O’Sally recovered from his wound though he always had a limp. He was given a life sentence and died in prison after starving himself to death along with Bobby Sands.
Robbie left military life as soon as he could and got himself a job as a diver on an oil platform in the North Sea.
As for me, I was headed for the waters of Scotland to learn another part of the SBS’s varied trade. The next year was going to be wet, cold and windy, and filled with laughter and tragedy, the mile markers of an SBS operative’s life.
6
Within a few days of returning from Northern Ireland, before heading into the North Sea, I was sent to Brunei to attend a jungle training school run by the SAS on the Tutong Estuary. We were picking the brains of the Australian SAS, who had the most advanced jungle warfare techniques in those days, specifically small-team patrolling, instant ambush, anti-ambush and anti-pursuit techniques. The Australians learned much of their trade in Vietnam, where they achieved more kills per man than any other special forces unit in that war, and throughout their hundreds of operations they never lost a single soldier in the field due to direct action. Most of their fatalities were caused by booby-traps. The New Zealand SAS, who also saw action in Vietnam, was made up mostly of Maoris and they are still the finest military trackers in the world. They demonstrated their skills by tracking one of our patrols long enough to ascertain our direction, then moved around and ahead of us to lay an ambush which we walked into.
At the jungle training school we were joined by some older SBS members who had served in the conflicts in Aden and Borneo. During the long yomps through the jungle, bivvying up every night, these old soldiers taught us many useful tricks. Building bashers to live in, hunting, trapping, dealing with insect, plant and wildlife, and ways to make life in the jungle more comfortable. On one occasion Alan, a powerhouse of a Marine who was on my SBS selection course, slung a hammock between two trees and built an elaborate overhead shelter with attached mosquito net. Pete, one of the old and bold of the SBS, made himself an A-frame bed and shelter out of tree branches that looked like a penthouse suite compared with anything the rest of us had put together.
‘What do you think of that?’ Alan asked Pete as he indicated his hammock.
Pete glanced at it then looked up for a second to confirm something. ‘You won’t live through the night,’ was his comment.
He was serious. We looked around Alan’s hammock for a deadly spider-nest or snake pit or something like that but could see nothing.
‘First thing you do when you make camp in primary jungle is look up,’ Pete said.
We looked up, and there it was, a massive tree, a dead-fall, leaning precariously against another tree and just waiting to collapse, all several tons of it, directly on to Alan’s bivvy. Alan could not dismantle his hammock quickly enough, never taking his eyes off the dead-fall. Every so often throughout the night you could hear the dead trees crashing to the earth.
One afternoon off while down in the local village of Tutong, I was enjoying a beer and a piece of
ratou
, the local spicy taco-like pancake, with Jakers, when an Iban walked in. Ibans are the local tribesmen who live in the jungle. He was a proud and serious man in his forties with jet-black straight hair in a bowl cut. Short and wiry with lightly tanned skin, he wore a thin jacket, shorts and leather sandals. His body was covered from head to foot in tattoos. He recognised us as regular Royal Marines by our berets and walked over, sat on a chair at our table and demanded a beer in a calm, polite, mellow voice. We looked at him, surprised by his manner, which intimated we owed him one. He hardly looked at us, staring ahead with his chin up and arms outstretched supported on an ornately carved walking-stick. We bought him a beer.
We never spoke to him, and after his third or fourth can of Tiger he suddenly started to talk about his part in the Borneo confrontation when he was young, working for the British against the Indonesians. He talked in the simple English he had learned all those years ago.
He had been recruited as a tracker for the Royal Marines. Ibans were a gentle people and used mostly blowpipes to hunt with. His job was to lead the Marine patrols through the jungle, tracking the enemy and pointing out booby-traps. The Marines had always offered him food while on patrol but he preferred to live mostly off what he found in the jungle, adding seasonings such as curry which he carried in a small pouch slung over his shoulder. After demanding another beer he recalled the most memorable moment of his war.
