In Cornwall, I virtually locked myself away for two months. I’d get up in the morning, do some exercise, meditate and visualise the life I wanted. When I was still in Australia, I’d learned meditation from a spiritual psychologist. It gave me the ability to clear my mind, stop the chatter and focus. People get freaked out when they hear the word ‘meditation’, but there’s nothing mysterious about it. It’s the mental equivalent of tidying up a room or chucking out a load of possessions you don’t really need. Meditation is about keeping your head in a battle-ready state and clearing a path. You don’t have to sit there in the lotus position, making a humming noise. You can just sit in an armchair, close your eyes, concentrate on your breathing, clear the mind and focus on the things that are really important to you.
People can solve a lot of issues with meditation. It certainly put me on the right track. But because the value of meditation isn’t immediately tangible, it’s hard for people to understand. Meditation’s rewards take time, sometimes a lot of it. It’s almost like planting a tree and waiting for the fruit to grow. Most people don’t have the patience for that, they need to see fully formed fruit immediately. For a long time, you might only see subtle changes in your lifestyle or view of the world. But if you take short-cuts all the way through your life and you’re not battle-ready, when the shit hits the fan, you won’t be able to deal with it and things will get worse. The older you get, the more things compound. Your mind becomes almost impenetrable, so that you need a jackhammer rather than a feather duster to clean it out.
During my self-imposed imprisonment in Cornwall, I might listen to the radio while I was cooking my food at night, but I’d never have the TV on. I basically created a boot camp for myself and tried just about every suggestive trick possible. I listened to inspirational podcasts. I made lists of things I wanted to change. I drew a clock face, wrote a different goal at each number and visualised achieving that goal. I stood in front of the mirror every morning and read a contract to myself, outlining what I needed to do to succeed in business. It felt unnatural and I found it really uncomfortable, but if you can’t tell yourself what you want, how can you hope to achieve it?
I also visualised myself on stage with Foxy, in front of a big audience, talking about our time in the Special Forces. I imagined what we’d be wearing, who was there, the questions that were being asked. And every time we stepped onto that stage, we would get a rapturous reception. That time in lockdown was like a religious mania. It had worked before, it would work again.
There were times when I doubted my ambition and methods, because I kept hitting brick walls. I couldn’t get my hands on any cash, because I didn’t have a credit rating in the UK. In the end, my mum had to get me a credit card. I was 43 years old at the time, which was quite sobering. Even with my mum’s help, it was a struggle. I had a bit of work, doing hostile environment awareness training a couple of times a month, which gave me just enough money to live on. But it costs a lot to start a business. I needed to get a website built and money for marketing. I’d told Foxy I was going to get it all sorted, but it was getting to the point where I wasn’t going to get my house rent-free and I might have to go back onto the circuit, which would have been disastrous.
My drinking was still out of control, which was another major problem. I would go periods without it, but any excuse to get back on it, I’d take it. Foxy likes a drink, but I would carry on after him. I’d leave the pub, go to the train station, buy a load of beer and drink it all the way back home. Even drinking for one night would have a detrimental effect. It would change the chemistry, dilute my passion, stop me from wanting to train and make me depressed. It would cloud my vision and obliterate days that I couldn’t afford to lose.
In a bid to control my drinking, I went and had acupuncture. I was willing to do anything it took, and I managed to confine the drinking to weekends. I told my mum about my plans and she shared my passion. Between my late teens and my early forties, I’d barely seen her, which was another reason I wanted to come home. I started to worry that something might happen to me while I was away and I wanted to spend more time with her, especially as she had supported me so much. She had taken an out-of-control boy, sent him down the right path, shared his ambitions and supported him when he was going through the wringer. But not everyone stood so squarely behind me when I was trying to get Break-Point off the ground.
A close family member advised me not to indulge my dreams. He pointed out that other people were already doing the same thing, that it was a crowded market and I was wasting my time. He said I should do what I knew best, what everyone from the Special Forces does, and what brings in plenty of money: get back on the circuit, do VIP security, surveillance, all the stuff I’d done and hated.
He didn’t mean any harm, he was just trying to protect me. I thank him for that. But there’s nothing worse than someone pissing on your fire. And more dreams are extinguished by people close to you than anyone else, because they’re the people whose opinions you respect the most. I walked away from that conversation with major doubts and my passion dimmed. But before long, I was reinvigorated. Like my old maths teacher, the careers officer and my old Royal Marines sergeant, he’d done me a favour.
At the beginning of 2015, I did some hostile environment awareness work at Pippingford Park, in Sussex’s Ashdown Forest. And as soon as I got on that land, I thought, ‘This is Break-Point.’ I just felt so at home. I looked at the company’s offices and thought, ‘I will be in those offices, that’s where Break-Point will operate from.’ It was time to work my magic.
The blueprint was almost complete, the website was being built, I was looking into making pitches to corporates and I had what I thought was an HQ. But as hard as I tried to make things happen, I just couldn’t. I’d been visualising more intensely than ever, so I couldn’t understand it. It even made me doubt whether the attack in Fallujah had meant anything at all. To make matters worse, I was quickly running out of money and surrounded by people telling me to get a ‘real’ job.
