The Team House - British Parachute Regiment Sniper | Hugh Keir | Ep. 308

Episode Date: November 10, 2024

Support the show here:⬇️https://www.patreon.com/TheTeamHouseHugh joined the British Army in 2000 and served in the Parachute Regiment for 11 1/2 years, specialising as a sniper. He reached the rank of Sergeant.find Hugh here:https://charliecharlieone.com/about-h-hour/Subscribe to the new EYES ON podcast here:⬇️https://www.youtube.com/@EyesOnPodcast/featured—————————————————————-Today's Sponsors:GhostBed⬇️https://www.ghostbed.com/houseFOR 50% OFF!!!____________________________________Pre-order Jack Murphy's new book "We Defy: The Lost Chapters of Special Forces History" today! ⬇️https://www.amazon.com/We-Defy-Chapters-Special-History-ebook/dp/B0DCGC1N1N/——————————————————————To help support the show and for all bonus content including:https://www.patreon.com/TheTeamHouse-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]#parachuteregimentBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-team-house--5960890/support.

Hey guys, it's Jack. I just wanted to talk to you today about a way that you can help support the podcast if you're not already. To support the channel is to become a Patreon member. So we have Patreon memberships that start at just $5 a month. And when you sign up, you get access to all of our episodes ad free. That's the big bonus for that. I mean, we also do some Patreon bonus episodes for our subscribers. But this is the biggest and best way that you can support the Team House. channel and podcast if you'd like to, and we really appreciate that. So go and check us out at patreon.com slash the team house. Special operations. Covert Ops. Espionage. The Team House. With your hopes, Jack Murphy. Hey, guys, this is episode 308 of the Team House. I'm Jack here with Dave. And our guest on tonight's show is Hugh Kea. served in three para doing deployments three deployments to Afghanistan, two to Iraq, a couple to Northern Ireland. And he is also the host of the H-hour podcast. And Hugh, before we jump into

the interview, man, H-hour, I sense, is it somewhat of a similar mission statement to what we do here, except on the other side of the pond? Yeah, it seems like it. I think there's definitely crossover between the two. And it's, you know, you've got a long form going on. It sounds like you interview people you're pretty much interested in predominantly from a military or or military adjacent background so i think yeah seems seems pretty similar except uh mine are mostly brits and yours are mostly um who what kind of people do you what kind of brits do you have on your podcast oh man it well it's starting off you know predominantly my my network is probably ex-military and ex-military male so it started off ex-military male and now um i go into all sorts

of different areas. So from experts in psychedelics and medicine and psychology, politicians, musicians. Okay. Now, it's predominantly ex-mill. Okay. But, you know, as it goes, the bigger the network gets, the more access you've got to other people, you think, there you'd be a good chat too. That's awesome. Well, yeah, congratulations. I hope people will go check out H-hour, get a different perspective on a similar topic, right? But Hugh, let's, Let's start off. I want to hear a little bit about you. Tell us about, you know, how you grew up and how that took you towards the British military. Yeah, that's a good question. So I think, you know, a lot of people who end up in the military do so because they've got family who were in the military. And it's kind of a almost a right of passage in some families and, or it's expected. It wasn't the case to me.

I grew up in Wales, which is part of the United Kingdom, you know, next to England, but it's definitely not in England. It's not to be confused. There's no love to loss between the two countries, right? And I grew up on a farm in the middle of nowhere, you know, like four, three or four miles away from the nearest neighbour. There was literally no one around.

So I spend a lot of my time out and about doing what you do when you're, all you've got is countryside, and your dad's a keen, keen countryside enthusiast in the most positive way I mean that. So we went out rambling, you know, he was out, show me how to shoot and just learning, learning all about it. So that's where I grew up. And I ended up, I basically ended up. Initially, I wanted to join the Air Force, which is obviously not where I ended up. I'm not sure why I wanted to join the Air Force, but I think.

I had a feeling that I wasn't really happy with myself. I was quite low self-esteem, really low self-confidence. Not quite sure what it is. I think it's because I had quite an isolated upbringing in terms of like social opportunities. Like there was animals. There wasn't many kids, you know. And they don't talk very much. They talk a little bit, but I haven't a clue what they're saying.

But when, you know, when you grow up, most people, they grew up and they finished school and they're out socializing with their friends. and then on the weekend to socialising with the friends and I didn't really have that. So I think my social skills development was just really poor. And I think that as you grow up

and you become a teenager and you just more of these interactions are expected and like social status becomes a conscious thing and the way you interact with other people and they interact with you actually impact how positive or negative you feel about yourself. I think it really impacted me.

So I was really low self-confidence, low self-esteem, going into my teens. and I think that I saw the military as an opportunity to sort of prove myself to myself, if that makes sense. Really, that's what it is. It wasn't for anyone else. It was kind of to prove to myself,

hey, you're not a loser. You've got something about you. And really, the only thing they had gone about me at times, I was pretty fit. I was physically fit, but physically fit from the waist down. Like, from the waist up, it was just skin and bottom. For the waist down, I thought he was like tree trunks

just from running on all the hills when I was grown up, you know. And so yeah, South Wales, looking at the RAF, the Royal Air Force, I needed, I think I wanted to go into aviation engineer or something random like this that I've seen in a book about career opportunities in school. I needed A levels for that, which is our college qualifications. I don't know what you call them over there, but it's, you know, you go from your normal school stuff into college. I needed A levels. There's a couple of years to do that. and I got college royally wrong. One, I wasn't paying attention. And two, I sell up a website. This is like the 90s.

So I was way ahead of the curve. I set up a website which was neathcologysux.comode. And it wasn't too much about the college. And I thought I'd be really clever and hiding my track. But I wasn't. And I'd have to leave the college before I pushed. So I wish I'd still had that website, but I don't anymore. And so I left. I had no A-levels. I couldn't join what I wanted to do in the RAF.

And there was an advert on TV at the time for saying, I'd go and spend 24 hours with the Paris. I had very little knowledge of the Paris or any of the military, really. And I went and spent 24 hours down in a place called Aldershot, which is in England. It's not too far from London. And that's where, that was the home with the Paris at the time. And you basically go and spend 24 hours. They show you all the nice shiny weapon systems and nice uniforms

and a lot of the guys who were serving at the time and you do all the cool military stuff, none of the horrible military stuff. And there was a fitness assessment, which was basically a run, a mile and a half, I was a mile and a half warm up and then a mile and a half best effort, and I won that.

And then I thought, yeah, I'm going to join the Paris. And I signed up for that immediately. But it took about, it took me about six months before I could even start training because my mother's Irish, so Republic of Ireland, and it meant extended security checks. At the time, it was sort of the tail end. It was the tail end of the Northern Ireland,

the troubles, as they know over here. We were still, we still had an active operation going on in Northern Ireland. And they needed to cross the teas and dot the eyes and make sure I wasn't the wrong kind of person getting into British military. There was a lot of people got left off. the family tree with that that that the application was submitted the reality is that the island's so small you know everyone's related but be related to a terrorist like a member of the IRA or at least someone who helped them a few times and it was there's a there's at least one person i knew at a time who he was

i don't know maybe 20 or 30 years older than me and he was used to be a get the way driver for the after they'd been dropping bombs off and things. It was his claim to fame, so to speak. So there's a little bit of fiction on your entrance clearance there. But that is an interesting thing and something interesting that, you know, the British government did have to deal with, right? I mean, I can understand that they'd be concerned about that. Yeah, yeah.

And, you know, the reality is that we were, until very recently in our history in the UK, we were having terrorist bombings on home soil by people who were born in the UK. Yeah. You know, or they were south of the border in Ireland. So you've got Northern Ireland, and you've got the island of Ireland, and you've got Northern Ireland, which is part of the UK, and you've got below that, it's the Republic of Ireland. And the terrorists want that to be reunited,

and they don't want the UK to be any part of it. And they were planting bombs and blowing people up in the UK, London, Birmingham, you know, all the shop, different places. they do it in Northern Ireland as well but that wasn't that long ago it's pretty crazy when you think about it I was growing up in times like that these days you think of terrorism

you think it comes from overseas as in it comes from a place, a country which they don't look like you, they don't speak the same language and they can't possibly understand your culture and the reality is it wasn't it was homegrown so to speak and it made for pretty challenging operations you know when you

go out to do counterinsurgency operations or any kind of operation against an enemy who speaks exactly like you speak. They grew up in the same country you did. They know exactly how you operate. They don't look that much differently. They don't dress that much differently. Really difficult. Really difficult. Turns out we're pretty cunning. Yeah. Well, I'm sure we'll get into that a bit. But so you joined the paras. Tell us about, you know, your intake. What kind of like selection process there is a training to just get into this unit. Yeah.

So on paper, on paper I think the first two phases of joining an infantry unit in the British Army, you've got a phase one and a phase two, right, pretty much for everyone. And phase one is basic, basic infantry skills. And in phase two, you'd normally go on to, you start specialising the trades. If you weren't going to infantry, if you're going to engineer's or something like that, then phase two would be oriented around that. And then some other units will have a phase three where there's extended learning, particularly technical fields, you know.

Infantry, so it was just phase one and phase two. With the difference being for the power is different to every other infantry unit in the British Army is that we have a selection at the end of phase two. So it's not just the case of, okay, pass your basic tests and demonstrate your basic knowledge in phase one and phase two and you're into a unit. If you've got to demonstrate those as a minimum, and then do your selection at the end, and then maybe you'll be selected. even if you pass the selection you maybe fail but uh just ignoring that for a second sort of the phase one

and the phase two takes about eight months seven or eight months i think it's still the same now it's a long course yeah yeah i think phase one is like 12 weeks um the first six weeks you're on you're on camp you don't get to go home um and then after the six week period you have like a sort of a the first formal piece of how you know your basics now and you do a little parade on the on the parade square and you get given like uh i think at that point you give at that point you're giving it like a maroon beret you had the paris cat badge on it but it had like a green backing stuck behind it to demonstrate that you were real paris just in training but you get to wear the parrary and the cat badge um and you wear that then continuously throughout for me the first the first 12 weeks phase one

were pretty you were pretty all right i thought i didn't find it difficult i don't recall finding it difficult. I think the, you know, the instructors that I had, they would, I would describe them as pretty easygoing. You know, you guys, you're experiencing training will differ to the next guy who went through. You're all dependent on the year you went through who you had instructing you. Did you have decent guys? Did you have lunatics? Did you have violent guys? Did you have people who took no bullshit? Or did you have people who didn't want to be there? And for me, that phase one, I had a bunch of guys who were great instructors. It was just pretty late back. And I thought, for most of them or at least the section commander

I had is in charge of my 10, 12 guys was super laid back. And the problem with that for me was that was not setting me at well for phase two, which was like carnage. I went from having this layback crew to go into phase two and just

having a bunch of like psychopaths. And yeah, yeah. So, you know, I was kind of left phase one after that 12 weeks, still kind of be in the low self-esteem, low self-confidence guy, but not realizing it. It's like a foul sense of confidence that gives me, yeah, I've done 12 weeks. I'm a real soldier now, and I wasn't. Phase two became bad shit.

And also it was a change in location as well. So our phase one time was done in the Birmingham area, which is like west of England. And there's not a lot of hills there, there's not a lot of mountains. So the train area is pretty limited. And the phase two, we moved up to an area called Katrick, which is in North Yorkshire. And North Yorkshire is north of England, but it's cold, it's miserable. You know, that's why everyone in Northern England is pretty tough. It's because they just have to deal with hardship.

Like people from Boston, right? Just like, they just grow up in misery. So they just like these stoic, hardcore people. It's like north of England, the same with Wales. The Wales is the same. He's just miserable. Island too. and so we had like that that change in scenery changing surroundings and up to phase two

where we went to where we went to phase two I stopped me over if you want to stop everything no please continue yeah cool so we went to phase two the changing surroundings was also that the Paris training location there on the barracks Heli's barracks it was called at the time or was at the time it was right next to It was on a massive camp, a big training camp, and there were lots of other units there, lots and lots of other units there. So one of the reasons that it was kind of quite chaotic

and quite a lot more, a lot tougher, I'd say, dealing with the staff that I had anyway, is that not only that they were trying to train us in being the best that we could be to go out of the units, they were also trying to teach us to absolutely detest and loathe anyone that wasn't like in training to be in the Paris or even anyone any soldier who wasn't wearing that cap badge you literally don't speak to them you don't look at them they're not they're not worthy they're not worthy of your attention and we recruits to be told this and i kind

of got it's like one of the one of the differences uh we have one of the advantages we have i think well it is an advantage yeah it's that para recruits go all the way through we're only trained predominantly only, anyway, most of us are only trained by other Paris. So all other units, they'll be trained by anyone. So if I want to join, I don't know, let's say the Rifles Regiment or any other regiment, I can go to a training unit. I could have one instructor from, it could be the Paris, one instructor from the Royal Irish Regiment, one instructor, you have a mix.

And I think that, I think that shouldn't be the case. Because I think it, I think in most cases, it kind of waters down the, the emotional investment that an instructor has in training up a recruit, that recruit could be going to any unit. Whereas if you're training up recruits who you know got to your unit, I think you take a bit more pride in that. This pilot turd goes to, because what happens is, when I got the, you know, three-parr and you get some idiot come from training, the first thing you ask is who you're instruct, who's your instructor? Yeah. Because you want to know who's, who trained this, muck it up. Or you want

to go and ask that instructor, what the hell happened you? Like, why is he through? So we, so we, you are only trained by ourselves. And I think that works well because we have this sense of pride, real sense of pride and elitism drilled into us. So we put extra effort into training our guys. It wouldn't work so well if you didn't really give it down or our unit didn't really give it down. And the reality is and also the instructors. I mentioned the selection process at the end of the P company earlier, at the end of phase two earlier. Instructors want all the guys to pass. They want as many as the guys to pass as they can. They don't want it to fail because it demonstrates it's how good instruct they were getting the guys to that point.

