Authors: Peter Ratcliffe
When someone is RTU-ed, he is never sent back with a bad report, nor is his unit told why he has been sent back. His record merely shows that his service skills are no longer required by the SAS. The fact is that anyone who undertakes and succeeds in passing Selection is a different breed of man. And he will go back to his regiment not only a far better soldier than the majority of men in it, but one with something to offer that regiment. In other words, because he is not considered suitable for the SAS in no way means that he is not a good soldier. Indeed, if he hadn’t been pretty special in the first place, he would never have got as far as he did.
Four years is a long time to be under scrutiny, yet quite often a man’s inadequacies don’t come to light for many months. His fitness level may drop, for instance, or he may turn into a barrack-room lawyer, although we didn’t get many of those. When I joined the Regiment, I was told by one old hand, ‘Opinions are like arseholes. We all have one.’ Bear in mind, members of the Regiment are universally outspoken and like to voice their opinions, because they all have a tendency to think they are budding generals. (If this seems ludicrous, it’s worth noting the number of very senior generals of the British Army in recent years who are ex-SAS.) They are also fond of the sound of their own voices.
Some men are sent back to their units because they simply can’t fit in, others because their intellects are not always up to the level necessary for the jobs they are called upon to do. This last sometimes doesn’t show up until a man has attended a series of demanding training courses dealing with, say, medical matters, or signalling, or demolition, where the complexity of the subject and the technical expertise demanded can defeat all but the best.
On the subject of the SAS and casualties, when a man is injured, particularly in the field, he has to have the best immediate medical attention available until he can be delivered into the hands of skilled surgeons. The SAS sends men for medical-attachment training to several hospitals around the country that are sympathetic to our medical needs, so allowing us to gain hands-on experience.
Together with a mate called Jock, I was sent on medical attachment to an NHS hospital on the south coast. Arriving on a Monday morning, we reported to the casualty department, where the first person we bumped into was Richard Villars, a former SAS medical officer, later to write a book of his experiences entitled
Knife Edge: Life as a Special Forces Surgeon
. After leaving the service Ricky had become an orthopaedic consultant, and this was also his first day at the hospital. He invited us to his clinic. Donning white coats like real doctors, we sat behind him as he settled at his desk.
After a while there was a knock at the door and an old woman in her eighties shuffled in. Ricky smiled at her and said breezily, ‘Come in, old thing, and sit down.’ When she was comfortable, he asked, ‘So what’s wrong with you, old thing?’ She immediately launched into a rambling complaint, the gist of which was that her shoulder hurt so much that she could not sleep. Ricky disagreed; it wasn’t her shoulder that was hurting, he said, but her neck, whereupon the two of them argued for several minutes about the source of her pain.
He sent her to the X-ray department and an hour later she returned, clutching the plates. Ricky looked at them and remarked, ‘Call that a neck, old thing? It’s a load of old rubbish.’ In order to ease her pain, he said, he was going to have her put in traction. The old woman wasn’t giving up yet, however. ‘But what about my shoulder?’ she demanded. Again he told her it was her neck that was the problem, and yet again to her complete disbelief, as well as her annoyance. As the poor old thing walked out, she shouted, ‘Well, you want to try sleeping with my shoulder, then.’
The door banged to behind her. We looked at the newly arrived orthopaedic consultant. He was grinning. ‘You bastard!’ I said. To which, still grinning, he replied, ‘You’ve got to treat them firmly.’
Such moments aside, I found the medical course fascinating. Most of my time was spent in Casualty, but I watched operations in the theatre, carried out post-mortems – simple pathology – and spent some time on the wards. All the time my knowledge was increasing, and most of it has stayed with me, so that I even know how to amputate a leg. I have to say, though, that I wouldn’t let any SAS mate chop my leg off. I’d rather take my chances with gangrene …
When, in the summer of 1977, I went with another SAS member for a refresher course at another hospital, this time in the north-west, the consultant in charge wouldn’t let us wear white coats, telling us we had to wear green coats instead – like the hospital porters. Being somewhat pissed off with this, we rang the head of the Medical Wing in Hereford and moaned about the ruling. However, he told us not to rock the boat and to go along with the consultant’s decision because, apparently, it was difficult to get our men accepted for training at this particular hospital. The result was that although the nursing staff all knew who we were and what we were doing there, a lot of people called us porters, which used to amuse the nurses enormously.
