I looked at the cheese sandwich. They could hardly punish me by putting me in a worse stress position than they had already. They might drag me out and be a bit rough with me, but so what? At least I'd have a cheese sandwich and a mug of coffee down my neck.

I couldn't see any steam coming off the coffee, so I knew it was fairly warm and I'd be able to gulp it down.

Anyway, it was in a metal mug, and they tend to cool it down quicker. So I thought: f.u.c.king right.

I lunged forward and grabbed the food and drink.

The boy recoiled. Guards came bursting in, but they were too late to stop my feast. They blindfolded me and held me down.

The young guy, still being my mate, said, "Did you enjoy that?"

"I cannot answer that question."

I went into the next interrogation. It was the same routine, being picked up from the stress position, and by now I was really looking forward to interrogations because it was so painful against the wall or on the floor. It was the same two interrogators I had the very first time.

"You're a d.i.c.khead," they said. "We gave you the chance to help us; now you're going to pay for it. Get your clothes off."

I undressed.

"What's your number?"

"Two-four-four-zero-eight-eight-eight-eight."

"Right, now say it slowly.l I did, and I had to do it again.

Because of the training I knew to play on the injuries, looking like I was knackered, all that sort of stuff. I repeated my number for what seemed like hours, really slowly. Great, I thought; it took up more time, I was in a better atmosphere, rather than in a stress position in the holding area, and I wasn't being moved around every five minutes by the guards.

Then I was told to jump up and down on my toes, which was even better because I started to get warm.

They said, "We've had enough of you, you f.u.c.king idiot."

They walked out, and two women walked in. One was in ' her late twenties and looked very prim and proper in gla.s.ses. The other, who was in her forties, was wearing jeans.

"Take off your pants," they said.

I took them off.

"That's a bit small, isn't it?" The older woman laughed. "What are you going to do with that? Is that why you're a big, rough, tough soldier, to cover up your inadequacies? My little finger's bigger than that. Not going to impress many girls with that, are you?"

She turned to the younger one and said, "Would you do anything with that?"

"With what? I can't even see anything."

They were trying to find a c.h.i.n.k in my personal armor, but as far as I was concerned, everything they were saying was fair comment.

After all, it was freezing cold in the room; in the circ.u.mstances, even Errol. Flynn wouldn't have been looking his best.

I guessed everybody W'as learning about his own personality, his own strengths, his own weaknesses. I was certainly learning about mine. I had no trouble with the insults and abuse, but some people were starting to trip.

When I was in the stress positions, I heard people shouting, "f.u.c.k this!

I've had enough of this s.h.i.t!" Realistically we were having a rather nice capture, but physically doing it still wasn't nice at all.

I clung to the fact that this was an exercise and it would end.

I was taken for yet another interrogation. I was sat in a chair, and the blindfold came off. There in front of. me was a cup of soup and the training wing sergeant major.

He said, "Do you recognize me?"

I didn't say anything.

"Do you recognize me?"

I said jack s.h.i.t. I wasn't too sure if this was a ploy.

"Right, I'm telling you that now's the end of the exercise. Do you recognize me? If you say yes, that's fine, if you say no, we can just stay here until you do."

He was wearing a white armband; I remembered that we'd been briefed that that would signify the end.

"Yes, I recognize you."

"Drink the soup."

We had a debrief with the interrogators.

When it came to my turn, they said that I'd stuck to the big four, which was good. It had been a bad move, however, to make a grab for the coffee and the cheese sandwich.

"If it hadn't been an exercise, I wouldn't have done it," I said.

"I know that in real life there would have been repercussions.

But this was an exercise and I was hungry, so why not?"

"How were you feeling physically? Were you as exhausted as you gave the impression of being?"

"No, I was playing on the physical side."

"How many interrogations did you have?"

"Six."

Wrong. This was interesting. I was one interrogation out. And I had been held for thirty hours, not the forty that I'd thought.

"What about the interrogators? Was it obvious what they were trying to do? Were there any stages when you were worried about it?"

