22 Special Air Service Operator | Robin Horsfall | Ep. 237

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Welcome to episode two hundred and thirty seven of The Team House. I'm Dave Park. Jack could not be here tonight. UH. We welcome our guests UH former two para and twenty two sas Operator Robin Horsfall. Uh. Robin, thanks for being with us tonight. Great to be Dave, great to be here. Yeah, and we know it's late, so we will we will try and turn and burn on this and so you don't step until four am your time. So Robin, you know, uh, so Robin.

Amongst other books, you know, the book that I read was Running Scared, which is about your childhood, about your time and the para, uh, the sas, you know, a lot of fascinating things. One of the things we always like to ask our guests is about their origin story, and you cover quite a bit of that in your book. Can you tell us a little bit about your childhood, exposure to the military and then what had eventually led you to the military. Yeah, the book's actually called Fighting

Scared. I'm sorry. Yeah, yeah, get your mistakes in early. That's the that's the idea. And yeah, I was. I was born in nineteen fifty seven, twelve years after the Second World War. My mother was seventeen years old when I was born. My father was in prison, and I never had a father until I was seven years old, when my Michael Jeffrey Horsfull married my mother and adopted me and gave me his name.

My stepfather had no experience of children and at the age of seven. I had had no experience of fathers, and his method of controlling me was and beat me into silence. And I often write that he stole my voice. We took it away from me. When you when you beat someone into silence, you take away their ability to negotiate, to laugh. It's very difficult for them, for them to make friends. And so I had had a

quite a difficult childhood from that personal sense. But I found my escape with going out with my pals and disappearing from home, going fishing, riding my bicycle, keeping away from the house, and trying to avoid school as well. When my parents' marriage started to fall to pieces after about seven years,

I was fourteen years old and I was failing at school. But in nineteen seventy two, the school leaving age in the UK was fifteen years of age, and at age of fourteen, I walked into a military recruiting office and said I'd like to join the army and they said how old are you? I told them they said, you're too young, but to fill these forms in and we'll give you some tests for next year. So I did the

tests and I wanted to join the Royal Army. Medical Corps. I wanted to be a medical technician, and I ended up in the Parachute Regiment as what we called an infantry junior leader, training to be a non commissioned officer of the future. And I stayed in that system for two years and three months, and before I was eighteen, I became a member of the Parachute Regiment. And what was that like at the time, You're fifteen, sixteen years old and you're in the Parachute Regiment, right, yep, yep.

I was in the Infantry Junior Leaders Battalion, but we all had our regimental badges the units we were going to go to when we were seventeen and a half, and it was very much a military college system. You continued your education, you were trained to be soldiers. You were given adventure training, you were given leadership training, you were given you got up at six o'clock every morning. You were busy until ten o'clock at night. You had no

time to actually feel sorry for yourself. You had to live with in twelve man rooms with a bunch of tough lads from the backstreets of all the cities in Britain, and you learned to live and cooperate with one another as a team, and gradually you were moved up through the system and learned to take

command and take control. So by the time I was seventeen and a half, you know, I'm sure being an American you've heard of Malcolm Gladwell, And Malcolm Gladwell wrote Tipping Point where he says, you know, you do ten thousand hours of anything, you'll you'll be an expert. But by the time I was seventeen and a half, I had three thousand hours of soldiering

under my belt before I even joined my unit. So it was a really really good foundation, and it gave me mail mentors and role models and masculine guidance, some good, some bad. That prepared me well to be a to be a top infantry soldier. And so at seventeen and a half, is your transfer to the actual forces? Is that? Is that upon like an age or is it like a graduation from their secondary education? How does

that work? Yeah, it's it's both. It's you reached the age of seventeen seventeen and a half, I was a little older, and you automatically pass out, you graduate, and you you then go immediately to your to your chosen units. With mine was the parachute Regiment, and you go through their preparation policies, you know, So going to the parachute Regiment, you then go through the training process with them again. But we were very well,

very well prepared for that. We were extraordinarily fit. We knew the weapons, we knew the techniques, we could do that. We could do the instruction almost as well as the instructors. The only step up was in the levels of aggression. Aggression was encouraged because what goods a soldier if you won't fight, and your primary role as an infantry money is to fight. If you can't fight, then you waste your time. It doesn't matter how

many wonderful skills you have. If you won't fight, then you know you shouldn't be there. So you were encouraged to fight amongst yourself as much as anything else and sort your problems out and build that kind of unique camaraderie that comes between very very masculine and tough men. But you have to you have to, you have to really take your courage in your hands and step up to the plate and play the game. And of course there's the parachuting part

as well, which that ages is a real challenge. You know, you you are choosing to trust your equipment and out of an aeroplane and trust that that equipment will save your life and the first time as well as you will know as well as I do, it's an extraordinarily feat of courage and there's a smile on your face for the rest of the day. Having done it once, it's not too difficult to carry on and do it again. Yeah, what now was the peers? Was that a place that other people could

go to, other men could go to right after boot camp? Yeah, they could transfer there from other units in the British Army, or they could they could join straight from civilian world. In my intake, we had just over fifty men, and forty eight of them were former junior soldiers. There were only about five or six that were from the civilian world. So and out of that, out of that fifty four I think it was, forty seven actually passed and one of the junior sold one of the junior soldiers.

Two of the junior soldiers actually got held back and one failed, so yeah, and two got held back through injuries parachuting injuries. Was there a challenge with integration with these people who had come from the civilian world that had no experience at all. No, I don't think so. I think we were inclined to help them. They didn't have as much experience as us. So you know, you just you just play to your strengths. They would have

had difference, they would have had different strengths. You know, everybody in a team has a bad day, and everybody in a team has a strength. And you know the strength might be that you can carry more weight, but you can't drive a truck and so on. You know, you can, you can, you can do astro navigation. You were SMI guy, you what you know what people might call a geek, but you have your value. The guy over there who's a little bit tougher and harder than everybody

else, that's his value. There's a big, strong guy who can dig trenches faster than anybody else foxholes as you call them. Everybody works together. And then at this point in time, what was the parih's mission in the world. What were they set up and designed for? Well, you are

a parachute paratrooper. I love the piece in Band of Brothers where you've got the eighty second Airborn going into Bastone in the Second World War and the infantry retreating that take the ammunition off them and going off into the dark, and somebody shouts, you know, don't go up there, you're going to be surrounded. And the repliers were paratroopers were supposed to be surrounded. And that's a that's a that's a wonderful cool americanism that I really really love to repeat.

You are trained to go. A job of a paratrooper is to drop behind enemy lines and hold the ground until the infantry and the main army catch up with them, and to distruct enemy enemy communications and forces behind their front lines. And you know it's so we're supposed to be surrounded. Yes, we're also supposed to be the stormtroopers of the British Armed Forces. You know, we believe we're young. We're usually between the age of eighteen and twenty

three. We believe we're immortal. We believe that we can do anything in the world, and if we can't, then we end up dead and we carry on. We have a few drinks for our friends and then we carry on. It's a crazy world with a crazy sense of humor, especially the British sense of humor, but it works. And what was going on in the world at this point in time, like what types of things were the British Army and military involved in now predominantly at that time you're talking about the

nineteen seventies. I went to the Parachute Regiments as an adult soldier in nineteen seventy four and we were heavily committed on the streets of Northern Ireland where we were patrolling and we were standing as peacekeepers between two religious groups, the Protestants and the Catholics, who were trying to murder one another, and things were escalating and we were sent there to support the police and enable them to maintain

law and order. As time developed, through bad politics, through the imposition of internment, which is trial imprisonment without trial, then things broke down. The Catholic community regarded the soldier as being on part of the opposition, and we ended up with a group called the Provisional Ira who then started to kill soldiers as well as as well as their religious opponents as well, and it

became a long term war which lasted thirty years. Can you tell us you know, Northern Ireland is something that's sort of faded into history for people who are not interested in history, and as you mentioned before the show, even some of the history that's out now gets it wrong. Can you sort of give us the run up and why this was going on in Northern Ireland.