One warm afternoon – the weather here seemed a good deal better than I remembered it from earlier times I had spent in the city – a man who’d fallen and cut his knee arrived in Casualty. With a large wink, the staff nurse told us that it was our turn to deal with the patient. The guy was lying on the bed in a curtained-off cubicle when we walked in wearing our green porter’s outfits. The staff nurse turned to my partner and asked, ‘Have you done much suturing, Colin?’
Colin, who had a Lancashire accent so broad you could spin cotton from it, shook his head and admitted, ‘Well, only on bits of rubber and oranges.’ At this the guy with the gashed knee reared up from the bed and screamed, ‘I’m not an orange! You’re not touching me!’
Two days later, a joiner turned up in Casualty, having put a wood chisel through the palm of his hand. It was my turn to play doctor, so I went into his cubicle with a student nurse called Anne, a stunning blonde. We were doing a no-touch routine. So after scrubbing our hands, we put the equipment pack on its side and opened it with plastic forceps, and from then on didn’t touch anything with our bare hands.
I examined the man’s wound, feeling along his arm with my gloved hands, at which he said, ‘All right, Doc?’ I mumbled, ‘Er, yep, fine thanks.’ In fact, I was so nervous my hands were shaking. Selecting a suture with which to stitch the cut, I left it too short and pulled the thread straight through. In all, I did that five times. When the patient asked how many stitches I’d given him so far, I answered ‘None.’
‘That’s funny,’ he said. ‘I felt it go through several times all ready.’ Eventually, after a dozen attempts, I managed to get three stitches into the guy’s palm, which seemed to do the trick. Anne, however, was standing behind him and laughing herself silly at my efforts. Nevertheless, I managed to give him an anti-tetanus injection, bandaged him up and sent him on his way.
The following Saturday night, Colin and I knocked off work at the hospital at about nine o’clock in order to go nightclubbing. We walked into a place called the Minstrel. We were pretty certain we wouldn’t know a soul there, and we were right – until suddenly, somebody shouted from the bar, ‘All right, Doc?’
It was the joiner from Casualty. He was standing there, waving his bandaged hand at me. He bought me a pint and told all the girls who were with him how I’d stitched his wound and bandaged his hand. Somewhat embarrassed, and slightly anxious that my appreciative ex-patient might discover that I was a long way from being a doctor, or even a qualified paramedic, I muttered something about doing so many, I’d forgotten. Laughing, he said that when he’d told his sister, a local nurse, how his hand had been stitched by a doctor in a green coat, she’d said, ‘Don’t be daft. Only porters wear green coats.’ He thought her comment was hilarious, so if he reads this, he’ll know his sister was pretty nearly right all along.
If the courses we were sent on had their funny moments, so too did life in Bradbury Lines. In Mobility Troop, as in the other troops, all the men who didn’t have homes in Hereford lived in communal rooms in the long wooden huts that were a feature of the camp, and which predated the Regiment’s arrival. The only privacy was afforded by lockers separating the beds.
One night I and a friend of mine, invariably known as ‘Jimmy’ after a famous disc jockey, were asleep in our beds when the door opened and in tiptoed Taff, another friend who had passed Selection with me. Despite his attempts at silence he woke us, partly because it was obvious he was not alone. He’d smuggled a woman into the camp and, once safely in, had brought her into our hut. In the semi-darkness, and because of the lockers, she couldn’t see that we were sleeping in the same room.
They lay on his bed and he asked her what turned her on. Keeping very quiet, Jimmy and I listened in fascination as she told him, and within minutes they were hard at it. The pair of them were well away and pretty oblivious to their surroundings, but when we heard Taff tell her not to speak with her mouth full, we two listeners couldn’t help but let out a couple of suppressed giggles.
