 You know, over an extended period of time I was involved in a number of huge attacks and we lost a lot of people. But as I came down to the roundabout, we swung a left. There was a massive car bomb about 150 metres in front of us. We actually cracked one of our arm windows at the back. We kind of like shmagged up and put make-up on and on that lot to make it kind of fit in a little bit. We were in two car moves across the whole of the country. And they lost about nine people in the West End of Kidna. Nick, how are you, brother? How are we doing, Chris? Yeah, top dog, mate. Top dog. I've been for my little run this morning, so that always makes me feel special for the day. And you're taking lots of people running. I am, yeah, remotely online and also on the hills and farewell runs and stuff like that as well, yeah. There's lots of events coming up in there so people are kind of getting back into it a little bit. Yeah, let's get into all that because I love it. I'm also interested from a sort of coaching perspective. How do you get clients? How do you keep them? What sort of things are people looking for? Because ironically, I've just gone from being the commando coach to being the legends coach. I did that for a few reasons. I won't go into that now, but I'm just thinking about audience perception and a few other things. But 23 SAS, that's something that comes up a lot on this show. Is it? Yeah, we have to watch a lot of your posts. Yeah, you're right. Yeah, people are fascinated by it. Not of interest, yeah. Yeah, I think you hear a lot about the regular SAS. There's kind of no secrets there, are there anymore? It probably should be for the special air service, but I think everyone kind of knows the score. But coming up, doing this as a civilian is, that's no mean feat, is it not? No, and I know it's changed quite a lot over the years, especially since I left, which was officially in like 2004. But what I know is kind of going back to what you said earlier on about elite outdoor fitness and what we offer. I think I kind of captured a little bit from the early days from when I was in the military and then when I left and then I trained to join 2-3 specifically. I found that the training that was given to these young lads or whatever that were trying to join 2-3 or SBSR or even 2-2, et cetera, wasn't sufficient enough to get them through and so the rate of failure, which is even high and out, to be fair, was there and there was no need for it because I was relatively... Well, I was very fit and strong when I went for selection and it was a bit of a shocker to me when I went for selection because without sounding big-headed, I kind of was the fittest person I knew when I was in the military, but then when I went on 2-3 selection, I found it so hard because I wasn't specifically heel fit. I was probably more power fit than I was SF fit in that respect and there wasn't any guidance around it. Maybe we should speak to, you know, and I think they're missing out on that. It happens to be actually that we're the go-to, or I am specifically because I'm the only one that does personal training for SF now, with regards to 2-1, 2-3, a little bit of SBSR and 2-2 as well. And I'm the go-to place now for that. So we've kind of got like a hidden website where people can get a business card off of certain locations and they'll flash it and it comes up with a little bit more info regarding myself, what I've done, what selections I've done, because I've done a couple to just go up the tiers like 2-3 and HDR. And yeah, and I think hopefully we've got 100% success rate of getting people in at the moment, so we're doing quite well in that respect. Yes, just in lightness, what does HDR mean? It was like a higher contingency like reserve regimen that was supposed to bring 2-1, 2-3 in line with 2-2 so that we could work with them, not do all the, some of the like, you know, for example, the black stuff, you know, dropping up the sky at 20,000 feet, we didn't do any of that, but it allowed us to go on operations with 2-2 and just kind of suppose, because we were like the second tier, go to maybe 1.5 tier, I suppose. And I'm not sure what even exists now. I think there was about 36 folks that went through. It was in Africa and you had to like do 4K now on the hills, do the sea course, et cetera, et cetera. So yeah, so I was lucky enough to do that and it was there. Got you, we'll come on to that because obviously everyone's always fascinated to know what does the regular SAS think of the reserves. But tell us more then. So you actually train people that want to go on these kind of high power courses then, these high powered military courses. Yeah, Marines, power, French kind of commandos and power, the legionnaires and the UK ESF as well. So we're kind of like, we're the unofficial go-to because obviously, you know, there's a lot of hoops to jump through. I'm hoping that one day maybe we'll be a bit more, you know, they'll take us on board a bit more because it becomes a bit more official. But I think the process works, you know, I've done it myself and luckily for me, I did a PHI course when I was in the army. I did sports, nutrition and sports science at university. And so I've got a good background in that and also I'm absolutely passionate about it and I'm not passionate about it at an elite level, although I'm coming names elite outdoor fitness, it's about getting those people, like we just discussed prior to this actually, getting those people that don't know where to start and then they come off it. Because most people, they go in and out of fitness and out of training and they're bound in, they're bound out and even later on in life, you know, they don't understand that they start to lose maybe a little bit their speed, a little bit of their, you know, their muscular kind of body. They start to lose that little bit, start training a little bit differently than you would do if you were 18 or 19 years of age. And that runs in line with training people for the likes of ESF because the age limit has gone up a lot in the last few years but they're not getting, they're getting less people through because when you go for something like that, and this is only my opinion, you need to want it and you need to need it in your life, you know, it's not a passing course in the sense that you have to pass certain specific tests or there is to a certain extent, majority of it is there, on a daily basis you're failing most of the things that you do that you need to continue on and keep pushing as hard as you can all the time. And so there's always that mindset of saying, I just need to keep driving forward, even though I'm feeling like I'm failing at most things that I'm doing because that's the tasks that are at hand, you know, no matter how fit and strong you are, they bring everybody to this very low level of like capability through tiredness and lack of sleep and exhausted of effect of the actual course itself. And I suppose really you, if you've got a lot more in your life, like maybe family and children, and maybe even a good job, they're all draws when you're in that hole to say, come on, back to your normal bloody life because it's a lot better. You know, we had like pilots and like horses that would, they were destined to pass because they were doing so well and they kind of sucked it halfway through and then said, no, I don't want to continue. No, it's a given up course, a lot of people give up. And I think nowadays, because they're, I think the age limit, you know, you might crowd me on this actually, it's changed so much just in the two or three years with COVID and that you've got people that have got a little bit more in their life than maybe a 1920, 21 year old that's already served three or four or five years in the military has, you know, when I went, I didn't, I fell out of my family a little bit, my mum and dad and my brother and I didn't really get a lot of contact with them. I was just training that was on my own. I'd left the military specifically to train and just kind of focus my mind on it. And so it was never an option for me to not complete that and finish it. Yeah, of course. I always get a bit like when people message me and so you want to join up Robert, but it's like, dude, you've got children. What? Don't you like them? Yeah. They want their dad killed in a foreign war zone or something. We are quite deluded in this country about what the military, I think we've, you know, the military is so embedded in our psyche on this island through history that we live in a bit of, psychosis isn't probably the right word, but I think people know what I mean if I say we're a bit deluded about what the role of killing people is. Yeah, I think, you know, for me, you know, I kind of talk for myself, it changed when I had a family. I was quite late coming, I was nearly close to 40 because I didn't just serve in SF and which was, I think, a relatively short code of time, actually. But then that kind of allowed me to jump on and be relatively successful if you want to call it that, doing my job in the right way when I went to Iraq, which was for about five years, and then Afghanistan for about six years afterwards. And yeah, and I couldn't have done that with children. No, I'd taken that hot off to some of the guys that I served with that did. But what I found, certainly with Iraq and the Afghan thing, more than the SF thing, that quite a few of them actually came unstuck eventually a little bit, especially in Iraq. There's a few of them that took their own lives, unfortunately, and there was a lot of them that kind of perished out there, unfortunately as well. But generally, I couldn't have done that. And a little bit of a dip is when I was in Afghan, we were doing a joint operation out there with the Herod for the lads. And I think I didn't have a death in my life. I think I had a death in the family. So I was out there, or I was on Jew-R&R or something like that. I was out there for a few months and I came home, but I came home on my own, got into this herk at a blacker night. So we got, like, Kelly lifted out and then we went up to Bagram base and then we got lifted out from there. We went dark stuff. And I was on the back of this herk. And I thought it was on my own because I was told that was on it on my own. And I saw somebody at the back. So I went down and it was one of the lads for another location. I said, oh, what's the script? What's the matter? How come you're getting out of country? And he said, oh, I'm having a baby. And I went, oh, when he went, now she's having it right now. And he spent a week at home, and he flew him back because I went, I spent about eight days, seven or eight days, and I came back and he was on the same flight as me, come back in again. And I think we did six or nine months after that. And when I, you know, my little ends only five now, but I was like a stay at home dad because I was actually bringing an elite outdoor fitness together when I finished the Middle East and that's when I kind of met my wife and I had my little girl. And I remember thinking after about six or seven months of like looking after and spending all that extra quality, like dad time with her, how difficult it must be for the blokes that are serving a six months tall, it's only about a baby and they come over and they're six months old. That gift of like spending that time with your little, do you know what I mean? And I know that there's a compromise and I get that. And I think it's harder and harder for people that join in the military now because the age limits are going up for those specific reasons. Yeah, see, I think of it the other way. I think how sad is it for that kid that the most important time, the first year of your life is when bonding is so incredibly important and it will make or break you as an adult. Yeah, I couldn't have done without that. I needed it in my life to have the, I don't spend any time away. We do a couple of expeditions a year with Trident Adventure, which is like our sister coming to a city centre and the lads that used to serve with, we go to Moorka, we go to like the Arctic, Sweden, Norway and so on. And one of those is 10 days. I think he's drawn it a bit short for eight days. But I find that hard being away from a family. Do you know what I mean? Yeah, that's all like, that was my life before. And I don't think that's a bad thing. You know, I know what's important. But what I will