Collectable Books On the Shelf
In January 1991, an SAS patrol was inserted into Iraq by Chinook. That event has led to a veritable cottage industry of books about the ill-fated Bravo Two Zero
There have been enough books published about the SAS for us to know that joining the elite regiment isn't easy. Under the headings of Aptitude and Continuation Training, candidates have to undergo tests in endurance, jungle warfare, escape and evasion, tactical questioning and creative writing... Well, maybe not creative writing, but either side of the millennium it sometimes seemed as if anyone who passed selection was running up and down Pen Y Fan in the Brecon Beacons one day and writing their memoirs the next.
Obviously, I am being flippant because it was mostly what happens between those two points that fills books. Of course, there had been SAS memoirs written before the First Gulf War, but that seems to have been when the publishing of such books stepped up a gear, starting with Andy McNab’s Bravo Two Zero (Bantam Press, 1993).
Although there was a mention of the ‘Bravo Two Zero’ patrol in Looking For Trouble (Harper Collins, 1994), the autobiography of Lieutenant-General Peter de la Billière, the comma…
