 and I looked down I could see the yellow flame sort of breach and they actually received fourth degree burns so what that means is there was exposed bone open canopy door plan route onto wind low level and go for it and as I looked at my left hand canopy window I saw a thin streak of visible yellow orange flame and and I was down and out for the count. Yeah I started getting it a bit bored in the pool and I start you know bored of counting laps literally. When I did my quadruple Ironman I had the underwater headphones and I hopped in the pool all ready to listen to David Goggins audio book yeah and like all great plans after about I think 30 seconds it just stopped working. No plan survives contact with the enemy huh. Well I bought one of those little waterproof phone bags that you can get to take to the beach or whatever and I put my phone in slipped it down the front of my wetsuit had Goggins playing he's all good on the Bluetooth but I'd recommend that to anyone if you're doing distance in a pool which can get a bit you know staring down at blue. Repetitive yeah. Yeah but it's I'm a bit of a cheat like that when I do sort of distance well when I do. I have tried it actually I did think I did better coaching with the swimming a couple of years back and and I was as in I was being coached by these lovely ladies it was a course that I was offered through Help for Heroes just to sort of brush up and technique. These girls were fantastic I mean I marveled at it because they're all sort of middle aged and one or two of them had been involved in like you know Olympic sort of para athletes in swimming that is and they were really really amazing so they just broke me down and then sort of rebuilt me you know going back to the drawing board really focusing on technique and all the little bits that go with that and you've got to embrace the process but what was really fascinating about it was you know the experience they had and you've got to you've got to trust trust it or trust them as coaches and yeah and then at the end of it they one of them lent me you know one of these underwater you know in the airs and I thought it was just incredible you know I mean I'd never experienced that before and it felt like a real novelty listening to clear music whilst on sort of face down in the water putting the strokes in you know to swim but I mean it's quite a common thing now for athletes like you say they're they're getting into this as a as a form of motivation you know mate you're not you're not boring me or anything I'm just going to listen to some Joe Rogan no worries yeah but it's I think it's like that is that well that's these new things is it over the over the year these were yeah these were similar little things that you know those ones look pretty pretty you know bulky if I may say you know they're going to give you a bit of drag aren't they if you're going for performance oh mate I'm I'm so self-liked through the pool I'm like a seal in the pool I need something to slow me down and remind me that I'm I'm only human oh there you go mate yeah you know so some industrial sized earplugs do you want to know the problem lay you down the problem Jamie is I still haven't got my head around the fat I need bloody glasses and so I don't ever go out the house with glasses I've sunglasses maybe but not real glasses so when I get to the pool I'm like what the what does that say that is that is that how do I sink the blue tooth again it takes takes about two that one the left ear or the right ear I can't tell yeah but um god your are you do you get fed up with people saying your story is just beyond but is is it I mean listen you know as a speaker it's something I've done for probably about eight years in my life now for various different audiences you know everything from schools to you know give me a pat on the back for this one women's institute that was quite scary but a great bunch and then sort of larger corporates you know to you know I've spoken to big pharmaceutical company to you know British aerospace engineering a AGM conference and big audiences like so so you know you kind of accept that there is an element of one for the speaker with individual story there's an element of repetitiveness and you feel somewhat like you're kind of regurgitating aspects of your own personal life story your own history and so yeah of course to a degree you know if you're reasonably good at what you do you know otherwise you probably wouldn't want to go on but um you do get you do get encouragement and and a lot of people yeah turn around and say of course you know wow you know it's a quite an extraordinary story so for sure if I'd out of a pound every time someone had sort of subtly encouraged me with regards to the speaking then I'd probably be doing pretty well but it's one of those things you know you just accept it and I think if it helps people in cliches it sounds but if it if the story you know aspects of my life do inadvertently help folk that are listening then it's a good thing you know it can perhaps help to motivate them and give them a bit of a boost in their own mindsets to go on and perhaps you know you know achieve things in life and you know try to to give themselves a bit of a lift and that's what I think that's what speakers in general or speaking is is kind of what it's all about and then just a quick one but you think about it the earliest earliest form of entertainment for mankind you know I'm talking about you know probably caveman sat around the old you know the campfire they didn't have broadband they didn't have tv or radio broadcasts in those days so from the you know from the earliest origins of man would probably sat around the campfire out in the open if the weather was good or in the cave system or whatever I'm just trying to imagine picture the scene and what did people do for entertainment well they dance around the fire for sure but you know there's only so much energy you can expend and you're going to you're soon going to grow tired of that so you know it's probably a lot of stories were being told you know from the elders getting passed around that the group you know and that's how lessons were learned and and so stories that's what I'm trying to say with mankind are literally the very earliest forms of entertainment as it were and I think it's important that you know we we don't lose sight of that you know for all of the the noise on this planet in terms of media in terms of everything that's in our faces every single day and you know where I'm coming from because you've got you turn on the tv you're inundated with advertisements you know television radio internet and you've got so much information coming at you 24 7 but I think it's um it's kind of crucially important that you know as human beings that we don't lose sight of you know that that ability to be able to just talk to one another and for for people to subsequently you know embrace that and listen and we don't lose the the essence of good old-fashioned communication and to some degree that is probably lost a little bit in this day and age I mean I just came back on a train from the pool this morning just a few stops in in London to get back to to where I'm based and you know I couldn't help but notice and you see it time and time again everybody sort of head down on their phones nobody's kind of making eye contact nobody's really talking to each other anymore it's a kind of a changing world and a changing scene so perhaps ever more reason why you know good old-fashioned human interaction and stories and perhaps speakers are quite you know useful in life it's just my my take on it just my observation and what about how much of your story do you tell because I'm sure you've got your story I've got mine I'm saying that so people at home don't go well Chris yours is nothing like it's like when I'm not trying to say that what what I'm trying to say is we both speak about what were incredibly difficult challenging times in our lives and I'm starting to wonder if maybe I shouldn't go so full ball because I don't think I I I'm not sure of people some kind of get it I don't think others are kind of ready to hear like the depths of addiction is not very pleasant you know sure but I think you know never underestimate yourself and I think that for individuals in general if you feel like you've got a story to tell and if you feel you know from the heart that it it's worth telling and you could thereby help other people you know by sharing that um then I think it's a good thing and it can be not only good for the individual but it can be good for for audiences and you've only have to have that that will and that inclination to want to tell your story and to want to share it with others and I would say to anybody that feels that they've got a story you know don't be afraid like I said it goes back to that good old-fashioned you know the merits of human communication and this age old skills and in a way we're partly losing that because of the modern age and technology and the internet and so on and so these these is this is an important issue in a way it is kind of an important topic or a debate it's worth speaking out and it's worth sharing and I would encourage anybody especially young people who perhaps are so wrapped up in technology and you know they've been brought up with that now in the 21st century and you know when we were kids you know back in the day we were kind of out in the park and you know climbing the trees or riding our BMX bikes around the park and kicking a football around I'm not saying that doesn't go on but there's perhaps less of that with the younger generation now because they're so glued to technology and computer games and the internet and that wrap up information. I'll tell you what Jeremy don't get me started and I'll say that because anyone who watches my channel knows I talk about agenda 24-7 it's I'm a father it's my duty you know I'm sworn to protect a young person and to those of us in the know it's so blatantly apparent what is what is going on and the destruction of society, humanity, individual identity we're now it's like you say conversations is so important but now the conversation comes it starts off from Walt Disney then it then it comes up through the ranks and it ends up with CNN and Fox News perhaps we take that for another another day because I don't want to I talk about it a lot is what I'm trying to say but I completely agree with you 100% you know we're in a situation now where when I go for my run and I run down and say I run down the cycle path and there's all these lycra crab 40 year olds on their 3,000 pound mountain bike trying to I don't know what they're doing I applaud it I think it's good but what I'd applaud more if they could hold their head up and say hello when they go past me that especially when they've got three children in tow and I think you know if people are wondering what the effects of this agenda is what it's doing to us this is a great example it means that a father who should be the leader of his household should be an example should be somebody his children are fiercely proud of my daddy was this and he was this right that traditional it's now turn into lycra crab Wally who literally has not got the social skills outside of the office environment to go oh my you know that's what it's come down to it's really kind of a um I don't know if I'm sending out subtle messages there but I've had my glasses delivered and I think that's a fair observation there Chris I mean I'm not a father so I can't really comment you know as yet but that is an observation that you know fathers or indeed parents should should be role models and it's not the tone I mean are we losing that sense of community spirit yes massively it's it's been just purposely being destroyed because once once the community's gone once that connect human connection is gone then the psychopaths have just got free reign to do what the hell they like but um we can you know we can look upon things you know you know we have to be careful because I think in general as far as society goes