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Speaker 2: Special Operations, cobertsb.
Speaker 3: And I.
Speaker 2: The Team House with your hopes, Jack Murphy and David Bark.
Speaker 4: This is Dave.
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Speaker 1: Welcome to episode two hundred and ninety three of The Teamhouse.
Speaker 1: I'm Jack here with Dave. Dimitri is pressing buttons in
Speaker 1: the back over there, and we're very excited to have
Speaker 1: on the show tonight. Simon Leak. Simon served in the
Speaker 1: paras and then went to the Special Air Service in
Speaker 1: nineteen eighty eight. Served nineteen years in total in the
Speaker 1: Special Air Service Regiment, saw action in the Gulf War
Speaker 1: a few other places, and has now parlayed the skill
Speaker 1: set that he learned in the military to teach counter
Speaker 1: poaching to various African park rangers and we'll talk all
Speaker 1: about that in a bit. Simon. Thank you for joining
Speaker 1: us tonight.
Speaker 3: Yes, it's a great pleasure actually, considering we're twelve hours
Speaker 3: ahead here. So this morning I had a heavy night
Speaker 3: in this bar where I am. Now it's sort of
Speaker 3: a leaving thing and presentations, so come on back here
Speaker 3: with a cup of coffee. But it's great to be here, Simon.
Speaker 1: Can you tell us a little bit about the history
Speaker 1: behind the bar behind you and the memorabilia.
Speaker 3: Yeah, this is I mean Brunei, Brunei being an independent
Speaker 3: country on the island of Borneo. If nobody knows where
Speaker 3: that is far east Borneo is divided between Malaya, Malaysia
Speaker 3: and Indonesia, but Brunei.
Speaker 6: The British Army have been based.
Speaker 3: Here in Brunei since the nineteen seventies with the Jungle
Speaker 3: Warfare School. Previous to that doing the Malay Emergencies. It
Speaker 3: was based in Malaya, so there's a deep, deep history
Speaker 3: jungle warfare here. Now. I was here as the Senior
Speaker 3: Military Instructor, which is an SAS post, exactly twenty years
Speaker 3: ago at the Jungle Warfare School Jungle Warfare Wing, it
Speaker 3: was known as then now it's Jungle Warfare Division. But
Speaker 3: we refurbished this bar actually during that time and it's
Speaker 3: called the labby Arms, so I gave it that name.
Speaker 3: So it's great to be back here. Last night I
Speaker 3: was presented with the modern labby Arms T shirt. But
Speaker 3: it's hallowed ground. It's one of those literary bars. I'm
Speaker 3: sure you know somewhere. It's a very privileged place to be.
Speaker 3: The Jungle Warfare School here is, you know, it's second
Speaker 3: to none, and they've been running infantry skills in the
Speaker 3: jungle and tracking and tracking has been my main phone
Speaker 3: for focus. So that's that's that's what I'm doing now.
Speaker 6: But it all, it all.
Speaker 3: Started here with a few beers in this bar, probably
Speaker 3: twenty years ago. Yeah, all this stuff on the back here,
Speaker 3: I've got a presentation or two that I gave, but
Speaker 3: all around here it's the walls are absolutely crammed with
Speaker 3: their presentations and history and and everything else. So it's
Speaker 3: a it's a fantastic place to be.
Speaker 1: It's super cool. You can only imagine the personalities that
Speaker 1: have been through that bar over the years.
Speaker 3: Yeah, exactly, exactly.
Speaker 1: Yeah, So Simon, let's start at the beginning. Tell us
Speaker 1: a little bit about what your upbringing was like and
Speaker 1: of how that took you towards military service.
Speaker 3: Yeah, okay, so I was I was actually born in
Speaker 3: Q eight, but that was two expat parents there. But
Speaker 3: I was brought up in Lincolnshire, and Lincolnshire is a
Speaker 3: real farming is a real farming county on the east
Speaker 3: coast of England, very very basic education. Gained absolutely nothing
Speaker 3: from school and I did what most of the kids did.
Speaker 6: With who had no other option, was to go and
Speaker 6: work on.
Speaker 3: The land in a landgang, doing whatever seasonal jobs they were.
Speaker 3: So you know, you get picked up in a van,
Speaker 3: you drive out to the fenland fields and my first
Speaker 3: job was what's called gapping sugar beat, you know, with
Speaker 3: a hope, going along taking out the excess sugar beat
Speaker 3: as it's growing, thinking what the hell was twelve years
Speaker 3: at school all about? And that's that's what I did.
Speaker 3: And eventually I got a job on a farm. I
Speaker 3: got married, I lived in a farm cottage tied to
Speaker 3: the job, and that was going to be me for
Speaker 3: the rest of my life, you know. And that's that's
Speaker 3: what people generally did. You worked on the land and
Speaker 3: then you retired at sixty five and then.
Speaker 6: Died at sixty seven. Your body was messed up. So
Speaker 6: I was pretty sorted.
Speaker 3: I didn't need to have any ambition or career or
Speaker 3: go to college because I was.
Speaker 6: I was learning. My trade was farming.
Speaker 1: How things change, that's I mean, in what part of
Speaker 1: England is this, by the.
Speaker 3: Way, Lincolnshire, it's the biggest county. It's right on the
Speaker 3: east coast, so between between Norfolk and.
Speaker 6: Yorkshire for anybody who knows England.
Speaker 1: And so you were working as a farm laborer, but
Speaker 1: you had mentioned to me that, ironically you were also
Speaker 1: a poacher in your youth.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's right to supplement. What was a you know,
Speaker 3: a wage that wouldn't be allowed now. I was going out.
Speaker 3: We we had a gamekeeper locally who was breeding pheasants
Speaker 3: for the for the shoots for the autumn shoes. So
Speaker 3: I used to go out at night with a with
Speaker 3: an air rifle, you know, a pellic gun and shoot
Speaker 3: them off the rooft at night. And I became very good.
Speaker 3: And he had to be a really good shot. He
Speaker 3: could he had to get a head shot on a
Speaker 3: on a bird at night.
Speaker 1: Pheasant is usually hunted with a shotgun, right.
Speaker 6: Yeah, that's right.
Speaker 3: You normally blast them to pieces with a shotgun, but
Speaker 3: a clinical head shot is far better. And I was,
Speaker 3: and I was doing that, and I was and I
Speaker 3: was doing pretty well. So we lived off a lot
Speaker 3: of lived off a lot of pheasants, and it stood
Speaker 3: me in good stead because I became a very good sniper.
Speaker 3: A few years later, but I got compromised, I got
Speaker 3: found out, and I sort of left the farm and
Speaker 3: therefore had to leave the cottage that I was living
Speaker 3: in with my wife at the time. And my brother
Speaker 3: at the time was in the Royal Marines, and it
Speaker 3: was April nineteen eighty two and just he just got
Speaker 3: recalled to go to the Falklands War. He took part
Speaker 3: in the Falklands War. And as he was leaving the door,
Speaker 3: he just come to visit me and he said, okay, well, hey,
Speaker 3: have you ever thought about joining.
Speaker 6: The military as an option?
Speaker 3: Because I had no idea what I was going to
Speaker 3: do other than get another farm job, and I thought, well,
Speaker 3: what I'll give that a go. Before I knew it,
Speaker 3: I was in the recruiting office and I decided to
Speaker 3: join the Parachute Regiment.
Speaker 6: And the next thing.
Speaker 3: I'd sort of got fast tracked through because my brother
Speaker 3: was heading down to the Falklands and I was really keen.
Speaker 3: So later on that year I was on the train
Speaker 3: Lincoln station going to Oldershot, you know, the home of
Speaker 3: the British Army then and the depot for the Parachute Regiment,
Speaker 3: and everything changed. No longer, no longer a farm worker.
Speaker 3: I took that cassette out and put a put a
Speaker 3: new one in.
Speaker 6: And became minister.
Speaker 3: It was a complete a chance, a chance decision, and
Speaker 3: I thought, I'll give this a go. If I don't
Speaker 3: make it, I'll go back to farm working. But obviously
Speaker 3: obviously I passed the training and that led to hear.
Speaker 3: It makes you wonder what you would have done. You know,
Speaker 3: if if I hadn't done that, I would I would be,
Speaker 3: you know, probably retired and dead farm worker by it.
Speaker 1: So tell us about serving in the powers. And also
Speaker 1: you were in the Reckie platoon in the parers. This
Speaker 1: is so we're talking about mid nineteen eighties, I guess
Speaker 1: at this point tell us a little bit about what
Speaker 1: that was like for you.
Speaker 3: Yeah, Well, the parent when you join a parachute regiment,
Speaker 3: you go into just a rifle company, and after a
Speaker 3: period of time you get the option to do the
Speaker 3: course to join you know, a support company, so anti tanks, mortars,
Speaker 3: machine guns, platoon, signals platoon.
Speaker 6: If you want to go that way.
Speaker 3: But one of the options was patrols platoon, and patrols
Speaker 3: is the Repie and in three part of the Repee company.
Speaker 3: Patrol Company as it was then, had a really fearsome reputation.
Speaker 6: They were they were the you know that.
Speaker 3: Eventually they took a lot of those guides and formed
Speaker 3: the Brigade Pathfinder Unit. But those guys were massively experienced
Speaker 3: and respected. And it's a very very difficult selection process,
Speaker 3: you know. It's a bit like a mini version of
Speaker 3: sas selection. So I had done a sniper course fairly soon,
Speaker 3: did very well on the sniper course, and I could
Speaker 3: hear the pheasant in a tree at night, and then
Speaker 3: so I put myself down for the for the patrols selection,
Speaker 3: and the guys were saying to me, yeah, you won't
Speaker 3: pass that, you haven't been in long enough, but you'll
Speaker 3: you'll be a better soldier when you come back to
Speaker 3: the rifle company. But I got through, so I stayed
Speaker 3: with that. I stayed with that record platoon for the
Speaker 3: six years until I left. I did selection.
Speaker 1: And then so you went the SAS selection in nineteen
Speaker 1: eighty eight. When did the SAS like as a potential
Speaker 1: career path for you sort of like come into your mind?
Speaker 1: And I mean, how did that come about for you
Speaker 1: as an individual?
Speaker 3: Well, you know, it's it's always something that's in the
Speaker 3: back of your mind. If you're a serious soldier, no
Speaker 3: matter what unit you're in, at some stage, you're going
Speaker 3: to be considering could I do it? You know, And
Speaker 3: most people think about it and then they don't even attempt.
Speaker 3: And what you always find is the guys who go
Speaker 3: for selection, you either never see them again or they
Speaker 3: come back, and they normally come back with one trainer
Speaker 3: on because they've got an injury or whatever, and you
Speaker 3: only get to hear the stories of the failed guys.
