Break Point

by Matthew Ollerton

  Most Special Forces soldiers wanted to hang out with the lads they worked with, but spending my spare time talking shop at barbecues because it might increase my chances of promotion was never an option. That world of networking, talking to people you wouldn’t normally talk to and don’t necessarily like, filled me with dread. I just wanted to do my work, get out of there, do my own thing and have a good time.

  It’s an amazing feeling to know that you’re one of the few. You see people walking around acting hard and think, ‘You’ve got no fucking idea, mate.’ That gives you a sense of power and responsibility. But being in the SBS was a personal thing for me, all about the pride that I’d managed to get in.

  A lot of the guys in the Special Forces detached themselves from anyone who wasn’t. They wanted to spend all their time among the same kind of people, a bit like people when they become famous. But for me, it was just a job. I still had my old mates from the Marines, because I didn’t think I was suddenly superior to them.

  I always needed to see the purpose in everything, so I asked a lot of questions. And asking questions didn’t always go down well. Asking questions shows an inquisitive mind, which some people see as a threat. The majority of the training was excellent, but there were moments that would cause me to ask why. Scenarios would be built that wouldn’t make sense to me. But whenever I raised my doubts, the reply was always, ‘Shut the fuck up. We’re doing it just because.’

  The jobs were special, and I had a lot of laughs with the lads. But there wasn’t enough of that good stuff going on. It’s not like I’d return from a mission and immediately be sent off to train for the next one. I’d have to wait for my pager to go off again, and that might take months. And when my pager did go off, that didn’t mean the job would go through. I might be sat in a hangar for weeks before being stood down.

  Unsurprisingly, that led to us taking risks. One weekend, me and another lad were driving up to Manchester – which is a fair few hours from Poole – when we got the call. An incident had gone off at Stansted Airport and we had to tell the bosses that we were halfway up the M6. Instead of getting a bollocking, we were blue-lit all the way to Essex, with a different police unit from each county picking us up on the borders and clearing the route. We were screaming through red lights, bouncing over roundabouts and laughing all the way. But as soon as we got to Stansted, we were stood down. That was incredibly frustrating, and it happened all the time. All that adrenalin, and suddenly you were being told to return to camp and shine your buttons.

  I wasn’t settled or satisfied, just as I hadn’t been in the Royal Marines. Which makes me think being a soldier was never really my calling. I didn’t want to be there, I felt I should have been somewhere else. This was the dream job, I was part of a gang that people write books and make films about. But the reality is always different to the dream. My partner Laura often says, ‘I can’t imagine you being in the SBS.’ To which I reply, ‘I can’t either.’

  The Special Forces was always an alien world to me, I was a square peg who had been hammered into a round hole. Being in the Special Forces was almost like a hobby. I was like a tourist, someone who popped in occasionally, before popping out again. I never gave that job the respect it deserved. Something is wrong if you’re in the Special Forces and all you want to do is go clubbing. I sometimes wish I was in the SBS now, because my mindset at the age of 48 suits the job better. Youth is wasted on the young.

  Recently, Foxy took me through a checklist of what people go through when they’re suffering from mental illness, and one of the things he mentioned was never being settled or satisfied in your work. It was only when he told me this that I realised my mind had never been right throughout my time in the military. It didn’t matter that I was, on paper, doing an exciting job, I was still unhappy. And I’d never really been happy. I never felt settled in the military. My head was so busy all the time, there was no peace of mind, because I was constantly questioning what I was doing and why I was doing it.

  That’s why I used to drink so much, because it would block that noise out, numb everything and cut me adrift. On the face of it, I was a fun drunk. But it wouldn’t be one night, I would drink for days, until I had to stop because of work. And then I’d have to go through the torture of cold turkey, when the demon comes knocking on your door as soon as your head hits the pillow and all you can think about is having another drink to numb your thoughts.