say is, it's going away for one day with someone working on an exercise, but an event or whatever somewhere or I'm doing an event for two or three or four days. It's quite nice as well because it brings you back in and gives you more perspective on your life and appreciation of things that you've got at home. Yeah. It's funny, isn't it though? And that, you know, in nine months, that's your kid saying, Dada for the first time or obviously in this case, not. That's your kid walking for the first time. That's you taking your kid to the swimming baths for the first time. Yeah. That's you changing. God knows how many nappies, which might sound a bit bizarre, but that's a bonding thing with your son. And it's, you know, I always remind, always remind my boy, I was the first one to change your nappy son. All the nurses in the hospital were a bit like, really? But yeah, it's interesting. The kids, the service kids just get well overlooked and it's starting to really, it's starting to be appreciated now amongst the charities that, you know, there's damage being done there, but then I think the services are going to struggle now. It just seems that people don't want to, you know, join up anymore in the way that they used to. And now that there are, let's just say forcing them to have procedures, especially experimental ones, it's getting people email me all the time, like, what do I do? I say, well, what do you think you do? You, you know, if you die next week, what, you know, do you think the M.D. care about that? You are literally just a number and I think, judging by what I see online, it just, it doesn't seem to be the thing these days that young men go, oh yeah, I joined the military. I mean, some do and I don't really know young women, so I can't comment there, but then again, we also kind of live in bubbles, don't we, or echo chambers, because you train people illegally. And I talk about my military days on the podcast, so I get to speak to a lot of young men. I've coached four guys through limps to now, or at least, you know, an hour or two on the phone when they were really struggling and bang, they all, they all got out of the remedial troop in the green, green lids. And that's what it's about, isn't it? It's about, I didn't have that. You know, I started my journey in the R.A.S. and I'm leviated it, and I couldn't wait to get out. I didn't really leave school with any qualifications. I spent that year where I was trying to join up, getting qualifications at college, Math, English and Science, because I didn't leave with anything, and so I kind of joined the military, was on the ground crews with the helicopter squadrons, and I didn't enjoy it at all, having a little village, and I didn't know what was out there. And because a couple of my members were in the R.A.S. and doing calling jobs, and not like you clean mountains and all that, and on the herds, I kind of thought, yeah, okay, that's the route, and then I'll just see where I go from there. And I suppose that's what I did. But what I found was, just for myself, there was nobody to speak to, there was no people to get that bit of information on whether you want to get a little bit fit, and I was fortunate enough to win a couple actually in Ireland, specifically, and then I started training people in that regard, and then eventually I went SF myself, and it was a shocker for me, because I thought I was fit as a fiddle, and I seemed to do very well on all the bases, because I was lucky I went kind of, I went with the squadrons all over the country and around the world a little bit, and as soon as I got up on a camp, I'd go, wait, where's the armilage? Is there any power in there, any millions, any training sessions on? Any combat fitness tests, CFTs going on at this time, and I was all amongst it, because I just was so competitive, and I just wanted to get a burden on the back and prove myself. And then when I went through SF, because I didn't have any specific guidance of what sucks to wear, or what boots to wear, or how bad t-shirts were on them, when they're cotton, not synthetic, and with a burden on them, and the smaller things. The time is specifically for the SF people, and it's about saying, look, because most people that come to me, as long as they're the right age and they haven't got any underlying conditions, and their body composition is such that they allow them to gain the fitness and the momentum to carry them through the courses over an extended period of time, I'm pretty confident that I get most people through, because it's like anything like me, I know we discussed it earlier very briefly. It doesn't have to be hard. When you're doing those, what we would call very demanding sessions of running, I don't know, 20, 30 miles, you build up to that, so that it's only as hard as your first week that you ran your four miles on it, because it's building up to that nice and gently. And I think that's really important. It's about giving the people the confidence to say, look, whether it's SF or whether it's like a lot of my people, and we do quite well at this one, have our conditions or they're struggling, coming back from cancer and remission, or they've had hip replacements, or they're very overweight, it's about giving them the confidence to give them a program and having that 20, 4 or 7 communication with somebody that can say, look, yeah, it's quite normal for you to feel like this. It's quite normal for you to feel at this stage after training for six weeks to feel a little bit overwhelmed, because you need to have a bit of a reload, you need to let all those chemicals get a bit more balanced, because you've been over yourself for a couple of weeks and get back into it. Most people, they get that wrong, and that's why they're in and out of fitness. What we do is, or what I do now with people, whether it's SF or not, just give them a bit more balance over an extended period of time and make it part of their life. Our retention with the league outdoor fitness is superb, actually. If anybody comes to us and leaves, because it's actually not for them. But most people, if they leave, they come back three or four months later and they don't really lose anybody, actually. And from the original group of about 140 people that we had like two or three years ago, most of them are still with us, in fact. And the average age, I would probably say, is 40 to 50. The elitism out of it, or elite outdoor fitness, and I probably should change the name of it, but it's there now, it's only there for people that want to maybe push themselves and just do something a little bit different. Actually, just going and competing in like, I don't know, Power's 10 or actually finishing the Avalanche endurance events fan dance with a bit of weight on, or even clean fatigue. That in itself is a huge accomplishment and that's what we do. That's, I think, where we're good at. Does your name then put people off? Let's just take some stereotypical example. Maybe you're a middle-aged woman or I say middle-aged, a woman over, I don't know, 35. I'm already going to get in trouble here, aren't I? But you're carrying a bit of timber, you realise only you can make changes in your life. I would think, when you see a name like elite outdoor fitness and it's run by a military guy, they'd go, actually, I'll go and do the Pilates. Again, going back, so I was always the commander coach, but I'll be honest, I'm just trying to get away from all things military, because the older you get, the more negativity there is when you've got one foot in that. Yep. I deal with lots of veterans on a daily, daily basis and for me, life's all about having a high vibration, high energy, having people around that you can talk to that inspire you, that fucking believe in you and love you, push you on and you can have intelligent conversations about the universe and this sort of stuff. Our company is exactly that. It's transparent and it's authentic and it's quality people that want to be more positive and they want to bring about more balance in their life and you're right, elite outdoor fitness I should have changed it and I suppose at the time it's one of them, it's now kind of forged itself as a name, a popular name, taking away the fact that 95% of all our people are these people that need a bit of balance and they need a bit of motivation to allow them to just get a little bit more active not even fitter, just getting out there and being active and getting away from working at home all day and going where do I start? But apart from that, we've won the majority of all the big events out there especially with weight, power 10, commander shuffle we've got course records and like fan dance and all the waist series and then joints, we're doing well and it's only because I think you just touched on the point there which was quite a lot actually and we probably need a little bit more exposure but I quite like the fact that we're growing, we're getting bigger but it's a manageable pace because I like to speak to every single person that's with elite outdoor fitness I pretty much spoke to for like an hour or two and I do quite often as well because I'm always here for them because I think that's really important and that's pretty much probably 50% of my job is engaging with people and kind of working out what their strengths and weaknesses are why are you coming off your fitness why are you getting tired all the time and just trying to find like you said before it's a little bit like life coaching in actual fact rather than a personal trainer but the majority of the people that come to us which is a negative for us is a lot of it is online and it's linking up with people once or twice or three times a month and taking them out on the hill or teaching them how to navigate or if that's what they want to do or how to kind of not feel vulnerable when you're tired and you're cold and you're out in the elements for example and things like that majority of the time they're expected at home to look at a program speak to me on the phone or speak to us online because our programs are like in groups so they can chat to people and they can see everybody's results online and things like that so they can help that motivation it's actually quite difficult because they've just got to go out there and do it themselves and you can tell somebody when I started to kind of think about the concept of the outdoor fitness I was working in the Middle East and I had a relatively, I wouldn't say easy job but it was less on the ground and I was a country manager so I was a little bit more office bound in the compound and I had a bit more time to kind of plan my exit strategy from Afghanistan and what I found was that people needed to be motivated and they needed to be I need to sit down and I need to look at their whole life and say how can I keep this person motivated how can I get them to go out three or four times a week and do some exercise or to progress in their kind of fitness and what do people need and luckily for us I think we've got that balance right and you're right that it scares a few people but at least outdoor fitness and we're going to be looking at that to be fair don't get I'm not in any way I'm more asking because I'm just interested for my own I'm interested for my own like I said I was the commander coach but I never I wouldn't want people to think if they come to me for coaching that I'm going to put them through any kind of mental physical endurance course because it's not what I am and it's not what I do and it's not what I think exercises about mental health and so it can be as short as a mile run around the block which is that was my normal I did that for years the only reason I put it up is I become so fit doing it it wasn't worth going out of the house because I was already back home again so now I put it up to three miles and with the the marathon of the Sands people sought their life out and stopped insisting that people have experimental medical procedures then hopefully I'll be back on that in March but I thought running across the Sahara desert I should maybe I might go for it is what I'm trying to say and try and get as fit as I can and really see how I can get on with it but with the name thing Nick you know it's more that I think with the legends coach it's more that I coach legends I coach everyone to be a legend and understand that we all have a legend inside us and it's just a choice so I thought