Speaker 3: So that doesn't help. But there were two things that
Speaker 3: pushed me to go that way. One was the battalion
Speaker 3: was about to go to Northern Ireland for a two
Speaker 3: year tall and I was twenty seven, just going on
Speaker 3: twenty eight, which would push me into thirty because you
Speaker 3: couldn't do selection off an operational tour in Northern Ireland.
Speaker 6: So that was one thing.
Speaker 3: The other thing was I was getting divorced from the
Speaker 3: girl I met when I was a farm worker, so
Speaker 3: it sort of suited me as well to get the
Speaker 3: hell out. So I thought it's now or never if
Speaker 3: I'm going to do it, So I did put my
Speaker 3: name down. They sort of fast tracked me through again
Speaker 3: because they could see I needed to make a move.
Speaker 3: So I filled a car with what belongings I had
Speaker 3: and drove to Hereford, which is the home of the
Speaker 3: Special Air Service.
Speaker 1: And tell us about what selection was like for you.
Speaker 1: I mean nineteen eighty eight, this is old score.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's changed quite a lot since then. Back back then,
Speaker 3: you just turned up with no prying knowledge other than
Speaker 3: what people have told you. So you've got an idea
Speaker 3: what goes on, but there's no there's no briefing beforehand,
Speaker 3: so you turn up and it's just that initial phase
Speaker 3: it's just are you fit enough. It's all about fitness,
Speaker 3: robustness and determination. So the first day it's what we
Speaker 3: call the CFT, the Combat Fitness Test, which is a
Speaker 3: standard test to weed out anybody who's you know, just
Speaker 3: just not fit enough. And that's that's running around with
Speaker 3: carrying weight for you know, several miles. The next day
Speaker 3: we did what's called the fan Dance, and the fan
Speaker 3: dances well renowned, has been one of a very very
Speaker 3: hard test and that's over the Brecon Beacons, the mountains
Speaker 3: in Wales that the se S uses their sort of
Speaker 3: initial selection process. So you're carrying out very very heavy weight,
Speaker 3: you're running over some of the tallest mountains and you
Speaker 3: have to get round a circuit in a group that's
Speaker 3: led by a d S and instructor in a time
Speaker 3: frame and if you don't make it, it's as simple
Speaker 3: as that, then you're off. So that was day two.
Speaker 3: Now they you know, to get to that stage, you'll
Speaker 3: have done attended a briefing course, a pre selection before
Speaker 3: you even get to that part, and then day one
Speaker 3: there's a buildup of you know, maybe a week or
Speaker 3: ten days before you do that actual test. So it
Speaker 3: was quite harsh, and it was one of the things
Speaker 3: that the only I would say, stumbling blot that I
Speaker 3: had because I really is prepared, perhaps that I ought
Speaker 3: to have been. You get a bit of time off
Speaker 3: to go and do some pre training, and in my
Speaker 3: time off, I'm afraid I didn't do a lot. I
Speaker 3: ended up in, you know, with some friends, getting very
Speaker 3: drunk with the opportunity to do that, so I was
Speaker 3: a bit laxadatical about it. So I suffered on that
Speaker 3: I didn't have my boots, didn't fit me properly. I
Speaker 3: only had one pair of boots, so I wasn't that
Speaker 3: very well prepared, so it really hurt one.
Speaker 6: But I managed to get over that.
Speaker 3: And then it's a build up then to test week,
Speaker 3: which is just physical tests carrying increasingly heavy weight individual
Speaker 3: marches over those mountains, and you either make the time
Speaker 3: or you don't. And if you get through that, which
Speaker 3: obviously I did one of the few who did, then
Speaker 3: you're the build up training and then you come out
Speaker 3: here to Brunei and do your sort of six weeks
Speaker 3: of jungle jungle training, which many finder is the hardest part.
Speaker 3: Everybody has their own their own experience and they'll say
Speaker 3: what they found the hardest.
Speaker 6: From For me, it was that day too.
Speaker 1: From some of the folks we've talked to on the
Speaker 1: show before, it's I mean, the way I understand that
Speaker 1: is the Brecon Beacons as part of the selection course,
Speaker 1: and by the time they get to Brunei, that's sort
Speaker 1: of like where you're warning how to be an operator,
Speaker 1: how to run patrols.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's right. The first stage, the test week is
Speaker 3: literally just nobody. You know, these structures don't give a
Speaker 3: damn who you are, where you're from, what your level
Speaker 3: of soldiering is. It's just can you carry this heavy
Speaker 3: pack and you're invited to, you know, get over that
Speaker 3: hill in the time allocated.
Speaker 6: When it comes to going to.
Speaker 3: The jungle, then they're highly focused on your personality, your
Speaker 3: individual skills level, how adaptable you are, and your robustness.
Speaker 3: The jungle tests everything about an individual. It takes you
Speaker 3: to your absolute limit. So those who are bluffers, those
Speaker 3: who think they're good soldiers, those who are.
Speaker 6: Talking the talk.
Speaker 3: You know, you get a lot of people who, you know,
Speaker 3: they assume that the good soldiers and they're the ones
Speaker 3: who stand out the most and they're generally the ones
Speaker 3: who fall by the wayside, and it's those quiet ones
Speaker 3: who just keep on going and keep going and get
Speaker 3: through to the end. So it's a it's a huge
Speaker 3: level and it really does sort out. You know, it
Speaker 3: doesn't matter who you are. You've just got to keep
Speaker 3: going with it. You've got to go with the drills.
Speaker 3: If you don't get your administration done properly, the jungle
Speaker 3: will eat you up. So's there's no other place like
Speaker 3: it to test the mental strength of individuals as well
Speaker 3: as their soldiering skills, and you have to be a
Speaker 3: fast learner. You know, some guys come from a unit
Speaker 3: in their military where they've done literally no soldiering skills
Speaker 3: at all. Yet it's still a teaching phase, so you're
Speaker 3: taught everything before you even get there. You know, there's
Speaker 3: a navigation map, reading work, patrolling, shooting, and then everything else.
Speaker 3: So everybody has a fair chance. It's not you don't
Speaker 3: just go straight in there and you can either soldier
Speaker 3: or you can't. So everybody's brought up to a level
Speaker 3: before you go, and you have to play catch up
Speaker 3: at times, do you feel that.
Speaker 5: Having come from like Iraqi element that you had a
Speaker 5: leg up on some of the guys who came in
Speaker 5: with no kind of combat.
Speaker 3: Yeah, but for definitely could. I've already done quite a
Speaker 3: bit of work in the jungle in Central America, and
Speaker 3: Belieze was the other British Armies base, so I'd been
Speaker 3: out there a couple of times, and yeah, just the
Speaker 3: the navigation. Navigating in the jungle is a specifically hard
Speaker 3: thing to do, especially before the days of GPS, so
Speaker 3: I already had a handle on that, and just you know,
Speaker 3: just living in the jungle, it was something I was
Speaker 3: used to. The heat there, living in hammocks and pole
Speaker 3: beds and that sort of stuff, so it was definitely
Speaker 3: an advantage to me. But still at the same time,
Speaker 3: it's it's about an individuals.
Speaker 6: Something deep within an individual that.
Speaker 3: Sends you beyond the you know, where other people, you know,
Speaker 3: fall by the wayside. Is there's just something and it
Speaker 3: doesn't really matter how much experience you've got or what
Speaker 3: you've done. It's something that comes from deep within that
Speaker 3: keeps you going beyond where others have just sat down
Speaker 3: and said, now I can't do this anymore. I don't
Speaker 3: know what it is.
Speaker 1: After you graduated from your training, what squadron did you
Speaker 1: get assigned to and could you tell us about what
Speaker 1: it was like the first land there, like what the
Speaker 1: what the culture of the of the squadron was, like
Speaker 1: your teammates, you know, and we don't we don't need
Speaker 1: to talk names if you don't want to, by I'm
Speaker 1: just kind of interested in like what the culture and
Speaker 1: the vibe was in the unit at that time.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's so, you know, after the the whole selection process,
Speaker 3: you just get sort of thrown your bury and told
Speaker 3: that's what you've done. Now, now go to your squadron.
Speaker 3: And I went to a squadron. I wanted to go
Speaker 3: to the Amphibious troop boat troop. So you get you
Speaker 3: get a choice of three insurgent skills, Air Troop, Mountain troop, Mobility,
Speaker 3: or boat troop, and I chose boat troop. You don't
Speaker 3: always get your choice, but so basically you go then
Speaker 3: to the squadron offices.
Speaker 6: You have an interest room.
Speaker 3: It's a little bit like this behind me, you know,
Speaker 3: the room where everybody meets in the morning, and it's
Speaker 3: full of memorabilia.
Speaker 6: So kind of walking there as the new guy.
Speaker 3: There was a couple lovers went there, but the culture
Speaker 3: is it's a complete contrast to being in the in
Speaker 3: the wider army. You know, where you're you know, you're
Speaker 3: you're constantly looking over your shoulder for somebody who's going
Speaker 3: to shout at you. Uh, you know, we'll give you
Speaker 3: a bollocking for doing something wrong. There, it's completely relaxed.
Speaker 3: Everybody is mature enough to go about their business without
Speaker 3: any of that. Everybody is on first name terms. Doesn't
Speaker 3: matter whether you're the the O C. The officer commanding
Speaker 3: the unit, or the sergeant major. Everybody speaks nicely to
Speaker 3: each other and its first name terms. So that's that.
Speaker 3: For me, having having joined the army quite late, you know,
Speaker 3: I didn't go straight into the institution, which is the military,
Speaker 3: from school. I was. I was very sort of comfortable
Speaker 3: with that because you're just you know, you're talking to
Speaker 3: people like they're just or everybody's on on an equal level.
Speaker 3: Although you respect the fact that you know there's experienced
Speaker 3: people and you're under their management now, but there's a
Speaker 3: very serious focus you know damn well that you're you're
Speaker 3: never going to stop working and everything you do you
Speaker 3: have to perform well. Uh So it's course after course
Speaker 3: after course because when you when you arrive as a
Speaker 3: new trooper, you you have no insurgent skills. So you know,
Speaker 3: I knew nothing about boating or diving or anything, so
Speaker 3: I had under my belt. And then an individual skill,
Speaker 3: what do you bring to the you know, to the
Speaker 3: patrol as such, So you have demolitions, medics, signals. You
Speaker 3: have to have all of those skills because when you're
Speaker 3: out on operations, you don't have anybody attached to you.
Speaker 3: You don't have those experts, so you have to become
Speaker 3: an expert yourself. So the first thing I was pushed
Speaker 3: into was the demolitions course, and that was a very
Speaker 3: very difficult course could It involved lots of calculations and
Speaker 3: learning lots of rules.