Well, the people of Ireland as a whole, especially the Catholic population, fought a war of independence in the early twentieth century and eventually that came to a negotiated peace where partition was agreed between the North and the South. A small part of the north of North of Ireland was allocated to remain part of the British state, the United Kingdom under the under a Protestant majority, and then there was an open border, and below the open border was established a

Republic of Ireland or error, and that republic still exists. So people who imagine that Ireland is was occupied by British forces during the nineteen seventies and eighties have got it completely wrong. Northern Ireland was part of the United Kingdom. It had a mixed population of Catholics and Protestants who had political and religious enmity, and so nobody was occupying anything and the troops were there initially to keep

the peace and to prevent people. They actually prevented successfully prevented a civil war in Northern Ireland. And as you mentioned, and there were a number of different and fashions in the area at that time. Correct. Yeah, the like all terrorist groups, as they get bigger, they tend to break in,

they tend to descree and break into different factions. So we had I don't want to get the titles wrong, but we had the Official IRA, the Provisional IRA, and several other breakoff groups from that that actually killed each other as much as they killed their enemies at times. And then you had the Protestant groups predominantly led by the the UDA, and those divisions sadly still

exist. And although there's there's a reduction, huge reduction violence in Northern Ireland, these problems still simmer beneath the surface because it's very difficult when both political factions get their boat from that division for them to actually come together. Because when people come together and the enmity disappears, they're going to have to start

talking about housing and economy and jobs and more important things. But all the time they can keep people divided into two groups, then they guaranteed their political power and their votes boy, we've never seen that in the last ten years. So what so was it mostly because not all of these groups we're targeting the British military, but some of them were, especially on please tell yeah. Yeah, well, in the early years, they were targeting the populations

of the other religious group. So the Catholics were attacking the Protestants. Protestants attacking the Catholics and or at least the loyalists and nationalists. But it gets complicated when he started to use those terms. So and they were they were killing huge numbers of people. They were blowing up houses, blowing up pubs, blowing up schools with children in, knocking down people's front doors, and machine gunning people in the hallways of their houses. It was absolutely a criminal

nightmare. And so the soldiers weren't there to prevent that from happening. And the Catholics in the early years built no go areas, they built barricades across their enclaves because they were a minority group and they were actually really demanding civil rights and equality which was being denied to them. You know, you had similar stories when you go back to Martin Luther King Jr. And the issues that you had with racial discrimination in America. Well, the Catholics in Northern

Ireland were in some ways in the same situation. They were denied votes, they would deny property, they would denied jobs, and so they tended to be the poorest people in the society as well. So they marched for civil

rights, and they got attacked for those marches. But things moved on from that and it became it became a long term conflict where the soldiers were in the middle getting attacked by both sides, but predominantly from the provisional Ira, who killed an awful lot of soldiers and killed an awful lot of policemen as well as and they never ever released any prisoners. So if they caught us,

they killed us, and they tortured us first. And and as you guys there as peacekeepers, obviously, as a human being, feelings get involved. And you know, if one of your guys get swrolled up, captured, tortured, you're you're not likely to look upon the people who did it, or people associated with them favorably. Did so, did did any parts of the British military start looking at this that they were the allies of the Protestants there, or that did they get heavy handed, like how how did

that work? In the early years, I think it was nineteen seventy one, an incident took place in Londonderry which was nicknamed Bloody Sunday, where thirteen

member thirteen Marches Catholic Marches were shot by members of the Parachute Region. There's a lot of stories, that's been a lot of investigations over thirty years, and my personal opinion, and it's the opinion of many of my colleagues, is that a communist system was used whereby the crowd was inflamed and marching, and from behind the crowd, certain terrorists opened fire with a view to causing the military to open fire in return, and knowing that it was going to

cause civilian deaths and then they could blame the armed forces for those deaths. That's still under question. People will disagree with that opinion. But one of the terrorist leaders, Martin McGinnis, before he died, actually admitted that he was the first person to open fire on that day, but nobody wants to

talk about that particular fact and it's on record, you know. So I've actually been involved with the Northern Ireland Veterans movement and led it to the last eight years and we have a new legacy bill going through Parliament in Britain. And I've actually volunteered to be a commissioner, a non executive commissioner on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, because in spite of my long term commitment there, I did five tours of Northern Ireland. I actually understand a lot of the

history. I sympathize with the situations of both sides, and the victims of it were mainly the civilian population and the security forces in fighting scared. See, I got it right that time in fighting scared. Your preface or your first chapter is basically first kill or you know it's it's the first time. Yeah, first kill. Can you tell us about that incident? Like you're was this your first firefighter of just the first time that you were engaged closely

with it with an enemy. It wasn't the first fight fight I was in, but it was the first one. It was a very good one to open the book with. Yes, because it's a hook. It's a hookahok. But I was very careful with it because I didn't want to identify the people concerned in that incident, the victims in that incident, because that makes

it a personal issue with people who might still be alive to day. And although it's a political issue and a military issue that took place a long long time ago, I did not wish to identify exactly where it was and when it was. So there's a little bit of misdirection in that story as well. Now when you talk about the victims, you're talking about the family that

the terrorists killed prior to your engaging these terrorists. Were you, guys, Was that just a routine patrol or like blocking point for you guys, or did you know that this this event that happened. No, it was it was a vehicle checkpoint. We were out on a routine patrol and they just happened to come our way. And by the time they came our way, we'd been alerted to the fact that this particular vehicle with these gunmen in was heading in our direction, and you know, they opened fire, We returned

fire, and they died, and that was it. Were incidents like those, you know, common for the Paris there, for the peacekeepers there, where you have these vehicle checkpoints, for vehicle control points, and armed you know, these armed terrorists come up on the checkpoint. They weren't common because you know, the terrorists would have people out on the ground identifying where you

were. I mean, you set up immediate VCPs and an immediate vehicle checkpoint, and then you'd move it and you'd go and set it somewhere else. So you'd put them up very very very quickly and removed them very very quickly, so A so that they didn't know you would be there if they were trying to escape from committee a crime. And B so you didn't stay there

too long. It became a target toward them, so you know, But no, such incidents were quite rare, although in in my five tours three with the Parachute Regiment, I got shot at three times, and I got and I laid on a bomb once, I laid on an improvised explosive device once, hopefully something I would never have to do again, and I didn't. So you know, you did. You didn't have regular daily combat, but you were a target every single day when you went out of the barracks

and patrol the streets. You were waiting to be shot at right real quick rather And if you excuse me, I just need to give a shout out to our sponsor today, which is re Medical. Let's take a moment to tell you about a sponsor, REMA Medical. We know how difficult it can be to be at to get accurate disability ratings and the proper benefits from the VA. Despite your best efforts and multiple doctors visits connecting new or worsening disabilities

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mean, also find her on Instagram. She's gott amazing art. We love it. Uh. Robin betthew thank you so much for your patients. So what you know you mentioned the the improvised explosive device. What were the types of because we know car bombs were a big thing in Northern Ireland back then. What were some of the other challenges when it came to improvised explosive devices? And why did you lie down on one? Ah? Well, I was on a patrol and we were going into a bar with the other.

There were two patrols. One was going into a bar to do some questioning and our patrol was to lay down an open ground and cover them. It was dark. It was January nineteen seventy seven, and I laid on the ground. It was late in the evening, about eleven o'clock at night, and I rested the magazine of my rifle on the ground, and instead of

resting on some grass, it scraped on something metallic. So I pushed away some of the grass to see what it was, and it was a galvanized bucket with a taped on cardboard lid, buried half into the ground with the open side facing a post office wall which was off to my left. And so I realized what it was immediately and jumped up and ran around the corner

and trolled. Told my patrol commander, and a couple of hours later we got the amunition technical officer to come in and he took it to pieces and there was twenty pounds of co op explosive, two ounces of franjis and an electric detonator and two hundred meters of wire leading off into an area called the turf lodge, and they tried to initiate it, but because of the cold and icy weather, whatever the initiator was, it didn't have enough power to

set off the device, and so it was a successful, a successfully disarmed bomb, and I got congratulated for my performance of running away. What were the other types of ads and how would they use them? Because we think a lot about ads now in Iraq ens but these have been tools of terrorists for a very long time. Yeah, I think the Provisional ira led the

world in developing improvised explosive devices. They got an awful lot of training from the Soviet Union and from the Libyans under Colonel Gadaffi, and they developed explosive devices. Predominantly their favorites were with cars, but they would they would use sticky devices like napalm in small in small devices put down little alleyways and pathways. They would put land mines in small gaps between which you were taught not to go through. You always climb over a fence rather than go through a

gate. You were taught to keep your eyes open for anything put suspicious. You never picked up what seemed to be a lost piece of military equipment because the chances are it was booby trapped. Everything was potential booby trap. Everything outside of your barracks was a potential booby trap. So you were constantly aware of that. But the biggest ones. You know, they would have supersized three tons of explosive in the back of a large truck and blow the hell

out of the inner cities, which they used to do. It didn't. These things didn't just place and take place in Northern Ireland. They took place all over the British mainland. In They killed civilians in Glasgow, in Birmingham, in London, in Manchester. They even killed serving soldiers and their families in Germany. So this wasn't limited to the conflict zone it was it was

all over the United Kingdom and anywhere that British soldiers served. So I when I when I was with the Special Forces, we used to work undercover in northern civilian clothes, so identities were secret because of the Irish threat, and our families at home were also targets for terrorists as well, so we had

to be extraordinarily careful about who knew who we were in those days. And that mythology of putting a brick across your eyes and nobody knowing who the hell you were carries on today in spite of the fact that that threat no longer exists, right right, So can you give us a little sense of especially again, we focus a lot on the global war on terror here, but you're fighting in a civilian population that already looks like you, they talk like

you. They might have a different religion, the Catholic or Pride cent but but at any given time in that population center, you might come under fire from any location. You might get hit from a bomb. Like, how how do you guys manage to exist in that world without I don't know, without just getting very dark about things, you know, how do you manage

to maintain humanity in that type of world? Well? I think we were dehumanized by our training in many ways, but we were also extraordinarily well disciplined. So should should we anytime break the law, then we were taken to task for it by the military police and by our own leaders and commanders as

well. So although we had to be really really strong and determined to do our job well, we also had to stick within the laws of the United Kingdom because we were in our own country, sure, which that made it frustratingly hard at times, but it also meant that we could hold the moral high ground rather than anywhere else. And of course mistakes were made, and people are people, and some of us did the wrong things at times, but it wasn't policy, and it certainly wasn't the norm soldiers went out on

the ground. They would go out on two to four our patrols in four or five man groups. We would patrol and we would monitor the area. We would stop and question people, stop and question cars, and hopefully return back to our barracks for sometimes a two hour sleep, and then get back out on the ground again. Some of us would be on standby. It was a four month tour. You'd come home and then six months later you'd go back and do another tour. But my recollection of it that most of

the time I loved it. I enjoyed being a soldier. That's what I've been trained for some the age of fifteen. Why wouldn't I want to be there with the toughest men, as sons of bitches in the world who were older than me were leading me. I remember one particular night, one of my patrol commanders, my Isaacs, a Welshman, we got shot at in the dark, and before I could even react, he had run straight towards

the sound of the firing, and we just followed him. And that's the kind of leadership you had, and it wasn't a case of old take cover, we're being shot at. He went straight at them and they ran.

