The Team House - 22 Special Air Service Operator | Robin Horsfall | Ep. 237

Episode Date: October 2, 2023

Born in Farnham, Surrey, UK. Following a divorce from his birth father, his mother Hazel married his step-father, who adopted him and gave him the name Horsfall. A broken family life adversely affected his education, so he left school in 1972 at the age of fifteen and joined the army as a boy soldier. Despite a long period of isolation and bullying by his peers, he became a full member of the Parachute Regiment in 1974 and served three tours of Northern Ireland. In 1978 he volunteered for SAS selection and passed on his second attempt in March 1979. He went on to qualify as a Paramedic and Sniper. He was a member of the SAS counter terrorist team that assaulted the Iranian Embassy in London in 1980, helping to rescue the nineteen hostages who had been held for six days.Check out Robin here: ⬇️https://Robinhorsfall.com--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Today's Sponsors:Ree Medical ⬇️ https://reemedical.referralrock.com/l/TEAMHOUSE04/ Need accurate medical evidence that can maximize your VA benefits? REE Medical and their team of specialists are passionate and experienced about helping Veterans. Find out how they can help you at https://reemedical.referralrock.com/l/TEAMHOUSE04---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------To help support the show and for all bonus content including:-AD FREE AUDIO-AD FREE VIDEO-Access to ALL bonus segments with our guestsSubscribe to our Patreon! ⬇️https://www.patreon.com/TheTeamHouseOr make a one time donation at: https://ko-fi.com/theteamhouseTeam House merch: ⬇️https://teespring.com/stores/my-store-10474963Social Media: ⬇️The Team House Instagram:https://instagram.com/the.team.house?utm_medium=copy_linkThe Team House Twitter:https://twitter.com/TheTeamHousePodJack’s Instagram:https://instagram.com/jackmcmurph?utm_medium=copy_linkJack’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/jackmurphyrgr?s=21Dave’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/dave_parke?s=21Team House Discord: ⬇️https://discord.gg/wHFHYM6SubReddit: ⬇️https://www.reddit.com/r/TheTeamHouse/Jack Murphy's memoir "Murphy's Law" can be found here:⬇️ https://www.amazon.com/Murphys-Law-Journey-Investigative-Journalist/dp/1501191241The Team Room Reading Room (Amazon Affiliate links):⬇️ https://jackmurphywrites.com/the-team-room-reading-room/Intro music by https://www.youtube.com/user/RemixSampleWant to sponsor the show?Email: ⬇️[e-mail]#SpecialAirService #22sasBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-team-house--5960890/support.

Hey, folks, I just want to take a minute to ask you to go in rate this podcast, let the Team House know how you think we're doing, go and rate us on whatever platform you're listening to this on, whether it's iTunes or Spotify or whatever else. Those ratings really help us out, and we really appreciate the feedback to let us know what you like and what you don't like. And if you do like the Team House and you'd like to support us, go check out our Patreon page and you can actually support the stream as well as get access to our team house. and you'd like to support us, go check out our Patreon page, and you can actually support the stream and well as get access to our bonus segments and bonus episodes. Yeah, if you're going to give us a great review, please do. And if you're going to give us a not-so-good review,

why don't you just send us an email and we'll talk about it. Special Operations, covert odds, espionage, the team house, with your hosts, Jack Murphy, to David Park. Hello, everybody. Welcome to episode 237 of the Team House. I'm Dave Park.

Jack could not be here tonight. We welcome our guest, former 2-Para and 22SAS operator, Robin Horstfall. Robin, thanks for being with us tonight. Great to be here, Dave. Great to be here. Yeah, and we know it's late. So we will try and turn and burn on this. and so you don't step until 4 a.m. your time.

So Robin, you know, so Robin amongst other books, you know, the book that I read was Running Scared, which is about your childhood, about your time of the para, the SAS, you know, a lot of fascinating things. One of the things we always like to ask our guests is about their origin story. And you cover quite a bit of that in your book. Can you tell us a little bit about your childhood, your exposure? to the military and then what eventually led you to the military? Yeah, the book's actually called Fighting Scared.

Oh, I'm sorry, fighting scared. I'm sorry, fighting scared. Yeah, get your mistakes in early. That's the idea. Early and often. Early and often, that's me. Yeah, I was born in 1957, 12 years after the Second World War. My mother was 17 years old when I was born.

My father was in prison and I never had a father until I was seven years old when a man called Jeffrey Horsfall married my mother and adopted me and gave me his name. My stepfather had no experience of children and at the age of seven I'd had no experience of fathers and his method of controlling me was to beat me into silence. I often write that he stole my voice. He took it away from me. When you beat someone into silence, you take away their ability to negotiate, to laugh. It's very difficult for them to make friends. And so I had a quite a difficult childhood from that personal sense. But I found my escape with going out with my pals and disappearing from home,

going fishing, riding my bicycle, keeping away. away from the house and trying to avoid school as well. When my parents' marriage started to fall to pieces after about seven years, I was 14 years old. And I was failing at school. But in 1972, the school leaving age in the UK was 15 years of age. And at age of 14, I walked into a military recruiting office and said, I'd like to join the army. And they said, how old are you? I told them they said, you're too young, but fill these forms in and we'll give you some tests for next year.

So I did the tests and I wanted to join the Royal Army Medical Corps. I wanted to be a medical technician. And I ended up in the parachute regiment as what we called an infantry junior leader, training to be a non-commissioned officer of the future. And I stayed in that system for two years and three months. And before I was 18, I became a member of the parachute regiment. And what was that like at the time? You're 15, 16 years old and you're in the parachute regiment, right?

Yep, yep. I was in the infantry junior leaders battalion, but we all had our regimental badges, the units we were going to go to when we were 17 and a half. And it was very much a military college system. You continued your education. Okay. You were trained to be soldiers. You were given adventure training. You were given leadership training. You were given you got up at six o'clock every morning. You were busy until 10 o'clock at night. You had no time to actually feel sorry for yourself. You had to live in 12-man rooms with a bunch of tough lads from the back streets of all the cities in Britain. And you learned to live and cooperate with one another as a team.

Gradually you were moved up through the system and learned to take command and take control. So by the time you, I was 17 and a half, you know, I'm sure being American, you've heard of Malcolm Gladwell. And Malcolm Gladwell wrote tipping point where he says, you know, you do 10,000 hours of anything. You'll be an expert. But by the time I was 17 and a half, I had 3,000 hours of soldiering under my belt before I even joined my unit. So it was a really, really good foundation. and it gave me male mentors and role models and masculine guidance, some good, some bad, that prepared me well to be a top infantry soldier.

And so at 17 and a half is your transfer to the actual forces, is that upon like an age or is it like a graduation from their secondary education? How does that work? Yeah, it's both. You reach the age of 17.70 and a half. I was a little older. And you automatically pass out. You graduate. And you then go immediately to your chosen units. Mine was the parachute regiment. And you go through their preparation policies. You know, so going to the parachute regiment, you then go through the training process with them again. But we were very well, very well prepared for that. We were extraordinarily fit. We knew the weapons. We knew the techniques.

We could do the, we could do the instruction almost as well as the instructors. The only step up was in the levels of aggression. Aggression was encouraged because what good is a soldier if you won't fight? And your primary role as an infantryman is to fight. If you can't fight, then you waste your time. It doesn't matter how many wonderful skills you have. If you won't fight, then, you know, shouldn't be there. So you were encouraged to fight amongst yourself as much as anything else

and sort your problems out and build that kind of unique camaraderie that comes between very, very masculine and tough men. But you have to really take your courage in your hands and step up to the plate and play the game. And of course, there's the parachuting part as well, which that age is a real challenge. You know, you are choosing to try. trust your equipment and jump out of an airplane and trust that that equipment will save your life. And the first time, as you will know as well as I do, it's an extraordinarily feat of courage. And there's a smile on your face for the rest of the day. Having done it once, it's not too difficult to carry on and do it again. Yeah. What now was the Paris, was that a place

that other people could go to, other men could go to right after boot camp? Yeah, they could transfer there from other units in the British Army or they could join straight from civilian world. In my intake, we had just over 50 men, and 48 of them were former junior soldiers. Oh, really? There were only about five or six. that were from the civilian world.

So, and out of that, out of that 54, I think it was, 47 actually passed. And one of the junior soldiers, two of the junior soldiers actually got held back and one failed. So, yeah, and two got held back through injuries, parachuting injuries. Was there a challenge with integration with these people who had come from the civilian world that had no experience at all? No, I don't think so. I think we were inclined to help them. They didn't have as much experience as us. So, you know, you just play to your strengths. They would have had different strengths. You know, everybody in a team has a bad day and everybody in a team has a strength. And, you know, the strength might be that you can carry more weight, but you can't drive a truck and so on. You know, and you can, you can, you can, you can. can do astro navigation. You're a smart guy. You know what people might call a geek, but you have

your value. The guy over there who's a little bit tougher and hard than everybody else, that's his value. There's a big strong guy who can dig trenches faster than anybody else. Fox holds, as you call them. Everybody works together. And then at this point in time, what was the Perez mission in the world? What were they set up and designed for? Well, you were a paratrooper. I love the piece in Band of Brothers, where you've got the 82nd airborne going into Bastogne in the Second World War. And the infantry retreating, they're taking the ammunition off and going off into the dark.