You know, that doesn't mean they don't want to drop people off. They won't bin people off, you know. But then you go to Paris selection and it's inverted, right? And there's instructors want to see how many people they can get to drop out. Yeah, yeah, yeah, basically. I mean, I mean, I started, when I started in a phase one, there was 63 of us. And when I finished, when I got the battalion, there was 12 or 14 of us. Wow.

Who had got through all the way. Yeah. who got through all the way, which is a pretty big, like failure rate, so to speak. But a lot of those, you know, most of those numbers, they dropped off pretty early on in phase one and phase two,

especially fears two. It was so challenging. It was literally, you know, it was, there was no room forever. The smallest area was hammered. And I get why. But in that particular, you know, training team,

violence was always not, always like a go-to for, I'm going to fix this problem. And part of the issue I had was, like I said, I was like super nervous. I was always panicking. Like in my head, I was always panicking.

And so I'd make mistakes, tiny things. And I would just get battered for it. Because you know what it's like you make one mistake. And if you're not in the right mindset, it just creates another mistake. Right. Another mistake.

You start overthinking another mistake. And I was in, in that early on in phase two. Like I found out the hard way. It's really the hard. I hated it. I hated it initially. But,

but got to the selection and managed to pass it. Hugh, I'm going to flip it over to Dave here for a quick word from our sponsor, and we'll jump right back into it. So if you guys sleep hot at night, you know just how disruptive it can be. Whether you're having trouble falling asleep, you're waking up sweating in the middle of the night or all the above. That's where Ghostbed can help. As the makers are the coolest beds in the world,

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Tomorrow I will be at an event in Hackensack, New Jersey, 92 Kennedy Street, Hackensack, New Jersey, sponsored by Triple Lot Design, clothing company. and I'll be there at 11 a.m. And we're going to be talking about the book and some of the stuff in here. It covers Detachment A, Detachment K, Green Light, Blue Light, The Commander's in Extremest Force. Some things I haven't been written about before.

So I'm excited about it. And I hope to see at least some of you tomorrow morning. And for our podcast listeners, that's on the 9th. So by the time you've heard this. Yeah, that's Saturday the 9th. So don't show up tomorrow when you hear this. And please check out. or Patreon. There's a link down in the description.

If you sign up, you get access to all these episodes, ad-free, and support the channel. We really appreciate it. You guys keep this whole thing going. So, Hugh, back to you. Yeah, Hugh, real quick, from the numbers that dropped, what percentage, if you can take a guess, were self-select and then what percentage were, like, billowed out by the instructors? I'd poor man you're asked me now I I I'd say in a vicinity of 70% was South Select yeah like mentally you know I mean the phrase would be rang the bell we don't have that but mentally you'd been out and then the other 30% were gone a very small amount would have

have gone back basically gone back to a previous platoon hey a different training battalion you've gone back a step need to redo this could be life firing it could be safe handle and it could be something critical you're going back or fitness if it's not fitness

go back and others would just get fit in there do I say about 70% it sounds like yeah I think that's probably

true of all of them yeah all of them yeah yeah it's amazing how many people

go into these processes and decide that it's just not for them midway through or part way through yeah

I think you know I think they just have a I know it's a combination of what some people would just be pure ignorance some people with the overconfidence some people won't know what they're doing

you know a lot of people who a lot of people who join up over here is because they've got a lack of options and it was definitely part of it what it was with me I sort of I didn't really know what I wanted to do I saw a lack of options and I knew this is something and it's also for sure

they mismanage your own expectations don't realize how hard things are going to be and that has to be more the case these days, you know, where things are pretty flippin' easy when you grow up these days. They were pretty easy when I was growing up, but relatively speaking, they're a lot easier now. Yeah. And then

what were, are there any good slang words that the paris would use, like when they were conditioning you against the non-paras? Like, what were some of the words that Paris called other units? There's two main, well, there's

one main one. So we would refer to other units as crap. hats. Crap hats. And the reason being is that. So we've got, you know, we've got our normal standard dress and we've got a ceremonial dress.

Yeah. So for us, the head dress we wear, our beret, that's all we wear. We wear that ceremonial dress. We wear that standard dress. It's like we don't have any option. Right. Most of the units, with the exception of one,

I found out recently. Most of the units, if not all, apart from our tank regiment, they have the beret. But then for the ceremonial dressed, they wear these, like, weird cap things. Yeah. I say weird, they're really common, but to me they're weird, and

they make them look like a postman somewhat. So you just know the crap, I don't, just stay away from the crapats. And the other one, which was less common, would be just non-ferrocious. Stay away from the non-phorotious. They're not worthy of time. Yeah.

Yeah. Crapass has been taken on a little bit by other, we've been taken on by a few crapats recently. And they tend to say They tend to say it's a bit slander, if you want to insult someone else, a bunch of crapouts. And I think, you are too. Before, yeah, before we move on, let's talk a little bit about what the paris actually are, especially for the Yank audience listening to this that maybe isn't exposed.

I mean, the paris are a storied unit, an elite, you know, airborne infantry unit within the British military. I mean, tell us a little bit about the unit in a tent. history if you can. Yeah, no worries. So, so we're relatively young, you know, the British, obviously, you've got an esteemed history of military going by hundreds of years. And so we're pretty young in terms of military history in, in the British forces. And people do take, they do go to great pains to try and point that out as a weakness, but I like to see as a, hey, we're modern, you know, we're not, we don't have all these, uh, crazy tradition holding us back. But we were formed in in

in 1942 and it was actually Churchill who called for it he saw the Germans had he sort of Germans had deployed paratroopers in I think 41 or 40 maybe and the Germans had actually had a horrendous casualty rate when they did it and Churchill thought hey that's

sound like a great idea that's a reality what happened we need an airborne infantry and what they actually did was they they basically started training. They got asked of volunteers from different units and they put together an airborne unit

and became originally known as commandos and then later on became the partnership regiment and actually went through a couple of iterations early on but yeah so 1944 when we were formed. I might be a little off on my history but I think we may have gotten our maroon berets from you guys actually.

Okay, yeah, well yeah the maroon braids are pretty common across the world. Yeah, I think it was the exposure to the American forces to the British that that came from. Yeah, well, the maroon, actually was, yeah, so the maroon color was actually chosen by, are you aware of a general or field marshal? We ended up as Montgomery. But what, I thought, wasn't it the wife of one of the officers that chose the color? Yeah, exactly. It was Monty's wife. Okay. Yeah, yeah. That's where the American airborne got their maroon berets from also. It originated with you guys. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, it makes sense. So that's where it came from. So it was 42, yeah. But, I mean, originally the intent was, and still now, the, you know, the main function, the capability of our regiment is shock troops, you know, deploy behind animal lines quickly and fucks you up, basically. You know, just cause mayhem and to enable other operations to go on.

That's our, you know, that's our main wartime role. It must be the same for your airborne units. Pretty much. Yeah, I mean, it's the ultimate flanking maneuver, right, to parachute behind enemy lines and hit them where they don't expect you to be, right? Yeah, exactly, exactly. We're the only unit of the year in the British Army whose sole purpose is, you know, power insertion, basically.

And so they did operations in World War II, I take it? Mm, lots and lots of operations, lots and lots of. I could reel them off if you want. I could reel the battle on us off. Let's hear it. Let's hear it. Let's go. This is a para appreciation podcast.

You want me to do it? Okay. Brunival, Arenner, Braville, the Rhine crossing, Arnhem, Normandy, Primisole Bridge, Athens. Somewhere else I can't remember.

And somewhere else I can't remember. And then Falkland Islands. But the pump was there's 92. Do you have any idea offhand? I know I'm kind of putting you on the spot, but do you have any idea how many airborne combat operations they did during the war? Oh, I couldn't tell you. Hundreds.

Hundreds. Yeah, yeah. I couldn't reel off the number fear, but it was hundreds. It's interesting that on the American side, the Rangers were not airborne during World War II. That didn't happen until Korea. But the 101st who are not airborne. today. We're during World War II and they jumped into

Normandy and did all of that, yeah. 101st on Airborne today? They're air mobile. They're in helicopters going from point A to point B. They're not parachuting, no. Don't they still, though, have, do they still have the airborne designator on the... They might have an airborne tab. Yeah. That might still be there. But they're not airborne. Yeah, they're air mobile.

Oh, no, I didn't know that. I didn't know that. No. I didn't know that. I'm sure. So when did that happen? Because I just come back from Arnham, well, I said just come back two months ago, just come back from Arnham, which obviously was Operation Market Garden.

Are you guys aware of? Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so there's always a lot of Americans out there. And I'm sure I jumped into Arnhem, not in 1944, but I did it in like 2009, I think it was, no. Yeah, 2009 maybe.

And I'm sure I jumped with 101st. I jumped the young airframe. You know, it's, It's possible that they were a 101st guy that went to airborne school and was qualified, I mean, or somebody who was in the 101st and had their combat patch and then went to an airborne unit. I mean, it's possible. Sure. Jumping with Americas, by the way, is it different kettle of fish, is jumping British. What's the difference between the two?

Well, structure in order in how we send the sticks out. I will go out half a second, each side, half a second, to stop the air. States. Now, when I jump with the Americans, with you guys, it was, it seemed to be every man for himself. What surprised me most was people were really eager to get out the door. It's not the case with those. Like, you know, okay, we'll get up and get out. We're hot and sweaty, but we'll get out when we get out. And, you know, some people aren't to find the jumping because obviously the injury rate's really high. Yeah. But, you know, when I jump with the US in Juana, they was like, they were gagging to get out.

I didn't know what was going on. I think part of that, especially like with the 82nd, I think part of that might be just because the sheer number of people, they're trying to get off a bird at one time. And each pass. They're just these mass tack like passes where, you know, it's just raining bodies from the sky. Well, hopefully not raining, but, you know.

But, yeah. A controlled descent. Yeah. Semi-controlled descent. Yeah. Yeah. like stealing air and things like that probably aren't major concerns for you guys when you're jumping, right?

Spaced out and everything. You're spaced out and it's orderly enough? No, we'd always, when we jump, we'd always try and jump as close together as you would in an opposition. So like half a second. Okay. So, you know, you, when the sim stick's gone out the door, when you've got, the people listening to it on the way, you've got blokes jumping out both sides of the air for him. Yeah.

part of the second in the chance of an airsteel is still pretty high yeah so we're at anem you know one of the one of the things like to do when to go out and watch jumps in arnhem is i spent what four hours laying down my back on the on the on the drops i'm looking up and along with everyone else going ooh air steel you don't you know the the the like the controlled easy to sense are not the ones you're looking for you're looking for the ones which you're Orlando Cavo and she didn't. Some things never change. Yeah.

So you make it through Paris selection. Tell us about being like a young guy, new recruit, showing up in the unit and what that's like. Oh, man. Well, again, it's like a, he loves you into false sense of security, you think. Did phase one yet, thought yet great. Into phase two, that was like carnage.

And then finished phase two, got, did selection, past selection. I was selected, I should say. Was selected. And you think, yeah, right, it's in. We're in the Paris now. And got the battalion. And it became, it was, man, it was like walking into a meat grinder.

You know, you think, you've made it. You think there's nothing else you need to prove. And then you walk into the unit and you realize that you have the smallest fish in a lot of people who have been there for a while. All of these people, all of a sudden realize, I was looking up to these people nine months ago, eight months ago, nine months ago, nine months ago. I was looking at these guys and thinking this is the reason I'm joining. And now you're in there with them. I'm expected to be the same standard. And it was pretty daunting.

Pretty daunting. I ended up in a room, an eight-man room where I first got put into. Really basic. And I had a mate in there, actually, who I had from training. And I'd broken my hand on selection. So I'd been delayed to get into the unit because I knew. he's after you do selection, do like a live firing exercise, final exercise and something else. And so I'd been delay going on to that. So I came a few weeks later.

And I got put into a room with him. And he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he was chatting in the first hour in there. We were chatting away. And he came, a guy came in in the room who lived pretty young. And I said, all right, mate. Or whatever I said to him, called him, mate. However he was speaking, I referred to him as mate and he walked out. my friend Ben who actually went on to British SF he said he was looking at me and he was like a ghost and he said what are you doing I said what's it he called him mate who is he said he's a corporal

like it's the minister of defense yeah but I wasn't expecting that I was expecting hey it's big boys rules I've like you know I've passed my driving test kind of there I can drive whatever I want. I've done all my training. I can do what I want. I'd have to call a corporal's corporal. And I wasn't the case.

I just called this guy Corp. He was one of the most respected and formidable corporals in the unit. He also went on to SF as well. And I, yeah, it sort of, oh, shit. And then I'm going to try and learn how you get through it. But it was hard and fast. You know, it was January 2001, I think, when I got to the unit. And it was kind of a weird time because the British forces at the time,

our operational tempo was not high. We had a few small things going on every now and again. And a regiment would deploy and do some peacekeeping or something like that. The exception had been, there'd been an operation, a hostage rescue mission into Sierra. Yeah, Barabbas. What was that, sorry? Yeah, we had Phil on talking about it.

Phil Campy? Oh, did you? Okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So that was, you know, Paris, Paris Marines and SAS, on SBS when I did that. And so that happened to the year before. But apart from that, nothing much had gone on.

