Mud Sweat & Tears - Bear Grylls [41]
It was this ‘fight’ and determination that would become the key ingredient to attempting Selection – much more than any natural ability.
If SAS Selection does one thing, it ensures that everyone, over the many months, reaches that stage where they are physically ‘dead on their feet’. Utterly spent.
However fit you are.
What the SAS is looking for is spirit and fight: those soldiers who, when every bone in their body is screaming for rest, will dig deep, and start moving, again and again and again. That isn’t natural fitness, it is heart, and it is this that Selection demands of all that attempt it.
At this stage, though, I maybe didn’t have the confidence in myself to understand that we all have that spirit in us.
I felt a little more comfortable with the marines. I had experienced a small taste of what would be asked of me as a potential Royal Marines officer.
I knew it would be tough, but I felt I could do it.
I was good at press-ups and pull-ups and ‘yomping’ with a backpack (a staple of life in the marines); could I manage the ultra-long marches over the high mountains, carrying seriously huge weights on your back, which is such a core part of SAS Selection?
That somehow felt beyond what I believed I could do.
Yet still the voice niggled.
In the end I concluded that nothing ventured, nothing gained. (A vital ethos to follow if life is to have flavour, I have since learnt.)
I knew I should at least attempt Selection.
If I failed, well at least I would fail whilst trying. Face down in the dirt. Knowing that I had given it my all. (Oh, and what’s more, I knew that the SAS required secrecy from anyone attempting Selection, which was perfect. If I failed, I concluded, at least no one would know!)
So that was the plan; but in truth, if I could have had any idea of the pain and battering that my body would go through on Selection, I would have realized it was insane to continue with this mad dream.
But luckily, we never really know what the future holds.
CHAPTER 37
Normally, for a soldier to attempt SAS Selection, it first requires several years of service in the regular army. But the SAS is comprised of three regiments, with 21 and 23 being reserve regiments to 22 SAS.
Both 21 and 23 SAS tend to be made up of former paratroopers or commandos who have left the regular army, but still want a challenge and an outlet for their hard-earned skills.
The SAS then take these ex-soldiers, and put them through a rigorous selection course, designed to separate the best. Then they take those few and train them up in all the skills of a covert, combat operative.
But 21 and 23 SAS are also open to any civilians who can prove themselves capable of the exacting high standards demanded by the SAS. The route in is longer and more spread out, but it is a potential route in, all the same.
What I liked about the SAS (R)(Reserve) was that it gave you a degree of flexibility in how you lived your life.
You weren’t a full-time soldier, yet many of the SAS Reserve soldiers did it as their main job. They could be deployed anywhere in the world at little notice, were highly trained and specialized, yet they could pick and choose how much time they dedicated to the regiment.
I loved the idea of that.
Joining straight in from being a civilian meant a very steep learning curve, but if you were successful you could join the SAS(R) without all the tedious process of having to learn conventional, boot-cleaning soldiering first.
And I never had any ambitions to be a conventional anything.
Quite a few of my friends had set out after school to join a regular tank or infantry regiment, as officers. It would invariably involve a lot of ceremonial duties and high living in London. But despite the fun that they would surely have, I found the thought of that lifestyle, at barely twenty years old, totally unappealing.
I wanted adventure, and I was looking for the less trodden path.
If I was to join 21 SAS, I could only do it as a trooper, in other words at the lowest military rank available. I wouldn’t be an officer like my public-school