I gave it to them straight. Some of these people had been right f.u.c.kers. They'd done their job very well.

They were aggressive, there was aggressive handling, but we'd had to expect that. We were cold, but so what?

It was very demanding, physically and mentally, but at least we knew there was an ending. I'd have hated for it to have been real or to have gone on for very much longer.

The last big hurdle was over. We looked a state. We'd been out in the field for a week, and we had a week's growth. Everybody's hair was sticking up and tangled with twigs and straw. We had those really big, wide, bloodshot eyes; we were stinking. n.o.body in the camp gave us as much as a second look.

I had a shower and headed for the cookhouse and a great big plate of steak and chips. A couple of blokes were already back, and the others trickled in over the next twenty-four hours. All the stories were coming out, including one or two with unhappy endings. One bloke had been in a stress position when he felt his blindfold slipping down.

He knew that he stood a chance of getting f.u.c.ked off, purely because they would think he was actively pulling the blindfold down himself, so he ut his p hand up. Nothing happened. He stood up and sort of semitumed, and by now the mask was down. They binned him on the spot.

The argument was that he'd pulled his mask and broken the rules.

They f.u.c.ked up, and it was unfair. But then, no one said it would be easy.

In the pub the following night the Selection blokes compared notes.

Everybody had been of the same opinion about the others in their team and had wanted to spread out and get away.

Dave, one of the paras, said, "I got to a farmhouse, put an OP [observation post] on it, had a look around.

Everything seemed okay, so I went up under the window and I thought I'd just listen. The tv was on, and it sounded all rather nice; then I could hear loads of people talking. I got up and had a look through the curtains and it was the whole training team sitting there. I said to myself, 'I think we'll give this one a miss."' There was a long weekend off; on Monday morning we would carry on with our continuation training.

By now the training team had more or less got what they needed. We were starting to get a relationship, we were starting to talk about squadrons and things in general.

They opened up a bit more, but we still had to call everybody Staff apart from the squadron sergeant major, whom we called Sir. We weren't in yet.

There was a pub that used to put trays of sausages and French bread out on the bar on Sundays, so George and I went and had a few pints of Guinness and filled our faces out. We were walking down the road afterward, bored out of our heads, and decided to go around to see an ex-Green jacket who was in D Squadron. His wife used to work for Bulmer's, distributors of Red Stripe lager, and the four of us sat there all afternoon, chatting away, slowly getting p.i.s.sed.

After a few hours I announced that I was going to the toilet. I got to the top of the stairs and felt an ominous urge in the pit of my stomach.

I ran into the toilet, and projectile vomited all over the floor and walls.

Panic. I cleaned up as best I could, then fell down the stairs and into the front room.

"Well"-I beamed-"must be going."

In the morning I was in s.h.i.t state. I went around to D Squadron lines to see what had happened.

"b.l.o.o.d.y h.e.l.l!" he said. "She's gone ballistic!"

I thought I was severely in the s.h.i.t. I ran off and bought her a bunch of flowers and a box of chocolates. I went around to the house, hoping against hope that she wouldn't be in. I knocked on the door.

There was n.o.body at home.

I propped the gifts on the doorstep and pulled out a card from my pocket.

"So sorry about my terrible behaviour and all the ' inconvenience I must have caused you," I wrote. "I hope that one day you will forgive me and certainly promise that it will never happen again." Then I signed it, "OWmi'tsh all best wishes, George."

I telephoned Debbie and said, "I'm in! I reckon I've pa.s.sed!"

She was really pleased. I was really pleased. But the sad thing was that I was so engrossed in what I'd been doing that I didn't stop to think about what she'd been going through. She'd been stuck in Germany, unsure of whether I was going to pa.s.s or what the future might hold; she hadn't seen me for months, and all I'm doing is phoning her up and telling her how great I am. I was so selfish; she was getting two letters a month from me and maybe a phone call a week, and it was never to say, "How are you?" Maybe I didn't ask because I didn't want to hear the answer.

