 Hello friends. I hope this finds you well. Today I wanted to talk to you about a very special gentleman, also the author of a book that I read. The book is called Free Fall. I just picked it up in a charity shop one day and had quite an effect on me. It's a story of someone who's not got an identical story to me by any means, but there's a few parallels. We've both been in the elite forces, myself the Royal Marines as you probably gathered by now, this gentleman in the parachute regiment and then the SAS, with both skydivers, both pilots and the clincher. We've both experienced severe psychiatric illness, so mental mental health to a level, I should say, kind of above your sort of routine depression and anxiety and that that sort of stuff. Not that I'm putting anyone, you know, anyone else's challenges down, but I mean like pretty serious stuff. Now, it's the story of Charles Niche or Niche Bruce and I'll tell you how it came about that I came to be doing this video. I read this book, like I said, it had an effect on me, so I'll read, I'm just going to dive straight in and read the first part of the book, so spoiler alert if you haven't read this book, but if you probably haven't read it by now, you may be not going to. 34 years ago in the time before I went mad, a man looked down from the edge of space. Joe Kittinger or Kittinger, Jr., a US Air Force captain, pulled himself upright, shuffled forwards and stepped from a balloon gondola, 100,000 feet above New Mexico. He looked like an overstuffed teddy bear in his life support suit, but without it, in the upper limits of our atmosphere, his blood would have boiled and his organs exploding. Within seconds of leaving the gondola, he's reached a speed of 614 miles an hour. He failed for another four minutes before his canopy opened, the longest freefall parachute descent in history. So the author of this book, Tom, the SAS chat, starts off his book. He's going to replicate this feat, reproduce this feat, except he's going to do it from space. So a little bit like the Felix Blomgardner stunt, where he took the balloon up into space and then jumped out and I'm sure many of you saw it, many of you saw the video, obviously it's on YouTube if you haven't. Now, let's just go through a few photos here. Why did I feel an infinity with this story? Let's have a look. So there's the book cover. I think this was a German version, Fritz Fowler's Freefall. I don't think the English cover has got the wing dagger on it. And this is Charles or Niche. And that was me. We both flew Cessnas, at least at one stage or another. I've actually got the shirt ripped off my back. You can't see it. They cut the back out of my shirt. That's what they do in the States when you get your pilot license. They cut your shirt. There's me flying over Florida. Niche actually flew. I think it's from the United States back to the UK, via Greenland and Iceland, which over that amount of water is a pretty brave thing to do. Again, we share passion for skydiving. Although I won't pretend I had the 30,000 jumps that Niche had in his logbook, which is any skydive will tell you is a phenomenal, a phenomenal amount. Even highly experienced skydivers can have 2,000 jumps. This gentleman had 30,000. There we go. Skydive, you get to do it, folks. Just do it. If it's something you want to do, go to Florida. Do it for cheap. You just have to do it. It's great fun. I'm with Mario here. Mario stoned off his box, which is something quite a few of the skydivers in Florida didn't have a problem with doing that. One of the skydivers I jumped with used to take a bottle of tequila, sort of strapped tequila and lemonade or something strapped to his, one of his harness straps is what I'm trying to say with a straw. He used to hop and pop, which meant he'd jump out of the top, so 12 to 15,000 feet. Rather than skydiving, he'd pull his chute immediately, sink down to earth, getting drunk. I'm going to speed this up a bit now. There's a leg, but it is. It's just quite something. Just to even be in this position in your lifetime, it's fairly incredible. As me looking like something out of a Bond film, like Moonbreaker, like I'm the bad guy or something. There I am chatting with Robin in one of our podcasts. I said, Robin, did you know this chap, Tom Reed? Because he wrote this book, he spoke openly about his mental illness. At the end of the book, you've got the impression that he's all happy and he's overcome it and bang. Then you hear that he threw himself out of an aircraft while it's flying above England, landed on a football pitch. Obviously, when I say throw himself out, but without a parachute, it's just awful. I guess no one's going to know for real what goes on in someone else's head, but was that a case of he couldn't stand it any longer? The mental anguish? We'll talk more about that. Who's ever going to know? Robin said, oh, you mean niche? Or niche? I said, what are you on about? He said, niche, that was his name. He wasn't called Tom Reed. He's actually called Charles Niche Bruce. He's got the Queen's Galantry Medal. Let's talk a bit about him, shall we? Niche served with the parachute regiment, as I said, and then joined the SAS. There's a picture in the C-130, so in the Hercules. Got a newspaper article here. Let me see. Let's see if I can find it. Yeah, excuse the adverts. Fact of life now, aren't they? But how I fought to stop SAS man suicidally, a woman pilot who watched an SAS hero jump 5,000 feet to his death from the cockpit of her plane yesterday, gave him a dramatic account of her struggle to save him. Just awful. The woman had won the Women's Freefall Skydiving Championships and guessing they were friends. It's kind of irrelevant for what we're talking about today, so I won't dive into that any further. But let's just go back to the story. Served with the Red Devils. Let's have a look at a bit of their footage because this is the Paras Freefall Display Team. And unlike the Royal Marines, who I think is disbanded now, I think the Red Devils are still going. If they are, folks, can you put it in the comments? Can I also say thank you to everyone who's joined the Patreon recently? If you haven't joined the Patreon, could you please do so? It's £1.99 a month, folks, and it allows us to bring you stories like this where we don't just talk about guns and killing. We put the mental health aspect in. We put the soldier's rights aspect in. And they are getting a hammer in, aren't they, at the moment, with all this Northern Ireland stuff. So let's have a look. I can't play you too much of this because it's not my film. But for commentary purposes, we're allowed to play a bit of it. It's an absolutely spectacular video. It must be 4K. But look, there they are in barking. It looks like the Hercules, doesn't it? If that's not the Hercules, can you put it