Life Under Fire

by Jason Fox

  I was then honest about my purpose. Once I’d been lucky enough to get a job on SAS: Who Dares Wins, I decided to use the platform as an exercise in honesty. I opened up about my mental health issues on TV and in media interviews, hoping it would help others to recognize any problems they might have too. I also detailed my struggles in Battle Scars. I’ve since been approached by men and women from all walks of life who have explained how the writing encouraged them to ask some painfully honest questions of their own. A number of them were military; others had been affected by a different type of trauma. Being able to help those people in some way gave me a sense of purpose.

  Of course, there were regrets about some of my behaviour; I wasn’t particularly proud of certain things I’d done in life. I’m human. All of us have made mistakes and nobody’s perfect. But by being honest I was able to at least right some of the wrongs I’d committed and eventually my day-to-day life became easier. The changes didn’t take place overnight, though, and there was always plenty of hard work ahead – there still is – but gradually, more and more positivity arrived in my life.

  Honesty had become a part of the recovery process.

  Following the first season of SAS: Who Dares Wins, after I’d admitted my breakdown to a large TV audience, I was asked whether I was worried about the public perception of me.

  I thought, Why the fuck have I got to worry about how people see me now? I’ve laid it all out there. I don’t need to stress about putting up a make-believe bravado to feed my ego. My cards are on the table. I’ve said: ‘This is me.’ I’ve nothing to hide any more.

  The emotions and circumstances that had led me to rock bottom weren’t unique. (In Phase Eleven we’ll look more closely at how to spot the warning signs, because it can be difficult to recognize trouble when you’re in the thick of a meltdown.) And not everybody needs to reach their lowest point to benefit from this process. Some people keep missing their work or personal targets without ever realizing why, but brutal self-honesty is a great way of shining a light on our weak spots.

  None of us are bulletproof, either; all of us can be broken by life, often when we least expect it. Sometimes it only takes one shove. I’ve heard of people whose successful businesses were ruined by a negative relationship with alcohol. They lost their driving licence following a drunken offence. Unable to use the car, their livelihood went down the pan. In the wake of financial collapse, their home, family and prospects disintegrated until they were left with only the bare bones of a life. In other cases, perfectly natural events have sent people into a spin. Recently, a psychology student got in touch, having heard about my struggle with mental health problems. She wanted to use my story as a case study. During a phone call the student then explained how she’d followed a similar path to mine, having suffered from post-natal depression. Apparently she’d had a grim time of it. Just as a gunfight too many had triggered my step towards the edge, so childbirth had broken her.

  Regardless of the cause, it takes a resilient mind to handle emotional turbulence successfully, but there are many ways to cope. During a life-altering experience, such as the diagnosis of a chronic illness, if a person has been brutally honest about the changes to come, there’s a good chance they’ll be able to manage the process more effectively. They may even have put one or two coping mechanisms in place to help themselves, such as a regular social event or a support network they can call upon. Denial during these periods can occasionally prove problematic, mainly because the shock of such a huge lifestyle shift is pretty overwhelming. I soon realized that my mindset in the fallout of leaving the military hadn’t been too dissimilar to what many other people go through when they lose their job, or when they break up with a partner. I’d been deluding myself.

  My new life was a jolt.

  I certainly wasn’t honest prior to being medically discharged with PTSD. It was set to be a life-changing moment and I ignored the truths about my new reality. I didn’t ready myself; I lived the lie that I’d be experiencing a new beginning where everything was going to be cool once I’d woken up on my first day outside of the military. I hadn’t considered the drastic changes to my identity and day-to-day routines because I was scared to acknowledge them. It was hard for me to imagine that I’d become completely lost. The inevitable shift, when it arrived, was difficult to cope with at first.

  What I needed was to be honest, and it was a lesson I’ve since learned the hard way. These days, if ever I’m asked for advice, or whenever a new intake at Rock2Recovery has asked me for help, I often use the same line: honesty is everything.

  ‘The best way for you to look at this situation now, as hard as it is, is to see that you’re on a positive journey,’ I’ve explained. ‘At some point, you’re going to find a new you. But – and there is a but – you’ll have to be honest with yourself first.’

  There are people who will always play the victim. They want everything to be fixed for them, rather than by them, and that’s fine. But they’ll never really get to the bottom of what’s breaking them down or weakening their chances of success, because without honesty they’ll remain blind. The first step towards really resolving whatever issues have taken a person to breaking point – such as underlying feelings of rejection, failure, grief, anger, fear or resentment – or have caused them to miss their targets, is to self-assess during a period of brutal truth. It’s not easy. In fact, it can be bloody horrible. I know, because being truthful with myself was such an excruciating moment. But once it was done I was able to piece my life together and grow. I’d understood exactly what I needed to do.

  While this might sound like a tricky process at first, one effective way to kick-start an episode of long-term change is to answer some pretty difficult questions – with unflinching honesty. What those questions might be is completely down to you. However, the clue to their validity lies in the process. If they’re uncomfortable, then they’re probably on point. They might include the following:

  Am I happy – really?