And, you know, when the operation, I don't know what it's like in the US mail, but I imagine the same. Like, when the operational temper is low, people get real bored real quickly. Yeah, yeah. Tension's really poor. recruitment is pretty poor.

And the kind of people, you end up with a big pool of people who are in who are senior who haven't actually done a lot. Right. And it's a very different environment, what I know now, to be in it when the operational tempo is really high. You know, you end up doing just bullshit tasks,

bullshit taskings, bullshit training. It's just very repetitive. You know, you've got commanding officers who have taken up, over, for example, three power for two years, who want to make them park. They want to get their CBE or their MB. They want to get their knighthood of their award from, you know,

Buckingham Palace for amazing service of the country. And how can they do that when there's no operation going on? They invent ways. They're trying to reinvent the wheel. Right, right. Yeah, yeah. So it wasn't a pretty place to be at the time. It was difficult.

But then, obviously, you know, 2001, like I said in January, I joined, and then September, everything changed. everything changed. I'd deploy to Ireland, Northern Ireland, the end of 2001 of Christmas. That was their first operational tour was Northern Ireland. And again, that was winding down. So it wasn't that interesting. I mean, I don't even remember it being that exciting. I remember a little bit of trepidation going out of my first patrols around the areas you're in, but nothing crazy. There was nothing real kinetic going on. Attacks and things at the time in Northern Ireland were directed inward to themselves,

as in to the local populace, if anything was going on, or towards the police. Very little towards British troops because the Northern Ireland peace deal and all this had been signed and it was winding down and British troops were pulling out of there slowly. So that was all a bit of an anti-climax, but, you know, 9-11 happened and the world was changed forever. So you had to have probably your lives was changed forever as well. And tell us about that, about how things changed and your unit deploying and, you know, that first pump over to, I don't know if it was Afghanistan or Iraq first for you, but what that was

like? Yeah, that was, I mean, I was actually at home on leave when that all started unfolding. And by that time, we moved off of the mountain and we moved down to a little village in the valley floor right next to a couple of rugby pitches and I was going out to have a kick of a boat with the ball and this thing unfolded on TV. And I was sat there four hours later, five hours later. still with my rugby boots on my rugby ball. I hadn't gone anywhere. I was just sort of captured by what was going on. I don't think I really understood what was going on at the time.

I was only young. I was very naive. Military was concerned and just global geopolitics was concerned. And when I returned to the unit, I have to leave, you know, like maybe a week or so later, it was just something different in the air. We knew we kind of had an inkling that people are going to start deploying. didn't know what we didn't know we didn't know who we didn't know where so just all a bit happened yeah and my actual first uh global war and terror operation if you like was was was

the fact it wasn't the global war and terror it was the invasion of iraq in 2003 that was the first related thing I did but before that there'd be deployments into Afghanistan Kabul uh Marines went and uh two power went on that um but my first big, big off was into yeah, the Iraq invasion of Iraq. Tell us about the invasion then. I mean, that's a hell of a, your first pop, that's

pretty hardcore. I remember getting told about it. I remember getting told about it and told we were going. I remember being like elated. I was driving. I got a phone call similarly deploying to Iraq and I remember being like, can I get a phone call?

I remember, well, anyway, at the point I was elated about it as in my car driving home. I remember like shouting out loud, going to war, yes, going to war. And I think back on that, I think, well, pretty naive to be reacting like that. It's like excitement, but the excitement, happiness was a little bit too elevated. But again, we, you know,

kind of off the back of that period of nothing going on and the prospects of nothing going on ever in your career was becoming pretty obvious. So the chance to go to war was exciting. We started a beat-up process, you know, a pre-deployment training, very early on. But that was the first sort of example there.

I saw. It sort of continued for a few years where our ability to, our capability to train, train ourselves for these other types of operations. I mean, even normal war type like the Iraq invasion was, it kind of weren't there. We still had, like, our training regime and our training our TTPs, tactics, techniques, and procedures,

and everything was geared up for Northern Ireland, Northern Ireland mainly and like peacekeeping missions in Kosovo or Bosnia or where and that kind of continued on even to Afghanistan where it just wasn't good enough so the Iraq training beat up was was a lot of conventional platoon company attack like stuff

we did a massive defensive exercise which was we jumped in we jumped into a drop zone in in Salisbury plain which is kind of southern England west of London, big open area dropped in there for a 10-day exercise

pure defensive jumped in with a crazy amount of kit and as you always do I think we marched in maybe 15 miles through the night through the next day

and then just started digging trenches stage three as we would call them so you're the full war style trench two fire up two fire because they're fire pits, they're not fire pits. Yeah, fighting positions, yeah. Fire trench, either side,

wriggly tins, a tinn in the middle, earth over the top, so they can withstand a chemical, biological, anything attack, which took like two days. Have you ever done, have you ever done those kind of exercises?

Not full trench lines, just fighting positions, individual, like, yeah. Or like in body pairs, yeah, you know, yeah. Oh, god, terrific. The first time I experienced hallucination

well, sleep deprivation. It was just madness. But you spend all day, because you dig into the day. You spend all, obviously you've got your patrols out, you've got centuries out, but most people are just dig it. You spend all day looking for where the engineers are, where they're like the digger trucks, come along to help.

And you see them coming up the line, help in different trenches. And then by the time they get to your trench, maybe they help dig it out. Or maybe you get the guys in, put some explosives in and blow it, and it almost always makes the trench worse. It just caves it in. Like, fuck.

We did that. It did that for a day. It was horrific in terms of sleep deprivation effort. And a lot of life firing in an area called Breckon, Sunny Bridge training area, which is like a main infantry sort of training area in the UK. It's in Wales. Conveniently, it's about half an hour from where I grew up, which is good. And then we headed off to Kuwait.

That was a big unknown. You know, I think we were expecting. We were definitely expecting full, full on, full scale war fighting for us. Yeah. The reality was for that, is that most British units didn't have that. We had some real low level contacts, you know, ticks. Some units had a bit more than others. The armour was really the ones, the units that had a lot.

But we had very little infantry-wise. And we were all pretty naive to it as well. I remember, by saying naive to it, we were pretty wet behind the years that came to any form of combat, you know, because none of us had done any of it ever. And again, going back to the point about the kind of people who are in command positions, almost everyone in command positions in that unit, three parr had done no form of combat whatsoever. They'd never been, never been shot at, never shot at anyone else. There was a handful of people who had been, who had served in the Falcon Islands in 1982 when the Argentine were invaded. and they were, you know, they had literally done the most hardcore, hardcore fighting, but 20 or years before.

And there was only a few of them. So their impact was very little. And we really looked up to them. But, you know, those guys were, they weren't in command positions. They were like quarter masters and things like this or long engagement officers. So Ellie, and Ellie is what we call that, a guy who's, or a girl, who's gone all the way through the ranks from private all the way up. and then they basically get invited to stay on

and they get converted into a commission, convert to captain and stay on. And there was a few of those. So apart from them, no one knew anything, really, in terms of the realities of combat. I remember being sat in the trench, and we were getting, I said, a shell script, wasn't a trench, a shell scrape,

maybe a couple of feet deep. And the Ramala oil fields, and we were getting artilleryed. And the guy next to me, who says, still a good friend now, Tom, and he's, a little bit of panic. So what we're going to do if,

what we're going to do if we get hit? Nothing, mate. What you can do, buddy. We're going to be fucked. He said, oh, don't speak like that. Don't tell, well, you know, what you're talking about.

This kind of, you know, the reality of the situation here. And that, and that was kind of the example of sort of the naivety of us. Fast forward. Fast forward, three, four years. And it was a very different experience for everyone. People were very different at that point. So Iraq, you know, the Iraq war was a pretty bit of an anti-climax for our unit.

Some guys had a good time in terms of they actually got, you know, they pop the cherry, so to speak. Yeah. I didn't really, you know, we got artilleryed big deal. We had no close quarter or any corner. my section, my platoon anyway, no form of engagement whatsoever. The nearest we got to that was we went out on a, we went out to ambush the Ford,

the Ford observation officer, the Iraqi Ford observation officer who was coming forward on a motorbike, getting his binders out, trying to spot where you were and he bugger off. He was just out of range, he'd bugger off, and then they actually would come in and so he went out to ambush him. We went out one item. He didn't turn up next morning. And then another platoon out the next day,

and they shot them up and got them but we didn't get them that's the closest we got really a big hand in climax which was weird because we came back from there and everyone we were treated as heroes like well amazing he did all this crazy stuff it's like yeah you don't want to say yeah right you know what I mean well I came up to a house with my parent and everywhere else in the house you're yeah they're handed you a beer and you just nod your head yep that's exactly how it happened yeah yeah but again but then Then that's a matter of perspective, right? Because even if I said to him, well, this is what we did,

they still go, wow, that's amazing. Yeah. Okay. You know, just a thought we're getting shot at this. Amazing. How long was your first pump? How long were you guys out there? That was so four months, four and a half months.

Okay. Yeah. We ended up, we did like a couple of months of war. And then we went into the, when the peacekeeping or the post-war phase kicked in, we ended up moving to patrol the Iranian border because there was a concern that there was a concern that the Iranians

were trying to kickstart an insurgency like immediately and they were smuggling weapons across the border, which they were. Right. So we would go over and patrol the border in vehicles. Patrol the border, that's pretty fun. Because the border area, I don't know if you've been in the border area

like in southern Iraq where they were around. It's like flat at the pancake. You know, it's all mar. and you got raised roads, dirt tracks. You can see a vehicle four or five kilometers away. You can see the dust. So if we'd spot them, spot people, doing a deal on the side of the road, mainly,

and we'd go hair-ass, chasing after them, they'd see us coming. They'd see us coming. But still with the stop, it was going as quick as you could catch you. It's a bit of fun. You know, we'd get there, and they'd chuck all the weapons,

and they'd chuck all the cars, they'd be wards of cash, they'd chuck all the cash, and we'd bring that back in. Sometimes we'd catch people and bring them in for a question, But he was, again, it was pretty, it was pretty timid. It's pretty timid.

You know, it definitely, definitely not what I was expected. It was what I was expecting in reality is what we got in 2006 on the first Afghan tour. But that's not what happened. Tell us about that then, about the next trip over to Afghanistan. I actually went back to Iraq, actually. Oh, okay. I went back to Iraq, down the five, which was a little bit different. You know, they'd switch to that by that point,

ADs were front and center of the modus operandi of whoever was decided to attack us. So it's very different, but again, not a huge moment on. And then in 2000, not for myself, anyway, and then in 2006 when we went to Afghanistan. So that was known as Operation Herrick 4 actually. There have been three operations before in, but the three before basically establishing our base, which was Camp Bastion, it was called. Herrick 4 was the first time that combat troops had been sent in. And that was three-parra battle group. So it was our battalion for three-parra, of which probably 500-600 powers,

with a few admin added on to that. And then a battle group, the rest of the battle group was to support us. It was like 2,000 strong. So logistics, engineers, you know, all the usual. that would come along medics and and specialist signals comm's guys and all that that was also pretty much an unknown going in

I remember there was an interview with a politician at the time I forget his name and he said that he hopes that the operation would go without a shot being fired is what he said and the mission was to go in and

basically go and take control of not take control, but have a presence in key areas in Helmand province. So to basically to lay the ground for reconstruction, provincial reconstruction where it was needed and to stabilize, like local government and minimise Taliban, minimise Taliban influence in those areas. So he said not a shot being fired.

And then six months later, we'd done over a million rounds, I think, had been fired. He got it way wrong. He got it way wrong. Yeah, we went, I mean, that was, our beat up training for that was in Omaha. Now, by that point, I mean, I said Iraq had been the two tours there, been pretty much an anti-climax,

but didn't take away from the pack, and now we were used to deploying what the operating, what, you know, deploying operations is like different mindset of switch, switches, the different expectations you should have, is in don't have any expectations anything can get thrown in you. From the type of accommodation you're going to be in to how often you see that accommodation

to how much water are you going to be getting to the weapons systems you're going to be using. And that was no different with Afghanistan. But the difference was there was a definite difference in the beat up training and that is because I think the history of Afghanistan is so different. Like, you know, the Brits have been

beaten up pretty badly in Afghanistan before. Russia got smashed pretty recently, relatively speaking at that point in Afghanistan before. It's not a place to be trifled with. Yeah. And it was a great book. There is a great book called The Bear Went Over the Mountain. Oh, yeah.

I don't know. Yeah. Yeah. It's interviews with Russian commanders from the 70s and 80s, and they're trying to understand basically after action reviews, but a whole book of it.

And where they went wrong. Why the Mujahideem ever just to just do them over. And I mean, you know, in summary, because the Mujahideen, the people of Afghanistan, mainly were part of the Mujahideen, and now the Taliban, they're pretty savvy. Like, they know how to, they know how to fight the enemy, you know how to fight the foreigners.