Speaker 6: You had to learn parrot.
Speaker 3: Fashion, and for me, with absolutely no education from school,
Speaker 3: I suffered on that and I had to work very
Speaker 3: very hard to do that. I have to confess I
Speaker 3: cheated a little bit because I knew that there's no
Speaker 3: way I was going to pass that test. You know,
Speaker 3: I was very good at the demolition side, and I
Speaker 3: spent a lot of my career doing demolitions, teaching demolitions.
Speaker 3: But you know that all the calculations you do you
Speaker 3: know measuring a bridge, the structure of a bridge, working
Speaker 3: out the minimum amount of explosives you need to cut
Speaker 3: that particular section of a bridge takes a calculation, but
Speaker 3: we generally use the calculation pe equals plenty. They just
Speaker 3: had to think about it.
Speaker 4: Put funny that that's we use that too.
Speaker 5: I mean, it's funny that it's it's a it's a
Speaker 5: breacher's it's a breacher's motto everywhere everywhere in the world.
Speaker 3: It seems like, yeah, well that's good. The world big thick, Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 3: You don't necessarily take a calculator with you, so you
Speaker 3: you you get a good idea of what you need.
Speaker 3: You know, you look at the piece of metal that
Speaker 3: you need to cut or blast your way through and think, yeah,
Speaker 3: I know what's needed.
Speaker 4: Simon, excuse real quick. We just want to give a
Speaker 4: quick shout out to our sponsors tonight.
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Speaker 1: And folks, I just want to tell everyone out there
Speaker 1: real quick. I have a book coming out in December.
Speaker 1: We Defy the Lost Chapters of Special Forces History. So
Speaker 1: this book covers Detachment A, the guys that are undercover
Speaker 1: in Berlin, Detachment K, and Korea, the green Light teams
Speaker 1: that jumped in trained to jump behind Soviet lines with
Speaker 1: backpack nuclear weapons. This book's up for pre water on
Speaker 1: Amazon right now. The paperback will be out December ninth,
Speaker 1: so please check it out.
Speaker 4: Thank you, Sorry about that, Simon. Back to you.
Speaker 5: So, I'm curious because you know you mentioned how everybody
Speaker 5: you know, it's a more casual environment.
Speaker 4: Obviously everybody's a high performer. You have to do your job.
Speaker 4: You go by first name.
Speaker 5: What happens though if a leader, for instance, because you
Speaker 5: don't have like the military I don't want to see
Speaker 5: you don't have the military structure, but things are a
Speaker 5: bit more relaxed.
Speaker 4: But what happens if a leader isn't quite as skilled?
Speaker 4: Do they lose a lot of respect?
Speaker 5: And how is that handled when the kind of the
Speaker 5: conventional sort of military standards and discipline isn't there.
Speaker 3: If if it's I mean, it's a very rare thing
Speaker 3: that somebody is found to be you know, let's say
Speaker 3: they've reached their ceiling as such, and they're found to
Speaker 3: be not not leading in the way. Maybe it's a
Speaker 3: personality clash, maybe they're just not handling things terribly well.
Speaker 3: Then they are just moved aside, they're invited to leave.
Speaker 3: You know, it's white you kind of never stop being
Speaker 3: assessed as such, and at any time you could be
Speaker 3: sent back to your original unit. So of course there's
Speaker 3: a lot of respect for the older the older guys.
Speaker 3: But it's really it's really once you're out on the
Speaker 3: ground on operations where you know, you know yourselves. Operations
Speaker 3: is a great level when the ship's going down, and
Speaker 3: then then you get to perhaps observe who perhaps are
Speaker 3: the natural leaders in those in those circumstances, So you know,
Speaker 3: if you've had a quiet period of operations, and the
Speaker 3: nineteen eighties was was quite a fairly quiet period for.
Speaker 6: The Special Air Service.
Speaker 3: There was still a lot going alright along, but no
Speaker 3: major conflicts until the first Gulf four.
Speaker 6: So when we were sort of thrust.
Speaker 3: Into that, those who we looked to for leadership, it
Speaker 3: was like, Okay, here's your opportunity. Now we're looking to
Speaker 3: you for guidance. We're going into some dodgy situations here
Speaker 3: and get you really do get to see the true
Speaker 3: manner of individuals and everybody's been on operations will have
Speaker 3: had the same experience. Take over.
Speaker 1: If you could signon, could you tell us a little
Speaker 1: bit about, you know, your squadron getting spun up for
Speaker 1: the Gulf War, the deployment and what happened.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so nineteen ninety everybody was I think we were
Speaker 3: on the counter terrorists team at the time. So you
Speaker 3: do six months, you know, two year rotation. Every six
Speaker 3: months you're on a different sort of part of that rotation,
Speaker 3: and part of that is the counter terrorist team. So
Speaker 3: you're based in the camp doing your drills and then
Speaker 3: on the.
Speaker 6: News, obviously we saw the Iraqis.
Speaker 3: Rolling into Q eight, and this was sort of July
Speaker 3: August time, nineteen ninety I think, and it was it
Speaker 3: was leading up to my thirtieth birthday, and I remember thinking, shit,
Speaker 3: at some stage, we're going to end up there. And
Speaker 3: as I was born in Q eight, I thought, here
Speaker 3: we go on the thirtieth birthday, I'm going to be
Speaker 3: stuck in QA and it ain't going to go well,
Speaker 3: you know that sort of irony. So we knew, having
Speaker 3: you know, watching that on the TV, at some stage
Speaker 3: we were going to be involved. Now G Squadron with
Speaker 3: a stand by squadron at the time, so when your
Speaker 3: stand by squadron, you're ready to move at a moment's
Speaker 3: notice to wherever it's needed. So it was going to
Speaker 3: be them. But things moved on and by the time
Speaker 3: we'd got over Christmas, A squadron had moved into that
Speaker 3: slot of standby squadron. So while G Squadron had been
Speaker 3: doing in all of their sort of preparation and everything,
Speaker 3: we were we were then put in the front line
Speaker 3: and we we headed off and we left, we had
Speaker 3: a briefing, we left Hereford at night and a bus
Speaker 3: and we we went out and you know, we we
Speaker 3: ended up in one of the Middle Eastern countries where
Speaker 3: we did build up training, uh, you know, mobility training.
Speaker 3: It's quite funny because we used to have a bit
Speaker 3: of banter with the mobility guys saying, you know, this
Speaker 3: is a no one's ever going to be driving around
Speaker 3: the desert again like we were in the Second World War,
Speaker 3: you know, and ship the next thing we're in We're
Speaker 3: in land rover, you know, the pink Panthers, land rovers,
Speaker 3: and we're we are waiting to drive over the border
Speaker 3: from Saudi Arabia into into Iraq. So it was, you know,
Speaker 3: it was a quick transition from being in Hereford to
Speaker 3: getting out to doing focus concentrated training on all the
Speaker 3: weapon systems. I was part of a two man mortar team,
Speaker 3: and a mortar team is normally four guys, but we
Speaker 3: we'd worked it down into two. So we had mortars
Speaker 3: at our disposal, all the heavy weapon systems, and we
Speaker 3: went out in half squadron groups.
Speaker 6: We were split down.
Speaker 3: I think we had five five land rover Pink Panthers,
Speaker 3: and a larger vehicle an actmap which carried a lot
Speaker 3: of stores, and we drove over the border at night,
Speaker 3: well before the ground wall started. So we were we
Speaker 3: were heading over there too, just you know, create havoc
Speaker 3: behind the lines. So it was it was great and
Speaker 3: you know the funny we laughed. We were laughing at
Speaker 3: the time. I wasn't laughing so much, but I I
Speaker 3: was the lead vehicle driving over the border. Uh you know,
Speaker 3: dark of night, night vision goggles on, and the intelligence
Speaker 3: we had as to what we would find was fairly scanned.
Speaker 3: You know, it was like, well, we really don't know.
Speaker 3: We know the border has been mined in places with
Speaker 3: anti tank mines, but we're not sure where. So as
Speaker 3: we were driving over, I was in the league vehicle
Speaker 3: with the second in command and the guy in the
Speaker 3: back who was manning the armament that we had the very.
Speaker 6: Large grenade launching machine gun.
Speaker 3: So we had you know, teams are three on each vehicle,
Speaker 3: and we were driving across literally we don't know if
Speaker 3: it's mind or not, so that the only drill we
Speaker 3: had was the vehicle behind give you a big space
Speaker 3: in case you came cart wheeling back because you'd hit
Speaker 3: a mine. And I remember the my mate in the back,
Speaker 3: he was leaning on the rollcage as well and a
Speaker 3: member and whispering to me it'll be okay. So if
Speaker 3: we hit a mine, I'm going to be killed out right.
Speaker 3: It worked out, but he said, you're probably going to
Speaker 3: be badly mutilated and injured. Ha ha. You know, so
Speaker 3: I had I had this in a swimming around in
Speaker 3: my head as we're driving forwards, wanting to put my
Speaker 3: fingers in my ears in case we roll over an
Speaker 3: anti tank mine. And as it as daylight came, you know,
Speaker 3: I could take the night goggles off.
Speaker 6: Dawn was coming. And as we were driving.
Speaker 3: Across, I looked down and there were there were tank
Speaker 3: tracks everywhere in straight lines leading up to the border,
Speaker 3: and I'd never really sort of observed tank tracks, and
Speaker 3: I thought how big they were, and I thought, the
Speaker 3: only reason they would be doing that, there's probably mind
Speaker 3: laying tanks, you know, tracked vehicles that lay the minds.
Speaker 6: So that focused the mind.
Speaker 3: A little bit. But clearly clearly what we didn't hit
Speaker 3: any anyway, and that was us The next thing, We've
Speaker 3: rolled over into Iraq, and we you know, we just
Speaker 3: headed closer and closer towards Baghdad.
Speaker 6: And the mission was initially.
Speaker 3: To just create, you know, find as many targets as
Speaker 3: we could, to create Mayhem. But then we got the
Speaker 3: message that everything had to be related to scud missiles
Speaker 3: because the danger was that the they were firing scud
Speaker 3: missiles at Israel, and if Israel got drawn into the war,
Speaker 3: then that would that would really that that would the
Speaker 3: Iraqis and the Iranians would potentially join forces together, because
Speaker 3: at that time there was a you know, they they
Speaker 3: didn't have very good relations. But if the Israelis got
Speaker 3: involved by retaliating, then then it would be a bigger problem.
Speaker 3: So our mission was everything now has to be related
Speaker 3: to scud missiles, et cetera.
Speaker 6: So that's what we did. We went around.
