Page 367 - They Also Served

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Caroline Neil 1988.
Caroline Neil was born in Hong Kong in
1964. Educated at Fullbrook School in
New Haw, Surrey, and at the University
of London, she was commissioned from
Sandhurst into the Women’s Royal
Army Corps in 1988 for permanent
employment with the Royal Army
Educational Corps. The female cadets in
her intake were the first to wear Number
1 Dress (Blues) on their Sovereign’s Parade and march with their male counterparts, as up until this time, female cadets paraded in their Lovat green uniforms.
After two years working at an education centre in Osnabrück, Germany, she passed the rigorous selection process for 14 Intelligence Company (known within the army as ‘The Det’) and worked on complex, covert operations in Northern Ireland on the frontline of domestic terrorism in East Tyrone and South Armagh. Two years later, she became the first female officer to be posted to the SAS Regiment as an operator, where she worked across the regiment in various roles as a full member of the operational teams, for both the SAS and the SBS. Caroline and her female colleagues in ‘The Det’, and those who served with the SAS and SBS, were the trailblazers for women operating on the frontline.
Also trained in unconventional military parachute insertions, both into the sea and onto land, she was the first female officer to receive the coveted SAS parachute wings. She achieved yet another ‘first’ when she became the first female officer to head up an overseas training task for the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office completing her career in the regular army in 1997 as the assistant operations officer of 22 SAS. Retaining her commission in the TA, she served for a further two years as the J5 plans officer for 21 SAS, the Army Reserve Special Forces unit based in London.
For the next 15 years Caroline worked for FCO while at the same time building a freelance portfolio in the security and risk management field. This included training BBC journalists before they deployed to conflict zones, culminating in a period as head of high-risk security for the BBC in the aftermath of the Iraq war in 2003. In 2011, she organised the evacuation of British personnel and embassy staff from
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