And we knew that. So the beat of training going in was very different. We spent, the last thing we did was we spent three weeks in Oman. And by that point, I was with the sniper platoon. So I'd gone there, the sniper platoon in 2004. So within three powers. The way it works with our snipers is you can get badged so you can be invited to go and

attempt the sniper course and selection. It's not a selection, selection for the unit. The sniper course, when you come back to the unit, you may get invited to go into the sniper platoon. And the way the snipers work is we will very rarely operate as a platoon but we will go and put one or two snipers to different subunits different teams different sections different companies to support whatever they're doing um so in oman that was very much where we focused our training it was on you know shooting in those kind of conditions um and uh we'd also

been graced with quad bikes you know like ATVs uh so we were trying to get trying to work out how best to use it. We hadn't asked for those. It's kind of just been chucked at us. You know, like you get the big operation start off. Lots of money gets thrown in and often you get a lot of kit. You think, what are we going to do with this? We got given a bunch of quad bikes. I did a lot of training with those. And then, and then, and then deployed Afghan. Definitely a different feeling going out there and it was to Iraq the first time. We went to Iraq for the war. It just seemed more serious. It would just, everyone just seemed very serious. It was like, like we knew shit was going to go down, but he didn't

quite no way. And again, I think it's just down to the history of that place. I mean, you said you were in Helmand? Yeah. Yeah, the first time when I was in Helmand, yeah. I mean, that's like one of the most contentious parts of the entire country. It was, yeah. I mean, at the time, we weren't clear on just how active the Taliban were there and how many there were, and how, how, how, and what their appetite was for having a scruff. And the first, I think the first four or five weeks where we were deployed. Nothing happened. You know, we, I remember going, I remember we've been in a place called Gresh, a little town

called Gresh, because we knew there was a Taliban influence there. We went in, we were linked in with the local, the local leader. It was actually, we were actually based at the US base there. It was the US base. And in that US, I can't remember the US unit was there. The US were there. There was also a unit of our special boat service, so SPS, our service. so SPS, one of our special forces units.

And then a company of Paris went in there, myself included. We went and did a bit of patrolling around the town. But the people were, like, they didn't have a clue why we were there. They didn't understand what was going on. You know, they hadn't just been a war where we were going in to rescue them from, some of being an enemy. We just, we weren't there one day. And then the next day we were from their perspective.

I remember getting asked by a, no, the Turb getting asked if we were Russians by a lady in the town, you know. We weren't greeted positively. We were greeted negatively. Over the first four or five weeks, that was kind of what it was, just bedding in, getting a feel for things. And then after that, I think once the Taliban got a handle on us and kind of where we looked like we were going to be settling into, then they kicked off. and yeah i remember the first again up to that point it's 2006 now you know we've done iraq iraq invasion done iraq again two power had been out to macedonia uh one paris sierra leo and all these things had happened so many pockets of little things going on but even up to that

point the thought of having um a firefight a contact was like wow if you knew someone that had been in the contact. It was like, wow. That guy got shot out and he shot back. It was literally like, it was like a, there was like a mythical beast to these people, because it was so rare at that point. And then I remember the first, the first contact happened.

It was a big battle that happened in an area called Nowza. I can't remember, I wasn't on that up or that mission, but I remember the guys come back in, it was a company up, and now a sniper's came back in off that. And they were just so happy. I mean, they were just

sweat and dust and just they looked fucked they looked like wrecked like they just done a hundred mile and the reality was they just tasted their first experience of you know an hour's long hours long battle in

40 50 degree heat in Afghanistan in a in an enemy that know exactly where all the rabbit runs are and they don't wear uniform they look like just like the locals yeah all the tricks in the book and that was the first one

and then after that it just carried on they started hitting everywhere the Taliban started hitting everywhere obviously the most famous one is one of the most famous is the Sangin Valley Sangin district where the

I think where we eventually left years later and the US Marines came in maybe 08 I think I was or 2010 Marines came in so you know you guys had been there as well but it was the the the tempo of contacts with the enemy was like nothing i ever i ever expected no one expected it was just through the real crazy um it was crazy what was your unit's mission

there um you know you talk about these contacts like what was that you guys were trying to accomplish versus you know what the taliban's trying to stop you from doing we were trying to You know, one of the things I've realized over the last couple of years doing my own interviews, I mean, you will know you guys think through things and you process things from ages ago based on what someone else said. I think I should be able to,

we should be able to remember these missions verbatim. And the reality is I don't. That's a bit odd. But in summary, it was to gain and hold ground and minimize influence in these key areas so that we could so we could bolster the key leaders, the local leaders, basically bolster local governance

and in areas where we want to do some reconstruction or improve education, improve civil services and all that, then we could do that down the line. That was our mission anyway. So we ended up going to, I think we had five or six locations, Sangin, Gresh, Knauzat,

Galashkar, a bunch of different places. and we bid off a bit more and we could chew really we spread too thin I think well we know we spread too thin because what what resulted what ended up happening was instead of being able to get into a position set get into a compound most of the time you would take over like civil buildings like the civil seminar I said take over we'd go and in there with the police's blessing, local leader's blessing, go in there and the aim would be to saturate

the areas. But when the Taliban started attacking back, we didn't have the troops to saturate the area because we'd already taken on too many places. We had two few troops dot around to do any kind of saturation. You know, they just became purifying, just to survive, basically

survive and keep the handle on these areas. Very limited to get any supplies in or out. I ended up in a, I ended up for two months in a place called Musa Kala. And it's known as the siege of Musa Kala. There's been a few things written and produced about it, documentaries. And for two months, you couldn't get in and you couldn't get out. And, you know, we, we were down to our last rounds of ammunition. We were down to our last, like, our last supplies of food. And by the time I got out of that place, The rest of three power is already back in the UK.

Because they couldn't, the RAF wouldn't fly in because if they tried to fly in, they get an airframe shot down. It was just complete lockdown in that position. That was kind of the worst of it. It's kind of the most famous example of that. Yeah, it wasn't, it was life-changing, like genuinely life-changing. You know, that must a call a example.

I mean, we get hit five, six, seven, eight times a day. And sometimes it would be five or ten minutes, a five or ten minute contact, you know, battle. Other times it would be hour plus every day, all day, every day. And it was the same in Sangin. You know, in Sangin and Sanin D.C., they're quite lucky there, where they had the ability to get out of the gate. There was a bit of, there was a bit of dead, not dead ground. There was like a buffer zone of open area between the compound walls, so to speak,

and the green zone. Now, when I say the green zone, I don't mean like Iraq, I mean green zone is in green area where enemy can hide because obviously the green zone is known by a lot of people who look serving Iraq as safe area.

Green zone in Afghanistan to us means a totally different thing. It means like foliage. It means river, foliage, you know, ditches and irrigation. And then you're saying, and they can get out, so you go out and patrol

and go out and do fighting patrols and things, But they would experience the same thing. Like every time they go out, they get smashed. They probably get smashed on the way out. They get smashed the way back in. They get smashed from the compound. And the casualty rate for that tour across the battle group was like 1 in 10.

I think it was like 10%. It was pretty pretty high. In a 10 day period in the first 10 days I was in Musa Kala, we took 55 casualties in that 10 days. Now a big proportion. of the, and it was only 8 of us, but we also had Afghan forces in there. There were maybe 20 or 30 of those. So between them and as 80, 8, 8, 8, there was like 50-od, 50-od casualty, three dead in 10 days.

It was just carnage. Yeah, it was pretty heavy. But there was nothing, the Taliban had locked down. In that compound, they could literally get to walls. Like, if you were to, if you were to, if you were to, if you were to, you were to, you to, if you're doing like a war, a bit of war training, a bit of war gaming, and you had a map of

the town of Musa-Kala, and you were asked to, hey, pick the spot on there, which would be most difficult to defend, you'd pick the district center because it's like impossible defender, and that's exactly where it were. Yeah. And we hadn't chosen it, like we hadn't chosen it. So, so months before,

the Afghans have been in there, and one of our, one of our Pathfinder platoon unit, which is one of our elite, which is one of early reconnaissance units called Pathfinders. They were basically driving past, one of a better expression in the desert on the high ground, looking into Musaqala, just doing some reconnaissance.

And at the time, there was a contact going on. The Afghan police were getting hammered by the Taliban. And the way into support, the way into support got in there, into the compound, and then couldn't get out because of the lay at the land. You could walk, a Taliban fighter could walk to the wall and not be seen. You know, you could have a century up here, high up and not be seen because it was just, it was just the centre of a very, a very dense, very dense built up area.

They got in and then they struggled to get out and we put a battle group up in. So the whole battle group did an operation just to create a safe path through the town. so we could take the path finders out and replace them with a Danish unit which we did as on that up put that on that was just crazy as well Taliban did not want us to get in there we put the Danish in

then a Danish got stuck and they took a lot of casualties and they also had a sniper threat at a time there was a Taliban sniper sniper it was being pretty effective taking people out headshots within the compound

so I got tasked Was that Danish unit? Was that Armadillo or am I thinking of a different one? Ooh, it rings a bell. I'd have to check on that though. They did a documentary about it a Danish infantry platoon.

Did they? Maybe it was. Maybe I'll have to check on that. I'll have to check on that. But yeah, I got tasked with, going in with a friend of mine

who was my sniper buddy working with my pair I going in with a section which is eight with eight infantry guys so paris eight other parrars and a major and a sergeant major

and we were going to go in because by this point there was a platoon of Royal Irish Regiment in there the Royal Irish Regiment were part of our battle group that were supporting us like additional numbers

and they were stuck in there So we were going into basically battlefield casualty replacements and they had no sniper capability either. So we went in there, the Danish ripped out, we went in, and it was a helicopter dusk, one of the last helicopters that came in, dropped us off. And I remember it was nighttime, got shown this little room, we were sitting in, we were going to be sleeping in.

And Jared is my oppo, his name, where you sat next to the opt-room and just a a cacophony of noise just outside kicked off knew it was a contact but it was just it was loud and it seemed like it was coming from everywhere and you know you're in a building

inside a room when you hear a contact on it. It sounds like it's everywhere anyway because of the acoustics and we went grab the weapons we were running outside we didn't have a clue of the layout of the compound, didn't know anything we literally just landed and we went bolted outside and it was literally all foresight

of the place was just erupted. The Taliban were bumping all four sides. And it was a complex attack. It was, you know, multiple, multiple flanks, multiple weapons systems. You had, you know, small arms, you had rockets, you had Chinese rockets and RPGs going down.

And so we just grabbed the first bit of high ground we could and just started shooting in what we could. And it was wild. You had, because you had the British in there, who you know we were pretty square away as in professional soldiers like Paris but you also had the Afghan forces in there

who were you know they may think they were professional but they were like crazy there was one guy who we learned you could easily spot him this this policeman you could easily spot him in a contact at night because whichever the sangha he was in was the one with all the sparks

were flying from because the AK-47 you had had a bent barrel so you would fire the you would fire it Anyway, he was sparks by now. Yeah, yeah, honestly, yeah. I mean, why not? You couldn't get a replacement in there.

Yeah. But, you know, that first night was just that shit, and that's how it went on for the entire thing. Like a proper batters in the fire. And the thing is with that is, we'd been in loads of stuff at that point in that tour. That was like, I went into Musaqarly in August. I'd landed in Afghanistan in March.

So I was pretty seasoned by that point in terms of, you know, facing the enemy. And that was just took it up a whole other level. And it's also a different ballgame when you were really restricted in what you can do tactically. We didn't have the manpower

to even get out of the gate because if we tried to get out of the gate, we'd only have maybe a section or sort of get out unless we took everyone from the compounds out. And that means we'd be given the compounds up to the Taliban. We weren't. That wasn't our mission. We had to hold it.

We couldn't go out of the gate. It was literally just defunders out of the ground. end. It's all we could do. And because they could get the walls, you know, one day you'd be getting a small arm's attack

from a couple of flanks now that you'd be getting grenades thrown over the wall from the mosque, which was just a bile at this point. It was pretty frantic. It wasn't a nice position to be in.

It's different dealing with stuff like that when you've got lots of tactics, options at your disposal when you are pretty much at the best of what the enemy wants to do that day. Right.

It is pushing a different mindset. And also, we did know when we were leaving. There was no, you know, there was no indication of when we were leaving whatsoever. And I don't know if you know anything about that siege, but what ended up happening was our combination of negotiations with our officer in command there, a guy called Adam Jarrett, Major Adam Jow at the time. he was discussing with a local leader who started coming in on behalf of the Taliban

they'd try and sort of bringing it into the carnage because the town was just getting trashed there was no civilians there at this point it was just Taliban apart from one there was one civilian guy and he was an old dude mad as a box of frogs walking stick blind as a bat

and he was living outside the town must have lived inside of the town at some point but every day he would walking, feeling his way up a wall. Regardless what was going on, what fire fights, what anything was going on, you feel his way at the wall, you get to his little shop, do whatever he needed to do in the shop. He wasn't

selling to anyone, because there was no one to buy anything. Do whatever he was doing his shop, maybe getting supplies or whatever. And then he would, like, manhand himself, back out, blinders about, every day. And he was the only single thing that would come in. And what happened is the, Adam, and then outside of that, the,

so back in Bastion, there was more senior conversations going on with senior Taliban and senior parts of the British military to negotiate a ceasefire. And the ceasefire happened. And the Taliban organized local transport for us. So, you know, local jingly trucks, cattle trucks, Afghan cattle trucks, completely with Afghan drivers. And one morning a bunch of trucks turned up.

That's at dawn, dawn, and just before dawn. and we jumped on to those trucks and the Taliban extracted us into the desert where a bunch of Chilocks were waiting for us. She was nice of them. She's just so, so surreal. At the time, it didn't think anything,

but, you know, to, you, you, the stories of, oh yeah, the, you know, the enemy allowed us to leave and saved us. They sort of kind of got us out. They're like Second World War stuff or Korea or somewhere else. It's not 2,000.

six Afghanistan like the first century yeah and that's what happened and that's what happened and when we came back when we came back in we were told

so when we finally got to Camp Bastion we were brought together and told you won't this didn't happen you won't talk about this yeah yeah and we didn't you know even even

even a lot of guys in three Paris didn't know about it until much later yeah and the first I saw that it'd be sort of become public was on Wikipedia 2009 So it was clear that was color, yeah.

