Beards, rags and madmen - and the art of good soldiering, by CHRIS RYAN



By CHRIS RYAN, SAS veteran and best-selling author



The Taliban are the greatest enemy force we have faced since World War II

Different soldiers play by different rules. Does this make one better than the other? Possibly

Winston Churchill once said: ‘The first virtue in a soldier is endurance of fatigue; courage is only the second virtue.’



Our greatest wartime leader was rarely wrong. The ability to carry on when you are almost dead on your feet, to continue to hold your ground when others have faltered, is what, I believe, goes to make up a good soldier.

It can be taught, but more frequently it is a quality some are born with. Every year 400 men apply to join the SAS; less than ten per cent will make it. Contrary to popular belief, recruits are never chosen for this elite regiment, they have to volunteer.

They know what is ahead of them, or they think they do. The slow process of breaking somebody down physically, and then mentally, is what training a member of the regiment is all about. The reason so many fail is not because they lack courage, but because they lack the inner determination to carry on, on little or no sleep, with no food, with the certain knowledge that they could be facing death. But these are attributes not reserved just for members of the Special Air Service, or SAS.

I personally believe that the Taliban are the greatest enemy force we have faced since World War II. They are ideologically driven, the most dangerous of all motivators, and embrace the concept of death, believing, of course, that it will lead to them to a better place. As with the Viet Cong in the ill-fated Vietnam conflict, the Taliban fight a dirty, nasty and brutal campaign on their own terrain.

From a civilian point of view, it often appears as if they’re a bunch of amateurs in rags. And on the surface, they look woefully under-equipped. We are a 21st-century fighting force. We have access to helicopters and aircraft to move equipment over great distances, yet still they’re catching us out. However, like all things, the facts are a little more complicated.

The Taliban, like the SAS, fight in small groups, preferring to attack at night. And then, as soon as it becomes light, they blend into the background, walking around the villages, mixing in with the women and children, often their own families, their outfits making them as anonymous as the next man.

It is impossible to estimate their numbers and even though we might suspect someone to be one of them, no soldier wants to get into an armed fight around civilians – well, not if they can avoid it.

Different soldiers play by different rules. Does this make one better than the other? Possibly. It does mean some are more determined, regardless of cost. I was told a story recently about a Taliban attack that shows their ruthless determination and explains why so many experienced soldiers, myself among them, suspect it is an unwinnable war.



From a civilian point of view, it often appears as if the Taliban are a bunch of amateurs in rags. And on the surface, they look woefully under-equipped... Yet still they're catching us out

The Taliban leadership received intelligence that a British patrol unit had once used a particular pass. They believed that eventually the troops would pass again, in the exact same place, on the exact same path. Night and day for six months two of their men waited. They booby-trapped all the places where the patrol would take cover under fire, and eventually their determination paid off and they got their result.



Getting tired and taking your eye off the ball is not an option for the British soldier serving in Afghanistan today. A member of the Parachute Regiment once told me that in his recent six-month tour of duty, there had only been three days in total where he had not been shot at. To be fired at, hour after hour, was not something we faced in the Falklands war. These men have ‘endurance of fatigue’ printed on their DNA.

It is a quality they share with my own hero, Sir Archibald David Stirling, the leader whose men were encouraged to live by Churchill’s dictum. Men had been braver than brave before, but they had never been officially encouraged to adopt such unorthodox techniques. For Stirling, it really was ‘Who Dares Wins’. It was an attitude to soldiering that prompted Field Marshal Montgomery to say of him: ‘He’s mad, he’s quite mad.’ But in war, he said, we need people like him.

Winston Churchill once said: 'The first virtue in a soldier is endurance of fatigue; courage is only the second virtue'

Stirling had been recruited into the Scots Guards via Ampleforth public school and Cambridge, the Army in his blood, as it often is for devoted soldiers; his father had been a brigadier general in World War I. Stirling was, as they say, a gentleman but also a fighter.

