SAS - Are You Tough Enough - Desert
Just Deserts?
Greg Clarke / 22.02.2004
It was a long journey to Windhoek in the centre of Namibia where we spent a couple of days acclimatising, before setting off to our final destination. When the sand covered road eventually ended we transferred to some open 4 x 4 transporters and waited. All of a sudden we were off across the sand dunes with a helicopter, quad bikes and cameras everywhere. The guys on the quad bikes were carrying rifles and looked rather serious. Reality TV was starting to become rather dramatic.
Blisters
We arrived at camp with our rucksacks laid out before us, lined up and waited. The helicopter landed and out stepped Eddie Stone looking rather cool and menacing. There were several other SAS men, or ‘staff’ as we had to call them, wandering around being nasty to people. One of them poked me in the stomach to see if there was any muscle under my layer of flab and fortunately there is. At one point we were instructed to remove our sun glasses but one of the lads didn’t and had them ripped off his face.
We were ordered to strip and put on our uniforms. Before leaving the UK we were issued with army desert boots with a rock hard plastic sole to allow us to get used to them, but I added a cushioned insole and avoided wearing them. I knew they would be trouble.
Eddie started with a quick interview with each of us picking up on how we described ourselves in our application forms … I should never have described myself as lazy. We then moved straight into some exercises running up sand dunes, doing press-ups and carrying poles. This was not too bad even with the heat but my problem was that I didn’t have the courage to put my hand up and say ‘please staff can I go to the toilet’. I just made it on time to discover that my digestive system was in turmoil. We settled into our tents in teams of four with one female in each team. The tents were permanently open one side just enough to catch the wind at night.
Next up was a test of the boots. We were taken off in the 4 x 4’s again across the dunes to a road and set off in our teams at minute intervals instructed to catch the team in front. This we never did but we did close the gap. After about half an hour we were turned back and Eddie told us to make every effort to catch the team ahead of us. He stopped alongside us several times to keep the pressure going. We ran some of the flats and the down hills only stopping for a few seconds to take a stone out of our boots. Eddie was not just testing us on not just how fast we could run but on how well we stuck together as a team. The pressure was put on the faster runners to split the team and go on ahead but we resisted this and stuck together. Unfortunately, when we returned the soles of my feet felt like they had been beaten by cricket bats and a small blister had appeared on the ball of each.
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