She encouraged me with everything I showed an interest in. I was a decent runner, so she ferried me to cross-country races at weekends and was always watching when I was competing on the track in the 1500 metres. My best mate Mark Sheriff was a brilliant runner and we raced together. But I got kicked out of the athletics club because I wouldn’t train. I was one of those kids who rocked up for a race and smashed it. I just couldn’t be bothered, had too many other things going on and couldn’t dedicate myself to one thing. But at least I had positive things going on in my life, activities that gave my existence a meaningful purpose and made me feel vibrant and worthwhile.
Not that my path was entirely straight and narrow after the shotgun incident. Unexpectedly, I was chosen to be Yellow Team’s sports day captain by my classmates, which was actually quite a proud moment. But because of the trouble I’d been in, the teachers put the kybosh on it. That rejection was a massive blow to me. It made me hate school even more and I resented everything about it after that. True, I was a pain in the arse at times and failed just about everything academic. But they turned their back on me after the shotgun incident, weren’t prepared to encourage any growth or entertain the idea that I might be able to recover the situation and make good. As far as they were concerned, I was a lost cause and a terrible influence.
I had this rivalry with another kid in the 1500 metres, and our race at sports day was supposed to be a life-and-death battle. I hadn’t trained and this other kid was the favourite, but I wiped the floor with him, beat him by about 200 metres. After crossing the finish line, I walked straight off the track rather than sticking around for prize giving. I didn’t look back, and all the while I was thinking, ‘Fuck you all…’
After the shotgun incident, I became a bit of a loner. The kids from my school decided I was a nutter and their parents were probably telling them to stay away from me. I picked mates from a different school, and they included some of the hardest families in town. I started drinking, going out to pubs and clubs, back when you could get in pretty much anywhere at the age of 15. Not that drinking was unheard of in my family. In Burton, a lot of people worked in the brewery industry and used to get paid in beer. My mum worked in a managerial role at a brewery; my brother did an apprenticeship as an electrician and went to work at a brewery; my sister worked for a brewery and would come home with crates of Diamond White stacked up in her car boot.
I started skiving off even more, so when my dad invited me over to Malta, where he was selling timeshares, I jumped at the chance. The plan was for me to revise for GCSEs while I was staying with my dad for a couple of weeks, but I never bothered finding out when my exams were. When my classmates were revising, I was sunbathing on a beach. I returned from Malta with my hair bleached white and this amazing tan, but I’d missed most of my exams. I was walking down the corridor at school when someone ran up to me and said, ‘Fucking hell, Ollie, Mr Henry’s after you, he’s hunting you down!’ I just thought, ‘Fuck this’, walked out of the school and never went back.
My dad disowned me for a second time, but I didn’t give a shit. I didn’t see any value in the education system, had no interest. I didn’t have any bandwidth left to absorb any pointless knowledge, there was so much else going on in my head. I was joining the Marines, and that was that. Nothing else mattered.
Kids who are constantly getting into trouble don’t normally have their hearts set on joining the military. It doesn’t really add up, because if they’re rebelling against institutions and authority, the last place they want to be is in the Army, being shouted at and told what to do every minute of every day. I know my mum was surprised, because she knew only too well how wild I was. The first time I was put on report at school, I came home, handed my mum a piece of paper, she opened it up and looked aghast. On the piece of paper, a teacher had written: ‘I received this report card in the form of a paper aeroplane.’
The teachers used to say I could attain so much if I wanted to. But I didn’t. But even though I was out of control, I craved stability and responsibility. Being a kid wasn’t enough for me. I wanted to be a man already. My mum said to me, ‘Matthew, how are you going to be a Marine if you can’t take orders?’
And I replied, ‘The Marines will be different, because everyone else will be doing the same.’