it was more user friendly if you're making money doing what you're doing then I'd say don't don't change because you're probably getting a few I don't know yeah well we are we're changing people's lives and it's just I found that it's quite it works quite well in the sense that people that do come with us they've got a bit of motivation they've got a bit of momentum to change their lives from the offset if they do come to us at the moment and I don't think that's a bad thing because you almost need that a little bit because it is so you know everything's remote if you have a personal trainer who was in the Middle East I used to stick with engineers and I used to train like 20 or 30 people all the time because I was in a big compound on a military base and I ended up doing it for the military as well and that was easy to do because you could look at somebody you could look at your form or you could look at somebody's body composition and say look you maybe need to present the speed sessions into your program a little bit more gently because you're a big lad and you put a lot of pressure on your ankles your hips etc etc it's easy to do like that and doing it remotely is a lot different and so having people that have got that extra drive and motivation because they're not scared and put off by elite outdoor fitness it's kind of worked to our advantage so I'm kind of happy with that and also same like you said I've tried to steer away from the military aspect a little bit because I suppose to an extent I wasn't being SF on that I wasn't comfortable with it and I didn't want to be that personal it was like I find it really difficult to sell myself and to sell that part of it as well but I've got a great team of people around me now within the elite outdoor fitness sort of shown me a platform that we use really that kind of collects data and not just that but gives us an overall idea of what works and do you know what people buy in if you want to call it that buy into the fact that maybe some people that are being in the military or specifically SF and elite forces just have that extra bit of whatever if you want to call it that where they can have a bit of confidence moving forward have a bit more motivation or be able to dig a little bit deeper because that stuff isn't specifically for certain individuals that have done those courses it's for anybody it's just you need to know how to tap into that a little bit and actually understand that you can gently and progressively tap into that type of those types of areas so that you can gain more if for example if you're going to do in the marathon to SF or if you want to do your first 10 mile run or whatever you don't need to be training ridiculously hard and beasting yourself like the military saying to achieve those dizzying heights of like a greatness if you want to call it that for each individual yes I guess this thing about jumping off the wagon is this again this is goes back to what I'm saying about mental health if you run for mental health then you have you want to run every day but not well yeah you do because when you don't you don't feel so bloody great about your life whereas whereas the old me was like going down the gym for bodybuilding was what I looked like and it was I'm not going to knock it you know we've all done silly things in our life but when I look back at it it's just so silly like going to a gym just so your muscles get bigger it's like Arnold Schwarzenegger stuff I enjoyed that period in my life but it did get a bit out of hand just biceps and abs when they walk out their backs like that and you can't even see a muscle group in it it's just that now my whole psyche is different now I want my body in tune with my mind hmm I want my body in tune with my mind and now I'd rather be nine and a half stone and be able to run like the wind then I would be 15 stone and just sort of look a bit silly in the mirror um so um but I think that people they have trouble motivating themselves for getting out and getting you know smashing a fitness or even just having fun with it I think it's because they haven't made that journey across to the spiritual side it's to them it's all still about like physical you know you know most people that we train they do too much they do too much too quick in actual fact and um if you look at the science behind it whether you like it or not what essentially happens if you progress quite hard because normally if you're coming back into training let's say when you're 20s or 30s or 40s you're not the same as you were when you were 18 but your muscles will remember you've got a bit of muscle memory there so your fitness and the way that you can project yourself forward will grow quite quick but it's the other smaller things like the little niggles and you know the little injuries and niggles that you can have or the strains or the overwhelming feeling that you might get after 4, 5 or 6 weeks because your body will progress and it will progress quite quite quickly but over an extended period of time and what's happened during that time is the chemicals and the balancing kind of chemicals and hormones in your body are going to start increasing increasing to allow you to um to perform more efficiently and recover quicker and build muscle and tendons and ligaments and things like that and strengthen things up you know like testosterone and like human growth hormone to name like two of them but what happens is over an extended period of time is you get so ties because they're increasing too much is that all those chemicals start to drop off and then that's when people have a tendency over a period of years to offer on their training like that little bit because if they just pull themselves back the journey I find because everything's manageable then isn't it it's rather than going out and beating yourself because unfortunately that's how the military used to be and like if you look at the military now and I am out the loop a little bit because I'm obviously not in on one of the training teams but I think it's a bit more science-backed now when you go on these courses and they've got people that have actually gone and done a little bit a few more other courses to allow them to correctly train people appropriately for what they want to do let's say a 30 week commander course you even told me about your epic Tritrathlon Ironman 30 days you can achieve so much especially when you're at that age and if it's done more gradual it's going to be an impressive result at the end isn't it and you're going to more likely get more people that finish that one past that command course rather than just beasting people for 30 days although I would say for the units such as the command course the powers and even the military to a certain extent those elements of beasting sessions are designed for something a little bit different aren't they to put that kind of mental thing there the taxing that you have when you haven't got anything left in the tank so there is a place for that but I certainly don't think there's a place for it for people that start on their fitness journey you want them to say look you want to start in January you want to be still training in December and feeling good about yourself when people do fitness and you touched on it earlier on let's say they have a few bits and bobs going on with mental health for example if they incorporate the right level not too much not too little the right level of fitness if you want to call it that and maybe hitting a few components of physical fitness more so than most and I don't know kind of a multi-discipline approach to training which is what we do you find that you're more balanced and you're more balanced when it comes to your family stressors at home dealing in money issues work normal life stuff you find that you're more balanced and more capable to kind of take a step back and have a look at it because that is all that I've ever done in my life people said when we go to the when I was in the Middle East and we were in ambushes and stuff like that but they learned from me the way that I dealt with some of those as a team leader but I certainly didn't just start dealing with it like that it was a learning process and that stemmed from the way that I trained quite a lot and making sure that I was able to touch myself and also be able to take a step back sometimes when I was in stressful situations because I had the kind of the balance, the hormonal balance to allow me to do that and I think fitness plays a huge role in that whether you're working in the Middle East or whether you're doing something stressful you can put it into your everyday life and it will make you a more balanced person when your husband's going on in you you'll just be more balanced and more able to have a bit more perspective on the situation and rather than overwhelming yourself and a bit of a chemical imbalance because that's all that it is, isn't it? Yes So let's talk about the Middle East you mentioned that you had colleagues commit suicide Can you tell us a bit more about that because this is obviously a problem, isn't it? Is this problematic of former forces? Yeah, and I suppose it was yeah, a lot of the lads that was in the forces with both army F and the less in the SF world actually we've had a couple unfortunately but we've had a couple that have stemmed from them putting themselves in situations that have been quite harsh like there was a drowning and things like that and they weren't able to save them because of the types of people that they were they put themselves out there and even to achieve a successful outcome and it played on their minds for an extended period of time in their lives so that was very unfortunate but I think that the drinking and the addictive culture of being in the military for a lot of people that plays a large part in the or played a large part in maybe of committing suicide you know and I think the military hopefully has changed quite a bit actually like Sam a little bit out of the loop but maybe that's got a lot better but certainly when I was in it was a drinking culture it was having always something there to kind of shock your system, shock your body and almost if you weren't part of that culture you were a little bit of an outcast, right? Yeah there's I can hear a bit of a rumble wind is it? Yeah it's that we've got a storm outside it's been hammering down as well Okay it looks really beautiful where you are without obviously don't give us your address but what part of the world is that? Like Wales Mid Wales, yeah in the months nowhere basically nice and quiet Yeah we got some beautiful landscape on this island haven't we? Yeah it's a day before everyone writes into complain Yes Yes did you know anybody sort of closely or were they just acquaintances? No all close, all good mates yeah and it's surprising I think well I think it's worse in males and possibly in females and I don't quote you on that but you know my understanding is I think that women and I see this in the outdoor fitness we've got a lot of women and they just seem to be better at it they seem to be more balanced and more capable of progressing gently and also certainly when I was working away I worked with females and males certainly in the Middle East and in the military and I just found that there was certainly a highway I haven't got any female friends that did that but I have male friends and I just think that I think maybe ego plays a bit of a part when it happens I was unaware that it was even close to that and I think I'm quite transparent and open person and I'd like to think that and I think I brought that part into the outdoor fitness and I think that's why partly it's successful as well because I think I'm really approachable I'm open, I don't really have much of an ego in that respect so I'm more than happy to speak to people more than happy to get upset about my past bits and bobs that have gone on quite a lot of guys, especially the lads that unfortunately came a little bit unstuck they weren't open as much to maybe going and sitting down with a mate and saying look, I'm really struggling at the moment or this has happened at home and I feel like I'm really getting overwhelmed or I'm taking too many steroids because that was a big thing out there as well or I'm drinking too much or whatever it was always swept under the carpet oh no, it's fine, everything's great because it was a gung-ho job