Combat Story (Ep 23): Robin Horsfall UK Special Air Service (SAS) | Paratrooper | Mercenary | Author

there were people going in the team going in the basement a team going through the roof a team going through the back door and a team going through the back floor balcony we cleared the building in seven minutes we killed five terrorists we captured one and we rescued 19 people alive my part in that was to go through the back door and as faisal the person who had murdered the lavazzani came clear at the bottom of the stairs i opened fire at the same time as one of my comrades and uh he was carrying a grenade at the time and um you know he got 27 rounds in them the the pin hadn't been pulled from the grenade and so it didn't go off welcome to combat story i'm ryan fugit and i serve war zone tours as an army attack helicopter pilot and cia officer over a 15-year career i'm fascinated by the experiences of the elite in combat on this show i interview some of the best to understand what combat felt like on their front lines this is combat story today we hear the combat story of robin horsefall a former british special air service or sas tier one operator paratrooper mercenary entrepreneur and author during his time in service he deployed five times to northern ireland in brutal peacekeeping operations was part of one of the most storied and successful hostage rescue operations in the heart of london and was part of a one-way or suicide mission during the falklands war his combat is well documented in his first book fighting scared in which he describes his evolution from victim to tier one operator to warrior poet the title of his most recent book his stories are brutally honest and light-hearted such as sas training with delta force or how he and the sas helped princess diana with her hair in a way that only brits can manage i hope you enjoy robin's combat stories as much as i did robin thanks for taking the time to share your story today that's a pleasure to be here and uh we were just just chatting i think it's interesting to share with the folks at home that uh the poor planet on my part for this one that england is playing france and rugby and you were missing it and people the us audience here will not understand the gravity but um yeah the um rugby union in the uk is uh is as important as basketball to me it is to you you know so um england to play in france it's uh it's a really big game it's on live as we're talking but providing my son who's 38 my oldest son is 38 doesn't phone me up with the results then i can watch it when we finish i can watch it as if it's live so you know i'll i'll cope okay fair enough it's a great start though because we're gonna have the uh cross-atlantic discussion here with uh your experience in the british military sas the paras and what happened afterwards so i think it's just a fitting start to this yeah if if you'll allow me i want to read one quote from towards the end of the book um fighting scared and i i want to dive into a lot of your experiences but i think this one sets us up really nicely for what i believe would would serve as some of the foundation for you growing up and i was very interested to see this in the book the way you describe your life as a child but here's the quote and this is again like the last 10 of the book all my life there's been two conflicting sides to my personality the man who wanted to help others and be kind and the victim who was determined never to be bullied again and i as i i read these books on kindle and i take screenshots and circle interesting points i was just amazed at how many fights you got in as a kid many unprovoked and and what that sets you up for later on so i'd love to hear that context from you growing up as a kid what that was like well i was um i was um that my father i didn't know because when i was born he was in prison he was a thief and he was in prison so my mother had me and i never knew my father as a child so we lived with my grandmother and my mother worked in a hospital laundry and um you know it was quite a happy childhood she along came my sister not long afterwards and my father went back into prison quite quickly and um finally they got divorced when i was seven and a man called jeffrey horsefall married my mother just afterwards and adopted me and gave me his name but you know i had i was seven and i had i hadn't had a father for the first and most important seven years of my life and we didn't get on very well and his way of dealing with uh my problems was to beat the hell out of them so um you know it wasn't it wasn't a case of smacking a child it was the case of beating a child and he was a car mechanic and he had these huge huge big hands from lifting engines and uh you know i'd run away from him and if you get that kind of situation in your life you end up with um a problem with authority you don't trust authority you don't if you don't have male role models or you can admire and look up to if you're if you're frightened of male role models and you you feel threatened by everybody you lose your ability to argue and negotiate because people have knocked that out of you so that was the foundation of my life and i think that creates a kind of victim complex where you don't believe anybody's going to like you you don't have the ability to argue and talk back to people and consequently you're the weird guy you're the one everybody gets everybody isolates you're the one who gets pushed inside you're the victim you're the one who gets picked on and um when you are the victim you have a choice in life you can either continue that way and become the whipped puppy or you can become the leader of the group but one thing you can never do is become a member of the group you you're different you're outside the group so you can either lead it or you can follow it but you can never be in it and uh as time passed then i ended up being the person at the front of the group still alone still fairly isolated but no longer no longer frightened yeah no it comes it comes through actually i had a comment in here that i wanted to talk about it seems like no matter what point in time you seem like an outsider even though you've gone through the grueling selection the training you've bled together with other people um it you just seem to have this loner not even loner but you just seem like you're looking at it from the outside instead of part of that organization the way others might imagine it what i would say to people who find themselves in this situation is the worst thing you can do is try even harder to be one of the gang because the harder you try the more they despise you and people don't dislike you for what you do they just dislike you you don't have to be a bad guy for somebody who's like you they just have to dislike you viva it gives you good looking because you got more hair than me um because because for lots and lots of reasons so one of the things it took me a long time to learn was stop trying to make people like you be nice be a decent person do the right things and who cares if they like you that you end up liking yourself and um and then to hell with them yeah and i'm going to jump forward a bit but i i'd like to continue on with your childhood but i think that you brought up something that makes me want to ask you about the karate influence on your life and for those who haven't read the book this becomes a mainstay towards the end of your your career probably middle of your your time in service but then is the mainstay after service for you and this karate empire that you effectively built in in europe what i wanted to ask though is you describe this male role model figure if somebody's missing it the issues with authority the time that you've been training people especially with karate or martial arts do you see this in your students sometimes are you able to recognize this and help them i do especially the children but um young adults as well [Music] you can you can sense it in their behavior sometimes with martial arts you have to move somebody's body into a certain position and they'll flinch or they'll resist you touching them and they'll be shy of it um and so you know you recognize yourself in that person and you work around it um a good teacher is somebody who gets eight out of ten kids to do uh what they want them to do um a great teacher is somebody who gets the knife and the most amazing teachers are the ones who get the tenth because they know how to paint a different picture and put a different and set a teaching in several different manners and different styles to get that tenth one to understand because that tenth one thinks or feels in a different way to everybody else and the great buzzes i mean karate was just the catalyst that allowed me to teach because i love to teach and i love to teach children more than anything and um it was it was getting that tenth one getting that huge buzz inside when the kid that everybody thought was gonna fail the kid himself thought he was going to fail and then he can do it and then he achieves and then you just see the whole change in his persona and the way he advances because you believed in him i have very high expectations of children and they usually exceed them did you did you feel like you had anybody looking at you that way when you were a kid robin it sounds like the answer is no from the from reading the book no i i didn't i think um i think the one thing that would have changed my life completely it would would have been if i'd had one male role model one mentor who had understood me and trusted uh and and seen where i could go i had to i had to work very hard to discover all those things for myself i mean um i started karate because i was already in special forces when i started karate but everything we were doing was with guns um and an awful lot of undercover work with small arms and pistols and so on and then when you weren't doing that you were you were with the bigger weapons but um we weren't doing any alarm combat and so um i went down to the local town and joined the local karate club and it gave me something that uh i even though i'd been um a soldier since the age of 15 years of age um i i still lack something and that was confidence in confronting my peers um i still had that isolated victim complex once i started uh training in karate something changed in me um they were less inclined to be um facetious or cutting or sarcastic um and so a lot of people dream in martial arts i'm going to learn this martial art i'm going to become amazing at it and then i'm going to fight everybody that confronts me and i'm going to beat them up and i'm going to be amazing but what happens is you change um and so people no longer trouble you the the confrontations that you anticipated just don't occur and on rare occasions when they do occur they're not with your peers they're with idiots who are drunk or on drugs and uh they don't last very long so i'm kicking myself because i'm jumping ahead here but