“Ian Simpson was a key player and Jenny’s account of their marriage is a survival story in its own right.” Andy McNab By mid-morning on Friday, he had started to compile a list of the dead… At Stirling Lines, the SAS camp in Hereford, less than a mile from my home, Pat Dawson, the Families Officer, received a phone call on the Thursday night. ![]() Journalists travelling with the Task Force were initially told only that the helicopter had crashed and that those who died were Royal Marines. The news of the accident didn’t filter through immediately. It was the forty-eighth day of the Falklands Conflict and the greatest single loss to the Regiment since it was founded more than forty years earlier. Those who didn’t find their way out were lost, and nineteen of them came from 22 Special Air Service. There was blind panic in the water as the survivors pushed past flailing limbs and floating equipment to find their way to the surface. On its second approach to Intrepid, 500 feet above sea level there was a loud bang and the helicopter suddenly lost all power before plunging into the waves in the darkness. It had been on a routine five-minute hop across the mile of rough seas separating two ships, HMS Intrepid and HMS Hermes. ![]() The Sea King had been carrying thirty men. When I heard about the albatross later I thought of the Rime of the Ancient Mariner and reread Coleridge’s famous lines. They believe the huge seabird might have flown into the rotor blades of the Sea King and caused it to ditch in the South Atlantic that Wednesday evening in May.īloodstained feathers were found floating on the waves near to where the twenty men on board had drowned. They say an albatross may have caused the accident. It is also the story of a passionate and fiery relationship that survived against incredible odds, an enduring love that kept two people connected from the small-town world of Hereford to the jungles of Belize, the bleak mountain tops of the Falklands and the deserts of Iraq. She was one of the few women brave enough to take up an offer to go into the Killing House and learn for herself some of the tricks of her husband’s trade.īiting the Bullet gives a woman’s eye view of the SAS – the rivalry and betrayal behind the bravado and the camaraderie, the intense pressure that so often leads to domestic violence and marital break-up, a life that is at once exhausting and exhilarating. She grieved with friends whose husbands died in combat and rebelled against the strict rules of behaviour expected of an SAS wife. She shared with him the burden of his undercover work in Northern Ireland. Jenny nursed her husband Ian through malaria caught in the jungles of the Far East and through the traumas of seeing his fellow soldiers die in the Falklands. ![]() How many wives have to learn to live for months not knowing where their husband is, or what kind of danger he might be in – from IRA terrorists he is stalking, Argentinian or Iraqi soldiers, a faulty parachute or a dangerous training mission gone wrong? How many women could live a life in which they must check their car every morning for bombs, knowing that the IRA has their name and address? When every stranger might be an enemy and even neighbours don’t know their true identity? When Jenny Simpson married she joined a unique band of women – the SAS wives – and entered a world of secrecy and danger that few outside it could begin to imagine. ![]() Biting the Bullet: Married to the SAS Jenny Simpson
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