The first five days were a blur of limited sleep, endless tests, and more PT than we had ever done before.
Each morning began with one of these hour-long, killer PT sessions, held at 0500, before the day’s program had even begun.
Meals were often eaten standing up, and I wasn’t quite sure why they had bothered to issue us with beds, we got to see them so little.
We’d go from stripping foreign weapons blindfolded, and against the clock, to a ballistics lecture; then into a practical signaling exercise; then from a lake crossing into another pack run; followed by live contact drills, helicopter rehearsals, a field medics lecture, and a practical assessment.
The pace was intense, and the DS wanted to test our individual mental and physical abilities to stay alert and switched on and working well as a team, even when our heads were bursting with new information and we were physically shattered.
We were up each night until 3:00 or 4:00 A.M., often doing mock ambushes and live attacks.
The hardest times were when we were just lying there in some ditch in the pouring rain, so tired that it was near impossible not to nod off for a few seconds. Cold, hungry, and drained of adrenaline—waiting for the DS to pass through our “ambush” site high up on the boggy Yorkshire moorland that surrounded the barracks.
Often they never showed, and we would finally haul ourselves, and all our kit and weaponry, back to camp in the early hours, where we’d have to clean everything like new.
Only then could we collapse into our billets for a precious couple of hours’ sleep.
I learned to dread the alarm that roused us each morning for PT, after only having had such a small amount of sleep.
My body felt like the walking dead—tired, bruised, stiff. Yet the skill level we were required to operate at increased every day.
That was the real test of this phase: Can you maintain the skills when you are beat?
I remember one early-morning PT session in particular. We were doing our usual series of long shuttle sprints and fireman’s lifts, which had us all on the point of vomiting. Just when I thought I could run no longer with the weight on my shoulders, there was a loud thud and cry of pain from behind me.
I glanced behind me to see a recruit lying sprawled out on the concrete, oozing blood.
Apparently, the guy carrying this poor recruit on his shoulders had sprinted too close to a lamp post on the road and, as he passed it, he had thwacked the guy’s head so hard he had been knocked clean out.
The silver lining was that the medics moved in, and we were all dismissed half an hour early. Perfect. But this didn’t happen that often. In fact, that was about the only tiny letup we got for two weeks.
This general lack of sleep really got to me. And little can prepare people for how they will react when deprived of it—over multiple days. Everything suffers: concentration, motivation, and performance. All key elements for what we were doing. But it is designed that way. Break you down and find out what you are really made of. Underneath the fluff.
I remember during one particular lecture (on the excruciatingly boring topic of the different penetration abilities of different bullets or rounds), looking over to my left and noticing Trucker jabbing his arm with a safety pin every few minutes in an attempt to keep himself awake.
The sight cheered me up no end.
What became so draining was that nothing that any of us did went unnoticed. Again, it was carefully planned that way: they wanted to see us work under the maximum amount of fatigue and pressure.
Soon I was just longing for the final four-day exercise, where at least we could get out on the ground, in our patrols, away from this intense scrutiny and hell.
The day of the final exercise started in the cold predawn (as usual), but with no PT (unusual), and we were moved into our small four-man patrols.
We could no longer have any interaction with anyone outside of our own small team or cell. (This is a standard operational security measure to ensure that if you are captured then you have no knowledge of any other patrol’s particular mission.) It effectively acts to keep you 100 percent mission-focused.
Orders were issued and individual patrols briefed on their mission-specific details.
The day was then a flurry of mission preparations: stripping down our individual kit to the bare minimum so we could carry enough ammunition between us. Filling magazines with rounds and tracer rounds, cleaning weapons, studying maps, rehearsing drills, memorizing emergency heli RVs, going over E&E (escape and evasion) procedures, and testing radio comms.
I was fired up, and chomping to get going.
The four of us then ate, went over the mission once more, and then rechecked our kit once again.
The helicopter was due at dusk.