Yeah, I had never heard of that. Yeah. Yeah. It's interesting. It's, to me, it lends to the frustration of a lot of Gwai veterans in terms of, especially Afghanistan. I mean, it happened in Iraq, but especially in Afghanistan, they put a few guys out on these tiny little cops or these little, you know, know, positions that couldn't really be held. And really what these positions did, what they did is they served to draw the enemy to them.

You know, it's always like we need to deny the enemy this area. But you're not with, you know, with 20 guys, you're not denying anything to anybody. And they would leave, you know, allied troops in these positions, these untenable positions. And leadership didn't do anything with that. Yeah, I think it was, yeah, yeah, I agree. And I think the cause of it in 06 was we just underestimated how much effort the Taliban were put in, and how annoyed there as being there. Yeah.

And I mean, I'd like to ask Tudel. So the colonel of three powers, a guy called Stuart Tudel, and he's quite well known over here as a military expert, a tactician, very well respected by us. he led as well that he was a perfect CEO at the time and but I'd like to ask him you know

what like why did we go into all those positions I can't imagine it was his decision I'd like to think it wasn't his decision you know I think it was higher up but I think if we consolidate it to your point now Dave if we consolidated on a few

like half the number of positions yeah you know that's six months but then I don't know it could have been time pressure, could have been just get out there, do as much as we can as we can and we'll deal with it. And it just didn't go like that. Because that really set the tempo for the rest of the operation.

It also sounds like the expectations when you guys first went in there was that this wasn't going to be what it became, right? That you weren't going to have that level of resistance. And the thing is, is that the thing is that, the other interesting thing is that people, people didn't believe us when we came back, when we described it was like, which was really frustrating.

So they didn't believe... Because the story at the time was that the war's going well and you're telling something different? No, no, it was because we've gone, again, we've gone from a military which very little experience or chance of having a contact with the enemy

to all of a sudden, you've got this unit come back and going, hey guys you need to get CVCA training like get your medics trained up this is not it's not childs playing anymore

because one of the things that happens in those low operation temples as well is you kind of pay lip service to the training you're doing or the training you're giving especially on the medical front you do the basics you do what you're supposed to do

but there's no like emotional investment in it and all the lessons you learn from the previous carnage operation mission you know war or Falkmans in our case or Gulf One, you know, they're not carried forward when the operations aren't,

temper wasn't high. Right. So we had come back and thought, shit, yeah, we need to pay, like, we need to up our game with medical training, for example, first day training, we up a game with other things, basic things. And we were trying to, so when we came back, we got, we got asked, some of us got asked to go and be part

of the pre-deployment training for the what would be the third unit going out there because obviously we left, the unit had already come in which was the Marines or battle group. You guys to go and advising these things and I went on, so I did two stints on that two different places. I went and was part of training for a company

an infantry company from a different unit, a different regiment. And I also went down to the sniper training unit elsewhere the sniper training unit they wouldn't believe

what the weapon system was capable of we used an L1A3 which was 3338 like AI thing we were telling them it's capable of much more what the pamphlet tells you by the way like you can go further distances it's fine but the the infantry company was much more

more frustrating you know we were told literally told when we were the permanent staff with the instruction like don't scare them don't don't because the other thing is these are different kinds of units there's an advantage to having a selection process yeah yeah right anyone that arguments different argue argues differently he's talking out's nonsense they do argue differently the units who don't have a selection process don't want to believe having a selection process is better the reality is having a selection

process means you end up with on average more resilient more capable people than either the unit it doesn't obviously is exceptions to that rule here here comes Hugh straight out of Afghanistan with a wild look in his eyes. Yeah, yeah. But, yeah, yeah. And there was definitely, it was definitely a worry that people go out there with the wrong attitude.

You don't want to be going out onto a mission like that and being worried about losing your life. You want to be going out on a mission like that. I'm thinking, I'm as capable as it can be. I know exactly what he's been done. There's no more training I could prepare me for this. I trust the people around me and I trust the unit a part of. So you went in and we were softly, softly.

Build their confidence. Yeah, exactly. We were softly softly. And it was over a couple of weeks, this particular part we were on with them. And it was coming towards the end of the beta training. And they were just doing really basic things wrong. Like the officers would, there'd be a battle going on. And this is training.

It'd be a battle going on. And the officers would, they'd want to consult the map. And they'd get behind like a land rover, a soft-skinned vehicle. to consult the map because for 20 years they could do that in training and hide behind a soft skin vehicle as if that's going to stop around they look at the map and we come over and go guys you can't you know if you do this out there you're literally going to you're dead it's not going to stop stop it and went on and no one was listening and they got to the they got to the last day and and stood up and the British expression has ripped a new asshole into them and just told them

you guys need to start switching on you're not paying any attention not listen to what we're saying. Part of the problem was as well is that the Paris in the UK we're not that popular amongst other units. For a bunch of different reasons, right? And it's unfounded reasons mainly. An airborne unit being cocky? I don't believe that. Yeah, it was pretty arrogant. Like I said, we've got these names for the unit. Right. rush, and there was definitely a part of it in people not believe in this and they thought we were sort of inflating it. I'd always build it up like yeah, with the greatest, we need to

make these stories up. Say no, no, this is really what happened. You were really going to go out there and soon as you go on the ground, you're going to get shot up. And if your drills and skills aren't good enough as a team, as a unit or as an individual, you're probably going to get injured or get someone injured or killed. It's going to happen. It took, you know, it took a couple of tours for everyone to realize, hey, it is actually like they said it was. It is that crazy.

So, I mean, this is interesting because you know, you're going from, you know, being that sort of like cocky young paratrooper to growing into being a professional soldier and like passing these skills on to the younger guys that need this stuff when they get overseas, which I think is like a very interesting progression to make. Yeah, I think, yeah, I found that actually quite, the command side of it, I found, I was finding a little bit difficult, not in terms of tactics on the operations, so to speak.

You know, I was not bad. Like, modest, modesty kicking in. That wasn't bad, you know, on the ground. Not bad at all. But the reality for me, in terms of career, my career progression, promotion had been, right. rapid, crazy rapid. You normally, to become a section commander, you know, running the team of eight, you're looking at eight years, maybe average of about eight years to get to that position

at that point. I did it within three or four. And I say it did it, wasn't aiming for it. I just ended up as a, you know, running my own team at that point. And then I became a sergeant within eight. And a sergeant's normally like 11, 12 years. And it was too quick. I'd cut my teeth in terms of combat, if you like.

But I still was dealing with that sort of confidence issue, believe it or not. In terms of handling guys, commanding guys. It was all to do with like a status thing, social status thing. One of the things that happens, I don't know if it happens your side of the pond, but when I first joined three para, if you got promoted, then you would move unit, subunits. So if you got promoted,

you'd move from at least move platoons. You go from this platoon to that platoon. You're supposed to go from company to companies. You'd go from a company strength for us is like 140. You'd move companies. And the reason being is that you're not all of a sudden being put into a leadership position within your peer group. Because your peer group is still your peer group.

They're still your friends. They will do that. in like in ranger regiment for instance that's more when you get to the platoon sergeant level a lot of the squad leaders are kind of homegrown in the element but when you get to the the command has some concerns when like all three or four of the platoon sergeants and the company are boys that like grew up together that you're creating a little mafia yeah yeah that's how your kill squads come together yeah yeah so they yeah at that point they start to guys get moved around a little bit.

Yeah, so, yeah, so when I got my first promotion, I ended up staying in staying in the same. They didn't move me. I can't remember why. I was just a nightmare. Like my social circle was a group of people who were just like alphas. I was not an alpha at that point. It wasn't an unwell who is at any point, really. And I found it really hard, but 06 changed it.

I think thinking about it, 06 changed it. You know, I got a real belief in my life. myself there. There's not much else can give you a bigger confidence boosters going out, doing something tasty, even if one off. Now, for the people out there, I've only ever done one bit of combat they've been in,

but they've been in, they've done it, it's survived, they did well with their team, they've respected, they got through it, achieved the mission, that is like, that is literally can be life-changing. That 06th tour is basically what true of me, I am now, this, you know, outgoing, a confident guy. I was totally different before.

and I managed over time to pull that into and help me with the command element, just confidence command. You know, I wasn't, it was not that I was a weak commander, but it was almost like a posture syndrome, you know, it's just like so quick. I just gone through the rank so quick. I was sitting around, you know, I was the equivalent rank to people I was, again, looking up to when I was in training in some cases. I was the same rank as people who had taken me.

through training in some cases. It's like, fucking out. What was the next step for you? I mean, now it sounds like your section commander, like sounds like our version of a squad leader. What was the next jump for you? I mean, I think you did one more trip over to Afghanistan, right? I did two more. Two more. Yeah, yeah. So I went to snipe is no four.

Oh, six. I was a full screw, what we called a corporal. So yeah, section commander squad leader. but within the snipers so a sniper team commander and and then oh eight was the next time at Afghanistan

2007 that year between was a combination of guest instructing on our sniper course down in down again in southern England near London and advising on pre-deployment stuff for other people and then 2008 the start

of that, the start of that year was a leadership course for me, which was doing my course for qualify myself to get promoted to sergeant. So that would be, from a sniper's perspective, that would qualify me to lead the, lead the, be the sniper, the battalion, be the sniper, platoon commander, basically. I did that, I did that in that earlier and early in the year and then deployed out to Afghan. Now, the second Afghan tour for me was very much different to the first. It was quite good. The whole of three, I said quite, yeah, it was quite good.

The whole of three parrero, we deployed out to Kandahar at that point. And that was a bit of a culture shock. That's the first time I'd ever been on a big, a camp with USA, Canadians. Like one of these huge camps, like Canadians, hockey. You guys must have been there. Oh, yeah, the boardwalk with the Tim Hortons. The boardwalk, you know, it just come off. My first experience of Afghan was 06.

Right. You know what the Brits are like. We're pretty tight with our money. Like, we're pretty frugal. There's nothing. There's none of this coffee shop nonsense. You've got a cat in. It's like stepping into a, what you call it?

What do you guys call it? A mall. It's like a cinema on. Yeah. Yeah. Crazy. Crazy. So you went there, but the option we were doing, we were doing strike ops.

So strike ops for high value targets in southern Afghanistan mainly. So you would spend two or three days in camp What was the name of the camp? Camp, not Campsuita, I can't know what it was called. In camp, then the mission would come up and either a company of us would go out on the mission. And the mission could be, or the whole unit, but it's rare the whole unit.

The mission could be like a day, out snatching grab, like out on the helies, drop into just outside the village, run in, grab the target, getting out. And it was never, it was always capture, like mainly capture. And capture or kill was quite rare. But then we'd be in, get them and get out. And, or sometimes the mission would be, you know, two or three weeks, it would go and be to support a US unit like a badgram area or a British unit elsewhere or to put a faint in for an SF attack going

in somewhere. So we did that for for the six months there. And that was, that was really, really good. You know, we had guys doing work with CIA on a couple of missions down near the down near the Pakistan border, I think. You know, just interest in varied, varied missions, which

really enjoyed, really enjoyed. I mean, it's some really good results as well. And we also got to do some of the tasty stuff we did in A. O6 tour. We've gone in, like I said, we're going to boast, so two para were out there at that time in Helmand doing kind of the equivalent tour we done in

and they were having some real, real, they were in some real tasty places and we went into a couple of their spots and both of them and basically got to get, give them a bit of a rest and go in and do some areas, they weren't able to reach purely because of resources and the state of their troops, basically. We were fresher and had some great results in there.

That was the first time actually I came across a Taliban fight away uniform, as in it wasn't police uniform, he was his own the own uniform it sounds like this is kind of like a deployment where you're really moving on to sort of like what's the term I want to use but more like special

operations than infantry yeah definitely yeah definitely and that was quite quite rare at that point for us for the regiment anyway one power we're doing one power I think we're already in the special forces support group roles

so they were doing sort of stuff with with SF and our guys so our guys rotate between we've got three battalions main battalion one one parr two power and three parr and so you change between the battalions so yeah guys who go off to one para part of special force support group then come back and it's just a that's to that's to make sure

there's you don't have skill in any particular area because you've got a special force support group one para and you know you do very little conventional stuff you do a lot of SF oriented stuff training wise and mission-wise and so and so we were chop and change between to make sure the skills aren't lost and you and you and you and you're sharing knowledge between units as well so that was quite unheard of for us at that point but it was yeah it was good it was um it was uh it was refreshing to have such specific defined right team bound missions

yeah not like are you here for six months yeah but yeah um it all also must have felt good to go on the offense after your last tour. Oh, yeah. Oh, definitely. Oh, yeah, good point. Yeah, it did for sure. And it was also a variety of offensive ops we were doing. Sometimes we go out with vehicles and being laid up in the desert in the Liga for a couple of days and then go patrolling into the green zone and put a bump in. Other times, you know, we'd be dropped off on a heli, K's away, and then going on foot, put an ambush in, and then bug out. It was good to be on the offensive side, for sure. And like I said, we had a lot of great results, like tangible results.

You get, one of the advantages of doing your missions like that is, because intelligence is so much more, you're closer to the, you're sort of closer to the source of intelligence, right? You're closer to the agencies who are really on top of where the intelligence has come from and what it can mean. And so we'd often get feedback. So if we captured or killed someone and brought them in,

we'd often get feedback a couple weeks later. Like, hey, that guy you brought in or that guy he shot, he was actually such and such commander. He's actually such and such, and you'd probably like fucking awesome. You don't get that in normal operations. You know, you just, because he very rarely, returning a dead guy to the agencies,

especially like in Musa Kala or in Sangin. You don't you haven't got time or the inclination to do it. The dead guy staying out there and they're going to and his friends are going to sweep them up. Right. You're not leaving the wire to recover the body and even if you didn't, nobody's going to come collect it. Yeah.

