Selection stage 1

At the beginning of this selection process (until recent years) each cadre of volunteers was greeted by the regiment's commanding officer at Hereford, or by his second-in-command, with a mordant welcome to the effect that 'It's nice of you all to come along; I don't suppose most of you will be with us for more than a few days'. In fact, Phase I is now intended to achieve two things: to provide simple fitness training to ensure that potentially suitable people will not fail the course because they have not had time to get into sufficiently good physical shape and to induce the 'passengers' -- those seeking a break from the boredom of garrison duties in Germany and elsewhere -- to drop out as quickly as possible.

ENDURANCE PHASE

 

The selection course for the full-time, regular 22 SAS Regiment, based at Hereford, starts with a month long phase designed to test a candidates endurance to the limit. It begins with all candidates doing the standard BFT (Battle fitness test), which consists of a 3 mile run, the first mile and a half of which must be completed in twelve and a half minutes, with the rest in your own time. The next 5-6 days are spent on basic map revision, orienteering, gym work and 5 mile runs. 8 mile cross country runs are also done, with the candidates required to finish in under an hour. At the end of the first week is the first real test, the Fan dance.

THE FAN DANCE

The fan dance is done carrying a 32 pound bergen over a route of 24km. The selection course is split into two, with one group starting at the Storey arms, the other at a point near Torpantau. The group starting from the Storey arms move up the fan to Pen Y Fan, around the Cribyn, and along the Roman road to a check point near Torpantau. They then turn around and do the lot again in reverse. This test weeds out any weak candidates and leaves only the men who have a chance of passing.

 

As the course continues, the volunteer finds that his judgement is becoming eroded by lack of sleep. Each day begins at about 4am and ends with a briefing at 10.30pm or later for the next day's exercise. After the fan dance, the daily tabs of between 15-64km with bergens weighing 40-60 pounds are started. Night marches are also included, to learn the candidate in the regiments SOP of only moving at night.

The candidate is never told the cut off time for any of the tabs, they are simply informed to keep up with the DS (Directing Staff). If a candidate has a bad day, they are given a `gypsy`s warning` by the sergeant major. They are told to improve or be binned. One more bad day after a `gypsys`, and they are told to go to platform 4. This is the regiments way of saying thanks for trying, but fuck off. It refers to platform 4 of Hereford station, which used to be the platform for the London train.

TEST WEEK

 

Test work is what all the hard work leads up to. It is a series of 24-64km marches, all over the Brecon beacons. There is then the sketch map march --- using a hand drawn map rather than a real one. Finally there is the endurance march --- A fearsome tab which takes around 20 hours to complete. After this the remaining candidates are gathered together and told if they have passed this phase or not.

One soldier who passed the course recalls that 'it is a test of strength, stamina and sheer will power: a real bastard. People worry about it and rightly so. Nothing that has gone before compares with this. Most people who are fairly fit can keep going for eight to twelve hours. This goes on for 20 or more. I took 21 hours which was regarded as rather wet.'

 

The endurance march caused one fatality in 1979, Three others
-- two of them Territorial volunteers -- died during preliminary
marches over the next twelve months. Before this, only three
volunteers had died during the twenty-three years that the initial
selection course had existed, and one of those had suffered from
a rare heart condition. Through a tragic irony, the first victim
of 1979 was not a novice bidding for a place in the regiment,
but the hero of Mirbat, six years before, Mike Kealy, now a
major. In the early hours of 1 February 1979, he joined thirty
recruits as they set off from Talybont Reservoir in conditions
made treacherous by darkness, snow and ice underfoot and with
visibility reduced to only a few yards by freezing rain, sleet
and snow. Even on a fine summer's day, the forty-mile route
would have been a formidable proposition for an experienced
hill walker. That day, as events were to demonstrate, it was
virtually impossible. Though the men moved off in two parties, each of about fifteen, they were soon spread out across the hill in smaller
syndicates of two or three men. To be completely alone made
it harder, slower and therefore colder to walk on an accurate
compass bearing in what one SAS officer later described as
'minimal visibility'. Two men, after all, could take it in turns to
act as markers for one another if no other landmark were visible.
A solo walker might be limited to the uncertain procedure of
getting his 'fix' on a patch of bare snow a few yards in front.
A further hazard faced the solo walker. To move too slowly in
such conditions carried with it the risk of increasing cold in a
biting wind, and with it the insidious onset of exposure, which
hacks away at good judgement long before it reduces bodily
warmth to a dangerously low level.
Kealy chose the loner's way. To some extent this was inevi-
table: he was not part of that selection course; though he had
twice participated in the shorter, twenty-mile marches during
the preceding three weeks. Also, he was a comparatively senior
officer, somewhat older than almost any other participant, and
regarded by them with awe blended with the suspicion that he
might be one of the selectors. But why should he participate at
all? After all, he had been in the regiment for years and had a
record of rare distinction in Oman. A sergeant in charge of the
course explained later: 'He wanted to come on the endurance
march to see if he could still do it in the time.' Now thirty-three,
Kealy had been in administrative work after service in Northern
Ireland, and was returning to operational duties to command his
own squadron. To an outsider, what may seem uncommonly
like menopausal recklessness was, to him, common prudence.
He had to be fit enough for the next operation in any climate,
and the only way to be sure of that was to demonstrate it to
himself.