I wanted to join when I was 16, but was advised to wait until I was 18, otherwise my criminal convictions would have appeared on my military record. While I was on probation, my mum would drive me to Derby every week, where we’d visit the Royal Navy Marines careers office. Apart from the lady who scoffed at the idea of me piloting a submersible insertion craft, they were great to me. They’d talk to me for ages, let me read magazines and watch the training videos. Although I do remember my mum asking an officer what they’d teach me as a trade, and the officer replying: ‘To kill.’ My mum tells me she wanted to cry.
For two years I was in limbo, doing manual labour jobs to tide me over. Having started talking to my dad again, I even worked for him selling timeshares. I was one of those annoying people on the seafront, bothering you when you just want to have a nice stroll and eat an ice cream. I lasted two days before jacking it in. I didn’t stick at anything, because I didn’t have a passion for anything. Whether it was school, digging holes or flogging time-shares, none of it made me feel like I was living.
7
THE WIDEST SMILE
I never heard anything about the situation with the farmer again, it was all just dusted under the carpet. Clearly, the DS had decided that his story was a load of bollocks, otherwise they would have taken further action. But the fact of the matter was, I’d jumped in a car with a pisshead and compromised myself.
You are allowed two goes at Selection, so I had the option of giving it one more crack. But that wasn’t my immediate thought when I got back to 45 Commando. It wasn’t that I was embarrassed at having to return. Most Royal Marines are very conscious of their limitations, as most people are. They are crack soldiers just by virtue of being Royal Marines, but most don’t think they’ve got it in them to even apply for Special Forces Selection. So there was huge admiration and support for how far I’d got. But I’d started to doubt my military career all over again.
Selection takes almost everything out of you, strips you back to your bare minimum, physically and mentally, before asking the question, ‘Now, what have you got?’ You end up reaching deep inside yourself, trying to dredge up every last grain of resolve. It’s about seeing if you’ve got the necessary minerals to find something in those lowest moments, for example, if you’re captured behind enemy lines or retreating and being hunted down like rats.
I’d gone from almost leaving to almost getting into the Special Forces to being sent back to a place I had been desperate to escape from, a place I thought I’d never see again. It was almost like being recaptured, and the idea of having to do it all again didn’t seem that appealing. But I soon came to my senses. The fact I’d come so close once gave me the energy to do it all over again. On top of that, I could still remember the words of my sergeant (‘This is going to be hilarious!’) and I still had this flickering passion to be a Special Forces operator. Soon those flickers were fanned into a raging fire again.
Second time around, SAS and SBS Selections had amalgamated, so that there were 250 of us at pre-selection in Hereford and it was only at the very end that people would be separated. In fact, I’m one of only a couple of people who have done SAS and SBS Selection, in its previous form. Amalgamation meant I’d have to tackle the dreaded Hills Phase, so this was going to be new ground. We’d be out on those hills day after day, running, marching, covering large distances in a limited amount of time, all while carrying a Bergen and a rifle. And it wasn’t just aimless yomping, we were having to navigate, reach checkpoints, and all without any direction or encouragement from the DS. And if I suffered a bad injury or failed a march, that was it.
But the early signs were good. We lost so many people on that first march ove
r the Pen y Fan, the highest peak on the Brecon Beacons. After day one, as many as 20 per cent of the recruits were on their way home. But I smashed it. We had to cover 26 kilometres in under four hours and I was one of the first five or six home.
What I found odd about the Hills Phase was that we had an agenda, so we knew everything we were going to be doing. When it was purely SBS, we didn’t know our arses from our elbows and survived on next to no sleep for the duration, and that was the hardest part. So the first two weeks was nothing compared to what I’d already been through. After day one, I was lying in bed thinking, ‘It can’t be as simple as this.’ I was waiting for someone to burst into the room and throw a flash-crash distraction device at me. But, mercifully, it never happened.