i don't want to lose this thread that we're talking about because i think it's important for people especially leaders today i i wonder i'm just thinking back to the time when i was when i was an officer and some of the the soldiers that i interacted with certainly it had these characteristics right but i i did not grow up that way and i didn't see the world from that perspective i wonder if there's a way if you could share from your perspective how could a leader like a an nco a senior nco or an officer better engage with a soldier that they see exhibiting some of these to kind of smooth out some of the rough edges and help them excel given that background that they're coming from yeah well the first thing is you can't treat them any differently in terms of discipline to anybody else they have to you know the second you start going easy on them then everybody else will notice it um so what you do is you pull them you know and what i would is uh take them aside tell them i understand where they're coming from and then give them responsibility so i would expect more of them um it was a common thing when i was in the parachute regiment for a particularly troublesome individual who was a private soldier to be promoted um because as soon as he had that responsibility um it focused him it gave him um a lot more self-confidence because an awful lot of bad behavior comes from a lack of self-confidence so giving somebody responsibility is just one way of dealing with that it depends it doesn't always work there's no um one shoe fits everybody system but um that would that would be one idea with a difficult person um being careful not to um a lot of junior leaders i mean junior officers as well as junior non-commissioners have a have a habit of seeing one person in a group of men who is weaker more isolated more troublesome and then becoming a member of the pack that continue to bully him so it's very important as a you know i'll give you an example with kids um a lot of a lot of things we used to do was pull two kids out and say okay pick teams and he would pick one and then they would pick one and of course the kid that isn't popular is always the one standing last against all okay you get him you get that guy um and being aware of those things and making sure that those situations never occur so you make sure that you know private billings is uh i identified and put somewhere without anybody else having a say in it um one of the things about having been victimized is you understand uh what creates what makes it easy for people to victimize you and it's not always the obvious uh bullying systems that come out in you know cheap movies it's very often more subtle than that it can be the tone of voice it can be you know something left undone it can be something ignored oh i didn't know you were coming oh i didn't know you wanted to come to the party oh i forgot to send you the email all those little things add up and then become an enormous weight just like drops of water in an ocean so um a good leader will be aware of those things um and it may be not be a bad thing for a lot of a lot of leaders to find themselves in a situation where they're isolated and peaked on for a while as part of training yeah no well said and this makes me want to ask if you could pull out one of those formative moments when you were a kid and went through this that really stuck with you what what would that be could you describe that for us um i didn't have a very i had a fairly happy childhood i can remember um i can remember being attacked by a boy when i was nine years old we were playing with our toy cars and his name was robert dan i remember it that clearly was playing without toy cars and all of a sudden he just leapt on me and beat the hell out of me and um it was the shock because there was no warning there was no argument there was no okay this is getting difficult he's bigger than me i can run away it was or i can call my mum it was just a simple out and out vicious attack for no reason at all um and that that shock factor was something that came back later in the years when and people can do that verbally as well as physically you can be sitting in a group having a very happy conversation then all of a sudden somebody throws a piece of vicious sarcasm in from the side that you're unprepared for and make you embarrassed and um you have to practice certain ways to deal with that um we get better as we add it as we get older later when i was 15 i'd been in the army about six weeks so i was coming up to my 16th uh birthday and um a boy a big a big lad called mick hitchcock who was you know 15 physically it was looking like he was 18. and uh he asked me if i was talking too much and he asked me uh if he if he wanted me to shut his if he if i wanted him to shut my mouth and not realizing that this was fighting talk i said yeah so he just stood up and punched me straight back onto my bed and i just laid there stunned and didn't do anything what i should have got up was jumped up and leapt on him and and got beaten up properly but at least i would have shown that i was going to fight back but i didn't and consequently the rest of the guys in the room because we had 14 to a room saw that and i became a victim and i've had to go back 50 years and it's nearly 50 years now um one thing i would change is i would have i would have got stuck into him and got a good hiding but uh and other people would have left me alone it took me about it took me a few more weeks to realize that i had to fight back but by then i had to fight back through all the people that had taken the opportunity to victimize me um which didn't make me popular and didn't make me any friends but it it stopped me getting beaten up yeah and i think just the the term or the phrase being a victim or being victimized in the u.s has this negative connotation of course and it's very interesting to see what you went on to do after that and so we will dive into that just find this fascinating evolution of who you were as described in the book so diversity creates character it doesn't necessarily create good character but it creates character some kind of character yeah so robin if if you can you've mentioned it uh a couple times now that you were 15 when you signed up in the us that's earlier than anybody's ever heard of so you could just slightly before that what got you onto the military track was it something in the family something you saw read what was it yeah i was um i i was struggling with my with my stepfather at home and uh consequently that spread into my school life and i started to i started to fail at school so um then i started to play truant and not go to school i used to put my school uniform on in the morning go out the door leave my bedroom window slightly open come back once my mother had gone to her father had gone to work back through the window get changed to go fishing so things weren't going very well at school or anywhere else and there was an army recruitment office in aldershot a town close to where i lived which was called the home of the british army and i was 14 years old at the time and you know on a path to abject failure and um i was with my cousin ricky and we walked in i said i'm going to join the army and school leaving age at that time was 15. you could leave school at 15. 1971-72 and i walked into the office and said i want to join the army sergeant behind the desk said yeah okay um how old are you i said 14. he said well you can't join this year he said but we can fill the paperwork in and we can send you on a course and a test and you know we can get you ready for next year and i think my mother was very relieved when i brought the paperwork home for a sign and it gave me a replacement family because i continued my education in the armed forces the first two years is boy service so you're a full-time soldier um but you have your education you take your school exams um and you and you learn how to be a non-commissioned officer in the british army so by the time i joined the parachute regiment when i was 17 and a half um i already had a thousand hours of soldiering behind me that was it i wasn't prepared for it yeah so why the decision for the army though was it i mean could you not have said hey i'm going to go and do this other vocation you know or i'm going to go work on an oil rig somewhere and leave this town like why uh mighty army well the early 70s was a time of a lot of unemployment in the united kingdom for a start add to that the fact that i didn't have any qualifications i didn't have any skills um um i didn't have any references that's for sure so um where was i gonna go um the army at that time was open to boys there were 13 000 boy soldiers in the british army uh some of them were tradesmen some of them were apprentices uh some of them were junior ruptured some were junior leaders i actually tried to join up as a junior technician in the royal army medical corps and um they said that i uh the tests i'd taken didn't qualify for me for that so i went from the royal army medical corps and ended up in the parachute regiment so um how did that happen but it did um i think as uh you know i said i was the the beaten bullied kid and um uh so there was some appeal to being one of these tough guys in the pictures um who jumped out of airplanes and and nobody messed with so yeah yeah so this brings up a question that i think a lot of people a lot of the americans who listen to this have myself included so the time that you're talking about the early 70s to us in the u.s that is the vietnam era like that's who we would have been looking at at the time in the british military who are the veterans at that time that you look up to or that that were the seasoned you know combat fighters of that era well most of um the british british army has only had one year where its soldiers haven't been in combat since the second world war i think that was 1963. um so the army was constantly involved in small engagements around the world i mean you had um after after the second world war you had korea for three years um which was u.n so british army then the british had palestine they had um cyprus they had borneo they had malaya and by in the early 1970s right up until nearly 000 we had the conflict in northern ireland so um you know everybody was when i was a child every adult was a veteran of the second world war and when i was a soldier every every soldier that i served with had seen combat in some in some theater or another so all your senior all your senior non-commissioned officers were um were mentors in one way or another sometimes because of their um inhumanity and sometimes for the opposite reasons now was was there a particular conflict if somebody had been say in northern ireland or um cyprus or one of these other fights where people looked at them differently like oh damn that was really tough fighting right there like i gotta listen to this person or were they all equally seen as difficult i don't