there'll always be an element of you know our society that we need to be wary of but there is also you know there's a lot of good out there and you know there's there's always going to be good versus a little less good or I don't like to use the word evil but you know I mean you know long time ago don't hold it against me but I was an ex I'm an ex-police officer so I saw a darker side of life and what goes on out there what truly goes on you know that often doesn't get reported and you know you know there's a lot of victim and there's a there is a lot of hate but there's a lot of people out there that you know generally speaking you know a sort of upstanding members of society and they they do try to do good and live by morals and principles and values but I will say that yeah I'm inclined to agree with you I feel that um we are we are losing somewhat you know can I clarify the Jamie so I'm not misunderstood I'm I'm not criticising the individual not not at all I'm talking from a structural global holistic perspective you can see the damage that has been done to people I'm not I'm just using one guy as an example sure sure you can take the the the war on females that's just reigned for god knows how long to this this destructive beauty culture and the mental health crisis it's now landed young young people in and I I only want to offer solutions because I don't believe in scare mong you know it's easy I can have a podcast and just go and and a lot of doing a lot of quite intellectual people have got podcasts where they consistently just point out issues and come up with possibly what I would call superficial responses to it um but I'm it's a changing world isn't it it's certainly a changed world since since we were very young and some sometimes for the better but a lot of the change is not necessarily for the better in terms of perhaps the development of of younger persons especially and there's bits and pieces I think that we're lacking compared to perhaps you know what to what children you know and younger people you know we're developing in certain areas and there's bits and pieces now that that are sort of lacking in terms of that and maybe it goes back to what I said you know maybe that communication skills are starting to fall by the wayside a little bit because we're just so engrossed in you know the wrath of information and media and it's just more than ever it's hardly it's like the world is high speed now there's not a lot of time for for much else um it's all strike that balance it's all been steered towards the what I'll call left the left brain so the ego it's all this right I've got a keypad so I can respond immediately to this injustice and the psychopath so I call quite they just feel they've thrown fuel on that fire because they love the division they love the fact that we're even having to have this conversation here now you know it's just it's just uh you know it's not I don't think it's uh it's the be all and end all and we need to just look towards the future and see how we can in a way make life better and then bring back those real values and principles and whether it's community spirit we need to focus on more and there's ways and means that we can kind of claw back you know the good traits of of our own humanity we just need to work on it you know and you'd like to think that the life in general is is a work in progress you know we recognize perhaps uh where we're slipping a little bit and we can hopefully nurture things and boost things for the better make make society a chirpier place to be and make people kind of happier reduce uh reduce these stigmas and perhaps improve mental health as we go and that's a topic of conversational in itself but you know if you if you don't address the bigger issues perhaps then you know these things don't necessarily fall into the correct alignment so we could get into all of this you know massively but you know we're not going to change the world in in one podcast and it's also crucial I think for the welfare of our children that people really understands what's going on in the world as opposed to what the mainstream media is telling them and I always say you get one life when it's gone it's gone you can't like I just have another no it doesn't work like that it's out and if all you've ever known is the mainstream media narrative you are never going to be an enlightened individual and for me that has been the crowning achievement of everything that I've ever done um way more important than flying skydive traveling military university whatever it it it might be but moreover it's because it opens you up to seeing the truth and everybody should be allowed to see the truth yeah so Jamie how does it how does it work with your special forces backgrounded do I understand right you came up what do you call it territorial yeah so background as a reservist um I mean that's you know sorry that that was the word I meant yeah so for the record I didn't serve as a regular soldier sort of full time did periods where I did sort of stints that were full time but um it was all kind of reserve forces covenant of employment and initially I was um following a sabbatical actually um from UK policing so I formally served with 10 valley police as an officer um back in the day in the sort of Milton Keynes uh Buckinghamshire region as well as a few different locations such as Buckingham itself a small market town um Oxford Alesbury but so I did a period in the police and then I took us a sabbatical like an official career break and then um did a bit of global travel and a bit of expedition work specifically with my great passion for scuba diving and I ran um um quite a big um marine conservation expedition in the Philippines in the deepest sort of South China Sea and then um so following all of that and following the the travel bits and pieces I think I did a stint working in Egypt and briefly in Caribbean I then came back to the UK it's still on this sabbatical and then I decided to do something a bit more structured and go off to university and do some study so I did a degree I did a BA honours in Scandinavian languages I think I was probably spurred on by um some you know family connection um on uh on my mother's side and I was just really interested I was just curious and also the fact that obviously as part for a languages degree you know you get to to go to the host country typically and expose so to learn the language uh but being um Scandinavian I went to Norway because I did my sort of major as it were in the language in in Norwegian because I lived in Norway I can I can speak um somewhat fluent albeit a little bit rusty Norwegian now and I lived in um in deepest Norway in an area that was close to the mountains close to an area called the Jotunheimen or basically the Norwegian Alps very famous in military circles for the absolutely yeah I mean not far away you've got the Hadanga Vida or the Plateau Hadanga Plateau which was famous for um you know the heroes of telemark escapades and um those critical missions against um German occupation in Norway during World War II when they went in and basically sabotage so allied soldiers of the um if you know the history say op grouse operation grouse op gunner side grouse and gunner side missions or rather patrols went in and they um um very famously and successfully executed a mission to sabotage the heavy water plant that the Germans had occupied and they were producing or manufacturing heavy water which was good or deuterium oxide which was going to it's a primary component or ingredient of the atomic bomb and that was a real worry for certainly for the for the UK government because if the if the Germans had produced enough heavy water to manufacture the atomic bomb then they already had the long range v2 rocket capability which was capable of long range sort of fire essentially from you know it could have been perhaps from from Norway or indeed Germany and that could have reached you know sort of greater Europe and then some so it was a huge concern hence why those missions were really critical it's not something that gets reported so often in in British military history but really really important all the same and so I learned about all of this when I was living in Norway and I did a lot of these uh I followed similar routes on the ground as a as a younger skier and um I used to love all that I used to love all the you know the kind of uh you know packs on your back and uh the the Langlaut so the walking on skis across the the Norwegian Alps and the mountains and I was in my absolute element and um you know thinking about some of that history can I just chop in is because I've lived in Norway on and off for about four years yeah what an utterly beautiful part of world amazing beautiful and the sense of community there and really strong the beauty of the landscape you know the mountains and the fjords um and I mean I had a whale of a time honestly and that was the pool for me um to do this particular degree course because I got to go and live in Norway for that year and and have a lot of fun and games so I pretty much attached myself to a center that was uh you know we were learning a lot of skills such as sort of uh mountain rescue and and I and I and I did a lot of skiing a lot of ski touring I even took my dive gear so I'm a keen scuba diver that I mentioned and I was an instructor with Paddy I had that ticket and I took my gear out and then literally within a space of a few months when I started off doing solo dives in the fjord which is okay you know it's never tremendous fun on your own and then the locals were kind of watching in awe I mean I'm talking 20 years ago now um and I ended up teaching the locals they came out of the woodwork to sort of watch and observe and at one stage there's me sort of breaking holes in the ice because it obviously froze over in the winter and um you know I'm putting a weighted line or a rope down through the through the aperture that the big hole that I'd made sort of wicks and sticks to cut through the ice and and then I'd just pop down there I had my dry suit on and my sort of thick neoprene hood and the sort of the the the the webbed gloves you know into that kind of style of dry suit have you got uh so it was a I had a tri laminate sort of butyl this kind of old rubber slash nylon thing and it was great up until the point when it started leaking so during the course of the year she started to infill with water from time to time and that got a bit miserable but luckily she started leaking like much later in the season when the spring sort of summer on its way so the weather the water rather was getting a little bit milder um but yeah just all in all it was um Norway for me was one big adventure playground and I absolutely capitalized on the entire year um and I was a sort of mature student as it were on sabbatical from from the police at the time so I was what mid 20s and I guess I was in my prime absolutely capitalized on the moment and just being there in the moment living there and trying to learn this um quite tricky language um but I just loved it I mean I the people I found were very warm very sort of embracing the strong community spirit and a wonderful adventure playground like I say and if I say to you I'm trying to think of the the way their grammar works if I say trick or do hembrent does that make sense um hembrent have you have I been burnt no tricker drink oh dricker yeah dricker do drink you yeah yeah hembrent is um oh homebrew yeah yeah did I I might have said it's been a long time since I've been over there but yeah it it's that thing that um that alcohol tradition has always been so expensive in in scan absolutely yeah that's a really fair point actually because already it was a bit of downtime sort of typically on a on a nice uh Saturday evening or whatever and you know there was a one little bar down in this in the town where I was based and they called it from memory they called it maya ria which is trans literal translation for like the old dairy and or the old dairy house because it was formerly like you know they were probably