But about three days in, I was coming towards the end of a march and among the first five or six again when disaster struck. I was carrying quite a heavy load, it was raining and wet under foot. As I made my way down this track towards the finish, pushing harder than was probably sensible, a slate slid under my foot. My ankle went over 90 degrees and I could feel and hear the tendons snapping. It wasn’t pain that I was in, it was a state of shock: ‘I’ve just fucked myself again. And this time, I’m not going to get another chance.’
I hobbled to the end and went straight to the medic, who helped me take my boot off. My ankle already resembled a balloon. The medic looked at a DS and slid a finger across his throat, meaning that he thought I was finished. Meanwhile, I was thinking, ‘Why is he doing that? Fuck, they think I’m dead.’
Back in camp that evening, the training officer who had failed me the first time called me in and said, ‘Right, we’ve seen the state of your ankle, I’ve spoken to the medics and we’re going to give you a medical withdrawal, which means you can come back and try again. If you try to carry on and fail a march, you’re gone and can never come back.’
The training officer thought my response was a foregone conclusion. But I replied, ‘With all due respect, sir, I’m not prepared to go home.’ As far as I was concerned, this was it. I didn’t have the will to return to 45 Commando. If I accepted the medical withdrawal, I’d never go back.
The training officer shook his head in disbelief and said, ‘Man up! Take the medical withdrawal and come back when you’re fit.’
‘No!’
‘Well, as far as I’m concerned, you’ve failed. And it’s your own fucking fault.’
I turned around and hopped out of the office.
In Selection, people are looking for the first excuse to bail out. You’ll see people dropping out with twisted knees and ankles, blisters and bad backs. They’re looking for something physical to blame because the alternative is to say, ‘I couldn’t handle it mentally, so I had to throw in the towel.’ I didn’t want to be one of those people, even though my injury was worse than anyone’s I’d seen that had withdrawn before that point.
The following morning, I got up early, strapped up my ankle with reams and reams of medical tape and swallowed a shitload of ibuprofen. At the start of that day’s march, the DS were looking at me with disappointed faces, probably thinking, ‘What an idiot. And what a fucking waste.’
The march was across the Elan Valley, which is some of the most frustrating, ankle bending terrain in Special Forces Selection. The Elan Valley is a green, marshy desert, with leg-sapping peat bogs and football-sized tufts of grass known as babies’ heads. More people are failed or voluntarily withdraw on the Elan Valley marches than any other. And, just as I suspected, it was fucking horrendous. Throughout the march, I had tears streaming down my cheeks from the pain. I just scraped through, but I had another week to go.
But that’s just what I kept doing every day: guzzling painkillers, deleting some of the pain, listening to the Neneh Cherry song ‘7 Seconds’ over and over in my head (it must have been on the radio a lot at the time!) and doing just enough not to get red carded. That was down to pure desire. I just wasn’t prepared to go home. I’d visualised how things would pan out and I used that as my focus. Although towards the end, I had to shelve that vision, because it would have become too overwhelming. When things get really tough, you have to boil it down to getting one foot in front of the other.
It might sound horrible, but seeing people fall by the wayside massively boosts your own confidence. I sometimes laugh about it with Jason Fox, my old colleague and mate from SAS: Who Dares Wins. We refer to it as ‘the Quickening’, that phenomenon from the film Highlander when a character chops an enemy’s head off and steals all their energy.
Up in the hills, I’d see older, more experienced, stronger-looking people dropping to their knees, crying and puking their guts up. And as I went past, I’d almost be able to see inside them. They’d be completely hollowed out, empty, with nothing left. Sometimes I’d say, ‘Mate, come on let’s do this together!’ As soon as it was clear that they were going no further, I knew their remaining energy was on offer. They’d grimace and nod and I’d get this injection of power, like a lightning bolt of electricity, before disappearing into the distance.
Selection was the one place I’d been where image didn’t mean anything. Humans are always self-doubting, always looking for things to go wrong. But Selection made me realise how debilitating that thought process is. Our idea of where our limits are is often misjudged, because we’re constantly comparing ourselves unfavourably to others. But it didn’t matter how big or strong or fit someone looked before the start of Selection, it was all just perception.
