there's an awful lot of metal flying around. and it happened to me in... ..in my first battle when i was hit... ..hit in the chin by a piece of metal which lodged itself in my jawbone. and i should have been killed then. my four companions... they were... they were working class men. you had a bond with those four. it couldn't be taken away from you. you and the other four had gone to the brink of death and come back. and that happened four orfive, six times.

and you got... ..you got a feeling of sort of complete comradeship with them. nothing could... nothing could take it away. it was extraordinary, really. you didn't have that same sort of relationship with the other people in the regiment, as we did with those four men. i think towards... ..towards the end of april, beginning of may, i think they thought that they were, they really had had it. they were surrendering quite a lot. they didn't... normally when you took a mountain or an objective, they counterattacked you, probably once or twice to try and get it back again. but they stopped counterattacking. and i think that was the time they realised that they were on the defeated side.

at the time, if you didn't kill that other chap, he killed you. that was it. captured the objective, fight. kill people. awful, isn't it? i mean, i've killed... i've killed my fellow man. i'm not proud of that. but i didn't go around sticking bayonets into them. my killing was at a long range. i was probably 1,000 yards, 2,000 yards away from the people i killed using the guns, 25 pound of guns. i was shelling them. when i eventually got

into a hospital, i said to the nurse, "can i send a telegram to my mother and father?" and she said, "oh, yes, certainly." and... so i sent a telegram and i said, "wounded... "bullets. .. "left arm, left leg. "not serious, should survive." i thought that might amuse them. and it did. yes. i loved the desert, i thought it was absolutely perfect. there's something about, like, being on the sea in a way. you could go in any direction. there was a great sort of freedom attached. beautiful, smooth, smooth surfaces, sand and impossible great sand dunes... ..hundreds of feet high. oh, yes, i thought the desert

was a wonderful place. some of the maps were very, very blank. i mean, i had a big chart, they were on naval charts, really, with a lot of latitude and longitude lines. and in some cases, i had one chart which had just a few little speculative hatch lines on it. and a camel... and a dotted line across it with what was labelled "suspected camel track". and so therefore, one had nothing really on some of those maps at all, except latitudes and longitudes.

well, i thought david stirling was a first class man, highly intelligent, highly motivated. who actually... ..was motive power, in many ways, in the founding of the sas. who also was the person who managed to recruit about 80 chaps... ..who he thought had the requirements that he needed. and one of his major requirements was he wanted people who would be able to get along with each other in difficult circumstances. he was more interested in that in a way, than what the qualifications were.

so those early operations were conducted, as far as possible, in great secrecy. we were brought up, we were all brought up to keep the whole thing totally under the hat. in the sas, we were mostly shooting in the dark or at things, or putting bombs on targets and hoping not to disturb the people who were going to be the recipients of it. well, they make very good stories, no denying. refuel your vehicles, mr sadler. are we going tonight? let's not be too creative. call me mike. and they were very exciting

at the time, in some cases. exciting and frightening at the same time. of course, everyone had to take chances, which gave rise to considerable possibilities of risk and danger. and they were all part of the business, really. you had to put up with it. it was not something that people were enjoying at the time very often. well, it was exciting to... ..to be shooting off of things. yes, i suppose it was. certainly we didn't think of ourselves as war heroes. we were... i don't think we were war heroes. but i think it's a term

which is much misused. i went up to newcastle with a friend and... ..went into the recruiting office. asked the recruiting sergeant if we could join the northumberland fusiliers. i say i was only an 18—year—old boy. i was scared of me mum and dad, never mind the nazis. and then came the day when they said, "you're going to be sent overseas." we got on buses. we went down to glasgow. we were put in a big shed and given some clothes to wear. i don't know if you know what a topee is? a topee is the helmet that they used to use in india with a big brass knob on the top.

and we were fitted out with all that type of clothing. puttees in the type of material that they would use in india. and so that's what we got dressed up in. a couple of days later we were told to take it all off and put on a different type of equipment. and the ship, i didn't know this at the time, i was down in the hold with everybody else, the ship turned into the mediterranean... and the next thing i know, inland in a port... and i found out that it was the port of algiers in north africa. very scary for an 18—year— old boy who had never been out of north shields. yeah, but because we had been trained to do what we had to do, we just got on with it. you know, i mean, if the sergeant saysjump, you said, "how high?"

and we just did whatever we were told to do. and that's the easiest way to get on in the army. if the sergeant or the corporal says, "do it," you do it. a lot of the time i was trained in weapons, but because i had a little bit of a problem with one of my eyes, they thought that a rifle wasn't a good idea for me. and so they put me on bren guns. in fact, for a period of time in africa... ..i was a twin bren gunner, and that meant that i was sitting on a very small vehicle with two bren guns pointing backwards... with the convoy in front and i was like tail end tommy, watching for aircraft, attacking from behind. or if i was at the front, then i did the same again. but they thought because of the eye problem that i was better with the twin bren guns rather than with a rifle. on occasions as you were driving

along particular roads, everything was fine, no problems. and it... it happensjust like that. you hear the buzz, you look up. there's somebody throwing bits of pieces at you. so you fire back, do what you're trained to do. turn your machine gun in the direction of whatever it is that's attacking you and let go. yeah, it happened. it'sjust like going out in the dry and getting wet. they had a lot of stuff that we weren't able to get. i mean, theirfood was 100% better than ours. if you got a corned beef sandwich, that was a three—course dinner as far as we were concerned. but the yankees had all kinds. i can't remember what they had. i went to one or two of their... i forget what they called them,

they didn't call them the naafi, they had a different name for it. and when you saw the type of food that they were given in there, i mean, a banana, never sawa banana. but, you know, things like that were fantastic. orange juice or an orange. but we never got those. we got corned beef and sardines... or some kind of fish or whatever. but you never got doughnuts. you never got bananas or oranges. so, yes, the yanks, we got on all right with the yanks.

live from washington. this is bbc news as title 42 ends, us officials say border crossings remain lower than expected. but there are fears that the numbers could rise significantly and as new immigration rules take effect, we speak with the mayor of one border city bracing for a potential migrant surge. plus —pakistan�*s former leader is free on bail in islamabad. his arrest has led to turmoil in the country. hello i'm sumi somaskanda. we start tonight at the border of the united states and mexico, and concerns that there will be a surge of migrants following the expiration of title a2. that's the measure put in place three years ago,

which allowed us authorities to turn asylum seekers away