We had another firefight across the I think was the Anderson's Down Cemetery, and again the IRA opened from a block of flats in the turf lodge and the guys just opened fire and did fire a maneuver between the gravestones across the and the terrorists panicked and left the weapons behind and legged it because they were so shocked by that response we had. But after after a few years, the terrorists used to move out of areas that we had been given as our patrol

area and wait until we'd gone before they came back. So's the what were the two parents. Were they there on the unit in you know, doing those patrols or were there multiple units? No, No, there were At times there were thirty thousand soldiers in the province. And you know, you're talking about a province that's not as big as New York State. So we're

the population of about five million people. So we had soldiers in every you had a company in, you had a battalion in every area of Belfast and every area of London area and you had other battalions in the countryside where which it used to be called Bandit country, where it was very, very dangerous to travel anywhere in a in a motor vehicle. You either went by a helicopter or you walked, because a second you got in a vehicle, the chances are you were going to get blown to pieces. So it was it

was. My last tour was in across McGlen in South Elmark and patrolling the border between the Republic and the North of Ireland, and which was called Bandit country. And again out with my comrades, out on the ground doing real soldiering, patrolling, getting down in defensive positions at night, trot getting up before first night, patrolling again, stopping, making a making a brew, having a quick something to eat, patrolling and looking for the enemy. And

it was my job, and it was a thrill. And i've I have, I have rose tinted memories of an awful lot of it with great guys. Sure, so you did three tours, four months each, and then what brought the sas onto you like? What brought that into your review or

when did you start considering that? Well, I went to a lecture in the Depot the Parachute Regiment and older shop when I was twenty years old and listened to members of the Special Air Service give a lecture, and in that lecture they said, don't really bother company until you're twenty five to twenty seven years old, because you know that's the average as of the guys here.

But my platoon was called the Vigilant Platoon, which was a guided missile section, and we were like the wild bunch of the Parachute Regiment, very independent, very lacks discipline, but very a hell of a lot of soldiering. And they disband did us, because the new missile milan was coming in, going to the anti tank platoons, and so they didn't need our platoon anymore. So they said, look, you can't go anywhere you like. And I said, that's great, I'll go back to the second Battalion the Parachute

Regiment, two PARA. And they said that's fine. And then they changed their mind. And if you promise something to somebody and you change your mind, you're an ass right. Right. On the other hand, if you say if you say no to somebody and change your mind, you're a hero, right. But they changed their minds, and I was deeply offended and upset about this because they were going to put me in I've been a soldier three years now we're going to put me back into a one par of rifle

company where people younger than me were going to be senior to me. And I wasn't going to tolerate this, so I knew. I said, well, I know that's something you can't stop me from doing, and just to cock a snooter authority, I went to the battalion clerk and volunteered to go to the SAS and there were there's a guy in the back of the office who would the Yorkshireman and Yorkshiman talk like this, and he said, I don't know why you're doing that. All the story said, you're far too

young. You'll be back with your tail between your legs, your wanker, and but I volunteered and he was nearly right because the first time I tried tried essay A selection, I didn't pass, but they kept me on because they thought I had potential. And four months later I took it and passed. And it's nothing like the movies. It's nothing like the TV nonsense that

people see, say a selection last a year. The first the first month is in the mountains of Wales, where where the final week, the final five days is the equivalent of five marathons over mountains in five days carrying weight alone, and the final marches forty miles. Do that, you go on

and you do continuation training, most of it in the jungle. If you pass the jungle phase, you do a combat survival instructors course the final week where you're chased by a battalion across countries and you have to escape and get to targets. And then you if you're not already a paratrooper, you'd do a parachute training and then you join your squadron on probation and then in the next six months you have to learn a personal skill and the troop skill.

My personal skill was as a paramedic, so I got there in the end, and my troops skill was as a mountaineer. And then at the end of twelve months, providing the guys like you, you're you're you're actually qualified, and you're allowed to stay for another two years before you're assessed again. That's intense. Can you tell us a little bit about the first time you did it? And you know how how you failed or why you think you may have failed. Yeah, I was in the first month, and I

was in the test week phase. And I got to the four of the five the fourth of the five days, and it was wet. It was I was alone, and I had these two massive, great ulcers on my back where my burg and my rucksack frame had rubbed two big holes in the back, and they were bleeding down the backs of my legs. And I started to think about the forty mileer that was going to come the next day, and and I realized that I wasn't ready, I wasn't up to it.

And I returned to the previous checkpoint and said, you know, I'm voluntarily withdrawing. And there was a medic there who treated my back, and I prepared all my equipment to return to return to my battalion. The following morning, I got called into the office said, look, you know you're young. We think you've got potential. Would you like to stay This would have been September nineteen seventy eight. Would you like to stay until January?

You can help out with the guys who are doing their continuation training, and you can prepare yourself better, and in January I started the process again and that January nineteen seventy nine was one of the coldest januaries in Britain for over fifty years. And of a fifty six of us that started, eight of us actually passed and six of those six of those eight were from the parachute regiment. Wow now, and we had one person die on it as well.

Really was that I can't remember. I know you you got lashmaniasis, and that's something that did I think that you know troops who undergo like tough training, like everybody's seen that happen once or twice. Can you tell her? Did you get it that first time? I got it during my jungle

training. On the second I went on a selection that I passed, and that was in Belize and Central America, and leashmaniasis cutaneous leashmaniasis is quite common down there, and you get protozoan carried by a sand fly and it creates an ulcer which eventually eventually heals up. But the leashmanias that I got, leashmaniasis that I got was brazilianis, and brazilianis leashmaniasis is far more serious.

It starts with the same ulcer, but then it starts to metastasize across the body and then it'll go away and then up to ten to twenty years later or re emerge and destroyal the mucous membranes in your bodies in the same sort of symptoms of syphilis, and you'll die. So there I was, and I didn't tell anybody. I thought, well, maybe I've got it, but I'm not going to tell anybody. I'm going to finish selection first. And I finished selection and then I ended up in hospital for three months getting

an antimonial drug which eventually cured it. Yeah, yeah, so that that's that's right, because it's it's sort of a tropical disease, right, I'm trying to remember, h yeah, yeah yeah. So your second time, so you you made it through the forty miler, you did all that, and then what was the rest of the training like, because I don't know if while you were in the Paris you did like the jungle training and things like that, but what was the training like that you went to compare to

what you did while you're with the Paris. Almost almost all of my training with the Parish Regiment was North European training. Yeah, so a North European training is cold and wet, so predominantly cold and wet. Cold and dry is easy. Cold and wet is the hardest, you know, it really is. I mean you go, you go, people go somebathing when it's twenty below. If there's no wind, you know, it's just this do and the snows on the ground. It's glorious and they go ski and have

a great time and get suntan. But when it's cold and wet, that's danger weather. That's when you get hypothermia. That's when you need to know how to live and survive in cold weather. And though the walls of Northern Europe in the Second World War were fought in that kind of environment, especially in the winter. So but when I went to the sas and the first time I did jungle training, and in the jungle, everything wants to eat

you. Not the big things, not the imagine things like the big snakes and the big cats, and you know, it sits the little things. It's the mosquitoes and the leeches and the ticks and the bugs and the bacteria and the fung guy that get between your legs and give you, give you rashes and the trees that you chop and the sap comes out and gets in your eyes and you can't see three days, and you know it's it's all.

And the ants, the ants get into your into your hammock at night and they want to eat you two because you're just a big smallless boredom or everything in the jungle. But again it's pure soldier in and there was a

great joy to it. That the great tests were to carry the weight, to keep going, to navigate well, to do the signals, to do your share of the work, to go and fetch water in the morning, to do your drills properly, to move fifteen minutes, stop for ten, move for fifteen minutes, stop for ten, circle back on yourself before it

got dark, put your hammocks up and move before first light. To prevent your enemy from tracking you and prevent and you know, and to learn your skills, and to learn your bugout skills because your small patrols, so if you do hit an enemy, it's laid down a lot of fire and get the hell out of there. Because your brain roll main roll in the jungle is reconnaissance, and your secondary role is to go back and bring in larger

forces to do camp attacks. Yeah. Yeah. And as a soldier, because you mentioned, like when you were in Northern Ireland that you know you're a soldier, you're doing what you loved. Was this more of that for you? Yeah? Absolutely. As soon as I was out of camp, as soon as I was in the trees or in the field or out on the ground carrying a weapon with my friends, I mean that was soldiering.

