Life Under Fire

by Jason Fox

  Jason Fox with Matt Allen

  * * *

  LIFE UNDER FIRE

  How to Build Inner Strength and Thrive Under Pressure

  Contents

  Introduction: Life Under Fire

  PART ONE

  The Battle Mind: How to Find Resilience Phase One

  Basic Training: The Commando Spirit

  Phase Two

  The Power of Purpose

  Phase Three

  The Experience Factor: Knowledge Dispels Fear

  Phase Four

  Finding Your Tribe

  Phase Five

  Supermen and Wonder Women: Understanding the Truths Regarding Men, Women and Resilience

  Phase Six

  The Power of Honesty: Handling the Truth

  Phase Seven

  Self-awareness: Defeat Your Demons

  PART TWO

  By Strength and Guile Phase Eight

  Mission Planning: Prepping for Pain

  Phase Nine

  Developing Emotional Control

  Phase Ten

  When the Battle’s Done

  Phase Eleven

  CASEVAC: Counting the Cost of Battle

  Phase Twelve

  The Reload: Finding Your Yukon

  Endgame

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Jason Fox joined the Royal Marine Commandos at sixteen, serving for ten years, after which he passed the gruelling selection process for the Special Forces, serving with the Special Boat Service for over a decade and reaching the rank of Sergeant.

  Today you are most likely to find him gracing our television screens and giving us a taste of action and adventure around the world.

  Also by Jason Fox

  Battle Scars

  To Jules: the final piece in the puzzle

  as I rediscovered my inner strength

  Some of the battles and military operations mentioned in Life Under Fire took place in unnamed war zones. The details and locations featured in those operations have been redacted to protect the security of those involved and the practices of the UK Special Forces.

  INTRODUCTION

  Life Under Fire

  So how do we get out of this?

  We were fleeing the scene of a bloody gunfight, running from the edge of a hostile village as enemy rounds ripped overhead. I looked around. Everybody was frazzled, a unit of men stranded in a remote outpost with nothing ahead but sand and rock for miles. Our landing zone was somewhere in the distance where hopefully a helicopter was waiting to extract us, but before that was five kilometres of potential ambush across the type of terrain Special Forces operators usually referred to as deadly ground – a stretch of exposed battlefield with very little cover and nothing in the way of escape routes. Walking across it was often a test of nerve. A daisy chain of improvised explosive devices (IEDs) might lie in wait; snipers in hidden positions could pick us off one by one at any moment; and there was every chance a mob of gunmen might give chase from behind us in Toyota pick-up trucks rattling with weaponry. But the biggest problem with crossing deadly ground was psychological: the understanding of an awful, inevitable reality.

  We were all out of options.

  We’d been patrolling and scrapping through the town in 45C heat for hours on end, as part of a heavy three-day operation. All of us were approaching breaking point and our squadron had also taken a handful of casualties. The wounded were inexperienced local soldiers working alongside the British military’s elite forces and we’d been carrying them in pairs. One soldier had been shot in the arm, another in the leg. The most worrying injury was the poor dude whose gut had been torn through with a bullet. Blood pulsed from a hole in his stomach and he looked to be in a pretty bad way. I figured he’d live, but only if we could make it to our ride home in good time. The mood was jittery as we sprinted for safety.

  I’d been in plenty of knife-edge situations like this one before – operations where the work had been tricky or helicopter crashes where I’d become convinced my time was up. During one operation, I’d been part of a team responsible for kicking in doors on a search for drugs and ammo. While I was moving from building to building, a gunman opened fire on me as I turned into a dead-end alley. Rounds ripped into the brickwork, drawing a deadly silhouette around my body, but I remained unscathed. Talk about a lucky escape. Now, moving across deadly ground, I needed some more of that good fortune, but the odds were stacked against me.

  Weirdly, the mission that week had started out in a fairly routine manner. The aim had been to make our presence felt in a lawless outpost that intelligence had flagged as a hideout for fundamentalists and terrorist training cells. The town was located in an unfamiliar territory, one the British Armed Forces had yet to visit, and so we possessed very little information about what type of reception we could expect. Our arrival was completely unannounced and initially the mood among the local people seemed fairly agreeable. They’d been caught napping – literally: when we’d entered the town at dawn a truck of fighters had just slowly cruised towards us. The blokes inside, dressed in black robes with only their eyes showing through their headdresses, waved and seemed to smile, but I knew their AK-47s were in there too, stashed out of sight. Their leader made an obviously flimsy offer of cooperation. It was bollocks and we knew it. Once we’d kicked in a few doors and moved through one or two buildings – where we found stashes of guns, ammo and drugs – the mood turned nasty. An hour or so after we’d returned to our makeshift camp a few miles away, a loudhailer echoed instructions through the streets. Our interpreter relayed the highlights back to us.

  ‘This will not happen again,’ yelled the voice. ‘We will engage the enemy when they come back …’

  A fight was coming.