One day he was taken out of the jungle and placed aboard an Army lorry along with several other British soldiers. It was the first time he had been in a motor vehicle. After he had been driven for a while he was taken out of the lorry and put in a long room. Many soldiers joined him in the long room and they all sat and waited. He wore nothing more than his usual bark loincloth and carried his bamboo dart quiver – his nine-foot long blowpipe was taken from him and left outside the hut.
He was given a pack and shown how to carry it on his back like the other soldiers. He had never worn a backpack before but he put it on because the British asked him to and he trusted them.
A terrible storm suddenly blew up outside and the long hut shook violently. Ibans lived in long huts themselves made from the trees that grew around them. He knew that even the white man’s long huts made of metal could blow down in a monsoon and he felt safer outside. But when he tried to leave they would not let him and he became ill at ease because he thought he was now a prisoner.
No one in the room spoke to him and hardly anyone looked at him even though he was the only Iban there. He thought everyone in the hut was afraid of the storm outside because they hardly spoke and looked very serious and uncomfortable. Then after a time a door to an adjoining room opened and a man came in talking loudly.
Everyone stood up as if the man was important. Then the Iban said he was suddenly grabbed by two men on either side and walked down through the room. He was worried but they told him that it was all right and he could leave now. The storm continued to rage outside and the hut was shaken and buffeted. Everyone else was getting ready to leave. He was taken to a door at the back of the room which opened as he got to it. He froze in horror in the doorway and refused to go. The jungle was now far, far below.
He was forced to the edge of the door but he yelled and begged for them to stop, trying to explain that he was not a bird and could not fly, but they didn’t believe him. They wrenched his grip from the door-frame and hurled him out. He pulled his knees up and hugged them tightly to his chest, keeping his face tucked in between them and his eyes screwed shut. When he hit the ground his knees impacted with his face and broke his cheek-bones. Then British soldiers came and cut him out of the strings and canvas that were tangled around him.
Without medical attention he worked as a tracker for two weeks even though his cheek-bones were broken. He said he saw a lot of fighting before the battle was over and then he went back home.
At the end of the story the Iban finished his beer and would not accept another. He stood up and walked out of the bar.
I enjoyed the contrast of the jungle weather and terrain with that of Britain. And the sea was like diving in a tropical fish tank compared to the mud-pools overpopulated with jellyfish where we did much of our SBS diver training. Our jungle training was a six-week introductory course in case we had to join operations that were currently brewing in Central America. Afterwards, I was back in the UK to learn the meat of our main role – maritime warfare.
Much of the work the SBS does, especially in water, on or below it, is pioneering and inherently dangerous. The SBS were, and still are in most areas, the cutting edge of maritime special forces warfare, both conventional and anti-terrorist, involving expertise in activities from beach reconnaissance, sabotage and information-gathering to oil platform and large ship assault and recapture. The US Navy’s SEALs at that time for instance did not have a counter-terrorist team to talk of, but then they had few terrorist threats in those days either. In 1982, when the US Navy SEALs decided to put together their own anti-terrorist group, the SBS advised and trained its first members – a role it still performs today.
The SBS training ethic has always been, ‘If we can do it in the worst possible conditions we can do it any time.’ The SEALs had their own version of the saying which was, ‘There’s two ways to do something – the easy way and the British way.’ It was intended as a dig at us but we took it as a compliment.
Specialised maritime warfare had to be pioneered by people with experience of and dedication to the sea. It was unreasonable that the SAS wanted to move in on our role. They did not have the pedigree for such a commitment. Their own Boat Troop at that time was little more than a handful of rubber boats and canoes in mint condition due to lack of use. Many Royal Marines joined the SAS and were often placed into the Boat Troop because of their background, but the irony is that Marines who joined the SAS and not the SBS usually did so because of a dislike for our water-sports – it’s not everyone’s cup of tea.
