Selection
To join the NZSAS, New Zealand Army, Navy, or Air Force personnel must pass a ten-day selection course (two days pre-selection, eight days selection) held in Waiouru. Selection, as it is known to service people, was described to the Weekend Herald by a participant as "mental and physical torture".
The first day covers all of the fitness tests in the New Zealand Army, completed to the NZSAS standard. This is followed by three days of open country navigation while carrying a 35 kg pack and rifle, with a minimum of food and sleep metered out. Among the exercises is the notorious 'Exercise Von Tempsky' which is executed on the fifth day of selection course. Von Tempsky consists of 24 hours of marching in either a swamp or sand dunes while carrying rifles and alternately one or two 20-litre jerrycans and a 35 kg ALICE pack. The final exercise is a 60-kilometre endurance march, carrying a 35 kg pack, web gear and rifle, to be completed in under 20 hours.
Officers undergo an additional two days of selection to test for the their suitability to lead NZSAS soldiers.
Even if candidates make it through the selection course, they must pass psychological, medical and academic tests (plus others) to be chosen for the nine-month SAS training course. Candidates receive the coveted SAS beret and Corps belt when they have successfully completed the nine month basic cycle of training.
On average 10–15% of candidates pass both selection and cycle training.
Read more about this topic: New Zealand Special Air Service
Famous quotes containing the word selection:
“Historians will have to face the fact that natural selection determined the evolution of cultures in the same manner as it did that of species.”
—Konrad Lorenz (1903–1989)
“Every writer is necessarily a critic—that is, each sentence is a skeleton accompanied by enormous activity of rejection; and each selection is governed by general principles concerning truth, force, beauty, and so on.... The critic that is in every fabulist is like the iceberg—nine-tenths of him is under water.”
—Thornton Wilder (1897–1975)
“When you consider the radiance, that it does not withhold
itself but pours its abundance without selection into every
nook and cranny”
—Archie Randolph Ammons (b. 1926)