The Big Breach Read Online Free PDF Page B

(Directing Staff) to ensure that we were using only the original equipment issued to us. Anybody who tried to make the selection process easier by purchasing better-quality boots or goretex waterproofs was immediately `binned', the terminology for ejection from the course. At about 2130, we crammed into the back of a leaking canvas-roofed four-ton lorry and drove down the King's Road, past its thronging pubs, out of London and down the M4 motorway towards Wales.
     
    We would arrive in the early hours of the morning at a remote forest location somewhere in the bleak Brecon Beacon mountains, often already soaked if it was raining. Using our standard army issue sleeping bag and poncho to make a bivouac, we slept for a few hours in a copse or by a mosquito-infested reservoir. Reveille would be at 0600 and the DS gave us an hour to eat a breakfast of dehydrated porridge, canned meat and boiled sweets, make a mug of tea, then pack away all our kit into our bergens. At 0700, the DS gave us a grid reference, usually a hilltop six or seven kilometres away. We set off at the double en masse , navigating to the control-point with our waterproofed ordnance-survey map and precious compass. The field rapidly strung out as the fittest and best navigators got to the front. On arrival at the checkpoint, another member of the DS, enviably curled up in his tent with a hot brew on, called out a new grid reference another ten kilometres or so away across difficult terrain. On arrival there, we would be given another grid reference, then another, and so on, never really knowing where or when the march would end.
     
    At around 1800 the fastest runners reached the final checkpoint where we cooked some of the rations that we had been carrying all day and got some rest. The other runners would straggle in over the next few hours. The really slow candidates, or those who could not complete the course through exhaustion or injury, were binned. At about 2100 the DS would brief us on the night march, done in pairs, as the risk of navigating through the craggy mountain ranges in darkness was too great - candidates had occasionally died of exposure or made navigational errors and walked off cliffs. We normally finished this shorter march at about 0400, caught about two hours' sleep before reveille and breakfasted, then there followed an hour or so of hard PT, known as `beasting'. A `warmup' run of about four kilometres in our boots, with badly blistered and cut feet from the previous marches, half-killed us and and then a gruelling routine of press-ups and sit-ups finished us off. At about 1100, the torment was over and we collapsed into the lorry for the five-hour drive back to London.
     
    Every weekend, the ratchet was tightened a bit more and the field of remaining candidates got smaller. The marches increased in length and difficulty of navigation and we had increasingly heavy loads to carry in our bergens. I was secretly pleased to see the marine who had sneered at me drop out of one of the harder marches, moaning about badly blistered feet.
     
    The final and most dreaded selection weekend was the infamous `long drag'. We had navigated all over the Brecon Beacons and knew them too well, so long drag was held in unfamiliar territory in the Peak District of northern England. The goal was to cover a total of 65 kilometres cross-country in under 20 hours, carrying full webbing, a 501b bergen containing all our gear and rations, and an old FN rifle from which the sling had been removed. At the end of that test only 19 of the 125 who started the course remained of which I, proudly, was one.
     
    Although the long drag endurance test was a major hurdle, there was still a long way to go before those of us who remained would be `badged' with SAS berets bearing the famous `Who Dares Wins' motto and accepted into the regiment. Every second weekend for the next six months was taken with `continuation' training, learning the basic military skills required of an