plans in the world and they might not make an ounce of difference. In the Special Forces, as in any branch of the military, you cannot choose your enemy. You just have to deal with whatever is thrown at you.

  To some degree, you’re being dictated to. But you can’t let that happen for long; at some point you have to take control. When pressure starts being applied, you have to strip away everything else and focus on one thing, which is the threat. It’s not really a case of being calm, it’s about learning to deal with that level of pressure, which comes down to all the training that we do. If you’re properly prepared, you’ll be able to keep on top of your cortisol levels and see things in slow motion. It’s like momentarily entering a parallel world, so that when it’s over, you can never reimagine it. Afterwards you think, ‘What happened? That didn’t seem real.’ You go somewhere else, like in The Matrix.

  Ship seized, we got them down on the floor, snapped the plastic cuffs on and called in the support elements for extraction. A frigate came close, HMRC operators came aboard, we disappeared into the ether, before heading straight to a ‘hot’ debrief. The main concern was that no one from our side had been injured or killed. But it doesn’t matter if the job went well or not, the debrief is essential.

  I speak to people in the corporate world for whom debriefs are an alien concept. They’re too busy discussing how awesome they are down the pub or running to their car because they don’t want to get a bollocking. But debriefs are where lessons are learned, and the information gleaned from them is fed into future operations. Even the best operations contain some shit moments – the engine on my boat almost gave out, for Christ’s sake! And when you’re trained to the level we are in the SBS, you become extremely self-critical. What could we have done differently? Maybe I should have done this instead of that? Could I have stepped left instead of right? You see that same forensic self-analysis in elite sport, such as when a football team wins 5–1 and the manager will complain about the one goal they let in. It’s about looking for imperfections in the apparently flawless.

  That first mission was every bit as good as I thought it would be (apart from the spluttery engine) and it was what I wanted to be doing every day. To see all that training put into action was an amazing feeling. The communication between the team was almost telepathic, you knew everyone else had your back without anything having to be said. As I was thinking what should be happening, it was happening. There was such a flow to our movements and we fitted with each other perfectly. It was as if we were performing a ballet, with everyone exactly where he was meant to be at any given moment. It was seamless, harmonious and really rather beautiful.

  What made our operations even more miraculous was that our little dance was often only one part of a far bigger picture. As we were inserting onto that ship on my first mission, there were other ships being hit and doors being knocked all over the UK, Europe and further afield. That level of coordinated planning is almost unbelievable. Our team, with all the Gucci gear, was like the star on top of a Christmas tree, but without all the infrastructure and everyone working in tandem, whether it was people pushing pens or working in the stores, we wouldn’t have been able to do our job. It only takes one person lower down to make a mistake for the whole operation to come crashing down.

  10

  SQUARE PEG, ROUND HOLE

  To do your first job with the Special Forces is an iconic Ü moment. It’s Boy’s Own stuff and meant that I was finally part of the club. Even if I’d left the following day, I’d done a mission for the SBS.

  A few months later, I had a massive weekend of partying planned in Bournemouth, just down the road from the base. I was heading to the pub on Friday afternoon when my pager went off. My first thought was, ‘For fuck’s sake, this can’t be for real, I want to be out getting hammered.’ I phoned to check if it was a drill and they said, ‘No, come in straightaway.’

  On my way back to camp I was thinking, ‘This is bollocks, we’re gonna be sitting on a fucking ship for another three or four weeks, and then the job might not even happen.’ But when I walked in, everything was already moving fast. The Chinooks came in, we got our kit on and flew straight up to the relevant airbase. As soon as we got there, we were told we’d be hitting a ship that night. This was the dream job. No fucking around, no sitting about waiting. It was fast, it was slick and it was exactly how I wanted every job to be. It even occurred to me that I might still be able to get back in time for a proper drink-up.

  There was a boat full of drugs doing drops all around the coast, with smugglers on board believed to be carrying weapons. This time I was part of a helicopter team and there was no time for rehearsals. We had to acquaint ourselves with our objective and target, study the plans of the ship, decide which teams would go where and how we would insert – and then go and do it.

