Inside the SAS w/ SAS Operator Jay Morton

**Jack Murphy** (0:01)
Hey, everyone, welcome to The Team House. I'm Jack Murphy, here with today's guest, Jay Morton. Jay served in the British Parachute Regiment, and then in the Special Air Service. Multiple deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan, and today he's an ambassador for Delta 3 Oscar, which we'll get into.
Jay, thank you for joining us on the show today.

**Jay Morton** (0:22)
Awesome. Thank you for having me, Jack. Whereabouts in the world are you?

**Jack Murphy** (0:26)
We're in Brooklyn.

**Jay Morton** (0:28)
Amazing. I've never been to New York. Never been to Brooklyn's New York, right? Same thing?

**Jack Murphy** (0:33)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, come visit, man. Be happy to have you here.

**Jay Morton** (0:37)
Yeah, I love the US. I was recently out in Montana in Whitefish.

**Jack Murphy** (0:45)
Oh, yeah. It's beautiful out there.

**Jay Morton** (0:47)
Yeah. San Diego, California. I was there for the NASCAR race and then spent some time in Laguna Beach, but I'm going back out in August. So, yeah, I'm potentially going to stay over there for the three months on my ester during winter, because our winters are pretty rainy and wet over here in the UK.

**Jack Murphy** (1:09)
Well, it looks pretty nice where you are now.

**Jay Morton** (1:12)
It's beautiful.
We're in midsummer, and I live in a place called Bournemouth, which is on the coast. So my apartment is pretty much opposite the beach, which is good stuff.

**Jack Murphy** (1:23)
That's great.
So, Jay, I guess we'll start at the beginning, right? I usually ask our guests what their origin story is. If you can tell us a little bit about, you know, what your upbringing was like.

**Jay Morton** (1:38)
Yeah, of course. So British-born. I grew up in a town called Preston, which if anyone knows the football team Manchester United, it's probably about an hour north from Manchester United. Just a small, working-class city.
Grew up with normal parents, mother and father, older brother, and went to school, loved playing sport, hated school. So there was a... I think I'd always wanted to go into the military at some stage. I wanted to join the Royal Marines growing up, or before that I wanted to be a fireman, I think, as a kid full of testosterone. I was always driven or drawn to kind of dangerous jobs. And yeah, at the time there was a mate of mine at school that we were like two of the fittest guys in school and we were always kind of competing and battling in sports. And he actually joined the Parachute Regiment when he left and went and joined Three Paro, which is one of the battalions. And he'd come back on leave and always tell me these stories about what he was up to. And it was mainly around shooting guns and going out and getting pissed with the boys. But weirdly, you're kind of drawn to that. And I think looking back retrospectively, it's more about the teamwork and the camaraderie ship and being part of a shared purpose and a shared goal that you're more drawn to. But as an 18-year-old, 19-year-old lad hearing stories about fighting in the town and getting pissed and all that kind of stuff is what it's kind of masked as.
So yeah, I ended up joining the Parachute Regiment age 19, which was a massive shock to the system. It was probably the first time I've been away from my hometown and traveled and went to live in a different place in the UK and they're based in Essex in Colchester. And yeah, shortly after, obviously, we deployed to, it was kind of the back end of the Second Gulf War.
And we deployed out to Iraq for three months on a short deployment. And it was the back end of that tour that obviously you guys over across the pond were talking about going over into Afghanistan.
We literally came back from that short deployment. We all got pulled into a tent just before we flew back and got told that the US are looking at going into Afghanistan. And there's a potential that our battle group and battalion were going to be the first ones to go in in 2006 And we flew back, had a short period of leave. And then I think we had three or four weeks leave. We got pulled back in, flown out to Oman for a six week training package. Had like a couple of weeks leave and then deployed out to Afghanistan. And that kind of kicked off the Afghanistan deployment specifically for the UK and for you guys as well.

**Jack Murphy** (4:50)
Just to back up a little bit, what was the sort of selection process like to get into the paras?