I wasn't a great fan of being in barracks, marching up and down and polishing boots, although I did my fair share of that as a boy soldier, it was something I tried to avoid when I became an adult soldiery, and so unfortunately I was a paratrooper and we minimized that to the nth degree. I loved being a soldier. I hated the bullshit. Yeah. Yeah. So one thing we I didn't ask you when you were in the Paris

what type of weapon weapon systems did you guys use? Typically? Yeah, I main weapon was the self loading rifle, the Belgian FN So it had a twenty round magazine seven point six two ammunition, and it gave you section firepower up to six hundred meters with a general purpose machine gun in the light role, which was also seven to six two, so you could engage the enemy at six six to eight hundred meters as a section, and that was

a very powerful unit. Your anti tank weapons were the sixty six millimeter light anti tank weapon and the Carl Gustav eighty four millimeter which tended to put sixty six in a section and the eighty four as a as a platoon weapon.

And then also you had two inch mortars. I moved into support company, so I ended up which the Americans called weapons company, and I ended up using eighty one millimeter mortars as my main weapon until I went off to the until I went off to the Vigilant Patoon and thank guided missiles, and so I was very very active. I was moving from I joined my battalion, I got on the shooting team. I joined a battalion in Northern Ireland.

I came back, got back on the shooting team, joined a battalion again, back on the schoot, back on to the more To Patoon, and then transferred to the Vigilant Pattoon. When my mother died, she was only thirty seven years old. She died a breast cancer. She'd got divorced by that time, so the army had become my soul, my parents. I was essentially an army orphan. There's a piece in the old film with Richard Gere, an officer and a gentleman, where the top sergeant kicks his ass

on the fight arena and he says, why didn't you go home? And he says, well, I haven't got anywhere to go. This is you know, this is it, And the army was it for me. It was my home. It was my mum and dad, it was everything. I had no home to go to outside of that. By the time I was nineteen, Yeah, so I was. I was a pretty mean young man. I would have killed any of my country's enemies given the right circumstances, and I loved being a soldier. But I was quite a bitter young

man as well. So the lack of a father figure, a lack of a role model, had made it very, very difficult for me to laugh at myself. And if a young man is not capable of laughing at himself, then he's vulnerable to an awful lot of abuse. So I very much a loner as well. Until I met my wife. Yeah. The reason I asked you about your rappers because I know one of the things you mentioned in your book was how your love for the MP five when you got ty.

Yeah, the MP five is the is still forty years later, the best low velocity submachine gun in the world. It's an amazing piece of German technology. You know, it's got a closed face blowback system, so it's got very little deviation. When you're firing the weapon on automatic, you can you can put three rounds into a one inch circle from five meters away, which means, you know, you can you can take a man out with

three headshots with a quick burst with great deal of accuracy. It's and it's still the favored weapon for building assault now with slot teams and special forces groups around the world. Yeah, so with the with the sas, like, what what were some of the different because you did the jungle training and you know you did, but there are also a counter terrorist unit and counter terrorism had become you know a thing, right with all of the airline hijack not

just in Northern Ireland, but we had all the airline hijackings. You know, there were a number of things going on in the world what was that portion of sort of like the SAS training for you, like, well, what really what really established the Pagoda Team, the counter terrorist team in the Special Air Service was the nineteen seventy two Olympics where the Israeli athletes were murdered by the PLO and the police had tried to rescue and it had gone completely

wrong and lots of lots of people had got killed. The athletes had got killed. So the British invested in the SAS preparing for such an incident in the future, and it started off in its infancy with submachine guns we've taped on right angle torches, and gradually developed as the money came in. The investment took place until by the time I got into the regiment in ninth I'd

got into Regiment seventy eight. But in nineteen seventy nine it was my squadron's turn to be the counter terrorist team, so it wasn't a selected team that

was set aside. Each of the four Saber squadrons did a six months tour on the counter terrorist team and it was ours our turn in spring of nineteen eighty and only six weeks after we took over the team we had our incident, the famous incident that made the Sas famous around the world, at the Iranian embassy in London on May the fifth, nineteen eighty right where we rescued where we rescued nineteen hostages, right, And you know, you mentioned the

Pagoda team. And what's interesting is that the America the Iranian Hossas crisis for America in Iran was seventy nine. So the world knew this was something that could happen. I believe in your book you even mentioned it wasn't Margaret Thatcher who said, I can't imagine would be like we had people in an embassy, Well it was actually it was actually nineteen eighty two. It was only ten days before we carried out our mission. And so you know, the

world's morale in terms of our counter terrorism was on a real low. You know, this huge mission that had been put together by US special forces had been so large that you know, things that things hadn't gone well, and certain errors had caused the deaths of their own people, and of course the Iranians paraded those brave people's bodies on public television, and so it was it was highly embarrassing for the world, and then only ten days later we had

our opportunity to deal with our terrorist incidents, and we had a much much smaller team. Because something I do want to say is Special Forces is partly special because it's small. The first should stand for small, because as soon as Special Forces get big, it becomes just another unit, just another battalion, because you can't have that many special people, so small is special.

But we had our incident, and in spite of things going wrong in the initial phase, we were well trained enough to put them right and we ended up with nineteen hostages rescued, five terrorists killed, and one captured in seven

minutes. You can, for the people who might not be familiar with this event, can you walk us through sort of how it went down, where it was and then your involvement, because you you guys, if I remember right, you guys are just rotated on PAGO to team not too like like you said, like a month after you broke in, right, that's right,

only a few weeks before. Yeah, much much to the chagrin of G Squadron, who we took over from, because you know, everybody that they had been us on the thirtieth of April six or Abistani terrorists took over the Iranian embassy in London, captured twenty four people on the inside, including three British journalists and a chauffeur British chauffeur as well, and the embassy start and they made demands for their story to get onto television and to the release

of their people in Iran who had been imprisoned by the Ayatollah Hormone. They made demands and we were in Hereford at the time, which was one hundred and twenty five miles from London, and on the first night we deployed and got to twenty five miles outside London and where we waited the permission to go

into London. We did not get that permission, so we moved into central London to a military barracks called Regent's Park Barracks, and we parked up there for the day, and on the second night we got permission to move into the building next door to where the hostages were taken, which was the Royal College of General Practitioners, And in a big yellow pantechnicum truck, we sneaked over a wall at one o'clock in the morning, taking all our kit equipment.

We got into the building next door without being seen by anybody, and we prepared for an immediate action. And the immediate action is that it all goes wrong. Now they start killing people, everybody. Each group's got an air of responsibility. You go in there and do the best you can, and then you start to prepare a deliberate action. So over the next four

days, our commanders prepared a deliberate action. We got plans, we got photographs, we got identities, we got we found out where armored doors, windows, where the hostages were held, what they looked like, what the

situation was. Then the ghost hostage negotiators established a link with them and managed to negotiate the release over three days of three of the hostages, so you're left with finally left with twenty and on the fifth day, Mustafa Kharkouti was also released by the terrorists a gesture of good will after their demands being put onto the British Broadcasting Corporation Services on television, and it looked like it was

going to resolve itself. But on the sixth day, Feisal, who was pretty much the hard man of the terrorist group, took the Chegade affair. A man called Lavazzani downstairs and executed him by putting two shots in the back of his head, and a few hours later they threw the body at the front door, at which time Margaret Thatcher gave permission via her Home Secretary to give the military permission to mount an assault. By that time, our deliberate

action had been prepared. There were forty eight of us that assaulted the building. There were five floors and fifty five rooms. Each group of eight had been given a floor, and the cunning plan was for us to sneak up to the building, to plant our charges which were going to take out the windows and doors, initiate them all at exactly the same time, and to

clear the building. And while one of the guys was abseiling down the back of the buildings from the roof, his foot went through the window, and this was heard by the lead terrors, Salim, and he told the negotiator

that there had been a suspicious noise and he was going to investigate. The commander gave the command to go early, and so on the front of the building where the famous television footage that people can find on YouTube you see John Mcalid's leap across the balcony, slammed the charge on the window and leap back in. He's only about four feet away from it when it's initiated, and

takes the window out. That wasn't supposed to be the game plan. On the back door where I was, our explosives man had had time to lay the charges, So Big Bob Curry comes in with a eight pound sledgehammer and takes the doors out with the sledge hammer and ino our guys up above me. I'm looking up and the guy who's stuck on the rope, he's got his absale glove caught in his v rim and so he's jammed just above the windows. The guys have gone down past him, they've gone through the windows.

They've thrown in their flashbangs, their pyrotechnics, and the curtains have caught fire. So the curtains are now burning the guys hanging above the window, and he's turning into a barbecue and he's screaming, and on top of that, he's got the pressels which on his radio pressed as well, so nobody

can communicate. And the squadron commander must have been thinking, oh my god, this is the coffin of my career, and all all we can here is Tom hanging on the rope, and he's screaming because he's getting burned, and so it looks like an absolute disaster. The guys on the roof are trying to cut the rope while it's under tension, but he's kicking himself away from the flames, and if they cut it on the outswing, he's going to drop thirty feet on the concrete. So they've got to get him.

