Almanac (Armed Forces) Life: Confronting the Real SAS

 

Source: Wikimedia Commons

 

I’m not sure why, but my partner Lynda, a normally measured creature by nature, has been glued to the reality program SAS Australia. Whether she’s enjoying seeing celebrities being tortured or has some morbid fascination with the military I’m not sure, but it’s been mildly curious seeing this other side of her.

For those who haven’t seen the show, it consists of four ex-special forces personnel who take approximately a dozen so called celebrities to a remote area and put them through physical and mental stress that they would never have dreamed of encountering.

The irrational yelling and screaming by the instructors in the show certainly brought back memories of my own Army basic training at Kapooka forty-three years ago. The Army’s modus operandi behind their team-building is to humiliate the weakest link and subsequently punish the entire team, therefore forcing the rest of the team to pull that dysfunctional person ‘into line’.

It’s a brutal process that is designed to ‘shake the tree’, but I always hated it.

My own first-hand dealings with the SAS were limited. One of my aircraft mechanic mates at the Aviation Centre in Oakey, Qld made the cut for the SAS and completed the infamous, thirteen week ‘Carter’ course. He inexplicably knocked back the offer to be a SAS ‘Sapper’, returned to Oakey, got honourably discharged and started his own adventure company in the north-west of WA.

His descriptions of the training were filled with sheer horror, particularly when he was dropped in the middle of the Simpson Desert with little food and water and told to get back to civilisation over the following couple of weeks. The sleep and food deprivation formulated for the participants meant that only the strongest mentally could survive.

The second time I ran into the SAS was at Oakey when some Sappers and Gurkhas, (members of the fearsome Nepalese Regiment) were visiting on some secret mission.  We met in the ‘boozer’ and found them to be friendly, smart and humble, quite the opposite to what we had anticipated.

Having said that, a couple of days later many of our aircraft which were housed in supposedly impenetrable security including constant dog patrols, had “exploded” stickers placed on them as a demonstration of their skill in sabotaging our fleet of planes and helicopters.

My last engagement with the SAS was on my very first bush trip at age seventeen to a military exercise (‘pretend war’) in a huge area of land north-west of Rockhampton that is owned by the government, called Shoalwater Bay.

The reason why us pacifists of the Engineering and Aviation Corps were going to war, was that we were classed as a “field force” unit, which meant we had to be ready to go to a real war within 24 hours. Accordingly, we were forced to do ‘warry’ type activities during the year such as going bush, shooting rifles and gas training to justify our existence and appease the warlords.

For the experienced mechanics and pilots, going bush for six weeks was nothing more than a quality camping trip. There was plenty of booze, good company, cards, cricket and lots of fun amongst the serious work attended to during the day.

We had to treat the exercise like we could be attacked so we had token guard posts or foxholes manned by rotating, armed, semi-drunk mechanics just in case someone checked on us to see that we were actually taking the pretend conflict seriously.

After a couple of days, a group of us were blindfolded and driven to an SAS camp. The mission was for us to witness their camp and report back to our colleagues that the SAS were active on this exercise.

The camp consisted of a number of small ‘cells’ made from joined together hessian where potential prisoners were tied up and blindfolded whilst awaiting interrogation. They insisted that they weren’t on anyone’s side during the ‘war’, and were just there to annoy the hell out of anyone they felt the urge to terrorise.

True to their word, on the following morning, members of the camp complained of things missing from their ‘hoochies’ (army tents) including rifles and there had “exploded” stickers on the nylon exteriors.

It’s not like it would have required too much stealth by the SAS Sappers, as most of our squadron would have been in a deep XXXX slumber! Anyway, they made it clear they were around and suddenly cold-blooded stories of the SAS activities in Vietnam started spilling out from our own veterans, just enough to make a kid like me nervous.

In a stroke of luck, about a week later, a senior NCO (non-commissioned officer) had to return home and had been living in a civilian three-man tent. I somehow scored it, moved my stretcher and gear in there post haste and looked forward to the upgrade in comfort. On the first night after acquiring the tent and in a terrible drunken haze, I retired to the tent but had to get up for a 4am guard duty.

One of the guys I was replacing came and woke me up at 3.45am in order to allow time for getting dressed. I woke up completely disoriented in total darkness where you literally couldn’t see your hand in front of your face.

Desperately needing a wee, I felt around the end of the tent for the zipper but couldn’t locate it. Comprehensively blind and about to wet myself, I even tried to bite a hole in the nylon just so I could release the agony that I was experiencing.

Exhausted and resigned to the pain, I urinated in the corner of the tent on my knees and as the dampness flowed underneath me, a voice came from the OTHER end of the tent where the zipper actually was, “Willow, what are you doing mate? That’s disgusting! Get the f…k out here!”

So now that I had my bearings, I grabbed a towel, cleaned up as best I could, snatched my rifle and with what little dignity I had left, wandered over to the foxhole for a two-hour stint with fellow mechanic Gary Noonan. An hour later it was still pitch black and impossible to see ten feet in front of us.

Suddenly there was a rustling just ahead of the foxhole. Images of the SAS camp came flooding back and in a minor panic thinking I was destined for an interrogation cell, I delivered the following standard military command, “Halt! Advance and be recognised!” A pause, then more rustling. I repeated the command a few more times but with no response and concerned about waking the camp up, I stopped.

At approximately 5.30am the sun started to rise and with it, the blinkering eyes of two imbeciles in the foxhole. Standing thirty  feet directly in front of us was a seven foot kangaroo and twenty of his mates standing behind him in an arrow formation. A slight head movement by the giant Big Red at the apex of the arrow and all the roos turned and hopped off to where they came from, leaving the two military hard men to fight another day!

Australia, your nation is in safe hands!  Good luck to the contestants on SAS Australia. If you need some help, especially if you are confronted with belligerent kangaroos, please don’t hesitate to call.

 

To read more by Ian Wilson on the Almanac site click here.

 

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