No, exactly. And most of them wouldn't have any actionable intelligence on them anyway. Right. You know, it's a reality. Yeah. Then what was the third pump to have? Afghanistan. Very similar to the first in terms of, you know, occupying platoon houses, occupying for an operating basis.

And again, it was in Hellman, but obviously there were so many more troops. I think at that point, we had 10,000 in country. I think you guys had something like 40,000, maybe more, I think. So smaller areas, more troops in smaller areas. more troops in smaller areas but because so that was 2010 2011 through Christmas that was but because the public sentiment

towards what we were doing out there started to shift slightly like the public's the public's appetite over here for accepting casualties and deaths on a daily basis was really starting to die down starting to dwindle you know a bit like the support

for Ukraine this at the minute it's like it's on the dying down so it makes it really hard to the appetite of risk becomes less. And that tour was, he was much less conventional, much less sort of small arms attacks from the Taliban. What the Taliban realized early on in 2006 and 2007, so from the first instance of British troops getting out there,

it's like, hey, we may not be able to combat them like this. We're not doing very well. We're getting slaughtered. So they started switching their tactics over to ID's indirect attacks, much like, you know, it happened in Iraq and happens elsewhere. And that's what. that's what it was like in 2010, 2011. They would tend to initiate contacts with small arms.

If they were going to have a prolonged contact with small arms, they'd be quite far away, like minimal risk themselves, but it'd almost always been indirect attack of some sort, be it an IED or something else or multiple IDs or something else. And because of that less appetite for risk that the British military had out there, it actually restricted us a lot in terms of what we could do technically. You know, so there was things like there was a rule that you weren't allowed to go and put any form of mission in, any form of patrol, any form of any action in, which was less than 12 people. Now, I'm a sniper.

Like, 12 people's a fucking nightmare. Yeah. You don't want to doing that. And so that, it's a bit of a bit of. immediately restricts your ability to move super silently, to move without being seen, to move without being heard. You know, unless you've got 12 ninjas or 12 snipers, no disrespect, but no disrespect.

But we're snipers and we're trained that way for a reason. We're just better doing that kind of stuff than other people. It makes it real problematic. And again, it provides more opportunity to enemy to attack. And then you couple that with the ramp up in protective equipment that we had to wear. You know, we were really numbered down with these massive, massive, which is normal now, but these massive, you know, front plate, massive back plate. Our helmets had changed.

So on the first, you know, we went out in 2006. We'd be on, like, airborne helmets, which were very lightweight. 2010, we couldn't do that. In 2006, the reality was, because of the way the Taliban could move, they're so lightweight, they're dishdashes, right? They've got a few pouches with the mags in and their AK-47. They don't need much water because they live there. They're like accustomed to the climate.

what we would end up doing a lot of the time on our offensive operations is we need to get dropped in so we jump off the helies and we would take our armor off and we would cache it and even then the at the end the armor was really light anyway it was like a flack jacket for one of a better word and then a small chest plate you know maybe i don't know eight inches by four and maybe nine inches by four inches in shape cover your heart and one of your back to cover your heart from the rear we would ditch those and just put in a pile and we were going with nobody on that we were going with nobody on it and we'd have a helmet to be clip into our weapon because we could move faster and towards the advantage to be able to move fast outweighed the disadvantage you have no armour

you're less likely to get short if you can get shot if you can move quick you know if you can move as quick as the enemy fast forward to 2010 to 2011 you wouldn't be allowed to take your armour off it was like no

not allowed to do it no helmet off and as snipers the kind of equipment were issued you couldn't even get into a decent fire position or like a prone

fire position because if the armour would raise your chest up the helmet would hit the back of your arm on the head and push forward you couldn't get your help to look through the scope just a nightmare again these are I think these are just I don't know if you guys experience the same thing or your guys experience the same thing you know it's very frustrating but how did you explain to the the mother or father of a dead of a dead kid that um you know less arm is better right when maybe you know I went into a I went into an inquest after the first

tall. When we came back an inquest to a couple of guys who died, they'd been a direct hit with the water and they were just peppered, obviously. And the mother was there. And one of the questions she asked of the Ministry of Defense representative is like, why can't, why aren't you able to issue body armor that covers the entire body? You know, like, I know the answer to that. Right. You guys know the answer is obvious to anyone who is. rationally thought, but not to the mother of a dead kid. Sure. You know what I mean?

Sure. So it really, it really happened things, which ultimately I think is, you know, one of the reasons that our footprint was a lot smaller. You know, you could put loads of troops in an area, a footprint is a lot smaller. The Taliban have more confidence.

We had loads of ice our assets up. You know, we had loads of eyes on the ground and things, but you need boots on the ground to have any form of influence. And in reality, on those, you know, canary insurgency operations, as you guys know, one part of it is killing the enemy the second part of it is winning over the locals demonstrate why we are here

you know you've got to go over and you need boots on the ground to do that and safe boots in the ground and it was difficult for us to do it plus Afghanistan the winter is miserable yeah my God yeah so coming back from that tour talk to us a little bit about like you know where your head is at

at the time you're kind of you like you said you moved along quite quickly in the paris. How did you see kind of your future prospects at this time? What was your decision-making process like? I wanted, so one of the things we have to do, were you supposed to do before, certainly before you get promoted to a corporal,

so, you know, a squad leader or like a platoon sergeant, is you're supposed to go and do a, we call it an e-posting, external posting, supposed to go and do basically the common one is going to be an instructor somewhere for two years. Just, you know, so it's basically to me, it's basically to try and reduce the chance of someone getting promoted up to the ranks because his mates high up. He's got mates and this guy is actually useless to get promoted. Sort of to validate, hey, this guy's being externally audited, if you like.

Right. You know, that's what it is. I didn't have to do that. Because the operational tempo, what I was doing, I didn't, I didn't, I didn't, I didn't go anywhere. Which I'm glad of because I would have missed the fear of missing out with, the extreme for any of these operations. But I knew I was going to have to do one because

they wanted me to, they being their career people in the unit, wanted me to go to Sandhurst as an instructor and instruct young officers. So bring the young officers up. And that's quite a prestigious post-it.

You go there if you get you get told to go to Sandhurst if your career projection is high. Like you're going to go all the way. You're going to be a regimental sergeant major of one of the units, basically. They think that's the case. It's not guaranteed, but you go to Sanders to do that. I didn't want to go to Sandhurst. I want to go to Brecken. Like a Brecken, like I mentioned earlier, in Wales as well, it's our infantry battle school. It's cold, it's miserable, it's horrible. It's where you send soldiers to go to learn how to be technicians, how to think under pressure, how to be. How to be. perform under pressure physically and mentally in one of the most disgusting places in the UK, you know, in terms of environment and weather and terrain, made Wales, glorious country. I wanted to go there because Sanders was, you know, you're teaching a lot of drill, you're teaching a lot of,

you're teaching basically new recruits all the other every officees out of the bullet boots, you know, polish their boots and iron the uniform. You don't know all the other stuff, like teaching them tactics and all the rest of it, but I only wanted to teach that stuff. Yeah. And he only want to teach it to the actual guy who's actually, you know, young guys like I was, who were not officers. And we're the guys who make everything work, you know. But they didn't want me to do that.

So we had a fall. I ended up leaving after this, the third tour. And I think I'm happy about that. I mean, I wouldn't be here now talking to you guys if it wasn't. But yeah, that's what happened there. I got pretty bitter about it because I sort of I'd not put up a fight about anything I'd done everything it was asked

to be up to that point you know my my operational tempo throughout my career I've been high non-stop you know from 2001 that first Northern Ireland tour all the way through 2011 non-stop my feet hadn't touched the ground and I'd perform well not grumbled about anything and then the one thing I asked for and they said no

and I got very upset very quickly. But the thing is at that time is that we knew that three power knew that we weren't going back to Afghanistan. It was the end of it for us because it was all dying off. And the rotations, we weren't on that roster. There was like another four or five rotations to go and we weren't going to be on it. So, and there was nothing else on the horizon. So the prospect of staying in and basically being, you know, like one of those.

old grumpy guys that had been there when I turned up in 2010. We've done nothing, you know, or bitter because they were in the Falklands and had done nothing since. They were angry about that. You know, the prospect of being that and being basically a camp soldier, you know, a barrack soldier was not exciting. And the circuit was kicking off at the time. You know, I think Davey mentioned you were a contractor. Yeah.

So at the time, since 2006, actually, since 2006 for us from Three Power, once people had done what they wanted to do and satisfied themselves with combat in the military a lot of the guys at 06, 12 and 3 power they left and they went onto the circuit because the circuit in Iraq was booming, you know,

private securities was booming since 01, 02, so 03, sorry, onwards was booming and there's a lot of money to be made. So those guys went and I did the same thing after 2011 out there, earn a lot of money.

That was the plan, earn a lot of money and so we get to do cool things. But just, you know, getting paid more. Yeah. That's what I did.

I think it wasn't quite as, wasn't, I was looking at it through rose tinted spectacles. How did it go in actuality? Well, you know what, private security deals.

Yeah, first of those, private security deals like out in, out in the oil fields, out in Iraq. and other places. It's basically a glorified taxi service

at the most part. Yeah. So, yeah, that's what I did. You know, armored vehicles carrying oil workers around different parts of the area. It was a bit surreal because we were working an area that I'd been in 2003 in trenches and the trenches were still there.

You know, Ramallah, and Rish in place by this. So that was a bit weird. And flash, you know, fast forward to, that would have been 2011, late 2011, I started there. and Iraq hadn't changed much for the better since we went in in 2003. That's a bit of a common theme in other places, right?

Definitely haven't changed much. But in Iraq's a pretty particular place. It's not, I don't know, it's an odd place. It's almost like they don't want to evolve that much. I don't think. I think they're quite happy the way it is. Middle Eastern politics are extremely frustrating, to say the least. Yeah, true.

Yeah, true. And frustrate even more of countries like Iraq where the politics don't seem to pervade outside of the capital city. Yeah, right. Yeah. And Afghan even more so. Afghan even more so, right. Nobody cares what's going on in Kabul. It's not their tribe.

It's not their village. You're all. Exactly. And this is, this is, I mean, this is, it's a good point. If this goes back to some of the frustrations he had on the third time he went out there. That third tour went out, I was doing a sort of a jewel. role of like a low like a intelligence officer role but on a sub unit so part of the company part of a power company and and also a sniper role there on the offensive operations that

we did and so I got this sitting on a lot of the sureers the meetings with the key leaders you know by that point they they were just they were just saying the words that they yeah you want to be you know and we knew that someone were Taliban we knew there was all we knew they were playing both sides and they knew we knew we and we couldn't know anything about it and the reality is they they knew we were going to leave and they just they're just marching time they just yeah they just they just plodding along until until the Taliban come back in because it's a real they said it's stuck between a rock and a hard place right they know the Taliban's in to come in they know we're there we know they don't want us to

to like the Taliban or help the Taliban. We don't want them to help the Taliban. So they had to be seen to be helping us while not pissing off the Taliban. Right. Because we're going to be got. So, and back to the point that brought us up, is that it doesn't impact their lives that much who is in charge.

They still get the 10. This is away from like Kabul, away from Lashkar Khan Khan in the sticks, the farmers, the rural areas. You know, the, the bedwind. Their life's the same. British people are patroling or the Taliban. You know, their life's the same, I think, for the most part.

And probably it's more, probably they would perceive it as more structured and predictable and understandable under the Taliban. Because that's what they've known for longer. They understand Sharia law and all the other things. They know them better than they know us. They play the long game, right? Yeah. I mean, it's kind of, it's not frustrating to talk about it like this, because I don't want to. make it sound like what was the point about it you know it's uh it's um but it it kind of

it puts it into perspective and you see them when you when you when you leave like that ignoring the evacuation what three four was it now four years ago it puts into perspective when they move so easily back under the taliban ratio you just carry on as normal jogging it's just like take take out the leader put this leader in this structure government structure and it's fine they don't change anything. And there's very much a, like a fatalistic, tenor or whatever to, like, a lot of these Islamic countries where if a strong man is ruling, it's probably because the strong man deserves to rule.

Like, you don't have these ideas of, like, individual liberty and things like that. They just don't stand up for it often. Yeah, exactly. So it's like, okay, yeah. So, all right, so we're going in and we need to improve X country because their standards of living on what we expect them to be like don't match up with ours. Okay, but how do they match up to their expectations?

Right. Because by their expectations, they're totally fine. Right. It's like the tribe in the Amazon, we don't have smartphones, right, you don't have bricks, and you don't have bicycles, they don't bother because that's how they live and they're going. they're quite at me. They don't know any different.

Even when you introduce something different than they don't like it. They're not still the same. It's kind of the same. And the standards are very different. Same with, you know, again, Afghanistan, as you pointed out there. What is right and what is wrong is different based on your perspective and when you're understanding and what the culture is built on,

foundationally, historically. So you did the contractor circuit for a little while. And where are you at today? What are you up to nowadays? is. I manage, well, I do HR, which is, which started out as a hobby. The podcast started off as a hobby, but now it's like a second job. Really.