as well and I think that all kind of fed into this into the system and people kind of work in the system going out and doing these jobs and it's all kind of very volatile and very violent and difficult to control that aggression that's needed on the ground if you can call it that and then when they go home maybe they're acting a little bit differently and maybe the response from their family is a little bit different and I think over periods of time over years there was a lot of health and the outcome I suppose to a certain extent were there guys committing suicide in the Middle East or was this on leave is there a pattern to this kind of thing a few of them did it when they went home and a few of them did it when they were out there as well just in like the bashes and pistols there was a lot that went out and it was to be honest with you it was quite a bit of a fuzzy time especially like 2003 at the end of the war we went in they were flipping flat pack in the hold of Baghdad and we went in like we were there within three days and it was a harsh time and it kind of just thrown in there and the military kind of set up certain bases and we were just out on the ground and just never got to have a breather from it I was doing 12 months tours at one point I think I did a six month tour and it came in for like a week and a half, two weeks and then I went straight out there and did nine months and 12 months and 12 months and 12 months and so I just didn't get a nobody was getting a break and I think we have to be quite a unique individual to be able to cope with the stresses there and I think it worked better for people that were like happy in their own minds and that were happy to say I'm struggling with this little bit or whatever because I think that was really important and most people struggled with that and didn't get that balance right Yes so Nick you must have seen quite some action then over the years Yeah I spoke more so as a civilian working on the contractor side actually yeah as soon as I got into country we went into I think we went into Jordan initially and it was I can't remember what the border crossing was called but it was pretty much Baghdad Fallujah, Ramadi and then the border was about 150 miles away we came in there and we were in like people got picked up on the truck, no weapons but I knew a guy that was in country already and I'd liaised with him and he kind of just chucked me a taric pistol so I put that down with pants and that's all I had and we got involved in a massive RTA just before Ramadi and I got out and I was a trauma medic around and started looking at this guy that was quite badly injured actually because they piled into this vehicle that had just done like a a 45 degree turn in like a four tonne vehicle and he was only like about nine or ten years old that was driving it and I got out and your man said get back in the car we're going, I said you can't leave him he called it after that the three point wall like they'll, you're out of the car they clock you, you're dead it was probably within about two and a half minutes there was a couple of PKMs which are like large machine guns like a GPMG that you would know and there was a couple of PKMs that opened up from a building and then a couple of guys that were like cutting across doing a flipping towards us like a fire manoeuvre essentially and we were back in the vehicle and the locals unfortunately had to sort themselves out but it was a good it was a good thing to happen because it was I'd only been in country probably about an hour and a half, two hours and it just gave me all I needed it kind of like, do you know what I mean it reset me to say okay I know where I'm at now yeah very quickly I kind of I had a death in the family so after about one month so it must have been December 2003 and so everything was trying to start to settle with the militia I suppose that you'd called them now were there to organise themselves and they were parts of all the services police and government services and military if you want to call that security that were within Iraq they were trying to you know it was probably it was very integrated with the militia and I had a death in the family and you know they were like 1.5 million pound contracts and they couldn't just get like a couple of vehicles and take me to the border so I ended up getting a taxi all the way from Baghdad to the Jordanian border and when I got to the border they flipped and they took me and they took me down into this cell and like a bit of harsh harsh kind of harsh kind of a routine there and they owed me for about three and a half hours and I was lucky to get out of that actually in hindsight and I started to realise that over a period of time that it wasn't going too well for me and I ended up having to flash my ID card that I had from our British army and they released me sorry this was where in which town it was on the border of Iraq and Jordan but I was on the Iraq side when I approached and got out of the taxi and I tried to get my way through two bloats came it wasn't an office it was like a desk where you have to show your passport to get through they just grabbed me and pulled my hand behind my back so I knew it I was down some steps into like a dark dungeon area they launched me on the floor at the bottom of the steps just so I spanked in there's a bit of a harsh kind of routine to give me a bit of shock tactic and then they held me there and they just questioned me on everything and I didn't give much away at the beginning and I was quite honest and open because there wasn't really anything to hide but at the same time I think we don't want to say that was with the security can't do anything so I kind of had a bit of a and then eventually I actually took the to flash my ID and I thought I could this is the last translation I showed them a British Army ID and said look there's probably an eye in the sky already because I was supposed to cross the border like two hours ago there's going to be a British call sign that are under cover on the other side waiting for me and they just they just released me straight away and I was through and I ended up getting into like a fixer's car that had been waiting for me on the other side and then we made it back into Jordan and luckily when I came back about five or six days later um there was a team waiting for me because I'd obviously given them a sick wet on the water and then from then when I got back into country yeah it was just pretty much hell on earth about four and a half well two and a half years specifically but four and a half overall yeah in what respect just being hunted on the ground yeah no top cover you know there was other companies out there that had a bit of top cover and stuff like that but essentially you're like a two man at the beginning we were a low profile like schmag up and put make up on all that lot to make this kind of fit in a little bit we were in two car moons across the whole of the country we were stopping over in like military bases like Scania and stuff like that and refuelling and they'd give us free food and we'd go in the D-Fag and we'd sign it with our locals but pretty pretty harsh you know the ambushes they would set up soon as you left the location they'd be on the radias and the telephones and the kids would as well to say these are the cars this is the colour of them they would you get stuck in traffic they'd come round your cars they'd look how many magazines you got how many weapons, what equipment you got and then they'd forward it on you're always constantly trying to maneuver around them and kind of obey them and you know over an extended period of time I was involved in a number of huge attacks and we lost a lot of people you know Nick you need to explain this for us because we for those of us in that situation you're making it like really blasé how do you mean you lost people are you seeing people shot dead are you fighting for your life yeah so normally an ambush would involve they're quite complex ambushes an ambush is a killing zone it's designed to kill everything that's in there and they were starting to perfect this over that period of time and they would set up a roadside bomb a car bomb on one side and they would even have firing from both sides they were always firing on to each other so maybe you would have two or three vehicles because as we progressed through that two to three to four year phase of Iraq we would have more vehicles because we started to lose vehicles and then you would have to nick other vehicles but when a car bomb goes off or when a suicide attack happens or whether there's like a charge that's set in the mode of any kind because there's so many it will take a vehicle out and that vehicle will end up stopping probably 150 meters down the road so then you will go into a bit of a tactical kind of formation to do your best to get those people out of that vehicle and normally there will be fatalities in those cars so you'd probably be engaging in a contact for like maybe anywhere between five or ten minutes up to about 35-40 on some of the situations that we're in we had a number of situations for example and we lost three of them and we all ended up in one vehicle and getting out there leaving a couple of people behind potentially that was kind of the weekly norm out there in Iraq So they were dead bodies you left behind? Yes, I was very lucky because I was working in a I was a senior TL of two teams at one point and luckily for me, for my entire time in Iraq I only lost one person which happened just to be my best mate and he was in our car with me but we did quite well and the reason for that I think is probably predominantly the training that I implemented into my specific teams and also the interaction with the local national staff that used to work with us because I think that was really important as well we got that balance right within our team and they saved my life on a number of occasions and vice versa whereas other teams didn't get that a little bit and they left breaks behind they left people very vulnerable the locals didn't look after the expats and the expats didn't look after the locals so having that kind of camaraderie that you would have in the military between the local nationals and the PSD staff I think were really important so we kind of got that one What company were you with there? We had a company called Heart Group and Heart Group pretty much took on all of the jobs that nobody else wanted and so on quite few occasions we had contracts that would give to a security company they would subcontract to another security company and they would subcontract to us we would subcontract and they would go out we did at the beginning a lot of low profile stuff engineers and military personnel were out at different locations and we were kind of awesomagged up that was good for a start but what you find out there with let's say Sardis City and Fallujah Ramadi is they plot the vehicles as you approach them the outskirts of the city they recognise that they're not local they know the local vehicles and so they're on you straight away we had other cool signs eventually after a period of time like Olive and Armour Group where they came unstuck and we had to go back I'll give you an example of that we came out the Assassin's Gate and it's called the Assassin's Gate because it got demolished about six times and then rebuilt with massive truck bombs and you'd come straight out turn right over the Assassin's Bridge and you'd come down to a little roundabout and you'd have to come swing round and go to Palestine, I think it was in the Sheraton hotels which were all the news presenters were and things like that and that was the location and to a certain extent because it was the serve of the Tigris it was almost part of the green zone but as I came down to the roundabout we swung a left, there was a massive car bomb about 150 metres in front of us it actually cracked one of our armoured windows at the back and it was a big time and it was a cool sign that we'd been working with and there were three cars and they took out all three cars because they were driving quite close and they called everybody in sight except for two lads that got out so we bomb burst in and dropped our clients off and I said I'm going back to see if I can help them so the ex-pat that was with me didn't even come with me he said I ain't going out so I took two locals