Speaker 3: We were looking for community anything to do with communications,
Speaker 3: blowing fiber optics cables and that sort of thing, and
Speaker 3: just raiding any you know, any installations, anything that we
Speaker 3: deemed might be related to the firing and sCOD missiles.
Speaker 3: So it's quite an interesting time. We were therefore, about
Speaker 3: a month and a half driving behind.
Speaker 6: Enemy lines, saying to the mobility guys, yeah, okay.
Speaker 3: We are, we're back driving around the desert. Absolutely no
Speaker 3: different to those guys in North Africa in the Second
Speaker 3: World War. Yeah, it's quite interesting.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so it sounds like you guys were fairly successful
Speaker 1: in like stirring up some trouble behind enemy lines.
Speaker 6: Yeah, we were.
Speaker 3: I mean we we had had three squadrons involved in
Speaker 3: the end B Squadron, you know, the bar Bravo two
Speaker 3: zero patrol everybody knows about because that was the first
Speaker 3: of a series of books that came out. Uh D
Speaker 3: Squadron were in another corridor. Nobody knew. We didn't know
Speaker 3: who else was involved. We just knew our role. We
Speaker 3: were split down into half squadron groups, so we had
Speaker 3: no idea what the other half squadron was doing. We
Speaker 3: just had our own corridor to operate in. And yeah,
Speaker 3: pleased to say there's there's no books have come out
Speaker 3: yet regarding what we got up to, which is which
Speaker 3: is quite nice. There's been quite a few books have
Speaker 3: been written. The guy who wrote Bravo two zero, Andrey McNab,
Speaker 3: he was my next door neighbor in Hereford. So when
Speaker 3: we all got back, he actually got back before before
Speaker 3: we did. He was doing a series of briefings to
Speaker 3: military audiences on their escapades. You know how they they
Speaker 3: got shot up and they had to escape and evade.
Speaker 3: So it was quite an interesting story. But he would.
Speaker 3: He asked me for some photographs, he said, for the briefing,
Speaker 3: So I posted some through his letter box next door.
Speaker 3: And the next thing, I've got pictures of me on
Speaker 3: the on the news.
Speaker 6: Because had come out. So if you look carefully in that.
Speaker 3: Book, there's a there's there's a picture of me in
Speaker 3: the my back garden fence because he climbed over into
Speaker 3: my garden and took a picture of.
Speaker 6: His kit in there.
Speaker 3: So he and I never got my photographs back, but
Speaker 3: he bought me a bottle of whiskey and a you know,
Speaker 3: and a thank you card.
Speaker 1: So, I mean that's interesting too, that that Andy. I
Speaker 1: mean he was taken as a p o W and
Speaker 1: released and all of that happened before you guys even
Speaker 1: got back to the UK.
Speaker 6: Yeah, yeah, that's right.
Speaker 3: I mean, all that was going on, we actually had
Speaker 3: two guys from my troop who had been sort of
Speaker 3: back squadded because there wasn't enough room on the vehicles
Speaker 3: to take all of us, and two of those guys
Speaker 3: ended up in the Bravo two zero patrol. Wow. It
Speaker 3: was a great surprise to us because we had absolutely
Speaker 3: no idea until everybody got back, you know, the dust settled,
Speaker 3: and then all these stories started to come out. Unfortunately,
Speaker 3: one of those guys was killed out there, very very sad,
Speaker 3: but yeah, and then the other guy got shot in
Speaker 3: the leg, so it didn't go totally well for them.
Speaker 1: So you get back to Hereford and then sort of,
Speaker 1: I mean, tell us what sort of was the next
Speaker 1: step for you in your career.
Speaker 3: Well, actually I was still on leave after that. And
Speaker 3: the way it works is you get a you get
Speaker 3: a message or a phone call to come in, bring
Speaker 3: your passport.
Speaker 6: You think, here we go again.
Speaker 3: So I ended up out in in Africa, in Ethiopia,
Speaker 3: where there was trouble going on out there with rebels
Speaker 3: coming into Ethiopia and basically taking over the government. So
Speaker 3: we were we were out there to support the embassy
Speaker 3: and the Ethiopian royal family, and from there, you know,
Speaker 3: we were just back into the same routine, the sort
Speaker 3: of two yearly rotation counter terrorism training, standby for operations,
Speaker 3: et cetera. And you're doing that and doing more courses.
Speaker 3: You know, you're constantly building up more and more experience,
Speaker 3: so there's never there's never a time that you're not
Speaker 3: doing anything until the next call and the next big
Speaker 3: thing really was the Bosnia. Bosnia came along in the
Speaker 3: sort of early nineties and we were we were involved
Speaker 3: in there as I was in one of the first
Speaker 3: small groups to go out just purely to do some
Speaker 3: sniffing around see what was going on and finding an
Speaker 3: inroad for the regiment to go out there in larger groups.
Speaker 3: So I had to go and learn Serbo Croat, you know,
Speaker 3: the local language. So that was a quick to the
Speaker 3: language school, the British Army Language School, learned the learned
Speaker 3: as much as I could of the language, and then
Speaker 3: went out there with the small team a little bit
Speaker 3: under cover, so we say, working for the UN and
Speaker 3: really getting some ground truth as to what we going
Speaker 3: on there, so that the you know, the wider regiment
Speaker 3: could formulate a plan and get out. And then I
Speaker 3: deployed again with one of the squadrons that went out,
Speaker 3: and then I was I was due to deploy yet
Speaker 3: again after that with my own squadron, a squadron, and
Speaker 3: I sort of said, you know, I've I've kind of
Speaker 3: I spent a lot of time out there. I could
Speaker 3: do with the break, and that's when I had the
Speaker 3: opportunity to go to training wing and training wing is
Speaker 3: is the you know, the organization of staff that do
Speaker 3: all the selection training. So I spent sort of two
Speaker 3: and a half years doing that, so you know, that
Speaker 3: was a good break for me and a really really
Speaker 3: good experience being part of that selection and training process
Speaker 3: for the sas. So my career went.
Speaker 1: What was like that, like bringing all this operational experience
Speaker 1: you had doing behind enemy lines action also the sort
Speaker 1: of like undercovera low visibility reconnaissance and bringing that back
Speaker 1: to the training environment to teach the next generation.
Speaker 6: Yeah, well it's great.
Speaker 3: You know, it gives you credibility and it makes you
Speaker 3: feel that you've you know, you've got a good reason
Speaker 3: to be there doing that job because you've kind of
Speaker 3: been there and done it. But your focus is just
Speaker 3: assessing those individuals because when you you know, obviously they
Speaker 3: go through the hills phase that part of the selection,
Speaker 3: you don't give a damn who they are. But when
Speaker 3: it comes to the jungle part of selection, you get
Speaker 3: a five or six man patrol and you're with them
Speaker 3: throughout that time in the jungle, So you're assessing each
Speaker 3: one of those characters and it's really down to you
Speaker 3: whether that whether that individual passes all failed, and many
Speaker 3: will get to the end they'll think they've done really well,
Speaker 3: but you know, it's a it's a sorry, but there's
Speaker 3: just something about you that you're you're not quite the
Speaker 3: right person. And because because you've been there, you you
Speaker 3: know the kind of individual that you want to be
Speaker 3: serving with. And that's how you look at it. Do
Speaker 3: I do I want to be out serving with this individual?
Speaker 3: And if the answer is no, then they are told
Speaker 3: them very sorry, but you have a past. Yeah, it's
Speaker 3: quite a responsibility, but it's the selection process is a
Speaker 3: real level playing field, and you know, it's just a
Speaker 3: it's just an awesome process. So I really enjoyed that part.
Speaker 1: And from there you were off to Brunei again to
Speaker 1: take an instructive position there.
Speaker 6: Yeah, I did.
Speaker 3: I did a couple of years in what was called
Speaker 3: then the force Projection wing, where you are the expert
Speaker 3: in your insurgent skill and you or your role is
Speaker 3: to ensure that training is done, it's relevant and any
Speaker 3: operations that involved that insurgent skill. You are the sort
Speaker 3: of lead advisor on that. So you take individuals who
Speaker 3: have got experience in that with its Mountain troop air troops,
Speaker 3: et cetera. And you know, they're they're working really hard
Speaker 3: to set up exercises and training make sure the operational
Speaker 3: procedures are updated and correct. So for me, I was
Speaker 3: liaising with the Navy with ships with submarine commanders and
Speaker 3: getting as much time as we could training with those
Speaker 3: assets to make sure that everybody was absolutely ready to
Speaker 3: go should there be a need for it.
Speaker 6: So I did that for a couple of years.
Speaker 3: I was the troop staff sergeant, so I was commanding
Speaker 3: the troop back in the squadron for a couple of years,
Speaker 3: and then eventually I moved on a training post here
Speaker 3: in Brunei as a senior military instructure, and here we are,
Speaker 3: I'm back here again and advising them on some of
Speaker 3: the you know, the skills that they're doing now to
Speaker 3: make sure that they are relevant to other environments other
Speaker 3: than the jungles. So, you know, if they end up
Speaker 3: in Africa, and Africa is turning into a sess fit
Speaker 3: now of religious terrorism, and the Western world I don't
Speaker 3: think has really got to handle on that. It's a
Speaker 3: very very serious problem.
Speaker 1: I want to talk to you more about Africa, but
Speaker 1: you finished your career as the Procurement n c O
Speaker 1: the or in the procurement wing of the regiment as
Speaker 1: a sergeant major.
Speaker 6: Yeah, that's right.
Speaker 3: We have a it's called Equipment Capability Cell where you
Speaker 3: have a handle on what is required for the squadrons operating,
Speaker 3: so ANYTHILM boots, equipment, vehicles, weapons. You've got a team
Speaker 3: of individuals who are focused on all of those areas
Speaker 3: and it's ensuring that the procurement system of the of
Speaker 3: the military is focused in the right areas for what
Speaker 3: you need. Because it's the military, procurement is a big machine.
Speaker 3: It's pretty inefficient, a lot of money wasted. There's been
Speaker 3: all sorts of stuff, you know, talked about how kit
Speaker 3: and equipment gets gets selected and brought in a lot
Speaker 3: of money wasted. So it was focused on that to
Speaker 3: make sure we got what we wanted when we needed it.
Speaker 3: So quite a quite a busy and quite an important cell.
Speaker 1: I have to ask, since we're on this topic, any
Speaker 1: particularly cool pieces of kit that you're able to talk about,
Speaker 1: things that you thought were pretty interesting.
Speaker 3: Well, at that time, we were replacing the old desert
Speaker 3: land rovers that we traditionally had since the beginning of
Speaker 3: time with a new with a new vehicle, and that
Speaker 3: that vehicle came from a company called Supercat, and it was.