A second job doesn't earn for me, but it's one of those are kind of step away from because it's just so valuable for a million different other reasons. But I work for a global stat comms company. I do service delivery for government, government, customers, Satcom's company, which is interested in itself. Yeah, yeah. And it's also strange because I was never a comms guy when I was in.

I kind of can't work out how I ended up in a satcom's company. But, you know, I'm here and I'm enjoying it. But yeah, I took out as my day job, but that is very much an enabler for H-hour. You know, and a few other things I do on the side, which is sort of, you know, veteran-oriented. But, yes, what I do. I think, like you guys, I try and do an episode. out of a week at least. How did each hour come about?

How did that idea germinate in your mind and come into fruition? I, all right. So in a nutshell, I went through a, when I left, I wasn't in a great place mentally. I didn't know at the time. And I basically went through a number of years of tough times for various reasons, one of which was like a mental hell. And that created all sorts of other problems. work problems, all sorts of things.

My transition from the military into the civilian world was not smooth. It's not smooth for anyone. But mine was over a long time not smooth. It took ages and for a bunch of different things. I learned a lot of stuff along the way. And I got pretty low mentally, like as low as you'd want to get mentally

or as you wouldn't want to get mentally. And I didn't want other people to go through the same thing, basically. But at the time, I'd been listening to a very popular podcast by Mr. Rogan. And, and like you guys, you know, interviewing, when you're listening to someone interview people from different walks of life and backgrounds and countries and perspectives, then you kind of, you tend to pick something up from each one a little bit of information, knowledge, and I think it arms you a little bit. It's sort of great, pick up these little tip bits that can help you at an unexpected time in life. So I basically wanted to communicate what I learned. I wanted to avoid my old friends and people I don't know, behind. me going through the same situation

I'd gone through. Little things like stuff I'd learned about the circuit. Stuff I'd learn about mental health. Stuff I'd learned about getting by in a civilian world generally. And so I started to podcast up for that reason. Basically chat the people,

have a conversation with people I'm interested in and I committed to myself. I started that with a... I mentioned a guy earlier called Jared. was my sniper buddy. He did the first 10 episodes with me. And started up with a commitment that if I'm going to interview people, and they're going to have these conversations about these subjects,

and I need to be on open book. Otherwise, it's pointless doing it. Everything's got to be out there and be honest about my own experiences and what I think about things. And so that's why I did it, to try and communicate useful information to people, but I would sound like a preacher. You know, if I walked into three para,

so I started the podcast in 2018, I mean, if I walk into three-paralli, three-power lay and three-power barracks, for example, and said, hey guys, if you try meditation, I get beaten up, I get kicked up back then, beaten up, kicked off camp, never come by, the fuck is this going on the boat? As if you bring it up in a conversation in a decent context with someone else who's of a similar background, then it's totally fine. That's an example. You know the score.

That's why. Try and get information to people that is useful. basically. But it's got into something much more than that. You know, he's brought this about, so, you know, one of the reasons I know about team houses from one of your patrons, a guy called Coke, who's a British guy. Yeah, and he's also, he's also under my patrons. And I find that, you know, if I understand, start of my podcast, I wouldn't be interested in introduce to you guys and having these conversations with you guys and learning about what you do and your side of

the pond. And also, I think it's huge value in spending time talking, actually active listening to talking, because there's so much that I, even, you know, the questions you fired at me today, there's so much that it makes me processed and I'll continue thinking about over the next couple of days about what I think about things and why I think them,

you know, which I think, it's an invaluable thing that most people don't get to do these days. How often do we get to sit down and talk, actually talk to someone and listen to someone for an hour, two hours at a time? No one does it. No one does it. My hope is that, you know, for a lot of the guys, a lot of the veterans out there that are able to connect with, you know, a show like H hour or the team house, and it sort of gives them a little bit of that connectivity, you know, they don't feel totally isolated or alone. Yeah, yeah, true.

I mean, that's one of the, I think it's one of the reasons that a lot of people struggle, Max, military struggle when they leave is that we incorrectly think that we are the only person. Right. through what we've got to do. And the reality is, the unfortunate reality is that most or many, many people go through it. And especially with guys are concerned, we just,

you know, we just useless talking about feelings and rightly so in a lot of cases. I understand it. But the worst thing in the world when you're literally, is to be isolated. Like I was talking about Musa Kala earlier.

We were isolated. It was fucking horrific. I never want to go through that again. And the reality is that we've got another buddy-buddy system. We've got mutual. support everywhere. There are people within our networks who we know

or don't know who have been through the same thing that can offer advice. They're ahead of us on the track. They've been through the shit that you can't give them through now and they can help you. But if they don't know about it, they can't. Isolation is not a good thing. Even with the distance,

you know, with the best, we'll step up for each other whether we know each other on. I think it's also like very valuable to normalize the talk about, you know, the post-traumatic stress, about, you know, the challenges of becoming a civilian again. Like, it's good to normalize that because I think, I think most of us when we go through that, we think that we are alone in that struggle and we wonder what's wrong with us. And so what do we do? We do what we've been trying to do, which is to tighten up

the rucks track, you know, the rucksack, put our heads down and keep trying to put one foot front of the other. And a lot of times that's not the solution. No. And it also invites an attitude that, let's say, you know, talk about post-demaric stress and also, and the symptoms associated, they also invites an attitude that it's something that is chronic and cannot be improved or cured, which most people think is the case. And it is absolutely not the case. Right. There's a few people against the podcast, a few people I've been very lucky to speak to. And one of them is an American guy, two of American guys, actually. One is a good. guy called Dr. Mark Gordon.

I don't know if you've heard of him, but I know he's working with a few of your Special Forces Unit, someone there. And he is basically one of the world-leading researcher on on neuroendocrinology, so brain hormones, adjusting neuroendocrinology to combat the symptoms of PTSD. So we're right now, all of the main focus on reducing symptoms of PTSD and preventing PTSD is all on.

It's all psychology. And the sort of the physical side of it, the physiological side of it's missed. So what Mark has found is that, so let's talk about preparing, let's talk about reducing the likelihood of developing PTSD. So what Mark does with a bunch of SF units in the USA, and I know he's been engaged with a couple of SF units back here,

is preemptively supplementing, and girls, as in literally supplements, which produce certain brain hormones, which are susceptible to getting drastically impacted in like blast injuries, not blasts but in blast in repeated trauma, repeated battles, so that layer upon layer. So SF units, SF guys, operators who are doing a lot of work. He administers these hormones, which are naturally got them in your body anyway. So when they do go into a contact, we do go into an extreme situation and come out and survive the other side,

gets them back in, checks the baseline for the hormones, bumps up again what is deficient. And then it basically drastically reduces the likelihood of developing post from XRMAX. That's amazing. Yeah. Yeah, it's incredible. Because it just, you've got the resiliency you can build in people,

like that just through training and your rigorous training and physical and mental and then this additional element, the physiological level is incredible and you can do the same with treatment of PTSD. So there's an actually there's an amazing

American documentary film called I think it's called Quiet Explosions. Mark Gordon features in it, there's a Green Beret features in it there's a US Navy lady which is in it and an American football player and all these people exhibit symptoms of PTSD and they've all basically got traumatic brain injuries.

Now the interesting thing is three of them, so there's four of them, three of them have got traumatic brain injuries from blast or concussion. So obviously the American football player, you've got the Green Beret who's basically getting his head blowing out by breaching, breaching charges. The Navy lady has got the same symptoms. She got acute PTSD, but she has never been around weapon systems. She's never been a blast, anything like this. The Navy lady was raped.

She was raped on a service vessel, but the trauma of the rape produced exactly the same symptoms. Wow. Right. Traumaic brain injuries, everyone else. Now these people have been treated with, again, supplementation, neuroendocrinological supplementation, checking which hormones are deficient, bumping them up, and then seeing which PTSD symptoms, main after that,

baseline the physiological side, and then implement the psychological treatment, if needs be. Because after this point, it's kind of psyched with me, this physiological side has been completely ignored and paying attention to it in madness. So how do you get into that?

Oh, the PTSD. So a point on that is, you know, there is this, I don't know about over there, but here, there is a definite, so some guys and girls who have PTSD,

they can, they can sort of fall victim to the victim mentality and kind of be their own barrier to improve it or they can misunderstand that it doesn't it's not necessarily a chronic condition I think that's changing slowly but it needs to be much much quicker so you said the doc I took this notes on my phone you said that the documentary was called quiet explosions

I think it's quiet explosions yeah and the doctor's name is Mark gold Mark Gordon Gordon okay yeah yeah Mark Gordon Do we have questions for Hugh? We do. Hughes stated that he was beat in training. Oh, thank you very much solely 1, 2, 3, 4, all-wheel drive to AWD2. Thank you.

Hughes stated he was beaten in training unit, life, and approves for discipline. Does this happen in the Rangers Green Berets? If so, do you approve? In Ranger indoctrination, there may have been some physical correct. action issued. That may have happened. It's not common. Like corporal punishment isn't common. I don't want to give anyone that impression that like it's a normal thing. In special forces, no. I mean, what you'll find like is if like two guys are really budding heads and they might decide to take it to the wood line, so to speak. Don't call Thunderdome. Yeah, but that's a little bit

different than like, you know, a squad leader taking a private wall to wall, slamming him in a wall lockers. You know, that kind of thing, I think that's mostly a thing in the past. Yeah. Yeah. When I was in Marine boot camp, it was not unheard of, but this is back in 89. But it was not uncommon for a drill instructor to, like, maybe do a little wall-to-wall if they felt it was necessary. Desperate times. Yeah.

Yeah. Since then, I haven't really seen it. Like, you know, you have, you have like the hazing or the scuffing up. Like, they'll scuff up the privates in Ranger Battalion, or they did. And this, again, this is 97. It might be different now. But they would definitely, you know, find fun and sweaty activities for, uh, for, for, for junior enlisted who maybe lost their firing pin or whatever. But, yeah.

Soie, thank you very much. There are serving female officers in the paris. How much fitter do they have to be than the soldiers? Is fitness for the para officers comparable to SAS officers? Good question. No, the fitness levels are different. So let's focus on the females a minute. The females are in the paris,

so they've only, they've only, you know, it's quite recently they've got there, but they do, those females who do the same selection, the same physical selection process as their male officer counterparts. But that selection process is slightly different to, as enlisted selection processes, is slight differences. But they do the same as the male, so the fitness is the same. And then officer fitness levels comparable to SAS officer. No, different.

I mean, again, I'm generalising here, but different because the SAS selection fitness levels are so much higher requirement than what they are with the powers. I say physical so much higher. The biggest barrier to get into SF over here, special forces of view as selection wise is, you know, your likelihood of getting injured. It's almost like you, you're likely to get injured. You can get to a point where you only need to be so fit to pass all the selection tests, but your body needs to be literally strong enough, just to not get hammered and develop a stress fracture or roll an ankle or break a bone, you know. But no, they're different.

They're not comparable officer in the Paris. And they're not far apart. They're not equal. Yeah. Soli, thank you very much. what sorry sorry sorry I have something

popping up okay how good were the enemy and the GWAT did they have units comparable to UK US Special Forces and Infantry How good were the enemy

in what sorry In the GW in the global war on terror in Iraq and after that Oh sorry I'm the GWR Oh how good were the enemy Relative to what

It depends on where you were in what time I think where you were and when. You compare one of them to, if you compare an individual, like Taliban fighter, for example, to an individual British soldier, then not comparable or in terms of professional soldier and skills. There's no comparison.

We're heads and tails above them. The reason that they were so challenging to fight is because you were fighting them on the wrong turf. and again I alluded to some of the restrictions that we had in us earlier. We were much heavier to move around. And yeah, they were just more, they were mainly, they're more agile. They knew the terrain and they weren't wearing uniforms. They weren't easily identifiable.

And they also knew they could play the long game whereas we were playing the short game. Cunning, very, very, very cunning fighters. That was in Afghanistan anyway. And a lot of the time, we didn't even fight enough guys. You know, we killed a couple of people one time, and they were Pakistanis. They were there fighting for Taliban. Yeah.

Just a different place. And the second part of that, did they have units comparable to the UK, US, SF, and M3? And it's, no, they didn't really have units that just had a bunch of guys that would come together. Solly, thank you much. How good were your military leaders? Did you have, did you or have you, did you have your versions of Rommel, I guess? Well, when I was serving, yeah, I think, I mentioned a guy called Stuart Tootler earlier. And he's quite famous over here.

I say famous, relatively speaking. And there's another guy called Tim, well, Colonel Tim, oh, I can't remember his surname. So he's not, he's relatively famous. Tim gave a famous speech on the eve of the Iraq invasion allegedly it was that Bush had it up on his wall as in your present

Bush had it up on his wall in the White House for some time but Tudel I think Tudel was he was one of those commanders who outside of an operation ground he would strike you as average just another officer

and in fact we had another officer at the same time he was pretty much quite disliked, who was junior to Tertutu. But when operations and missions like this happen, exceptional things go on, you get unexpectedly, you get these like heroes emerge from, from the group of whatever,

from the organization. And the unexpectedly become the perfect person at the perfect time for the perfect operation. And Tudel was that for that time. And interestingly, with Tudel, his, his regimental sergeant major, his right-hand Mahan, was also not liked, well, Tudel was like,

his RSM was not liked at all before that 2006 tour, not like as in despised. However, the pair of them together on that tour, they were perfect, the personalities were perfect, the way Tudel commanded was perfect, the way the RSM was just perfect for what was going on. Like anyone else, I think it had been a very different kettle of fish. We would have more casualties, more deaths.

