7 Things US Special Forces Found Strange About the British SAS

"It had to be those people who would keep pushing, even when it was clearly time to quit." Colonel Charlie Beckwith wrote that line in his 1983 memoir, describing the kind of soldier he wanted for America's new Delta Force. He had learned it two decades earlier as a Green Beret exchange officer inside Britain's 22nd Special Air Service Regiment, based at Hereford, where everything he found at first seemed wrong: scruffy quarters, sergeants arguing with officers, men giving up rank just to wear the sand-coloured beret. This video walks through seven things that confused American operators about the SAS - from the brutal, feedback-free selection across the Brecon Beacons (the Fan Dance over Pen y Fan, the sixty-four-kilometre Long Drag) to the open 'Chinese parliament' planning sessions where troopers argued with their commanders before a mission. It follows Beckwith through Malaya, where he nearly died of leptospirosis under British medical care, through Vietnam, where he was shot and sorted among the hopeless cases, and into the creation of Delta Force in 1977 - built, deliberately, on the model that had once baffled him. It ends at two operations eleven days apart in 1980: the failed Desert One rescue attempt in Iran, and the SAS raid on the Iranian Embassy in London. If you want these stories told from the documents and the record rather than the legend, hit like and subscribe to Sabre Tales - it helps these histories reach more people who care about getting them right. 📚 Further context / historical background: For more on the SAS, Delta Force and the events referenced here, see published memoirs by special operations veterans, official U.S. government inquiries into Operation Eagle Claw (including the Holloway Report), and campaign histories of the Malayan Emergency, the Indonesia–Malaysia Confrontation, and the Iranian Embassy Siege. #SpecialAirService #DeltaForce #MilitaryHistory