milking cows there back in the day because it was a really traditional sort of rural town a place called song darl if any of the norwegians are like listening in in the song of your day in the filka or county and anyway down to the maya ria on a on a friday or saturday night if i was lucky and i had a few krona to spend on on beer not that i had a lot to play with back in those days but you know you go down you sort of set yourself up to go down for a couple of drinks but you go late right because the beers were so hideously expensive and it's about 10 pound a pint and that was back then so god knows what it costs now you'd have to sort of remortgage if you wanted a night out on the lash but um we could buy the the homebrew so friends at home in case you're wondering what i asked you i asked did he drink homebrew over there and it's basically this stuff moonshine oh moonshine yeah basically that's it in the states they call it moonshine yeah this is why i um the publisher sent me this book because i saw it on their website and i said could i podcast this person because i'm fascinated with all things a bit rebellious and yeah yeah of course in in norway you you get individuals that own a still and they drip off this homebrew put it in a two litre coca cola bottle or whatever yeah everyone knows someone in the village that does the homebrew and you go around pay them a few crowns and this is just it yeah and you basically stoke up on that for the first kind of a half of the evening and perhaps a nine nine or half nine or something in the evening you'd basically rock up at the local bar i mean there was only this one bar in town it was a bar slash the nightclub next door but it was it was just it it seemingly all rather innocent because it was you know very rural community but great great fun and um yeah there was there was always a few few sort of nights nights in this local establishment that i remember but i had a lot of fun and games in general sort of living in norway and it was a tremendous life experience and um i feel quite privileged to have lived that slightly alternative life and that slightly alternative culture in my younger years that um resonates um strongly with me when i look back and um yeah and i recommend anyone um particularly if you're looking for something a little bit different go spend some time in scandinavia travel around because it's a stunning country and um there's just outdoor the outdoor world the outdoor scene there is just phenomenal if you like skiing if you like hiking if you like uh any kind of water sports um it's all on your doorstep you know yes amazing amazing part of the world um moving back to your um special forces story so i'm i'm assuming what did you is it 21 sas is that there yeah so that came a little bit later so initially so how i kind of got into it always um i originally so i actually just through my time at university i joined something called the cambridge university officer training corps and um this was a great unit um whereby you could get proper exposure to what the british army had to offer and i did some wonderful things like i went on these what they call fam visits and they were like familiarization visits to to to to cut around different um regiments and cores of you know indeed the british army and so it might be artillery one weekend or it might be kind of a you know a chance to practice with infantry skills and you know we're perhaps hosted by the royal anglion regiment which was the local unit up at um kings linn and then they had of course the two battalions with the vikings and the poachers so the first and second battalion of of the royal anglion regiment so we had you know i think i remember different psi so staff instructors when within cambridge otc had different skill sets some what some guys might have been um warrant officers in reavey so word electrical mechanical engineers then organize a fam visit to the reavey we do a fam visit to um artillery like i mentioned down at lark hill and the camp sort of down towards um solesbury and we were working on the planes with no proper artillery assets of um of the british army um and then later on we did competitions so you know it might be an infantry competition for example can bring patrols across the sort of the boggy mountains of breccan and and and black mountain in wales or we might do um a competition towards the end of the summer with the king king george the sixth gunnery competition with with the um with the royal artillery for the army so altogether fantastic exposure a bit of a recruitment workshop for the british army meaning you know they were interested to sort of hire you prospectively as a junior officer perhaps as a reservist or indeed to go forward for for regular commission um and then moving on from sort of otc antics i got the opportunity to to do a number of courses so interestingly my co was pretty pro and onside so he recognized that i was quite keen as an individual he sent me back and forward to norway a few times and i did like some ski courses with the british army i think i did a skiing instructors course eventually i did an stl's course i ski tool leaders course it was basically like ml but on skis in the mountains um these are all like joint services kind of tickets or courses that you can go off to do um i did driving courses all the way to like you know class one sort of hgb one i did some sailing courses um to to day skip a level i did and then um i think i did a pti's course and then so i really you know took took advantage of what was on offer and and the time that was available because it was great focus for me you know and then the two highlights for me with otc was um in my penultimate year um that was of university so year three um i then i put myself forward so i volunteered to go forth to do the um the p company course which was the the british army regimental selection for the power street regiment and i went up to catarick in north yorkshire and um that course i found was utterly nails so i went through as a a junior or so a white t-shirt officer cadet so i got a little bit more scrutiny and a bit of a tough time of it and as a white t-shirt i pretty much got you know the full the full kind of horrors and and pretty pretty much beaten up and subjected to a lot of criticism um at various intervals of the course i found it utterly challenging and extremely character building when it really digs deep um but i surprised myself i got through it um i felt like by the skin of my teeth because i felt like i was being beasted within an inch of my life pretty much morning and afternoon you know every day of the week for some three weeks duration and i did get through the process and that culminated with in the test week with the all arms p company selection program and then following that i've probably developed that little bit more confidence and i i went forward for um the uh the short service commissioning process with the royal military academy at sandhurst so that was about another about a month's course um down in in camberley in in surrey so then that was that was the very sort of end of my sort of otc era and i pretty much exhausted you know the what i could potentially do within that um within that group within that um within that core if you will and then it was put to me actually it wasn't necessarily my idea um you think it would be but it was actually put to me that um you know i'd give i'd have you know relative success with p company with with uh with sandhurst and stuff like you know being on a couple of cambering patrols at that stage you know these patrolling premier sort of infantry patrolling competitions with the british army and had some success with a bronze and a silver medal so my superiors and the staff instructors and the commanding officer at cambridge turn around and said you might want to consider going forward for um selection for uk sf so this is how it sort of came about and i thought i thought about it at first and i was quite daunted by the prospect because you know you'd you'd heard about the the the likely statistics of you know those that were successful versus those that weren't typically successful and of course i'd read a few books you know sort of uh you know good old uh you know andy mcnav sort of chris ryan sort of era with some of those um those narratives that were coming out in the 90s and i'd read some of these books when i was a bit younger and sort of christ you know i don't know if that's for me and the likelihood is i'm probably going to fall by the wayside and get binned but actually it's a different um in my experience sort of humbling going through the processes um it's actually contrary to a lot of what you think and you don't naturally necessarily get binned off of the program if you're going to fall by the wayside as it were as an individual and not get through it's primarily because you choose to voluntary withdrawal or vw from the process um as the terminology goes because you pretty much lose heart and that i saw that and i witnessed that in a lot of individuals and absolutely you know um hands down i very much um you know on occasion sometimes felt like i didn't necessarily have the metal or the stuffing to be able to pull through all of that because if for me as a reservist it was actually a 13 month program and there was many times when i felt like i maybe should consider throwing the towel in but there was something innate within me that refused to let go so i was a bit like a sort of uh to give you an analogy i was a bit like you know a little yorkshire terrier because i'm not a big guy you know sort of average sort of height guy sort of 72 kilograms sort of five foot 10 quite a natural racing snake but i was like that little you know yorkshire terrier on the end of a rope and you know where the owner dangles the rope and the terrier bites on and then the owner perhaps lifts this little rope into the air and you got the terrier sort of hanging off it by his teeth well that was the analogy that i would use i i just held on at all costs i just refused to allow myself to cave in to the pressures because i knew that i'd been through these different processes that i described in the lead-up to all of this and that did help me that helped me a lot because i thought well if i've been through this process and then that process then surely there's something about me that that should be able to hold on and then the truth is if you can hold on for long enough and it's not easy make no bones it's definitely not easy but 13 months you know and if you've got that hunger and that will to hold on then as i found out you might just surprise yourself so from my observations a lot of you know peers and contemporaries that i perhaps went through the selection process with uh perhaps just lost heart or perhaps you know they've got other pressures in their life that were really pressing like put it family or employers or let's just say other commitments that that perhaps were taking precedence in their mind and whereas SF should have been taking precedence because it has to and if you don't put that at the forefront and stay hungry then the chances are you will probably lose heart you'll start to make excuses and then you'll kind of drop off the curve with the kind of pressure of it all as it were um so it's not necessarily rocket science i would suggest it's not impossible but as an individual you do have to really really want it but there's many examples in life where you have to really want something whether it's you know you're following an educational path or you're you're perhaps putting all your you're throwing everything into perhaps learn a new trade and get qualified you know there's just many times in life where if you want to achieve and if you want to to make something of yourself as an individual then you really just have to hold on and if you hold on for long enough then you might just surprise yourself with the process so that's the sort of take from that and that's probably the lesson that i would have you know for anybody really um so yeah um i mean it's by no