with me I said volunteers and two locals put their hand up because I had a good relationship with them we bomb burst out there just to see if we could help because the worst thing you find in that environment is that nobody comes to help you but all you're doing is you're pressing a button for people to say this is where it happened and the amount of teams that were completely wiped out it was absolutely ridiculous unfortunately she'll say for that two lads actually got out they were very lucky and they nicked a local national car and they got out of there before the crowd started to come in but situations like that were happening all over the country with the company that I worked for I started a project it was subcontracted to us and I was told to lead the contract and I said this is what I need I need four vehicles, I need all the tops of the four by fours cut out I need top mounted PKMs or GPMGs X amount of ammunition blah blah blah we didn't get anything we ended up with four vehicles with AKs and the windows smashed out the back so you can sit there in the back cushions around you with a PKM hanging out the back window it's not the way that you go about doing a professional job it wouldn't have worked the three expats that I was working with we had about 12 or 13 with a translator a local national team all the expats resigned and they went and said I'm not doing it so it came to the day and I had to make a decision I could have proposed to say this is what we need and they said no and I said well I'm not doing it and luckily enough for me I made the right decision because the next day they said the four set put local national team not mine now and they lost about nine people and the rest of them got kidnapped and then that project then were slept for about a month and then they sent a team out and then they sent another team out over a period of months both those teams got hit and the other teams got injured in those teams they were combat teams and they were delivering kit to two camps up in the Fallujahumadi area and it was just a complex attack so we're talking front vehicle had two PKMs at the end of the road and they just fired straight through the windscreen so they just killed the entire front car the second car the driver got shot and he pressed something that I had instigated actually which was you press a button on the thrower satellite and it was their car systems and it would come through to the office it was already live in the office and he was speaking to it and saying he couldn't move because he'd been shot and then somebody came to the side of the car because you could hear it and luck he survived and there was only two expats out of four that survived so they lost two expats but they lost I think 13 they were very well rehearsed by the local militia that were carrying out these attacks and so it was really important to make sure that you did training with your local national team to make sure you had the best available resources at hand whether that was vehicles or weapons and also so you can get out contact with the drills that you've kind of been learning so how does it work then so if an expat gets shot dead in less to say in his vehicle trying to return fire or something what physically happens to his body then I mean from a logistics point of view does it get desecrated by the by these militia do the police come take it away does it get repatriated so at the beginning it was a bit of an unknown really and nothing really would happen just giving an example we kind of lost one of those contacts I think we lost 17 people the two expats they made it out separately one made it to Camp Thaluja and was turned away on the back gate because there was a wacky on the gate before the Americans and they kept turning them away and they ended up having to go on foot then they got into a car and said I'll give you a thousand dollars he made it back to Baghdad another guy made it back to a camp and between that time they sent in some jets and they just blew the whole road up on the other occasion there was one of the guys that had made it to that footwell of the guy that had been shot and this was all on loudspeaker for us and a Dushka from one of the buildings up top and I think there's a film like Cleo M Peasant Danger and it was exactly the same as that because we know that because they put it on one of the websites online so that people like us could view it and then put you on the back foot a little bit that's what they used to do most of the stuff and they would send it to the military camps to scare you so they videoed it and one of the guys, that guy that was there he ran through, he got shot in the back leg but he made it into a drainage ditch and he went into the little pipe and when they videoed it they took all our labs and they put them in there and they just drilled them all and so the water went red and then after about 40 minutes he came out of the drainage ditch because he could hear the tanks coming and he ran down the road and some American tanks and the Humvees had turned up they asked him if there was anybody else alive and he said no and they just blew the whole road up so we had like a guy called Yves and we had a guy called Seito Akito who was an ex-firefighter he was in the French parachute one of the French parachute regiments and he became a firefighter and then he came to us and the other guy that survived had been with him and he got shot in the building he kind of kicked the back door open he'd come off the road, he'd gone into a building he'd gone through the building he kicked the steel back door out and there was people on the roof there so they kind of drilled him and he fell back onto his back still alive he'd been shot about seven or eight times so he exited the building and he was one of the guys that actually made it to a camp like 40 miles away somewhere but Seito Akito died because they videoed him alive with his badgers and CPA badge and all that badging system that he had on his passport he'd held on him on his chest but I think he died very quickly unfortunately but yeah the families were ringing up at an extended period of time and asking where the loved ones were and they were saying that they hadn't survived they'd been kind of taken out in the instant itself because that's how it was done other situations that we found ourselves in where guys were fatally wounded and we couldn't get them out because when you've got three or four cars and you're separated by about two or three hundred meters and one of the cars gets wiped out it's very difficult to get back in there and now we did and my teams were lucky enough not to have a fatality like that we went in there and got people out and just like relied on our training and our tactics that we were doing to go through set processes to bound them out to where there was a bear and then we would cut across and then they would be a hundred meters away and we'd pull them into us and luckily it worked but on other situations it didn't work like that because they were already dead etc so they were just left there and then we'd send a local national team up about two or three days later to go and collect the bodies What if the bodies weren't there? I mean they'd leave them there they always were left there and on some occasions we had bongo trucks where we loaded up about 12 or 13 bodies on one occasion and they opened up all the checkpoints as we were coming out and they didn't attack our lads or anything like that it's harsh it's the first time I've ever really spoken about anything so I'm sorry if I'm wheeling off a little bit but it was a harsh environment and it was really, really, really hard for the local nationals because they lost three figures in 18 months when I was there for that company and we lost double figures and expats and when they came back they would lay them down in the back of the bongos and the families would come and they would argue which ones was their son or their family member because you couldn't make out nor tell It was a very money-oriented kind of job there was always two or three deaths written into each of the contracts and believe it or not and the lads the SF lads that had kind of got lifted at Basra if you remember that Yeah we turn us a bit about it and then I'll I won't go into that too much because obviously you know what to second up but there was two lads that kind of got lifted there and they did a great job the SF kind of command in acting very quickly before they were triggered to be sent to different locations because that's what they do to get you out when they kidnap you but for us the security type thing it changed overnight because every single checkpoint in that country then just became massively hostile and they pretty much said that they would kill all expats they wanted a female expat specifically and then we'd have to have a process of going through the checkpoints and goodness me, maybe a hundred times when I got to checkpoints we would be engaged before we even got to the checkpoint and half the vehicles had gone through the checkpoint and so we would have to drive through checkpoints while being engaged under fire it was just hell on earth really as I say my team was very lucky we had a lot of injuries but we only lost one person unfortunately in Al Anbar Yeah that SF thing I was just querying it because Colin McLaughlin was in Iraq I saw them in the I didn't know them but I saw them in the bar that night but I was sat outside this cafe thing in Bazaar camp near the enclave and there was a young lad there and he was about seventeen and a half years of age and I went over and chatted him because he just looked really he didn't look very well so I went and had a chat with him because there was only about six or seven of us there and he said is he okay? he's actually really strange and he said he was in that incident today and they went down there as a support group walking behind the tanks and slotting police officers and stuff like that essentially to go and do the attack on the police station where they had held these lads I believe before they got transferred to another safe house and yeah he'd shit himself in the cafeteria about an hour and a half before just through nerves and he'd come out and they were trying to encourage him to come out and that really for a seventeen year old he would have gone through basic training basic training and then he finds himself in a war zone like that that's what he's been trained to do but at the same time yeah they didn't seem to be a support system or structured to help people like that out but for us the war changed that day we just came under attack we were going through checkpoints and getting hit through checkpoints we would go through two specific checkpoints and they were about a kilometer to two kilometers between each of the checkpoints and they just increased the numbers on those checkpoints so normally you'd have like four, five, six people on checkpoints there's like about fifteen or sixteen people on one of the checkpoints at one point and then they would hit us from both sides and they would hit us from both checkpoints as well because you could see where the rounds were in the front and the back and the sides of the vehicles and then one day a call sign went up there and went through that first checkpoint and it was always on the interpersonal outlaw and they opened up a bit too early and he took with a GPMG because they had GPMGs they took the entire checkpoint out which was about sixteen blocks next day we went up there because we had to and there was like two young lads on the checkpoint and then there was never any dramas in it after that but pretty harsh environment Josh, does the name Andy Brad so mean anything to you? Has he been on the internet? It kind of does a little bit. Has he read a book? He was one of my mates in the Marines and he worked for Olive Security and he got shot dead in Mosul with another former Marine they got ambushed by some militia and they were taking a client to like a fuel plantation you know a fuel factory processing unit or something and apparently 18 pickup trucks just appeared out of nowhere full of armed fighters and Andy and I think the other chap's name was Chris I didn't do a lot of Mosul I went up to Mosul but I didn't do a lot we had other teams of Mosul one of the teams that was up there and it was Seb he was in French National Legion so we had like about two