Speaker 6: It was developed by our by our own guys.
Speaker 3: They worked for a number of years to develop that
Speaker 3: vehicle and that has now become the standard desert vehicle
Speaker 3: now for the British Army. The the Americans at the
Speaker 3: time were interested in it, so it's become a standard
Speaker 3: sort of desert operations vehicle. So that was pretty good.
Speaker 3: The rifle, we've been using the M sixteen as our
Speaker 3: standard sort of rifle and that was getting replaced by
Speaker 3: a rifle called the DeMarco. And what else they were
Speaker 3: probably the main things.
Speaker 6: You know, it's like new.
Speaker 3: Helmets, looking at optics, whatever, whatever's new on the market,
Speaker 3: new technology, just working with those with those organizations to
Speaker 3: develop stuff that we needed.
Speaker 1: And so you retire in two thousand and six and
Speaker 1: then you go on the circuit tell us about post
Speaker 1: service life.
Speaker 3: Yeah, well, if you know, once you finish your time.
Speaker 3: I mean I could have stayed on, but I would
Speaker 3: have been just going around this sort of the bizarres
Speaker 3: in camp doing sort of adam and stuff.
Speaker 6: So I thought it was time to leave.
Speaker 3: And I'd already you know, you're not really short of
Speaker 3: work when you leave, because there's a lot of you,
Speaker 3: you know, old colleagues are out and they're working or
Speaker 3: they've set up businesses. So my first job there's a
Speaker 3: sort of a stately home close to Hereford where they
Speaker 3: were teams of guys that I knew were running close
Speaker 3: protection courses and there was a new course they wanted
Speaker 3: to run and it was training US Special Forces guys
Speaker 3: in counter ied.
Speaker 6: Drills.
Speaker 3: So the idea was, if you know, if somebody finds
Speaker 3: an an improvides explosive device out in the Middle East,
Speaker 3: for instance, instead of just reporting it and blowing it,
Speaker 3: the standoff and observe And it was all about surveillance,
Speaker 3: following vehicles, following cars, bringing a lot of experience that
Speaker 3: had come from Northern Ireland during this sort of undercover
Speaker 3: surveillance units that were working over there. So I was
Speaker 3: involved in that for a while. We had the different
Speaker 3: US SF units coming through and then I got sort
Speaker 3: of headhunted a local company, an American company had a
Speaker 3: base in Hereford and it was to design and develop
Speaker 3: and sell rugged eyzed military hardware and software. And I
Speaker 3: went there as a sort of maritime expert looking at
Speaker 3: fitting this kit and equipment onto the boats. So this
Speaker 3: company had a they had an officer in Fort Bragg
Speaker 3: in Norfolk, you know, close to the Navy seals, and
Speaker 3: in Hereford and Australia close to the Australian sas.
Speaker 6: So they had all of.
Speaker 3: That expertise, all of those operators working for this company.
Speaker 3: But it went well for a few years, and then
Speaker 3: they folded for various reasons, and then I was out
Speaker 3: of a job again. Ended up in Slovakia with the
Speaker 3: team doing close protection for US interests out there. That folded,
Speaker 3: You're redundant again. Then I ended up in Curdistan working
Speaker 3: for a Canadian oil company doing the security. That folded
Speaker 3: when sort of Islamic terrorism sort of got a little
Speaker 3: bit of an issue and various other problems. So that folded,
Speaker 3: and that's when I found myself heading out to Botswana
Speaker 3: with the training team again guys that I mostly knew,
Speaker 3: heading out there to resurrect Botswan and Special Forces UNI.
Speaker 3: So that was an eighteen month contract and that's how
Speaker 3: I got a foot in the door in Africa.
Speaker 1: Could you tell us a little bit about like what
Speaker 1: that situation was in Botswana and why you had to,
Speaker 1: as you said, resurrect The special Forces unit was something
Speaker 1: that had fallen by the wayside.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it was.
Speaker 6: And it's typical of.
Speaker 3: Foreign countries and how they look at maintaining skills and standards.
Speaker 6: You see the same in the Middle East.
Speaker 3: Now this this unit, it was a special Forces unit
Speaker 3: based in a in an air base that I think
Speaker 3: the Americans must have built some years before, because it
Speaker 3: was it was one of the most amazing. The facilities
Speaker 3: that they had as a special Forces unit would have,
Speaker 3: you know, as good as I'd seen. You know, I
Speaker 3: was over working with Delta in in Uh where are
Speaker 3: they Fort Bragg, isn't it the Delta Go. Yeah, I've
Speaker 3: been over working with spent some time, and the facilities
Speaker 3: these guys had, you know, they had a parachute center,
Speaker 3: they had an aircraft for doing counter terrace drills, a
Speaker 3: CQB killing house. They had swimming pools and stargeants, messes
Speaker 3: and everything you could. And everything was going derelict because
Speaker 3: nothing had been used. Sol courses and ranges were overgrown.
Speaker 3: So our team we went in there, we resurrected all
Speaker 3: of this. We got bulldozers, we opened up the firing
Speaker 3: ranges again. And we were recruiting from the Botswana Defense Force.
Speaker 3: I was running a selection process with another guy and
Speaker 3: continuation training, you know, bush skills, just general soldiering a
Speaker 3: lot of ranges, getting them up and then handing them
Speaker 3: over to the other team, and they were doing counter
Speaker 3: terrorist type stuff.
Speaker 6: So it was good. But you know, during those.
Speaker 3: That selection process and training, we introduced the tracking that
Speaker 3: we had because the other guy was a former instructor
Speaker 3: here at the Jungle Warfare School, and we introduced tracking
Speaker 3: to them because those guys were also responsible for any
Speaker 3: anti poaching that was going on in the country. So
Speaker 3: that that was then when I thought, shit, this is
Speaker 3: teaching this now and the bush skills, et cetera is
Speaker 3: It's exactly what I should be doing because I spent
Speaker 3: all those years, you know, I spent twenty four years
Speaker 3: becoming an expert, and then I spent ten years on
Speaker 3: the circuit doing nothing but earning money, doing you know,
Speaker 3: a job that really anybody I didn't need all of
Speaker 3: those skills. So then I thought, if for the rest
Speaker 3: of my time I could just do this, I can
Speaker 3: teach anti poaching rangers or military the skills I can
Speaker 3: bring the skills that I've got, then I'm a you know,
Speaker 3: I'm going to be happy doing that even if I
Speaker 3: take a considerable drop in wages kind of thing.
Speaker 6: And that's what I've been doing ever since.
Speaker 1: Yeah, So from after that point, working a lot of
Speaker 1: training jobs with non governmental organizations, training these entire poaching units.
Speaker 1: Before we get a little bit deeper into that, can
Speaker 1: you talk to us a bit about poaching in Africa?
Speaker 1: And I mean, I think a lot of us here
Speaker 1: in the United States and probably in the West in general,
Speaker 1: don't really understand how complex that problem is and how
Speaker 1: difficult it is to counter it. Like if you could
Speaker 1: kind of like bring us in big picture to a
Speaker 1: little picture on that.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Right, So we we bounce into a lot of
Speaker 3: different countries and each one has their own, you know,
Speaker 3: individual problems, but basically you've got sustainability poaching. This is
Speaker 3: where the people from the local communities around the protected park,
Speaker 3: I mean, and they use a whole variety of means,
Speaker 3: you know, shooting with homemade weapons, snares, traps, poisoning, fishing
Speaker 3: with nets, and they can devastate those stocks. So they're
Speaker 3: coming in, they're helping themselves to all the resources for
Speaker 3: their for their own needs, you know, because they've traditionally
Speaker 3: hunted those lands. So that's an endemic problem across everywhere.
Speaker 3: So you know, that's the first thing. Then you've got
Speaker 3: the professional hunting gowns.
Speaker 6: And they are usually funded, backed by.
Speaker 3: You know, government officials or rich people, armed, dangerous, often
Speaker 3: ex military, and they can come in in big units.
Speaker 3: And there after the rhino, the elephant, the horn and
Speaker 3: tusk and anything else that they can get. And they've
Speaker 3: been responsible for wiping out the stocks of rhino, for instance,
Speaker 3: in a lot of countries where they've had one hundreds
Speaker 3: of thousands of these animals, and throughout the seventies, eighties
Speaker 3: into the nineties they were completely cleared out, completely extinct.
Speaker 3: And some of those governments saw those is as the
Speaker 3: same as they wood minerals, you know, is mining they were.
Speaker 3: That was that was just a commodity that they had
Speaker 3: and an open market in China and Vietnam as as
Speaker 3: they still is.
Speaker 6: So now the NGOs have.
Speaker 3: Got involved and they you know, they're protecting the parks
Speaker 3: and they're reintroducing them. But the other thing that's perhaps
Speaker 3: less known about our cattle herds of cattle and the pastoralists.
Speaker 3: The cattle are owned by the rich and influential, So
Speaker 3: Kenya is a classic example. So somebody who's rich in
Speaker 3: Kenya ruves their wealth by having thousands of head of cattle.
Speaker 3: They're not traded for meat, but they're just held. They're
Speaker 3: traded in marriages and that sort of thing. But those
Speaker 3: are traditionally herded by some of the tribal groups. So
Speaker 3: you've got the Sambu, the Pact, the Turkana, the Massi,
Speaker 3: and they feud with each other, fighting over the grazing lands.
Speaker 3: And a lot of those then are going into the
Speaker 3: parks and conservancies. They've got cattle bomas hidden inside there.
Speaker 3: They're breeding the cattle, and those pastoralists will kill anything
Speaker 3: either either to eat or anything that might be a
Speaker 3: predator against their cattle. They fiercely protect them, and they're
Speaker 3: aren't they're dangerous, and a lot of rangers and park
Speaker 3: staff are being killed almost on a daily basis out
Speaker 3: there by these So that's the cattle herding. But the big,
Speaker 3: big threat at the moment is religious terrorism, and you know,
Speaker 3: you don't get to.
Speaker 6: Hear of it on the news.
Speaker 3: A lot of Extentsial and West Africa, even this year,
Speaker 3: there's been people, I know, people I've worked with, people
Speaker 3: I've trained, have been sort of slaughter and you know
Speaker 3: by particularly Islamic jihadis, and and it's such a big
Speaker 3: threat now across the whole of Africa. There's not a
Speaker 3: single country that either doesn't have that within its country
Speaker 3: or it has a border with the country that does.
Speaker 1: What is what is if I can ask Simon, what
Speaker 1: is this intersection between poaching in Islamic terrorism in Africa?
Speaker 1: Like how like you said, a lot of the some
Speaker 1: of the people you trained were killed by them, Like
Speaker 1: how did these two things come together?