We wouldn't achieve what we did, but they were perfect. So a tutel, I'd say on that. Yeah, he was our Roman. Solly, thank you very much. Did you guys ever refuse an order during combat or ever hear this? Hugh said he refused to shoot an enemy, and are you with his commander over this? Yeah, that's not, yeah, so I didn't refuse to shoot an enemy.

I would not have. Maybe not have done that. So the situation, that situation, Solie is referring to, is we were on high ground in Afghanistan. My team was on high ground. We were extracting. We were with another team. Actually, that was a joint mission with a US unit, actually.

We were extracting. We went for helicopters to come in, and I thought I spotted, so maybe 800 meters away, 900 meters away. I thought I spotted what we would call it dicker. I thought I spotted a local, or remember the Taliban. giving sigils with a mirror, basically signaling where we were

or something that's gone on to the Taliban, other people. I wasn't 100%. I was pretty sure he was signaling. This was a person, you know, a fighting age male, but on the younger side, I'd say maybe 12, 13 years old. And I reported this because I was there and I said reporting it back. I was talking because the team were behind me. I was talking it back.

and the commander of the other team that was away. It wasn't a sniper team. The other team that was with us told me to shoot the guy and shoot the kid, I should say. Well, I said no. He was senior to me,

but he wasn't my direct chain of command. And I said, that's the situation Solis referred to. I said no to that. It wasn't 100%, you know, and could I have killed him and got away with it? Yeah. Is that the right thing to do?

Would I be sitting here? You were talking about regrets, Dave, at the start of this. I would absolutely, something I'd absolutely regret. So it was the wrong, it would have been the wrong decision to do it. Now, question was, did I ever see anyone else do anything of that? No, I didn't, I didn't see anyone else doing anything like that. So refusing an order to shoot someone. It's pretty rare, it's pretty rare to receive an order to shoot someone.

Like, very rare. I've been told it once, and I've given the order one. Yeah. Apart from that, it's mostly reactive. Like, see the enemy shooting dead within the rules of engagement. So it's pretty rare. So I didn't see that off of anyone else. Thanks.

And if you guys hear our church just started upstairs, so we apologize for any background noise. But dance along with a tune if you know it. Sully, thank you. Was the ROE given to your units always fair? Hugh said units were using surveillance balloons to which hunt their own during firefights. Are we always fair? Ooh, that's a matter of perspective.

I think fair is an interesting word. No, I think the ROE were always, almost always, it was too much control. Yeah. And I suppose there's too much risk, almost always. And I say that because for most of the time, when I was in Afghanistan, on my first tour, we were operating on

429 alpha, which we would, you sort of colloquially described that as war-fighting R-O-E, see an enemy, armed enemy, you can kill them. I'm really generalising you, so someone's going to pull me apart

and say I'm war criminal, I haven't got the 429 alpha in front of me, but it was kind of the most relaxed version, and it was really rare for that to be issued. I was on it for most of, time in Afghanistan in the places I was, other units weren't. To answer the question, no, for the most part, they're not fair. They really hamper us in terms of what we can and can't do.

There were some, for most of the, most of the guys and girls in Afghanistan on the second and third tour, most of them were on a rule of engagement and said that even if you saw a Taliban fighter with a weapon in his hand, clearly identified as a Taliban fighter, with a weapon in his hand, you wouldn't be able to shoot him. you were not allowed to do it you had to wait till that weapon was pointed at you then you had to go through a certain procedure before he didn't put the trigger on him

which is just crazy and I understand I understand the reasons for having the ROEs like this but that it was a legacy follow or carryover from Northern Ireland Card Alpha for us as we call that rule of engagement was from Northern Ireland so not they weren't fair

but the problem is you've got to mitigate for idiots yeah you've got to mitigate for people who are fucking trigger happy and you've got to mitigate for people who don't understand the rules of engagement or don't have the brain process in power to be able to quickly think through those engagement whether they're right or wrong. Because they engage themselves mainly

if they don't know when they can and can't pull the trigger. But it is frustrating for those, for the majority of us who are quite capable of doing it. Yeah. Yeah, I know, because we've talked to like J-Tax who basically had to go through, you know, a 15-page document to call in, you know, to call in anirstrike.

Oh, you probably had to go through 15 layers. of command at one point. Yeah. So I thank you. Do you think you or your colleagues are owed anything for your their service? No, definitely not. No, no, no.

Ode anything? No. It's nice to get some gratitude sometimes. Mainly it's nice to not, it's nice to not get it completely ignored. When we returned from Afghanistan in 2006, there was nothing. It made it quite a difficult

reintegration. So on late later tools when it was kind of known what Afghanistan was like at that point, a unit would come back from Bino Cs for six months. They'd come back and they would have a big service. They get presented to the key to the city and all of these formalities and the recognition. And when we came back, we didn't have any of that. And it actually was actually very different for me again because I came back late later than everyone else. Three-powered already even back. I was stuck in Musa-Kala, came back a few weeks later. And I got picked up by a minibus in a commercial airport yeah because we came back in on um so no i don't think we rode anything at all and uh i think it's a mistake i think rode anything should does that mean that

the public shouldn't feel obligated to um obligated to be demonstrate gratitude maybe yeah i think the public should be obligated to do it or even consider it not demonstrate it but actually think okay people do a job and they are they are worth of our admiration. Yeah. You know, regardless of what you think of, regardless of what you think of what the military is doing in X or Y, Z, different place, be that Israel, be that Ukraine at the moment, be it Syria, be it anywhere else.

That's only a small part of it. The reality is that without the military, whichever country or in your military, without your military, then your country would not exist. And a stronger country would take it over and you would not be living in life you live now. Yeah. You know, here in the U.S., like we have, the VA, the Veterans Administration, we have the hospitals, who it's, it's, it can be very inefficient,

admired in bureaucracy and has its own issues, but it is an organization that is there for the care and treatment of veterans. I know that you guys have your like national health care. So is there anything like that for you guys over there? Is there anything that, where, where you are paid specific attention to for, like, post-traumatic stress or the issues, the veterans might find themselves? Yeah, they're a fledgling organizations, government departments that are doing it. They got the OVA, the Office of Veterans Affairs. There's a few fledgling organ, I say fledgling.

Fledgling in, yeah, they're relatively young, but also fledgling. And if they've been around for a while, they're not very well advanced. It's not great. Like you said, we have the advantage of the National Health Service. And a few things that have come in over the last five, ten years. As a veteran here, you'll get prioritized now. Okay. Health service, you can be, you know, you go for a, you book a doctor's appointment.

Then you can self-identify as a veteran if you want, and it can prioritize you. So that's good. But it's nothing like you guys have got over there. But I think that's a cultural difference, mainly. mainly but also probably a lack of appetite in spending money where there's no tangible benefit for the ruling party you know yeah I think if you could say hey do this thing you'll convert directly the votes for you then they don't do it but in reality they can't they can't predict that so they don't unfortunately um yeah sorry RS thank you very much um sniper is now is out now

on all digital platforms. So get yourself from Tom Berringer. Did you ever watch the Tom Berger? Yeah, years ago. Joe, I think the last time I watched out before I joined up, actually. Hey, sniper 10 is out with Chad Michael Collins. We've had him on the show. We'll have him back when Sniper 20 comes out.

Sully, thank you very much. Would you guys be willing to speak with your enemies, even those who killed people, knew. If he's not being recorded and no one's going to ever looking for him after. It's a good question. You know, I've got, so I mentioned Northern Ireland earlier and that's, so that, Solly you're talking about there is the Jewel patron, yeah. And I think I've mentioned to him before about the potential of interviewing a Northern Ireland, like a Northern Ireland. Yeah, yeah. Terrorist, Reform terrorists. And he's pointed

me towards a an Northern Irish terrorist who killed a bunch of people and expressed remorse and wrote to the family and apologized. I do that. I think I've got room in me for remorse and regret in terms of those kind of things. Now, interviewing someone who killed a mate of mine, I don't know.

I don't know about that. Yeah. I mean, I don't know about that. Probably a no. Yeah. Hard no. Yeah. Uh, Jack.

you have an opinion on that I mean if it's somebody who killed somebody I knew I mean that makes it pretty personal I mean I don't know if I'd be able to just overlook that yeah but but somebody who fought like let's say fought in Saddam Hussein's army against us yeah I'd interview the guy yeah

yeah yeah um sally uh thank you when is ex SAS Ben Griffin next coming on both your podcasts he claims the US used his unit to torture civilians. Who is this?

I don't know who that is. Is this an inside joke? No, no, no. Ben Griffin is a relatively well-known name over here in like pacifist circles. Ben was two-parra and then went to the S-A-S-A-S and he co-founded the UK arm of Veterans for Peace over here. And I think Veterans of Peace is started up in America, but he chaired Veterans for Peace over the year in the UK.

I know Ben is quite well known because he's done talks. Have you seen when they do speeches at the Oxford Union? Yeah, I've seen that. Yeah, yeah. So he's done a talk there about problems with our interventionist foreign policy and things like this. But he claims that he saw war crimes being committed by the SAS when he was serving with them in Baghdad, when he was out there with them in whatever year it was,

oh, three or four maybe. I interviewed him 2018 or 2019. Back when my views on things are very different then. Again, this is the advantages of talking to people long form. I think you form opinions much quicker. Like I probably would have to wait until I'm 70 or eight years old to form the opinions I hold now. But in that conversation, with him, he claimed that, and we locked horns on this, he claimed that in the British military, you could, in Afghanistan, just kill someone, anyone, just go and kill a civilian

and then you get away with it, and there'd be no reprimand from it, which is absolute nonsense. And it's nonsense in any unit, I think. There's a chain of commanding disciplinary procedure for a reason. And we get rules of engagement drilled into us for a reason, and we go through all, I don't know where you, we have the, over here, we have these like virtual training systems

where you'll be sat there in a, you know, with like a, a weapon, but it fires lasers and you'll watch a, you know, a scenario unfold in front of you. Really complicated scenario and a basic fire, it gives you a scenario where should you shoot the person or should you not, is it within our area? If you're not, it's really complex. You go through all the mental mathematics in your head, you got to go through to do it. We do that to ensure that we don't go killing people, shouldn't go kill him. And Ben thought differently, or thinks differently. Now, it was interesting with Ben Griffin is.

I highly recommend him as a guest, actually. Interesting with Ben is he's now no longer a member of Veterans for Peace. He now relaxes doing a very simple yet rewarding job up on an island off the coast of Scotland. He's still very much up for conversations. He's coming back in so we're going to revisit that conversation. I'm interested to go back and listen and see where my own opinions have changed. Yeah. Yeah.

Interesting guy. Sully, thank you very much. When will Jack and Dave appear on the H.R. podcast? Anytime you want, voice. Anytime you want. Yeah, whenever you're ready for us. Yeah, maybe an impersonal. I'll come over when we can do it. Even better.

That'd be amazing. Yeah. M. Corbyn, thank you very much. How can American Soft make it culturally acceptable to have a beer fridge like you find checks? Well, do you guys have beer fridges? We have, what, just generally, we have beer fridges, yeah. Where are we talking about specifically? I'm not sure.

I think he's talking about, like, in your unit, you know, does your platoon have a fridge of beers? And I don't want to- I don't want to shock anyone, but there are some American units where that's a thing. Yeah. Dee, did you see anything on the Patreon? No, there's nothing. All right. Hugh, one last thing, because as we were having this conversation, it got me thinking,

I feel like I recall a story about a guy. He was either a para or a Royal Marine that went and joined the IRA. I do not know that. That doesn't ring any bells? It was like way back in the 80s. It was before any of our time. No, I don't know that story. I can think around for you, though, if you want.

Oh, yeah. I mean, I think that would be a fascinating. story or a fascinating interview if the guy's still around. And then we have one. I'm a former two-parra bullshit blue. I'm like three-para-gungy green. You all know what I mean. Respect, always, and thanks for your service,

you. Yeah, so the battalions have their different, oh, thank you for that by there. The Italians have the different nicknames and mythical attributes. So three-parra, apparently, we're really grungry, which means really dirty. We never wash.

They'll bother it. this not never wash your uniforms never wash ourselves grungy three that's what you're referring to two para he's referring to a bunch of they're very straight they like their processes don't like the thing outside the box very much I'm joking I'm joking I'm just riding him up yeah one para

weird just odd odd odd odd people do odd things with broomsticks on the weekend when no one's looking Hugh where can people go to find a shower the best place is Charlie Charlie 1.com so yeah Charlie Charlie and then oh any dot com is the best place to go or just search for H hour podcast and you find

it anywhere. Okay. Yeah. Appreciate it. Yeah. Thanks for your time today, guys. I really enjoyed. Yeah. Thank you. We really enjoyed it too. We really appreciate you coming on. Yeah, awesome perspective. It's difficult being in the guest seat. I forget. It's very challenging. I actually find it comforting because I usually have to do the interviews. So when it's someone else's responsibility to have the questions and everything, it actually is a little relieving. I find. But next Friday, we will be back with John Kiriaku, a former CIA officer. Is he coming in studio, D?

No, he's going to be remote. Okay. So we will see you guys on Friday. Hi, on. Huh? Eyes on. Go check out Eyes on, our sister podcast with Andy Milburn and Jason Lyons. It is on its own separate channel now.

Search for it on YouTube. There's a link down in the description. So we'll see everyone Friday. Hugh, thank you so much for spending your evening with us, especially for you, it's like probably one in the morning right now, right? One third. It's been pleasure, so I'm not complaining. I appreciate it, man.

Thanks for making the effort. Cheers, guys. Stay safe. All right, we'll see all of you next Friday. Bye.