think um the kind of conflicts that the soldiers that i were used to um were like vietnam where you had major brigades divisions fighting open warfare with other armies most of the work that we did in those years was similar to what the modern soldier has done in afghanistan and iraq um you know walking along patrolling trying to protect the people and then getting blown up by a bomb um shot up by a sniper who then disappears so it's um or a mortar coming in and that's the end of it so it's it's it's short-term warfare but that can be that can be just as scary because you spend long periods in theaters where you are at serious risk and you so there's constant fear and but there's nothing happening and that can be more mentally uh hard than actually knowing where your enemy is that he's wearing a uniform that you get information that they're coming this way you expect them to come um or you're going to attack them or you're going to carry out mission um so the only time i while i served with the british army the only time i had that kind of conflict was during the falklands um but um after i left the army and joined foreign armies i saw more of that type of more of that type of thing but um during my service with the british army um that was the that was the main thread of what we did we patrolled we protected and we got we got murdered yeah so i i'm sure people just heard you say when you were with foreign armies and it is very interesting to hear about this and we will get there so i it's really fascinating the trajectory your your military career took even after the british army um so what i what i'd like to ask is if you can give some context to the yanks who are listening to this about the para regiment right so you're you're in the paras what does that mean like what is the sense of of that unit within the british military how does that stack up against other units it seems like it's a pretty big deal but uh for those of us who aren't as familiar well i'll i'll choose my words carefully but uh they're very much like airborne forces around the world uh they believe and probably they're justified to believe that they're the meanest sons of [ __ ] on the whole planet they they can't die and if they do it serves them right um nobody can beat them nobody can fight them uh they're stormtroopers they'll do everything that nobody else will do there's um there's a wonderful piece in uh band of brothers the hbo series um where um winter is taking his men to bastogne and the infantry are retreating and they're taking the ammunition off them and one of the instruments says don't work there you're going to be surrounded and the replies we're paratroopers we're supposed to be surrounded and uh you know that that that i mean that series i mean it's us airborne and it's it's very very similar the characters the training the people the attitude if you could take that and put it and put it let's just lay it over the british parachute regiment as well it would be exactly the same got it okay that's that's a perfect setup and please fact check me here that's the unit that you're originally assigned to when you get out of this boy training or whatever you want to call it this military training at a young age i would say you go to the paris right and then your first foray into combat is northern ireland correct yeah we actually i i joined my battalion um in march 1975 um after finishing the depot training and the parachuting um so i it was just after my 18th birthday that i got my wings and we were stood by to uh parachute into cyprus because the turks had invaded uh cyprus and it looked like we were going to have a i was going to have my first airborne operation by parachuting into cyprus but the you know somebody chickened out or the un decided it you know would sort the problem out still going on today and um so i was then deployed for my first tour of northern ireland um into a hard part of west belfast called the arduin where you know there were bombs going off every day people getting murdered every day a lot of people in the usa don't know very much about the conflict in ireland ireland was partitioned in 19 in in the early in the early 20th century with an agreement that the protestants would live in the north the majority protestants would live in the north and that would be part of the united kingdom of great britain and the republic of ireland would exist in the south um the civil rights march started in the north because the catholic people there were being deprived of their civil rights and um open open conflict uh began between the two opposing uh religious parties so the army went to stand in between them and um we did that for for many many years and most of the bombings and most of the killings were sectarian between the two sides um they weren't directed at the military they were they were directed at the civil population and we were there to help the police um but um the british the security forces lost nearly 6 000 men and women there um the casualty figures for northern ireland exceeded 50 000 that's civilians and military and security forces so it was a terrible time and uh terribly vindictive time but i was a young 18 year old paratrooper and i loved it i was with the big boys i had the you know i was with the tough guys i had a big rifle and i had great ncos and you know i actually quite enjoyed my time on the ground i did five tours of northern ireland in the in the next six years so robin let me let me ask you to provide a bit more context here because you're right americans myself included don't know a lot about this and i'm trying to imagine because we cannot there have been very few instances that i can even think of where americans have been in military have had to go and patrol a place with people very much like themselves who look and sound like them in you know so close to home so i would imagine that was extremely difficult to wrap your head around after coming out of paratraining all of the basic training you went through the fighting the way you were trained to then go in and effectively be like almost peacekeeping i know it wasn't peacekeeping but you're supporting the police you know you're not necessarily doing these deliberate hits that you might have been doing in the sas right what's what was that like for you going in as an 18 year old at the time well it was a peacekeeping role um we were there in support of the police but it was in our own country it was we had to go across a small stretch of ocean to get to it but um to try and give it some context it would be like your national guard being on the streets in washington dc trying to keep um let's try to use two extremes um um white supremacists away from antifa you know now and they lived in the community all the time they were killing each other in secret you had to be out on the street with your rifle um and and then they start to pick on you because you're getting in the way yeah sort of example and frighteningly enough that happened in january where we had national guard in dc but you're right i would almost imagine that like the 101st airborne being asked to go to like alaska somewhere in canada and patrol for years in those areas so it seems like a very difficult task so if you could robin could you take us to the first time that you're in what you would consider a combat environment there so maybe it's the first patrol you go out on what did it feel like you're a young guy you've been trained and here you are with the big boys okay well we had these small land rovers with a thin skin on the back which we call macrolong and it was there to stop stones and bricks and bottles and it wouldn't stop at nine millimeter low velocity round let alone a high velocity round and it had a flap on the top that opened and one of us stood at the top with our rifle pointing out and looking while the other two guys were in the back and the patrol commander was in the front with the driver and i was driving down a slope at about i don't know eight ten miles an hour uh at a place called balisil and flats in north north belfast when all of a sudden there was this crack over my head followed by a thump so it was a high velocity round crack thumb and um the bullet went over the top of my head and i turned and i cocked my weapon because we weren't allowed to have them made ready caught my weapon looked went down out the back door of the vehicle onto the road realized it was going eight miles an hour so rolled backwards into cover to the side just in time to hear the last words out of my volca patrol commander's mouth the first words were what the was that and um i heard was that and i was already in a cover position giving cover to the other guys who were disembarking and getting out on the street so we followed up called out a quick reaction force and um we found nothing on the day but we we managed to identify the place where the shot came from and uh captured some weapons a few days later um i got back in the evening and um i realized that my knee had swollen up where i rolled backwards parachute roll backwards with my rifle in my hand and uh went to wash my hands and cam cream off and realized my hands were shaking but at the time my training had kicked in you know i was 18 but i've been a soldier for nearly three years and my training kicked in i did the right things i was pleased with myself because i've done the right things and um and i hadn't been scared but the adrenaline kicked in later and you know a little bit of the handshake and back on patrol four hours later and away you go with a with a limp and was it was it in in ireland during one of these deployments that you have this i don't even know how to approach it this encounter with a minefield and uh and live ordinance was that during this time there was an encounter with um with an improvised explosive device and people who you know watched tv you'll hear the press call them ieds improvised explosive device and it was dark and one of our patrols was going into a drinking bar to um question some of the people in there uh in a very strong catholic area called the valley murphy in west belfast and um so we we laid on this waste ground on the other side of the road and i laid on the ground and rested my rifle magazine on to the dirt and it scraped on something metallic so i i pushed away the grass and realized that i was laying on a galvanized bucket with a taped on cardboard lid uh which was facing the wall about five meters away of a post office sent them you know um similar to a claim or mine the explosion would have gone off and the blast would have hit anybody between that and the wall um so i i got off it and ran around the corner and told my patrol commander pete light i said there's a claim on mine there and he said are you sure i said i'm absolutely sure i was laying on it so there was a captain in charge of the patrol in the bar the bar was called kelly's bar and he came across and he said take me back and show me where it is and i