Secrets of the SAS: In Their Own Words - First Season

The SAS.

The world's most secretive and feared military unit.

The SAS, in reality, is nothing like anything

I have ever seen portrayed on a movie or TV.

It's better than that.

For 70 years, this mysterious force

has played a pivotal role

in every British military operation you've heard of

and plenty you haven't.

We know we're on it, the British Government will deny

all knowledge of us being on it.

In this series, for the first time,

elite SAS soldiers talk in unprecedented detail

about the gritty reality of life inside the Special Air Service.

You have to have control,

but when it's necessary, and only when it's necessary,

act with extreme violence... professionally.

Piling off of helicopters, people swinging down ropes,

enemy running this way. It's carnage.

Cars and guns, stuck everywhere.

You've got pistols and machine guns in the car,

you've got all sorts going on.

It was great fun, like a video game almost.

There is no such thing as an uninjured soldier.

We're trained to go to war, we're trained to fight.

But how do you train to look at somebody

that was once your friend and is now dead?

I basically drunk myself into a stupor and tried to shoot myself.

Get out the car!

This is the frank, intimate truth

of serving and surviving in the SAS.

Combat, for a soldier, is violence in its absolute pure form.

There are no restrictions on you.

Being in a violent atmosphere like that becomes addictive.

We find that quite difficult

because we're a nice, you know, liberal democracy,

and we've sort of sanitised warfare.

Er... But there's, you know, sections of society that--

And in particular, young men as well, particularly like to fight.

On the battlefield,

if somebody attacks me, I have to attack them back.

And if I don't attack them back,

they'll keep attacking me until I'm dead.

First time I shot a bloke,

the first thought that went through my mind

was, "Got him."

I never thought of those guys as married men,

photograph of the wife and kids in the back pocket.

To me, they were just a running, charging, adrenaline fuelled target.

They were just the enemy. They were people I was fighting,

and quite frankly, and to be perfectly honest,

I enjoyed what I did.

And it was kill or be killed.

So, it all came about,

the Royal Irish had taken a turn in their wagons

in an area they shouldn't have been in.

They'd come across a checkpoint run by some West Side Boys

and they'd been captured.

The West Side Boys are a team of screaming lunatics from West Africa,

and who were ready to fight anybody who came in there

and give it to them.

They would chop arms and legs off, they would kill members of family,

they were high on drugs and alcohol.

A real kind of gangster type of enemy.

They were hacking people's heads off;

you're dealing with people that are absolutely off their tits.

They could be stoned, they could be all sorts.

The hostages are being held by heavily armed West Side Boys...

...at an isolated jungle camp.

There was no doubt in my mind

that if we didn't go in and rescue the Royal Irish

they would've been horrifically executed.

We was told, "Get yourselves over to Africa, go and get them back."

Are you scared now?

From my point of view,

all I really wanted to do was hear that actually,

yeah, we were gonna go and get these people.

Let's go.

Are you scared? I'm talking to you!

D Squadron, 22 SAS fly in and begin preparation

for a hostage rescue.

General public believes we dress up as camels.

We sneak in with our slippers on under the cover of darkness

and ninja people to death.

I think there's some very strange views about what we do.

Motorcycles with rockets on them and all that sort of shit.

The reality is, the first thing that we always do

is plan the mission in microscopic detail.

There is the thing that the seven Ps, you know?

Prior Planning and Preparation Prevents Piss Poor Performance.

You think about something, like an attack, a hostage rescue,

there are such high stakes

that you have to invest so much time in the planning process

to allow for different contingencies,

to make sure that you've got the right plan.

The motto of the Special Air Service is "Who Dares Wins,"

but, actually, what it should be is, you know,

"Check and Test. Check and Test."

When we built this life-sized replica of the enemy camp,

it was all done by kind of mine tape

and a little signs, like, where the hostages were.

Sweep the room. You take the right, I'll take the left.

So that if we arrived there at night we'd kind of know directions

of where things were and distances and stuff.

Go, go, go!

I land on the football pitch, hopefully, swimmingly well,

I fight across unresisted, you know, we win the day, it's tea and medals.

What if they fire back?

Well, we'll take cover and we'll support all this.

What if they do this?

Well, we'll do this and he'll do that and that'll happen.

What if-- You know?

So you've asked all these questions in your own mind.

There's the whole myth.

Special Air Service, you know, the perfection and all that.

We're clearly not because, first of all, we're human beings,

who've got to come up with plans to achieve an aim.

And that aim always involves going against an opposition

who have got definitely a different plan than yours.

Anything's moving, just stop it from moving.

- Yeah. - Should be good.

I think things almost invariably never go to plan.

But, bizarrely, the amount of planning

that you've put in will help you bounce back from that.

Intel says our boys are in the back rooms.

So the West Side Boys are supposed to be sitting round here on the floor.

It puts you in a place

where you're forced to make decisions.

You aren't being told what to do. And some people relish in that.

Absolutely, we're cleverer than the enemy.

Every time. Every time. Because we know how they work.

We've studied the enemy.

We study the target until such times as you find their weakness.

Everybody has a weakness. Every target there's an easy way in.

There's an easy way to do things and there's a hard way to do things.

We'll invariably always find the easy way to do things.

Unless it's women, of course.

Then it's usually the hard way to do things.

It was very, very high risk.

It was a very unique environment within a jungle camp

that was kind of deeply located with a heavily armed enemy.

Getting those hostages out was never gonna be easy.

We were effectively just going down there, all guns blazing,

straight into their back yard for a punch up.

It seemed almost so obvious

that we would get casualties from that.

The official mission title is Operation Barras.

The SAS have their own name for it.

We ended up, you know, going in for what was, you know,

it was called Operation Certain Death.

So it's gonna be, you know, it's a do or die type of thing.

Irish Ranger. Look at him.

Look at him.

The SAS send a four-man recce patrol upriver

to study the target in detail.

So my role for Operation Barras was recce patrol.

So we were dropped off to go and find the camp

and report back prior to the main assault coming in.

The purpose of the recce is simple.

Give the attack team enough information

to incapacitate or kill the enemy as efficiently as possible.

It allows you to build a pattern of movement

for what's going on in the target area

so that you can add that into the planning phase

to work out how to go in and neutralise the target

with the least amount of effort.

You can get almost within touching distance of the enemy,

such is the nature of that environment

as long as your camouflage is good and you're keeping the noise down,

you can almost go into the camp and come out of it...

remaining undetected.

The post that Colin's recce patrol set up

is called an OP, an observation post.

It's a job every SAS soldier is intimately familiar with.

I used to like the old OPs, you knew where you were.

Obviously, you had a job to do and that's why you were in there.

So you would come in under the cover of darkness

and take the insides of a bush out with you

and discard them somewhere, inhabit the inside of that bush.

You don't just randomly get in a bush because you like bushes.

Well, not on working days, anyway.

At the weekends, you do what you like.

I think the longest one I ever did was about 18 or 19 days.

But you could go in probably a bit longer than that.

Ideally you shouldn't wash or brush your teeth

for about a week before you go in.

If you think about somewhere like the jungle,

if someone's brushed their teeth, you can smell that mint

for maybe 100 or so meters away.

So the smallest things make big differences.

You can't have hot food, you can't go and use the toilet,

so you'll eat your compo or your ration's cold.

Shit in a bag and piss in a bottle.

So that you for all intents and purposes, you've never been there

should anybody go and discover that position

or walk through that position at a later stage.

Granted, you can't watch Jeremy Kyle, or whatever

but, you know, it's certainly not the end of the world, is it?

You stay alert by taking the piss out of each other.

One example of that black humour would be...