  I didn’t see myself as an alcoholic, because it wasn’t as if I had a bottle of whisky on my bedside cabinet. But I couldn’t imagine a life without drinking. It was a crutch, especially in social situations. In the military, everyone always has a beer in their hands, so drinking helped me to integrate. Before I joined the military, I was quite judgemental about drinking. I remember my mum going to a work Christmas party, getting shitfaced and puking down my auntie’s back in the car on the way home. My auntie was wearing a fur coat, so wasn’t very happy. My mum ended up crawling around outside, trying to get into the house. I had some mates round, and when she crawled past the French windows I said, ‘How disgusting to have a drunk as a mother’, and closed the curtains. But when I went in the military, I became the opposite. That’s the power of peer pressure, of wanting to feel safe in the pack.

  From my mum crawling around on the floor and me being disgusted, fast forward to my brother’s wedding. I was standing at the bar getting stuck into the drink when one of Justin’s Royal Navy officer mates shouted: ‘Naked bar!’ ‘Naked bar’ is a Royal Marines tradition to rival wearing women’s clobber. If someone from the ranks shouts ‘naked bar’, everyone has to take their kit off and carry on drinking as if it was the most normal thing in the world. It started in Norway, where the bars are more secluded, but soon made its way to the UK, where the bars are more crowded. You won’t be surprised to hear that Marines are always being banned from pubs for doing it.

  So having heard someone shout ‘Naked bar!’ in this posh accent, I turned around to see a load of officers stripped to the waist. Affronted, I said, ‘Fucking hell, do you guys even know what naked bar is? This is naked bar…’ With that, I stripped all my clothes off – socks, shoes, underpants, the lot – in the middle of the wedding reception, while the party was still in full swing, and carried on drinking. The rest of the night was a bit of a blur.

  The following morning, Helen wasn’t very impressed, although I’d fallen out with her even before I’d got naked. I went downstairs to pay the bill, still a bit jolly and acting the fool, and everyone was avoiding making eye contact with me. I asked my sister’s husband why everyone looked so miserable and he replied, ‘Matt, don’t you fucking remember what happened last night?’

  ‘Yeah. Naked bar. It’s a Marine tradition.’

  ‘No, not naked bar. The last time I saw you, you had your cock in your aunt’s ear…’

  I left the hotel pretty sharpish after that. Thankfully, my aunt saw the funny side.

  Alcohol can be a positive thing. There was nothing more I wanted to do after finishing work than relax with a drink, and it certainly aided the bonding process. But alcohol can only really be a positive thing if you can control your intake, and it quickly got to the point where alcohol was controlling me.

  It didn’t help my overall mood that I was earning under two grand a month. When you consider what we were doing, the level of training, the commitment, the risk and the high esteem we were held in, the pay was pathetic. Some people made it work, but I never could (although that was partly down to my hectic social life), and we were being paid significantly more than regular soldiers.

  If you asked people down the pub, ‘What do you think a Special Forces soldier earns?’, they’d be saying things like, ‘Hundred grand? Quarter of a million?’. Nope. Nowhere near. And they wonder why they have a problem with retention. We do it for our country and it can be very exciting, but we’ve still got to pay the mortgage and the bills. I thought they were taking the piss and advantage of our patriotism. I just wanted to be re
warded properly for the job I was doing, without any catches. They’d give us bonuses, and I worked it out that they would roughly equate to a small deposit on a house. So I viewed those deposits as a devious device, because they knew that once a soldier had a mortgage, they were trapped in the military. Perhaps that’s me being overly cynical, but I’m convinced there’s an element of truth in it.

  My colleagues weren’t aware of my misgivings, because I kept them to myself. Complaining wouldn’t have gone down too well with many of them, who were diehard military. Institutions such as the military want you to do as you’re told, but that wasn’t for me. I hated that.