  Our work on that mission followed a familiar routine. During the evening we usually grabbed an hour or two of kip under the stars at our base, having smashed into some known enemy positions that were located in the mountains nearby; during the day we made a series of routine patrols through the town to get a feel for the place. Our adrenaline peaked and swooped with the action. Given that we were at the tail end of a six-month tour of duty, where we’d been running missions pretty much every night, I was already at my physical limits. Sprinting around under the hot sun while carrying a backpack of heavy equipment and weaponry had taken its toll. Emotionally I’d become a little frazzled, too. The stress of entering buildings unannounced and scanning the shadowy corners of dingy houses for gunmen and bomb-makers, while looking out for the safety of innocent civilians and screaming kids, had yanked at my nerves.

  When the battle eventually came, it was ugly. We’d returned to the town the following morning for another series of door-to-door searches, but a different atmosphere had seeped into the disorientating alleyways and thoroughfares. As promised, there was a noticeably more hostile vibe and way too much activity for my liking. People watched us closely wherever we walked. A group of lads on motorbikes zipped through the streets, constantly checking on our progress, but this time their AK-47s were in view. It felt as if the first shot was only a heartbeat away until finally, at noon, I heard the unmistakable surge of bloody violence.

  Bup-bup-bup. Bup-bup-bup.

  Somebody was firing on the other side of the outpost. My earpiece crackled. There was a shout.

  ‘Contact north of the village!’

  More shouting came through on the squadron’s comms network.

  ‘We’ve got a casualty! We need to host a rendezvous point!’

  I heard panting, the sound of soldiers running.

  ‘Yeah, there’s two motorbikes moving around with shooters,’ shouted the voice. ‘Foxy, we’re coming to where you are. You’ll see us in five minute
s …’

  Scanning the streets ahead for approaching gunmen, our unit took cover. A few local soldiers, trained military personnel who were working alongside us, jumped behind the nearest wall. Others ran into a doorway. The buzz of roaring motorbikes and firing AK-47s was drawing closer, and my heart rate quickened as the oncoming gunfight played out over the comms. I’d found that one of the funniest things about war, or any horrendous situation I’d been faced with – those fast-moving life-or-death moments – was that the hearing, the imagining, of death or horrific injury on the radio was often far scarier than any act of violence I might have witnessed with my own eyes. An operator on the peripheries of a battle listening to the screaming and shouting through their earpiece could be more rattled than those lads firing in the thick of the action. I’ve heard it’s the same for medics working in a frantic A & E situation. Doctors learning about a mass casualty event can be traumatized just by the anticipation of what they’re about to see; emotionally they end up in a much worse place than responders helping any badly wounded victims at the scene itself. Without visual contact there’s no context; the mind makes shit up, and any imagined story is far worse than the reality.

  There was no doubt from the yelling in my earpiece that a nasty fight was kicking off, but I had very little idea how the engagement was taking shape, or its speed and scale. God knows how many people were shooting at us, or from where. I later learned that a group of enemy commanders had hidden themselves on a nearby hill. From above our position they were orchestrating the chaos with binoculars and walkie-talkies. One of them must have spotted my unit because a truck of gunmen suddenly turned a corner in front of us. The sky lit up, bullets chewed into the mud around me. There was a scream, then another. Two of my local troops had dropped to the floor. I returned fire, shooting into the side of the truck as it tried to reverse away, but it was hard to tell if anyone was killed in the exchange. Everything had happened so fast.

  Bup-bup-bup. Bup-bup-bup-bup-bup-bup.

  The gunfire drifted into another corner of town. As my adrenaline decreased, I heard heavy breathing – mine – and then the moaning of our two injured teammates nearby. One of them slowly rose to his feet and I noticed the bloody flesh wound to his arm. The other lad was in worse shape. At least one round had carved under his body armour, shredding his guts to ribbons. With the help of another soldier we dragged them both to cover, and a medic rushed over to patch them up as best he could. More British troops, retreating from the gun battle on the other side of town, soon joined us before climbing on to a nearby rooftop to pick off any advancing motorbikes or trucks.

  Fuck. We’re pinned down, I thought.

  Our only hope at that point was if a Chinook helicopter could swoop in to CASEVAC (casualty evacuate) away the wounded – and us. But the response from our air support was worrying. Apparently we’d kicked over a hornets’ nest. The local militia were fuming and any approaching choppers would make for easy target practice.

  ‘We’re not coming in there, it’s too hot,’ said one of the pilots. ‘Get everybody to a safer place for us to drop on to, maybe the camp. We’ll extract you from there …’

  Bloody hell. I remembered our walk into town a day or so earlier and estimated we were around five kilometres away from safety. We’d need to run for most of that distance while carrying the injured between us. Meanwhile, an angry force might be at our backs, so we’d all need to draw upon every grain of emotional and physical resolve if we were to make it home in one piece.