And somebody shouts, you know, don't go up there. You're going to be surrounded. And the reply is, we're paratroopers. We're supposed to be surrounded. And that's a wonderful, cool Americanism. that I really, really love to repeat. You are trained to go. A job of a paratrooper is to drop behind enemy lines

and hold the ground until the infantry and the main army catch up with them and to disrupt enemy communications and forces behind their front lines. And so we're supposed to be surrounded. Yes, we're also supposed to be the stormtroopers of the British armed forces. You know, we believe we're young,

We usually between the age of 18 and 23. We believe we're immortal. We believe that we can do anything in the world. And if we can't, then we end up dead and we carry on. We have a few drinks over our friends and then we carry on. It's a crazy world with a crazy sense of humor, especially the British sense of humor. But it works. And what was going on in the world at this point in time?

Like what types of things were the British Army and military involved in? Now predominantly at that time, you're talking about the 1970s. I went to the parachute regiment as an adult soldier in 1974. And we were heavily committed on the streets of Northern Ireland, where we were patrolling, and we were standing as peacekeepers between two religious groups, the Protestants and the Catholics, who were trying to murder one another,

and things were escalating and we were sent there to support the police and enable them to maintain law and order. As time developed through bad politics, through the imposition of internment, which is trial, imprisonment without trial, then things broke down. The Catholic community regarded the soldier as being part of the opposition. and we ended up with a group called the Provisional IRA who then started to kill soldiers as well as as well as their religious opponents as well. And it became a long-term war which lasted 30 years. Can you tell us?

You know, Northern Ireland is something that sort of faded into history for people who are not interested in history. And as you mentioned before the show, even some of the history that's out now gets it wrong. Can you sort of give us the run up and why this was going on in Northern Ireland? Well, the people of Ireland as a whole, especially the Catholic population, fought a war of independence in the early 20th century. And eventually that came to a negotiated peace where partition was agreed between the North and the south, a small part of the north of Ireland was allocated to remain part of the British state, the United Kingdom, under a Protestant majority. And then there was an open border,

and below that open border was established the Republic of Ireland or era. And that republic still exists. So people who imagine that Ireland is was occupied by British forces during the 1970s and 80s. We've got it completely wrong. Northern Ireland was part of the United Kingdom. It had a mixed population of Catholics and Protestants who had political and religious enmity. And so nobody was occupying anything.

The troops were there initially to keep the peace and to prevent people. They actually prevented, successfully prevented. a civil war in Northern Ireland. And as you mentioned, and there were a number of different groups and factions in the area at that time, correct? Yeah, like all terrorist groups,

as they get bigger, they tend to break in, they tend to disagree and break into different factions. So we had, I don't want to get the titles wrong, but we had the official IRA, the provisional IRA, and several other break-off groups from that. that actually killed each other as much as they killed their enemies at times. And then you had the Protestant groups predominantly led by the UDA.

And those divisions sadly still exist. And although there's a reduction, a huge reduction in violence in Northern Ireland, these problems still simmer beneath the surface because it's very difficult when both political factions get their votes from that division for them to actually come together because when people come together and the enmity disappears, they're going to have to start talking about housing and economy and jobs and more important things.

But all the time they can keep people divided into two groups, then they're guaranteed their political power and their votes. Boy, we've never seen that. in the last 10 years. So what, so was it mostly because not all of these groups were targeting the British military, but some of them were, especially on, please tell, yeah. Yeah. Well, in the early years, they were targeting the,

populations of the other religious group. So the Catholics were attacking the Protestants, Protestants were attacking the Catholics, or at least the loyalists and nationalist, but it gets complicated when he start to use those terms. So, and they were killing huge numbers of people. They were blowing up houses, blowing up pubs, blowing up schools with children in, knocking down people's front doors and machine-gunning people in the hallways of their house. It was an absolutely a criminal nightmare. And so the soldiers went there to prevent that from happening.

And the Catholics in the early years built no-go areas. They built barricades across their enclaves because they were a minority group. And they were actually really demanding civil rights and equality, which was being denied to them. You know, you had similar stories when you go back to Martin Luther King Jr. the issues that you had with racial discrimination in America. Well, the Catholics in Northern Ireland were in some ways in the same situation. They were denied boats.

They were denied property. They were denied jobs. And so they tended to be the poorest people in the society as well. So they marched for civil rights and they got attacked for those marches. But things moved on from that and it became a long-term conflict where, the soldiers were in the middle getting attacked by both sides, but predominantly from the provisional IRA who killed an awful lot of soldiers and killed an awful lot of policemen, as well as, and they never ever released any prisoners.

So if they caught us, they killed us, and they tortured us first. And as you guys there, as peacekeepers, obviously, as a human being, feelings get involved. And, you know, if one of your guys gets rolled up, captured, tortured, you're not likely to look upon the people who did it or people associated with them favorably. So did any parts of the British military start looking at this, that they were the allies of the Protestants there?

Or did they get heavy-handed? Like, how did that work? In the early years, I think it was 1971. An incident took place in Londonderry, which was nicknamed Bloody Sunday, where 13 marches, Catholic marches, was shot by members of the parachute regiment. There's a lot of stories. There's been a lot of investigations over 30 years. And my personal opinion, and it's the opinion of many of my colleagues, is that a communist system was used whereby the crowd was in flame and marching.

And from behind the crowd, certain terrorists opened fire with a view to causing the military to open fire in return. And knowing that it was going to cause civilian deaths. and then they could blame the armed forces for those deaths. That's still under question. People will disagree with that opinion. But one of the terrorist leaders, Martin McGuinness, before he died, actually admitted that he was the first person to open fire on that day. But nobody wants to talk about that particular fact.

Yeah. And it's on record. You know, so I've actually been involved with the Northern Ireland Veterans Movement and led it for the last eight years. have a new legacy bill going through Parliament in Britain and I've actually volunteered to be a commissioner on that a non-executive commissioner on that on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission because in spite of my long-term commitment there I did five tours of Northern Ireland I actually understand a lot

of the history I sympathise with the situations of both sides and the victims of it were mainly the civilian population and the security forces. In fighting scared, see, I got it right that time, in fighting scared, your preface or your first chapter is basically first kill or, you know, it's the first time, yeah, first kill. Can you tell us about that incident? Like your, was this your first firefighter of just the first. first time that you were engaged closely with an enemy? It wasn't the first firefight I was in, but it was the first one. It was a very good one to open the book with.

Yes. Because it's a hook. It's a hook. Yeah, it's a good hook. But I was very careful with it because I didn't want to identify the people concerned in that incident, the victims in that incident, because that makes it a personal issue with people who might still be alive today. And although it's a political issue and a military issue that took place a long, long time ago, I did not wish to

identify exactly where it was and when it was. So there's a little bit of misdirection in that story as well. Now, when you talk about the victims, you're talking about the family that the terrorists killed prior to you're engaging these terrorists were you guys was that just a routine patrol or like blocking point for you guys

or did you know that this event had happened no it was a it was a vehicle checkpoint we were out on a routine patrol and um they just happened to come our way and by the time they came our way we'd been alerted to the fact

that um this particular vehicle with these gunmen in was heading in our direction and you know they opened fire we returned fire and they died and that was it were incidents like those you know common for for the paris there for the peacekeepers there where you have these vehicle checkpoints for vehicle control points and and armed you know these armed terrorists come up on the checkpoint they weren't common because you know the terrorists would have people out on the ground identifying where you were I mean you set up immediate VCPs and an immediate vehicle checkpoint and then you'd move it and you'd go and set it up somewhere else so you'd put them up very very very quickly and remove them very very quickly so A so that they didn't know you would be there if they were trying to escape from committing crime

and B, so you didn't stay there too long and became a target for them. So, you know, but no, such incidents were quite rare. Although in my five tours, three with the parachute regiment, I got shot at three times and I laid on a bomb once. I laid on an improvised explosive device once. Hopefully something I'd never have to do again, and I didn't. So, you know, you didn't, you didn't have to.

have regular daily combat, but you were a target every single day when you went out of the barracks and patrolled the streets. You were waiting to be shot at. Right. Real quick, Robin, if you excuse me, I just need to give a shout out to our sponsor today, which is re-medical. Let's take a moment to tell you about our sponsor, Remedical. We know how difficult it can be to get accurate disability ratings and the proper benefits from the VA. Despite your best efforts, and multiple doctors visits. Connecting new or worsening disabilities to your service just adds to the frustration. This is Remedical's wheelhouse, and that's REE Medical.

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She's got amazing art. We love it. Robin, back to you. Thank you so much for your patience. So what, you know, you mentioned the improvised explosive device. What were the types of, because we know car bombs were a big thing in North than Ireland back then. What were some of the other challenges when it came to improvise explosive devices? And why did you lie down on one? Well, I was on a patrol

and we were going into a bar. There were two patrols. One was going into a bar to do some questioning. And our patrol was to lay down an open ground and cover them. It was dark. It was January 977. And I laid on the ground. It was late in the evening about 11 o'clock at night and I rested the magazine of my rifle on the ground and instead of resting on some grass it scraped on something metallic so I pushed away some of the grass to see what it was and it was a galvanized bucket with a taped on cardboard lid buried half into the ground with the open side facing a post office wall which was off to my left and so I realized what it was immediately and jumped up and ran around the corner and told my patrol commander.

And a couple of hours later, we got the ammunition technical officer to come in and he took it to pieces. And there was 20 pounds of co-op explosive, two ounces of franjects, an electric detonator, and 200 meters of wire leading off into an area called the Turf Lodge. and they tried to initiate it, but because of the cold and icy weather, whatever the initiator was, it didn't have enough power to set off the device. And so it was a successfully disarmed bomb. And I got congratulated for my performance of running away. What were the other types of IEDs? and how would they use them?

Because we think a lot about IEDs now in Iraq and Afghanistan, but these have been tools of terrorists for a very long time. Yeah, I think the provisional IRA led the world in developing improvised explosive devices. They got an awful lot of training from the Soviet Union and from Libyans under Colonel Gaddafi. and they developed explosive devices. Predominantly their favourites were with cars, but they would use sticky devices like napalm in small devices, put down little alleyways and pathways.