means a boast because yes i was successful with the sf process as a reservist and i ended up joining and getting badged into uh two one sas as par or under the umbrella of of uk special forces but i i never actually for the records got to really utilize that i never really necessarily went anywhere in the operational sense so this is you know um something that i was looking back you know i slightly regretted because i put in essence i'd been a reservist for about seven and a half years and a five of the latter years i was with with uh two one sas and i was due to go on an operational deployment and i'd been in that unit or that regiment for five years and i'd done all sorts of training all over the world and let's just say that i'd been to lots of different environments from you know sweaty sort of humid jungle to you know mountainous terrain to temperate environments across europe and and sort of you know the deserts of north africa to also you know a couple of different locations in the in the extreme sort of northerly latitudes of the arctic circle so i got to really test myself as a soldier within within that sort of uh specialism of of sf in different environments all around the world and i suppose the the interesting thing was i i perhaps worked in temperatures from minus 45 celsius to probably on the flip side sort of plus 45 degrees celsius in in the sort of the warmer climates and really you know tough brutal physical environments that you know a human could operate in and what did that really teach me again it was all about holding on because just because you get through selection doesn't mean to say that you know it's going to be a walk in the park i mean the reason why they the selection is is quite tricky and it's quite tough is because ultimately when you're in the patrols you need to know and you need to learn how to just hold on because the work is quite um you know it's uh it's um you know there's an element of um what's the word i'm looking for but endurance that you have to have to operate in those different environments and and that sort of hunger to be able to dig deep so that's what my time in the in the services really taught me it was about how to to hold on how to really you know work hard to sort of dig deep and ultimately find it within yourself to sort of pull that term that gritty work out of the bag and sort of make it happen for the sake of you know your own role within the unit and that and and and par for the team with your oppos that was what it was all about but then you know realistically for me as an individual you know interestingly all of that that i'd done all of those years of you know lung bursting gut wrenching effort little did i realize that you know in my in my case what was it all for well it was really inadvertently seemingly what was going to set me up for the next phase of what i was going to encounter and you know hands up this was something completely abstract completely out of the blue that just knocked me on my you know gluteus maximus you know and the rug got pulled from underneath me in terms of what happened next so i in the summer of 2007 and i mentioned i was just about to go on an operational deployment with my unit and i'd been building up the training and you know sort of ramping up all of that effort and we were told that we were due to deploy but we had a bit of downtime so i chose to go and fulfill an ambition it's perhaps a lifelong ambition that goes back to sort of childhood and i was very much inspired by my late grandfather who trained as a pilot and he was also bit of a spotter with aviation and when i was a young kid he would take me to loot an airport to sort of observe the aircraft taking off in the distance the commercial aircraft and so this this this idea that i perhaps wanted to fly one day it was it was there from a very young age and so that summer 2007 when i was told that i was going to be volunteering and i was going to be heading out to operational deployment i wanted to fulfill that ambition to learn to fly now i didn't necessarily have long we're talking about a six-week window to try to make it happen so i decided to not just walk the walk but to talk the talk so the first thing that i needed to achieve was to go to the US Embassy in London and to try to persuade the authorities that i was not some kind of risk because remember this was in the aftermath of 9-11 and you know to specifically want to go to florida in the states to learn to fly uh because i was you know the likelihood was i was going to fulfill the ambition and and have that strong kind of meteorological time frame that window to get the flying done and hopefully i wasn't going to get rained off sort of three or four days a week and that was the risk if i was perhaps training in in the UK what year was this right so that was the summer of specifically we're talking sort of july august of 2007 in the summer of gosh you were there you were there just after me i i did my flying training in i think it's 2005 in in florida yeah it would have been probably you know a couple of years after you chris but i you know but from what i understand i definitely wasn't as successful as you in this uh in this arena so i went off and um and and i'd been so i embarked on this comprehensive flying training program to do my my training my ppl and um on this one particular day so i'm going to fast forward now about a month into the process i'm now piloting command and i'm i'm solo and i've been solo for about eight days and on this one moment i'm working up in the pattern sort of doing my sort of movements up in the pattern i'm at 1000 feet indicated and i'm looking at the altimeter in front of me on the dashboard and all of a sudden i looked sort of general observation i was looking left looking right looking forward and as i looked at my left hand canopy window i saw a thin streak of visible yellow orange flame and it was clearly emanating from the front portion of the fuselage so the front aspect of the aircraft itself the light aircraft single engine piston and as i looked and looked again i sort of did a double take i've got my left hand on a control stick my right hand on the throttle and as i'm banking around to my left and then sort of downwind crosswind and then final turn into wind the fire externally that i'd witnessed outside through the canopy window breached the cockpit internally and um suddenly i looked down at my feet working on the rudder pedals sort of left and right and i looked down i could see the yellow flame sort of breach and the flames were lapping around my feet and my ankles so you know um i won't deny that initially there was starting to be this fluster and this panic in my mind and i'm starting to take stock of what's going on inside the small two-seater chamber you know cockpit of the aircraft and i'm thinking about everything that's going on it's literally and sort of figuratively getting quite sort of heated in there as i'm trying to process what's going on and this emergency and as i'm descending and i'm just trying to sort of hastily bring the aircraft down towards the threshold so the landing point in the distance for the active concrete runway below in the distance but as i'm descending the flame was starting to build up so as i'm watching altimeter it gets down through 700 600 500 feet there about the flame was about now half the height of the chamber of the cockpit so it's roughly about sort of belly height as i'm sat in that left hand sort of skipper seat of the of the light aircraft and it was at that moment where the initial sort of fluster in my mind gave way to okay i've got a grip now and i know what it is that i've got to do and i've got a plan of action and that's what i needed so i immediately just veered gently with the stick to my left so i'm away now moving away from the concrete runway in the distance below and i'm just starting to glide in heading towards a grassy embankment and then i'm immediately reverted back to my training and you know it was the emergency protocol or the emergency drill for the aircraft and i remember follow the train so i just turned the key off the key to the ignition off the red switches for magnetos alpha and bravo off off the master switch off the lights off the scrubs off in the center column there's a fuel pump i flicked that switch to the off position rotate the fuel selective valve through 90 degrees off i'm still gliding in left hand on the control stick right hand on the throttle so i've knocked off the throttle now and i'm scrubbing as much airspeed as i can just sort of gently flaring to sort of reduce airspeed as much as i dare and then i ripped off my headset quite low level just a couple hundred feet through it in the opposite footwell because the comms with the tower below was futile because i was so low level and i remember probably the most extraordinary and important piece of information and advice that i've received from one of the us instructors was you know if there's an a problem if there is an emergency fly the damn aircraft and obviously what the guy meant by this was don't lose control and maintain control at all costs particularly in the emergency concentrate on piloting and flying the aircraft so having shut down everything and removed the headset and i'm now probably very low level about you know less than a couple hundred feet i carefully unbuckle the three point harness so that's the buckle around my waist and i've got the the harness running over left and right shoulder and around my waist i unbuckle all of that wriggle out of it and then i undo the left hand canopy door to my left and then i that pops up to the vertical position like a bit of a Lamborghini style door and then very low level now so i'm there's more sort of wind coming in and that was a bit of a double-edged sword because it kind of called the flames around my body but the increased wind was actually growing the flames so it was starting to aggressively grow the flames and i can remember those last moments within the cockpit i was literally sort of in a vain bid to sort of protect my airway from flame ingress because the flames were lacking my face now and when i shut in a bid to protect my eyesight because i didn't want them to get too damaged from the flame and an extremely low level so 50 feet 40 feet 30 feet looking left looking right looking forwards looking for hazard looking for obstacles approximately 20 feet so i was like sort of uh i described it i was kind of like jack jack in the box sort of jack rabbit i i managed to clamber quickly onto the seat and then open through the open door aperture so got out onto the left wing and stood momentarily looking only at the horizon not looking down and then i took a giant leap from the trailing edge of the left wing snapped my feet and knees together in the air hands above my head and i said look only the horizon and i jumped so off the back of the left wing and i was probably running in at about 30 knots estimated and and i was probably no more than about one five or 15 feet when i made that jump from the left wing of the aircraft and the motivation for that was the fact that i was on fire at that stage from head to toe so i landed sort of boom in the the long grass i the intention was to sort of pararole um out of the jump you know when i hit and made contact with the ground but it was um it was too fast and it was too sloppy and and in all sincerity i sort of thrust forwards i smashed my face in a secondary impact with the long florida sort of razor grass and so that was a secondary impact i had a bilateral nasal fracture super orbital eye socket fractures to both eyes i had a multiple soft tissue lacerations from the sharp grass to the right side of my nose to the a l through the lip to the face um and i think i popped a collarbone as well and my left index finger i don't know if you can make that out but that sort of hyper extended and fractured um awkwardly on contact with the ground and but that's not the worst of it the in the action of the jump i'd inadvertently ruptured the colon so that's the large intestine in