They've got to get the rope to part. On the in swing, Tommy Palmer has gone through the window below him, and his head's caught fire from the flames and the curtain. So he comes out the window, takes off his gas masks, throws it away, puts the flames out, and goes back into the window and kills two terrorists. The guy's on the roof cut down Tom. He comes down onto the balcony. Meanwhile, as he comes

down onto the balcony, the IDEO system becomes clear. The squadron commander, thinking that something all hell's let loose and it's all gone wrong, says go in. So me and my partner go into the building from the back door. But it's all looking pretty good. When we get inside the lobby on the ground floor, there's a chain of men up the stairs. There's gunfire,

there's noise, there's gas. But the policeman that had been held hostage for the whole week travel lock comes clear at the bottom of the stairs first and I pass him out to pass him out of the door to the next guy. Then the hostage has come down and we're passing them down. We're keeping them scared. Do as you told, do as you told, get down, said Bland says. And we pass them hand to hand. Out they go out, they go out, they go and amongst those is hidden

one of the terrorists. And then in the last group coming down the stairs, there's a commotion up on the stairway and a sudden movement and somebody shouts he's a terrorists blisters and he's holding a hand grenade in his hand, and there's one man standing about twelve twenty four inches from him, and he fires twenty four rounds into him, and I am about five meters away, and I fire a burst of three rounds and the guy crumples to the floor and

the pin still and the grenade and out they go out, they go out they go the buildings on fire. There are five terroriststead there's one outside hidden amongst the hostages, and seven minutes from the go, go go, the building is clear and on fire and the job is done. Wow. It's amazing that even with the challenges that were there, they're just you're like, the team's professionalism and and you know, prior training still led to a successful

mission outcome. Yeah, it was just like an exercise. We'd practiced for this. We hadn't only practiced for this, we practiced for the vehicles moving, for aircraft, for boats alongside the harbor, for SIPs at sea, and for buildings of course, and so these things had happened on exercise.

These things had gone wrong on exercise because we haven't had people burned so badly, but you know things that things had gone wrong, and you buy that training and buy the quality of the man and the selection process, you end up with people that can think clearly under pressure. Harping back to Malcolm Ladwell again in Bling or Tipping Point, he says, why do police officers make mistakes with weapons under pressure? It's because they're not of supremely good fitness.

They're usually got too many donuts in them. They they're not used to dealing with firefights on a regular basis. They're not used to training under fit, with fear and on the edge of danger. And so their heartbeat goes over one hundred forty five beats a minute. And when your heartbeat goes over one hundred and forty five beats per minute, you cannot make minor cognitive decisions, so you make big mistakes. You don't see what's in front of your eyes

anymore. Yeah, And so high fitness, really tough, really edgy training and lots of it, and a selection of the right people is vital. Yeah. And you're the gentleman who was cooking while on the repel line. Did he get down before we was well done? Yeah? He got he they cut him down, He hit the balcony and he went in and did his task and he went to hospital afterwards with some second degree burns to his legs. Yeah, but he completed his mission, big fijiarman called Tom Morrel.

Yeah, And so that was that was the show, right, That was what every hostage rescue team or every counter terrorist team dreams of. And

meanwhile, G Squadron is off, you know, gnashing their teeth. What was that like for you guys back at the unit, Well, I mean we the government wanted to take us out and parade us in front of the press, and we said, no, we don't do that, and we got back into our big yellow truck with all our equipment and we disappeared, and we became the most famous anonymous people for the next twenty five years. Our wives and girlfriends were hugging themselves with league because they knew it was us,

and they can't tell anybody. We went back to barracks. The regiment was enormously proud of everybody, even those guys that missed the boat on that particular occasion. They would have their day in the future. And yeah, there was an enormous amount of pride. But we had to get ready. They could have been another one the next day. So our equipment as soon as we got back, had to be prepared and to be restored. The ammunition had to be refilled, everything had to be cleaned and put back in

the vehicles ready to go again. And it looked as though we were going to have another incident. Only a couple of months later, when the Libyan embassy in London opened fire from a window and killed a police officer in London. It looked like we were going to have to do something again, but it didn't work out that way. But we became this mythological preacher, you know, the guys that could leap over tall buildings with a single bound or a bulletproof. We were good at what we did. We were good at

what we did. I think one of the next things you mentioned in your book was Operation Marcado. Can you give us some background on that and then sort of how that went down for you guys. Yeah, Well, the nineteen eighty two, the then president of Argentina, General Leopoldo Galtieri, needed a distraction to take is population's eyes from hyper inflation. The fact that he was murdering thousands and thousands of opponents the Argentinian people called them to disappeared.

So he decided to invade the Falkland Islands, which were a British protector in the South Atlantic. And he thought that it would be very much similar to Putin's idea moving into Ukraine, that he would just walk in and nobody would

do anything about it. But unfortunately he didn't. They didn't really take the personality of Margaret Thatcher into consideration and we deployed the British Armed Forces, Navy, Air Force and it would see the infantry down to the Falkland Islands to recover the islands, an eight thousand mile journey, and the task of my squadron was to fly into Argentina Operation Mikado and land on the runway and destroyed the superete on our jets, the French superet Our jets which were firing Exercet

missiles which had sank three of our capital's ships. And there was no return journey, so it was our mission to go in there, destroy the jets and get killed or captured. I had a wife who was by that time eight months pregnant, and I left home to carry out the mission, knowing what the mission was, but she obviously couldn't and left home thinking that I

wouldn't see my sunborn. And the good fortune in the story was that we got as far as Ascension Island. Halfway there and Ronald Reagan put pressure on Margaret Thatcher not to extend the war onto the mainland because the war on the Falkland Islands was going so well. The Paris Marines Guards, the air Force and the Navy were covering the island. They'd lost a lot of troops very short space of time. They'd lost the helicopters sunk in the Atlantic Conveyor.

Conveyor. The Argentinian Air Force had been very, very effective, but the pressure was put on not to extend it onto the mainland. So we waited, we stood by, we waited, we stood by, and finally we were flown down and we parachuted into the sea. And now I'm kidding now, guys, thirty members of B Squadron, the famous the famous squadron that raided the Iragnan embassy land in the Falklands. And four days later the enemy

surrendered. And so I got home to see my son when he was ten days old, and we went back on the counter terrorists team again just after I thought I was going to get back to UK and get arrest, but I got back to the UK and before we took over the team, I was sent on a rawmerin sniper course for the next twelve weeks. So that was my rest period. Horsefull. You never do anything in the Falkland's will get down to Lympston and do the raw marine sniper course. You lazy bars

and so, so what was that like for you? The Royal Marine Sniper Course, Oh awesome. The raw Marines have run a sniper course since the First World War and they have two grades of pass. One is to pass the sniper, which means you get over sixty five percent on every task, and the second is Sniper Marksman, which means you get over eighty percent on every task. And I got sniper Marksman. I was one of two guys they got sniper marksman course. And it's the epitome of infantry field craft.

Because people in the press they mixed up being a sniper would be in a marksman. A marksman is somebody who's marksman. Somebody was a good shot. Okay, he can sit up in a window and he can shoot in his good show. But a sniper is somebody who's greater field craft. He can judge distance, he's an expert camouflage and concealment. He can stalk his enemy's an expert map reading. He can do air photography, and he's also very highly trained observer. He can bring in artillery fire, he can bring in

mortify, he can be naval gunfire. He's an expert of communications, and so you know, there's so many skills packed into that one tiny individual that are all infantry skills but home to an extraordinarily high level. And yeah, it was a marvelous course and working with the raw Marines was a real thrill for me. Although there are always been the rivals to the powers, they're

like powers, but they're a little bit more mature. Well, I mean, and you know from our viewers and listeners who don't know, like the idea of the gilly suit. Gilly is a British word. I think it's a Scottish word, right, or it's an English word. It's a Scottish word. It comes from It comes from the guys that used to hunt the deer in the in the Scottish Islands, and so a Gillie suit was something they designed to where so that the deer didn't see them when they were culling

the herd. Yeah. So I mean there's there's a long heritage of like a lot of the sniper heritage comes from from the British. Yeah, yeah,

I think I think it does. It comes from predominantly the First World War where you had this four year war where trench warfare where snipers came into their own, but it was only the Royal Marines in the British Army that kept the process going during peacetime and they've always made and by keeping that going for probably an over a hundred years now, their standards are extraordinary and they

really are very very good at what they do. Yeah, and then you went to another school that was a bit of a detriment to your career, Right, what was it the course that was there? Where? Where was it that you were like blamed for, like losing the weapons and stuff like that. Oh, yeah, we went to we went to we went to do an exercise with Delta Force in Fort Bragg, North Carolina, and my patrol was put out on the ground without very very good instruction about what the

exercise program was. We didn't know we had live enemy on the ground. We didn't know that there were about two thousand rangers out there looking for us who knew that we were out on the ground. And so we got bumped and I was And we also didn't know that the training area in Alabama, in yeah, Alabama, down near Alabama was was completely devoid of civili So I was I was marking out some areas for black Hawk helicopters and measuring the

ground in civilian clothing, believing there were civilians out there. And as soon as I got seen, I got I got chased by the by the rangers, by the enemy exercised forces. And I had left my equipment with my partner who had to abandon it and run, and in that equipment was my

submachine gun. So I went escape and evasion, and they didn't catch me for six days, and I got picked up at the end of the exercise at the rendezvous point, by which time two individuals in my squadron who were senior to me and didn't like me, had made it their sole purpose in life to get me kicked out of the SAS, and they tried to say that the men didn't like me. I said, okay, let's have a buddy reggaeting, go and ask the guys, so that on deaf ears.

