Eye of the Storm (10 page)

We left Hereford on a Sunday afternoon in a 3-ton truck. They dropped us off in four-man patrols in different areas and we were given a place at which we were to rendezvous – if we managed to escape detection and capture. The instructor gave me a dead squirrel, a few potatoes and an empty bean can with a length of string for a handle, in which we were supposed to boil any food. Which was, of course, nonsense, since we had no matches and, as usual, it was pouring with rain. Further-more, even if I had managed to light a fire in that countryside, the smoke would have been seen from miles away. I would have been found before I’d had time to get thoroughly wet.

The hunters are looking for you right from the moment you get off the truck. But whether you stay undetected for as long as you are meant to, or get spotted and picked up earlier, you know you are going to face the Interrogation phase of the exercise.

As a prisoner of war, the only pieces of information you are permitted to give your captors are the ‘Big Four’: your name, rank, army number and date of birth. We were taught never to say ‘Yes’ to anything, and never to say ‘No’, so that, in answer to the question ‘Is this your name?’, for instance, we would answer ‘That is my name’ or ‘That is not my name’. The reason for this is because an enemy can use your one-word affirmatives and negatives from a recorded interrogation in a remastered tape or video to make it appear that you are confessing to them.

When it came to the Interrogation exercise, each of us was dragged into a room, stripped naked and blind-folded. Then the interrogating crew began to make remarks about the size of a man’s prick or the shape of his balls, or demanded to know whether he masturbated, the aim being to humiliate the prisoner. I found it curiously easy to ignore their gibes, simply by sticking to the Big Four in answer to any direct questions.

After some time I was taken outside and made to lean against a wall at an angle of 45 degrees with my fingers spread wide against the bricks and my legs apart. Extra loud ‘white noise’ – electronically generated sounds resembling continuous hissing and humming – was then played through speakers at a very high volume, and a rubber pouch containing rancid, horribly stinking, tinned army-issue cheese was hung under my nose. I reckon I spent three hours at a time like that. From time to time they poured buckets of water over my head so that I was soaked and cold. If a man smoked, as I did at the time, they blew cigarette smoke in his face, in an attempt to weaken his resolve.

Whatever the discomfort, however, the reality is that, unlike a genuine enemy, they can only hold you for twenty-four hours; more tellingly, they are only allowed to interrogate you for a total of eight hours out of the twenty-four. As would not be the case if you were captured by a real enemy, you know how long you will have to endure before it will all stop. Apart from that knowledge, the fear factor is the other main element missing from the Interrogation exercise, for the simple reason that you know that your ‘captors’ are not going to torture you as a genuine enemy might – and, in the case of several SAS soldiers captured during the Gulf War, did. You only have to remain calm and use your mind to shut out the insults and to overcome the cramp and the cold and the discomfort. In short, you can fool the interrogators. Besides, after all a man has been through during the rest of Selection, Interrogation is like a walk in the park.

Throughout the exercise, you can’t help noticing a number of people wandering about wearing white armbands. These are genuine umpires, and you know that they are not out to trick you into giving away information; they will also give straight answers to direct questions. This useful piece of information was to stand me in good stead towards the end of Interrogation. I was being taken down from the wall at the finish when I noticed an officer with a white armband walking around drinking a cup of something steaming. So I asked him the time, and he told me, ‘Five to three – in the morning.’ I was then taken back to the interrogation room where I found waiting for me the Selection Officer – he of the disheartening speech of welcome – and a colonel from the Joint Services Intelligence Wing (JSIW). At their direction I sat on a hard chair, waiting to see what would happen. As it turned out, the first question the colonel asked me was what time I thought it was.

‘Five to three, sir!’ I shouted.

He looked at the Selection Officer for a moment, and then said in wonderment, ‘Did you hear that? Bloody marvellous. Bloody marvellous. Well done.’ He must have thought that during the hours I’d spent leaning against that wall I had been counting off the seconds. Sadly, he didn’t think it was so bloody marvellous when I explained that I’d just asked the same question of one of the umpires.