They would put landmines in small gaps between which you were taught not to go through. you always climb over a fence rather than go through the gate. You were taught to keep your eyes open for anything but suspicious. You never picked up what seemed to be a lost piece of military equipment because the chances are it was booby-trapped. Everything was potential booby-trap. Everything outside of your barracks was a potential booby-trap.

So you were constantly aware of that. But the biggest ones, you know, they would have supersized, three tons of explosive in the back of a large truck and blow the hell out of the inner cities which they used to do it these things didn't just place and take place in Northern Ireland they took place all over the British mainland in they killed civilians in Glasgow in Birmingham

in London in Manchester they even killed serving soldiers and their families in Germany so this wasn't limited to the conflict zone. It was all over the United Kingdom and anywhere that British soldiers served. So I, when I was with the special forces, we used to work undercover in Northern Ireland civilian clothes. So our identities were secret because of the Irish threat. And our families at home were also targets for terrorists as well. So we had to be extraordinarily careful

about who knew who we were in those days. And that mythology of putting a brick across your eyes and nobody knowing who the hell you were carries on today in spite of the fact that that threat no longer exists. Right, right. So can you give us a little sense of, especially again, we focus a lot on the global war on terror here, but you're fighting in a civilian person,

population that everybody looks like you, they talk like you. They might have a different religion, the Catholic or Protestant, but at any given time, in that population center, you might come under fire from any location. You might get hit from a bomb. Like how how do you guys manage to to exist in that world without I don't know without just getting very dark about things? You know, how do you manage to maintain humanity in that type of world? Well, I think we were dehumanized by our training in many ways, but we were also extraordinarily well disciplined. So should we at any time break the law, then we were taken to task for it by the military police and by our own leaders and commanders as well.

So although we had to be really, really strong and determined to do our job well, we also had to stick within the laws of the United Kingdom because we were in our own country. Sure. which that made it frustratingly hard at times, but it also meant that we could hold the moral high ground rather than anywhere else. And of course, mistakes were made and people are people and some of us did the wrong things at times. But it wasn't policy and it certainly wasn't the norm.

Soldiers went out on the ground. They would go out on two to four out patrols in four or five man groups. We would patrol. And we would monitor the area. We would stop and question people, stop and question cars. And hopefully return back to our barracks for sometimes a two-hour sleep and then get back out on the ground again.

Some of us would be on standby. It was a four-month tour. You'd come home. And then six months later, you'd go back and do another tour. But my recollection of it is that most of the time I loved it. I enjoyed being a soldier. That's what I've been trained for at the age of 15. Why wouldn't I want to be there with the toughest mean of sons of bitches in the world who were older than me, were leading me?

I remember one particular night, one of my patrol commanders, my Isaacs, a Welshman. We got shot at in the dark. And before I could even react, he had run straight towards the sound of the firing and we just followed him. And that's the kind of leadership you had. It wasn't the case of, oh, take cover were being shot at. He went straight at them. And they ran. We had another firefight across the, I think it was the Anderson Stown Cemetery.

And again, the IRA opened from a block of flats in the Turf Lodge. And the guys just opened fire and did fire a maneuver between the gravestones across the, and the terrorists panicked and left their way. weapons behind and legged it because they were so shocked by that response. We had, but after, after a few years, the terrorist use to move out of areas that we had been given as our patrol area and wait until we'd gone before they came back. So was the, what were the two paras? Were they the only unit in, you know, doing those patrols or were there multiple units? no no there were at times there were 30,000 soldiers in the province and you know you're talking about a province that's not as big as new york state so with a population of about five million people so we had soldiers in uh you had a company in you had a battalion in every area of belfast and every area of london and then you had other battalions out in the countryside,

which used to be called bandit country, where it was very, very dangerous to travel anywhere in a motor vehicle. You either went by a helicopter or you walked because a second you got in a vehicle, the chances are you were going to get blown to pieces. So it was my last tour was in Cross McGlynn in South Arm. and patrolling the border between the Republic and the north of Ireland, which was called Bandit Country.

And again, out with my comrades, out on the ground, doing real soldiering, patrolling, getting down in defensive positions at night, getting up before first light, patrolling again, stopping, making a brew, having a quick something to eat patrolling, and looking for the enemy. And it was my job and it was a thrill. And I have rose-tinted memories of an awful lot of it with great guys. Sure.

So you did three tours, four months each. And then what brought the SAS onto you? Like what brought that into your view or when did you start considering that? Well, I went to a lecture in the depot, the Parachite Regiment, Noldershot, when I was 20 years old, and listened to members of the Special Air Service give a lecture. And in that lecture, they said, don't really bother coming until you're 25 to 27 years old, because, you know, that's the average age of the guys here. But my platoon was called the Vigilant Patoon, which was a guided missile section.

And we were like the wild bunch of the Parachute Regiment, very, very... independent, very laxed discipline, but very hell of a lot of soldiering. And they disbanded us because the new missile, Milan, was coming and going to the anti-tank platoons. And so they didn't need our platoon anymore. So they said, look, you can go anywhere you like. And I said, that's great. I'll go back to the second battalion, the parachute regiment, too, para. And they said, that's fine. And then they changed their mind. And if you promised something to somebody and you change your mind, you're an ass, right? Right. On the other hand, if you say, if you say no to somebody and change your mind, you're a hero. Right. But they change

their minds. And I was, I was deeply offended and upset about this because they were going to put me in, I'd been a soldier for three years and they were going to put me back into a one power rifle company where people younger than me were going to be senior to me. And I wasn't going to tolerate this. So I knew, I said, well, I know there's something you can't stop me from doing. And just to cock a snooter authority, I went to the battalion Clark and volunteered to go to the SAS. And there was a guy in the back of the office who was a Yorkshireman. And Yorkshire talk like this. And he said, I don't know why you're doing that all that story, he said, you're far too young.

You'll be back with your tail between your legs, you'll wanker. but I volunteered and he was nearly right because the first time I tried tried essay selection I didn't pass but they kept me on because they thought I had potential and four months later I took it and passed and it's nothing like the movies it's nothing like the TV nonsense that people see essay selection lasts a year the first the first month is in the mountains of Wales, where the final week, the final five days is the equivalent of five marathons over mountains in five days carrying weight alone, and the final march is 40 miles. You do that, you go on and you do continuation training, most of it in the jungle.

If you pass the jungle phase, you do a combat survival instructors course. The final week where you're chased by a battalion across countries and you have to escape and get to targets. And then you, if you're not already a parachute, you do a parachute training. And then you join your squadron on probation. And then in the next six months, you have to learn a personal skill and a troop skill. My personal skill was as a paramedic, so I got there in the end. And my my troop skill was as a mountaineer. And then at the end of 12 months, providing the guys like you, you're a, your, your, actually qualified and you're allowed to stay for another two years before you're assessed again

that's intense can you tell us a little bit about the first time you did it um and you know how how you failed or or why you think you may have failed yeah um i was in the first month and i was in the test week trace and i got to the four of the five the fourth of the five days and um it was wet. I was alone and I had these two massive great ulcers on my back where my Bergen, my rucksack frame had rubbed two big holes in the back and they were bleeding down the backs of my legs. And I started to think about the 40-mile that was going to come the next day. And I realized that I wasn't ready. I wasn't up to it. And I returned to the previous checkpoint. and said, you know, I'm voluntarily withdrawing.

And there was a medic there who treated my back. And I prepared all my equipment to return to my battalion. The following morning, I got called into the office and said, look, you know, you're young. We think you've got potential. Would you like to stay? This would have been September, 1978. Would you like to stay until January? You can help out with the guys who are doing their continuation training.

and you can prepare yourself better. And in January, I started the process again. And that January, 1979, was one of the coldest January's in Britain for over 50 years. And out of 56 of us that started, eight of us actually passed. Wow. And six of those eight were from the parachute regiment. Wow. Now, was that?

And we had one person die on it as well. Really? But was that, I can't remember, I know you got Leishomoniasis, and that's something that, that I think that, you know, troops who undergo like tough training, like everybody's seen that happen once or twice. Can you tell it? Did you get it that first time? I got it during my jungle training. Okay. I went on the selection that I passed. And that was in Belize.

Central America. Leash maniasis, cutaneous leased maniitis is quite common down there and you get a protozoan carried by a sandfly and it creates an ulcer which eventually heals up. But the leishmanias that I got, leishmaniasis that I got was Brazilianis. And Brazilianis leishmaniasis is far more serious. It starts with the same ulcer. But then it starts to metastasize across the body and then it'll go away and then up to 10 to 20 years later it'll reemerge and destroy the mucous membranes in your bodies in the same sort of symptoms of syphilis and you'll die so they there I was and I didn't tell anybody I thought well maybe I've got it but I'm not going to tell anybody I'm going to finish selection first and I finish selection and then I end up in

hospital for three months getting an antimonial drug which eventually cured it now Yeah, so that's right, because it's sort of a tropical disease, right? I'm trying to remember. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So your second time, so you made it through the 40-mile or you did all that, and then what was the rest of the training like?

Because I don't know if while you were in the Paris, you did like the jungle training and things like that, but what was the training like that you went to compare to what you did while you're with the Paris. Almost all of my training of the Paris regiment was North European training. Yeah. So a North European training is cold and wet. You know, predominantly cold and wet.