Then one day, I got a call from Foxy.
‘Mate, you know that idea we’ve got for Break-Point? How do you feel about doing that on TV?’
‘Shut the fuck up. Have you been drinking?’
‘No, I’m sitting here with the production company. If you’re interested, you can have a chat with them now.’
The guy from Minnow Productions told me that they’d already built the treatment for the show and asked if I’d be up for appearing on it. It took me about half a second to say yes. It was as if someone or something had suddenly said, ‘Enough! Here’s what you wanted. Happy now?’
I’d had to take a deep breath and withdraw from the world in order to clear all the shit out of the way and move forward again. But now I’d finally delivered. Visualising rewards had long been a key part of my thought process, whether it was beers with my mates after Special Forces Selection or cocktails on a beach with the missus after a particularly gruelling mission. And this TV show was my reward. It was the stage I had visualised, except a hundred times bigger. It was the perfect platform, the exposure I’d been seeking.
I’m aware that people will be sceptical, but I actually believe that if I put enough effort into visualising something, it will happen. Opportunities will begin to arise that will enable you to realise your ambitions. But it’s not voodoo. It’s not simply a case of saying, ‘I want to be a millionaire’, over and over again, and seeing the money flood in. It’s about painting a picture of how that money will improve your life, which involves emotion, which in turn makes you motivated enough to follow your dream. And I truly believe that because I painted the picture of my business in such minute detail, and attached so much emotion to it, it delivered so much more.
18
MAVERICK MARINE
The idea for the TV programme had already been pitched to a few ex-Special Forces guys but they had turned it down. People from the Special Forces aren’t supposed to be celebrities and a lot of peop
le from that world wouldn’t dream of revealing their identities. A lot of former Special Forces guys had conducted sensitive operations globally and were still apprehensive about possible repercussions. Also, once you show your face, you can’t go back to the circuit and that comfortable old world of security and surveillance. But for me and Foxy, it was the perfect opportunity, because we wanted to leave that old world behind for good. So just seven months after returning from Australia with nothing but a dream and a bag full of clothes, I signed a contract to appear in series one of SAS: Who Dares Wins.
The producers had sourced everything for the show from the internet, which was important for me and the other DS. The only way the Ministry of Defence would have accepted us taking part was if we were seen not to be providing them with insider information. However, we would still have an input, so there was a strange dance between us and the programme makers. They built the framework, which was 30 guys being put through an approximation of Special Forces Selection for eight days, and we filled in some details. So if we felt something wasn’t appropriate, we’d tell them and they’d invariably listen.
We knew that everything we did and said would be scrutinised by the MOD before it was broadcast, but we had no intention of revealing any secrets. The show was never supposed to be about operations or tactics, it was purely about giving a glimpse of the physical and mental demands of Selection. And Selection doesn’t teach you to be a Special Forces soldier, it merely prepares you to be trained as a Special Forces soldier. The applicants weren’t going to be in the SAS or SBS after eight days on the programme, the plan was simply to beast them, to find out if they had the raw minerals for Selection.
There were some Special Forces veterans who said, ‘This isn’t the sort of thing ex-Special Forces should be doing, it’s not on.’ But I knew we weren’t going to divulge any of our dark arts, so the only people we’d be compromising was ourselves. Does the programme take away from the mystique of the Special Forces? Maybe. Prior to SAS: Who Dares Wins, the only Special Forces soldiers most people had seen were Andy McNab in silhouette form and the chaps storming the Iranian Embassy in 1980.
While I understood why we had to be secretive, I thought it would be more beneficial to remove the masks and come across as real people, with the same issues as everyone else. That doesn’t make the Special Forces any less effective in war. It’s not as if the enemy will be watching the show and thinking, ‘Brilliant, these boys aren’t as hard as we thought they were.’
It comes down to ego, people wanting to maintain the mystique so that other people think they’re something they’re not. But most of all, I thought the show would allow veterans, regardless of their rank, to be proud of what they’d done for the country. And I think it’s done that. Veterans aren’t celebrated here like they are in America. Too often in Britain, veterans are ignored.
Shortly after signing the contract, I phoned Helen, because I thought Luke needed to know that I was going to be on TV. I told her what the programme would involve, that we were going to take civilians and give them a taste of the hardest military selection process in the world, and she replied, ‘So why do they want you?’
‘Helen, I did Special Forces Selection twice.’
‘Well, you never told me anything…’
When I appeared on TV for the first time, I had people contacting me and saying, ‘I knew it! You used to disappear for ages and no one would know where you’d gone. Either you were in the Special Forces or in and out of prison!’
The recruits were just random people, selected by the programme makers and handed to us in Pembrokeshire. We had no idea who they were, but it was our job to find out their stories and try to crack them. What they all had in common was that they wanted to prove something to themselves.
