Mud Sweat & Tears - Bear Grylls [64]
I was in front when suddenly I slipped and started to slide fast down this muddy, icy gulley. Trucker was right behind me, falling, too.
As we slowed in the snowy, gravel slush, I turned to climb back up where we had fallen, when suddenly we saw a light just below us.
I realized that this was the checkpoint we had been looking for in vain. What an answer to our desperate, quiet prayers!
We checked in and headed out for the last RV.
Suddenly the going got almost impossible. I went up to my waist in bog three times. The terrain was also littered with endless cut tree trunks, half-submerged in the peaty ground.
I was freezing cold and badly dehydrated now. This march was beginning to beat me.
I had nothing more to give. Slowly but surely, from sheer exhaustion, I was beginning to shut down.
Matt, one of the other recruits from our squadron, was with us now as well. He could see I was at my limit. He pulled me aside, and made me put on an extra layer of clothing. He shared his water bottle with me and helped me stand.
He did more for me in that hour than I can ever thank him for. Then, together, the three of us pressed on.
Soon, we spotted a dirt track down below us. It was a way out from these cursed tree stumps. We knew the consequences of being caught using a track. RTU’d at once.
But we were getting nowhere in this godforsaken terrain, and we needed to make up time if we were to pass this final march.
It was do or die.
We picked our way through the maze of dense tree stumps, and stumbled out on to the track.
Cautiously, we began to follow it.
Suddenly we saw headlights ahead, and we dived over a barbed-wire fence. We had nowhere to hide – so just hit the dirt. We lay there, faces pressed into the mud, and didn’t move.
I prayed that the headlight beam wouldn’t pick us out.
The Land Rover, with the DS inside, rumbled slowly past without stopping. They hadn’t spotted us.
We risked the track for another thirty minutes, then cut east back into the woods and then on to open moorland again.
The end was now only eight miles away.
But the end just never seemed to come. We were like the walking dead.
Matt, Trucker and I had to stop and sit down every five hundred metres for a rest, but then we’d fall into a daze in a matter of seconds as the weight came off our shoulders and legs.
Two minutes sitting, slumped in the snow and mud, then I’d have to kick Matt and get him moving again. It was my turn to help him.
‘Get up, Matt, we’ve got to finish this.’
Eventually, across the reservoir, we spotted what we’d been looking for.
Headlights glistening on the water.
They were coming from the four-tonne trucks that stood waiting for us at the end. We could hear the distant low rumble of their diesel engines turned on to fire the heaters inside the cabs.
It was only half a mile as the crow flies across the reservoir, but probably three miles to march all the way around.
Renewed energy soared to my muscles. I picked up the pace and started to march as fast as I could. It was pure adrenalin, driving me to finish this hell.
Finally, after twenty-one hours, Matt, Trucker and myself were the first of the twenty-one SAS recruits to finish Endurance.
I had never felt so exhausted, relieved, proud and broken in all my life.
But all I cared about was that I was through the mountain-phase of SAS Selection.
Continuation training, though, would prove to be a very different and much tougher beast altogether.
CHAPTER 58
At the end of the ‘hill’ phase, only a handful of recruits from our squadron remained.
It took me nearly six days to get any real feeling back into my swollen feet and blistered back, but I had proven myself fit and resilient in the mountains.
Now would come the time to be trained.
First we had to learn what they called ‘green army’ skills (which are the regular, basic soldiering skills), and then, when these were mastered, we would move on to learn the SF skills.
It would be on these specialist skills