  I was surrounded by soldiers who were great around camp, whose boots were always shiny and who would always be on time. But you’d get them in the field and they’d perform like a bag of shit. In that respect, it was no different to working in an office, in that someone who turns up on time every day and stays later than everyone else might be terrible at the job but will still impress the bosses. As a soldier in peacetime, you get noticed more for the stuff you do in camp than in the field, but I couldn’t handle the monotone existence of being a camp soldier. That’s why I’d go out partying and turn up late the next day, because the partying and the drinking were substitutes for the jobs we weren’t doing.

  When I was partying and going wild on camp, even during the week, some of my troop sergeants would try to rein me in. But they couldn’t. Other troop sergeants could see a bit of themselves in me and tolerated my behaviour. People imagine the Special Forces to be this slick, disciplined group of people. But that’s not an accurate picture. The SAS and SBS are a bunch of mavericks who can, and will, get the job done when needed. That goes back to its roots, when they were thrown together in the Second World War. They were guys who would do whatever it took. They weren’t about following orders and seeking higher command – ‘I’ve got the target in my sights, can I take the shot? Oh, he seems to have gone now’ – they got things done and got the fuck out of there.

  But even within that Special Forces environment, some leaders aren’t able to accommodate non-conformists. Non-conformists are too often written off as misfits and therefore impossible to manage. That’s how I was viewed in the SBS, because I always wanted to be different. Not better, just different. Even when we did psychometric testing, I got different results from everyone else. I was a pain in the arse. I asked too many questions. I wanted to know why, instead of just doing things. I thought asking questions was a positive trait, not a negative. I wanted to create my own path, not walk in other people’s footprints.

  The odd job would come up, which I would get very excited about. But afterwards I’d be back in camp again. There was always the hope that at any given moment, your pager might go off and a few hours later you might be jumping out of a helicopter. And every time I’d be thinking about leaving, one of those jobs would come up. But it wasn’t enough. I wanted it to be high-octane 100 per cent of the time, not once in a blue moon. So, after about a year in the SBS, I put in my notice to leave.

  I had my notice in to leave for a big chunk of my military career, which tells you everything you need to know about my ambivalence towards the job. Maybe if someone had sat me down and told me I was making a terrible mistake, like the officer who suggested I join in the first place, it might have changed my mind. But no one did, and I probably wouldn’t have listened to them anyway. I was adamant that I was leaving and going outside. Then another job came up, my enthusiasm returned, and I took my notice out again. That happened three times during my six-year stay in the SBS. And because I always seemed to be on my way out, I was never considered or interested in promotion.

  Looking back, I realise I wasn’t only bored of peacetime soldiering, I feared the apparent predictability of my future. It sounds crazy, that I’d consider a job in the Special Forces too predictable, but I wanted to do more with my life. This was deep thinking for a soldier in his mid-twenties, but the reason people get stuck in a rut is because they don’t think. And if they do think, often the conclusion they come to is, ‘It’s only thirty years until I retire, I might as well settle with what I’ve got. Stay in as long as I can and get extended service. That would be the easiest thing to do…’.

  I could see the journey ahead if I stayed in the military. Circling up the ranks, doing the same thing, over and over again. I knew people who’d done that and I could see they weren’t happy. Why would I want to do the same? It was another break point in my life: I could either carry on pootling along or I could veer off-road and take a more unfathomable but potentially more fulfilling route. The choice was mine.

  11

  OVER AND OUT

  We spent a lot of time in the SBS training special forces from other countries. On the way to one far-off country, where we were teaching special forces soldiers jungle warfare, my team got pissed at the airport and I missed the flight. I had to be flown into Miami and spent the night there partying while the rest of the boys were building the camp. By the time I arrived in the jungle, the camp was half-built and all I had to do was assemble my camp bed. Everyone was looking at me as if to say, ‘You jammy bastard.’

  One of the things we taught was spy rigging, which is when you drop down the rope from the helicopter to get troops off the ground as quickly as possible. Often, the foreign guys had never been in a helicopter, so when they were lifted through the winch hole, all you could see and hear were their arms and legs squirming all over the place and their terrified screams.

