Jungle Training.
‘BECAUSE ALL OF us who had qualified for the endurance test had been forced off the mountains by the weather and had survived, training-wing decided that we could all carry on with continuation training, then complete endurance at the end of the combat survival phase. The remaining twenty-two students, including two officers or ‘Ruperts,’ as they were dubbed prepared to leave for the small Central American state of Belize.
The SAS has probably more experience in the tropical rainforests than any other serving unit in the British Armed Forces. The modern SAS Regiment evolved from the Malayan Scouts in 1953, and it has been involved in jungle warfare somewhere, from Malaya to Borneo and Belize, ever since. The skills that have been handed down through the Regiment have been updated continually over the last fifty years. Now it was my turn to learn. I had never been to the Tropics; for me this was a whole new adventure. While we were waiting to leave the UK, we spent the time learning SAS patrol skills, which are completely different from standard infantry skills. Infantry works in units of ten men called sections: three sections make a platoon, four platoons make a company, and four companies make a battalion. An infantryman is usually supported by about eight hundred men. In the SAS, the smallest unit is a patrol. Four men make a patrol, four patrols make a troop, and four troops make a squadron. A patrol is supported by a man at the other end of the radio.
All our drills were learned as teams of four, with the occasional grouping of five men to absorb the odd straggler. SAS patrol tasks are usually limited to reconnaissance, sabotage and laying A-type (automatically fired) ambushes. With only four men, direct confrontation with the enemy is avoided at all costs, so most of our jungle drills involved learning ways to lay down a lot of continuous fire while trying to break contact with the enemy (or running away, as it's more commonly known).