  When the time came for the helicopter team to insert, we fast-roped in the pitch black onto the target, which was even more difficult than it sounds. The sea was rough and the landing bridge was tiny. And because the ship was listing violently from side to side, the rope was only on target for a couple of seconds at a time. One inch to the left or right and it would have been fatal, but this was our bread and butter. We’d trained and trained for this type of thing, so it came naturally. That said, the fact that everyone managed to get on target was largely down to the skill of the pilot, one of whom was Prince Andrew. I used to call him our cabbie: ‘Come on, Drives, step on it!’ And he’d say, ‘They’re a bunch of blaggards – but a fine bunch of blaggards!’

  As soon as we were on the ship, we made our way to our objective, which was the main hold. When we opened the door and poured in, we were greeted by piles and piles of cannabis, covering every inch of the floor and almost up to the ceiling. The smell almost took my face off. We all looked at each other and in a joyful tone I shouted, ‘Fuck me!’ As our sergeant came flying in, we were all laughing our heads off. When we saw him, we were almost on the floor: because he’d put his balaclava on in the dark, it had slipped round his head, so that his nose was hanging out of one of the eye holes and one of his ears was hanging out of the mouthpiece. Our sergeant started shouting at us, ‘For fuck’s sake, lads, let’s deal with the threat first!’, and we were an absolute mess.

  Luckily, while we were in stitches, other teams had taken out three enemies on the bridge and we secured the remainder of the ship in a matter of minutes. There were five or six X-Rays on board but no casualties reported. Once again, they didn’t even know we were there until they saw the guns in their faces.

  As soon as supporting elements were brought in and on board, we extracted as quickly as possible. That involved getting into the boats, getting away from the target, Chinooks swooping in, lifting the boats out of the water and carrying us off. The gig was over in a heartbeat. I flew back down to my base, had the debrief, sorted my gear out and was ready to go partying late Saturday afternoon. My officer was at the same party and there were people smoking dope. We were looking at each other and smiling as if to say, ‘If you only knew where we’d just been…’

  Getting to play with all those big boys’ toys was almost unbelievable but also a logical conclusion for someone who grew up playing with weapons and vehicles. I’d basically become the Action Man I owned as a kid, the one in the frogman’s outfit.

  But it’s not as if I’d walk into a pub and tell everyone what I’d been up to in the Special Forces. I might tell people I was in the military, but t
hat was it. Because the Troubles were still going on in Northern Ireland, the last thing I wanted to be gobbing off about was the fact I was in the SBS. But I could tell my family and friends. When you hear people saying, ‘I was in the SAS, but I can’t tell anyone – even my loved ones – anything about it’, that often means they’re a charlatan. We call them Walters, as in the fictional fantasist Walter Mitty.

  Once, I went back home to Burton and was so proud of being in the SBS, I ended up telling a mate down the pub. This bloke laughed at me and said, ‘You can’t be in the SBS, because you’re not allowed to tell anyone.’ From that point on, I was more circumspect about who I told. I’d see other people talking shit, usually to women in pubs, and think, ‘That bloke sounds like a fucking idiot, and that’s how I’d be perceived if I started mouthing off about what I did.’ Because people don’t believe you anyway, you just come across like a tit. You might as well go around telling people you’re a dolphin trainer or biscuit designer, which I did from time to time.

  When I went out in Poole or Bournemouth, I didn’t say a word about what I did for a living. In fact, I avoided mentioning the military altogether. A lot of the time I’d tell people I was down from Manchester. I loved the club scene, would lose myself in that world for whole weekends. I was bang into house and techno, had my own decks and would host parties in camp.

  I didn’t like the stigma attached to being in the military. In military towns, the ‘green’ army has a reputation for bad behaviour, getting crazy drunk and bashing up civilians. I didn’t want to be associated with that world or stereotyped as that kind of person. While I was always a bit of a loose cannon, I was never one for fighting in pubs. There were others from the military who’d be out doing the same as me – who hated all the institutional bullshit and didn’t feel like they really fitted in – but they were few and far between.