said i'm not going back there i said we've had all this training that tells you once you've discovered something to clear the area keep away from it and they showed us pictures of people who've been blown to pieces by these things but he gave me an order so we crawled across the ground and he tied a piece of string to it and we crawled back and he started pulling on his piece of string and i'm laying behind him with my fingers in my ears and it wouldn't come out of the ground so and they called the ammunition technical officer felix and they came in and cleared it and they found that it had about 10 pounds of homemade explosive two ounces of high explosive with an electric detonator and the wires went across 200 meters of ground that they dug a trench for and buried and it had been initiated but it was january it was cold it was wet and the battery they used hadn't been powerful enough to set off the bomb so um yeah it was a fortunate night for me was the training at the time so the idea that you would just get up and move away from it was did you understand like this thing isn't going to go off if i move it has to be dedicated somehow no i knew i knew that it was it was a homemade device buried you know it wasn't like something with a pressure plate on it yeah so you know there it was it was designed to fire a blast at that post office wall um and um you know and anything else close to it and especially the guy laying on top of it so um so i got the hell out of there quickly yeah and you you have many near-death experiences i don't know if i would say this is the first one but um did you come away from that like oh my god that could have been it right there um no um uh you got on you you were back out on patrol um we had to call in the place off all night and one of the corporals was threatening to beat the hell out of me because there was nothing there and uh we're all out here freezing and we're going to beat you up when we get back horseville you know and a few more expletives but uh when we got back up obviously you know the the mine had been discovered and uncovered and he didn't say a thing um one of the sergeants came to me and said well done and that was it don't get too big time about it buddy you know get back on patrol and um do it again yeah pretty much that and you know there was there was no kind of um leeway given for you to be weak in any way for you to uh say oh i'm troubled by this um in fact you laughed at it um to a degree you know you survived so you enjoyed it if you if your friends and we did lose lose friends someone got killed um you know you you had a drink to them that night you sang songs for them and then you you got on with the job that was what you were supposed to do and we did um it was um as i say back to being a paratrooper meanest leanest keenest sons of [ __ ] in the world you know it it's interesting you say that i just i interviewed a gentleman jeff depatsy who is canadian special forces their jtf2 in post-911 era and he he talked about how important that is when when there is this like an experience like you just described or lose somebody and how that has to come out very quickly um so that it can be rationalized dealt with and properly properly dealt with i would say and i don't know we had a kind of um we had a kind of affinity with vikings at the time you know we used to shout odin when we jumped out of airplanes and stuff like that but i mean we left geronimo to the americans and uh we um yeah so and um you know so there's this kind of uh well and we still refer to pete our friends who have died as going to valhalla um and we do that kind of thing we we would drink for them we would sing for them and um and wish them happy times in valhalla and died with their sword in their hand so i i want us to jump ahead to your sas time this election but there's something that came up in the book and i'm just curious if i read this correctly but it seems like surprisingly to me your time with the perez was a more positive experience for you than the time in sas in terms of the camaraderie the feeling within the team the mission um is that accurate just before we jump into the sas yeah i think um when you go when you're an 18 17 year old boy and you boy a young man and you go into a parachute regiment you all go through the same meat grinder you know you all go through the same sausage machine you'll come out the same shape at the other end uh you know in the buddy buddy system and support your friends and the weakest man's a different man on every day and carry the other man's load and very very close there's a great esprit de corps um because you're selected as a team player when you go into special forces you're very much selected as an individual the selection process is for a man that can work alone the man that can uh lead uh foreign troops the man that can take responsibility way way above his pay scale and rank um so there are different type of creature entirely and they need to be kept busy um by count montgomery who was the land forces commander and d-day in europe was irish and he said you know the irish are great fighters when they're not fighting somebody else they're fighting one another and special forces soldiers in my experience are very much the same they need to be busy they need to be working they need to be focused on something because if they're not they start turning inwards and fighting amongst themselves um people came to me uh in later years when i was bodyguarding and said look we want to get four sas guys on this team i said no you don't you want to get one sas guy and a couple of marines and paris because that way you know there's only one guy who thinks he's the boss um if you get four sas guys they all think they should be the boss um so yeah it's a different experience my you know it's complicated i was with the sas for six years and the last couple of years were difficult um uh for because it wasn't all institutions have rank and if unfortunately you're an institution where one or two people of higher rank than you don't like you then they can destroy your career um but that story's in the book you know and um it's the re it's the reason that i left yeah you know there are a couple things you just said that i have heard several of the american tier one operators talk about uh guys who are in delta and in particular it's it's this individual versus team selection process and i know that the delta was modeled with the sas in mind with that selection process you know and it's very much the individual who gets through and then they're placed into a team environment later and and i've always wondered about that because you have to work as a team when you're in those just like you you describe in your book about working in a team environment but you're truly selected as an individual person that's right you are i mean um sas selection during my time it may have changed a little now but the selection process takes a year um the first month is spent with heavyweights going over mountains alone with the map and compass and getting to different checkpoints in certain times but then you go on to continuation training where you go into the jungles and you work as four-man groups even first month working alone second month working as fours in jungles fourth and fives carrying greater weights living in the jungle where everything wants to eat you every everything that's small especially mosquitoes ticks mites bugs you know you name it it'll eat you um and then you go on to combat survival training where again you end up working alone living off the land being chased by people um and then you go through an interrogation phase where you learn resistance to interrogation and then you go on to get your badge and join your squadron but you're on probation for another six months during which time you have to learn a personal skill and a truth skill and my personal skill was to qualify as a paramedic and my troop skill was as a mountain climber so and then at the end of that year you then qualified and then you're allowed to stay in for another two years before you have to re-qualify um and uh be reassessed not do the whole thing again but just to some people say do we want to keep him yeah yeah geez and actually this guy tom satterly who spent two decades in delta he was saying when he got out and he was asked to go train other forces they were he was hired because he was in delta and he was like if you want to go train other people hire green berets that's what they do and it was always like no no we need a delta person to do this it's like all right hire me and i'm going to hire green berets to go and do the training yeah yeah i'll i'll be there i'll be the officer i'll be the administrator they can do the infantry training because that's what you need yeah you need people who can train infantry um and basic infantry tactics you don't need people to train special forces that's a that's a big budget uh problem you know yeah so i i know you just talked through the the selection process there was one story that came out with i believe it was in selection in this bitter cold the second time you go through it where people do they die on that event robin yeah one man died um we were and he wasn't actually on the selection he was one of the uh sas majors called david keeley mike mike kiwi sorry excuse me mike keely and um you know he he'd actually served a long time with the sas and was highly thought of um we've been up in the up in the mountains the brecon beacons um they're not very high compared to american mountains they're about just over 3000 feet high but they they're on the west of the united kingdom and they face the prevailing wind so they in winter they tend to sit around zero so they're cold and they're wet and they're wet and they're wet and wet cold is far more dangerous than dry coal we've been up there this was the um the last day of that month and the march we were to do that day over the mountains was 40 miles um he came up for a walk to the first checkpoint and he never had his cold weather gear with him he just thought it was going to be you know eight miles the first checkpoint and then he would stop and get on the truck and um and that he had a walk now we got to the top of the first ridgeline the wind was blowing about 40 miles an hour there was a crust of snow with water running underneath it and the wind was running hitting us from the left in gusts and uh he went down with exposure so that some of the guys took some of their uh cold weather gear out to try and um warm him up and they dug they dug a hole but it was wet and so one of the guys simon stayed with him in a shelter um to try to keep him warm and the rest of the guys carried on i went back to the stock um because the weather was so atrocious nobody got the first checkpoint um mountain rescue went out the next day and the g squadron went out the next day and they found simon alive but they found mike dead next to him um he died of exposure