That’s why you don’t just pick the fittest people and be done with it, because you can put the fittest person in the world behind enemy lines and they might crumble under the mental pressure. Selection doesn’t care if you can run a marathon in under two-and-a-half hours or you compete in Iron Man triathlons every other weekend. Far more important is that you can endure a high degree of mental discomfort for extended periods of time.
The DS just couldn’t get their heads around how I was managing to continue. The tutting and head-shaking was replaced by raised eyebrows and wry smiles. And then, after the first week, the pain started to plateau. I’d seen off the worst, or at least learned to accept it.
I don’t blame the DS for doubting me. In fact, he was a good egg to have offered me that medical withdrawal. The DS clearly thought I had it in me to be a Special Forces soldier and didn’t want to see me throw away the opportunity. But people doubting you can be such a powerful motivation, especially once you realise that a lot of people who doubt you are doubting themselves. Seeing other people push themselves to the limit and achieve outlandish things is horrible for some people. They know, often deep inside, that if they really, really tried, they could do what you’re doing. But there’s something stopping them from taking that first step. Once you’ve done that, the other foot naturally follows.
A huge number of recruits didn’t make it through the Hills Phase. But I did, and I earned a lot of respect from the DS for doing so. Not that they were popping champagne and showering me with kisses. It was more a case of, ‘Fuck off home, I’ll see you next week.’
My ankle still wasn’t what it should have been, but it had come a long way. And, of course, I had been in the jungle before. One of my DS was a guy who was captured during the famous Bravo Two Zero exfiltration in the First Gulf War, later immortalised by Andy McNab in his book of the same name. This guy was a legend to all the lads, so I was desperate to impress him. Whenever our patrol got lost, he’d say, ‘Ollie, tell us where we are.’ And I’d usually be able to, because I had wealth of experience after completing this phase before. But a week or so in, a DS decided to give me a bit of a buzz. He came up behind me and said, ‘How long do you think you’ll end up doing?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Well, how long do you think you’ll last in the jungle?’
‘I’ll do it all, I hope…’
After that brief exchange, the DS walked off. I thought, ‘Fuck, what was that all about?’ I thought I’d been doing brilliantly, but
now I wasn’t so sure.
From when you’re a kid, you’re always looking for validation. When you’re at school, you’ll draw a picture, take it home so your mum can ruffle your hair and say, ‘Oh, what a wonderful drawing. I’m going to stick it on the fridge so that everyone can see it.’ Whatever you do, you want someone to put their arm around you and tell you how well you did it. You expect praise from teachers, university lecturers, colleagues and bosses. When a footballer scores a goal, he expects cuddles from his teammates and a thumbs-up from the boss, not to mention the cheers of thousands of supporters. When a guitarist finishes a solo, he expects a smile and a wink from his bandmate, the crowd to go wild, and a groupie or two secured in his trailer post-concert. But Selection gives you none of that. And until you’ve had that validation taken away, you don’t realise the dependency it creates.
In Special Forces training, you might be smashing every march, nailing all the skills and feeling like a first-class Special Forces soldier in the making, but if nobody is telling you that, the worm of doubt wriggles its way into your mind and starts eating away at you. That lack of validation can rot you from the inside. People fail themselves in the jungle. Before they know it, self-doubt has consumed them. Their concentration goes awry, they start making mistakes doing weapons skills, stop attending to personal admin.
And here’s the kicker: while it feels like nobody is playing a blind bit of notice to what you’re doing, you’re actually being watched at all times, because the DS send out local trackers to trail the patrols. These guys, who are able to smell body odour, shit, urine and toothpaste from 100 metres away, study everything you do, and any sub-standard soldiering is reported back to the DS. When the DS discuss a recruit, everything boils down to one question: would you want that soldier to be working by your side in a few months’ time?
Break Point Page 7
