by Bear Grylls
The plane levelled out. The guys became alert again, checking and re-checking equipment. Someone reached for the door.
As it slid back on its rails, the ferocious noise of the engine and 70 m.p.h. slipstream broke the silence.
‘Red On.’
All seemed strangely serene as we stared at the bulb flashing at us.
It flicked to green.
‘Go.’
One by one, the guys dropped from the door and quickly fell away. Soon I was alone in the cargo area of the plane. I looked down, took that familiar deep breath, then slid off the step.
As the wind moulded my body into an arch I could feel it respond to my movements. As I dropped a shoulder the wind began to spin me, and the horizon moved before my eyes.
This feeling is known simply as ‘the freedom of the sky’.
I could just make out the small dots of the others in free-fall below me, then I lost them in the clouds. Seconds later I was falling through the clouds as well. They felt damp on my face. How I loved that feeling of falling through whiteout!
Three thousand feet. Time to pull.
I reached to my right hip and gripped the ripcord. I pulled strongly. Initially it responded as normal.
The canopy opened with a crack that interrupted the noise of the 130 m.p.h. free-fall. My descent rate slowed to 25 m.p.h.
Then I looked up and realized something was wrong – very wrong.
Instead of a smooth rectangular shape above me, I had a very deformed-looking tangle of chute, which meant the whole parachute would be a nightmare to try to control.
I pulled hard on both steering toggles to see if that would help me.
It didn’t.
I started to panic.
I watched the desert floor becoming closer, and objects becoming more distinct. My descent was fast – far too fast.
I’d have to try and land it like this.
Before I knew it, I was too low to use my reserve chute. I was getting close to the ground now, and was coming in at speed. I flared the chute too high and too hard out of fear. This jerked my body up horizontally – then I dropped away and smashed into the desert floor.
My body bounced like a rag doll. I landed in a cloud of dust and dirt, and just lay there, groaning.
I had landed directly on my back, right on top of the tightly packed reserve chute that formed a rock-hard, square shape in the middle of the pack. The impact felt as if that rock-hard chute had been driven clean through the central part of my spine.
I couldn’t stand up; I could only roll over and moan in agony into the dusty ground.
I was crying as I lay there in the dust, waiting for my buddies to come and help – I just knew that I had blown it.
We get one shot at life, and in those agonizing moments I realized I had messed this up big time.
I had this pit of my stomach fear, that life would never be the same again.
CHAPTER 67
I lay there, delirious, drifting in and out of consciousness.
As the guys I was with began to help lift me, I was still moaning in pain. Eyes squeezed tight, writhing in this slow, contorted agony.
I could hear one of them say that my canopy had a big tear in it. That would explain why the chute had been so wild to handle.
But the rules are simple, and I knew them: if your canopy is uncontrollable, then you have to cut the chute away and release yourself from it. Then go back into free-fall and pull your reserve.
I hadn’t done that. I had thought that I could control it.
I’d been wrong.
I then remember being slumped in an old Land Rover, and driven frantically to the nearest hospital. I was carried inside and sat carefully down in a wheelchair.
Two nurses then wheeled me down a corridor, where a doctor did a rough assessment. Every time he tried to examine me, I winced in agony. I remember apologizing to the doctor, over and over.
Then I remember him wielding a long syringe and jamming it into me.
The pain went instantly, and, in a haze, I tried to stand up and walk. The nurses grabbed me and laid me back down.
I remember this Scottish doctor’s voice (which seemed strange as we were in the middle of southern Africa), saying to me that it would be some time before I would be doing any walking again. And after that I don’t remember much more.
When I woke up a man in a green beret with a big feather poking out of it was leaning over me. I must be hallucinating, I thought.
I blinked again but he didn’t go away.
Then this immaculate, clipped British accent addressed me.
‘How are you feeling, soldier?’
It was the colonel in charge of BMAT (British Military Advisory Team) in southern Africa. He was here to check on my progress.
‘We’ll be flying you back to the UK soon,’ he said, smiling. ‘Hang on in there, trooper.’
The colonel was exceptionally kind and I have never forgotten that. He went beyond the call of duty to look out for me and get me repatriated as soon as possible – after all, we were in a country not known for its hospital niceties.