the in the torso area the colon um and i also lacerated my my liver internally which was now hemorrhaging and bleeding profusely and causing me some some real problems there but on top of all of that and i said the motivation for for the jump was the fact that i was on fire and for the record i was 63 third and fourth degree burns and that was the show stopper and indeed the career stopper for me so you know as i mentioned i might have been you know formerly that guy uh that served with with you know uk sf but in a moment in in in the moment that i described and perhaps 45 seconds of my life and the burn that rug got pulled and it's not a sob story but it's just to say that um my life was literally never going to be the same again now this is where i got exceedingly lucky because having um extinguished the right shoulder and patted that out on the ground and the right scalp which was still on fire like a roman can and i patted that out you can see the extensive damage that i had there um i was able to um quickly get myself into a sort of fetal position on the ground but i'm kind of watching through my spread fingers and i just caught glimpse of the aircraft in the distance probably about no more than a couple of perhaps london double decker buses you know the big red buses away from me and she was nose heavy left wing down and the propeller was actually still about about six feet above the ground so roughly the height of a man and i physically watched my own aircraft crash land into the ground and then subsequently after a short pause boom and there were mighty explosion and i was just outside the fire radius of that and uh but not outside the shockwave and i remember that shockwave going through me and back again i then desperately tried to crawl away in the long grass to make distance uh just to get to get further away from the heat of the inferno and i managed to probably get about 15 feet or so not far and i was utterly exhausted i had nothing left to to give and i just waited and i grew cold and i was recognizing shock so we're talking deep systemic shock perhaps fluids were running out of my body at a rate of knots that you know i i couldn't comprehend or really fathom it was a hideous time and the pain washed over me like a giant tsunami wave the pain was off the charts sort of indescribable and i didn't in all sincerity believe that i was going to be able to hold on because you know you imagine all the fights that i'd ever been through you know with all the sort of military kind of training that i've done and all the sort of selection processes and this was like you know you know to the power of 100 in terms of pain and suffering over anything that i'd ever been through in my former sort of adult life and all that sort of training that preceded and and i honestly didn't think i was going to be able to hold on and i was hyperventilating with the pain and i grew so cold even though the hot florida sun was being down on me and so i took my shoes and socks off and i thought to myself you know this is one journey i'm not going to need shoes and socks for and i tucked everything in neatly laces socks put it by the right hand side of me on the ground and i crossed my arms across my chest because the pain in my torso remember sort of the damage that i'd described was really excruciating pain and i found that by putting my arms across my chest and lifting my knees up to my chest and then gently laying back in the long grass that offered me some some subtle respite from all the pain in the torso area and then just in my sheer you know i guess astonishment really i heard the sort of whoo whoo whoo whoo in the distance and i knew that the authorities and the services were coming for me the sirens grew louder and clearer and again i waited and perhaps within about 15 minutes i think that i'd been holding on for as long as 15 minutes before the paramedics arrived on scene and those boys very diligently must have jabbed me with the morphine suet because trust me life suddenly felt pretty damn good but i know in my in my subconscious that it was very bad i mean it was extremely grave situation and i knew that i was very badly burned from head to toe and i also the irony is here that i also qualified a patrol medic that was something that i specialized in the paramedic level within my role within the army i'd sort of specialized with the unit and i understood implicitly what it meant for a human being to be up against large third degree burns and i knew that was me at that time and i didn't honestly believe that i had that i was going to likely make it however i got very lucky because they airlifted me from the scene so paramedics in the ambulance were on scene within 15 perhaps within another five minutes there was a helicopter on the ground and they put me into the back of a chopper i can remember that sort of and that oscillation from the chopper and we're sort of heading off up into the the Orlando airspace and i got transported by chopper about 20 25 minutes and i went to Orlando regional health center which was arguably one of the top trauma facilities on on the planet because florida is a bit of an adventure playground and they do happen to receive quite a number of big burns patients and certainly on an annual basis so the doctors are very well versed in practicing what they do and they received me and i was pretty far gone in my mind i was thinking you know this is not a life that i want um i was quite happy to sort of check out and indeed i was asking them for for help in that respect to sort of just put me out on my misery really and sort of end it and whatever it took and i was prepared to sign on the dotted line but history was if you like written that day in the sense that um you know the one of the uh you know the the decisions was to actually take me down to theater as it were and to put me under and and and in actual fact they put me under for a period of six months so it's a very long protracted period of traumatic recovery but my god they're very good at what they do and you know and luckily for me i was in the prime of my life still you know i just turned 32 years of age and i had that real fight within me um and with the intervention from the doctors and the specialists and indeed all the nurses in Orlando many many months later i was able to sort of pull through the acute phase of the trauma but albeit you know having gone through you know the worst of the worst i reached the very lowest ebb of humanity and where you can go to so i'm talking pneumonia septicemia renal failure all manner of complex infections you know to to the body and and a myriad of different surgeries so i had um i faced in all um so six months drug induced coma two years inpatient stay within the hospitals within both the us and the uk respectively i had 62 operations under general anesthetic about three years of physical healing you can get your head around that and about five years of probably you know psychological recovery and acceptance to what had happened to me and to therefore coming to terms with the new body in the new skin and the new life because my life changed um dramatically you know i went from being that kind of elite soldier to you know to ground zero and i had to you know um you know um absolutely fight back from the very very lowest ebb like i mentioned and it was a tremendous fight and a tremendous ordeal and to this day i'm not quite sure how realistically i was able to achieve that um but all i will say it probably harks back to you know what i was talking about um perhaps earlier or perhaps it was in a former conversation with you that it's all about will and determination and if you have the ability to to hold on and then you you know realistically you might just surprise yourself and that's what i learned coming through this process that um you know ultimately you know i had to really dig especially deep like way deeper than i'd ever dug before remember i talked about some of the processes that i'd been through in life that this this situation or this ordeal put that into the shadows you know everything in my life in terms of what i thought was tough and suffering and perhaps pain this ordeal you know that it put everything into into the shadows really and um and it was it was monumental in terms of what i had to come through and that that will and that that process of holding on and so that was what i learned that that's what i kind of became and that's what i guess i'm all about now in terms of sharing um the wider story with the the hope and the belief that i could help people with that and so i'm all about sort of resilience and um and and what it is truly to be resilient and and what it is truly to to be able to hold on and to to perhaps carve a new path for yourself as an individual so you know from my humble experience you know what you know what what i learned to understand is no matter how dark life may seemingly stoop you know we can all figuratively turn it around if we want it badly enough and um and that's what it's all about in a nutshell so um yeah it's a new life and it's a new existence should we should we say as i mentioned in in this new body sort of version 2.0 it feels like a new body because i've had that many surgeries and i've been at the um the hands of so many different plastic surgeons you know both sides of the pond um and i've had to accept it all and um i've had to accept that i look a bit different you know when i'm walking down the street and um you know that was a tough thing to swallow i remember you know the first time i sort of stepped out in public you know away from the hospital and you know you look a bit different and people are suddenly looking at you and looking at you again they're sort of doing a double take in the street uh admittedly you know the face was a lot more swollen and uh sort of you know looking traumatized back then it sort of settled down an awful lot and the scars have uh sort of blended in a bit more but i always going to look different and um i accepted that change of appearance and um you know um life is certainly worth living but i also learned that you know you've got to grab it by the horns once again and set yourself new goals new challenges and that's what i did and that's what uh i was able to go on and do so that's really the story in a nutshell chris gosh a million questions ironically and don't hate me for this but some of them some of them are about the the the piloting procedure and what what was going through your mind but let's let's take that uh later and let's let's start with it all sounds just not just utterly incredible i mean my god jumping from burning planes it's i used to watch your bionic man as a kid and that was the sort of thing you saw in uh uh you know from from hollywood but the the trauma you went through as an incident is on on such a magnitude that i just i don't i don't i don't even know if i'm able to try to get my head around it and what i want to know is was there a point at which the trauma became pain or the trauma became depression or or or or did it you know did did your experience get worse with anger um i mean let's just use someone else an example so mark omrod who i'm sure you're probably familiar with a former submarine lost three limbs in afghanistan he was remarkably sort of chipper for someone that's just lost three major parts of his body and i have no doubt that there were you know lots of tears and lots of soul searching etc etc but ultimately he just looked himself in a mirror and went right okay let's crack on and and he seems to have done a really remarkable job of that yeah i know mark um is an extraordinary bloke um i'm sure he won't mind me saying that um but even though i know that you bootnecks raw marines you don't necessarily uh like to be put on a pedestal necessarily but uh you know you've got generally an extraordinary mindset and that sort of tenacity but i remember the first time i saw mark uh many moons ago i think i'd heard about him or seen him on social media or whatever and being a keen diver i actually went to the um the london dive