Mud Sweat & Tears - Bear Grylls [67]
The pace was intense, and the DS wanted to test our individual mental and physical abilities to stay alert and switched on and working well as a team, even when our heads were bursting with new information and we were physically shattered.
We were up each night till 3 or 4 a.m., often doing mock ambushes and live attacks.
The hardest times were when we were just lying there in some ditch in the pouring rain, so tired that it was near impossible not to nod off for a few seconds. Cold, hungry and drained of adrenalin – waiting for the DS to pass through our ‘ambush’ site, high up on the boggy Yorkshire moorland that surrounded the barracks.
Often they never showed, and we would finally haul ourselves, and all our kit and weaponry, back to camp in the early hours, where we’d have to clean everything like new.
Only then could we collapse into our billets for a precious couple of hours’ sleep.
I learnt to dread the alarm that roused us each morning for PT, after only having had such a small amount of sleep.
My body felt like the walking dead – tired, bruised, stiff. Yet the skill level we were required to operate at increased every day.
That was the real test of this phase: can you maintain the skills when you are beat?
I remember one early morning PT session in particular. We were doing our usual series of long shuttle sprints and fireman’s lifts, which had us all on the point of vomiting. Just when I thought I could run no longer with the weight on my shoulders, there was a loud thud and cry of pain from behind me.
I glanced behind me to see a recruit lying sprawled out on the concrete, oozing blood.
Apparently, the guy carrying this poor recruit on his shoulders had sprinted too close to a lamp post on the road and, as he passed it, he had thwacked the guy’s head so hard he had been knocked clean out.
The silver lining was that the medics moved in and we were all dismissed half an hour early. Perfect. But this didn’t happen that often. In fact, that was about the only tiny let-up we got for two weeks.
This general lack of sleep really got to me. And little can prepare people for how they will react when deprived of it – over multiple days. Everything suffers: concentration, motivation, and performance. All key elements for what we were doing. But it is designed that way. Break you down and find out what you are really made of. Underneath the fluff.
I remember during one particular lecture (on the excruciatingly boring topic of the different penetration abilities of different bullets or rounds), looking over to my left and noticing Trucker jabbing his arm with a safety pin every few minutes, in an attempt to keep himself awake.
The sight cheered me up no end.
What became so draining was that nothing that any of us did went unnoticed. Again, it was carefully planned that way: they wanted to see us work under the maximum amount of fatigue and pressure.
Soon I was just longing for the final four-day exercise, where at least we could get out on the ground, in our patrols, away from this intense scrutiny and hell.
The day of the final exercise started in the cold pre-dawn (as usual), but with no PT (unusual), and we were moved into our small four-man patrols.
We could no longer have any interaction with anyone outside of our own small team or cell. (This is a standard operational security measure to ensure that if you are captured then you have no knowledge of any other patrol’s particular mission.) It effectively acts to keep you 100 per cent mission-focused.
Orders were issued and individual patrols briefed on their mission-specific details.
The day was then a flurry of mission preparations: stripping down our individual kit to the bare minimum so we could carry enough ammunition between us. Filling magazines with rounds and tracer rounds, cleaning weapons, studying maps, rehearsing drills, memorizing emergency heli RVs, going over E & E (escape and evasion) procedures, and testing radio comms.
I was fired up,