Later, during a debriefing before we were taken away and given something to eat, they asked us what we had thought of the ordeal. I gave a diplomatic answer, but in fact I was perfectly well aware that Interrogation is not a tough test. If I had really been captured and interrogated by a genuine enemy, I would not have known what was coming next, and would almost certainly have been subjected to far more brutal physical abuse, possibly over a period of weeks. In an exercise, however, you know that the experts grilling you are not allowed to shoot you, or pull out your fingernails, or beat you up, or inject you with drugs, or any of the thousands of other hideous tortures of which so many regimes are capable. Indeed, sleep deprivation is probably the harshest thing you have to face during Interrogation.

Yet you need to be subjected to that for far longer than they can manage before your mind starts slipping the clutch and you begin to hallucinate. Above all, as I have said, the fear factor, and especially the fear of the unknown, was missing – and it still is on the Selection exercises they do today.

However necessary it may be to train soldiers to withstand an enemy’s attempts to extract information, I believe that the whole interrogation exercise is both antiquated and deeply flawed. We were trained using film shot during the Korean War, which had ended nearly twenty years earlier. Whatever the effectiveness of the mainly Chinese interrogators in their often brutal treatment of Allied PoWs during that war, the fact is that there are drugs available today that will make a prisoner tell his captors whatever they want to know a sight faster than if they were to gouge out his eyes. As a result, training men in ways of limiting the information they give an enemy while under the influence of drugs should be of paramount importance. It may be, of course, that for medical or scientific reasons this is not possible. Nevertheless, it should certainly be considered.

All in all, I have to say that I regard the Interrogation part of Selection as little more than a farce. While it is moderately useful in preparing a soldier for some of the indignities he might suffer as a PoW, and in giving him some practice in answering direct questions with the Big Four, the fact that he knows he has only to hang on for, at most, twenty-four hours, and that the DS cannot subject him to the kind of physical torture an enemy might apply, severely limits its value.

Interrogation ends Selection. Mine finished in the early hours of Sunday. Monday morning saw the survivors – those who had passed – assembled in one room of the Training Wing building. We didn’t need to use the Blue Briefing Room. There were not enough of us left to have filled one corner.

Once assembled, we were told we had passed and that the commanding officer of 22 SAS, the then Colonel Peter de la Billière, known throughout the Regiment as ‘DLB’, would be arriving shortly to present us with our berets. He walked into the room and we all stood. He then went to each of us, handing us our sand-coloured berets and shaking our hands with a brief ‘Well done’. He was not much of an orator. Only later would we learn that he was a great soldier, and a brilliant tactician with a superb military brain.

One hundred and twenty men had started out on Selection back in August. Eleven of us had got through. And I was one of them. I was in the SAS. Although I was careful not to let anyone see it, it was the proudest moment of my life. It remains so to this day.

There was an amusing sequel to my transfer from the Paras to the SAS. In June 1972, while still with 1 Para, I was stationed at Bruneval Barracks in Aldershot, and was spending a lot of my time training for SAS Selection, which I was due to attend in just two months. A Para instructor who was also going on Selection and who was based just down the road in Browning Barracks, told me that he had a spare Fablon-covered map of the Brecon Beacons, and offered to lend it to me. This was good news, since getting hold of a decent map in those days was extremely difficult, so I walked down to Browning Barracks during my NAAFI break to pick up the map.

The Para battalions identify themselves from each other with different-coloured lanyards, which are wrapped around the left shoulder and have a knife attached to the free end, which is tucked into the tunic or shirt pocket. The colours are red, blue and green, representing 1, 2 and 3 Para respectively, while members of Depot Para wear a lanyard made up of all three colours. Having collected the map, I was just leaving Browning Barracks when a great booming voice roared at me, ‘Hey, you! Hey! YOU!’