show at the time and i think it was like url's court and so i rocked up on the saturday or whatever it's saturday morning i see this fella in clearly in prosthetic limbs um in the distance in the in the hall and um and as i got closer i see a guy not just in with prosthetic um limbs but also a prosthetic arm and he's dishing out leaflets and he's going up along the row of seats one after the other putting a leaflet onto every seat and he's going up and down the aisles and i thought that's i think i recognize that guy it's mark umrah so i went up and sort of introduced myself and we got talking and it just dawned on me you know because he's extraordinary that um you know you know ordinarily you'd see some able-bodied person doing that putting the leaflets out on all the chairs but you know mark's uh very driven and i think that was testimony to the character of and the caliber of the guy even back then this was years ago that he was there going up and down the rows chucking out all the leaflets on the seats and i mean since then i know he's gone on to do incredible feats and you know sort of uh you know sort of walking events and he's doing a swim or something to some big sponsored swim in the pool and yeah he just he just never stops and and that's the tenacity that's the mindset and and again you know if you've got that hunger if you've got that will no matter what's happened you can surprise yourself you can still go on and achieve incredible things i mean fortunately for me you know i wouldn't allow the injury to dictate my legacy and even though i'm not going to be that kind of elite sort of soldier as sort of part of service with uk sf or whatever those days were numbered i had to accept that no way i could run with the squadron anymore with the injuries that i had and but no big deal you know because right you've got a slightly adjusted toolkit but you can still do stuff with the new toolkit albeit perhaps at a different pace and and i was able to go on and similarly you know like mark i was able to do challenges and events i did you know london marathon and it took me a long time i did it in like eight eight hours 30 because of the injuries to my lower limbs were pretty debilitating and slowed me down a lot but i was able to go on and sort of improve upon that i think with new york this is what i did a 707 time and then my very best effort in london on a third marathon occasion um and it was actually my last one but i did 615 it's not so much a boast but just to show that people that you know again with the will and determination irrespective of disability if you want something and you're hungry enough you can still pull something out of the bag and you can still participate and for me that's what it's all about it's not about you know collecting the medal or sort of breaking the record or you know um you know trying to sort of you know be at your sort of you know pinnacle point in life but you it's about achieving your goals and dreams irrespective i mean i've been able to go on and retrain as a pilot and and do challenges and events all over and if you want something you can do it you've just got to want to do it and and that's that's the testimony really you know i want i want to just go back to be they an induced coma that that just sounds of insane in itself i mean i don't even know how doctors manage someone in that state when you bear in mind they can't be eating or drinking so i guess it's all coming from a tube and then what what nutrition do you put in that tube that isn't going to make them even more sicker than they they already are there's just so many yeah i mean it was complex with drug induced coma there's an awful lot that goes on i mean i was fed through a tube a yellow tube up into my nasal sort of pharynx down into my stomach directly so you know you're fed sort of liquid food products for the duration of the time that i was in induced coma and i was intubated so you see a scar here in my sort of in the sort of lower sort of portion of the the airway here and that meant that a machine was kind of effectively breathing for me i became you know i quote you know forgive me but i quote like a small aspect of my my own story my own book life on the threads grab a copy of your book then if you've i'm sorry i don't know i don't sorry oh no that's not mine sorry that's somebody else's another another remarkable gentleman that sent me a book that i've just started reading a guy called ed jackson here but he was paralyzed his next former rugby player but was able to kind of go on and sort of turn his life around but anyway my own book i wrote and got published recently with penguin life on a thread and just to quote a very tiny aspect he's not to sort of go on too much about that but i became the adjunct of machinery so a living receptacle for machines tubes wires and powerful pharmaceuticals and that's what i became and that pretty much says it all really when i give you a just a small quote from the book to describe you know that very lowest ebb of where i reached you know on the on you know you know as a recipient of of acute medical care and and i was down and out for the count and i was at the mercy of the medics sort of looking after me 24 7 doctors nurses specialists of all sort of you know all departments and i had to you know in fact i was completely you know unaware of what was going on because the remarkable thing about drug induced coma is that you're kept under a level where your actual conscious self is not aware of what's going on but your subconscious self is still fighting you know and and driving all bodily systems internally to keep up the good fight as it were but you haven't got a scooby sort of outwardly consciously of what's going on and it's a remarkable process that i went through and and i guess you know in the in the main sense that i didn't really suffer or at least it didn't feel like i was suffering consciously but the real work in my mind began after that initial six month period because i was roused you know out of the drug induced coma and sort of awoken as it were and i really had to dig very deep to sort of to keep fighting and to keep up that daily uh extraordinary effort so you wake up after six months well that's what it felt like i mean don't forget you know the the period of drug induced coma you're not asleep for six months i mean you are you know you kind of live by a routine you know you're awake you're asleep you're awake but you don't really know what's going on because what they do is they use analgesia to keep your mind under a certain point so you're you're pretty much uh you know semi sort of anesthetized and it's very clever there was periods where i sat bolt up right having conversations with people in the hospital but i could not tell you you know the content of the the dialogue of those conversations because i was effectively still within that period of being drug induced and um there's periods where you're very much then they they titrate they add a bit more uh analgesia and put you under that little more so you're in a deeper sleep to enable you to rest more and say your body to be able to rest and fight more um but it is extremely clever and and this period like i said this period for me went on for six months but then um the next phase was the sort of step down unit so after the intensive care unit and that was a high dependency unit step down where you're awake now and you're fighting and you're conscious about what's going on and that to me was the real fight because i had to you know live with a pain and suffering to a degree and if i needed more um um in analgesia to help with the pain or or whatever i'd have to shout out for that you know and um and it became just a perpetual sort of daily nightmare i felt like that mouse on that treadmill kind of going around and around around but i wasn't necessarily making progress down the track if you understand that is how it was in my mind that you know it was a sort of an endless fight with little progress and and i think testimony to that is that i got about 18 months down the road so we're talking year and a half after the incident and the burn and um i just wanted to throw in the towel and i wanted to give up on on life as i knew it and and i became enthusiastic actually about the prospect of assisted suicide and i just generally didn't think that i had it in me to kind of keep going because i've been fighting for so long and said mouse on a treadmill for so long and and i challenge anybody you know when they were in the condition that i was to keep up that pretense and to just keep fighting day in day out um so there was a period where i really desperately wanted to check out and i i just i had an idea an ambition to to sort of to go through the process with dignitas in switzerland and that's the route i wanted to go down but fortunately i had some help um some uh some help from uh somebody from from ministry and uh from you know from a religious uh um sort of minister came to my assistance and offered me a bit of an ultimatum and sort of said that uh he would help me and he would sort of help to transport me and take me but um you know i made it i made a sort of a deal with him if you will that i was going to hold on for just one more calendar month and then during that that that that that further month i was somehow able to turn a corner i don't know how on earth i did it uh it's you know it's beyond my comprehension really quite honestly how i started to indeed turn a corner but let's just say some good things started to happen and i went for sort of further surgeries and there was some good results on the horizon and i started to to see some healing progress and then ultimately i was able to see the light and um look towards that and start to work towards the the sort of nurturing process to to pull myself out of a long dark tunnel a couple of years on um i eventually got out of the hospital then got home for the third year and then i learned to to to sort of uh to feed to to write my name and to sort of walk independently albeit with assistance at first but you know um i was able to really to pull it out of the bag and to go on and to be this this kind of version 2.0 as i call it and and you know um and then the challenges and everything that came much much later and that was about more about the self-belief and that that sort of nurturing process but yeah long road chris and um we get there in the end but burns is probably you know i don't want to compare it i mean you know every you know respect goes out to my fellow uh service personnel that have been through you know tough or deals in their own lives respectively and they've obviously had their own challenges um whether they've been blown up or you know avatations or uh you know burns i you know i know guys that have lost their eyesight and been sort of inadvertently blinded but you know there were some tremendous challenges that so many of of my fellows or contemporaries ex-servicemen and women have faced but you know again you know i think you know the testimony is that you know a lot of these individuals have shown great will great determination and great tenacity and they've sort of managed to pull out the bag and and go on and live sort of interesting extraordinary and remarkable lives once again um and so yeah it's just how much do you want it you know and that that's that's life in a nutshell really how was it for your family went to heat how i mean how soon did they get out i'm assuming they came out to florida yeah so um i was lucky that all my family in sort of stages came out um my mother pretty much was tremendous uh support she was out living with me more or less 24-7 and and then when i got back to chelmsford the burns unit in essics where they flew me back to stanston and then transported me to chelmsford burns unit after america um you know my mum was there very you know based locally um and fought and supported by various kind of armed forces charities to enable her to sort of you know literally be at my bedside a lot of the time and that for me was great you know moral personal