or three different names he was a good guy, he was a big guy and what he didn't know about convoys and the boots and stuff like that he was just experienced he said I've got to take a convoy across here and he would say stay away from that bridge do this, do that he unfortunately was coming out of Mosul and he was working on a project with us because Olive did quite a bit up in Mosul and he came out and he set up an IED with some gas canisters on the roof and it slid down the road and was engulfed with flames and the lads were trying to get to the windows but all the lads were like tapping at the windows with all the rounds going off inside and they all burned to death unfortunately and that was a real kind of harsh one for us because those lads in that vehicle just happened to be that they all experienced and there was like three expats in there and one local national and it wasn't far off it's almost in that environment anything happens and it's just uncontrollable they would hit us on the side of canals we had a couple of routes in where we'd have a canal on the left-hand side we lost three vehicles going into that we lost three people and three vehicles where they had hit us on one side of an IED so the vehicles would go into the canal and submerge and it was just another element that was you'd have to try and think round trying to do a spin on tactics of how to debuss from a vehicle that's sinking and you've got a couple of dead blokes or very injured blokes in it it's just impossible when you're under attack so especially on a linear type feature where you can't push back you can only go left or right or forward when there's a force that's attacking you and potentially daisy chains of explosives down the road so it was always thinking and always changing your own tactics kind of like fitting with this and then obviously you also have the other military like the Americans for example now a lot of the mailings I've worked with were amazing but they're an army, they're armies with an armies and others were so helpful and we lost quite a few people on blue and blue instance and stuff like that I was very lucky in myself you know I had a Cobra helicopter when we came over the top of a Brow Hill and we were just about to punch down and push a left into at the back of Camp Fallujah and go onto the military road a couple of humbries ago and so I said all big to stop stop or vehicle stop I ended up being right on this lip of a hill so if anything had gone wrong they would have just clocked that's the trigger car up there and it did as soon as the Humvee got to the the exit where the military road met the civilian road it just went about 30 meters in the air and killed I think two or three people in sign so eventually they kind of two humbries were sorting that out and two humbries came up with their 50 cows on me and they didn't fire but then a Cobra helicopter just sat above me about like about 80 meters and it just pointed like an escalation of force just went with his two guns on the front of the Cobra and luckily for me somebody crawled in this US Marine crawled in my left-hand side because they couldn't see through the bulletproof glass because we were kind of saying look you know I'm an albino ginger don't fire on that type of thing but on lots of instance we weren't allowed that kind of a softer approach as that probably was they just opened up and they opened up on a few of our people we think we lost four people in the first two weeks after the invasion in November of 2003 we lost just from a blue on blue because they were they were young lads and they were coming out training and they sat on the end of a 50 cow and on our report it would say we've got the exchange of troops we've got people coming in country and they're really nervous and trigger happy we've got people that are leaving after 9 months or 12 months or 18 months to do long tours want some kills at the end of it and they're trigger happy as well so it was it was a very difficult one let's finish off talking a bit about the SES what's the what's your feeling I guess it's difficult for you to say because you're on one side of the one side of the scenario I'm going to put to you but I see this asked a lot what do the regular SES guys think of the two three SES I mean I'm guessing they just see it for what it is it's there it's I think it's changed a lot actually I'm hoping that it has as well but certainly when I joined up which was 2000 they didn't like two one or two three and I can appreciate why as well because right up to probably about the mid 90s maybe a bit to the late 90s two three and two one and SPSR selection have been very different it was done over weekends even I think test week was done over weekends it was a lot different and there was a lot of old school when I joined up that probably weren't as professional as I would have liked enjoying an SF unit now you get those in every unit I've deployed with two two on many occasions and some of them when I was a team leader in Iraq and Afghanistan I was a team leader with two X2 two blokes in my teams and some of them were very good the majority of them were some of them weren't as good and it was a little bit like that two one two three like you get everywhere what I found was that the expectations of two one and two three were not in line with what two two wanted because the training was completely different and so it was like two completely separate units and they would say well they're not as good as enough and they're not doing the type of training we're not doing it was absolutely right but then over a short period of time when it came to certain types of training like contact drills or surveillance reconnaissance and urban OPs and ambush tactics and a few other bits and bobs two three and two one and that and in actual fact we went and did like a joint operation and I took over from I took over specifically from this guy who I later on met actually but I'll tell you back in a bit if you want he I took over from him in the middle of nowhere when we came off this chick and he was going on and we took over from a team of two two and at the end of that like I think nine months of like operations to the two the joint two two and two three the SSR unit had a lot more success working with the CIA and Delta Force and all that on what we achieved over that nine month period than the two two did so it doesn't necessarily mean that they're any better or not any better for specific jobs because that's what we were trained to do because what I found with the two one and two three guys certainly after like say the late 1990s was the training came more in line with two two I think it while I was in it changed from three to four can hour of the hills and three can hour this I think the sea course went from 12 hours up to 36 because that's certainly what I did and there was certain elements of the course that weren't in line with two two and that that was absolutely fine because they're a different unit than what we were but what we found was the people that wanted to join two two that came from two one and two three cast like mid 90s I would I would probably guess I I think were great soldiers to go for that unit and I think they've accepted that now a little bit more because when I was in there was only two books that I knew of from both these units reserve units that had gotten into two two and one of them was a this one and the other guy was a guy that I knew from from two one that I got in but everybody else had a stand-up fail and I thought it was just sorry Nick just clarify for us then so if you come up through the ranks in two three so I don't even know does that make you a civilian or no you're in the army but you're kind of not like full-time army although of course and then you can transfer to the to the regs is that can apply to join them yeah and do you have to do full selection on top of what you've already done yeah so when you when I joined HCR I went from two three to HCR I had to do a separate selection it was devised by a bit of a legend that was in two two I won't mention his name if you don't mind but he was an inspirational character and kind of like helped me in my facilitate my move forward and the natural fact he was the one that approached me on a number of times and said I want you to go for HCR I want you to go for this and that's exactly what you did what we found was that everybody from two one to three they were very capable SF soldiers if you want to call them that and when they went to do the all got stunned at fails at the end as if you say they weren't they weren't right for that unit or whatever but much later the guy that devised HCR he had a look at that whole political kind of situation I believe because I'd left by that time in 2004 and said look this isn't good enough these are labs that are essentially I have trained because I devised this unit called HCR and they quality people and you can take somebody that's been in the parachute regiment left school joins the parachute regiment does like four or five years comes as like a sergeant and then joins two two he's probably an exceptional soldier and he's got the grit that it takes but then when you're sat down with a warlord and he's got his kids there or whatever and you have to interact with somebody sometimes and I'm not saying all the times but it's very helpful if you've got somebody that has those qualities and attributes and that hardiness and that ruggedness and the capability to pass an SF course but at the same time has maybe run his own business and maybe has a degree and maybe just has a little bit more experience to communicate with people it's a good it's a great thing to have and I think they were certainly when I was in they were missing out on those people and now I believe it's changed it's certainly changed I think certainly the mid-2000s and I would imagine it had changed quite a bit now and there starts you see the depth of these people the fact that they're SF soldiers they're maybe not be trained to the level of doing certain things like you know oxygen they've been parachuting and stuff like that and some of the black stuff that they do and I like to say I'm out of the loop because I've been out since 2004 but certainly they're good quality SF soldiers for certain tasks and they're great candidates for 2-2 and the SBS selection and since then I think at one point for quite a few years the success rate of passing for those people was like about 100% 90-100% so it changed from nothing to 200% and there's always been this um this uh 2-2 and 2-3 and 2-1 but there wasn't as much of that was SBS and SBSR because a lot of the guys that were HDR which was the increased tier but they were SBSR they went down and they got the grandfather's wall and now they're in SB there's been a couple that are killed unfortunately but uh so they kind of got the grandfather's wall and uh jumped across to SB Wow yes gosh did you know any of the Bravo 2-0 guys uh no I've met a couple of them just you know in like uh guest speaking but the uh I'm just trying to figure out which one it was now one of the lads um my uh QM when I was on selection actually and he was and and kit out to me uh yeah so it was kind of kind of quite nice and humbling I suppose to a certain extent and what's it like to fire the M16 then yeah it's a great weapon I was really lucky I kind of uh I didn't do the SLR I came into the military when the SA-8 had come in I think it was the first year actually so I was SA-80 and then I did the M16 which then kind of crossed over to like the armor like kind of series DeMarco uh with the 40mm grenade launcher if I remember rightly so that was my personalized weapon it was a great weapon and uh you know doing the night vision shooting and everything like that when I deployed on one occasion we were our safe house and afghan was getting hit and we had a team of eight blokes there um and at any one time there was normally like four away so it was a small team in one place and they were trying to bracket us with these rockets and so the warlords we had a good relationship with them because we built up that relationship over a period of time and said look there's like about 20 of militia uh down here about 20 miles you know if you want to go and have a look from so four of us went out there and we got we got a confirmation from ops to say yeah yeah go out and have a look I remember thinking I