Having seen active duty from the start of World War II, he became convinced that due to the mechanised nature of war, a small team of highly trained soldiers with the advantage of surprise could exact greater damage to the enemy’s ability to fight than an entire platoon.

When the desert commando unit he had served in was disbanded in 1941, he managed to convince the then commander-in-chief, General Claude Auchinleck, to allow him to form a new special forces unit. Even then, his methods were unorthodox - with his legs damaged after a parachute accident, he slipped past security at command headquarters in Cairo on a pair of crutches in order to gain an audience with Auchinleck.

The unit was given the deliberately misleading name ‘L Detachment, Special Air Service Brigade’ and the beginnings of the SAS-style tactics were born.

Initially, the unit comprised five officers and 60 other ranks. Today, the Special Air Service comprises three regiments: 22 Special Air Service Regiment of the Army, 21 Special Air Service Regiment and 23 Special Air Service Regiment provided by the Territorial Army. The three regiments’ tasks are special operations in wartime and, primarily, counter-terrorism in peacetime.

The original unit’s first mission was to parachute men behind enemy lines to gather intelligence and harrass the German forces. Confidence was high, and they jumped in terrible weather conditions. The operation was a disaster: some men were killed in the drop, others were captured. Of the 66 who went, only 22 returned. It was a hard lesson to learn.

Stirling adopted an entirely new approach. For the first time there were soldiers with long beards, dressed in unconventional clothing. They would go so deep into enemy territory that the Germans would think they were their own men.

One crucial technique Stirling employed was to convert American jeeps into small fighting vehicles. They took old machine guns from RAF aircraft, mounted them on the vehicles and then drove straight onto enemy airfields and shot up the aircraft rather than sending in troops on foot to attach bombs to the aircraft under-carriages.

Stirling was famous for his escapes. He was captured by the Germans in January 1943, escaped, was recaptured, once by the Italians, who took great delight that he had escaped from the Germans, and then escaped on four further occasions, before finally being sent to Colditz Castle where he remained for the rest of the war. He was, rather inevitably, on the escape committee.

For Sir Archibald David Stirling it really was 'Who Dares Wins'

In the 15 months before his final capture, he and his elite team had destroyed more than 250 aircraft on the ground, dozens of supply dumps and roads, wrecked railway communications and had put hundreds of enemy vehicles out of action.

Stirling’s style was very dashing, but often good soldiers are a lot more understated. In more contemporary terms, perhaps the single most selfless act of bravery was performed by a man called Bob Consiglio who, at 22 years old, was the youngest member of Bravo Two Zero patrol when I served in the Gulf War.

It was 1991 and the group he was assigned to had become splintered on the run for the Syrian border. Consiglio became estranged from the rest of the men and found himself alone. He would have known that he was going to run out of ammunition and stood little chance but he decided to stand and fight, giving the others enough time to escape.

I was on the run by myself for seven days, and I know how frightening it is to be alone - and I wasn’t under direct fire. I can’t imagine what Consiglio went through. Every bone in his body must have ached from the wounds he sustained during that time.

To a major extent, the ability to resist pain and fatigue, and therefore push on through to perform courageous acts, to become the very best soldier possible, is the preserve of young men like Consiglio. There is a reason that the average age of an SAS soldier is 22-and-a-half years old, for instance.

Certainly there is no denying that the older we get, the slower our response times become, and perhaps the more we realise what we have to lose.

But in a military that is undermanned, the recent plan to disband the SAS veterans is a foolhardy one. These men have already proven themselves, many are decorated war heroes, so why throw away that crucial resource? Why not get them to plan operations instead? After all, who knows better the pitfalls of armed combat than someone who has got 25 years experience under their belt?

I know that it has been said that at the age of 50 one is unlikely to be swinging through a window and dishing out death, but surely there is a compromise. We don’t need middle-aged men swinging through windows; we do need them telling others the best way to do it without making unnecessary mistakes.

As the philosopher Francis Bacon once said: ‘Knowledge is power.’