support you know other siblings i have a brother and a sister that were able to support me as well and visit and my father uh when he was able to because he was sort of busy working at the time but yeah i was lucky you know a lot of friends visited you know had sort of ex service colleagues friends that had visited and to give me some sort of moral support along the way and of course a lot of these visits in the early days i don't even remember because you know i'm still in that sort of um you know period of sort of drug induced coma so i was having visits even during that stage i don't even necessarily remember the visits because of the level of sort of analgesia and sedative that i was under um so yeah tough times in in retrospect um but um you know i think i you know i tried to turn it around and i tried to look at myself in the mirror as it were and and realize that you know you know i am a glass half full kind of a guy rather than you know glass half empty and that i'm one of the lucky ones that it could have been a lot worse i mean i could have been far more disfigured i could have lost you know body parts i could have maybe not made it you know and so the fact that i'm here cracking on with life and living a somewhat relatively active life once again i count my blessings and i'm grateful for small mercies as it were and um yeah i mean i'm intent on just making the most of you know the time i've got left and hopefully hopefully sharing sharing the you know the you know those sort of motivational messages you know how has it been with the media because this is a i'll say it again it's just such an extraordinary story um i would imagine they were scrambling over themselves to to get i've had quite a lot of yeah i've had a lot of media input in recent weeks especially i you know i mentioned the book that came out so i got published with with penguin only in mid-may so we're now only um uh you know sort of early july so it's been it's only been about six weeks or so and then i had an initial scramble with the publicity so i was doing bits and pieces for bbc itv you know chris evans breakfast show um and various newspapers so either the sun covered it you know the mirror um the the daily mail and there was a lot of interest and i mean i'm still getting calls now um i did a i did a piece recently for bbc radio four on saturday live and then um i've got interest from um from um i think is it outlook of bbc world service so i've got that sort of pending and a lot of it so it's something it feels somewhat repetitive but again these are all quite interesting platforms and again if it helps me to sort of um share the story and and that can help people to a degree you know please share it sounds with the the the motivation and help to you know to inspire people and to develop other people's sort of aspirations in life then that's partly why i do what i do as a speaker and share it and um and the media of course you know has has shown interest and and played a role in my life up until now and indeed in previous years i've been doing a lot with the media on and off as an ambassador for help heroes i mean that's a role that i've done now for the last eight years um you know for and on behalf of the charity so these are this is important the media is useful um you try to take advantage of that in the same way as they try to take advantage of viewers as an individual with a story it may not always be there you know you may you may not always have opportunities and i guess you know like like a lot of people that are partly in the public spotlight you do what you do um for a period i think while you can and you just try to um to to sort of go with the flow on that you know and um and it can be useful on a technical point did did you ever get as far as learning how to crab an aircraft learning how to it's called crab oh yeah absolutely so in order to you know um basically lose altitude very quickly no no absolutely for sure but there was a risk with me the fact that i was only 1000 feet okay when the fire ensued and breached the cockpit there was a risk that i didn't have long in order to you know make or set myself up for a clean sort of natural glide into that new sort of flight path that i'd sort of given myself yeah um and time is of the essence especially when you're low level you kind of need time to be able to control the aircraft and i didn't want to lose massive height so quickly so in terms of crabbing or slipping the aircraft to uh sort of scrub off significant altitude quickly that was an option certainly but i needed time to follow the emergency protocol and execute the drill for that particular type of aircraft so what i mentioned about that sort of shutdown procedure i wanted time to be able to do that in a controlled manner and effectively and then concentrate on the glide and really control that and scrub off the airspeed sort of safely to a level that i was sort of comfortable with jamie did you had you realized at this point that you are going to have to get out and jump or were you yeah so it's a good question i made the decision quite early it wasn't something that i thought very last minute so i'd actually made that decision um sort of relatively high still albeit probably i was only you know 500 feet or so and then i just was able to follow um the protocol for that emergency procedure and i i feel that i got away with it by the skin of my teeth and um you know a little bit of quick thinking quick action and then of course making the jump some might say sort of grace of god sort of getting out of that cockpit on time um but albeit you know the truth is the damage was done i mean if i believe that i didn't i didn't uh you know try to land it in the conventional sense i would have been you know running in with too much time and the likelihood is um the fire within the cockpit would have absolutely overwhelmed me and and undeniably got the better of me hence why i made the decision to sort of veer away and set myself up for the um the exit whilst i was still airborne because it was a way for me to get out of that burning cockpit a lot quicker um and yeah so i was incredibly lucky to be able to pull it off but um my my my strong my absolute strong feeling was that if i'd have tried to land it in the conventional sense i would have been overwhelmed and i wouldn't have made it and indeed if that fuel feed had caught the um the um the fuel tanks of the aircraft then i would have been an absolute goner if that fuel feed had caught the tank within you know whilst i was still airborne and and that was delayed by virtue of the fact that i'd actually cut the fuel pump and turned off the fuel selector valve so it did catch obviously once she piled in and then subsequently exploded obviously the fire had caught that um that tank then and hence hence the sort of bomb going off but um yeah that was the absolute fear for me that um that i was going to be subject to all of that is there an actual checklist for if your plane catches fire do you remember not necessarily for fire but there was an absolute there was a there was a checklist for emergency and that was the the simple checklist that i followed so it was a systematic shutdown and in essence i was following uh the dashboard of the um of the cockpit from left to right that's all i was doing and that was the that was the checklist so as i mentioned you know ignition magnetos um master switch strobes uh lights fuel pump fuel selector valve it was just a sequence and the other bits were were pretty much uh no brainer to me so obviously the headset was a hindrance to me so i needed to eliminate that unbuckle the harness so i could indeed clamber out open canopy door clamber out onto wing low level and go for it and and i guess the confidence to do that um and to make that good old-fashioned sort of parachute exit style from the back of the left wing was perhaps born from the um the training that i'd received as an ex-parer myself so i'd done a fair bit of that in different locations around the world and you know of course um refresher training to the year on year within my time within service so it was a bit of a no brainer to me and the confidence to make that jump um certainly was was we came from all of that service and and what i'd been doing uh perhaps other people it might it may not have been an obvious option but for me it was a it was an obvious and quicker way for me to to exit the aircraft gosh it it's like i say it's just it's beyond belief it it's that decision that saved your life clearly um do they have like again it was a long time since i learned to fly but do they have um bloody fire extinguishers in a cockpit do you mean there was an extinguisher in there there was an extinguisher in the in the cockpit but it was in an awkward place behind the um so i was in the left hand seat and this fire extinguisher was behind the passenger seat so it was in quite an awkward place within this particular aircraft type and and in all honesty i didn't have the confidence to to sort of go for that um and the fact that the fire ensued and built up quite quickly uh it was my um my sort of gut feeling if you were if you will um to to to just follow that to that plan for emergency protocol and exit the aircraft that much quicker um maybe if it was a lot higher maybe if i was significantly a lot higher above you know 1000 feet i would have gone for the extinguisher but i know that in doing so it was in an awkward position i may not have been able to even reach round and grapple and and retrieve that uh given that i'm in a three-point fixed harness yeah um so that was a bit of a problem and and if i was a lot higher i probably wouldn't have hesitated to to to reach around and go for that um but i remember like i said my mind flipped back to the advice that i'd received from the us instructors you know above all fly the aircraft meaning maintain control and so i was literally trying to do my best to maintain control and and glide in sort of systematically and comfortably um albeit to a low enough level in order to to make the exit and pull off that um that jump um so yeah the fire's coming from the engine so it's coming essentially from outside the plane through the it had breached so it breached um at the low point underneath where the the footwell was yeah in in front of where my feet were operating on the rudder pedals so that's where they i'd seen the first alert you know the first breach internally and then i'd witnessed that fire sort of building up and i think testimony to this also in terms of my physical medical injuries my my lower limbs so my shin my front portion of my of both shins were very badly burned because they received the longest period of the burn and um and and they actually received fourth degree burn so what that means is there was exposed bone so both tibia were actually um somewhat exposed in the aftermath of the burn because the burn was so deep to the lower shins so that's fourth degree burns and the only reason that could have happened was because the lower limbs took a long significantly long period of burning so like i said the fire was building up within the low reaches of the cockpit so my lower limbs were burning for the longest period fortunately the upper extremities here so the neck and the face were burning for the lesser period um instead in rather than sort of 45 seconds the face was probably burning for i don't know 10 15 20 seconds and so luckily i didn't have fourth degree burns to my face otherwise you know it may have been a whole different story but yeah um you know for the rest of my life i'm going to have like extremely you know very badly burned lower limbs and the scars that go with that and the upshot was that was that i lost a lot of um in fact i lost a whole muscle group so i lost tibialis anterior the shin muscle and i lost deep perineal nerve in both my left and my right lower limbs respectively so that i end up with a bilateral um neuropathy or a bilateral foot drop as a result of that my gosh it's it's um there's a lot of swamping flora there isn't there it's a shame there