Cold and dry is easy. Cold and wet is the hardest, you know. It really is. I mean, you go, you go, people go sunbathing when it's 20 below if there's no wind. You know, they just do. And the snow's on the ground. It's glorious.

and they go skiing and have a great time and get sun tan. But when it's cold and wet, that's danger weather. That's when you get hypothermia. That's when you need to know how to live and survive in cold weather. And though the wars of Northern Europe in the Second World War were fought in that kind of environment, especially in the winter. So, but when I went to the SAS, it was the first time I did jungle training. And in the jungle, everything wants to eat you. Not the big things, not the imagined things like the big snakes and the big cats.

and, you know, it's the little things. It's the mosquitoes and the leeches and the ticks and the bugs and the bacteria and the fungi that get between your legs and give you rashes and the trees that you chop and the sack comes out and gets in your eyes and you can't see three days. And, you know, it's all, and the ants get into your hammock at night and they want to eat you too because you're just a big smorgas board of meat for everything in the junk. But again, it's pure soldier in and there was a great joy to it. The great tests were to carry the weight to keep going, to navigate well, to do the signals,

to do your share of the work, to go and fetch water in the morning, to do your drills properly, to move for 15 minutes, stop for 10, move for 50 minutes, stop for 10, circle back on yourself before it got dark, put your hammocks up and move before first light. to prevent your enemy from tracking you and prevent, and to learn your skills and to learn your bugout skills because your small patrols. So if you do hit an enemy, it's laid down a lot of fire and get the hell out of there.

Yeah. Because your main role in the jungle is reconnaissance. And your secondary role is to go back and bring in larger forces to do camp attacks. Yeah. Yeah. And as a soldier, because you mentioned like when you were in Northern Ireland,

that you were a soldier you're doing what you loved was this more of that for you yeah absolutely um as soon as i was out of camp as soon as i was in the trees or in the field um or uh out on the ground carrying a weapon with my friends i mean that was soldiering them i i wasn't a great fan of being in barracks uh marching up and down and polishing boots um although i did my fair share of that as a boy soldier it was something i tried to avoid when i became an adult soldier yeah um and so um unfortunately i was a paratrooper and we minimized that to the nth degree um i loved being a soldier i hated the bullshit yeah yeah so one thing we i didn't ask you um when you were in the in the paris what type of weapon weapons systems did you guys use typically yeah i

Our main weapon was the self-loading rifle, the Belgian FN. So it had a 20-round magazine 7.62 ammunition. And it gave you section firepower up to 600 meters with a general purpose machine gun in the light roll, which was also 762. So you could engage the enemy at 6 to 800 meters as a section. And that was a very powerful unit. your anti-tank weapons were the 66 millimeter light anti-tank weapon and the Carl Gustav 84mm which tended to be 66 in a section and the 84 as a as a platoon weapon and then also you had two inch mortars I moved into support company so I ended up which the Americans called weapons company and I ended up using 81 millimeter mortars as my main weapon until I went off to the vigilant platoon, anti-tank guided missiles.

So I was very, very active. I was moving from, I joined my battalion, I got on the shooting team, I joined a battalion in Northern Ireland, I came back on the shooting team, joined a battalion again, back on the shoot, back on to the mortar platoon, and then transferred to the vigilant platoon when my mother died, she was only 37 years old she died of breast cancer

and she'd got divorced by that time so the army had become my soul my parents I was essentially an army orphan there's a piece in the old film with Richard Gear an officer and a gentleman where the top sergeant kicks

his ass on the fight arena and he says why didn't you go home and he says well I haven't got anywhere to go this is you know this is it and the army was it for me It was my home. It was my mum and dad. It was everything.

I had no home to go to outside of that by the time I was 19. Yeah. So I was a pretty mean young man. I would have killed any of my country's enemies, given the right circumstances. And I loved being a soldier. But I was quite a bitter young man as well. So the... lack of a father figure, a lack of a role model that made it very, very difficult for me to laugh

at myself. And if a young man is not capable of laughing at himself, then he's vulnerable to an awful lot of abuse. So I'm very much a loner as well. Yeah. Until I met my wife. Yeah. The reason I ask you about your weapon is because I know one of the things you mentioned in your book was your love for the MP5 when you got to 22 S. Oh, yeah. Yeah, the MP5 is still, 40 years later, the best low-velocity submachine gun in the world. It's an amazing piece of German technology. You know, it's got a close-face blowback system, so it's got very little deviation when you're firing the weapon on automatic.

You can put three rounds into a one-inch circle from five meters away, which means, you know, you can take a man out with three headshots with a quick burst, with a great deal of accuracy. And it's still the favored weapon for building assault now with swap teams and special forces groups around the world. Yeah. So with the SAS, like what were some of the different? Because you did the jungle training and, you know, you did, but they're also a counterterrorist unit. counterterrorism had become, you know, a thing, right, with all of the airline hijacked,

not just in Northern Ireland, but we had all the airline hijackings. You know, there were a number of things going on in the world. What was that portion of sort of like the SAS training for you like? Well, what really established the Pagoda team, the counterterrorist team in the special air service, was the 19792 Olympics where the Israeli athletes. were murdered by the PLO and the police had tried to mount a rescue and it had gone completely wrong and lots of lots of people had got killed the athletes have got killed so the British invested in the SAS preparing for such an incident in the future and it started off in its infancy with

submachine guns with taped on right angle torches and gradually developed as the money came in the investment took place until by the time I got into the regiment in ninth I got in the regiment was 78 but in 1979 it was my squadron's turn to be the counterterrorist team so it wasn't a selected team that was set aside each of the four sabre squadrons and did a six-month tour on the counter-terrorist team and it was ours it's our turn in spring of 1980 and only six weeks after we took over the team we had our incident the famous incident that made the s famous around the world at the iranian embassy in london on may the fifth 1980 right where we rescued where we rescued 19 hostages right and you know you mentioned the pagoda team and what's interesting

is that the america the iran hostage crisis for america in in iran was 79 so so the world knew this this was something that could happen. I believe in your book you even mentioned that wasn't Margaret Thatcher who said, I can't imagine what would be like if we had people in an embassy. Well, it was actually, it was actually 1982. It was only 10 days before we carried out our mission. And so, you know, the world's morale in terms of counterterrorism was on a real low. You know, this huge mission that had been put together by U.S. Special Forces had been so large that, you know, things hadn't gone well.

And certain errors had caused the deaths of their own people. And, of course, the Iranians paraded those brave people's bodies on public television. And so it was highly embarrassing for the world. And then only 10 days later, we had our opportunity to deal with our terrorist incident. And we had a much, much smaller team. Because something I do want to say is special forces is partly special because it's small. The first test should stand for small. Because as soon as special forces get big, it becomes just another unit, just another battalion.

Because you can't have that many special people. So small is special. But we had our incident. and in spite of things going wrong in the initial phase, we were well trained enough to put them right. And we ended up with 19 hostages rescued, five terrorists killed and one captured in seven minutes. For the people who might not be familiar with this event,

can you walk us through sort of how it went down, where it was, and then your involvement, because you guys, if I remember right, you guys had just rotated on the Pagoda team not to, like, like you said, like a month after you rotated, right? That's right. Only a few weeks before. Yeah.

Much to the shagrin of G-Squardin who we took over from, because, you know, everybody wished that they had been us. On the 30th of April, six of Abbashtani terrorists took over the Iranian embassy in London, captured 24 people on the inside, including three British Germans. journalists and a chauffeur, British chauffeur as well, and the embassy staff. And they made demands for their story to get onto television and to the release of their people in Iran who had been imprisoned by the Ayatollah Khomeini. They made demands.

And we were in Hereford at the time, which was 125 miles from London. And on the first night, we deployed and got to 25. miles outside London and where we waited the permission to go into London. We did not get that permission so we moved into central London to a military barracks called Regents Park Barracks and we parked up there for the day and on the second night we got permission to move into the building next door to where the hostages were taken which was the Royal College of General Practitioners and in a big yellow Pentechnican truck we sneaked over a wall wall at one o'clock in the morning taking all our kit equipment we got into the building next door

without being seen by anybody and we prepared for an immediate action and the immediate action is if it all goes wrong now they start killing people everybody each group's got an area of responsibility you go in there and do the best you can and then you start to prepare a deliberate action so over the next four days our commanders prepared a deliberate action we got plans we got photographs, we got identities, we found out where armoured doors, windows, where the hostages were held, what they looked like, what the situation was. The hostage negotiator is established the link with them and managed to negotiate the release over three days of three of the hostages.

So you're left with, finally left with 20. And on the fifth day, Mustafa Kharkuti was also released by, the terrorists as a gesture of goodwill after their demands being put on to the British Broadcasting Corporation services on television. And it looked like it was going to resolve itself. But on the sixth day, Faisal, who was pretty much the hard man of the terrorist group, took the Chargerde Affair, a man called Lavazani downstairs and executed him by the putting two shots in the back of his head. And a few hours later, they threw the body out the front door.

At which time Margaret Thatcher gave permission via her home secretary to give the military permission to mount an assault. By that time, our deliberate action had been prepared. There were 48 of us that assaulted the building. There were five floors and 55 rooms. Each group of eight had been given a floor. And the cunning plan was for us to sneak up to the building, to plant our charges, which were going to take out the windows and doors, initiate them all at exactly the same time,

and to clear the building. And while one of the guys was absailing down the back of the building from the roof, his foot went through the window. And this was heard by the lead terrorist, Salim. And he told the negotiator that there had been a suspicious noise, and he was going to investigate. The commander gave the command to go early. And so on the front of the building

with the famous television footage that people can find on YouTube, you see John McAlead's leap across the balcony, slam the frame charge on the window and leap back in. He's only about four feet away from it when it's initiated and takes the window out. That wasn't supposed to be the game plan.