Speaker 6: Well?
Speaker 3: They they the terrorists will partly fund their terrorism by
Speaker 3: coming in killing elephants and rhino for the huge amount
Speaker 3: of money they make.
Speaker 6: But also they they kind of getting the communities.
Speaker 3: On their side by saying, you know, these are your
Speaker 3: these are your tribal lands, you know you and and
Speaker 3: they're gaining favor by coming in and deliberately targeting the
Speaker 3: security forces from within.
Speaker 6: So it's a two way thing.
Speaker 3: Part Partly they are funding the terrorism through poaching, They're
Speaker 3: they're feeding themselves because they have terrorist groups training groups
Speaker 3: all across Africa, and so of course the you know,
Speaker 3: it is part of the how they feed themselves.
Speaker 6: And and it's intimidation.
Speaker 3: They've they've there's a I mean I can talk about
Speaker 3: Benin in particular because I've done a lot of training there.
Speaker 3: Benin is a is a you know, a fairly small
Speaker 3: country over in over in West Africa.
Speaker 6: Most people have.
Speaker 3: Never heard of, but it borders Bikino, Fasso, Nigeria and Nigeria.
Speaker 3: And there are two parks there that I've worked in.
Speaker 3: And the NGO that leases those parks is an allganization
Speaker 3: called African Parks. Easily the most successful NGO because they've
Speaker 3: got leases on something like twenty to twenty five parks
Speaker 3: all across Africa doing fantastic work. But in Beneen, I
Speaker 3: went out there in one of the parks, Peenjari, and
Speaker 3: trained their rangers in tracking.
Speaker 6: The first time they'd had that training.
Speaker 3: Now it's a French former French dependency, so they speak French.
Speaker 3: A lot of the training they've had is from French
Speaker 3: Special Forces, Foreign Legion and that sort of stuff. So
Speaker 3: I gave them training tracking training. When I left about
Speaker 3: two months later, the park hit the headlines. Two French
Speaker 3: tourists had been taken hostage or they'd gone missing along
Speaker 3: with the tour guide, and the next headline was that
Speaker 3: they'd been found. Now, what had happened was the trackers
Speaker 3: that I had trained were first in on the scene.
Speaker 3: They'd found the burnt out vehicle, they'd found the ambush point,
Speaker 3: worked out how many, what kind of weapons, and they'd
Speaker 3: followed those tracks. They found the tour guide killed and mutilated,
Speaker 3: and they followed those tracks right up to the northern border,
Speaker 3: which is a river with Bikino Fasso. By that time
Speaker 3: the French military were involved. They took over and they
Speaker 3: eventually found not only those two French tourists, but another
Speaker 3: two hostages that they had one American one South Korean
Speaker 3: that nobody knew were missing, and they found where they
Speaker 3: were being held. There was a firefight to the French
Speaker 3: were killed, but they rescued the hostages. So the terrorist
Speaker 3: plan was to take those into Mali, another hotbed for terrorism,
Speaker 3: and hand them over to another terrorist UNI. So you
Speaker 3: can only guess what would have happened to those. So
Speaker 3: it was those trackers who were absolutely key to finding
Speaker 3: those That's incredible. Yeah, yeah, So so the next story
Speaker 3: in the neighboring park, the part called w National Park.
Speaker 3: I was out there again a couple of years ago
Speaker 3: doing tracking training exactly the same UH trained trained several
Speaker 3: teams as very good trackers and the I mean, these
Speaker 3: guys are awesome, awesome trackers when they get good training. Again,
Speaker 3: a few months later, that part hit the headlines, and
Speaker 3: this time the rangers were responding to I believe a
Speaker 3: poaching incident in two pickup trucks and they were hit
Speaker 3: by IED's IM provided explosive devices in the park, and
Speaker 3: I think they were there were more detonated when more
Speaker 3: people came up. So initially eight eight rangers were killed
Speaker 3: in that plus the chief instructor who was a French
Speaker 3: former Special Forces guy and a good friend, and he
Speaker 3: was the one who was arranging for us to come
Speaker 3: in and do the work. So he was killed out right.
Speaker 3: The two days later, another vehicle going down another improvided
Speaker 3: explosive device killed another two. So this this is in
Speaker 3: a you know, this is in a conservation park, and
Speaker 3: this this ship is going on. And then this year
Speaker 3: only in July the same part, another five rangers and
Speaker 3: seven military were killed in the same part again by terrorists,
Speaker 3: absolutely wiped out. So you know this, this is ongoing,
Speaker 3: and what I'm trying to say to the military that
Speaker 3: you know, if I could reach out to the British Army,
Speaker 3: I'm saying, you need to get your ship together because
Speaker 3: it's not going to be long before this is going
Speaker 3: to be British hostages are going to be taken killed,
Speaker 3: and they need to have a response, and they need
Speaker 3: to have trackers because you know, if a tourist vehicle
Speaker 3: is hit or you know, a vehicle of dignitary royal
Speaker 3: family whoever, and those people are taken, there's no technology
Speaker 3: really that is better than a good tracking team with
Speaker 3: is EARS senses to follow up those tracks, and at
Speaker 3: the moment, the British Army doesn't have that. We have
Speaker 3: the training teams over here. We've got the Gurkha Regiment
Speaker 3: over here based in Bruneye as the as a lead
Speaker 3: for jungle operations. But if I what I'm saying to them,
Speaker 3: if I get taken hostage, who's going to come and
Speaker 3: rescue me? Because there's nobody on a standby with as
Speaker 3: far as I'm concerned, the necessary skills and experience could
Speaker 3: to do that.
Speaker 1: Simon, could you take us a bit deeper on the
Speaker 1: tracking aspect of it, because that's a that's an art
Speaker 1: and a science of course. Yeah, and I'm just curious
Speaker 1: to hear I need. I mean, I know you're very
Speaker 1: deep into it in training. These guys could tell us
Speaker 1: about tracking and like the myths, the misconceptions, what it
Speaker 1: really is, how it really works.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Well, you can trace military tracking back to the
Speaker 3: nineteen forties and fifties. And what I've been saying to
Speaker 3: these guys here is the tracking developed first of all
Speaker 3: in Malaya in nineteen forty eight, right the way through
Speaker 3: to the nineteen seventies or nineteen sixties.
Speaker 6: When that conflict ended.
Speaker 3: They realized that trackers were very, very important and they
Speaker 3: were used indigenous trackers.
Speaker 6: At the same time in Africa, in Kenya we had.
Speaker 3: The Mau Mau Uprising where the British Army were involved,
Speaker 3: and they also saw the need for trackers and they
Speaker 3: were using the indigenous trackers. They're led led by officers,
Speaker 3: you know, British officers, So that went right the way through.
Speaker 6: In Africa.
Speaker 3: We then had the Rhodesian bush wars Uh and those guys,
Speaker 3: a lot of them had been you know, the sea
Speaker 3: squadron sas came from Rhodesia, so they already had they
Speaker 3: already understood how useful tracking was.
Speaker 6: Over in Asia.
Speaker 3: We had the Borneo confrontation then in the sort of
Speaker 3: sixties into the seventies and or the nineteen sixties that
Speaker 3: was and they were using trackers. So the British Army
Speaker 3: have been using trackers since since those early days. But
Speaker 3: there's there's been two two camps. If you like the
Speaker 3: jungle style of tracking and the African bush style of tracking,
Speaker 3: and they're they're very very different. In the road Jesian Wars,
Speaker 3: there was the guy who's considered the father of the
Speaker 3: drills and developing tracking. There was a guy called Alan Savory,
Speaker 3: very very interesting guy and I met him by chance
Speaker 3: on a on a ridgeline in Zimbabwe. He is he
Speaker 3: is the guy who started training the white soldiers because
Speaker 3: he had realized that a lot of the local indigenous
Speaker 3: trackers were obviously very good, but if it got very
Speaker 3: dangerous then they were inclined to lose the tracks. And
Speaker 3: they were finding exactly the same the jungle tracking. They
Speaker 3: had to start training the you know, the British to
Speaker 3: do that job, and that's how it all started. Alan Savory,
Speaker 3: Now if you look him up. He's he's now well
Speaker 3: known for holistic grazing and saving the planet with with
Speaker 3: calves and very very credible as well. But but now
Speaker 3: we've got military tracking in the jungle, military tracking in
Speaker 3: the bush, and because I've got a foot in both camps.
Speaker 3: When I came from Brunei and went to Africa and
Speaker 3: teaching tracking, I realized that we've got to change everything.
Speaker 6: We've got to change the drills.
Speaker 3: You know, because it's open territory, we can have two
Speaker 3: security I realized we could use two trackers working together,
Speaker 3: and that has revolutionized the speed that we can pursue
Speaker 3: the enemy, if you like, whether that's poachers or whether
Speaker 3: that's insurgents, whether that's terrorists. And so that's why I'm
Speaker 3: back here now to give to give my experience and
Speaker 3: my advice to the guys who are training here, because
Speaker 3: the jungle tracking is completely different to the bush tracking,
Speaker 3: and I want these guys to be prepared and ready
Speaker 3: and have the necessary skills and have practiced in the
Speaker 3: way that we do it out in Africa. Mission.
Speaker 1: How difficult is it to follow sporer in the jungle
Speaker 1: versus in the sahell? What are the differences between those.
Speaker 3: The actual physically following the tracks is much the same.
Speaker 6: You're looking for the same characteristics.
Speaker 3: You know, when when an individual has walked across a
Speaker 3: piece of ground, they make changes to that ground. Some
Speaker 3: of it's temporary, some of it's more permanent. But you
Speaker 3: you train your eye to pick up the slightest change.
Speaker 3: You know, it's not footprints, forget footprints, it's.
Speaker 6: It's scuff marks.
Speaker 3: It's stones that have been turned over, a leaf that's
Speaker 3: been knocked off the tree. The the difference between the
Speaker 3: jungle and Africa is in Africa you've got thousands of animals.
Speaker 3: You've got buffalo, you've got zebra, you've got elephant, you've
Speaker 3: got hippo, you've got everything, and all of those are.
Speaker 6: Trampling over the same So you've got.
Speaker 3: To distinguish between a human set of tracks and that's
Speaker 3: just the marks. It's the way they've laid the grasses
Speaker 3: in the grassland, the way they've turned over a stone.
Speaker 3: You've got to differentiate between an animal that's done that
Speaker 3: and a human being. And a lot of it is
Speaker 3: about working out the time. You know, how long ago
Speaker 3: did they go? Where they hear how many have used
Speaker 3: this track? Every now and then you will get a
Speaker 3: little bit of a footprint, whatever foot where they're wearing,
Speaker 3: and that just confirms to you that you're still on
Speaker 3: the right track. There's not much in the jungle apart
Speaker 3: from pigs that's going to interfere with that side. But
Speaker 3: in the jungle it's so close you can't see any
Speaker 3: further than maybe five to ten meters ahead, and that's.