wasn't any near you that would have been um well there's some ocean in the distance i'll be i'll be honest but it was it was um still albeit a significant uh distance we're probably talking you know just a few short kilometers away to the beach but i was working remember within the the proximity and the vicinity of this small municipal aerodrome or small airport and there was no way that i had the height to to extend myself out towards the ocean otherwise that might have been an incredible option did you say it was near orlando yeah it was in the orlando airspace region so it was out it was in the lower it was in the lower remit of the orlando federal airspace where it occurred yeah it's an interesting situation over over there that a lot of people will buy a plane simply because it's quicker to get around than than driving tremendously popular um you know there are literally um from what i understand there are you know tens of thousands of um private pilots in the states because like you said the states is so big and diverse and driving is not necessarily an option certainly in in perhaps some of the more rural aspects so if people are somewhat affluent and um and they've perhaps got that inclination yeah aviation is a really uh viable option for them to get from A to B um and certainly it's a great place to to fly and and you know i you know if i could have my time over again i probably wouldn't change things i i probably want to go through that same sort of process because it was a tremendous life experience up until that point and you know i'll forever have those memories of you know for sort of flying and sort of experiencing the joy of solo flight um in u.s. airspace it was a wonderful experience when you're doing your public speaking jamie what what sort of questions are people asking you what what what what what are people finding fascinating or or what are they curious about i think that in general i mean a lot of people are um are fascinated by you know the perhaps the detail and the thought process behind the actual incident in that thinking under pressure for example they're making concerted decisions under under pressure when you're under distinct duress so that comes into it you know i speak to corporates especially and they'll they'll talk about sort of uh you know executing sort of mindful decisions under pressure um so that's a thematic for for corporates um but also people are in intensely sort of curious about you know the will to you know how do you hold on and how do you nurture a mindset to keep pushing and going on and uh when you're your backs against the wall as it were and you're you know you've got everything to sort of fight for um and and you know it's uh you know that that's something i think that people are very curious about is about the whole recovery and again not just the physical but the the psychological you know um and that mindset that that ability to to redevelop yourself and to to reframe and to and to perhaps think outside the box and to go on and develop a whole new life because i think that i've it's not really a boast i think i've done a pretty good job at redeveloping my life i mean i could have quite easily you know thrown the towel in or even more tragically i could have turned to perhaps drink or narcotics you know drugs and and and you know felt sorry for myself on the on the contrary you know i decided to grab you know life by the horns and take advantages of opportunities you know events and and sort of challenge myself going forwards and and actually live a you know a newfound you know successful life all over again you know i was able to retrain in various different disciplines and pursuits and and you know i think that's what fascinates a lot of the uh the groups that i speak to is that if someone like me can do it you know then i think there's a hope for a lot of people out there i mean even if you take the latest issues with the pandemic and covid um people obviously have lost a lot and they've lost a lot of liberty and uh and perhaps people have struggled to cope and they felt perhaps sorry for themselves and it found it difficult in terms of their own mental health and and trying to hold on and have that resilience but i think whereby if i can perhaps interject a little bit with my own story and say look you know it's not so much of a boast but look this happened to me this was an extremely dark and undeniable episode of of my life and look if i was able to hold on and i was able to figuratively come through that from being sort of struck down from being sort of that guy that i mentioned to sort of ground zero um and and rebuild the life and sort of go on and retrain and and and re-qualify and perhaps achieve new things and then still have a hunger and and and live life then you know i think it's proof that you know there's hope for many other people out there it goes back to what i said earlier you just have to really want it and you have to stay hungry we all do if we stay hungry we can we can achieve remarkable things i mean i know that you're you know you're you're doing some great things and you've got a few years on me and you're in the pool and you're still smashing it out and you're sort of setting yourself these these extreme sort of challenges and i think that's commendable yeah i i it's 50 50 with me though jamie like i'm not just doing it for me i'm i'm doing it as as an example because i i i don't want to get into too deep a conversation but i just feel we've massively been lied to as a as a as a species and when i see people i mean to just take your situation how is it that we can become so so upset and depressed at say right losing a car valeting business just a silly example right but society's condition has hidden the beauty in life from us that much that we consider something so material and materialistic operations such as that is worth taking your own life for and then we hear your story and it's like it's a if we could get your story and give it to that guy or that girl when they're they're standing on that precipice or they're about to you know hang themselves in a garage and say dude come on look look look you you can start again you know you you you haven't been through this massive cat uh i don't want to say catastrophic isn't the right word but this massive life changing experience and bloody hell if there's ever a lesson for looking at the bloody bright side of life you epitomize it jamie you know well all i tried to i mean um you know like i said i tried to be that glass half full guy you know albeit you know i've got sort of a bit of scarred vision so dodgy hearing from that explosion i described and sort of a few battle scars a few sort of outward facial scars to say the least but you know you know there's always a life worth living in in my in my humble opinion and you know i understand i mean listen people's or deals we don't know what's going on in another person's mind and everybody has their own sort of tolerance to um to challenge and to difficulty and when your your glass you know you may may be able to tolerate a whole lot in your life before your glass sort of spills over with the stress level yeah for other people you know their their spillover point is you know they've got a much smaller sort of vessel and it spills over um and you know it's just one of those things um and and who are we to judge really what goes on in another man's mind if he if he or she reaches the lowest ebb and they they they kind of stoop so low um you know they're kind of considering sort of you know the ultimate act to sort of end it um i mean god knows i was there so i truly understand that i really do but but also on the flip side i firmly believe that um if you learn to you know see the brighter side of life and if you learn to look at um that what life can offer you um even though it might take a little bit of you know external focus you know thinking outside the box uh in order to to to redefine yourself in order to reframe the new narrative for yourself as an individual but you can absolutely go on and achieve you know new things you can you can you can switch you can you can almost you know if the wind's blowing you know from the north and you are once kind of tacking and taking advantage of that well you know figuratively speaking if the wind starts blowing from the you know from the northeast you can you can start to work with that you know and and sail a different path and and tack a new a new um a new a new a new a new track in life again you just need to know or you need to you need to know where the opportunities are coming from and perhaps um you know to to capitalize on and and monopolize on on where the opportunities are and and think a little bit outside the box and stay hungry above all i know i've said that again in the game but if you you know keep the old pecker up because life can always get better it really can you know you you know remember those rainy days and they're really dismal dark sort of rainy days that that prevail every now and again well you know before you know it you know they might last a few days at worst but then guess what you know the heavens will kind of open and and that the sort of the clouds will part and there will be blue skies once again and you can and you can live that to the new version of yourself and the new life but that's what it's all about you know just just hold on you know work with it work with yourself and and hold on and want it and you will get there yeah yes it's it was always got to bear in mind we're a product of our thoughts and our thoughts are temporary that's all they are they can seem really like bad at the time and but but they are temporary they won't last think think you know changes inevitable when uh yeah so hang in there folks for for anyone who might be struggling if you look below um Luke my manager and I we put together a a list of um support agencies there's one link at the bottom of this youtube video and if you click on that link it will take you to a separate website where we've listed as many avenues of support well we've we've listed about 10 to cover both civilian and civilian and military Jamie wow two hours doesn't cover it you know well we we've been chatting for nearly three hours three hours now first of all come back on the podcast and and let's just chat again because what I think we we haven't talked there's so so much more I think that we can probably yeah and also just be great to chat to you about you know about things like triathlon about stuff that's not so not so deep um obviously for this first one we had to we had to go into into that area but um I think we could probably do a part two and I can tell you about my triathlon story but it wasn't so successful but I can tell you about what I still got out of it even though I sort of failed miserably but that might interest some of you I love failure and I I'm because I'm an old man and I don't care about anything except my family I I love fate I love I love coming last and triathlon as much it means as much to me coming laugh and and chuckling as it probably does the guy who comes first um so I got nothing approved mate I was abysmal at the weekend it is trying and participating accounts my age so yeah that's see it the weekend it may as well have been um glue in fact I think glue I'd have been faster I could have maybe pulled my way through it a bit quicker um but yeah it's uh we get one life mate don't we and that's yeah we have to roll with the punches and and and and I think your analogy of the yachting is good and and then keep surging forth as the greats Muhammad Ali once said float like a butterfly sting like a bee yes jamie look after yourself stay on the line so I can thank you properly when I hit the record button off but um yes what what a story but more over what a guy so thank you ever so much hey thank you Chris oh you're welcome you're very welcome to everybody at home much love to you all thanks for tuning into another episode of the bought the t-shirt podcast if you could please like and subscribe that would be wonderful and see you soon