  Being up against it wasn’t exactly a new experience for me. Emotional and physical suffering was something I’d learned to endure, and thrive within, throughout my military career. I had joined the Royal Marines at the age of sixteen and passed one of the British Forces’ toughest training programmes, to become a Commando. Then, after ten years of dicking about during peacetime, in 2001 I signed up for Selection, the gruelling entry programme for the Special Boat Service (SBS), a wing of the UK Special Forces. The year-long assessment pitted me against the harshest of environments where everything seemed intent on ending my life: things with four, six and eight legs, the weather, even the bloody trees. Other obstacles were more familiar, more human; the aim being to test my motivation and mental resilience. The constant pressure and the standards demanded left me psychologically violated until I was deemed a suitable fit for what is one of the most expert combat units in the world. Several years of service followed where I operated at the military’s sharpest point in some of the world’s most dangerous war zones, fighting across a range of missions in counterterrorism, hostage rescue, counternarcotics and counterinsurgency. I was battle-primed for an escape like the one we were about to make.

  Having worked as an SBS operator – the term we use for an elite soldier – for over a decade, I’d been driven forward by a sense of duty and a sheer bloody-mindedness to push on in extremely testing circumstances. The same stubborn streak would shove me on again as my unit prepared to escape that town, all of us considering our first footfalls in our struggle across the rocks and sand. I scanned the roads ahead for incoming enemy, expecting any second to hear the distant bark of gunfire again or the deafening WHOOMPH! of a landing mortar attack. Another epic test of endurance awaited me, for sure, but it was my job to survive and I’d been well trained in the art of resilience. I wasn’t particularly looking forward to the run home, though. The work would be honking, but I knew I had it in me to complete the job successfully. There was no other choice.

  Suddenly more orders came across the comms. ‘All right, boys. We’re going to have to move out quickly. Let’s go now …’

  The casualties groaned as we scooped them up by their arms and legs and navigated the narrow streets and alleyways away from danger; other lads dealt with minor injuries and flesh wounds of their own, but nobody grumbled. Instead, the unit moved purposefully as a circle, checking for incoming hostiles as we withdrew from the town. Every now and then we’d stop to engage an enemy fighter, the gunfire reverberating around the streets until, unexpectedly, two Harrier jump-jets swooped overhead, their approach called in by our Officer Commanding. It was an aggressive show of force rather than any attempt to neutralize the enemy. Given that there were civilians in the area, not to mention the fact that it was impossible to tell the good dudes from the bad on the ground, the pilots had to be absolutely certain before they could lay down an attack of heavy fire. I heard a WHOOSH! and saw a bright flash. Both jets had fired off flares, a warning sign to anyone thinking of continuing their pursuit as we left the town’s perimeter. The fighters at our back soon slowed their pace.

  By the time we’d begun our walk across deadly ground, my shoulders were in agony and my calves burned. Every muscle in my body was painfully taut. Somebody mentioned that the temperature had now reached 52C. I’m not sure if he was kidding, but it felt as if I’d been shoved into a pizza oven. There was no time for rest, though, and water breaks were out of the question, because we needed to move fast. If the enemy decided to open fire again, we’d be very exposed. I pushed on as quickly as possible, nervously watching the desert ahead for any unusual sand patterns or signs of disturbed earth, the subtle indicators of a recently buried IED. But that was only half the battle. My head was all over the shop. Even though I was relieved to be leaving in one piece, self-doubt burned at the edges of my thinking.

  Fucking hell, I thought, looking at my wounded teammates. Are all of us going to get out of here?

  But what was the alternative to putting one foot ahead of the other? Yeah, I could have moaned about fatigue, or slowed down the pace of our retreat so we could rest, but would that have achieved anything? I’d have become a liability to my teammates, and to myself, when I needed to be an asset. Any mistakes I might have made as my focus shifted to self-pity would have endangered the group even further. Instead, I leaned into my training and experience, breaking down our intimidating escape route into a series of easily manageable targets, such as a rock, or geographical landmark on
e hundred metres ahead. Making it to each one felt like an achievement, an emotional boost to keep me going. I’d mentally congratulate myself and then reset, scanning the horizon for another target.

  Keeping only positive thoughts in mind, I pressed ahead through the dust and heat, each step drawing me closer to safety. I visualized sipping a cold pint of cider in a British pub; I even saw myself enjoying a day at the football. Concentrating on what was required to keep our unit safe became another distraction from the pain. I made sure to maintain my defensive position in the moving body of men at all times until, eventually, we made it back to the landing zone, where I knew the fight was done, both physically and mentally. I was spent, but we were away from danger. Squeezing into the back of a Chinook with dozens of soldiers, all of us piled on top of one another, bloodied, sweating and stinking, I finally allowed myself a settling sigh of relief.

  Commuting, British military-style, had never felt so good.

  How had I developed and grown to such an extent that I was able to operate effectively in some of the most hostile environments on earth? How had I become so resilient? Who or what gave me that emotional strength? And how much did it underpin everything I did? I understood that resilience was the voice in my head that pushed me on during a heavy gunfight. The same staying power had enabled me to live in the harshest of environments for months, as the environment rotted my body in the sapping heat and the wet. It took the same force of will to live in a cramped surveillance foxhole for several weeks on end with only a roll of cling film for a toilet, waiting for the slightest shred of counterintelligence that might prove key in a war against a dedicated enemy.

  But where had that drive come from?