The book thing is really interesting. They obviously do a pretty good job in terms of making these jobs attractive, but even if approved by governments for publication, I'm not sure they're well received by those that still do the jobs.

I think Bravo 2 Zero is an example where it brought people to the services but was not wholly approved by them.

This is worth a listen from 15 mins. The other episodes are interesting because he's a bit of a lad......

https://open.spotify.com/episode/2EriZoXI1GwhgJnPqb322L?si=6A7Z3tnFTRaEdfWmsit-gg&utm_source=copy-link


I did say to a mate that there seems to be a risk going away with these guys 😂 Shangri-la in Nairobi, Sierra Leone and a couple of other hotels...... 😂

I knew that a friend of mine had a military background, but just found out recently that he was SAS. Looking back, he has dropped subtle hints about what he did but never came right out and said it. We were recently discussing boots and foot care and he showed me the remains of his feet, and explained what happened to them going through parts of "Selection". That led to a discussion about some of the things that they had to do (Pen y Fan sounds like not a lot of fun...).

I am quite sure that most of our other friends really don't know the extent of his prior service and training.

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Starting from scratch...

Landing on a small boy at night could be scary as hell. My worst (best) landing was in the pitch dark off the coast of Nova Scotia trying to land on a small reserve frigate in an H-2. I made it down, but the crew we swapped with ended up diverting to a shore base. We were very good at it, but then it really is our bread and butter, we would be non-functional if we could not land reliably on small decks. We were surprisingly lacking sometimes in other areas due to lack of budget though.

I flew H-3s in Desert Storm. Sometimes we forward deployed off of destroyers to be closer to the action. Since the Iraqis did not have any submarines we stripped out our sonar and ASW gear and put in a couple of M-60s. Mostly we carried around SEALs and looked for mines. We also did scouting missions.

We had no armor, self-sealing fuel tanks, or night vision goggles. Best we could do for sensors was a TOW missile sight hung by a bungie cord in one of the doors. So scouting sometimes involved going to check out an unknown contact at close range, and knowing that if it was hostile we would be blown out of the sky. (We did have chaff and flares sometimes, but they were the types to protect ships from anti-ship missiles, not us.)

We REALLY envied the stuff the Army guys had.