On the back door where I was, our explosive man had time to lay the charges. So Big Bob Curry comes in with an eight-pound sledgehammer and takes the doors out with a sledgehammer. And he can go, our guys, up above me, I'm looking up. And the guy who's stuck on the rope, he's got his abseil glove caught in his D-ring.

And so he's jammed just above the windows. The guys have gone down past him. They've gone through the windows. They've thrown in their flashback. their pyrotechnics and the curtains have caught fire so the curtains are now burning the guy's hanging above the window and he's turning into a barbecue and he's screaming and on top of that he's got the pressel switch on his radio pressed as well so nobody can communicate and the the squadron commander must be thinking oh my

god this is the coffin of my career and all we can hear is Tom hanging on on the rope and he's screaming because he's getting burned. And so it looks like an absolute disaster. The guys on the roof are trying to cut the rope while it's under tension, but he's kicking himself away from the flames. And if they cut it on the out swing, he's going to drop 30 feet onto concrete. So they've got to get him,

they've got to get the rope to part on the in swing. Tommy Palmer's gone through the window below him. And his head's caught fire from the flames of the curtain. So he comes out the window, takes off his gas. mask, throws it away, puts the flames out and goes back into the window and kills two terrorists. The guy's on the roof cut down Tom. He comes down onto the balcony. Meanwhile, as he comes down onto the balcony, the radio system becomes clear. The squadron commander thinking that all hells let loose and it's all gone wrong says go in. So me and my partner go into the building from the

back door. But it's all looking. pretty good when we get inside the lobby on the ground floor. There's a chain of men up the stairs. There's gunfire. There's noise. There's gas. But the policeman that had been held hostage for the whole week, Trevor Locke, comes clear at the bottom of the stairs first.

And I pass him out the door to the next guy. Then the hostages come down and we're passing them down. We're keeping them scared. Do as you're told. Do as you're told. Get down to stairs. Get down to stairs. And we pass them hand to hand.

Out they go. Out. They go. Out they go. And amongst those is hidden one of the terrorists. And then in the last group coming down the stairs, there's a commotion up on the stairway. And a sudden movement, and somebody shouts, he's a terrorist, and he's holding a hand grenade in his hand. And there's one man standing about 12, 24 inches from him. And he fires 24 rounds into him.

And I'm about five meters away, and I fire a burst of three rounds. And the guy crumbles to the floor and the pin still in the grenade. And out they go, out they go, out they go, out they go. The building's on fire. There are five terrorists dead. There's one outside hidden amongst the hostages. And seven minutes from the go, go, go, the building is clear and on fire. And the job is done.

Wow. It's amazing that even with the challenges that were there, that just, you're like the team's professionalism and, you know, prior training still led to a successful mission outcome. Yeah, it was just like an exercise. We'd practiced for this. We hadn't only practiced for this. We'd practiced for vehicles moving for aircraft, for boats alongside the harbor, for Sips at Sea, and for buildings, of course.

And so these things had happened on exercise. these things had gone wrong on exercise because we haven't had people and burn so badly but you know things had gone wrong and you buy that training and by the quality of the man and the selection process you end up with people that can think

clearly under pressure hopping back to Malcolm Gladwell again in bling or tipping point he says why do police officers make mistakes with weapons under pressure it's because they're not of supremely good fitness they're usually you've got too many donuts in them.

They're not used to dealing with firefights on a regular basis. They're not used to training with fear and on the edge of danger. And so their heartbeat goes over 145 beats a minute. And when your heartbeat goes over 145 beats per minute, you cannot make minor cognitive decisions. So you make big mistakes. You don't see what's in front of your eyes anymore. Yeah. And so high fitness, really tough, really edgy training and lots of it. And the selection of the right people is vital.

Yeah. And you're the gentleman who was cooking while on the rappel line. Did he get down before we was well done? Yeah, he got, they cut him down, he hit the balcony and he went in and did his task. And he went to hospital afterwards with some second degree burns to his legs. But he completed his mission. Big Fijiian man called Tom Morrell. Yeah. And so what, what, that was, that was the show, right? That was what every hostage rescue team or every counterterrorist team dreams of. And meanwhile, G Squadron is off, you know, gnashing their teeth.

What was that like for you guys back at the unit? well I mean we the government wanted to take us out and parade us in front of the press and we said no we don't do that and we got back into our big yellow truck with all our equipment and we disappeared and we became the most famous anonymous people for the next 25 years our wives and girlfriends were hugging themselves with glee because they knew it was us and they couldn't tell anybody we went back to barracks the regiment was enormously

proud of everybody even those guys that missed the boat on that particular occasion, they would have their day in the future. And, yeah, there was an enormous amount of pride. But we had to get ready. There could have been another one the next day. So our equipment, as soon as we got back, had to be prepared, had to be restored.

The ammunition had to be refilled. Everything had to be cleaned and put back in the vehicles, ready to go again. And it looked as though we were going to have another incident only a couple of months later when the Libyan embassy in London opened fire from a window and killed a police officer in London. It looked like we were going to have to do something again, but it didn't work out that way. But we became this mythological preacher, you know, the guys that could leap over tall buildings with a single bound and were bulletproof.

Right. We were good at what we did. We were good at what we did. Yeah. I think one of the next things you mentioned in your book was Operation McGregor. Can you give us some background on that and then sort of how that went down for you guys? Yeah, well, the 1982, the then president of Argentina, General Leopoldo Galtieri, needed a distraction to take his population's eyes away from hyperinflation, the fact that he was murdering

thousands and thousands of opponents, the Argentinian people called them the disappeared. So he decided to invade the Falkland Islands, which were a British protector in the South Atlantic. And he thought that it would be very much similar to Putin's idea moving into Ukraine, that he would just walk in and nobody would do anything about it. But unfortunately, they didn't really take the personality of Margaret Thatcher into consideration. And we deployed the British armed forces, Navy, Air Force, and obviously the infantry down to the Falkland Islands to recover the islands, an 8,000 mile journey.

And the task of my squadron was to fly into Argentina, Operation Mercado, and land on the runway and destroyed the super eton d'ar jets, the French super et ceteraire jets, which were firing exocet missiles, which had sank three of our capital ships and there was no return journey so it was our mission to go in there destroy the jets and get killed or captured um i had a wife who was by that time eight months pregnant um and i left home uh to carry out the mission knowing what the mission was but she obviously couldn't and left home uh thinking that i wouldn't see my son born The good fortune in the story was that we got as far as Ascension Island, halfway there.

And Ronald Reagan put pressure on Margaret Thatcher not to extend the war onto the mainland because the war on the Falkland Islands was going so well. The paras, Marines, guards, the Air Force and the Navy were covering the island. They'd lost a lot of troops in a very short space of time. lost the helicopters sunk in the Atlanta conveyor the Argentinian Air Force had been very very effective but the pressure was put on not to extend it onto the mainland so we waited we stood by we waited we stood by and finally we were flown down we parachuted into the sea and now I'm kidding now guys 30 members of B squadron the famous the famous squadron that

raided the Iranian embassy land in the Auckland's and four days later, the enemy surrendered. And so I got home to see my son when he was 10 days old. And we went back on the counter-terrorist team again just after. I thought I was going to get back to the UK and get a rest. But I got back to the UK. And before we took over the team, I was sent on a Royal Marine sniper course for the next 12 weeks. So that was my rest period.

Horsefall, you never do anything in the Portland's War. Get down to Limston and do the Royal Marine sniper course, you lazy bastards. And so what was that like for you, the Royal Marine Sniper Course? Oh, awesome. The Royal Marines have run a sniper course since the First World War. And they have two grades of pass. One is to pass the sniper, which means you get over 65% on every task. And the second is sniper marksman, which means you get over 80% on every task.

And I got sniper marksman. I was one of two guys. They've got sniper marksman in course. And it's the epitome of infantry fieldcraft. Because people in the press, they mix up being a sniper would be in a marksman. A marksman is somebody who's a good shot. Okay. He can sit up in a window and he can shoot and he's a good shot.

but a sniper is somebody who's great a fieldcraft he can judge distance he's an expert camouflage and concealment he can stalk his enemies an expert of map reading he can do air photography and he's also very highly trained observer he can bring in artillery fire he can bring in mortify he can be naval gunfire he's an expert of communications and so you know there's so many skills packed into that one tiny individual that are all infantry skills but honed to an extraordinarily high level and yeah it was a marvelous course

and working with the Royal Marines was a real thrill for me although they're always been the rivals to the paras they're like parrars but they're a little bit more mature well I mean and you know for our viewers and listeners who don't know like the idea of the gilly suit Gilly is a British word. I think it's a Scottish word, right? It's an English word.

It's a Scottish word. It comes from the guys that used to hunt the deer in the Scottish islands. And so a gilly suit was something they designed to wear so that the deer didn't see them when they were culling that I heard. Yeah. So, I mean, there's a long heritage of, like a lot of the sniper heritage comes from the British. Yeah, I think it does. It comes from predominantly the First World War, where you had this four-year war where trench warfare, where snipers came into their own. But it was only the Royal Marines in the British Army that kept the process going during peacetime. And they've always maintained, and by keeping that going for probably over 100 years now, their standards are extraordinary. And they really are very, very good at what they do.

Yeah. And then you went to another school that was a bit of a detriment to your career, right? What was it the course that? What was there? Where was it that you were like blamed for like losing the weapons and stuff like that? Oh, yeah. We went to, we went to do an exercise with Delta Force in Fort Bragg, North Carolina. and my patrol was put out on the ground without very, very good instruction about what the exercise program was.

