Mud Sweat & Tears - Bear Grylls [49]
In those few hours’ reprieve, I would busy myself, sorting out my blistered feet, eating some food and heating up a hot drink. But after that was done I could only lie there waiting – waiting for that dreaded call to muster on parade for morning battle PT.
Each weekend this battle PT got more and more unpleasant, and harder and harder.
The next morning, in full kit, we paraded in the pre-dawn light. Everyone was shuffling around with stiff aching legs, and we all looked drained and exhausted. In contrast, the instructors were pacing around us. Hungry for blood.
Then at 0555 on the dot, the order went out.
‘Follow us, and keep up. This weekend, your performance has been appalling, and now you will pay.’
The DS set off at a pace down one of the forestry tracks, and we pulled on our packs and set out after them. Then the pace quickened to a level where we had to run to keep up – but running under so much weight was near impossible.
Within twenty minutes each of us was gasping and pouring with sweat, as we fought to keep up. An hour and a half later, that pace hadn’t eased one notch.
We had become this long straggle of moaning, exhausted bodies – dishevelled, and in no order – with about a mile between the front and last man. It was now broad daylight, and each and every man was dead on their feet.
I dragged myself along the final track, and finished somewhere in the middle of the group. But I was completely spent. I had nothing more I could give. Nothing.
If you had asked me to walk another fifty yards I would have struggled to manage it.
As I stood there, my sweat-drenched body steaming, one of the recruits started cursing and muttering quietly to himself.
‘I’ve had enough of this shit,’ he grumbled under his breath. ‘It’s bollocks. This isn’t soldiering, it’s sadism.’
Then he looked at me. ‘No one should be made to do this,’ he continued. ‘We are treated like pack mules, and even pack mules would eventually die under this workload.’
I told him to hang on in there, and that he would have forgotten about all this by the end of the day, when he was in a warm shower. He then turned and just stared at me.
‘You know the difference between you and me, Bear? You’re just dumber than me.’ And with that, he turned, dropped his pack in a heap, walked over to the DS and said he wanted out.
The DS quietly directed the guy towards the trucks.
The recruit climbed aboard one, and I never saw him again. That was how it always happened.
They beat you down by quietly raising the bar ever higher and higher, until either you snapped or you failed to make the time.
As they always told us: ‘We don’t fail you, you fail yourself. If you beat the clock, and keep going, you will pass.’
On the journey back, sat huddled in the four-tonner, I thought about what that recruit had said: ‘You’re just dumber than me.’
Maybe he had a point.
I mean, getting thrashed senseless did feel pretty dumb – and then getting paid only £27 a day for the privilege of being thrashed felt even dumber.
But, that guy who quit also missed the real point. Good things come through grit and hard work, and all things worthwhile have a cost.
In the case of the SAS, the cost was somewhere around a thousand barrels of sweat.
Was it a price I was prepared to pay?
It was a question that Selection would give me plenty of time to ask myself.
CHAPTER 44
Selection had seemed to take over my every waking moment.
I’d been told this would happen, and had never really believed it – but it was true. Something that you put so much effort and time into is hard to switch off from.
The excitement of what had passed, and the trepidation of what was to follow, consumed me in the days off we had in-between.
Trucker and I would return to our ‘student’ life in Bristol, where friends wandered casually between lectures and the canteen.
We would tag along, and hang with them, but we would also maintain a little distance.
We avoided the drunken late nights