The flight to the UK was a bit of a blur, spent sprawled across three seats in the back of a plane. I had been stretchered across the tarmac in the heat of the African sun, feeling desperate and alone.
I couldn’t stop crying whenever no one was looking.
Look at yourself, Bear. Look at yourself. Yep, you are screwed. And then I zonked out.
An ambulance met me at Heathrow, and eventually, at my parents’ insistence, I was driven home. I had nowhere else to go. Both my mum and dad looked exhausted from worry; and on top of my physical pain I also felt gut-wrenchingly guilty for causing such grief to them.
None of this was in the game plan for my life.
I had been hit hard, broadside and from left field, in a way I could never have imagined.
Things like this just didn’t happen to me. I was always the lucky kid.
But rogue balls from left field can often be the making of us.
CHAPTER 68
I was in and out of the hospital almost daily from then.
They X-rayed, poked and prodded me, and then they did it again for good measure.
T8, T10, and T12 vertebrae were fractured. It was as clear as day to see.
You can’t hide from an X-ray.
Those are the main vertebrae in the middle of my back. And they are the ones that are hardest to break.
‘Will I walk again properly?’ was all I kept asking the doctors.
Yet no one would give me an answer. And that not knowing was the worst.
The doctors decided it would actually be best not to operate immediately. They deduced (and they were right), that as I was young and fit, my best chance of any sort of recovery was to wait and see how the injury responded naturally.
The one thing they did all keep saying was that I was ‘above average lucky’.
I knew that I had come within a whisker of severing my spinal cord and never moving again.
I became affectionately known as the ‘miracle kid’.
Miracle or not, what I did know was that whenever I tried to move just a few inches to the left or right, I felt sick with the agony. I could hardly shift at all without excruciating pain.
Whenever I got out of bed I had to wear a big metal brace that was strapped around me.
I felt like an invalid. I was an invalid. This was crazy.
I’m screwed.
You stupid, stupid idiot, Bear. You could have landed that canopy if you hadn’t panicked, or you should have cut it away and pulled that reserve early.
As it was, I had done the worst of both worlds: I had neither gone for the reserve straight away, nor had I managed to land the canopy with any degree of skill.
I felt I could have avoided this accident if I had been smarter, faster, clearer-headed. I had messed up, and I knew it.
I vowed that I would never fall short in those areas again.
I would
learn from this, and go on to become the fastest, clearest-thinking dude on the planet.
But for now, the tears kept coming.
I woke in bed, sweating and breathing heavily. It was the third time I’d had this nightmare: reliving that horrible feeling of falling, out of control, towards the ground.
I was now on month two of just lying there prone, supposedly recovering. But I wasn’t getting any better.
In fact, if anything, my back felt worse.
I couldn’t move, and was getting angrier and angrier inside. Angry at myself; angry at everything.
I was angry because I was shit-scared.
My plans, my dreams for the future hung in shreds. Nothing was certain any more. I didn’t know if I’d be able to stay with the SAS. I didn’t even know if I’d recover at all.
Lying unable to move, sweating with frustration, my way of escaping was in my mind.
I still had so much that I dreamt of doing.
I looked around my bedroom, and the old picture I had of Mount Everest seemed to peer down.
Dad’s and my crazy dream.
It had become what so many dreams become – just that – nothing more, nothing less.
Covered in dust. Never a reality.
And Everest felt further beyond the realms of possibility than ever.
Weeks later, and still in my brace, I struggled over to the picture and took it down.
People often say to me that I must have been so positive to recover from a broken back, but that would be a lie. It was the darkest, most horrible time I can remember.
I had lost my sparkle and spirit, and that is so much of who I am.
And once you lose that spirit, it is hard to recover.
I didn’t even know whether I would be strong enough to walk again – let alone climb or soldier again.
And as to the big question of the rest of my life? That was looking messy from where I was.
Instead, all my bottomless, young confidence was gone.
I had no idea how much I was going to be able to do physically – and that was so hard.
So much of my identity was in the physical.
Now, I just felt exposed and vulnerable.
Not being able to bend down to tie your shoelaces or twist to clean your backside without acute and severe pain, leaves you feeling hopeless.
In the SAS I had both purpose and comrades. Alone in my room at home, I felt like I had neither. That can be the hardest battle we ever fight. It is more commonly called despair.
