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Index
Cover
Title Page
Contents
About the Author
By the same author
Dedication
List of Illustrations
Maps
Prologue
Part One: NORTH AFRICA 1941–3
1. ‘The sort of plan we are looking for’
2. Bands of brothers, packs of hounds
3. ‘The landing of small parties by night will clearly be most effective’
4. Friends in high places
5. ‘Jock wanted to be sure I was going to stay with it’
6. ‘An extremely truculent Irishman’
7. Wondering why he should be scared if Lewes wasn’t
8. ‘The man is the Regiment’
9. ‘A yellow streak a yard wide’
10. ‘We tried not to think about it. But we did’
11. ‘A nice little black pudding’
12. Rite of passage
13. ‘We’ll go because we’ve got to go’
14. Raining so hard it hurt
15. ‘Well crikey, if these people can penetrate this far …’
16. A landscape so vast it raked the senses
17. ‘You’ll like him, and he’s well placed to help’
18. ‘Advance and attack any suitable objectives’
19. Swallowed up by the huge dimensions
20. ‘I saw him rip the instrument panel out with his bare hands’
21. ‘Rommel must have had a headache’
22. ‘When they went up, they went’
23. ‘The only one to be killed and it had to be him’
24. ‘The day the SAS was truly born’
25. ‘Surrounded by bottles, reading James Joyce’
26. ‘You can get away with it by sheer blatant cheek’
27. The most ambitious SAS project yet
28. ‘Give them something to remember us by’
29. ‘The lorry kept spluttering to a halt’
30. They crammed down Benzedrine tabs and kept stag
31. ‘We had finally emulated Paddy Mayne on our own’
32. ‘The target was a fat and sitting bird’
33. ‘I suppose you’ve had a good time then’
34. ‘Our job was to constantly invent new techniques’
35. ‘Mort au Champ d’Honneur’
36. ‘It looks rather that we are expected’
37. ‘Let battle commence’
38. ‘This is going to be a shaky do’
39. Talking out of turn over gin-and-tonics
40. The Regiment
41. ‘A one-way ticket with no return’
42. They had become invisible
43. ‘Mistakenly overconfident about our security’
Part Two: EUROPE 1943–5
44. ‘It’s a bad one this time’
45. ‘Will you shoot my brother?’
46. ‘Paddy Mayne was the man’
47. ‘Those bloody fools back at HQ will one day tell me who I’m talking to’
48. ‘The best crowd he had ever had under his command’
49. Never quite lived up to its promise
50. ‘We don’t think about you at all’
51. ‘We just picked up our rucksacks and left’
52. The biggest airborne assault in history
53. ‘Saboteurs surprised at a rendezvous and shot’
54. ‘For the life of me I couldn’t think what all the noise was about’
55. ‘A marvellous killing-ground’
56. ‘Thank you, Madame, but I intend to attack them’
57. ‘My wife will be furious if I get myself killed today’
58. ‘Why don’t we just fuck off quietly because we’re not going to do any good here’
59. ‘In the face of enemy machine-gun fire’
60. He couldn’t believe that he’d actually survived
61. ‘In peacetime a man born to battle has to change his ways’
Part Three: SMALL WARS AND REVOLUTIONS 1947–80
62. ‘The standard jungle-drills must have come out’
63. ‘Scope for tremendous development’
64. A force that would ‘live, move, and have its being in the jungle’
65. ‘The Special Air Service, at last, was back in the regular army’
66. ‘Like a bunch of grapes hanging out of his slacks’
67. The worst going he ever experienced in Malaya
68. ‘The Regiment had got something. You could sense it from the moment you arrived’
69. ‘He was a coward and had surrendered to save his skin’
70. ‘There will be nothing left for my squadron at this rate’
71. ‘Condition their frame of mind to the extent where negotiations will be successful’
72. ‘We had done it in the nick of time’
73. ‘A great success as a bloody idiot’
74. ‘A battle for a man’s mind and a test of his will to win’
75. ‘When fighting for your life, you’ve got to enjoy it’
76. ‘I think we should expect to fight to the death for this’
77. ‘One of the most efficient uses of military force in the history of the world’
78. ‘The covert and clandestine actions for which it is world famous’
79. ‘Fifteen hundred pistolas’
80. ‘Purely for training purposes’
81. ‘Jesus wept!’
82. ‘Close with the terrorists and kill them’
83. ‘Not a very pretty sight!’
84. ‘Al Capone gangsterism’
85. ‘Never a happy hunting-ground’
86. ‘What the SAS are employed to do’
Part Four: BLACK OPS AND GREEN OPS 1980–91
87. ‘Blind or not, we’re going in’
88. ‘Eleven, repeat eleven aircraft. Believed real’
89. ‘Long nosed kamikazes’
90. ‘A bloody milestone in the struggle for freedom’
91. ‘Unholy priesthood of violence’
92. Sow fears in the mind of the enemy
93. ‘If it comes to a firefight it could well save your arse’
94. ‘High possibility compromise’
95. ‘No pain, only shock’
96. ‘The right bloke to have around if it’s action you’re looking for’
97. ‘Shut the fuck up and keep shooting!’
98. ‘The SAS had some new curtains to choose. Saddam could go swivel’
99. ‘More than a Regiment’
Illustrations
Epilogue
Bibliography
Notes
Acknowledgements
Follow Penguin
Copyright Page
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