  What’s my purpose?

  Does my partner bring out the best in me?

  Where or when am I most fulfilled?

  If there were no financial pressures, expectations or rules, what would I do with my life?

  Fear or purpose: what drives me on?

  Don’t mess about. Get a pad and paper, then figure out your own questions and answer them ruthlessly. The process will give you clarity. It will also shove you in the right direction towards rethinking your position, whatever that might be. A greater understanding of the situation will follow afterwards.

  HONESTY ABOUT INTEL

  Facts get manipulated. The truth becomes distorted; sometimes accidentally, sometimes with intent. You only have to look at some of the people operating in British politics, or in the media, to understand this sad reality, though even when people have used statistics to spin inaccurate headlines or, in some cases, to tell outright lies, they’re usually found out in the end. (Whether anything is done about the people responsible for the spinning during the fallout is often debatable.)

  However, when it came to analysing facts during operations for the British military, there was very little room for spin, opinion or interpretation. In order to be successful – and therefore resilient – an operator had to be brutally honest.

  Nowhere was this attitude more important than when we were engaged on a surveillance operation. The specialist units of the British military were often called upon to watch enemy targets for information. We might have had eyes on a terrorist cell operating from an urban address, on drug traffickers in the desert, or on a militia training camp in a mountain hideaway. At times, life on a surveillance operation was pretty grim. We might have to literally dig a hole in the ground a few miles away from our target, or cut our way into foliage, to get a suitable, undetectable position from which to observe the comings and goings of whomever we were tailing. There were times where I had to stay in one place for a couple of weeks, living off dried food. While we were taki
ng notes of what we’d been watching through our optics equipment, I found it important to remember one of the mantras of the military elite: integrity is all you’ve got.

  Humans have a tendency to be swayed by popular opinion, or to let misinterpretation creep into fact. But in my line of work I was taught that unbiased honesty was imperative. On observation jobs it was my duty to report only what I saw and heard, and to draw any conclusions from that limited information was pointless and dangerous. It served as nothing more than speculation. For example, I might have been watching a building known to be a long-term hideout for some unpleasant individuals. During the operation, it would have been my role to log when they entered the building and when they left. The car they drove and the locations they parked in were reported too. Any opinions on what they might have been doing in there were irrelevant because those ideas were not backed up by fact. I could have guessed that they were planning a terrorist attack from that position, or building a bomb, but what hard evidence did I have? (Unless of course I saw them wearing hazmat suits while carefully handling a box bulging with wires. Then it would have been a different story altogether.) I had to stick to the facts and nothing else.

  Why? Well, to be swayed by external ideas and to express them would have been misleading, and to mislead was highly dangerous when the stakes were so high, as they often were in a surveillance operation. It might be that, unbeknown to us, the people of interest operating out of that building had moved on and a new group, entirely innocent of any wrongdoing, had come in. Raiding them would result in a massive waste of time and money, and would freak out the people inside. It was vital that, in a line of work such as ours, the facts were dealt with honestly, impartially and without opinion, because intel was everything. That’s also the case if it’s the information we carry about ourselves, such as the honest answers to those all-too-painful questions about our weaknesses I mentioned earlier.

  Of course, not every situation is cut and dried; two people in the same position might see things very differently. When writing Battle Scars, I described a moment where fear had temporarily freaked me out. I’d stepped off a helicopter during a mission where we had been massively outnumbered by an unexpectedly large and aggressive hostile force. It was a night raid, and chaos kicked off in the darkness. Bullets and mortar blasts tore through the air around me; one of our lads was killed almost the moment we’d touched down. Having briefly taken cover in a ditch, we worked our way through the trees towards an enemy compound.

  I’d been tasked with leading the entry team. But as we got closer, two enemy fighters opened fire with AK-47s. With my night-vision goggles on, I wasn’t sure whether they were taking desperate potshots, just hoping to hit something, or if they could actually see us – their aim seemed a little off. We took our time, crawling closer before dropping them in a burst of fire. At the noise, another fighter staggered from a doorway. He was carrying a wounded mate on his shoulder. A couple of rounds rocked him to the floor, too, but as he fell, I spotted a boy standing behind him. He can’t have been more than five years old. Dressed in a football shirt that was several sizes too big and carrying a teddy bear, he was screaming. I wanted to get him to safety, but before I had a chance to reach out, he ran into the trees. Somebody shouted out on the comms: Slow down a bit! There are civilians in the area. Later, when I went through therapy, I spoke of how that lad in his football kit had haunted me as I drove around Hampshire and Surrey for my civilian job during 2012, my mental health on the brink.

  When Battle Scars was published, one of the lads who had been alongside me during the mission called me up to say he’d read it. ‘But I’m a bit confused,’ he said. ‘That kid you saw on the operation … There was no kid.’

  ‘What are you talking about? I saw him.’

  ‘Yeah, but I didn’t, mate, and I was standing right next to you.’