We didn't know we had live enemy on the ground. We didn't know that there were about 2,000 rangers out there looking for us who knew that we were out on the ground. And so we got bumped. And we also didn't know that the training area in Alabama in, in, yeah, Alabama, down near Alabama, was completely devoid of civilians. So I was marking out some areas for Black Hawk helicopters and measuring the ground in civilian clothing,

believing there were civilians out there. And as soon as I got seen, I got chased by the Rangers, by the enemy exercise forces. And I had left my... equipment with my partner who had to abandon it and run and in that equipment was my submachine him so i went to scape and evasion and they didn't catch me for six days and i got picked up at the end of the exercise at the rendezvous point by which time um two individuals in my squadron who were senior to me and didn't like me had made it their sole purpose in life to get me kicked out of

the SES. And they tried to say that the men didn't like me. I said, okay, let's have a buddy rating go and ask the guys. So that fell on deaf ears. They then said that I'd lost my weapon. And I said, well, okay, you know, I didn't lose my weapon. I, you know, I've told you the story. But I knew the writing was on the wall and that they were going to essentially a British term stitch me up and get me sent back to the parrars on the grounds that these two. individuals my sergeant major and troop staff sergeant had a very poor opinion of me so I thought I'm going to take control of the situation I'm not going to be the guy who gets beaten down and has my tail between my legs and I went on colonel's orders and the colonel said

why did you break every standard operational procedure in the book I said I didn't and my major said well no that wasn't horseful sir that was the other patrols. That was the other patrols. And then he said to me, well, you haven't done anything wrong this time, horse full. He said, but you've been walking on a razor blade for a long time. And I have no alternative but to send you back to the parachute regiment. And you don't have to be a lawyer to realize he's just said, you haven't done anything wrong, but I'm going to punish you. So I said, that's all right, sir. I said, I put my papers and purchased my discharge from the army yesterday.

He said, don't do that. He said, the wind blows cold on the outside. I said, don't blow too effing warm in here, does it? and I was out of the army in two weeks. I was gone. That was me 27 years old, 12 years in the army. It was my life. I was an army orphan.

But I was done with it. And I moved on. Didn't they try to stitch up some of the other guys that were with you, though, too? Yeah, the Tom McDonald got sent back to the parachute regiment. He was in the same patrol. The captain in charge, David Stewart, he got some. sent back to the Cameron Highlanders and the other patrol member got demoted and fined. In spite of the fact that they'd done absolutely nothing wrong.

It was a setup. It turned out years later, I found one of the sergeants who was teaching me to fly helicopters, Pete, he said that he was warned not to go on that patrol because something was going to happen. So we'd set up. We've been set up by our colleagues and for personal reasons. And yeah, there was a bad thing. I was bitter about it, but I moved on and put it behind me and didn't let it get me down. Yeah.

I mean, but with so many guys stitched up, like, because if I remember right, it's been a minute since I've read it. But if I remember, right, like, they were trying to, like, just clear out some of the ranks or these guys, or it was a personal thing for these guys? There was a change during that period in the British Armed Forces where if you didn't achieve a certain rank after a certain number of years, then you were discharged.

The Special Air Service had a large number of people who didn't want to be promoted. Right. And they weren't qualified for promotion. And they suddenly promoted them up the ranks. And people coming in afterwards were actually more highly qualified. qualified and more capable than they were. And these old boys felt threatened by these more qualified young boys.

And instead of saying, look how amazing my guys are, they tried to put them down. And that created a very, very difficult situation. Out of my troop, which was nine troop, over a two-year period, 50% of the troop either voluntarily left or were forced to leave. by these old boys. So it was a sad time. It was difficult. A lot of them, we went off and we became bodyguards.

We became security experts. We came consultants. And life moved on. I became a bodyguard to the Al-Faird family in London, a mercenary in Sri Lanka, a mercenary in Mozambique. And then finally, the bodyguard to Rafiq Khariri, who became the Prime Minister of Lebanon during the war there.

until, no, I did that before I went to Mozambique. But after Mozambique, my wife put her foot down and said, you do that again, I'm not going to be here when you come home. And so I stopped because she is the second pillar in my life that gives me stability, without any doubt at all. Without her, I'd be absolutely nothing. So, Robin, we've been at it almost an hour and a half. I'm happy to ask you about your time as a mercenary.

we would love to hear about it. I'm going to leave it up to you whether you want to do it now, if you're happy to talk about that time. Because I know it's, what is it, 1.30 there now? Yes, 121. Yeah. Yeah, I'm buzzing. You know, keep going if you want to.

I didn't realize how quickly the time had gone. I just wanted to leave it up to you because I know it's really late there. And I'm old. So you moved into bodyguarding. How long initially, like how long were you, was that first stent as a bodyguard for you? Yeah, I did it for 15 months in London. And, you know, it was okay. It was very, very good money, very good time off.

But it wasn't exciting. I mean, the biggest enemy for any bodyguard is complacency. And you spend lots and lots of time just waiting for your client and doing absolutely nothing. It's a very good place to get fat. and no after 15 months I was simply bored and so I volunteered to take a job in Sri Lanka as part of the Singlese forces fighting the Tamil Tigers in the north but realized after a very short time that I was on the wrong side and that a genocide was taking place in the north of Sri Lanka I was powerless to do anything about it other than resign so I resigned and

came home but I was I was missing my wife and kids too much anyway I had two children children by this time, son, my daughter. So yeah, I came home and struggled through a few little bits and pieces of work, bodyguarding here, security work there, set up my own little door company with doorman and struggled through. My wife worked long hours and we managed to pay the mortgage and feed the kids and keep it going. And then the job of all jobs, working with Rafi Kariri came along, which was a man with a genuine threat against his life. He was envoy for King fired. He was making his run to become the Prime Minister of Lebanon.

There was a war on in Lebanon, in Beirut especially. So Babylon was burning in Beirut at that time, and Damascus was a safe place to be. And we travelled around the world, doing diplomatic security, getting the release of French hostages from Hezbollah, meeting to the United States of meeting people like George Schultz in Washington, D.C. and Jacques Chirac in Paris and the king in Riyadh and Jeddah. And I learned to speak French at that time because Lebanese, Arabic is very similar to Scottish English. It's very, very, it's Arabic, but not as we know it, Jim. So, learning French.

I learned to speak French in Saudi Arabia. I learned to speak Arabic in England. I learned to speak Portuguese in Mozambique. And the only country I've ever worked and learned a language in and lived in was I learned to speak Czech in the Czech Republic. So it was nice to actually being a country where they spoke the language I was learning. But yeah, he was a good man. He was a moderate.

And I really, really liked him. but Heather got ill in pregnancy with our third child, Oliver. And so I had to retire from that and go over to England. And I was the bodyguard for an American for six months. A man called Albert Dunlap, who was called the chainsaw. And he was a man who used to mount aggressive takos of the companies, fire all the non-profitable staff and sell off the profits. And he was brought to England to take over British American tobacco.

and I was his chauffeur bodyguard and after four weeks I wanted to kill him myself he was that wicked he was that wicked and that evil I hated him with a venom yeah yeah I imagine that in order to he was probably very profitable

but in order to do that he probably didn't have a strong moral compass that the way we would think of it he had no ethics at all yeah he had And he was amoral and immoral. He was the most selfish individual I have ever met in my entire life. And his wife matched him very, very closely.

Yeah. How was it challenging for you having been, you know, a para in Northern Ireland, having an SAS because you went to Northern Ireland with the SAS too, correct? Three tours. Yeah, twice, yeah. Or twice. And then having been on the hostage rescue, all these things. And then you are a bodyguard, which for people don't know, it's not like the Kevin

Costner movie. People often don't treat their bodyguards well. You know what I mean? That that, that. Yeah, apart from, apart from Dunlap, I never had a problem with my principles. I was always treated with a great deal of politeness and respect. So, but you're right, it's never like the movies, but the Kevin Costner film, The Bodyguard is based on the mistakes that Costner makes. I mean, but the most realistic thing is that when Whitney Houston, Whitney Houston, yeah, she says, my God, you don't look like a bodyguard, you know, and that's so true because they expected to be this big 200-pound guy who's, you know, a mountain of muscle and flesh.

But that's not what a bodyguard actually is. The bodyguard's a grey man who stands very close to the client, and his job is to run away with the client, if anything happens. Right. And then you have the cordons. It's not his job to draw a weapon and shoot people. It's his job to get that client. One of the most wonderful pieces of bodyguarding drills I've ever seen was when Reagan was shot.

And within two seconds, he's in the back of that vehicle. Although he's got a hole in him, he's on his way to hospital within seconds. You know, those guys moved him and they were spot on and they had their drills down. American Secret Service are really, really good at that in the close protection groups. So they're very, very good. So that's a great piece of video to film to go back and watch if you want to see real expert bodyguards. You know, this man who's just there, he's invisible and all of a sudden Reagan's in the back of a vehicle and he's on his way to hospital, shell dressing on its wounds.

Yeah. Fantastic work. You know, can we, but was there, so were you satisfied as a bodyguard? Did, aside from the chainsaw,

um, what was it meaningful work for you? Yeah, it was meaningful work. As I say, the only reason I stopped with, um, with Hariri was because it was extraordinarily luxurious life.

I could keep fit. I got good time off and I got excellent money and I was treated very well was just simply the fact that my wife was early pregnancy. Yeah. And I had to go home. So outside of that, it was cool. But once she'd had Oliver and she was well again, I had to find a new future. And my future ended up being martial arts teacher. in southwest London. And I took over a small class of three children and eventually developed it into over a thousand kids in southwest London. That's amazing. And with about 50 adults.