‘Fuck!’ was my immediate thought, for this was the voice of the RSM, Nobby Arnold, a legend in the Paras, and a man to be feared and avoided at all costs. I turned round at once, marched smartly up to him and halted, bringing my right leg up to my waist and driving it immediately into the ground.

‘Sir!’ I said, looking rigidly ahead of me.

Nobby was about six foot three with a build to match. A former heavyweight boxer with the Paras, his nose had taken some punishment over the years so that when he spoke there was a nasal tone in his voice.

‘What are you doing in my camp?’ he demanded, identifying me as being from 1 Para by my red lanyard (he, being Depot, wore the tri-coloured lanyard).

‘I’ve come for a map of the Brecon Beacons, sir.’

‘Why do you need a map of the Brecon Beacons?’ he replied. ‘Are you going on your junior NCO course?’

‘No, sir, I’m going on SAS Selection.’

‘You’re fucking well
what
? You’re leaving the finest regiment in the world to go and join that shower?’ His tone of disbelief and contempt sounded even more threatening because of the nasal whine in his voice.

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Well, listen to me, son, the next time you come into my camp you knock on my door and say, “Excuse me, sir, can I come into your camp?” and I will say, “Yes.” Do you understand?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Now march away.’

I turned to my right, once again banging my right foot hard to the ground, and walked away. At once there came another scream from the RSM.

‘I said MARCH! What you need is more drill. Now get on that square.’

I put down my map and marched out on to the barrack square, with Nobby hard on my heels. For an hour he drilled me in quick time – ‘Left, right, left, right, left, right, mark time, left, right, left, right, about turn!’ – on and on it went until the sweat was pouring off me. Eventually the relentless stream of orders and the tireless nasal voice stopped, and he let me go. Thankfully, I picked up my map and marched, my arms swinging, in the direction of my barracks – or at least until I was out of the RSM’s sight.

When I returned, the platoon sergeant demanded to know where I’d been.

‘I’ve been doing drill with the RSM of Depot,’ I replied.

‘Don’t get funny with me,’ he said. ‘Where have you been?’

‘I’ve just told you. I’ve been doing drill with the RSM.’

He still didn’t believe me. ‘All right ‘ he said, ‘I’m going to check your story and if you’re lying, I’m going to have you.’ And with that he went to the Company Office and rang the RSM.

‘Oh, good morning, sir. My name is Sergeant Hutchinson, platoon sergeant of Machine-Gun Platoon, 1 Para. Have you been drilling one of my soldiers, sir?’

‘Yes, I fucking well ’ave, Sergeant,’ Nobby bellowed down the phone, ‘and while you’re at it, you can get your arse down ’ere at lunchtime, because you’re not doing your job properly.’

The conversation was overheard by the company clerk, who immediately informed the platoon. This was too good to miss, so at lunchtime we went down to Depot, found a strategic location from which we could see without being seen ourselves, and watched our platoon sergeant being drilled by RSM Nobby Arnold. He didn’t say a word when he got back, but we all knew where he’d been.

Six months later, having passed Selection and left the Paras, I was back in Aldershot to attend the funeral of the second-in-command of the SAS, who had sadly been killed in France. After the ceremony we went to the Para Depot for lunch, and later congregated around the coach that was to take us back to Hereford. Standing there in my best uniform (Number 2 dress) and SAS beret, I suddenly saw out of the corner of my eye the large, immaculately turned-out figure of RSM Nobby Arnold. Noticing that the RSM was staring at me, this rough, tough SAS soldier immediately sought refuge behind the coach. Nobby must have spotted the move and gone the other way, for he ambushed me as I crept along. I didn’t know what to expect, but he put his arm round my shoulder and said, ‘Do you remember me, son?’

‘Yes, sir,’ I replied.

‘Glad to see you made it,’ he said, and gave me an approving punch on the arm before walking away.

*
 Later Stirling Lines, having been renamed in honour of the Regiment’s founder, the late Lieutenant-Colonel Sir David Stirling.