overnight it was very sad loss um so we did the whole of selection and then we had to do that last 40-mile merch uh six months later yeah in there was only nine of us left by that time jesus you know what what i took away though that i don't think you touched on just them was you turning back was the same as is effectively saying all right i'm done because you're on your own right and in your mind this is they could pull you from the course but yeah your idea was i'm gonna die if i don't do this so i'm gonna have to turn around that's right yeah the other i mean we were essentially we were close to the top of the ridge called brim and um it was a case of go back down to the truck or go down the other side where the roman road was um which is an old stone road but then you would have had to have gone another over another high mountain in order to get to the first checkpoint well no but the guys that went down the other side they broke into a water pumping station and sheltered there for the night and i went back so in hindsight you know i i i made the wise decision you did yeah yeah yeah yeah but i think i think ego and pride could have made a lot of people make the wrong decision you know yeah well exposure i mean you get trained about cold weather um disease um and you know once you once you get that chill and you understand the um the way your brain's working what's happening to your body and you can eat but you can't warm up you know you've either got to get into shelter or you've got to get down off the mountains um and uh i got off the mountain paul mike didn't and all the other guys got off the mountain too there were 24 of us that got off the mountain from that march and then we all went up to the jungle and we came back from the jungle and um and 10 of us passed the jungle fees and then one person failed the interrogation phase so we were left with nine and um you know nine of us passed and i think that was at 57 who started right i mean to give an idea of the attrition and i we don't need to spend time on this but i found it was very interesting it was like a one-off that i think one of the officers who was in the training got booted because he had somebody delivering him uh like sleeping bag or something at night that was um that was on a previous election selection um with a guy who's now very famous so i won't uh you know lay into him but um he um did he we we've got like um your national guard is or your reservist so like our territorial army and he was with the territorial sas and he decided that he wanted to get into the regular sas but this red sports car kept showing up in the welsh mountains and made some people suspicious so they checked it out and what was happening his girlfriend was driving around and picking him up where she could and driving him closer to the next checkpoint where she could um to help him pass and of course he failed yeah he he who dares wins right i guess uh no who dares wins there's another video here sorry yeah there's a famous comedian uh who who says he who dares wins and in the comedy show it's it's a deliberate era it's who dares wins fitting an american would make it here okay good so i'd like to jump ahead to the uh to this hostage rescue mission if if uh you don't feel like i'm gonna miss anything in between because i'd like to spend a bit of time on that if that's okay with you yeah you do you go wherever you wish so i might edit this out later but i want to read just a page here from the book to set the scene admittedly i mean i've lived overseas half my life i was not aware of this event and sadly i'm sure everybody in the uk knows about it to us there's the uh the iran hostage rescue from the u.s side but this this was going on at the time very interesting story so i'd like to set the scene here and then turn it over to you to tell the rest sure so as the broadcaster was speaking just two miles away from the bbc broadcasting house this is in london three arab terrorists were walking from their temporary headquarters in earl's court to the iranian embassy at 16 princess gate one of london's most fashionable terraces right so americans should be thinking of this like imagine this happening in new york city or washington dc right um police constable trevor lock a tall well-built man age 41 was midway through his shift guarding the front door of the embassy he was a long-serving member of the diplomatic protection group and was armed with a 38 smith wesson police revolver that contained only six rounds of ammo inside were sim harris a long-haired bespeckled bbc sound recordist and kris kramer a bbc tv news field producer who were chasing up delayed visas for a visit to iran as dj jimmy young played the other side of me for the prime minister the three young arabs raced from a red car and filed fired several shots through the glass front of doors of the embassy building splinters of glass exploded into trevorlock's face and before he could react he was forced bloody faced and shot through the doors and into the building an uzi submachine gun thrust into his chest in the entrance hall the original three arabs were joined by three more who had apparently been waiting on some pretext inside and then this is the last bit here pc lock and bbc men were placed in a small upstairs room with embassy chauffeur ron morris with their hands held above their heads they watched and listened to the increasing commotion in the building the gunmen were shouting for ali who was ayatollah khomeini's charged affair in london they finally found him and threw him in with the british hostages he had a nasty gash on his face and a black eye the gunman can constantly apologize to the british prisoners as this was not intended for them so i'm i'm going to pause here but basically in the center of london you've got this hostage situation in the iranian embassy i believe it's six gunmen 25 hostages and if that sounds right robin if you could take it from there and just from the start could you tell us where you're at in your career like how long have you been in sas and and take us through this operation okay yeah i'd um i did january 1979 i started sas selection so i was a qualified sa soldier by january 1980 i'd been a member of b squadron 22 sas first six months by then we'd come back from northern ireland my first my first tour with special forces there and uh we went onto the counter-terrorist team which was called the pagoda team and um that meant the squadron did six months uh on rotation uh where you practiced four hostage rescue situations and this team had been formed after the munich disaster uh the munich olympics in 1972 when um the police tried to mount a rescue and the athletes had got killed terrorists who got killed policemen got killed and uh with great foresight the british government decided to allocate funds for the sas to form a secret counter-terrorist team ready to respond a moment's notice or anywhere in the united kingdom to a similar event and the team developed over the years um and uh we we operate there was there was a squadron which is with all our attached arms was about 60 men in four troops and it was divided into two equal teams called the red team and the blue team to train together and those two teams were divided into two halves the assault team and the sniper team but the snipers were also assault trained as well um so we had just finished training and taken over from g-squadron and um we were planning that day which was the 28th of april to drive to um scotland to do an exercise with the edinburgh police when it came over the news on the radio that um a hostage situation was developing in west london so we are our commanding officer cancelled the move and we waited to see what would happen and as the news came in during the day um it was clear that you know this was a serious situation but we couldn't move until the government asked us to um so our officer in charge hector gulland sent us home to get some more gear yeah he looked glad we're not going for away for a couple of days now this might be a long-term thing so go home you know get some more washington shaving kit and put put some more pleasantries in your bag because this might turn into something a bit longer so i went home and i i i got some more gear and left a note on the mantelpiece over the fireplace for my girlfriend at the time um who has now been my wife for 40 years and um saying uh not coming home the day after tomorrow if you want to know more you need to watch the tv and um and off i went back to camp that evening um we still hadn't been deployed by the government but the news was coming in that um 23 people had been taken hostage including um four british citizens um sim harris uh mustafa kahuti uh the chauffeur and uh uh kramer i can't remember his first name um a bbc uh journalist and um chris cramer and so and the rest were embassy staff the iranian embassy staff so our commanding officer mike rose now general sir mike rose um decided that he was going to move us closer to london because we were 160 miles from london and so he deployed us early and we moved to 20 miles from london to a place called beckonsfield which was an army education center and we got there just after midnight and we stopped for a cup of tea and um and to wait further orders and then we were given permission to move into regents park barracks in london on tottenham court road which was only about three miles from the incident area so we were already in london before the government even asked us to uh deploy we got there on on the off chance that we were needed because we didn't need to be two hours away fast driving with blue lights we it was much better to be there on the ground and the next day as information started to come in and it was clear that you know that these people were armed they had grenades they had explosives and they were seriously they were giving deadlines threatening to kill the people inside um prime minister margaret thatcher and our home secretary william whitelaw asked us to move in closer and they they emptied the building next door which was the royal college of general practitioners and um so the building next door was emptied and in the dark on second night we moved in next door secretly in through the back door in the dark with all our gear and we got ready to uh do an immediate action and an immediate action means that if they start killing the terrorists right now then you have to go in with sledgehammers and weapons and hope to make the best of it and save somebody um our main uh our main philosophy was kill the terrorists rescue the hostages if the terrorists are dead the hostages are going to be alive and we're going to be alive too so you know that was our philosophy but we were operating under british law so we had to be able to justify uh lethal force in any way that we used it so um we got ready to do an immediate action with the basic plans we had uh coordinated with the police but we can't just do a deploy um for us to