wasn't nervous at all you know there was nothing in it it was kind of quite exciting really that I was given the opportunity to go and do my first action kind of move into into a location um and like unfortunately nothing came off it because uh they don't really think about what they'd set up a lazy chain of rockets to go off at different times through the night um and so we just kind of dismantled that and then and got rid of it etc and the lad's already thinned out but uh the capability that you have as an SF soldier at night and uh you know even for me because I didn't I did a lot less of the CQB type of stuff we only did that if we found ourself well we had to in going in and out uh build properties and buildings rather less than you know like the a tutu does do like a with hostage rescue and stuff we didn't do any of that we just did it so that we could go in and out of buildings safely in clear rooms and stuff like that um is is phenomenal and that weapon certainly brings something to the table because much later on I was then had a tariff and I had a um a Glock as pet side uh side arms and we had like AK-47s and um and and the weapon that's similar to the GPMG which is the 7.62 which we have an AK-47 but it's longer uh in the uh in the machine guns Kalashnikov range and they weren't half as accurate but different different as well you know the AK-47 you can put in a river for about 20 years take it out put a little bit more on it move the working parts back and forth and it will fire around that's how good they are whereas the M16s are very good precision weapons but you need to keep them clean and you need to be on top of your admiral with it yeah I'd imagine the M16 fires similar to the SE-80 does it not they're the same sort of length same ammunition um I think it's a bit different it just seems I think it's the for me I just felt that um it was the difference between driving like a Skoda and a Porsche 911 it just seemed yeah no no I get I I mean obviously it proved itself in Vietnam whereas the SE-80 hadn't really at that time proved itself anywhere except that it had a lot of sort of it was uh it was just a really uh reliable weapon as long as you looked after it it was really accurate um as long as you had it zeroed in and you knew your own zero in with with regards to changing I think it used to be a car to them and then you change it over to like a night vision and it was so accurate um it was a great great weapon yeah really good 40 40mm was a bit less accurate um to be fair but it was a good piece of kit to have any weapon anyway yeah I think um I was lucky I had both SE-80 and SLR as my personal weapons and so SLR was on the shit along with a 9mm pistol we we had but I think everybody needs experience of firing 7.62 long barrel to understand the difference between that sort of weapon and a 5.56 yeah the difference being one is just so incredibly accurate with such punching power from such distance that it's just an awesome sorry I shouldn't talk about death in terms of being purely a mechanical point of view it's just incredible weapon the SLR the SE-80 obviously the lighter ammo NATO standard ammo share the ammo with the Americans there was a lot of lighter to carry there was a lot of other stuff outside marksmanship that went with that weapon wasn't there yeah um and of course when you're on the range or or in theatre you only need a bit of wind and it's just a game changer because then you're having to guess where how far to aim off or yeah that's what we used to do in a rack a little bit we kind of we aim off for the AK-47s a little bit because you don't get chance to zero your weapon all the time and so you'd see the formal of shot and then you'd aim off a little bit from the dust I'll give you an example of when the armored vehicles that we had the 7.62 the AK-47 miles would go through it and sometimes I was in an instant where I won't mention the name of it but we went into a location which was one road in one road out and it happened to be about 5 or 6 kilometres out there's a big mountain area there was a tank on there with about 4 humbies and they were obviously a predator from there as well drone and we went into this location we'd already been to a few and we'd come unstuck by a couple of ambushes and incidents we came off of a car and we were trying to sort that out and burn it and get it off the road we got attacked and we ended up all culminated to this thing where we went into this place and we had 4 cars and left the local national car outside the city gates as it worked and we went into a town almost really and when we went in there they chicamed it and the militia had taken over this police station if you want to call it that and they took our first car and we were about 50 metres back between us and the bloke called Brett who's ex-commando actually was in the car in front of me and he got out and he was lucky enough to get back in this car because I was shouting down the radio control get back in the car they'd already wheeled and they'd come in two massive pickups and PKMs on the back welded on the back on a tripod they just shot straight out in front of us and so I came up on the radio as I was moving forward because he'd kind of gone onto the centre of the reservation a little bit and he didn't give me enough room and I was driving this vehicle and it was an up-armoured vehicle and 4 blokes were in that and as I came on the radio because I thought I've got to go just mow us down in I could see Brett and he was airborne and he'd hit this centre of the reservation in a normal kind of XRUC car he did this centre of the reservation he was like flying for the air and you could see the power of the rounds hitting him and as I kind of moved forward I just touched their vehicle to knock it out of the way and it wasn't in gear or anything so it just moved just about a foot and it allowed me to scrape through but by the time I started to move to the time that I hit the vehicle it was only about 4, 3 or 4 metres away 4 blokes jumped off and they just opened up and I remember looking to my right and there was a guy stood here and he just pointed the AK-47 straight at my head and he unloaded a full mag 30 rounds into that window they were only supposed to take 5 or 6 because he went down I remember thinking he's well trained because he flipped the empty mag in the back of his foot in the back of his leg for some reason even though it was empty and then he pulled another one out and they drove the petrol tank the engine and all 4 wheels and all of the windows so when we got going we couldn't get the speed up on the car we were already on one flaps and they chased us down and all the electrics went off on the car and I had 2 climbs in the back of the car they were all shizzing themselves all the electrics went off a couple of times and I said yes and then we picked the local national rig there was a soft skin completely and the PKMs were raining down on us and you could feel them they were coming through the cars but they weren't hitting anybody at that point and he'd go you can't stop we can't cross it because they're chasing us and all the lights would actually come back on if it's like a gift from God and I bang it into 3rd jumpstart it and we'd be off again and then they stopped chasing us because we came into sight where that tank was and the car caught fire at this point and I couldn't see anything so I went to cross-deck because I couldn't see anything I piled straight into this ditch so that everybody that was in the back of the car kind of shot forward and headbutted the back of the seats and we cross-decked into the wet's car and I got the clients in there and the client when we got cross-decked in I said because we got our good drills and you have everything on your lap if you're going to cross-deck you leave absolutely everything and we got into the car and we were just about to go and I was just about to get in myself and make sure I pulled the radio out he said we need to go back into the boot and get a black bag that's in there and we're leaving everything and he went it's got a computer in there with all our future locations on so I popped the boot like we were still under fire from about a K-way because by this time they were staying out of the way of the tank but firing from a distance wasn't as bad I was just launching all this kit out until I got this bag, showed it to the client loved it in and we were off and we went and laid up actually about 200 or 300 meters away to the tank and see us and they sent a drone out and you could hear it above us like a predator and they put they put a ring around us of 50 cal from one of the Humvees I suppose as if to say do one because we don't know who you are like and then we had to go all the way down to Camp Fluja again Camp Fluja was like a safe house if you can call it that to actually kind of evade not just Americans but the militia as well but the rounds although they weren't high velocity rounds on their AK-47 they would still go through the armour that we had on some of our vehicles Yeah I've never worked that out because I got shot out twice in the Marines and the first time was an AK-47 and they hit the guy behind me and he survived it hit his Aniva jacket so it hit his flat jacket it didn't hit the plate it just hit the jacket itself like the fiberglass wadding but they said because it was a short round it bounced off and actually the round ended up in the top pocket of his Parasmok Yeah and the next day he had a massive I've got a photo of it massive bruise They're big slugs they're big slugs the rounds that kind of got hit by his 5.56 high velocity they'd normally find they just stood there and we had a few instance with Blue on Blues as a saying they all survived they did but I'd even approached other teams where we went out to assist and they'd been shot and it was on initial inspection it was like a big-ish hole at the back exit and you could almost not see it it was just straight through but with the 7.62 and we found this when we were firing into targets and stuff like that even at short range because of the lack of precision for that weapon and also the bad quality rounds they would sometimes spin the rounds hence it wouldn't make it very accurate but when they hit some of the lads just nasty they would get shot and say the chest area would come out somewhere completely different one of them had like a round that hit him in the middle section that came out of the bottom of his leg because they would tumble in the air a little bit we found that a great deal when we were practicing rounds because you'd look at the targets and it would be longer rather than just a hole that's just bad rounds that is when Jock got hit they reckon it was a 7.62 short round as opposed to a long one and that the short had less punch in power that's an AK-47 rather than a PKM which is good because if you get it by a PKM round it's devastating it'll be completely different because quite funny really I was the guy I was in front of Jock he was behind me and after the guy had hit Jock he actually hit him three times one round went through his weapon sling one took the antenna off his electronic equipment and the other one like I say slammed into him and then I called it a sniper but obviously with an AK it wasn't a sniper in that sense but gunman let's say then he turned his sights on me and the rounds were popping up like you see in the you know these little greeny brown geese kicking up like this yeah and I can't remember what I was going to say you got shot three times yeah I know that was it that was a funny thing but then someone messaged me and said no no no what it was it was this unit at this location right it's talking about the same contact you know and it was and he get any because I called a guy Jock because obviously in my memoirs I'd give everyone a pseudonym and it was the same guy because he called him by the room and then so and so and I'm like okay so I wasn't the guy like stood next to him five meters away from him then all right I say it's unusual you know we used to get blokes that would be a massive instance and included me and we'd write our own reports and I would not misread their reports and think contact were you in no it's a contact it's harsh we've lost blokes we've lost cars we've lost this or whatever you know we've gone to assist another team that have lost blokes and lost cars and then we've been