Yeah, but about 50 adults with about 950 kids from the age of four upwards. Yeah. Did you find that fulfilling? I found that immensely fulfilling. I took the bad experiences of my childhood and developed children into becoming strong, confident young people who were highly,

disciplined and happy within themselves because I think that a person who's disciplined and strong and confident will be a kind adult. The most vicious and unkind people are the people who lack confidence. It's always the coward in the group that it is the most vicious of all. And I was preparing them to be adults and training them to be adults. Not only did I teach some martial arts. I taught them to teach martial arts right from square one. So an awful lot of my my son Alex took over London karate when I broke my neck when he was 27. And now he teaches the children of the children that I used to teach. That's a wonderful thing. That's fantastic. How did you find parenthood given that, you know, your challenges with with a father figure, when you're

young, you know, with an abusive father figure, with, you know, bullying, being bullied in school. Like, how did you adapt to parenthood? I always loved parents. I've loved it. Heather, my wife, she got pregnant while we were on honeymoon with Alex. We couldn't wait for him to arrive. we had she already had two baby girls when I met her and then we had three more Alex Charlotte and Oliver and so we had five and it's it's it's been the most important our family my wife my

children sorry guys we have a bit of a hiccup here yeah we'll give it a give it a just a couple of seconds. Oh, yeah. Hey, everybody. Please join our Patreon. Patreon slash Teamhouse. You get exclusive content and also ad-free audio. And you help us keep in the drink.

Huh? And video. And also like, subscribe to the channel and check out our friend at invader girlart. com. Okay. Awesome. We're going to go ahead and I think, is you back? Yeah, I'm back. All right. We got you back. Excellent. Excellent. Sorry. I think we had a delay on your end. But anyway, you were talking about having your children and. Yeah.

Yeah. My wife and my kids are the most important thing. I always struggled when I was young, especially to make friends. and so me and Heather made three. And my kids, every time I got home, Daddy come home, daddy would go out, daddy would take camping, we would go out the mountains, we would go swimming. I taught them to swim, I taught them to play, I taught them to do all the things. I took them to sports.

I just loved being dad. And I still love being dad now, mind you. I've got two daughters now that are grandmothers. that's a peculiar thing the oldest two are grandmothers and so I'm a great-grandfather I've got six great-grandchildren and

but I just loved being a parent one of the things I struggle with now I'm 66 one of the things I struggle with now is that I don't have children in my life anymore my great-grandkids come every now and then to visit but I don't have enough time

and when I was teaching martial arts I was working with kids four hours a day every day. And that's an absolute joy. I've been to the local school here. I've taught poetry to children in the local school. That's been a great deal of fun. But so teaching is a vocation that I genuinely love. You know, so everything aside, all the adventures,

all the guns and bombs and explosions and stuff like that. But there's nothing more important than your family. And I think the toughest job any real man can actually achieve is to hold a family together, to be responsible for your wife and kids for their entire lives. That's what I really think. You mentioned your mom and Jeff Hors, Jeff, Jeff Horsfall, they split up. But you still attended his funeral. And then it was that there was a closure for you in that. Yeah. And yeah. Over the years. Yeah. Over the years. As I had my kids, you know, and he had a new wife and and further children with his new wife. We gradually became, you know, friends. And we used to visit and talk. And,

get by. We never really confronted any of the issues of me as a child. But when he was dying of cancer, my wife and I and my brother and sister-in-law, we went and we nursed him in the last weeks of his life. And we looked after him until he passed over. And when he had passed over, I sat alone with him in his bedroom.

And I said to his courts, why were you such a bastard to me? when I was a kid. And I swear a voice came into my head, not a voice that you heard, but the answer came into my head, which was, I was only doing the best I could the only way I knew how.

And that was a revelation. That was an epiphany moment. It was like my demons had been exercised. And I understood that nobody trains you to be a parent. Nobody shows you except your own parents or maybe your big brothers and sisters if they've got kids. and if you've had a bad example

you don't have anything else to go on and he was an only child he was brought up in the Second World War he worked in a factory a tough Leeds man and he'd been a soldier most of his life and

and you know he was he was a hard tough guy but beneath it there was a softness that I never saw as a child and so I understood I understood at that moment why he was how he was. I made a conscious choice

when I married Heather, never to be like he was towards my children. I can count, I know exactly how many times I smacked my sons and that was each of them twice and I never ever smacked my daughters.

And even then, looking back, I'm not so sure that that was even required, but I did. It was par for them. course in them days. In fact, it was well below par. I've got great kids. I still adore them. And I've got great relationships with them too.

So something we did an awful lot of things right. Yeah. Yeah. Where do you think, because you say that, you know, people learn how to parent from their parents and if, you know, so where do you think you learned how to be that father figured you, are there a specific? in the military that you can think of?

No, I learned how to be a parent from my wife. She took this lone wolf, this tough, mean, isolated individual, and saw right through the facade. She got into the cage with the lone wolf and tickled his ears, you know? And she taught me how to she gave me back my humanity. She taught me how to

trust my feelings again, to trust other people. She taught me how to bathe Alex to change his nappies, to carry him in the harness on my chest, to enjoy being a parent. She put love into my life that hadn't been there before. And, you know,

it gave me a worthwhile existence. It gave me everything that was really missing from this empty shell and it filled it up. And she was extraordinarily important in teaching me how to be a human being. That's fantastic. You know, we didn't really even talk about your time with the SAS and Northern Ireland. So I'm just going to ask a general question to curb the curiosity of people. But how did your time with the SAS, how did that different than when you were a para in Northern Ireland?

Well, from my perspective, it wasn't quite as much fun because, you know, when you were a soldier in the hard areas of the cities, you were constantly on guard, working with working in public view in uniform. When I was working undercover, you were working with specific information. You were targeting terrorists in certain areas. You spent an awful lot of time in observation posts. You were following people in vehicles. You were in inner city areas with long hair and donkey jackets looking like one of the locals. trying to blend in. So it was a very, very different job.

And I don't think I enjoyed it as much as I did the constant pressure of being on patrol, four hours on two hours off, four hours off, two hours on. You know, it was nowhere near as intense. And to be perfectly honest, it wasn't anywhere near as dangerous. Fascinating. So I'm going to get to some of their questions. DJ Sneed, thank you very much. What sets the two-two apart from regular S-A-S?

Is it mission set, skills, or mission set, skill set, or both? I'm not quite sure I understand the question, but I think that what sets the special forces soldier apart from other soldiers is the selection of the man and the intense quality, the training um thanks again did you see uh did the s as a used to rob banks and still hardware aka pull jobs for great britain or is that just movie stuff yeah i think that's just movie stuff um joe's got you thank you much was the 14 intelligence company debt designed to support sas operations abroad or were they only focused on northern ireland

Yeah, 14-In it was only focused in, was developed for Northern Ireland under cover work in Northern Ireland. They were trained by us, but they were an independent special unit that worked within the Catholic community and infiltrated the IRA. And they were extraordinarily good at their job. But yeah, only for Northern Ireland at that time. McIntyre, thank you for the very generous nation. Okay. Okay. So this might be a sensitive question. I don't know. Do you think Andy McNabb lied and made up most of the events dependent in Bravo 2-0? Mike Kiwi-Colburn, author of Soldier 5, and Malcolm Graham McAllen wrote about this mission in said book. Magnet also said, named and criticized the dead members. Yeah, there's a awful lot to talk about in that, and I think it would take a long time. If you want to know the truth of the mission, I think you should read Mike Ash.

as a book called The Real Bravo Two Zero. But I don't want to run down an old colleague on a public forum. It wouldn't be kind or fair of me. McIntyre, thank you very much. Did you ever meet TAC, aka Lomu, former SAS, Fijian operator or sovereign Yemen? Yeah, I knew TAC. He was in B Squadron with me, and I know him very well, yeah. Cameron Spence or Chris Jordy Ryan.

If so, what were they like? I don't know. I don't know him personally. I've spoken to him a couple of times on the telephone. He wasn't in my squadron with me. And so we're not, I don't know very much about him. Okay. McIntyre, thank you again.

Why was there a war going on in Mozambique at the time? who was in charge of the Mozambique government at the time and who were they fighting? Well, we were we were Farka forces, which was the army of Mozambique, the under the Frilemo government. The Russians had pulled out of the country, leaving an awful lot of gaps between the South Africans who had been fighting the African National Congress and launching operations from Mozambique into South Africa. And they had a specially trained group called Renamo.

And Renamo were Mozambique and Portuguese mulattoes, who were part of South African Special Forces, for want of better words. And they were denied a place of refuge by South Africa, and of course they were enemies in Mozambique, So they started living off the land and raiding the villages and towns for food, for women, for control, very much like local warlords. And the French were trying to build a railway from Maputu up to Malawi. And it was getting raided and bombed and blown up.

And so we were taken there to be officers in the FARC forces. and we ended up becoming company commanders and leading a lot of operations there. It was a pure infantry war. We had no air cover, very few infantry support weapons like heavy artillery. We did have Katusha rockets, but essentially it was an infantry war against infantry.

And it was a vicious war with an awful lot of civilian deaths. And the food for my troops used to get stolen on the way to the front lines so the troops were on half rations and if we got a cold night I would probably lose one or two men dead during the night from malaria because their rations were so low and they didn't have enough resistance without the food to defeat the malaria so it was a very very difficult place to be wonderful soldiers wonderful people Michael, thank you very much. In your view, why didn't Britain adopt an official policy of institutes torture, Northern Ireland?

Thanks. I don't think there's ever been a policy of institutional torture approved of by any government. I know that in certain rare circumstances, soldiers have taken it upon themselves to behave badly with prisoners. I think you might find that in the USA, the situation that occurred at Guantanamo Bay would be an exception to that. And, you know, those questions are going to come out in the long-term future again and be investigated, I'm sure. But in Britain, I think we've always tried to hold the moral high ground. and if there are incidences, they were not approved of by the government, and they were mistakes and criminal mistakes to that as well.

