 I got in too young. I got in just after my 22nd birthday which made older men resent me for being there as a young upstart and I hadn't I wasn't mature enough to know when to keep my God share either so I would say I expected standards to be somewhat higher but and I voiced those concerns with a view to try and improve you but I was too young I was a new boy and I should just keep quiet but when you had people coming into rooms to take lessons who didn't even understand didn't understand the basic principles of taking a lesson let alone the material they were trying to teach I'll give you one example I had a sergeant staff sergeant who came to the room to give a mortar fire control lesson when we're going down to the Falklands and he left out direction and type of fire now if you know anything about the trigonometry of artillery fire without the direction you have no idea where the rounds gonna land you know it's a much it's a piece of mathematics accounts to make sure the bombs landing right place and when I complained about it after the lesson I was told I had a bad attitude so let's you go with that the regiment are good at what they do but they're not necessarily good at everything they're not knights in white shiny armor they're not all heroes some beat up their wives some neglect their kids but you know most of them are good soldiers at the jobs they're trained to do and required to do it that they're not all they're not all as special as the mythology would like to make that's for sure and is this selection well let me just ask you what was your experience of it well I did it twice the first time I did it I failed I got into test week which is the essay of selection last year and the first four weeks is in the mountains and the last five days in the mountains is test week where you do increasing distances with increasing weights you start at 18 miles and you end up with the last March at 40 miles and there's a minimum time and you have to do these things on your own so it's nothing like the television programs there's nobody cajoling you or pushing you or encouraging you it's basically here's your next checkpoint get there and when you get there you get given the next one and the next one and everybody's doing slightly different routes you can't follow me my test week was in the coldest winter for many years in January 1979 I failed in the summer 1978 there were 67 of us on it and one person nobody can go to the first checkpoint on endurance which is the 40 mile March because the weather was so horrendous and one person died so they they sent 22 of us off to the jungle to do jungle training and when we got back from a jungle they passed nine of us and then we went on and then we did combat survival training and at the end of that they failed one person for 98 to this man and in those guys that weren't already parrots went through their parachute training and then you join your squadron and you get your cat badge but you're on probation this six months and you have to learn a personal skill and the treat skill and my personal skills as a paramedic and my treat skill was as a mountain climber and then at the end of the year so my my selection officially started on January the 7th 1978 on January the 7th 1979 I was officially classed on my military records as being a qualified SES soldier so you get that a year afterwards and then you stay for another two years and then you'll reassess and if you then you can stay for another three years and you'll reassess so it's a kind of paranoia about everything you can't afford to fail but it's one of the things about the selection process it selects people to be individuals whereas when you're selected to be a booty or you're selected to be a para you're selected to work strongly as a team and the weakest man everyone has a bad day you know looking after the weakest man and so on because you're a unit whereas when you're selected to be individuals that can be great when you're working in tiny groups or alone but when you're working when you're everybody thinks they should be in charge so it can cause an awful lot of friction you need to keep guys like that very very busy and very very focused all the time and they've got nothing to do they start fighting amongst themselves Robin what year was the embassy siege? The embassy was May the 5th 1980 40 years ago yeah yeah two years before the Falcons May the 5th 1980 and it was the day when everybody suddenly discovered that the SES existed a lot of people didn't know it existed before that even in the British army a lot of people didn't know it existed it was a very small unit 250 bad soldiers foresaid squadrons supported by about another 200 men in darkest terrifuture and it was a great place to be in a great unit to be with the mission itself was was a great mission you know i had my part in it but it lasted seven minutes really whereas you know walk in the streets of Northern Ireland in the Ardoin in the Valley Murphy night after night waiting for somebody to choose the ground and shoot you there's a far more frightening experience i mean nearly 50 of us went into the Iranian embassy and we rescued 19 people we rescued we saved 19 people's lives we killed five terrorists catching one but we saved 19 people's lives which is what we were there to do but it changed because suddenly people started to believe their own press and suddenly you know that anonymous group that had a good budget do all sorts of amazing things was under the spotlight and you know the regiment changed and i don't think it necessarily changed for the better during my time because at the same time the British army brought in this you know if you've done a certain amount of time you have to be promoted you have to carry so much rank after three years six years nine years and suddenly guys who weren't really qualified were suddenly given rank that um that they they didn't even pass their education promotion stuff it's all and that created a lot of frustration guys that would have been happy to let brighter people more ambitious people go past them were suddenly forced to carry rank and it damaged the SES for quite a long time did you ever Robin when you were obviously lining up to go through go through the those doors and windows i mean i i know the obviously know the answer to my own question but did you ever imagine the legendary status that would be bestowed on not just yourselves but that mission yeah so i mean afterwards you're excited you're i mean i was 23 um you're excited you're anonymous you disappear into fact herford nobody knows who you are you're not allowed to talk about it and you get on with your job it's the rest of the nation that's excited about it um and because we were taken back to herford and allowed to get on with our role in our jobs and we were anonymous um we were most of us didn't get uh too full of hubris most of us carried on and tried to just get on with the the life that we'd had before it was only it was only as time passed and you got the anniversaries me, John McElise and Tom McDonald um only spoke about it on camera 25 years later uh when uh louise norman did a famous BAFTA winning and winning um documentary sas embassy siege which was really really good and very very accurate um but it took us 25 years to talk about it or write about it so i think we kept our part of the bargain very very well um but it is a huge part of british history that anybody that was alive at that time and remembers it the americans had tried 10 days before to go into Tehran and rescue their own hostages in the american embassy in iran and the mission had gone wrong and um through accidents and failures and they killed eight of their own men and it was a big disaster so the world morally was on a big load and this