An account of the training of a special force soldier.

The day starts as normal up at 4am, we are used to it after all we are soldiers and we have been doing this for quite some time. The trouble is we are not just any old soldiers we are training to be special force soldiers, and as I climb wearily out of my bunk, I think to myself how much longer can this torment go on. It has been eight weeks now and there are only 20 men left, to day I know that there will be at least five more that either will be binned or will drop out. I think to myself I hope one of those will not be me, but who knows what this day will bring.

We gather in the briefing room to await the delights of the day, we all have inkling of what to day is going to be about, and true to form it is what we thought. We are going to be given a head start and then we are going to be hunted. The idea is to stay ahead of the hunting pack for as long as you can, live of the land, lie up in the day and travel by night, we can’t take anything with us, no weapons, no compass, no food, no water, just the clothes that we stand in. we are told that if for some unexplained reason we are not captured then after a certain number of days we are to come back to base and give ourselves up to be interrogated as if we had been captured.

We are given a code word so that when the head sheds think we have had enough and have passed the course we will know that the interrogation as ended. As usual the day is cold rainy and miserable, and we all set of in different directions, we know that if we just find a farmhouse and just hole up in one of the barns we will fail the course and be binned to our mother regiment which is in my case the Parachute regiment, doing that is a mortal sin the aim of this course is to see if you can evade capture and live of the land doing it and then when captured to see if the interrogators can break you, everyone as a breaking point they wont to see where yours is.