The average level of fitness of an SBS operative is generally much higher than that of his SAS counterpart. This is as much out of necessity as tradition. Long dives and swims followed by strenuous climbs up the sides of ships and oil platforms require a constant high degree of physical ability. Also, for conventional operations, we must be prepared to carry canoes or/and diving equipment across country on top of our normal field equipment. There was a reason for those backbreaking portages in selection. Physical training is an integral part of every SBS operative’s day no matter where in the world he is. The only time we never started a working day with a strenuous physical workout was during live operations. In my time, two SBS operatives have represented England in the Olympics and many more have taken part in world-class running, triathlon and mountain-climbing events. The high physical standards are a duty. You don’t need to be super-fit to charge into a building or aboard an aircraft, but if you only have a few hours’ notice to scale a massive oil platform carrying heavy equipment in horrendous weather having swum miles, or to climb up the side of a supertanker while other members of your team put their lives in your hands, you had better always be in more than just ‘good shape’.
When the SBS resisted letting the SAS train with them in submarines – where they hoped to learn the mysteries of exiting and re-entering them whilst submerged (E&RE) – the SAS made some arrangement with the Norwegian Navy and the German Kampschwimmers who were dabbling in the art at the time. But the Norwegians and the Germans were way behind us in the technique and were still firing themselves out of torpedo tubes. The SAS tried it for a while before deciding it was a tad dodgy and gave it a pass.
Pioneering guarantees that mistakes will be made and the SBS did not get off lightly when paying for their sea lessons. Exiting from and then re-entering a submerged submarine is the most clandestine method for coastal insertion and the infiltration of water-borne targets, and developing the skill has been costly in SBS lives.
E&RE is a process by which a team of SBS operatives ‘exit’ out of a slowly moving submarine while submerged at periscope depth, swim to the surface and head for their objective. On completion of the operation, the team return to the water, rendezvous with the submerged sub, swim down and ‘re-enter’ it. It may sound straightforward but the procedure is fraught with danger.
When I returned from the jungle I travelled to Scotland to take part in my first E&RE exercise. Many of the basic technical problems had been solved by then, but there were always dangers.
I arrived in HMS Faslane, the Navy’s submarine base on a sea loch in the west of Scotland, to join in rehearsals that were already underway several miles away. I hopped on to a fleet tender, a squat Navy tug-boat, and set off towards Loch Long where a team of SBS on HMS
Orpheus
(an O-class submarine) were operating.
It was a typically grey, wintry Scottish day. The water looked black and bottomless and the mountaintops were lost in mist. It was not raining but the air was moist enough to wet you within minutes out on deck.
In detail, in E&RE the submarine, with its team of SBS on board, slows to no faster than a couple of knots and no deeper than periscope depth, which is thirty feet. The first man out of the submarine, through the escape-hatch, half an hour or so before the team, is the casing diver. His work can sometimes take hours and so he wears long-endurance mixed-gas breathing apparatus. His job is to make sure the large air-bottles, distributed at various points around the outside of the sub, that the team will use to breathe once they have exited, are all in working order. He also prepares the team’s larger operational equipment for release, which is stowed outside the submarine in special watertight bins under the outer casing, or skin, in readiness to be floated to the surface on nylon lines along with the team when they surface. Finally, he supervises the divers as they exit the sub until they have all left for the surface, then ‘cleans up’ before re-entering himself and the sub departs.
E&RE is carried out at night and the casing diver works in darkness, moving around the sub mostly by feel and memory – a light could give him away to a passing reconnaissance aircraft, boat or a watcher on a distant hilltop. In the absence of through-water-comms he communicates with the sub by tapping the hull with a three-pound brass hammer he keeps in a leg pocket. The submarine crew are urged to stay silent when a diver is outside, giving the procedure an eerie feeling, his clangs echoing throughout the sub, telling of his progress and that he is in fact still with the sub.
The SBS team muster under the forward escape-hatch in the ceiling of the torpedo storage and firing compartment. Every submarine has escape-hatches in case the sub sinks and the crew have to abandon it. Using the hatch is most submariners’ nightmare and they must all attend a training school where they learn the procedure. They rarely practise it once training is complete, mainly because of the extreme danger. When the SBS exit the sub they use virtually the same procedure.