We were startled by the door to the grot being kicked open, and when we saw who stood in the doorway under the weight of his personal baggage we leapt to attention. As a regular Marine you never came to attention for anyone entering a room other than an officer or warrant officer, but our noddy buttons had not quite dropped off yet and there were still people who could push them. It was Corporal Jakers.
He recognised us, but did not acknowledge it. Assuming he was in the wrong building, with his customary scowl he shuffled back out. We breathed a sigh, irritated with ourselves for leaping to attention. We had to stop doing that. We were Marines now, not noddies, and on an SBS selection, for Christ’s sake. What was Jakers doing here, anyway?
The door burst open again and Jakers stormed into the room. We leapt to attention.
‘What are you arseholes doing in here?’ he shouted. ‘This is for SBS selection ranks only.’
‘We’re on the SBS course, Corporal,’ we said in an unsynchronised chorus.
He stared at us in total disbelief. Then he completely lost it. He started raving about how he had applied years ago for a crack at the SBS course and how he had done nothing but crap jobs such as teaching wankers like us at CTC while he waited for his chance and that we had not been in the corps a dog’s watch and here we were on the same course as him. He was going to see someone about this. Someone had made a mistake. And no way was he about to share a grot with a bunch of noddies, especially us. He took all his kit and slammed the door behind him.
We all exhaled and dropped our shoulders in relief that he had gone. We actually sympathised with him. It did seem unfair that he had waited all those years to join and here we were, fresh out of the factory. But as Jakers was finding out at that moment we were all SBS noddies now, him too. He was soon back. He threw his bags on the furthest bed from us, and as he packed his kit into his cupboard he mumbled on about how the corps was going down the toilet. But we were stuck with each other. As if life was not going to be hard enough for us in the coming months.
The SBS acquaint, designed to weed out the obvious no-hopers before the main selection course, lasted from Monday to Friday. Its aim was to see if we had basic map-reading skills; if we enjoyed the wet and cold, long mud runs, crouching in sodden bushes all night with thousands of ravenous mosquitoes; if we could run a mile in five minutes, swim twenty-five metres underwater and sit on the bottom of the deep end in a small, dark chamber (simulating a submarine lockout) without face-masks and sharing one aqualung between three without getting panicky or claustrophobic.
Several hundred Marines took part in dozens of acquaints held over a period of months, out of which 134 mustered for the main four-month-long selection course at the end of summer. That final number included fifteen Marines straight from CTC, Andy, Dave and myself amongst them.
The first few weeks of the main selection course were designed to wear us down mentally and physically and get us to a level of fatigue the instructors would then control throughout. The map marches, done individually whilst carrying up to one hundred-pound packs, grew longer each time until we were covering up to thirty miles in a single march. Sleep was kept to a minimum and often interrupted after the first few hours for mud runs and initiative tests. These periods of extra-curricular activity were known as ‘beastings’ and were frequent and innovative. Over one third of the selection course was spent in the field sleeping out. On long marches the directing staff (DS) liked to surprise us and do things such as give us one minute to consult our maps, memorise compass bearings, distances and the lie-of-the-land of the next four or five miles, then take our maps away and send us on. If you were caught with a spare map, the punishment would far exceed the crime. Speed as well as accuracy was important when moving from A to B. Those who did not make a rendezvous before it closed were likely to be off the course. Fail twice and you definitely were.