lifted not only british people but it lifted the whole world we've suddenly realized yes we can do something about terrorists we can fight back against the PLO or blowing people up um it it did put the IRA on the back foot as well in a big way um they became even more frightened at the sas than they previously were knowing that if we caught them you know the chances are they were going to perish so yeah it was a big a big change gosh was it ever i'm guessing it for the british public the thing that was so both shocking and impressive all rolled into one was the fact that other than war films you didn't actually see british forces or any force engage the enemy and yet there it was in broad daylight in our capital city yeah not only that but hang on this army's wearing black that what's that about um yeah and every every every terrorist group every counter terrorist group since then decided to wear black i mean somebody decided we would be wearing black army um boiler suits and that's what they were they were boilers you know um green boiler suits dyed black they weren't fireproof um everybody thinks we wore balaclavas we didn't we wore gas masks and gas suits with gas hoods on and so this idea of balaclavas uh came because two guys who were on the outside periphery on the cordon decided to rush up to the wall and try to get involved and they were wearing balaclavas but um no we weren't wearing balaclavas um so there's all kinds of mythology and nonsense that has come out afterwards um you know that that that terrible film that came out some a couple years back six days um i wrote the review about in the Daily Mail i mean it was just such a such a disaster such a misrepresentation of what actually happened and the characters involved when people characterise soldiers they want to characterise them as some kind of um extenders danny dire odd man you know caught shut his mouth and talked like that you know and we you know and i know that there's so many of the british army who are really really smart intelligent guys who can do so many things so well it's just that they've got that job and that role to do and i i really do uh hate it when uh special forces parrots marines uh all members of the british armed forces are portrayed as dumb enlisted man idiots um because there are there are some of them that are that's the truth but the majority are really really smart guys who just haven't had the advantages that other people had at the beginning of their lives and that's a lot of the reasons why we end up running businesses presenting podcasts um writing books running corporations um traveling around the world um doing many many things and getting qualified going to university later in life so many of my infantry junior leader battalion friends uh ended up with master's degrees you wouldn't believe how many yeah that sounds like a donald trump on it you wouldn't believe how many were you robin were you portrayed in that film i'm just wondering if i saw it if your because they only listed like two names at the end of john mack being one of them obviously yeah it's hard to say because the story so um irrelevant as i say there were there were 48 of us that went into the building and there were there were uh five teams of eight one for each floor so and there were two teams the blue team and the red team led by two captains and the idea that a lance corporal in any shape or form would have an influence over how the mission was run and they portrayed this the squadron commander hector gullum as uh as a person who was going to be told what to do by his sergeants i mean nothing could be further than the truth gullum was a a roughy toughy uh man who was in charge and there was no doubt about it and he planned and coordinated the whole mission from start to finish and didn't get an award um there were some brave things done on the day but at the whole team did the job um the um and you know it just it just wasn't it just wasn't right um the way the imagery the way the characterizations were the story was presented the only true bits in it were the bits that they cut and pasted from the uh television reports and that's that sad i'd hope for better i'd really hope for better there you go where were you when the falcons kicked off um i was in herford um our job was to uh fly down to uh ascension island get on to two c 130 hercules fly into argentina land on one runway where the super ontont objects were flying from the ones that sunk our capital ships and destroy them on the ground and then be killed or captured so that was our mission and um we prepared for it we got halfway um but the predominantly the marines and paratroopers were advancing across towards stanley quite successfully and um the um ronald reagan's government put pressure on margaret badger not to extend the war onto the mainland um and so we held on ascension island and um the mission was eventually canceled my wife was eight months pregnant at the time which was an interesting dynamic um but um coming towards the end before stanley had fallen we managed to get our mission reinstated but to fly down parachute into the sea and carry out any mission that was required that's attacked stanley from the rear and um we got down there parachuted into the sea and the raf hadn't put the parachutes on the rigs properly and all our kit the parachutes came off the containers and all our kit went to the bottom of the sea and then um you know the argentinians heard that half of b squadron arrived with no kit so they surrendered what was stanley like then robin it was it on the on the news footage it just looked a mess yeah um anybody that's been into wales and seny bridge um or exeter and dartmore will recognize um the folkland islands and essentially i i described a seny bridge without trees there's even less shelter um but it's cold it's wet it's miserable it's gray and it's bitterly bitterly cold because of the damp um so when i got into stanley um i went to see some old mates at tupara and uh hung out with them for a little while then went back to the ship lance a lot i was on lance a lot and um i got a message on the um over the radio that on the 18th of um 18th of june that my um my first son alex had been born four days after the surrender so yeah there was um surreal in a sense that it's too far away to you know really be able to enjoy it when i got home when he was 10 days old so yeah and how long um how long after the falklands did did you stay in the forces um i left the um i left the british army in uh november 1984 um i'd been set up by one or two people that didn't like me and um we had a new squadron commander who didn't know very much about the guys and um i ended up in the colonel's office and the colonel said you haven't done anything wrong this horse this time horseball but you're uh you've been walking on a razor blade for a long time um so i'm going to punish you and send you back to the parachute regiment so that's cool you know i haven't done anything wrong but you're going to punish me and i said that's all right sir i put my papers into buyout yesterday he said don't do that horse full he said the wind blows cold on the outside i said it don't blow too heavy warm in here does it sir and um i was discharged from the army uh from herford it did within two weeks and my life moved on and i was 27 years old i've been in for 12 years um it was my life i was going to be a 22 year soldier but um i got stitched up um and i was very very bitter at the time but i moved on and um and did lots and it allowed me to explore my true potential shall we say with lots of things i could never have done had i stayed in the bichon that i did as a as a result of that departure so sometimes the worst things that happen in life turn out to be some of the best