![]() ![]() They don’t care as much about how good you look doing it, just how quickly you can learn. Being in the infantry, I was working with weapons every day, so I was able to get dialed in quicker than most. There are a lot of people that try out for the selection who didn’t have the weapons experience that I did. By the end of the month, our group had gone from 220 down to 24 people.įollowing that you move on to weapons systems. The guys who haven’t prepared enough or don’t physically have what the mission is going to require. The guys doing a bit of a fantasy roleplay with the selection and don’t have the true desire to succeed. That experience is meant to get rid of all of those guys who think that they are James Bond. Depending on the weather conditions and what season it is, you have to get it done some time between 20 to 24 hours. The last day they have you do a specialized endurance hike 64 kilometers over the mountains. That repeats for 31 days, and it is the first true test of your mental and physical resilience. They just hand you your weapon and a pack that weighs somewhere between 35 and 58 pounds, then tell you to get moving. You don’t know ultimately where you are going or for how long you will be trekking. Then they call out your name and give you the first coordinate that you have to get to. They hand you a map and a compass to figure out where you are. Every day for a month they drove us out to a spot in the Black Mountains in Wales for a daily pilgrimage. The first month is purely testing your physical and mental stamina. They do two of them a year, one in the summer and one in the winter.ĭuring my selection, they started with 220 people at the beginning of the process. They mail you a date when you can come around for one of their selections. This is something that you put in for, and the process is seven months long. There are these urban myths that you are specially selected, but that is not the case. That was when I decided to try for selection into the SAS. During that time I was being deployed to Northern Ireland to deal with that unrest, and I worked my way up to platoon sergeant. I quite liked it after awhile, and ended up serving eight years in an infantry battalion. But it turned out because I went through an infantry junior leaders program, I was in for six years at least. I thought I had only signed up for three years. I first was placed in the infantry, just after my 17th birthday. I guess they were in Cyprus, but we had no idea where that was, not that it mattered. They showed us this recruitment video and I remember being in awe at the scene where helicopters were flying around the beaches with their doors open waving at the girls. I was getting in trouble in my youth, and I was put in this special program for rebellious kids. I originally joined the military service to get out of juvenile detention. ![]()
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