  There wasn’t a lot to do in the jungle at night, so some of the lads would spend their downtime fishing in the river. The river was brown with mud, but they were pulling out these giant piranhas with great big teeth. During the pre-brief for the diving phase, the officer was giving us the instructions and I was looking around thinking, ‘This can’t be right, there are giant piranhas in that river, we’ve seen the fucking things! Surely they’ll call it off.’ Eventually, I couldn’t hold back any longer, so I said, ‘The lads have been pulling out giant piranhas with razor-sharp teeth all week. Last I heard, piranhas eat people, has anyone considered that?’ As was always the case when you questioned their authority, they gave me short shrift.

  Nevertheless, when it came to the Monday morning, I was certain the diving would be cancelled. But during the brief, an officer said, ‘We’ve sourced these packets of shark repellent. When you’re swimming along, if you feel something nibbling your legs, remove your breathing apparatus, bite the packet and shake it in the direction of the nibbles.’ I couldn’t believe it. I thought it was an elaborate wind-up. Alas, no, he was being deadly serious.

  We had to swim in buddy pairs, with a leash between us. When we got out, my partner said, ‘Why were you swimming like a weirdo, with your knees tucked up into your chest?’

  ‘Because the first thing those giant piranhas were going to eat were my dangly legs, so I made yours the first on the menu!’ Afterwards, the officers came up with this cock and bull story about the piranhas only eating fruit. How exactly the piranhas knew the difference between a nice, juicy tangerine and one of my bollocks was anyone’s guess.

  Some European special forces were training with us one day, doing jungle insertions from helicopters. After we’d fast-roped in and were waiting for the command to move off, all we could hear was this horrible moaning and wailing. People were shushing and telling each other to shut the fuck up, but this voice started saying, ‘I have wood’, in a foreign accent. Now people were sniggering. Then someone said, ‘Quick! Medic!’ It transpired that this guy had hit a branch on his way to the ground and it had gone in through his arse and out through his groin on the other side, before snapping off. I’d wager that was the most painful wood he ever had. At least he got lucky with the exit wound.

  We also did a lot of river skills, taking small insertion craft with very quiet engines down tributaries and creeks. One night, we dropped some lads miles away, so that they could carry out a long-range insertion. When they didn’t come back i
n the allotted time, we had to scramble helicopters to find them. People were starting to panic, until about 12 hours later, when word came back that they’d been found. The lads had hit major torrents and rapids and were hanging on for dear life to rocks and trees. They’d lost everything – the boats, their weapons and some very expensive, sensitive gadgetry. It turned out that the second-in-command had done the recce in a helicopter about a mile up, so he hadn’t seen the torrents and rapids through the canopy. Luckily, no one died, but it was a monumental fuck-up.

  As well as training in the jungle, we’d also spend time in colder climes, training in Arctic warfare, and it was always big news in the local media when the British Special Forces were in town, in their big power boats with guns all over the place.

  The dive package started the day after we arrived, but I was still up for going on the piss. That’s just the way I was, I had to take everything to extremes. Some of the lads needed persuading, but it was Valentine’s Day and I sent them over the edge by suggesting that their wives and girlfriends would probably be back home shagging other blokes anyway.

  I managed to scramble a few lads together and when we walked into this club, the women were all over us. We didn’t have to say anything, they were expecting us. I ended up going back to this girl’s place, slept through my alarm and when I woke up it was 8:20, and the dive package had started at 8. My immediate thought wasn’t, ‘Fuck! I need to get there as soon as possible’, it was, ‘Oh well, I’m in the shit anyway, I might as well enjoy it.’ So I grabbed the girl, pulled her towards me while singing ‘Rule Britannia’ and had a bit more fun. It certainly beat being submerged in a freezing fjord.