actually carry out a mission we have to get permission from the prime minister to the home secretary to the chief of police and then in writing to the military commander handing over that only takes a few seconds but they could be a vital few seconds then the days dragged over you know negotiation teams came in communications were set up plans were made and as the days passed we started to form a deliberate action so we got plans of the building we got reconnaissance on the roof excuse me we got reconnaissance in the basement areas we got the janitor in to tell us where there were armored doors uh what the windows were made of and you gradually built up a picture of what the target area was it was five floors with 54 rooms and there were 60 of us and that's about 45 assaulted 40 45 assault team members including all the snipers and we made various plans we made plans to hit them in the building we made plans to hit them on a bus if they got a bus to go to the airport we got plans to hit them with snipers we got plans to hit them on the airplane we've got players hit them everywhere wherever they were whatever circumstances we made plans to hit them over the next few days and um it all looked like it was going to settle down they were getting tired they were getting desperate and it looked like it was going to be okay they released three of the hostages during that time one sick woman chris kramer who pretended he was sick and mustafa karkouti so it looked like you know they were they were cracking and then they had a hard man faisal and faisal uh was being provoked by the shah jay de fer the iranian charged affair uh lavazzani and lavazzani wanted to die for allah he wanted to die and be a martyr to his to his uh to his cause for his country and uh he provoked lavazzani provoked lavazzani and eventually lavazzani took him downstairs and put two two shots in the back of his head and then they threw the body out the front door on the sixth day margaret thatcher had said we will not assault the building unless they kill somebody well they killed somebody and um command was then almost immediately giving over on a small piece of paper very small piece of paper about that um from the commissioner of police to the commander of the uh armed forces and uh 20 minutes later we assaulted the building now the cunning plan was that we would all sneak up to our six different entry points and in eight man teams we would all enter each floor simultaneously on the go go go but one of the guys who was abseiling down the back of the building to get onto a balcony on the second floor the first floor off the ground put his foot through a window and um i was standing underneath and the window broke and you could hear on the right the negotiator was talking to salim who was the commander at the time and salim said i've heard something and max max vernon the negotiator was saying no it's perfectly all right you can't hear anything everything's fine sally and he said no i've heard something and he walked away from the phone and max said that he could hear a little voice and it said singing you're going to die you're going to die max felt very bad because he thought he failed as a negotiator um the next minute you know um hector realizing that we've been compromised because of the broken window gave the go go go early now i was on the ground floor on the back door and um our our explosive man was still putting explosives on the door on the front door on the front window on the second floor on the balcony um one of my great friends john mcelis was leaping across with a frame charge to put on the window behind which the hostages were being held and that was designed so it would blow the window outwards not inwards but instead of being able to sneak up and put it on he had now to run over put it on and as he was about four feet away from it the explosion goes up and there's amazing footage for anybody that looks up sas embassy siege uh seeing this explosion and you see eight guys going over the balcony entering the building rescuing the hostages and that was the main footage that most people saw for the next 10 years whereas there were people going in the team going in the basement a team going through the roof a team going through the back door and a team going through the back floor balcony um so seven minutes later we we cleared the building in seven minutes and we rescued 19 hostages one was killed by the terrorists during our entry um we killed five terrorists we captured one and we rescued 19 people alive and we cleared the building um my part in that was to uh go through the back door and uh as faisal the person who had murdered the lavazzini came clear at the bottom of the stairs um uh i opened fire at the same time as one of my comrades and uh he was carrying a grenade at the time and um you know he got 27 rounds in them three from me and 24 from my comrade and um the the pin hadn't been pulled from the grenade and so it didn't go off and uh we got the people out the building caught fire we evacuated the building and um we uh we then moved but after after handcuffing everybody separating the live terrorists from the hostages we went back into the royal college of surgeons and got our gear and disappeared anonymously into the dark great that's a great story and it was only ten days after the um failed mission by delta into iran so the world including the american public uh welcomed this because the western world's morale at this time after you know them losing those guys um through the um through the desert storm mission um was um you know it was it was very very sad so when we had this success only 10 days later any americans over the age of 50 will remember it just as well um but you have to find them guys that's right and that and that was that was desert one for us right that was the uh kind of catastrophic move um robin i wanna not to glorify this in any way but the the faisal when you took the shots at him was that the first time you had killed somebody with uh with the service weapon the reason i ask is i i want to compare this to what you described later on with the knife in the jungles because i think it's an important point you bring up in the book no there was uh there was another shooting um in northern ireland um which i i sort of shy away from um because um even today there are people who will say that was my uncle tommy um his name wasn't tommy by the way um but um yeah so but no it wasn't and um you know you if you take a um motor racing driver who drives at 200 miles an hour and you know he trains really really well to make that drive as safe as he possibly can because he's an expert driver and that's why he can go at those speeds and overtake and understand that the aerodynamics of the vehicle and how it works and so on and it's the same with the soldier the soldier trains so that when he's putting a situation where he has to kill somebody then he does it because it's his job and he knows how to do it he knows it makes him safe and he knows it saves other lives as well um so somebody asked me what how it felt and um i said it was one of the most simple things i'd ever done it wasn't difficult and that doesn't mean that circumstances like that are always easy because you're a trained soldier there are far more complicated situations where there are innocent civilians where there are people who are you know you don't know whether they're good guys or bad guys uh where you may have fired artillery into a particular area and then find there are civilians afterwards um and casualties um caused by your fire so you know um it's never that simple but i was fortunate um to have shot the right people for the right reasons and this this other event which we'll get to i think but you having to take somebody out in you know very close proximity with a knife leaves you feeling differently than what you just described in that sense you know so i just i think it's important to document that here and then when we talk about that it seems like it's a different experience for you on the back end yeah very different very different indeed so with that um and actually just a great plug for the book the way you describe kind of like moving out into anonymity afterwards is great but then having to be paraded in front of the royals i don't not to be overly sexy here but like everybody wanted to then who had privilege to meet you guys you get to meet margaret thatcher of course but then they want to see operations with you there's this great uh story with princess diana um so it's just a good plug for the book for those um you guys are supposed to be in the shadows but then there's still power that can wield influence to get in front of you yeah we're we're still in the shadows in the sense um but you've suddenly become the most famous anonymous people in the world yes and uh my um my girlfriend at the time was hugging herself because she knew what everybody else didn't know yeah i was one of them and of course the whole world is talking about everywhere everybody wants to meet you everybody wants to know you but they can't because maine the main reason is we're operating undercover in northern ireland exactly we're targets and our families are targets you know so we we have to remain anonymous because we can get we can be here our children our wives to be here at home so we have to remain anonymous so the main reason for our anonymity was there was a threat against us at home um but it was you know it was it was a great thing but then every uh privileged person and their pet dog was invited to hereford to meet us and we had to do demonstrations for them and um we started to get a little bit annoyed with it because and and certain people who weren't involved started to believe their own press um and believe that they were more than they actually had been before that event and uh thousands of people started to lay claim to the fact that they were on that balcony yeah and um so it it it deflected us from our work for a while and uh for a limited period the type of people that were turning up to join us changed as well um when i joined you wanted your main focus was soldiering soldiering and soldiering nothing else and um then people started to come for different reasons for the fame for the uh for the name for the cat badge um and that never completely went away but it did change um princess diana came to hereford with prince charles when they were married and they um we did a practice building assault and uh asked her if she wanted to drive one of the range rovers up to the building and we would leap across this range rover up ladders and assault the building float firing pyrotechnics and she undid the window slightly to let her fresh air in and one of the pyrotechnics went off by the window and it caught the lacquer on her hair on fire and uh a guy called joe i just call him ginge um he uh he opened the door quickly pulled her out and started to beat around the head and to put flames out and