  I couldn’t work it out. I’d seen him as clear as day, and the fact that doubt was being cast on my recollection put me into a bit of a spin. I started to wonder about myself in all the stress and terror, and I questioned whether the boy had actually been there at all. The senses tend to become overloaded in a gun battle of that kind; the mind tries to pick out which noises to worry about and which ones to ignore, and that can be pretty troublesome in the middle of a scrap. Working with night-vision goggles on can be a little disorientating too. They say the brain takes in hundreds of thousands of different bits of information every second. That process must run at a greater speed during combat situations where there are people running around, explosions going off and enemy fighters trying to kill you. Then again, my mate might have been looking the other way for a split second, during which the boy had appeared (and hadn’t put two and two together about the new intel regarding civilians in the area). Or maybe his mind had been protecting itself, shutting out the memory because it was too distressing to acknowledge.

  So, thinking about it, it’s really no surprise that one of us might have got it wrong. The important thing was that I saw what I thought was factually correct in the moment and I later wrote about it honestly. In a flashpoint situation of that kind, had we not heard the shout over our comms, it would have been my job to tell the people around me exactly what I had seen. If I’d stopped to think, Is he really there? or, Where did he come from? and second-guessed myself in the moment, I might have behaved differently from that point on. Instead, we slowed things down and reassessed our situation. The aggression in our work changed ever so slightly from that moment on, and our new approach was a little more cautious. I like to think it prevented an unpleasant accident from happening.

  If my recollection was wrong, I’ll put my hand up to it. Fine. So be it. It’s not as if anybody failed on the mission because of my experience. If anything, with both my mate and me being truthful about our understanding of the situation afterwards, we probably learned a lesson about perspective. But at least we’d been honest. In the big, wide world, people try to cover up their mistakes or uncertainties. They promise one thing and then pretend to have said another when things don’t work out the way they’d have liked. They screw up and keep quiet, hoping that nobody will notice – or, worse, they blame it on somebody else. I experienced that situation all too often when I started working in the service industry and it drove me crackers.

  As a specialist operator I was trained to ’fess up to any mistake, no matter how small, because the implications for not mentioning it might have been disastrous. If I lost a valuable piece of equipment or forgot to mention a scrap of intel during an operational debrief, I never kept quiet about it in the hope that my error would go unnoticed. Instead, I raised my hand afterwards, I apologized for the mistake and then figured out how best to un-fuck the situation I’d created. Any intel I added was then assessed and factored into the work we’d been conducting at the time. Equipment I might have left behind was replaced and made available for use, with nobody left exposed by its absence. Honesty kept my unit strong and our practices intact, whereas not being straight about my failings would have led to a nasty surprise further down the line, one that might have left us weakened in a dangerous situation.

  The realilty is that an individual can grow and become more effective by being honest at all times, both with themselves and with others. When it comes to assessing a situation, work only with the available facts, because everything beyond that is pure speculation. If those facts put us in a bad light, so be it. Covering them up will only expose us later on. Sticking to the truth is the best route to building a resilient character.

  OPERATIONAL DEBRIEF

  ❱❱ Honesty and integrity are everything in the military elite. Brutal self-assessment allows us to function more effectively as operators and to grow as individuals.

  ❱❱ When self-assessing, ask the questions that make you most uncomfortable: Am I happy? Am I fulfilled? What life would give me purpose? Do the people in my life bring out the best in me? Honest answers to tough questions of this kind can help us to become str
onger.

  ❱❱ Intel is valuable when working towards resilience, but only if it’s dealt with honestly. Try to make assessments using fact rather than opinion. Basing a judgement or decision solely on speculation and guesswork can lead to trouble.

  ❱❱ Honesty and integrity is everything when working towards resilience. If you fuck up, ’fess up. If you don’t know the answer to something, say so rather than bluffing. Forgotten to complete a task? Don’t blame it on someone else; show integrity and admit it. Nobody likes nasty surprises, no matter what their situation. Operating truthfully helps to avoid them.

  SITUATIONAL AWARENESS

  FAILURE AS A LESSON

  Failure. I hate that word. It’s the finality of it that bothers me: the idea that once a person has screwed up, they’re judged negatively or binned off. The reality of failure is very different, however. To not succeed immediately, or to mess something up, is actually a moment to be savoured. It’s an opportunity to pause and learn. In fact, failure is only the end if we allow it to dominate our thinking. If we can reframe mistakes as an educational experience, their negative impacts are usually diminished more quickly, whereas dwelling on them with regret or shame only prolongs the pain.

  In a military sense, I blundered very early on in my career while working through Basic Training with the Royal Marines as a naive sixteen-year-old. We were on a ‘Criteria Exercise’, a tactical drill that was supposed to teach us about standing patrols where a unit or soldier had to sit and watch a particular area, such as an enemy supply route or a potentially hostile rendezvous point. During the training session my unit was bumped by a mock enemy attack. We were ordered to retreat and in the chaos I left my day sack behind. The blunder was set to land me in some serious hot water. The training team were going to beast me once the exercise was concluded and I knew it. That one mistake played on my mind all day.