After the last twenty years of S.A.S. saturation since they burst into the Iranian embassy in London and onto the public stage it seems heard to believe that for the first 40 odd years of the regiment's existence it worked far from the glare of publicity and it's 'covert operations' were actually covert.
'Dangerous Men' describes and analysis the S.A.S. cultural phenomenon looking at the memoirs, histories, manuals, films and novels - even the story of an S.A.S. soldier's wife has been published as well as accounts of the regiment's activities which are sheer fantasy (e.g. The Nemesis File) .
The first two sections dealing with autobiographies and military history are the most interesting, contrasting the pivotal role ascribed to the S.A.S. in post -1980 writings on the Second World War and subsequent colonial conflicts with the lack of any great emphasis on the organisation in contemporary and near-contemporary reports and contrasting tales of heroism with the reality of wars lost and won largely by arms production and politics. Just how contrived the myth of the S.A.S. is can been seen by two books both written by former Major General John Strawson whereas his 1969 work 'The Battle for North Africa' doesn't even mention the S.A.S. in his 1984 book 'A History of the SAS Regiment' they are vital to victory in the battle for north Africa. Later conflicts in the Falklands and the Gulf seem to have been planned as 'S.A.S. wars' but the proposed missions were militarily pointless and even suicidal, nonetheless Sir Peter de la Billiere commander of land forces during the Gulf war and a former head of the S.A.S. devotes 15 pages of his book to the story of Chris Ryan 'The one that got away' from the failed and pointless Bravo-Two-Zero operation but just 23 pages to the entire rest of the land war. Newsinger sees this as the creation of a fundamentally erroneous view of war the popular image of the Gulf war etched into folk-memory for years to come will be of individual heroism - the S.A.S. surviving against all the odds rather than the corpses of Iraqi dead bulldozed into mass graves after the deserting army was massacred from the air on the road to Basra. The reality of war is of individuals being no more than tiny components in an assembly line of destruction to be shunted about until they meet their doom whereas the S.A.S. myth is one of individual self assertion - supermen strong enough to save the day far from the reality of a pawn infantry. This could have been explored further in 'Dangerous Men', I, for one, can think of a number of examples from the still almost universally respectable war which gave birth to the S.A.S. which depict a conflict with no place for individual initiative and heroism such as the drugging of British soldiers to dull their senses or the use of Russian troops in reconnaissance by attack - a tactic which involves ascertaining the location and strength of the enemies defences by launching a hopeless assault and noting where the gunfire mowing the 'attackers' down is coming from.
The S.A.S.'s role in mass culture is to make war popular a fact underlined by since the publication of 'Dangerous Men' by attempts to prevent the publication of critical S.A.S. memoirs. Newsinger goes on to identify the attraction of the S.A.S. legend as a fantasy substitute for a real world in which there is no great status to being British and/or male anymore and as a fantasy substitute of individual power in a society where most individuals are powerless.