Danny, thank you very much. Is there a specific reason Robin chose the army over the Royal Marines? I didn't get offered the, I didn't even think about the Royal Marines. I didn't know enough about them. I didn't live in an area where the Royal Marines were prevalent, but my home was only three miles from Aldershot, which was the home of the British Airborne Forces. So I went to the Parachute Regiments Depot to do my medical. So, yeah, the army was local to me. It never occurred to me. And your father, your dad, Jeff, he had ended up as a para too, right?

that's right he was a member of the royal corps of transport um which had a special detachment which was attached to 16 power brigade so they were the uh drivers the parachute the airborne drivers attached to the brigade um mcintyre so the rest of these questions from mcintyre thank you very much for for all your sponsorship mactire we really appreciate it uh what's your favorite episode of Blackadder. Oh, God, I love Blackadder. There's so many. Oh, goodness me.

I think the one that really sticks in everybody's mind is the final one, where they go over the top in the First World War. And, you know, that's very, very poignant and moving, because you've got this amazing comedy, and it's finished with such a poignant and sad moment. I think that's the one I remember the best. Yeah. But there are so many of them.

I couldn't identify an individual one that was particularly outstanding in terms of comedy. It's just marvelous stuff. The one that always sticks out for me. And it actually kind of I thought of it when you're talking about the suicide mission is the suicide unit, where they all just step out the window. Yeah. Or where he's trying to bug out, he's trying to pretend he's. mad. He's got two chopsticks stuck up his nose, you know,

and he's pretending to be mad. You know, it's crazy. And I just love the fact that the World War I is the best series for me and where the captain, the brigadier's aid is called Darling. You know, it's Captain Darling.

Come in here, would you, darling? And Stephen Frye, as general, you know, they're just wonderful, wonderfully written characters. I just adore them. I still watch them now sometimes. I hope that that was a blackadder that I mentioned. Maybe it was Monty Popper.

I think it was blackhead. Anyway, Magda, Rusty Furman, why did he say negative things about you to the Regimile Sergeant Major? Why did he have a beef with you? Uh, um, I don't know. I really genuinely don't know. Maybe it's just, I'm so good looking. It happens, you know?

It happens. while the SAS, while with the SAS, did you ever train with the Australian, Kiwi, South African, SAS? And what did you think of Delta Force? Yeah, I trained with all of the above. I thought they were all great, genuinely, because if I didn't, I would say so. Delta, they were wonderful. I mean, what I loved about Delta in the 1980s was the sniper weapons that they had, the money and the equipment, and they could hand-fill their own match.

filled ammunition and they had silenced high velocity well suppressed high velocity weapons so it was a I was like a kid in a candy store playing with those guys but they have very different sense of humor to us because the British soldier tends to be quite flippant about an awful lot of things and the American Special Forces guy tends to be very very firm and set in his ways and very professional at all times and so in moments of relaxation we would fool around with

water pistols and do crazy things and so by the time we got to do an exercise together they would think that maybe we weren't very professional and on one occasion working with them they were playing the terrorists with hostages in a vehicle

which was a short minivan you know with a sort of 12-seater van. And they came down this road round a bend and we blew the front wheels off and emptied the vehicle in four seconds. And so, you know, we went from being these crazy guys

who can't take anything seriously, suddenly to do the job. And we could flip from being crazy, flippant, rather ridiculous individuals to be professionals at a moment. They tended to be extraordinarily serious about their work all the time. time and good for them for that as well.

You know, there was no right and wrong in that. It was just a difference between us. If a para, any battalion got into a fight with a Royal Marine, who would win or would they just challenge each other to a drinking contest? Yeah, I think there's an old Chinese saying when two tigers meet, they usually turn and walk the other way. And yeah, you'd probably, that's not to choose between the two. Whoever, whoever was most sober would win.

Right, right. And then did you ever meet Peter McAlees? But I think you mentioned Peter was the one who jumped during the... No, no. No, there's John McAleash. Oh, John McAleash. I apologize. And there's Peter McAleash.

Right, right. And Peter, yeah, there's two different individuals. Peter McAleash and John McAleash. And Peter McAleash and John McAleash. And Peter, yeah, he's been a colleague and a friend over many years. I haven't seen him for a long time, but an extraordinary soldier, extraordinary soldier. And then a couple from our patron and sorry to keep you. So the wolf and sheep's clothing, like you mentioned the terrorists that escaped with the hostages during the embassy rescue.

you, how is he identified? Were there SAS on the ground sorting them? Or how is that wolf and sheep clothing identified? He was everybody got taken outside, all the hostages got taken outside and handcuffed and put on the floor. For their own protection, for our protection, safety and control. And Sim Harris, who was the BBC journalist who was rescued at the time, was laid on the floor handcuffed.

and he was looking at this guy on the floor opposite and saying he's a terrorist, he's a terrorist. And myself and my colleague, Tony, we picked him up and separated him from the group. That was Fowse Najat. And he did 28 years in prison for his crime for being part of that group. The Aaron, Mike, I'm sure they'll get answered, but did you train in the States? And we mentioned that you did. If so, were there outside of like the... issues that you had. Did you learn any valuable lessons training in the States with the Rangers

and Delta Force and whatnot? I don't think, I think a lot of the time we went there to add our experience to theirs. It was cross-training. I can't remember anything particularly relevant to standard soldiering that I learned. Yeah. I did, I did enjoy myself a great deal. some of the most welcoming and generous people that I've ever encountered anywhere in the world. I do remember learning about how to make my own ammunition from the sniper group at Delta. You know, that was something I'd never known about

and how to weigh and fill cartridges to make them more accurate. And so I did learn a lot about ammunition. I think more than anything else. Yeah, I mean, if you come to the U.S. and you don't learn about firearms, why did you come to the U.S.? Yeah, yeah.

More guns than any other country in the world combined. Yes. Adam, what did you think about the whole Bravo two zero debacle? It seemed poorly planned. Yeah, again, I'll refer you to my last reply, I think, to read, read Mike Ashes' book, The Real Bravo Two-Zero. I don't like to go on to a public forum and be negative about my colleagues from the past.

It wouldn't be fair of me. And can you talk about Operation Camono? I don't know about Operation Camino. It was obviously after my time. And Bill Gage, thanks, Bill. We love you, man. Bill was a former guest. Can Robin talk about the history of SAS selection?

how did the long rucking and the beacons get started? That process has had a major influence on special operations selections, especially here in the U.S., and he's just curious about how that got started. Yeah, I think the SAS tended to be a bit of a bandit group down in Herefordshire, left over from the Second World War. At the end of the Second World War, the Special Air Service was disbanded and a small group of reservists called Territorials kept it going as the artist rifles in London to a small group of people wearing that same cap badge. Then the Malayan emergency started with communist rebels taking over the British colonies in Malaya. and the artist rifles were asked to go there

and form a unit called the Malayan Scouts. The Malayan Scouts then were renamed the second 2-2-SAS. And they formed A-S squadron. And it got bigger, and then they formed A&B squad them. And it was returned to England after... They didn't return to England after that. They went to Borneo,

and then they went from Borneo, to Aden and they became a regular regular established regiment in the British Army again. Their main jobs were patrolling and reconnaissance and in jungle environments, but they worked undercover for the first time in Aden. And then they returned to England. They got given a barracks in Herefordshire and they grew, they absorbed Sea Squadron people from when, when, when Rhodesia became Zimbabwe. They absorbed G squadron, which was the Guard Squadron, which came from the Guards Independent Parachute Company,

which was part of 16 Power Brigade. And then D Squadron was formed. They ended up with four squadrons, four Saber Squadrons, a total of about 250 badge soldiers. And it's never really increased from that over that time. The selection process developed over the years, and was formalized in the early 70s and became this one year program and became a qualification with extra pay. Up to that time, it was people could just go down to Hereford and volunteer and if the guys liked them, they could join.

And a lot of them went, did a tour there and then went back to their old units and said, well, I've done that. It was fun. Now I want my promotion and to go back to my standard career. So I think that is pretty much the story. And the problem that special forces in the UK have now is that the British military has gone down from when I joined her. There was 175,000 regular soldiers in the British Army. And now there's only 68,000. And so you're trying to maintain that same number of special forces from a seed pool that is less than half the size. and that makes it very, very difficult.

Yeah. And one last question, and we'll let you go for Maccahahar. Also, thank you. Did you ever speak to Peter Ratcliffe? No. Peter was in a different squadron to me. He became the regimental sergeant major of the SAS after I left. So I never knew him and I've never spoken to him.

So that's pretty much that story. Robin, thank you. much for spending a Friday with us, especially considering how late it is for you? Well, guys, if you want to know more about me, go to robinhorsel.com. You can get my books. And if you don't want to get a signed one, you can go to Amazon. And you put my name into Amazon.com and all my books. I've got how many books.

I've got five books on Amazon. I've got a new one coming out next week, which is called Slava, Ukraine, Who dares shares, which is an observational dynamic. about the Ukraine war. That's, it's down in the link, or it's down in the description in the YouTube channel. For those of you who are listening, it's Robin Horsfall, H-O-R-S-F-A-L dot com, and you definitely want the signed editions. So go to his website, check him out, and buy all of his books.

Thanks, Dave. We deeply appreciate you. Thank you, Robin. We appreciate you. Um, next Friday. Next Friday, we have somebody from the SBS who was in the GWAT era actually on. So it's like a British two weeks. It's a UK two weeks.

I feel like I need some crumpets and tea. Um, there you go. Thank you, Robin. We deeply appreciate it. Thank you, everybody. Thanks, thank you. Have a great night.