When the SAS meet weekend soldiers, the results aren't pretty

Yesterday, I posted an old photo from my militia days. Brigade Commander Nick Packwood demanded more information, so here's my report, Sir!

Brigadier Packwood: "You can't leave us hanging like that... did you find the missing weapons?"

Eventually, the missing weapons turned up. Our little search party had nothing to do with the success of the mission. Partly because of the presence of an SAS patrol on base at the time.

The British army had a field engineer squadron encamped about a kilometer from where our course tent line was located. Their official mission was to re-build a wartime bridge somewhere on the Mattawa Plain. The odd thing was that every time we wandered past their position, they were rather noticeably sitting around, drinking beer, and being obviously unmilitary. Very weird, given the much more professional impression we all had of the Brits.

One day during my brief two-week training course, our little convoy of communications vehicles was ambushed by chaps in British pattern camo. One second we were driving along like good little toy soldiers, the next, every vehicle in the convoy had been sprayed with (simulated) automatic weapons fire, had a thunderflash (or other explosive simulator) blow up under the truck, and each member of the vehicle crew got "counted coup".

For "field engineers", these guys were incredibly good: we didn't see them before the ambush and within less than a minute we didn't see where they'd gone. I don't know whether they were just freelancing, or if we were mistaken for the real target of their ambush, but it convinced us not to mess with 'em.

A couple of weeks later, the prime minister of the day was grilled in Parliament about the rumours that the SAS were training in Canada. Even back then, this was supposed to be a bad thing: the eeeeevil SAS were not supposed to be welcome here in peace-loving Soviet Canuckistan, you see. . .