The founder of the British SAS was a Scots aristocrat called David Stirling. After WWII he found peacetime a bit boring – after having personally killed 43 Germans with his bare hands – and so he engaged in various mercenary activities in Africa and the Middle East. One of those mercenary engagements was the war in Yemen in the early 1960s. To cut a long story short, Stirling and his people had the war won but the handwringers in Whitehall in London didn’t like the idea of a private army fighting wars in a sensitive area and told Stirling to pull out, abandon the fighting and return home (or else).