i thought i'll have a little bit of that so i gave him a little bit of help because how many chances do you get hit a princess you know and um and um so um and she was famous at that time for having a very round um haircut and of course her hair had got burned and so they got a hairdresser in that afternoon in town and then vogue magazine had her with this new pixie boy haircut um in the evening and it became the new fashion around the world courtesy of the specialist of you guys that's great i bet she had to crack the window because of the smell and that in that vehicle with you guys in it is what i'm guessing uh no i think they were they were pretty pristine to be fair okay yeah yeah um yeah i'd love to jump to the uh i think what you would call the one-way mission the suicide mission that you guys were asked to do um i don't i don't want to i'd like to save some time to talk about the experience you had training with delta back in the states but if it's more appropriate to jump to the one-way mission now and then maybe we could hit the delta experience afterwards yeah if we could talk about it and i assume that is the falklands right that is the one-way mission and a very different experience from this very successful hostage situation in london well the falklands war in 1982 was the last time that the uh the british army royal navy and royal air force had a combined operation together and um you know it traveled over 8 000 miles to get to the falklands with very limited support from our allies and for those people who don't know um there was a right-wing junta in argentina at the time that were murdering thousands of their own people who resisted their government and um two and their economy was failing and leopoldo galtieri who was the dictator decided to deflect public attention by invading what they called the malvinas what we call the portland islands laying claim to it because it was 150 miles off their coast they invaded they defeat their army defeated 32 royal marines and they captured the islands believing that it wasn't worth margaret thatcher's government's um effort to travel all that way to do something about it well they were wrong and she deployed our armed forces and we traveled down there um when we got there um the first people in were g squadron 22 sas they parachuted onto the islands and uh someone dropped off by submarine and they uh prepared for the main landing force to arrive which was predominantly uh royal marines and paratroopers with some support arms and followed by the guards and um other other other small other support units when they got there the argentinian air force sank the atlantic conveyor which was a container ship and that container ship had almost all rc harriers and our chinook helicopters so instead of having an air force we had half an air force and instead of having six helicopters for transporting men we had one so all of a sudden our ability to function was very very different the argentinians deployed a cruiser a heavy cruiser from um um one of their main ports and that was a threat to the task force and we had two aircraft carriers down there now if that um that cruiser had managed to sink an aircraft carrier we would have been defeated before we got going if they're air force using exact missiles had had managed to sink any more of our capital ships they sank three destroyers then the whole war would have swung one way so the government and command of special forces decided that it would be a great idea to send a squadron into argentina to take out the super anton dard jets which were carrying the um set missiles that were sinking our uh capital ships and b squadron my squadron was chosen to do that so we trained for four weeks solidly um to fly two c-130 hercules uh transport aircraft into one of two airfields one at rio grande and one at ushuaya down in tierra del fuego which was where the jets were taking off from but they were clever they were moving them so we were never quite sure which one it was and the brilliant plan i say that facetiously the brilliant plan that was made was that we were going to land these two c-130x hercules aircraft on the argentinian runway which was protected by surface ware missiles deployed from the back of the aircraft as raiders in um in elandro was with uh with machine guns on and shoot up the airfield and find these jets and shoot them up while they were on the ground and um and then get killed or captured because there was no return journey there was no fuel to return my wife at the time was eight months pregnant with our first son and when i left the house early that morning to go on this mission um she didn't know what the mission was um i gave her the name of our son alex before i left we changed it from a previous name and um i left thinking that i wasn't coming back and people say well how do you do that well um you wear the cat badge you get the glory you do the seven minute missions into the iranian embassy well now it's the real thing and are you worth that cat badge and um so we deployed and we got as far as ascension islands halfway there in mid-atlantic and the delay was called because ronald reagan put pressure on margaret thatcher not to extend the war on the mainland and then it was on and then it was off and then it was on and then it was off um in the meantime the british military the guards paris and marines and all the attached arms the engineers the navy the air force were doing a fantastic job and uh we're defeating the argentinian army um hands down and we're approaching port stanley and as they became clear that the british armed forces are going to win um our commanding officer decided that he wanted to get us down there to catch the end of the war so we the two the two aircraft took off and uh the plan was for us to get over um the falklands parachute into the sea and be picked up and carry out a mission on uh west falkland or going to port stanley from the rear on the coast well the raf messed up one of the refueling systems for one of the aircraft so that turned back so now there are about 30 of us going to win the war and uh we get down there and uh we parachute into the sea and we're picked up by a frigate called andromeda uh alongside his the glamorgan with a big hole knocked out the back of it by an extra set missile but it's still a float robin sorry can i just interrupt for a second when you parachute in right you're parachuting into the atlantic freezing water right with some gear but not all of it because you're also jumping your gear in into the ocean yeah well i i yeah i'm glad you reminded me of that because we um we wanted to jump with our gear attached to ropes to our personal harnesses your league gears with you but the raf and powers that be decided that they wanted to put our gear in one-ton containers um so send it out as heavy load first and then we would follow it so it would go out on its own parachutes the navy would pick it back up from the sea and then pick us up as well but um they didn't put the parachutes on properly and the the um they had a quick release device on so these containers pendulums and i'm standing there looking out the back of the aircraft waiting to go off the back and i can see these bits of cloth floating across through the air and wondering what they are and the parachutes had come off all the containers and so instead of floating down to the sea we were bombing our own ships with these half-ton containers and then we followed it out so we land in the sea and it's it's classic military intelligence the great oxymoron and um we land in the sea with all our kit going to the bottom of the ocean and um but um two days later the enemy heard that 30 men from b squadron had landed in the sea and they surrendered so uh yeah that was what did you do in the ward well i was pretty scared at times but i didn't do anything not in that one but you know it was a it was a one-way mission and we the very fact that we were prepared to do it we were ready to do it we got halfway um you know it's uh and four days after the surrender my first song was the silver lining okay so i think just in the interest of time i would love if some other time i could interview you again to talk about your post-military career because i i don't want to shortchange any of that it's important i'd like to ask if we could talk about the some of the training you did with delta there's a formative time i think in delta's um you know history um just the experiences you had there's some really funny parts about this in the book as you can imagine when you put americans and brits together we had a british exchange officer in my unit when i was in afghanistan and i mean it just made it infinitely more interesting and funny at the time so some of the things that you bring up are great but to have the sas teamed up with delta back in the states i'd just love to hear some of those insights that you experienced there yeah we um we went across to work with delta who had you know formed their training system on the special air service in the uk and we used to exchange packages quite regularly and they were great guys great soldiers we got on brilliantly with them but um their sense of humor um was very very different and they were a fairly young unit compared to ours whereas we have do we tend to have a great um flippancy about things until the job needs to be done and um so there's you know you've got um guys who have to play the hard man all the time you know when they're bored they have to sharpen knives you know and so we found this quite humorous because we were up in chicago with them uh practicing assaults on aircraft and um they had surveillance teams on us in the evening following us around and uh so we would go up to them in the bar and say look guys we trained you to do this we know you're following us so why don't you come and have a beer and uh as that went on and um you know we thought they were taking the situation far too seriously because there was an irish community strong irish community in chicago and um so the next day we had um we had our briefing for the mission we were to do that evening the practice mission we were to do that evening on an aircraft and a guy called paul callahan came into the briefing as everybody has set up and they're all serious and all the officers at the front and everybody sat down to attention and paul comes in with a pink foam stetson on huge big pink foam sticks and sunglasses that are blue and yellow with electric windscreen wipers going on and he's got a thompson submachine gun water pistol in his hands and he hoses down the room you know with the with water well nobody knew what to do i mean we were just killing ourselves the delta guys are are scared to laugh the officers at the front are appalled and then everybody carries on that didn't happen you know it carries on so yeah once things get silly then they tend to get sillier so that that night when we were assaulting the aircraft we would take turns as