Speaker 6: Why it's slow.
Speaker 3: Your security is behind you looking over your shoulder as
Speaker 3: the tracker, and you are on often a narrow ridge line,
Speaker 3: so you're you're kind of walking on top of the track,
Speaker 3: moving slowly, pushing through the undergrowth as you go, and
Speaker 3: it has to be.
Speaker 6: A slow, deliberate follow whereas in Africa, you know.
Speaker 3: I've shown the videos here of my rangers literally running
Speaker 3: running along the track because they've got their security out
Speaker 3: on the flank, and we've got two trackers. They take
Speaker 3: over from each other. When one slows down, he's lost it,
Speaker 3: he's not sure. The other one comes up, leaps ahead,
Speaker 3: picks it up again, and the and they you know,
Speaker 3: they're they're constantly moving. So it's very very, very very different.
Speaker 3: But the initial thing is to train those individuals to
Speaker 3: coach them in exercises that we do to to notice
Speaker 3: very very small changes in the ground, you know, the grasses,
Speaker 3: the stones, rocky environments, and it's it's a skill that
Speaker 3: they they build up. They they kind of build up
Speaker 3: a library in their head of what those changes are.
Speaker 3: Once you recognize them, it comes what we what we
Speaker 3: call their key sign or key sport, and they then
Speaker 3: recognize that and if their eye is looking for that,
Speaker 3: they pick it out and they can see it. And
Speaker 3: then they get into a different environment, maybe from hard
Speaker 3: rocky areas to to grassland, and then they have to
Speaker 3: pick up what what what is it I can see
Speaker 3: now that tells me that my my target has been
Speaker 3: along here. You recognize it, then you're looking for it,
Speaker 3: and then you can see it. You know. It's a
Speaker 3: tracker is somebody who can see see things that a
Speaker 3: non tracker can't see. It's really not about following footprint.
Speaker 1: It's it's fascinating that we're always told the future of
Speaker 1: warfare is drones and technology, but there are literally these
Speaker 1: This is a form of intelligence gathering that's ancient, like
Speaker 1: it's been with human beings since the Paleolithic times, and
Speaker 1: it still has a relevancy.
Speaker 6: It absolutely does.
Speaker 7: There is nothing that will ever replace that, you know,
Speaker 7: And if you're if you're in a in an operation,
Speaker 7: let's say you've you know, an enemy has come in,
Speaker 7: they've hit your unit, and they've disappeared.
Speaker 3: If honestly, if they've tied a piece of string and
Speaker 3: then reeled it out, you would naturally you think, are okay,
Speaker 3: I'm going to follow that.
Speaker 6: Well, that's kind of what they've done.
Speaker 3: But it's the marks they've left on the ground, and
Speaker 3: most you know, most military commanders, they don't understand.
Speaker 6: It because they they've never experienced it.
Speaker 3: So the trackers go back to the units and they
Speaker 3: never use that skill again because it's not all batted
Speaker 3: and it's not understood, and it's like, well, where, you know, where,
Speaker 3: where will these trackers be in our unit? So it's
Speaker 3: it's been a frustration of mine for a long time.
Speaker 3: But if the focus now is on Africa and being
Speaker 3: prepared for that time when terrorism takes a hold of uh,
Speaker 3: you know, British or American subjects, then somebody has to
Speaker 3: be prepared and ready to go in there. And it's
Speaker 3: it's it's a gap at the moment because there's nobody
Speaker 3: doing that.
Speaker 5: You know, we've we've all seen trackers on movies and television.
Speaker 5: What's the reality of it though, in terms of can
Speaker 5: you tell how long it's been since a person's passed through?
Speaker 4: Can you tell how many people? Can you tell how
Speaker 4: much weight they were carrying?
Speaker 3: Like?
Speaker 4: What are some things that you get other than just
Speaker 4: like direction?
Speaker 3: Yeah, you by looking at those tracks, first of all,
Speaker 3: you have to g how long ago did they pass
Speaker 3: through here? So you're looking at a whole load of things.
Speaker 3: You're looking at how the weather has affected those tracks,
Speaker 3: So you need to know that you know, has it
Speaker 3: been windy, has it rained? You always do a comparison
Speaker 3: with your own tracks, so you make a mark in
Speaker 3: the ground the same and you look at how much
Speaker 3: of that weather you take note of the animals, have
Speaker 3: the animals superimposed their traps on top or are your
Speaker 3: traps on top of those?
Speaker 6: And the insects are really really important.
Speaker 3: If you can see disturbance of insects still because you
Speaker 3: know those people have gone through there, that tells you
Speaker 3: you're very close because you disturb those insects.
Speaker 6: For a while and then they go.
Speaker 3: Back into their normal pattern of things. Whenever you get
Speaker 3: a good area where you can actually see the footprints.
Speaker 3: We call it a trap trap. Then there's a method
Speaker 3: then of estimating the numbers by counting the numbers of
Speaker 3: heels in a set distance. So now you've got an
Speaker 3: idea how long ago did they pass through and how
Speaker 3: many are they And then you can look at those
Speaker 3: individual footprints. You can see if somebody is carrying extra weight.
Speaker 3: You can get an idea how fast are they going
Speaker 3: by looking at the footprints, looking at the length of stride,
Speaker 3: and you know is one person, for instance, carrying more
Speaker 3: weight than another, and that from a counter proaching that
Speaker 3: could tell you that somebody is carrying a tusk, for instance,
Speaker 3: or a heavy weight. So you're constantly gaining information as
Speaker 3: you go, and you're building up a picture of you
Speaker 3: know who it is you're tracking from the type of
Speaker 3: foot where they're wearing. Is one wearing a military style boot,
Speaker 3: one wearing a sandal or something. Have you got a
Speaker 3: mix of military styles and indigenous Where you've got a
Speaker 3: poaching site, you know the guides, the people carrying, and
Speaker 3: then you've got the shooters who were your sort of
Speaker 3: former military and it's exactly the same in a military context.
Speaker 6: You know, who is it that's just bumped your position?
Speaker 3: How many how far are they moving, and what direction
Speaker 3: are they going. You're trying to get into the minds
Speaker 3: of those individuals, building up a picture who they are,
Speaker 3: where they've gone, what are their habits and routines? Where
Speaker 3: did they stop? If they if you see they've stopped
Speaker 3: under a particular tree, you can work out what was
Speaker 3: the position of the sun at that time, because they're
Speaker 3: sitting in the shade. If that now is in the sunlight,
Speaker 3: you'll think to yourself where they must have sat here
Speaker 3: when the sun was in a different quarter, So that
Speaker 3: might aid you to work out when did they pass through.
Speaker 1: You had mentioned that there are sort of two different
Speaker 1: types of trackers, military trackers and indigenous trackers. Well, I
Speaker 1: this is a little bit of an unfair question, but
Speaker 1: I'd love to ask you since you have this experience,
Speaker 1: what are some of the who are the best trackers
Speaker 1: in the world, Like, who are the people that you
Speaker 1: want to go to to learn from people that you've
Speaker 1: been really impressed by.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I would say the best trackers in the world
Speaker 3: are the.
Speaker 6: People I've trained. I would say that.
Speaker 3: The the let's say the indigenous trackers to their country.
Speaker 6: Are probably the best.
Speaker 3: Because they've grown up in that country, they understand it.
Speaker 3: If you take them to a completely different environment, they
Speaker 3: would initially struggle. So I've trained trackers in Borneo, in
Speaker 3: jungle tracking, you know, locals to do that, and obviously
Speaker 3: a lot of African I would say in a lot
Speaker 3: of those more indigenous people, they are.
Speaker 6: More attuned to those natural skill.
Speaker 3: I find that their natural sense of direction is better
Speaker 3: than somebody who's come from the western country, and their
Speaker 3: powers of observation are absolutely phenomenal. They can see. There's
Speaker 3: so many times they've pointed out a snake in a
Speaker 3: bush and I'm standing there and I just can't see it,
Speaker 3: and they.
Speaker 6: Say, no, you know, you can see the snake.
Speaker 3: I can't see the bloody snake until they point it
Speaker 3: with a stick.
Speaker 6: So that's why.
Speaker 3: They make you know they're tracking. They get to a
Speaker 3: stage where I don't know now whether they're on the
Speaker 3: track or not, and that means that I got them
Speaker 3: to a level beyond my own, and I'm happy with that.
Speaker 3: But in the beginning, they're shuffling around, they can't see it.
Speaker 6: You know.
Speaker 3: We slowly build them up, but they're so quick to
Speaker 3: recognize the characteristics of sport as we call it. They've
Speaker 3: quickly overtaken my ability. But I can still get you know,
Speaker 3: the army guys I've trained, still get them up to
Speaker 3: a very very good level, but it takes a bit
Speaker 3: longer and they need to keep at it. You can't
Speaker 3: just do a course and then say that's it. You know,
Speaker 3: it's a skill. It's a perishable skill, but it's a
Speaker 3: skill that you improve. You've never finished. You've never finished
Speaker 3: learning as a tracker. Every time you go out, you'll
Speaker 3: notice something else that you can then use. You know,
Speaker 3: you can stick that in your library. So it's you.
Speaker 3: You've got to keep going and keep at it. So yeah,
Speaker 3: it's a rare skill, but it's a skill that everybody has.
Speaker 3: We were, you know, our our ancestors were trackers. It
Speaker 3: was part of everyday life. So we still retain that.
Speaker 3: It just has to be brought out and you've got
Speaker 3: to get guys away from looking at a screen. And
Speaker 3: that's that's a big change that I've seen over my time.
Speaker 3: People are so used to getting their information focusing on
Speaker 3: a small screen, getting everything from there. To then get
Speaker 3: them away from that stick that phone, leave it back
Speaker 3: in the you know, accommodation, and now start focusing your
Speaker 3: eyes on the terrain, on the you know, in the
Speaker 3: real world, I think we're getting further and further away
Speaker 3: from those instinctive, natural, you know, skills.
Speaker 1: So you are still training rangers in some of these
Speaker 1: different countries. You're back in Brunei right now. Tell us, like,
Speaker 1: what's next for you? Where are you going from here?
Speaker 3: From here I get back home, I've got about ten
Speaker 3: days and I'm going out to Malawi. I've got one
Speaker 3: of my trainers there in one of the parks that
Speaker 3: we frequent and he's doing what's called the Basic Field
Speaker 3: Ranger Course, and that's taking individuals, guys, men and women
Speaker 3: from you know, uh, living in the community three months
Speaker 3: worth of training to get them to be fully functioning rangers.