Society makes everything soft for people these days. There are few things in everyday life to test people’s fortitude. The warrior urge is deeply ingrained in a lot of people, especially men. For thousands of years, war was the norm. Only for a short speck of history has war been unusual. For 90 per cent of human history, people hunted and were hunted, which meant fighting for survival on a daily basis, which gave people a meaningful purpose. But today, so many people have no outlet for those instincts. I think that’s why there is so much anger in society, because people are not able to release it.
Whenever I’ve had periods with no meaningful purpose, I’ve spiralled out of control. Life will find a purpose for you, whether you like it or not. And if you don’t choose your own destiny, there’s a chance you might channel that pent-up energy into crime or end up doing a job in an office that you hate with every ounce of your being, essentially marking time until you die. Strange as it sounds, I used to see civilians living in warzones and think they were living a more natural existence than someone sitting behind a desk for nine hours a day, existing in a hazy world of nothingness. They wouldn’t choose to be in a warzone, but at least their life had meaning, however horrible their situation.
A few generations ago, far more men did manual labour, whether they were working down a pit, on a farm or in a steel plant. Those men led tough, tough lives. They were tested, both physically and mentally, every day. They plodded through life – got up at the crack of dawn, walked to work, worked like a dog for nine hours, walked home again, had dinner, fell into bed, and repeated that routine every day until they retired. They didn’t have time to think about their mental state. They were too busy struggling to put food on the table and heat their homes, and they didn’t know anything different. But far fewer people do such grinding work nowadays. Instead, people are fed into the system like coins into a machine, and they sit in offices, expending no energy and staring out of windows feeling frustrated and depressed with their lives.
So many people don’t focus on the things they want in life. They don’t have a plan, because they don’t have any goals. And if you don’t have any goals or a plan, you lack any drive, which can lead to mental health issues. I don’t understand why people are so surprised that mental illness has become so prevalent in Western society. If you have no meaningful purpose, year after year, you start to close down. It’s almost like your brain saying, ‘If you’re not going to use me, I might as well pull down the shutters.’
Some people go to the gym and train all day long, but never even think about training their brains. That’s a metaphor for the flimsiness of much of modern life. People assume that if something looks good from the outside, then it must be sound. It’s about selling a perception of perfection, not the reality. It’s the same with social media. It’s all pictures of perfect families on holiday in Disneyland. Nobody ever posts on Facebook that they got hammered at the weekend and did a shit in the middle of the lounge, just as I didn’t tell anyone that I urinated all over my wife’s prized possessions. Deep down, that person posting the picture of their holiday in Disneyland might be suffering inside, because they don’t know who they are or why they’re here.
A lot of the guys we got on SAS: Who Dares Wins flirted with joining the military before going down a different path, or had no interest as young men but developed an interest when any chance of joining the military had passed. But the basic premise of the programme was to see if you can take someone with no military experience, give them a taste of Selection and see if they have the makings of a Special Forces soldier. It turned out that most of them didn’t.
They might have thought they were gagging for a taste of the warrior life, to meet a need inside of them, but it was too much of a shock for them. Once we took away their everyday comforts, they disintegrated before our eyes. These were people who could lift massive weights in the gym and run for miles. But they were also people who worked behind a desk and had never even been on a camping holiday. They were used to eating when they wanted to, sleeping when they wanted to and being warm pretty much all of the time.
It made me wonder what would happen if this country ever went to war and had to introduce conscription. I reckon it would be mayh
em. The general fitness of the conscripts would be OK, but finding people of credible character, who could handle the indignities and the hardship, would be far more difficult. I sometimes think about the boys who fought for the United States in the Vietnam War. One minute they were at college, the next they were dropped into the middle of the jungle and seeing their mates being blown up or killed by some primitive animal trap. I wanted to be a soldier, wanted to be on the frontline, but those boys had no choice. Going from a normal life to a warzone would make people crumble in a heartbeat, especially today, when most people don’t know what hardship is.
There was a guy from that first series who was a fitness instructor and apparently training to be a stuntman. On the face of it, he had some of the attributes of a Special Forces soldier. But while we were waiting for the recruits to turn up on the first day, we were getting reports from our mole that this guy was marching up and down the train in the boots we’d sent him, running his mouth off about the show, while wearing a skimpy vest and a compass around his neck. This despite the fact he’d been given clear instructions not to talk about where he was going and what he’d be doing.
Sure enough, when this guy turned up, he was a typical show pony with a massive ego. From the moment he stepped off the train, he had our backs up. He kept talking about how he was going to smash this and that, about his exploits as a martial artist and an endurance athlete. He had the biggest guns, no doubt had his pick of the girls and probably thought he’d take the other recruits to the cleaners. Being an alpha male isn’t necessarily a bad thing in the Special Forces, if you can control it. But this guy struggled to control it. He was ultra-competitive and had a problem with authority, and as far as the DS were concerned, his attitude made him a potential weak link.
Either people like that change very quickly during Selection or they fall apart. As it turned out, we managed to push him and push him and quell his ego. But every now and again it would reappear. He didn’t know he was doing it until after he had done it. And when he did, you’d see the look of acknowledgement in his face: ‘Oh shit, I’m being a twat again…’
Break Point Page 17