They then said that I'd lost my weapon, and I said, well, okay, you know I didn't lose my weapon. I've told you the story, but I knew the writing was on the wall and that they were going to essentially a British term, stitched me up and get me sent back to the Paris on the grounds that these two individuals, my sergeant major and troops staff sergeant, had a very poor opinion of me. So I thought, I'm going to take control of this situation. I'm not going to be the

guy who gets beaten down. And that's my tail between my legs. And I went on colonel's orders and the colonel said, why did you break every standard operational procedure in the book? I said I didn't, and my major said, well, no, that wasn't Horseful, sir, that was the other patrol. And then he said to me, well, you haven't done anything wrong this time, Horsefully said, but you've been walking on a razor blade for a long time and I have no alternative but to send you back

to the parachute regiment. You don't have to be a lawyer to realize he's just said, you haven't done anything wrong, but I'm going to punish you. So I said, that's all right, sir. I said, I put my papers and purchase my discharge from the army yesterday. He said, don't do that. He said, the wind blows cold on the outside. I said, they don't blow two f in warm into here, does it and I was out of the Army in two weeks. I was gone. That was me, twenty seven years old, twelve years in the army.

It was my life. I was an Army orphan. But I was done with it and I moved on. Didn't They try to stitch up some of the other guys that were with you though, too. Yeah, the Tom McDonald got sent back to the Parachute Regiment he was in the same patrol. The captain in charge, David Stewart, he got sent back to the Good Cameron Highlanders, and the other patrol member got demoted and fined in spite of the fact that they've done absolutely nothing wrong. It was it was a setup.

It turned out. Years later I found one of the sergeants who was teaching me to fly helicopters, Pete. He said that he was warned not to go on that patrol because something was going to happen, so we would set up. We've been set up by our colleagues and for personal reasons. And yeah, it was a bad thing. I was bitter about it, but I moved on and put it behind me, and that didn't let it

get me down. Yeah, I mean, but with so many guys shot like because I if I remember right, it's been a minute since I've read it, but if I remember right, like they were trying to like just clear out some of the ranks or these guys or it was a personal thing for these guys. There was there was a change during that period in the British Armed Forces where if you didn't achieve a certain rank by a certain after

a certain number of years, then you were discharged. The Special Air Service had a large number of people who didn't want to be promoted, and they weren't. They weren't qualified for promotion, and they suddenly promoted them up the ranks and people coming in afterwards were actually more highly qualified and more capable than they were, and they these old boys felt threatened by these more qualified young boys, and it instead of saying, look how amazing my guys are,

they tried to put them down. And that created that created a very very difficult situation. Out of my troop, which was nine troop, over a two year period, fifty percent of the troop either voluntarily left or were forced to leave by these old boys. So it was a sad time. Was it was difficult. A lot of them. We went off, and we became bodyguards, we became security experts, became consultants, and life moved gone.

I became a bodyguard to the Alphayette family in London, a mercenary in Sri Lanka, a mercenary in Mozambique, and then finally the bodyguard to Rafite Career, who became the Prime Minister of Lebanon during the war there until fin No. I did that before I went to Mozambique. But after Mozambiat my wife put her a foot down and said, you do that again. I'm not going to be here when you come home. And so I stopped. Because she is the second pillar in my life that gives me stability, without

any doubt at all. Without her, I'd be absolutely nothing. So, Robin, we've we've been at it almost an hour and a half. I'm happy to ask you about your time as a mercenary. We would love to hear about it. I'm going to leave it up to you whether you want to do it now, if you're happy to talk about that time, because I know it's it's what is it one thirty there now? Yeah, it's one twenty one, yeah, yeah, yeah, I'm buzz in, you know, Okay, keep going if you want to realize how quickly the time

I've gone. I just wanted to leave it up to you because I know it's really late there. So I'm old. So you moved into bodyguarding? How long initially? Like? How long were you was that first stint as a bodyguard for you? Yeah? I did it for fifteen months in London, and you know it was it was okay, it was very very good money, very good time off. But it wasn't It wasn't exciting. I mean, the biggest enemy of any bodyguard is complacency, and you spend lots

and lots of time just waiting for your client and doing absolutely nothing. It's a very good place to get fat and no. After fifteen months, I was simply bored, and so I volunteered to take a job in Sri Lanka as part of the single these forces fighting the Tamil tigers in the north. But realized after a very short time that I was on the wrong side and a side was taking place in an north a Sri Lanka. I was powerless to do anything about it other than resigned. So I resigned and came home.

But I was missing my wife and kids too much. Anyway, I had two children by this time, son and a daughter, So yeah, I came home and struggled through a few little bits and pieces of work, bodyguarding here, security work there, set up my own little door company with Dorman, and struggled through. My wife worked long hours and we managed to pay the mortgage and feed the kids and keep it going. And then the job of all jobs, working with Raffi career. He came along, which

was a man with a genuine threat against his life. He was envoy with King five. He was making his run to become the prime Minister of Lebanon. There was a war on in Lebanon, in Beirut especially, Babylon was burning in Beirut at that time, and Damascus was a safe place to be. And we traveled around the world doing diplomatic security, getting the release of French hostages from the Azballah, meeting people like George Schultz in Washington, DC,

and Jacques Sharak in Paris and the King in Rhead and Jedda. And I learned to speak French at that time because Lebanese Arabic is very similar to Scottish English. It's very very it's Arabic, but not as we know it. Jim learning French, learning French, I learned French. I learned to speak at French in Saudi Arabia. I learned to speak Arabic in England.

I learned to speak Portuguese in Mozambique. And the only country I've ever worked and learned a language and lived in was I learned to speak Czech in the Czech Republic. So it was nice to be actually being a country where they spoke the language I was learning. But yeah, it was He was a good man. He was a moderate and I really really liked him. That Heather got ill in pregnancy with our third child, Oliver, and so I

had to retire from that and go to England. And I was the bodyguard for an American for six months, a man called Albert Dunlap, who was called the Chainsaw, and he was a man who used to mount aggressive tacos of the companies, fire all the nonprofitable staff, and sell off the profits. And he was brought to England to take over a British American tobacco and I was his chauffeur bodyguard, and after four weeks I wanted to kill him. Myself that wicked. It was that wicked and that evil. I hated

him with a venom. Yeah, yeah, I imagine that in order to it, he was probably very profitable of it. In order to do that, he probably didn't have the strong uh moral compass that the way we would think of it, he had no ethics at all. Yeah, he had. He was. He was amoral and immoral. He was the most selfish individual I have ever met in my entire life. And his wife matched him

very very closely. Yeah. How was it challenging for you having been you know, a para in Northern Ireland, having and and sas because you did you went to Northern Ireland with the sas two correct three? Two twice? Yeah or twice, and then having been on the hostage rescue all these things, and then you are a bodyguard, which for people don't know, it's

not like the Kevin Costumer movie. People often don't treat their bodyguards well you know some what you know what I mean that that that apart from apart from done that, I never had a problem with my principles. I was always treated with a great deal of politeness and respect. So, but you're right, it's never like the movies, but the Kevin Costner film The Bodyguard Is is based on the mistakes that Costner makes. I mean, but the most

realistic thing is that when Whitney Whitney Houston, Whitney Houston. Yeah, he says, my guard, you don't look like a body garret, you know. And that's so true because they expected it to be this big, two hundred pound guy who's, you know, a mountain of muscle and flesh. But that's not what a bodyguard actually is. The bodyguard's a gray man who stands very close to the client and his job is to run away with the client if anything happens, and then you have you have the cordings. It's

not his job to draw a weapon and shoot people. It's his job to get that client. One of the most wonderful pieces of bodyguarding drills I've ever seen was when Reagan was shot and within two seconds he's in the back of that vehicle and although he's got a hold of him, he's on his way to hospital and in seconds, you know, those guys moved him and they were spot on, and they had their drills down. American Secret Service are

really really good at that. In the close protection groups. So they're very, very good. So that's that's a great piece of video to a film to go back and watch if you want to see real expert bodyguards. You know, this man who's just there, he's invisible and all of a sudden breagans in the back of a vehicle and he's on his way to hospital, shell dressing on his wounds. Fantastic work, you know, can we But but was there? So were you satisfied as the body god did? Aside

from the chainsaw? What was it meaningful work for you? Yeah? It was. It was meaningful work. As I say, the only reason I stopped with with her Eerie was because it was extraordinarily luxurious life. I could keep fit, I got good time off, and I got excellent money, and I was treated very well. Was the just simply the fact that my wife was ill in pregnancy and I had to go home. So outside of that it was cool. But once once she'd had Oliver and she was well

again, I had to find a new future. And my future ended up being a martial arts teacher in southwest London, and I took over a small class of three children and eventually developed it into over a thousand kids in southwest London. That was about fifty adults. Yeah, but about fifty adults with about nine hundred and fifty kids from the age of four upwards. Yeah.

Did you find that fulfilling? I found that immensely fulfilling. I took the bad experiences of my childhood and developed children into becoming strong, confident young people who are highly disciplined and happy within themselves. Because I think that a person who's disciplined and strong and confident will be a kind adult. The most vicious and unkind people are the people who lack confidence. It's always the coward in the group that it is the most vicious of all. And I was preparing

them to be adults and training them to be adults. And not only did I teach them martial arts, I taught them to teach martial arts right from square one. So an awful lot of my My son Alex took over London Karate when I broke my neck when he was twenty seven, and now he teaches the children of the children that I used to teach. That's a wonderful

thing. That's fantastic. How did you find parenthood given that you know your challenges with a father figure, would you when you young, you know, with an abusive father figure, with you know, bully being bullied in school? Like, how did you adapt to parenthood? I I always loved parent I've loved it. I am Heather, my wife. She got pregnant while we were on honeymoon with Alex. We couldn't wait for him to arrive.