Speaker 3: And part of that is a tracking phase. So I'm
Speaker 3: heading out there to run two two week tracking courses
Speaker 3: within that, and hopefully my my friend, who's a new
Speaker 3: instructor tours. He's got some experience with tracking, but you know,
Speaker 3: I'll be sort of passing that information onto him as well.
Speaker 3: So I'll be a month in Malawi. Back home, I've
Speaker 3: got some potential in Uganda because there's a training academy
Speaker 3: out there that was I believe built by the Americans.
Speaker 6: You guys are great at coming in building.
Speaker 3: Something and.
Speaker 6: You've changed your mind.
Speaker 3: And this place is out there, apparently it's got it's
Speaker 3: got classrooms, generators, accommodation, everything you want, and it's not
Speaker 3: being used.
Speaker 6: So I've got my eye on that.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I tell you, we're just shuffling around following you guys, taking.
Speaker 6: Up what you don't need anymore.
Speaker 3: So, you know, I want to develop the potential of
Speaker 3: like an international training school where I can take people
Speaker 3: who want to get involved in this kind of work,
Speaker 3: put them through their paces, but also train at the
Speaker 3: same time, you know, African military rangers. We do a
Speaker 3: lot with the female empowerment and training as well, because
Speaker 3: the women in Africa are absolutely amazing and they're an
Speaker 3: untouched you know, and untapped into source out there in
Speaker 3: all walks of luck, all walks of life.
Speaker 6: If you see the African women are the ones you know, they've.
Speaker 3: Got to they've got a baby on their back, they're
Speaker 3: out in the fields, they're toiling in the fields.
Speaker 6: They stop to breastfeed.
Speaker 3: And then they're carrying massive heavy weights everywhere.
Speaker 6: They are the.
Speaker 3: Backbone of Africa. So if you can take that resource,
Speaker 3: we turn them into anti poaching rangers. They make fantastic trackers.
Speaker 3: You've got a slightly different mindset from the guys, perhaps
Speaker 3: less apt to be corrupt, shall we say, and more
Speaker 3: they think further ahead. I think their mindset is that
Speaker 3: they you know, they're bringing up children, they're thinking about
Speaker 3: the future, and they're thinking less about what can they
Speaker 3: get for themselves. So if they get a wage, they'll
Speaker 3: put that wage into putting a new roof on the
Speaker 3: house or education for their children.
Speaker 6: Where the guys, you know what we're like, you know,
Speaker 6: we'll be down in.
Speaker 3: The bars and getting drunk or buying a mo the
Speaker 3: bike or something like that.
Speaker 1: Are are there any well? I mean, first off, I
Speaker 1: mean you're presumably you have a company that you work
Speaker 1: for now doing these tracking things. Is there like a
Speaker 1: website or anywhere that you'd like to tell people about?
Speaker 6: Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 3: In about twenty nineteen, I decided we have to have
Speaker 3: a company name, a logo and a website. So that's
Speaker 3: Big five Protection. So that's www dot B five P,
Speaker 3: dot co dot UK and that will lead to the
Speaker 3: website and you know you're be able to have a
Speaker 3: look at what we're doing, what we've been up to.
Speaker 1: And we'll have a link down the description for you
Speaker 1: guys as well. Are there any other like NGOs or
Speaker 1: anything that you'd like to direct people to people who
Speaker 1: are interested in supporting some of these anti poaching efforts.
Speaker 3: Yeah, there's a there's a lot of there's a lot
Speaker 3: of great causes. Now. You know, if if we could
Speaker 3: get donor funding, we could do a hell of a
Speaker 3: lot more. I've got a focus at the moment in
Speaker 3: Samatra and Indonesia where the last of the rhinos, the
Speaker 3: last of the tigers, there's there's literally tens of them,
Speaker 3: and they're calling for us to go out there and
Speaker 3: help raise anti poaching units, and we can't do it
Speaker 3: because there's no funding. There's absolutely no funding to do that.
Speaker 3: When I was working in Sabah in Borneo a couple
Speaker 3: of years ago, when I was.
Speaker 6: First contracted to do that, there were.
Speaker 3: Two or three Bornian versions of the Samata and rhino
Speaker 3: were left and they and they've been they they've died out,
Speaker 3: they're completely extinct now. So my real focus is getting
Speaker 3: over there but without without some sort of donor funding,
Speaker 3: without backing, we can't do that. And you know it's
Speaker 3: going to take millions of dollars to establish a unit.
Speaker 3: But NGOs, like African Parks for instance, they are doing
Speaker 3: so much good and there it's a massive battleground out there.
Speaker 6: They're they're battling.
Speaker 3: All sorts of things, including journalists who are trying to
Speaker 3: expose things that aren't happening. But they're they're literally saving
Speaker 3: you know, loads and loads of parts, turning them around,
Speaker 3: getting the tourists back. But they're they're they're fighting. So
Speaker 3: that's a really good NGO to look up. And then
Speaker 3: you know there's individual small NGOs who are desperate out
Speaker 3: in Malawi. There's a Wildlife Action Group and there's a
Speaker 3: two forest reserves that I you know, help out as
Speaker 3: much as I can. And there's run by an Irish
Speaker 3: lady called Lynn Clifford, and she'll hate me for mentioning
Speaker 3: her name, but she is literally running the training and
Speaker 3: running these team of rangers and protecting those forest parks
Speaker 3: nobody's ever heard of, no one knows, but the Wildlife
Speaker 3: Action Group we I'm hoping to get back there this
Speaker 3: year and do some training, but we we generally do
Speaker 3: it for free because there's just no funding and it's
Speaker 3: a it's a great cause. And these are these are
Speaker 3: the forgotten areas that nobody's nobody's focused on.
Speaker 6: Everybody's heard of, you know, Kruger.
Speaker 3: National Park and some of the big parks, but some
Speaker 3: of these areas they're they're fighting to preserve and save uh,
Speaker 3: you know, species that could be wiped out. You know,
Speaker 3: the rest of the world is so focused on trans writes,
Speaker 3: black Lives Matter, climate, you know, catastrophe and everything else
Speaker 3: that it's like, just open your eyes and see what's
Speaker 3: going on in the real world. Not only are we
Speaker 3: destroying the planet, you know, my mining for the technology
Speaker 3: to make batteries for you know, for our net zero gains,
Speaker 3: we're also you know, we're destroying environments like the environments
Speaker 3: out in I was saying out in Samatra in Indonesia,
Speaker 3: and those species will be gone in my lifetime and
Speaker 3: that and that really bothers me.
Speaker 1: I'm in. I mean, we've covered a lot of ground here,
Speaker 1: but anything else that I've failed to ask that you'd
Speaker 1: really like to talk about before we get going, No.
Speaker 3: I think I've I think I've managed to squeeze in
Speaker 3: as much as I can talking about what I do
Speaker 3: and what I what I'm trying to achieve. Well, you know,
Speaker 3: I'm I'm stepping back a little bit now. I'm doing
Speaker 3: a bit of the talking circuit. I've been talking on
Speaker 3: cruise liners and it's not what I want to do.
Speaker 3: I want to be at the coal face. But I
Speaker 3: can only do so much by standing back and trying
Speaker 3: to talk to people, organizations, countries and say the wider picture,
Speaker 3: train other people to do what I'm doing rather than
Speaker 3: just be there and doing it myself. And we we
Speaker 3: need we need backing like everybody else needs backing. But
Speaker 3: you know, people are people are giving money, supporting some
Speaker 3: of the large.
Speaker 6: Charities.
Speaker 3: You've got WWF space for giants and stuff and that,
Speaker 3: and that's great. But when you're actually out on the
Speaker 3: ground and you see, you get an idea how a
Speaker 3: lot of that money is being spent and how it's
Speaker 3: being channeled. And by the time a charity organization gets
Speaker 3: so big, it's got executives, it's got massive teams, they
Speaker 3: all have to be paid for and sometimes some of
Speaker 3: that money doesn't you know, it might not be used
Speaker 3: in the way that you might imagine, but alternative. There's
Speaker 3: lots of small organizations groups NGOs who are crying out
Speaker 3: for some of that, and we have a real effect
Speaker 3: because we don't have offices. We're not paying for accommodation,
Speaker 3: we're not paying for business class flights to fly around
Speaker 3: the world. We're just getting struck in, you know, we're
Speaker 3: getting stuck into the problem as and where it is.
Speaker 3: So you know that's another frustration when you see how
Speaker 3: much money is filtering in and you know the cause
Speaker 3: and effect, sometimes you know it doesn't weigh up.
Speaker 1: Give people your website one more time.
Speaker 3: Yeah www dot b five P dot co dot UK.
Speaker 6: That's Big five Protection and that's who we are.
Speaker 1: Simon, thank you so much for this interview. Really appreciate
Speaker 1: you coming on the show. All the way from Brunei.
Speaker 3: All the way all the way from Brunei and its
Speaker 3: hallowed Hallo, Turfy, the labby Arms, the drinking establishment of
Speaker 3: the traditional jungle Warfare School.
Speaker 6: It's a great place to be, so it's great to
Speaker 6: have you here.
Speaker 4: We have one question real quick from m Corbyn.
Speaker 5: Unless there's anything on patrony, what's the most rewarding thing
Speaker 5: about doing nature and natural conservation work.
Speaker 6: What's the most worrying.
Speaker 4: Thing rewarding the most rewarding.
Speaker 3: Rewarding thing, Okay, the most rewarding thing is training other
Speaker 3: people to be the protectors. When you when you get
Speaker 3: when you get individuals right from the start and particularly
Speaker 3: on the tracking training, to see how good they are
Speaker 3: and how proud they are at the end of that
Speaker 3: is something that will It just makes me want to
Speaker 3: come back out and do it again. So it's the
Speaker 3: it's the training individuals, empowering them with the skills that
Speaker 3: that that I've you know, I've learned over my many
Speaker 3: many years in the military, handing that back over. But
Speaker 3: there's a hell of a lot more to do, you know,
Speaker 3: I haven't retired yet.
Speaker 1: Next week we're going to have Mike West on the show,
Speaker 1: who served in the Rhodesian White Infantry and then in
Speaker 1: the South African Defense Force Rekis, So he'll be on
Speaker 1: here next Friday. Simon, again, thank you so much for
Speaker 1: joining us todight or or this morning in your case.
Speaker 3: Yeah, Can I go and get some breakfast now?
Speaker 4: Absolutely? Yeah, thank you.
Speaker 1: We'll let you go have a nice evening or morning
Speaker 1: wherever you guys are at take care of there.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Great to see you guys, and thank you very
Speaker 3: much for the opportunity