At once she stopped whatever she was doing, anxiously whispering, ‘What’s that noise?’ Taff told her that there was a budgie in the corner, and asked her to get on with what she’d been doing when she left off. They were at it most of the night, which just goes to show that all that bloody marching doesn’t necessarily leave a man incapable of further physical effort …
Even ignoring such incidents, our daily routine was pretty informal, and a far cry from the drill and bull of the Paras. Each morning the troop sergeants appeared and we would all assemble in the Interest Room. We’d have a squadron meeting, which we called ‘prayers’, and then, if nothing was happening – that is, there were no courses, exercises or operations in which we were involved or which we were planning – then the rest of the day was ours.
In those days, soon after I first joined the SAS, we might finish work by ten in the morning, which left us with periods we called ‘prime time’. Those who lived away from the camp could go home, and any of us could go out and enjoy ourselves, although we were not permitted to take ourselves out of reach of the camp.
I remember returning on a Monday evening in June from my first tour on Operation Storm in Dhofar. We had been away for five months. As the coach brought us down Callow Hill on the road from Ross-on-Wye, we suddenly saw the cathedral and the city of Hereford spread out below us. It was a beautiful sight, and a delight to eyes that had seen nothing but heat haze, dust devils, sand and barren rock for six months. It meant we were coming home, home to the place we had missed so much, and had looked forward so greatly to seeing again.
It would be wrong, however, to give the impression that service in the SAS of the early 1970s consisted mainly of loafing around between operations. In those days, when we weren’t enjoying ‘prime time’, our lives were all ‘Go, go, go!’ No sooner had we arrived in the camp from Dhofar and dumped our kit, than we streamed down into the town for a night’s drinking. Yet by 4 am next morning, hangovers or not, we were on a coach heading for South Cerney, near Cirencester, where we were parachuting. Two days after that, we flew off on exercise to Greece. Our lives settled into a kind of varied round of exercises, courses, Regimental business, operations and ‘prime time’, and most of us never really knew from week to week what we’d be doing next.
Although I had met the troop commander, Adam, I hadn’t actually soldiered with him because we had been in a split location in Dhofar. He proved to be an exceptionally nice guy. As I talked with him at South Cerney, he told me that I was going to be in his patrol during the exercise in Greece, so that he could have a good look at me and see what I was like. I didn’t know it then, but the truth was that without his glasses he probably couldn’t have seen me at all.
We parachuted in to Greece, and began the exercise in blistering heat. All day we lay up in concealed positions, moving only at night. Before our first night move Adam came to me and said, ‘Billy, I want you to be lead scout and take a bearing to the railway line. We’ll cross the line, which runs due north, and then I want you to go north-west to the road. Once there, we’ll take another bearing.’
I said, ‘OK, Boss,’ and went off to ready my kit. In the patrol was a big Southern Irishman we called ‘The Ditch’, on account of the way he kept running Land Rovers into ditches. He could drink thirty bottles of Guinness a night without falling down, and still carry on the next day as if nothing unusual had happened. He must have had the constitution of an ox, although he was not the fittest man I’d ever met. All he seemed to do was drink and smoke. Three years later, however, he suddenly took up running and became a fantastic marathon runner. We couldn’t believe that he’d ever stop smoking. He was a good soldier and a decent bloke, but if driving Land Rovers wasn’t his long suit, neither was navigation, as we were shortly to learn.
The order of march was myself, Adam, The Ditch, two Greek soldiers who were attached to us, and finally Lance, a character to rival The Ditch, though in a completely different way, and who had saved our lives in Dhofar. Once night fell, we prepared to move. Using the North Star, I took a rough bearing on a landscape feature in the distance and led off. It took about forty minutes to get to the railway line, and once we had crossed it I readjusted north-west and moved off again.
We’d been going for about an hour when Adam made a clicking noise to indicate that we would take five minutes’ rest by a big tree up ahead. I stopped there and Adam came up to the tree, then there was a long gap before the two Greeks arrived, followed by Lance. In the distance we could hear The Ditch grunting.
I sat down. Eventually, groaning and wheezing The Ditch came up – and immediately called me a cunt. When I asked him what was wrong, he almost exploded. ‘What’s wrong? What’s
wrong
? This isn’t a fucking Grand Prix. Slow down and use your compass.’ So I told him that I was navigating by the North Star, at which he went barmy. ‘Using the North Star? You daft cunt. It moves.’