below? Bit of wingsuit. Incredible footage. Look at the backdrop. It's just stunning. It was stuff like this. In fact, it was watching Point Break that made me think, I've got to do this, you know. In my one life, this is something that I want to do. There they are. There's the boys look. Making the love heart, is it? I don't know the name of this formation, but whatever it is there, they're doing a good job of it. They're trademarked red. Practicing a wind tunnel. Look at that for an image, isn't it incredible? Just to have that image in your photo collection, you can see why guys do this, can't you? Live in life to the full. So, excuse me. So, yes, 22nd SAS. Nish was in 7 Squadron, which is, was the same one Andy, now was it, was it B, sorry, B Squadron, 7 Air Troop. There he is. There's our man and his red devil's gear. Looking quite young there, but we've got the world you're used to at that age, isn't it? Andy McNabb, immediate action. This is, they're in the same troupe together. I think Andy McNabb wrote a book called Seven Troop and he speaks very highly of Nish, Andy McNabb, as one of his heroes. There we are. There's also Nish Far Right. I'm not sure of the other two gentlemen apologies, but that's Frank Collins, I believe, second person in from the left. And Frank also killed himself. So, there's something going on here, folks, isn't there? You know, there's something that needs to be talked about. Dun-dun-dun. Let me just move on. Five and five B. There we go. Bob Shepard was in B Squadron in my podcast the other day. This podcast, if you haven't seen it, he talked about parachuting into the South Atlantic during the Falklands, as did Robin, Robin Horsefowl, and also as did Nish. Or Nish, sorry if I'm pronouncing the name wrong. Operation Mercado was to take out these things. These guys were going to go ashore, was it in a submarine? Then, I believe, was going to drop them off. They were going to swim ashore, attack these aircraft and then try to escape to Chile, which I think probably in hindsight even the SAS would agree was probably quite a suicide mission, or certainly a capture mission, isn't it? Nish was involved in Northern Ireland, where he got his Queen's Gallantry Medal. They're in a shoot, their the SS, his team were in a shootout with the IRA. And this chap here, Al Slater, I think I've got this photo right guys, please let me know for God's sake if I've got it wrong. Sometimes you get photos in a search engine and it's got the wrong name on. I can edit it out, always edit it out if we get to that, but Al Slater was killed in that contact, and I know these guys were the best of friends. There's Nish in Later Live. He went on to bodyguard for Jim Davison to protect wildlife with David Sterling, so the founder of the SAS, he went down there to Kenya to protect the wildlife against poachers. I'm guessing he did bodyguard work, probably really boring compared to what the life he was used to in the regiment. And of course he started the Skydive project, which he wanted to be the first man to skydive from space. And then of course his breakdown set in and all this didn't come around. Incredibly sad. It just came around kind of all of a sudden and there was no real understanding of what caused it because sometimes in these cases there isn't. There was a lot of talk of, yeah, well this is what servicemen go through when they see stuff in war, blah blah blah. And yeah, all these stuff are factors, but there's obviously a big difference between being traumatized, having depression, anxiety, chronic anxiety, and feeling like you want to end it all. These are all very serious. But to be where I was and where Nish was is to be severely psychosically ill or psychiatrically unwell. It's kind of another thing again. I mean it could be triggered by something as simple as something in your diet. A combination of that and alcohol and say perhaps stress. These are all these unknowns. While living in Chamonix one day he suffered a nervous breakdown and attempted to murder his girlfriend with a pair of scissors and somebody fortunately pulled him off. Eight years these episodes went on for which just must have been awful for anybody but imagine someone so active and imagine what you're going to lose. You're going to lose your pilot license, you're going to lose your ability to skydive all this kind of stuff. Just awful and on top of that like many veterans, Nish was no doubt carrying post traumatic stress. His ashes were scattered in a memorial skydive by his son and his former colleagues which is quite touching. There's a funny page I found right up. I think it was by Nish himself on the internet talking about skydiving, talking about how they upset the Arabs I believe it was or certainly some characters in the muslim world because the pilot was a muslim who took these boys up and of course gas expands at altitude and as these guys were letting let him rip with farts of course it was stinking the plane out and the pilot the muslim pilot actually brought the plane down and refused to take them anymore. Another story about a gorgeous blonde woman who said can I come up and you know can I come and film you in the plane and they said yeah but we're going bollicky buff you know we're going stark bollock naked so if you want to come up you've got to get your kit off love and she went okay apparently she was gorgeous and then at the last minute the pilot the plane goes fellas we're overloaded someone's got to get out so of course skydivers aren't getting out because this is what they love so it was good bye dear there's also a touching um touching page in a book where his brothers from the regiment come and visit him in hospital and you get this um you get this thing with servicemen they're quite they're quite direct and quite straight and they take things like that on the chin they don't pussy around with their words like uh sort of possibly many of our civilian counterparts would and I mean no offence but you know um uh and these guys rock up at the hospital and they're like oh it wanker which is sometimes what you need when you know you need a friendly face and that's about it folks um I was gonna finish by reading you the last paragraph in a book because it's quite touching but you know what in order to to niche rest in peace I'll let you buy the book and I thoroughly recommend it thank you for watching hello friend I hope this finds you well my name is Chris Thrall I'm a former Royal Marines commando and I fought my way back from chronic trauma and addiction to live work and travel in 80 countries across all seven continents achieving all of my dreams and goals along the way now I pass my simple system on to other people but I can only help you if you like and subscribe so please do so because you get one life and if you live it right one is enough