to who was to be the hostages so the british guys would be in the aircraft as the hostages and the terrorists and delta would have salted and then swap where when we when we assaulted them we came in with water pistols and we we uh soaked we soaked them all with water pistols and uh you know that who are these crazy guys they're not taking it seriously and the last um the last mission we did was on a moving bus and um so it's a moving a small moving bus with about a seating capacity of about 14 or 16 people and the delta guys were in the bus with their driver with their terrorists and with their hostages and we had to stop this vehicle and assault it and uh they thought we would either assault it when they were getting onto the vehicle or assault it when they were getting off but what we did was we blew the front wheels off while it was removed while it was moving and it came to a very sudden halt and we assaulted and cleared it in 12 seconds and um so from going from this you know yes yes again we've got to impress them so these guys are a bunch of idiots and then just to finish all of a sudden we did this and they were kind of it just didn't make any sense you're either supposed to be rambo or you're not you know and uh and um so we well i think we left them rather confused yeah but it was fun i love it i love hearing that it sounds like some of the training was really positive some of the smaller team um training you guys did where you were it sounded like very much co-mingled together three two and three of you yeah however they were great and their budget was so much bigger than ours i mean i was one of one of my main roles in the in the sas and in the british army was as a sniper um the the highest um the highest rank you can get as a sniper is royal marine marksman and i was a royal marine marksman and um so when we when i got across there and with delta i mean i was i was a kid in a candy store they had silenced high velocity white rifles they had match filled hand-filled ammunition they had point fives that you could fire with a camera clicker you know they i mean i was just oh wow you know oh god i wish i had one of these and you know so i trained with them and went back and used some of their ideas um and introduced them um but not long after i left so yeah that's great all right so i'm going to take a pause on that part of of your career i want to talk about what you're doing now um and then maybe one day if you'll let me especially with the new book maybe we could reset for round two if that's okay yeah so so let's robin if you can so i read fighting scared um i might just ask you why you titled it that and then if you could talk about what's happened what is going on more recently for you that you'd like to put on people's radar okay well fighting scared um i called it that because i was sat with my wife trying to figure out a title the first title we had where it was can't correct me i'm a rubber duck so which is still the title of one of the chapters um but um we thought no that wasn't right so uh we sat and talked she said what's the book about and i said well you know a lot of the early years are about me fighting and so why were you fighting so much i said well really because i was so scared of getting hurt so you know i i would um if somebody was looking for trouble i was going to give it to him first because i was so scared when i was a young man two guys almost beat me to death in my bed one night for no other reason the fact that they were drunk and that was never going to happen that was when i was 19. it was never going to happen again so um i was fighting all the time because i was scared um so we called it fighting scared that's the title of the book and it sticks and it still has a great deal of meaning going back to where we started this conversation um what am i doing now well there's two main thrusts in my life one is that i'm running a veterans campaign because and this americans will sit back and go my god how is this happening we've got soldiers that served in northern ireland up to 50 years ago who are being returned to court now having been cleared of any wrongdoing and re-prosecuted again for political reasons over and over and um so we're we're fighting that we've got a massive veterans campaign going on now and i'm one of their lead spokesman and fundraisers and um we're actually fighting not only the uh political groups that want to bring us to court but our own government who just wish it would go away so they're prepared to sacrifice a few old soldiers who were in their 70s now and early 80s one who's got 10 kidney function is on dialysis and they want to take him back to court he's been to court three times we don't have double jeopardy anymore you know so um we're fighting that that's a big thing we've got a national veterans protest day on the 28th of august this year and we expect to see something like 50 000 in london alone marching in protest and then i'm i'm still writing so fighting scared was you know i wrote that in 2002 and it's still it still hits the best sellers on amazon sometimes and then i when i we'll talk about this another day but i went off to university when i was 56 and as an undergrad and graduated when i was 59 and i did english literature with creative writing so i wrote a trilogy of little books and you've got to write you know simple books before you write complicated ones and that's the wise old paratrooper trilogy which are little short stories and anthologies and bits of poetry but the one thing i loved about uni was well i learned about poetry so two weeks ago i i did this one which is what warrior soldiers songs and i just released that on on amazon and um it's a pure poetry book um with some very deep um warrior stuff love stuff happy stuff funny stuff um it tries to cover all the different forms that i learned um and it's my one uh little piece of academic work to prove that i went to uni so i'm working on that i'm working on a novel and i'm keeping myself busy how's that that's great and actually robin i wanted to mention something that i read in fighting scared that resonates that you just brought up and that's this idea that the really tough people out there don't need to tell you they're tough you can see it it's okay like there's emotion that comes out i just interviewed an impressive individual eddie penny who is a seal team six operator in post 911 era and he just is very open about what he went through and it's tough and he nobody would look he doesn't need to tell anybody he's tough you just you can hear it and he's very open about that so um i i really took that away from uh fighting scared and i i'm looking forward to reading this as well because i think that's something that i pulled out of the both of those experiences talking to you now and in the book well i'm very humbled to say that thank you yeah and so robin i've got two questions i ask everybody um i'd like to pose them to you now and then we'll wrap up and you can get back and see who won this game um the first one is when you were fighting in in your military career and you could take this with both your time in the british military and then what you did afterwards was there anything you carried with you that was a good luck charm a talisman um something that had sentimental value that you carried with you on missions um a photograph of my wife and kids but i never carried it on missions i carried it i went i went to places and it remained with my equipment but you know um that would have been the only thing fundamentally um everything that i talk about or work on these days has that family affiliation you mentioned uh tough guys and um there would be one thing i want to say about tough guys i mean tough guys are there's nobody tougher than a guy that goes to school supports his family stays married looks after his kids and sets a good example for a long period of time to his peers and his family that's a tough guy the rest of it's all bull well said and then this last question that i ask everyone very interested to hear yours because i think what we have not covered here is how difficult your transition was for your career through the military and then your exit um so with that in mind this question um if knowing what you do now what you went through particularly the aggression the bullying the fighting um the one-way mission all of that in mind would you go back and do it all again yeah yeah i would um i don't have any regrets there uh apart from the one with the big guy at the beginning um but um no i don't have any regrets we go through life we learn uh if we're wise or if we want to become wise we learn um the big failure people make in life is making the same mistake over and over again that's the big mistake but i know i wouldn't change anything i think i think the person i am today is a person i can um be reasonably proud of and i think my kids are reasonably proud of me and my wife um and uh i was at a a major event in birmingham in england and tony curtis the 1960s film star was there as the it was called autographic autographica and we were signing autographs and he was the big star of the day but he was in his 80s and he had bad lungs and so in the evening suddenly um he couldn't come down to speak so they asked me to stand in his place i was supposed to be the warm-up man just before you know um and so they and somebody had said something a long time of you know uh what do you want to be your uh what do you want to to be the thing that stays with you at the end of your life and there was astronauts there was a dave scott who had landed on the moon and uh i had lunch with him and so there was all these amazing people who have done amazing things there i said well at the end of your life there's one thing that you really want to say about you more than anything else not that he was an astronaut not that he was a billionaire not that he was a politician what you really want the greatest accolade they can give to anybody was would be that he was a good man i agree with you entirely and rob and i i have to just say thank you so much for the time i'll have links to all all of these works that we've talked about um along with the episode so people can uh can find you and what's coming next thank you very much and hopefully one day you'll let me do round two yeah and i look forward to that i really do god bless america thanks for having

Channel: Combat Story

Views: 30,499

Rating: 4.9201231 out of 5

Keywords: Delta Force, The Unit, Special Forces, Special Operations Forces, Delta, Squadron, Operator, Citadel, Force Recon, Marine Recon, NCO, Non-Commissioned Officer, Ranger School, Ranger, Army Ranger, CIA, paramilitary, 1st SFOD, Robin Horsfall, British Special Air Service, British SAS, SAS, Special Air Service, Princess Diana, Mercenary, Author, Karate, Blackbelt, Falklands, Falklands War, Hostage Rescue

Id: PHR7Wwgx6x8

Length: 100min 5sec (6005 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 03 2021