SAS soldiers tend to be more mature and fitter than their counterparts in the Army, but the idea that they are particularly intellectually gifted is, by and large, incorrect. One SAS officer says, ‘The ordinary bloke is just thinking about his next team task. He’s just wondering whether it’ll be abroad and whether to buy a new hi-fi when he gets back.’
The most experienced soldiers are concentrated in the SAS Training Wing, which is responsible for the twice-yearly selection of new recruits. Some other NCOs can be found running training in the two Territorial Army SAS Regiments. Some of the older SAS soldiers have become psychological casualties, referred to Army hospitals after years on operations, or have been given a training posting as a reward for their service. Two of the SAS veterans who have recently published memoirs admit to having spent time under psychiatric observation. Not surprisingly, the Ministry of Defence is unwilling to discuss whether the number of SAS soldiers who succumb to mental disorders is higher than that in the Army as a whole.
Most of those who serve in 22 SAS retain the cap badge of their parent regiment, and may return to their old unit, even after years at Hereford. Any soldier can be ‘returned to unit’ (RTU’d) if he falls foul of the Hereford hierarchy. Attitudes to service in the SAS vary in different parts of the Army. In the Parachute Regiment, which supplies much of Hereford’s raw material, failure to pass selection or being RTU’d can carry a considerable stigma. The natural desire to avoid being RTU’d prevents many soldiers from voicing misgivings about orders or challenging the Training Wing NCOs who have such a strong influence on the ethos of the Regiment. In other regiments, where members rarely become members of the SAS, a soldier who tries for selection will be respected whatever the outcome of his attempt.
Officers and soldiers usually spend about five months after selection undergoing SAS training, which ranges from practising ambushes to learning medical skills and the Regiment’s special signals system. They serve in one of the four sabre squadrons – A, B, D and G (Guards) – usually for at least two years. Then they may move to the Training Wing, which undertakes many of the SAS’s more sensitive tasks outside Britain, or to other specialized parts of the Regiment.
SAS selection requires enormous physical stamina. The four weeks of evaluation culminate in a 45-mile endurance march to be completed in twenty hours while carrying a 50lb bergen rucksack. To meet this challenge many candidates will train for up to a year in their spare time, pushing themselves for months over difficult terrain in all weathers and enduring pain from injuries.
Officers are selected largely by the Regiment’s veteran NCOs, and many tend to feel they are still being judged after they have passed. As one says, ‘In general they have contempt for what they call “Ruperts”. They do not listen to reason. The only way to earn their respect is through physical achievement – which makes it rather difficult to discuss the finer arguments about our role.’
Many hours of an SAS soldier’s training are spent on the range, acquiring a high degree of proficiency with different weapons. Specialized courses include sessions in the ‘Killing House’, where soldiers are confronted with various situations in which they must make split-second judgements about whether to fire, with live rounds, at targets. Training emphasizes the need to open fire, with the minimum of hesitation, if the target is recognized as hostile. In some exercises fellow soldiers stand among dummies, placing their lives quite literally in the hands of their comrades who burst into the room and have to disable the ‘terrorists’.
SAS soldiers are scornful of civilians who believe that it is possible, western-style, to shoot a weapon out of a person’s hand or to disable someone with shots to the legs. In the terror of close-range combat a soldier cannot waste time aiming at a fast-moving limb; he is trained to shoot at the trunk – putting as many bullets into a person as is necessary to ensure they will be unable to use their weapon.
The skills which the SAS was meant to bring to Ireland were those fostered by the Hereford regime. A soldier who has the self-discipline to push himself across the Brecon Beacons with a huge bergen on his back in sub-zero temperatures will have the stamina to lie in wait for days in a hole in the ground, defecating into a plastic bag and sleeping in soaking wet clothes while waiting for a terrorist to arrive.
But the new arena of Northern Ireland was to reveal some vital defects of the Hereford system. Judgements between friend and foe were rarely as simple as in the Killing House. In Northern Ireland soldiers faced the threat that the enemy might shoot them first. Classroom doctrines about controlled ‘double taps’ – bursts of two rounds – were often forgotten in the terrorist battleground when SAS soldiers would let fly dozens of bullets, sometimes at people who were no more than bystanders.
The introduction of the SAS in Ulster was a political act. The symbolic value of sending an élite squadron to Bessbrook, the village from which most of the eleven victims of the 1976 bus shooting came, was clear. Although a London newspaper derided the despatch of twelve soldiers in January 1976 as a ‘token’ presence, in fact they were merely an advance party: several weeks later the SAS sent its D Squadron, numbering seventy-five, to Bessbrook.
From the outset, the SAS’s presence was publicized for political ends. Even though secrecy was vital to the type of operation the SAS wanted to conduct, various political figures and members of the security forces were keen to exploit the propaganda value of the Regiment. The republicans also understood, even before the SAS arrived, that fear