 

Yet in other respects his judgement was questionable. He had
made up the back-pack weight of his Bergen to fifty-five pounds
with bricks, and was not equipped with the waterproof storm
suit issued to the novices. Once on the hill in driving rain, his
smock and trousers were quickly soaked, causing a rapid loss
of body temperature. At the weigh-in preceding the march, his
pack was overweight and a brick was removed. Others on the
course made up the correct weight with additional clothing and
food. They did not carry bricks. And, though Kealy had gloves
in his rucksack, he chose not to wear them. One of the survivors
of the exercise found it necessary to wear two pairs, and he was
still driven off the prescribed route because of cold.
Initially, Kealy moved fast, passing the first man to leave,
Trooper E. But, after an hour or so on top of the ridge, this
trooper and four or five other candidates overtook him. By now, conditions were so bad that, despite their foul-weather suits, they decided to get off the ridge and into the shelter of the valley below. As they turned off the original route, Kealy
shouted, 'You're going the wrong way!' 'In a sense, we were,'
Trooper E. later admitted. 'The major just went on his own
and that was the last we saw of him.' By the time this group
reached the shelter of a barn in the valley miles below and some
hours later, one of their number was suffering from exposure.
Back-markers in the party later found Kealy staggering in
the snow, and stayed with him when he finally slumped into
a sitting position. But he threw away the gloves given to him
by one man, and allowed a jacket placed over his shoulders to
blow away, insisting that he was 'all right'. Further offers of help
made him so angry that the two novices with him concluded
that it was better to walk in front of Kealy and lead him off.
He stumbled after them. Then they lost him completely in the
darkness. Wind filled in the tracks Kealy made in the snow and
after a fruitless search for him lasting well over an hour, the cold
drove the two novices down the hill to shelter. At 9.30am, less
than seven hours after the march had started, a captain and a
corporal taking part in the march spotted what they thought
was a rock protruding from the snow. As they got closer they
saw that it was Kealy. He was unconscious now, but a feeble
pulse could be detected in his neck. Hurriedly, the two men dug
a snow-hole and slid the unconscious officer into a sleeping-bag.
The corporal also entered the snow-hole and remained with
Kealy in an attempt, almost literally, to breathe life back into
him. The captain, meanwhile, set off to raise the alarm. For the
corporal, it was to prove a long vigil.
By the time the alarm had been raised, several more hours
had passed. The first message to reach Brecon Police Station,
inviting general police assistance, was timed at 1.55pm. The
police contacted the Army only to be told that it would be
sufficient to put the local civilian mountain rescue team on
stand-by. Nevertheless, a police inspector made his way by road
through thick fog to the SAS rescue HQ some miles away, only
to be told, politely but firmly, that military authorities were
organising the search. The Army did not wish to duplicate
matters by using police or civilians. In the event, it was 4.30am
the following day, nineteen hours after Kealy had been found
unconscious, before his body was lifted off the hill by helicopter.
The corporal who had stayed with him, trying unsuccessfully to
transfer the heat of his own body to that of the dying officer,
survived the ordeal.The SAS major in charge of the rescue, identified at a sub-
sequent inquest under the codename 'Foxtrot', explained that
when the alarm was raised about Kealy's problem other soldiers
were still missing. The exercise was abandoned. Attempts by
helicopter to reach the position where Kealy lay were defeated
by bad visibility. Foxtrot was concerned about the loss of not
just one man, however important, but possibly several. His
first priority was to account for missing men and to direct
those still on the hill, including instructors at prearranged
rendezvous, to come down. Furthermore, there were both
Army and RAF mountain rescue teams at large. 'I had advice
from an experienced mountaineer', Foxtrot told the Coroner,
'that it was unwise in those conditions to put too many men
on the hill at the same time.' The only oblique criticism of
this strategy came from the Coroner, who asked whether it
would not have been opportune to invoke assistance from the
local civilian mountain rescue team, who knew the area well.
Foxtrot's answer, in effect, was that he had not discarded this
idea, but that it was overtaken by events in a complex situation.
It is highly likely that another factor at work was SAS
determination to keep the problem 'in the family' without
external aid (but not for political reasons or because of misplaced
'macho').