The idea of continuation training was to give us an introduction to the skills that would be needed once we got into our squadrons.

Our first introduction was to be to the CT (counterterrorist) team. We sat in the cla.s.sroom on the first day dressed in civvies. It was the first time I'd ever done a soldier's work in civilian clothes, and it felt a bit strange. The training team weren't going to be teaching us for this phase, we'd been told; it would be members of CRW, the counterrevolutionary warfare wing.

In came a bloke called Ted I knew from the Green Jackets. We'd always known him as Ted Belly because of the losing battle he fought in the inch war; now he was on the CRW. Ted was a tall, approachable c.o.c.kney with hair like straw. No matter what he did with it, his head looked like a bird's nest in a gale.

"Today we're going to learn all about the nine millimeter," he said.

"Anything you don't know, just ask and Uncle Ted'il tell you.

We'll have a day down here, and the rest of the week we'll be on the ranges. Maybe we'll have a few wagers-all right?"

The 9MM Browning pistol was extremely to the Regiment and underestimated by many outside, Ted said. It was an extremely effective and powerful weapon, easy to conceal, yet hitting at a surprisingly long range. The Regiment used it for VIP protection, counterterrorist and covert operations. On the counterterrorist team, everybody's secondary weapon was the pistol.

We had to learn every bit of theory there was to know about the Browning, as well as the stripping and a.s.sembling, all the technical details on what happened if a pin was filed this way, what happened if the trigger mechanism was slightly adjusted.

We learned how to hold the weapon correctly and how to stand correctly.

The method the Regiment used was totally different from the army's. It was based on combat experience, which the army hadn't got much of with pistols (I had fired one twice in my career). Ted taught us how to draw the pistol from various types of holster, how to draw it covertly when we had our jackets on, and even what sort of jacket to wear and how to wear it.

From different firing positions, we practiced until we could hit the target with both eyes open from thirty-five meters, then fifty meters, while pushing people out of the way in a crowd. We practiced from seven-thirty each morning until dark o'clock. We'd get a tea urn in the morning, pick up loads of scoff, and scream down to the range, eight of us having a really good time with the pistol.

I thought that as a sergeant in the infantry I'd know lots but found it was a vastly different world here. I guessed I was near the bottom of what would turn out to be a very steep learning curve.

"When you get back to the block," the instructor said, "practice your drawings in front of the mirror.

Don't worry, n.o.body will laugh. We all do it."

We were there for an hour after dinner, practicing in front of the mirrors in the toilets. Finally Ted came by with loads of boys and said, "What the h.e.l.l are you doing, you d.i.c.kheads?"

We looked sheepishly at the imaginary pistols in our hands while they took the p.i.s.s mercilessly.

On the final day Ted said, "Right, let's have a bit of fun then."

He got all the targets in and marked one of them with a circle the size of a tenpence, another with one the size of a c.o.ke can, then a larger one still. We had to fire at different timings: firing three rounds into the tenpence piece in five seconds at five meters, then back to ten meters, going back and back. We all put a fiver in at a time, and the winner took all.

Next we did some demolitions training with basic charges, saw some more of the squadron kit, and did a bit of signals work with the squadron radios.

"Wherever you are operating in the world, you will send directly back to Hereford," the instructor said.

"You'll have to learn a lot of antenna theory; it's not like in the films where they've got a radio the size of a cigarette pack with a little antenna and they start sending signals off to Katmandu. It doesn't work like that at all.

Depending on the frequencies and the time of day, you'll have to calculate the size of the antenna."

We had introductions to all the different departments, from the education center to the Regimental a.s.sociation; the only ones we didn't see were the "gray" ones tucked away that we were told we would only find out about later.

After three weeks it was time to go to Brize Norton to be para-trained.

It was one of those things that had to be done but that I couldn't really be a.r.s.ed about; I was itching to go straight to the squadron. The one consolation was the thought that the only way I was not going to get in now was if I broke my neck-or blotted my copybook.