We had she already had two baby girls when I met her, and then we had three more, Alex, Charlotte and Oliver, and so we had five and it's it's it's been the most important, our family, my wife, my children. Sorry, guys, we have a bit of a hiccup here. Yeah, we'll give it a give it a just a couple of seconds. Oh yeah, Hey, everybody, please join our patreon uh Patreon slash team house. You get exclusive content and also ad free audio and you

help us. You help us keep you help keep us in the drink huh and video and also uh like subscribe to channel and check out our friend at invader girl art dot com. Up, Okay, we lost some Uh We're gonna go ahead, and I think uh, oh is your back? Yeah, I'm back, all right, we got your back. Excellent, excellent. Sorry, I think we had a delay on your end that But anyway, you were talking about having your children, and yeah, yeah, yeah,

my wife and my kids. Uh the most important thing. I always struggled when I was young, especially to make friends, and so me and have there made three and my kids. Every time I got home, Daddy come home, Daddy would go out, Daddy would take the camping. We would go out the mountains, we would go swimming. I talked swim, I talking to play. I took them to do all the things. I took them to sports. I just loved being dad, and I still love

being dad now. Mind you, I've got two daughters now that are grandmothers. That's a peculiar thing. The oldest two are our grandmothers, and so I'm a great grandfather. I got six great grandchildren. And but I just loved being a parent. One of the things I struggle with now I'm sixty six. One of the things I struggle with now is that I don't have children in my life anymore. My great grandkids come every now and then to

visit, but I don't have enough time. And when I was teaching martial arts, I was working with kids four hours a day, every day, and that's an absolute joy. I've been to the local school here, I've taught poetry to children in the local school. That's been a great a great deal of fun, but so teachings of vocation that I genuinely love. You know. So everything aside all the adventures, all the guns and bombs and explosions and stuff like that, but there's nothing more important than your family.

And I think the toughest job any real man can actually achieve is to hold a family together, to be responsible for your wife and kids for their entire lives. That's what I really think. You you mentioned, you know, you mentioned that your mom and Jaffar, Jeff Right, Jeff Horse far they split up, and but you still attended his funeral, And then it was

that there was a closure for you in that. Yeah. Yeah. Over the years, over the years, as I had my kids, you know, and he had a new wife and further children with his new wife, we gradually became, you know, friends, and we used to visit and talk and get by, but we never really confronted any of the issues of me as a child. But when he was dying of cancer, my wife and I and my brother and sister in law. We went and we nursed him in the last weeks of his life, and we looked after him until

he passed over. And when he had passed over, I sat alone with him in his bedroom and I said to his courts, why were you such a bastard too me when I was a kid? And I swear a voice came into my head, not a voice that you heard, but the answer came into my head, which was I was only doing the best I could, the only way I knew how. And that's that was a revelation. That was an epiphany moment. It was it was like my demons had been exercised, and I understood that, you know, nobody trains you to be

a parent. Nobody shows you except your own parents or maybe your big brothers and sisters if they've got kids. And if you've had a bad example, you don't have anything else to go on. And he was an only child. He was brought up in the Second World War. He worked in a factory, a tough leads man, and he'd been a soldier most of his life. And you know, he was a heart. He was a hard, tough guy, but beneath it, there was a softness that I never

saw as a child, and so I understood. I understood at that moment why he was how he was, and I made a conscious choice when I married Heather never to be like he was towards my children. I can count I know exactly how many times I smacked my sons, and that was each of them twice. And I never ever smacked my daughters. And even then, I looking back, I'm not so sure that that was even required, but I did. It was part of the course in them days. In

fact, it was well below part. I've got great kids, I still adore them, and I've got great relationships with them too. So something did we did? We did an awful lot of things, right, Yeah? Yeah, Where do you think because you say that you know, people learned how to parent from their parents, and I you know, so where do you think you learned how to be that father for you? Are there specific men in the middle terry that you can think of? No, I learned

how to be a parent from my wife. She she took this lone wolf, this tough, mean, isolated individual, and saw right through the facade. He got into the cage with the lone wolf and tickled his ears, you know, and she taught me how to She gave me back my humanity. She taught me how to trust my feelings again, to trust other people. She taught me how to bathe Alex, to change his nappies, to carry him in the harness on my chest, to enjoy being a parent.

She put love into my life that hadn't been there before. And you know, it gave me a worthwhile existence. It gave me everything that was really missing from this empty shell and it filled it up. And she was extraordinarily important in teaching me how to be a human being. That's fantastic. You know, we didn't really even talk about your time with the sas in Northern Ireland, so I'm just gonna ask a general question to curb the curiosity of

people, But how did your your time with the ESAs. How did that different than when you were a para in Northern Ireland. Well, from my perspective, it wasn't quite as much fun because you know, when you were a soldier in the hard areas of the cities, you were constantly on guard, working with working in public view in uniform. When I was working undercover, you were working with for with specific information. You were targeting terrorists in

certain areas. You spent an awful lot of time in observation posts. You you were you were following people in vehicles. You were in inner city areas with long hair and donkey jackets, looking like one of the locals trying to blend in. So it was a very, very different job, and I don't think I enjoyed it as much as I did. The constant pressure of being on patrol four hours on, two hours off, four hours off,

two hours on. You know, it was it was nowhere near as intense, and to be perfectly honest, it wasn't wasn't anywhere near as dangerous signment fascinating. So I'm gonna get to some of their questions, DJ seed, thank you very much. What sets the two too apart from regular essay?

Is it mission sets skills or mission set skill set or both? I'm not quite sure I understand the question, but I think that what sets the Special Forces soldier apart from other soldiers is the selection of the man and the intense quality of the training. Thanks again, did you Seed? U did the sas used to rob Banks and still Hardware aka Paul jobs are great Britain Or is that just movie stuff. Yeah, I think that's just movie stiff.

Joe's guys, you thank you for march. Was the fourteen Intelligence Company DEBT designed as sport sas operations abroad? Or were they only focused on Northern Ireland? Yeah, fourteen IN was only focused in was developed for Northern Ireland under cover work in Northern Ireland. They would trained by US, but they were an independent special unit that worked within the Catholic community and infiltrated the IRA and they were extraordinarily good at their job. But yeah, only for Northern Ireland

at that time. Mac and Tyre thank you for the very geniush nation. Okay, so this might be a sense of question. I don't know, do you think any mc nab wide and made up most of the events depicton Brother to Zrael, Mike Kiwi, Colburn, Arthur a Soldier five and Malcolm Graham McAllen wrote about this mission and said book. Mcnad also said named and criticized the dead members. Yeah, there's a littleful lot to talk about in

that and I think it would take a long time. If you want to know the truth of the mission, I think you should read Mike Asher's book called The Real Bravo to Zero. But I don't want to run down an old colleague on our public forum. It wouldn't be kind or fair of me. Uh McIntyre, thank you very much. Did you ever meet tack Aka Lomo former sas Fijian operator of Sudron Yemen. Yeah, I knew Tachi was in the squadron with me and I know him. I know him very well.

Yeah, Cameron Spence or Chris Jordi Ryan if so? What were they like? I don't know, I am. I don't know him personally. I have I've spoken to him a couple of times on telephone. He wasn't in my squadron with me, and so we're not. I don't I don't know. I don't know very much about him. Okay, Mac and Tyre, thank you again. Why was there a war going on in Mozambique at the time. Who was in charge of the Mozambique government at the time and

who were they fighting? Well? We were we were fight Arqua Forces,

which was the Army of Mozambique under under the Frelimo government. The Russians had pulled out of the country, leaving an awful lot of gaps between the South Africans who had been fighting the African National Congress and launching operations from Mozambique into South Africa, and they had a specially trained group called Renamo, and Renamo were Mozambique and Portuguese mulattos who were part of South African Special Forces for want

of better words, and they were denied a place of refuge by South Africa, and of course they were enemies in Mozambique, so they started living off the land and raiding the villages and towns for food, for women, for

for control, very much like local warlords. And the French were trying to build a railway from Maputu up to Malawi and it was getting raided and bombed and blown up, and so we were taken there to be officers in the fark forces and we ended up becoming company commanders and leading a lot of operations there. It was a pure infantry war. We had no air cover,

very few infantry support weapons like heavy artillery. We did have Katusha rockets, but essentially it was an infantry war against infantry and it was a vicious war with an awful lot of civilian deaths and the food for my troops used to get stolen on the way to the front lines, so the troops were on half Russians, and if we got a cold night, I would probably lose one or two men dead during the night from malaria because their rations were so

low and they didn't have enough resistance without the food to defeat the malaria. So it was a very very difficult place to be. Wonderful soldiers, wonderful people. Michael, thank you very much. In your view, why didn't Britain adopt an official policy of institute torture Northern Ireland? Thanks. I don't think there's ever been a policy of institutes institutional torture approved of by any government. I know that in certain rare circumstances soldiers have taken it upon themselves to

behave badly with prisoners. I think you might find that in the USA the situation that occurred at one TIMEAMO would be an exception to that. And you know those questions are going to come out in the long term future again and be investigated, I'm sure. But in Britain, I think we've always tried to hold the moral high ground and if there are incidences they were they were not approved of by the government and they were mistakes and criminal mistakes to that

as well. Danny, thank you very much. Is there a specific reason rather than chose the Army over the Royal Marines. I didn't get offered the I didn't even think about the raw Marines. I didn't know enough about them. I didn't live in an area where the raw Marines were prevalent. But my home was only three miles from Aldershot, which was the home of the British Shereborn Forces. So I went to the Parachute Regiment's depot to do my medical So, yeah, the Army was local to me. It never occurred

to me. And and your your father, your dad Jeff, he had ended up as a para too, right, that's right. He was a member of the Royal Corps of Transport, which had a special detachment which is attached to sixteen Para Brigade. So they were the drivers the parachute the airborne drivers attached to the brigade. MacIntyre, so the rusties question comes from mac. Thank you very much for all your sponsorship mcder We really appreciate it.

