The party is in full swing inside The Gratto. So too is the floor show.
The two strippers and the SAS soldier are entwined on the Twister mat as dozens of the regiment's members and their guests cheer them on. The twisting trio are stark naked. One SAS member even gets down on his stomach on the floor to get a better view of what's on offer.
Inside The Gratto, the SAS writes the rules. Officially The Gratwick Club, it is their private bar next to their base at Campbell Barracks in the Perth suburb of Swanbourne. The barracks are a secure, off-limits facility. But The Gratto is just outside the wire, meaning the men of the regiment can invite whoever they want, including strippers. That doesn't mean the brass don't know about it. The commanding officer of the SAS lives a stone's throw over the road.
The footage of the nude Twister game is one of many videos provided by insiders for the book Rogue Forces that provide an unprecedented peek into the private world and culture of the SAS, both in Perth and Afghanistan.
The Gratto is no stranger to wild antics involving nudity and bucket loads of booze. There is a so-called heave beam, where SAS soldiers have been known to do naked chin-up challenges. The female partners of some of these men tell of soldiers cavorting with strippers, conducting their conversations entirely naked. There are photos of naked SAS soldiers proudly showing off their wares, as their comrades sip beer nearby and don't blink an eyelid.
On the Twister mat this day in December 2012, the highly trained SAS soldier is outfoxed by his female competitors, and he retreats from the battlefield with his can of rum and Coke. The two naked victors give each other a high five. As the SAS motto declares: Who dares wins.
Former SAS combat medic Dusty Miller is in the crowd. Looking at the Twister video eight years on, Miller's view has changed.
"At the time I might have been having a drink and cheering. But it's not something that I would ever indulge in or get involved in. It's just disgraceful behaviour. Silly," he says.
"There was a lot of nakedness at The Gratto … the guys would often get nude," says Christina* who was an SAS support staff member who deployed to Afghanistan in 2011/12. "The drinking was quite extreme."
The trigger-pullers of the SAS are supposed to be the Australian military's most elite and disciplined soldiers. But for years The Gratto was the scene of drunken and debauched escapades.
"[On] a Friday afternoon the boys would just get on it pretty hard," Miller says. "They'd obviously have a whip around, get strippers. It was just a very badly behaved rugby club mentality. Everybody liked to get naked as well."
'Getting away with it'
In another video taken at The Gratto, some SAS stayers are partying on after a big day on the drink. It's December 2013, the end of yet another busy year of deployments to Afghanistan. The Brereton Report into allegations of Special Forces war crimes will later pinpoint 2012 and 2013 as the two years in which alleged unlawful killings and cover ups reached their peak.
The booze is flowing, and some have dispensed with their shirts and shorts in favour of bare skin and budgie smugglers.
These soldiers are belting out the lyrics to a song, one that several members of the regiment say they sang regularly:
"We're getting away with it
All messed up
Getting away with it
All messed up
That's the living."
Getting Away With It (All Messed Up) by the British band James is supposed to be about a man who saves himself by saving a woman.
But former SAS members believe it had more sinister and literal overtones for the men of the regiment who sang it over and over again.
"It really did become an anthem," says Christina, who also sang the song. "I think there was this unwritten rule that you could do anything you wanted. Just don't get caught."
Miller remembers first hearing the song sung at The Gratto.
"Really the penny dropped for me … there's a sort of message here. And the message is simply like we're sort of getting away with it," he said.
"It was a song that fitted perfectly. It was like a tap of the nose, a nod. It was very significant. Very significant. It was almost like a theme song."
'One of the worst-kept secrets in the army'
Elements of the boozy and bravado culture on display in The Gratto were exported to Afghanistan.
Its focal point was another SAS watering hole, known as The Fat Ladies Arms.
"It was a pub in Afghanistan that no-one spoke about but everybody knew about," says Miller. "It's probably one of the worst-kept secrets in the army."
This video was edited together by the SAS after a 2007 rotation to Afghanistan and shows the bar in one of its earliest incarnations.
In the Afghanistan theatre, the consumption of alcohol was officially banned, unless authorised "for each and every occasion" by the commander of Australian forces.
Under the "Theatre Alcohol Policy", occasions where alcohol "might be permitted … will be limited to … Australia Day, ANZAC Day, Christmas Day [and New Years Day]."
But in The Fat Ladies Arms, the SAS ignored that policy and wrote its own rules for years.
There were bootleg homebrewed spirits, which SAS support staff member Christina was plied with one hazy night in the makeshift bar.
"I certainly was the drunkest I've ever been in Afghanistan. I was so drunk I was potentially borderline, like alcohol poisoning. The next day my lips were this blueish purple. I had pins and needles all over my body."
There was also an incident involving the discharge of a pistol into the ceiling.
"I'm not really sure how much more serious it can get when you've got drunk soldiers discharging firearms indoors," says Christina.
Miller recalls having to give SAS soldiers intravenous fluids the morning after the night before.
"On a few occasions it would be fairly debaucherous," Miller says. "[The SAS operators] would just ask me to give them [intravenous] fluids because they were that hungover."
On another occasion during his 2012 rotation, Miller had to suture up a soldier who had his arm sliced open by a patrol commander during a drinking session inside The Fat Ladies Arms.
Miller says the antics in The Fat Ladies Arm were infamous. But no-one in higher command has admitted publicly that they saw a thing – the wild drinking or even the bar itself.
"Seriously, living in the special forces compound is a bit like living in a caravan park," says one former SAS officer. "You tell me. If an establishment like this, with parties like this, was happening in your caravan park, how could you not know?
"Makes you wonder how such huge parties could happen when the commander's office is only 50 metres away. They must have been wearing earmuffs and a blindfold."
Says Miller: "It's pretty hard to hide two rooms that are made into one with a sign on the door saying, The Fat Ladies Arms."
This 2007 video shows the booze flowed freely, costumes were worn proudly, and there was much semi-naked posing with captured insurgent weapons.
The Fat Ladies Arms would remain the SAS boozer for another six years, until the Special Forces pulled out in December 2013.
The special operations commander banned topless barmaids and strippers after the Twister video was taken, although some reports suggest the rules were not being enforced until 2014.
Some of the bad behaviour would eventually be called out with the arrival of a new special operations commander back in Perth, a leader bent on reform.
In 2015, Major-General Jeff Sengelman asked the soldiers of the SAS to write him a letter to tell him what was going on inside the regiment.
Sengelman had heard stories about slack leadership, loose discipline and drinking.
In all, the special operations commander received 209 letters from the men of the SAS.
Most were about consuming alcohol in Afghanistan, some were about the use of drugs.
Sengelman was uncovering problems that had been festering in the SAS for years.
It was the beginning of a process that would lead to the reform of the regiment and the initiation of the four-year Brereton Inquiry that would find proof the SAS committed war crimes in Afghanistan.
"The problem they had at SASR was the attitude that you could do anything you wanted as long as you weren't caught," says Christina. "And that's what really drove the issues that occurred in relation to the drinking and everything else that happened."
*Name changed to protect the source's identity
Mark Willacy is a journalist with the ABC Investigations team. He gathered the insider accounts, videos and pictures for this story while researching his new book Rogue Forces.
Watch the story on 7.30.