Every soldier knew what he was getting himself into before he arrived in Poole for the course and should have been prepared for the worst. Daily programmes were available in commando units months before, detailing the aims of each stage of selection and what was required of a man to pass it. But as with my regular commando course, many men quit in the early stages. It was obviously more intense than they could have imagined. On top of the physical tests, by the end of selection recruits were expected to know the Morse code, to be able to calculate radio attenuation, know diving theory – including Boyle’s law and Dalton’s law of partial pressures – Archimedes’ principle, explosive theory, including the Munroe effect, electrical and igniferous detonations, basic sea navigation, and photography, which included developing film in the field. During the diving phase we covered miles underwater, day and night, in mostly zero visibility and freezing conditions using re-breather bubbleless diving sets. The sets were fine until they leaked. The first warning sign was that, instead of air, you sucked up a caustic soda cocktail (sea-water mixing with the carbon dioxide absorbent powder), which was a bit like drinking a glass of fizzy antifreeze. If you were in deep water at the time you choked to throw it up as you made your way to the surface, without being able to take a breath, and having to remember to exhale to avoid an embolism. The safety boat always carried a bottle of vinegar to pour down your neck when you surfaced to neutralise the alkaline soda, which was as delightful a drink as the cocktail, but at least it eased the burning.
We rarely had sufficient sleep and never time to fully recover between phases. This strategy was vital to the SBS selection. A man’s limits can only be assessed when he is physically and mentally exhausted.
‘What you go through on this course, fatigue-wise, physically and mentally, I hope you will never experience the equal of in combat,’ an instructor once said to us. ‘But if you do, well, you’ll know you can handle it.’
The fitter you were at the start of the course, the longer you could go before having to switch over to sheer willpower to get you through. By the end of the first month we had lost over half our numbers. By the end of the second we were down to about forty. And of the fifteen raw Marines from CTC there remained only three – Andy, Dave and myself. It was more than just coincidence that the only noddies left were from the same troop. We seemed to provide moral support for each other when each of us most needed it. All it took was a smile or a wink when times were hard. But although we were unified, the course as a whole was not, and us three nods were the cause.
The regulars on the course made a point of making the three of us feel unwelcome, especially our room-mate, Corporal Jakers, who constantly reminded us of our inexperience and, most important, our ineligibility. Regardless of what the SBS had decided, we made a mockery of the system. The sooner we quit, the better for the others.
Most mornings we would wake up to one of Jakers’ caustic comments such as, ‘Are you lot still here? I’d quit today if I were you, it’s gonna be a hard one. Why go through all the aggro?’
The one comment that niggled me most was, ‘You don’t really believe they’re going to let a bunch of noddies into the SBS even if by some freak accident you do get through the course, do you?’
The others would rarely talk to us unless they had to. We were referred to as ‘the nods’ and were fully expected to quit any day soon. But as the days rolled on and the numbers dwindled we were not amongst the quitters. Looking back, it’s possible this added pressure from within the coursemadeusmoredeterminednot to give up.
I was teamed up with Jakers for most of the canoeing phase, much to his consternation. The Directing Staff did it deliberately knowing it would piss him off. The partnership turned out to be to my advantage, though. Jakers was a very experienced canoeist. He had once competed in one of the most demanding canoe races in the world, the Devizes to Westminster, which was 124 miles in one paddle. He gave me the usual hard time at every opportunity, but as he did not want to do all the work on the long, arduous paddles he also gave me sound instruction and advice. On one thirty-mile paddle in a horrendous storm with the canoe fully loaded as if for an operation, we were capsized by a massive wave as we changed direction. We carried out the proper drills and climbed back in with the help of the other pairs who had formed a raft. Our equipment, including backpacks and weapons, was strewn outside the canoe attached by lines and we fought against the heavy swells to get ourselves back in order. Several stringers (the wooden skeleton of the canvas boat) were broken and we tied splints as best we could. The weather deteriorated further. A coastguard helicopter appeared low overhead after being called in by a civvy who had seen us from the cliffs. The crewman hung out of the cabin and vigorously waved us towards shore. We gave him the bird. As the helicopter flew away he signalled to us by spinning his finger around his temple. We pressed on and in the early hours of the morning, canoeing past the deserted beaches of Sandbanks, we entered the relatively calm waters of Poole Harbour. After that experience I felt I could paddle a canoe in any conditions.
With a month left to go we were down to about thirty drained and numb Marines which included the three nods. The others were less concerned with giving us a hard time by now. Everyone was consolidating their energies and concentrating on getting through the last and most difficult phases of the course.