What's your favorite episode of Blackadder? Oh god, I love Blackadder. There's so many, Oh goodness me. I think the I think the one that really sticks in everybody's mind is the final one where they go over the top in the First World War, and you know, that's very, very poignant and moving because you've got this amazing comedy and it's finished with such a poignant and sad moment. I think that's the one I remember the best. But

there are so many of them. I couldn't identify an individual one that was particularly outstanding in terms of comedy. It's just marvelous stuff. The one that always sticks out from me, and it actually kind of I thought of it when you're talking about the suicide mission. Is the suicide unit where they are just step out the window, yeah, or where he's trying to bug out. He's trying to pretend he's mad. He's got two chopsticks stuck up his nose, you know, and he's pretending to be mad. You know,

it's crazy. And I just love the fact that The World War One is the best series for me, and where the captain the brigadiers aid is called Darling. It's Captain Darling, come in here with you, Darling, you know, and Peter Stephen Fry as the general. You know, it just they're just wonderful, wonderfully written characters. I just adore them. I still watch them now Sometimes I hope that that was a Blackadder that I mentioned.

Maybe it was money Part. I think it was Blackadder. Anyway, mac Rusty Furman, why did he say negative things about you to the regimental sergeant major? Why did he have a beef with you? Uh? I don't know, I really genuinely don't know. Maybe it's just I'm so good looking. It happens, you know, it happens while the SAS. While with the SAS, did you ever train with your Australian, Kiwi, South African and sas? And what did you think of Delta Force? Yeah, I

trained with all of the above. I thought they were all great, genuinely, because if I didn't, I would say so Delta they were. They were wonderful. I mean what I loved about Delta in the nineteen eighties was the sniper weapons. That they had the money and the equipment, and they could hand fill their own match filled ammunition, and they had silenced, high velocity, well suppressed high velocity weapons. So it was I was like a

kid in a candy store playing with those guys. But they are very different sense of humor to us, because the British soldier tends to be quite flippant about an awful lot of things, and the American Special Forces guy tends to be very, very firm and set in his ways and very very professional at

all times. And so in moments of relaxation would we would fool around with water pistols and do crazy things, and so by the time we got to do an exercise together, they would think that maybe we weren't very professional.

And on one occasion working with them, they were playing the terrorists with hostages in a vehicle which was a short minivan, you know, with a sort of twelve seat of van, and they came down this road around the bend and we blew the front wheels off and emptied to vehicle in four seconds. And so you know, we went from being these crazy guys who can't take anything seriously suddenly to do with the job, and we could flip from being

crazy, flippant, rather ridiculous individuals to be professionals in a moment. They tended to be extraordinarily serious about their work all the time, and good for them for that as well. You know, there was no right and wrong in there was just a difference betweens. If a pea, any battalion got into a fate with a Royal marine, who would win or would they just

challenge each other to a drinking contest? Yeah? I think there's an old Chinese saying when two tigers meet, they easily turn and walk the other way. And yeah, you yeah, you'd probably there's not to choose between two whoever, whoever, whoever was most sober would win, right right? And then did you ever meet Peter mcleis, But I think you mentioned Peter was the one who jumped during No, there's a John McLeish, Oh, John

mcle apologize, and there's Peter macaleys right right, Peter. Yeah, there's two different individuals, Peter mcleis and John McLeish and Peter mcaleish and John McAleese and Peter. Yeah, he's he's been a colleague and a friend over many years. I haven't send him for a long time, but extraordinary soldier, extraordinary soldier. And then a couple from our patron and sorry to keep you so you the wolf and sheep's clothing like you May mentioned the terrorists that escape

with the hostages during the embassy rescue. How is he identified? Were there sas on the ground sorting them or how is that? How is that wolf and sheep's clothing identified? He was? Everybody got got taken outside. All the hostages got taken outside and handcuffed and put on floor for their own protection,

for our protection, safety and control. And sim Harris, who was the BBC journalist who was rescued at the time, was laid on the floor handcuffed and he was looking at this guy on the floor opposite and saying he's a terrorist, He's a terrorist, And myself and my colleague Tony we picked him up and separated him from the group that was fousy in a jat and he did twenty eight years in prison for his crime for being part of that group. The aeron Mike, I'm sure, answered, but did you train

in the States, and we mentioned that you did. If so, were there outside of like the issues that you had, did you learn any valuable lessons training in the States with the Rangers and Delta Force and whatnot. I don't think. I think a lot of the time we went there to add our experience to theirs. It was. It was cross training. I can't remember anything particularly relevant to standard soldiering that I learned. Ye I did.

I did enjoy myself a great deal some of the most welcoming and generous people that I've ever encountered anywhere in the world. I do remember learning about how to how to make my own ammunition from the from the sniper group at Delta, you know, that was something I'd never known about, and how to weigh and fill cartridges to make them more accurate. And so I did learn a lot about a lot about ammunition. Yeah, I think more than anything

else. Yeah. Yeah. I mean if you come to the US, so you don't learn about firearms, why did you come to the US? Yeah? Yeah, more guns than any other country in the well combined. Yes, Adam, What did you think about the whole Bravo to Zero debacle? It seemed poorly planned. Yeah. Again, I'll refer you to my last reply. I think to read read read my Cash's book, The Real Barado to Zero. I don't like to go onto a public forum and being

negative about my colleagues from the past. Would it wouldn't be fair of me? Yeah? And can you talk about Operation Kimono. I don't know about Operation Kimono. It was obviously after my time and Bill Gage, Thanks Bill, We love you man. Bill as a former guest, can Robin talk about the history of SAS selection, How did the long rocking and the beacons get started? The price That process has had a major influence on Special Operations

selections, you know, especially here in the US. And he's just curious about how that got started. Yeah, I think the SAS tended to be a a bit of a bandit group down in Herefordshire, left over from the Second World War. At the end of the Second World War, the Special Air Service was disbanded and a small group of reservists called Territorials kept it going as the Artist Rifles in London to a small group of people wearing that same

cap badge. Then the Malayan Emergency started with Communist rebels taken over British the British colonies in Malaya, and the Artist Rifles were asked to go there and form a unit called the Malayan Scouts. The Malayan Scouts then were renamed to the second two to SAS and they formed a squadron and it got bigger, and then they formed AMB Squadron and it was returned to England after they didn't

return to England. After that they went to Borneo and then they went from Borneo to Aiden and they became a regular, regular established regiment in the British Army again. Their main jobs were patrolling and reconstance and in jungle environments, but they worked undercover for the first time in Aiden. And then they returned to England. They got given a barracks in Herefordshire and they grew. They

absorbed C Squadron people from when Rhodesia became Zimbabwe. They they absorbed G Squadron which was the Guards Squadron which came from the Guard's Independent Parachute Company which was part of sixteen Para Brigade, and then D Squadron was formed to ended up with four squadrons, four Sabor squadrons, a total of about two hundred and fifty Badge soldiers and it's never a really increased from that over that time.

The selection process developed over the years and was formalized in the early seventies and became this one year program and became a qualification with extra pay. Up to that time, it was people could just go down to Hereford and volunteer and if the guys liked them, they could join, And a lot of them went did a tour there and then went back to their old units and said, well, I've done that, it was fun. Now want my promotion and to go back to my standard career. So I think that is pretty

much the story. And the problem that special forces in the UK have now is that the British military has gone down. From when I joined her, there was one hundred and seventy five thousand regular soldiers in the British Army and now there's only sixty eight thousand, and so you're trying to maintain that same number of special forces from a seed pool that is less than half the size, and that makes it very very difficult. Yeah, and one last question

and we'll let you go from ACTA. Also, thank you. Did you ever speak to Peter Ratcliffe? No, Peter was in a different squadron to me. He became the Regimental Sergeant major of the SAS after I left, so I never knew him and I've never spoken to him. So that's pretty much that story. Robin, thank you so much for spending a friday with us, especially considering how late it is for you. Well, guys, if you want to know more about me, go to Robin Horsall dot com.

You can get my books, and if you don't want to get a signed one, you can go to Amazon and you put my name into Amazon dot com and all my books. I've got how many books. I've got five books on Amazon. I've got a new one coming out next week, which is called Slavin Ukraine Who Dares Shares, which is an observational diary about the Ukraine War. That's uh, it's down in the link, or it's

down in the description in the YouTube channel. For those of you who are listening, it's Robin Horsefall H O R S F A L L dot com. And you definitely want the signed editions, so go to his website, check them out and buy all of his books. Thanks day. We deeply appreciate Thank you, Rabin, we appreciate you. Next Friday. Next Friday, we have somebody from the SBS who was in the gwat Era actually on so it's like a British two weeks, it's a UK two weeks. I

feel like I need some crumpets and tea. There you go. Thank you, Robin. We deeply appreciate it. Thank you everybody, have a great night.