involved in it a little bit everybody's writing their reports and you kind of read some reports and go you know what it's hard to exaggerate stuff like that it's harsh enough as it is you know people are very unusual in the way that they kind of like this stuff like that yeah but it's strange to actually talk about sniper another day this there's hundreds mate honestly and I a good boy will complete with it but I was I was looking after Julia Mannion and Mark Austin at one point for about three four months and they were in the green zone and I happened to be at this point just living in the red zone for a period of this I ended up going in the green zone for a couple months so I could be close to them at this time they were in one of the I can't remember what the hotel is called now but it was like where all the news presenters were which was in the green zone and one of Julia Mannion's like camera people or whatever had eaten some hoobas or something like that we've got calls saying that he's got anaphylactic shock and that he hadn't got his piraton with him so I was asked could you go and take his piraton now when you ask a question like that I was on the green zone in the red zone now that a lot can happen in that mile and you know I don't that's if anything that people would take from this then it's that it's just a completely harsh environment and you've been hunted all the time and we were just our local checkpoint or the checkpoint that was nearest to us was checkpoint 12 and I had a fly over it and that checkpoint had been wiped out probably three times and they've been rebuilt etc and that was the checkpoint that you exited up to Irish to the airport which was renowned as the worst road in the world I think it was 2.3 kilometers long but we certainly lost about four or five people on that road and there was at one point about two or three people on that that died a day it was absolutely ridiculous and used to sell mugs that said I survived with Irish anyway I drove into the checkpoint I've got drove into the checkpoint smacked myself up on that one just got a shitty low profile car and on me I drove to the checkpoint got to checkpoint 12 give him his piraton which didn't even look like he needed and on my way out I came out the checkpoint and they have to raise the last barrier to let you out and as I approached that barrier and I stopped so I looked to my left and there's a couple of Marines there and there's a couple of Marines back there and some local nationals a little bit further down somebody takes a pop shot at me a sniper and it hits the corner of my window right at the back of my head and I obviously flipped in react to lose my hearing straight away it's so loud when it enters the vehicle with the pressure change I couldn't hear anything and I looked left and the two US soldiers think that it's me that's done something in my car so they kind of aim their weapons at me and I just put my hands up and went as if say and I pointed down the road because there was torque and the sniper had done that a couple of times at the end of the steel that they put on this flyover right at the end of it I think he used to lay up there and when you looked at the round going in I think it was down there somewhere but they just raised the barrier with the electric button and yeah and I was off so that was kind of like my sniper attack kind of yeah It's funny that while we were talking I just remembered this is my photo album from Northern Ireland and I didn't think I still had this but this is his name up that's the contact report I just was wondering if I had that oh there we go that so this folks for friends this is what it looks like when you get smacked in the chest by an AK round and you've got a flat jacket on you can see that yeah see the bruise yeah see the bruise the job joker made his bed that day I was I was kind of like I changed my goal for a very short period of time I went into like as a training officer because they were quite impressed with the fact that we had only dead deaths in our team and we were getting out of big situations and stuff like that big contacts and ambushes and just the way that we deployed our cars and our low profile stance was a bit slick I think and so I was then put into a position which was training officer and down I was based down in Basra and only did it for about four or five weeks because I found it painful with the types of people that were coming in not there was anything wrong with like ex bouncers and stuff like that and meat heads that go to the gym but they had no military experience at all and they were I was finding myself trying to teach these people and they were a little bit gung ho and I just I found it impossible so I ended up going back on the teams in actual fact but I think it must be it must be a nightmare working with military people in that scenario because let's be honest there's a lot of real crap ones aren't there there are yeah there was people that just seemed to you know I worked with convoys at one point and we'd leave about two or three in the morning to hit a little bit of dark hours to get through certain places in the dark and I'd go up we had like we had a checkpoint here then the enclave basalt camp and we were between that in another camp and they'd walk up and get pissed in the bar and some of them would come back and I'd find them in the ditches and I'd have to go and wake them up and say you want to put a job in at one hour and I used to you know it changed after that a little bit because I had a bit more authority and eventually I would kick blokes out of country and say no drink you just don't drink you don't do X you don't do YZ you're just throwing people at it Was it was it hard because as a civilian were they respecting your rank as it were or your position as a leader or were they challenging you all the time? No it was difficult at the beginning because it wasn't until much later where we proved ourselves as a team you know my team was like cemented we'd been through a number of big ambushes unfortunately there was like about two huge incidents that happened in the country and I happened to be involved in all of them one of them was down in the Jaff is the biggest they reckon it was the biggest loss of life since the end of the war or part you know during the war and the Americans took down about I think about 1800 2000 militia and there were about four and a half thousand the rest of them they captured it was a huge thing and they all came from the news where they took they took Sardis city where did all those people go they went down into a field that was opposite a location that I was at there's only three expats there and it was just fluke that it happened the way it did they shot down an Apache that went over the top of us and landed about 90 meters away and killed the two pilots and then it just it just the storm started from there and it went on for about 24 hours and we had A10s coming in we'd have to get out of our towers watch towers we'd have to get out of there some bloke on Skype would tell us from like a scanner I think it was and say get out your towers we've got a thousand pound J-DAMM coming in and that 16 would drop a J-DAMM and then all night spectre gunships just malleted and so you have that incident there and a few other kind of very big incidents that we were involved in and I think over a period of probably about a year and a half two years you just build up a bit of a thing where maybe you know you're professional and I think you stick to your guns you're reliable and that goes a long way and also the company screwed the nut as well because at the very beginning it was a numbers game you just get bloke's out there but eventually they started to get better bloke's some of the bloke's will leave in the military some bloke's will leave in the commandos in the parachute regiment or even the basic army coming in and they just had the basic fundamentals that you needed from a soldier or whatever and even abroad we had lots of Russians working for us and we had lots of French and Germans and Danish lads and they were brilliant they were really really good some of them were not as good getting pissed and taking a pin out of a grenade and passing it around the room and all this kind of sketch it was a bit crazy at the beginning but we started to thin all those people out and then eventually we had about six teams of two expats that were all very good quality people and it was very unfortunate that we just lost in the 18 month period 17 expats that were then replaced replaced replaced so it ended up being that after that 18 months two years I worked for that one company when I then left and went to another company which was a bit of a safer job we'd gone through quite a lot of expats and there's probably only one or two of us that were left from the very beginning 2003 to 2004 because everybody else had lost their life unfortunately Jeez Happy year Nick I'm going to bid you farewell it's been absolutely eye-opening Thank you for the invitation mate it's great it's great to read all your postcards I love what you do mate it's good to link up with you so thank you You're more than welcome How have you survived mentally through all this because you've been through a lot I just raised enough I was on this concert just this morning and somebody else completely different but about the same kind of thing I I happened to link up with two or three people that I ended up getting very close to that I worked in the Middle East with and all three of them came to my wedding in fact and I thanked them there because fundamentally that's what I needed as an individual was actually sitting down and not speaking to a counsellor or a psychotherapist or my doctor or whatever it was actually just sitting down with a like-minded people that had gone through something very similar and that kind of knew I was feeling and knew that I probably I had to go to the process of talking about it at the beginning probably once a week and then about once a month then once every six months or a year and I think it's not for everybody but I think I've managed it quite well I think I'll always be able to get relatively emotional upset about some of the incidents that I was in and where we were essentially assisted and lost people and stuff like that and I don't mind that because it's part of my life now it's kind of in a sense it's kind of remembering those lads and stuff like that and at the same time you can't draw a line to it and go okay it's boxed away and I think I've learned to box things away as best I can and I use it to move forward in my life I think that everything's about perspective I love my life I love my family to bits I've got some great people within elite outdoor fitness that have now kind of I've become really friendly with and it thinks about taking things that have been in your past to allow you to have a different perspective on life because I think it's really important most people don't do that and I think that this is me talking this is what I do in my life but some people have had amazing lives they've had addictions they've gone through alcoholism or drug addiction or violence in their family or when they were brought up you can almost switch those round and use them to your advantage to have a better perception of life and help other people have a bit more a better understanding of balance and how you can use all those things that happen in life to kind of build that resilience and support and hopefully I've done that you certainly have mate all credit to you for our friends at home if any of you out there need a nudge with your fitness some support help you get into it the easy way whatever it might be or maybe you're aspiring special forces then Nick is your man we'll put a link below so action creates action for action creates a perfect life so whatever is such a thing as a perfect life it certainly helps you get the life that you deserve so get in contact with Nick and Nick's down the line so I can thank you properly but massive thank you for sharing your life with us appreciate it some gosh it's some real serious stuff you've let us be privy to you there so thank you ever so much my pleasure and to our friends at home big love to you all as always please like and subscribe please share could you put a note in the comments who you'd like to see on the show that'll be great and we'll see you next time thank you