The final exercises were not designed to support high numbers and the pressure by the DS to reduce the course to a more manageable size increased. However, this was in conflict with the aims of the SBS training officers who, sitting in the blind comfort of HQ most of the time, wanted higher numbers to pass. Orders from above were that the SBS was not only to make up its losses to the oil platforms, but to increase its overall manpower. The obvious method would have been to run more courses each year, but that was expensive, and in any case the Marine Corps could only provide so many volunteers each year. Few people if any (I never knew one) joined the Marines just to join the SBS. Hardly anyone had heard of the SBS outside of the Marines anyhow. The only other way to increase the number of Marines passing selection was to make it easier.
The DS, all NCOs, were generally more interested in maintaining the high standards. They didn’t care about the numbers game, nor exchanging quality for quantity. But how else were the SBS, and the SAS for that matter, who were also expanding, going to swell their ranks? There’s a natural law at play here – given one or two social factors such as peace-time, the population can only provide so many soldiers of such a standard. An argument from the HQ office was that the SBS course was too hard on men as it was. Too many potentially good operatives were being lost to injuries that could have been avoided. There was a lot of truth in that. I can recall at least two men on my selection who I thought were very good soldiers but who had to come off the course due to serious injuries. One did his back in while running with a waterlogged log across his shoulders after being ordered to by one of the DS. The instructor had no idea how heavy the log really was. But the man carried it without hesitation until he collapsed under its weight. The other Marine was carried off while running down a steep bank with a large, steel oxygen bottle weighing about seventy-five pounds – we were all running with one – when the soldier behind tripped and dropped his bottle on the leading Marine’s ankle. In that respect, selection courses were destined to become more controlled and more manpower-conserving. Unfortunately for me and the rest of my course, those changes were still a way down the road. Our DS were from the old school and things were going to remain the way they were, regardless of any requests from HQ Training to be more lenient. If the DS felt at any time the pressure was slipping, due to long spells of good weather for instance, they were brutally swift to compensate.
An example illustrating their methods came in that final month at the end of a long, tiring canoe paddle over several days. We came ashore, thirty of us in fifteen canoes, at the planned rendezvous, a lonely riverbank miles from nowhere. We expected transport would be waiting to pick us up. Instead we were met by one of the DS.
In a typical DS team of four to six men one would play the nice guy. He was more lenient than the others and almost human. We could relax a little whenever he was in charge. The rest of them were indifferent, cold and did everything by the book, all except one. He was Mister Nasty, heartless and devoid of pity. This was by design of course, similar to the good-cop, bad-cop routine. Mister Nasty usually administered the extra-curricular activities. When you woke up to a light flicking on in your grot at three in the morning, having been in bed only an hour or two, and saw him standing there, you knew he had not come to tuck you in and read you a bedtime story. His job was to make our lives hell. Mister Nasty, by design, was an impossible man to please.
A few selections after mine, certain members of a selection plotted to kill their Mister Nasty by tampering with his diving set. He survived, which was even more unfortunate for the course since he uncovered the plot.
It was our Mister Nasty, the symbol of pain, who had come to meet us instead of the truck. There were sighs and curses when we saw him casually approach, alone, with his hands in his pockets and a thin smile fixed to his lips. He stood on a mound and, looking down on us, explained that the four-tonner could not get this far due to poor road conditions and so we would have to walk a mile or so to meet it.
‘And don’t forget to bring everything with you,’ he added.
That meant our canoes, backpacks, weapons – the lot.
We broke down the canoes, each weighing 110 pounds (dry), and bagged and secured them to our already heavy, wet packs. Together the load weighed around 175 pounds. There is a technique for getting these loads on your back and on your feet. It is virtually impossible to do it alone. After the bagged canoe is secured to the backpack, it is left on the ground while the soldier lies back on it and threads his arms through the straps in the normal way. Once the man is strapped in and looking like a beetle trapped on its back, the pack is lifted from either side until he is on his feet and bearing the full weight.