That recovery was going to be just as big a mountain to climb as the physical one.
What I didn’t realize was that it would be a mountain, the mountain, that would be at the heart of my recovery.
Everest: the biggest, baddest mountain in the world.
CHAPTER 69
Sometimes it takes a knock in life to make us sit up and grab life. And I had just undergone the mother of all knocks.
But out of that despair, fear and struggle came a silver lining – and I didn’t even know it yet.
What I did know was that I needed something to give me back my hope. My sparkle. My life. I found that something in my Christian faith, in my family and also in my dreams of adventure.
My Christian faith says that I have nothing ever to fear or worry about. All is well.
At that time, in and out of hospital, it reminded me that, despite the pain and despair, I was held and loved and blessed – my life was secure through Jesus Christ.
That gift of grace has been so powerful to me ever since.
My family said something very similar: ‘Bear, you are an idiot, but we love you anyway, for ever and always.’
That meant the world to me and gave me back some of the confidence that I was struggling to find again.
Finally, I had my not insubstantial dreams of adventure. And those dreams were beginning to burn bright once more.
You see, I figure that life is a gift. I was learning that more than anyone.
My mum always taught me to be grateful for gifts. And as I slowly began to recover my strength and confidence, I realized that what mattered was doing something bold with that present.
A gift buried under a tree is wasted.
Alone one night in bed, I made a verbal, out-loud, conscious decision, that if I recovered well enough to be able to climb again, then I would get out there and follow those dreams to the max.
Cliché? To me it was my only hope.
I was choosing to live life with both arms open – I would grab life by the horns and ride it for all it was worth.
Life doesn’t often give us second chances. But if it does, be bloody grateful.
I vowed I would always be thankful to my father in heaven for having somehow helped me along this rocky road.
After three months in bed at home, I was posted to the UK’s Military Rehabilitation Centre at Headley Court, just outside of London. I could walk around a little now, but still the pain hounded me.
Headley Court and all the staff there were truly amazing. They gave me focus and structure; they gave me clear goals and helped me rediscover my hope again.
The treatment was intense. I often did up to ten hours of ‘work’ a day. An hour stretching on a mat, an hour in a hydra-pool, an hour’s counselling, an hour physio (with the pretty nurses!), an hour of movement classes, then lunch, and so on.
Slowly my movement returned and the pain lessened, until, by the time I left the centre, some eight months after the accident, I really was on the mend.
I knew I was getting better when I sneaked out one night, caught a train home, collected my 1200 c.c. motorbike, and, still strapped up in my metal back brace, rode the bike back to Headley Court before dawn.
The nurses would have gone nuts if they could have seen me, but my motorbike was my independence – and the risky but successful mission also meant my spirit was returning.
I was smiling again.
CHAPTER 70
Just before my accident, I had met a great girl who was a student at Cambridge.
With my newly found wheels, I used to ride like a lunatic up the motorway to see her after our final evening parade at the rehab centre. I would take her out for dinner, sleep over, and then get up at 4 a.m. to race the two hours back down to Headley Court, and morning parade.
The staff had no idea. No one, they imagined, could be that stupid.
It was often so cold in the middle of winter, that I remember riding along, back brace on over my leathers, and one hand at a time resting on the engine to keep warm. Talk about reckless, bad driving. But it was great fun.
The relationship petered out soon after, though – the Cambridge girl was way too clever for me. And I am not sure I was the most stable of boyfriends.
So much of my focus during my recovery was centred around Everest. It gave me something to aim for – a goal – however far away that goal may have been.
No one in my family really took it seriously. I mean, I could still hardly walk properly. But I was deadly serious.
Interestingly, none of the nurses mocked me. They all understood that recovery is all about focus, and goals. But I also sensed that few of them really thought it would be possible.
Out of the many British military attempts, only one had ever reached the summit of Everest. It was achieved by two of the fittest, strongest, most experienced mountaineers in the country.
Both were also SAS soldiers, at the peak of their physical condition. They had achieved it, just, by the skin of their teeth, narrowly escaping with their lives, having suffered horrendous frostbite and lost limbs.
For the time being, that was a bit academic. What mattered was that I had something to get stronger for. However crazy and far away from reality it might have seemed.
Life has taught me to be very cautious of a man with a dream, especially a man who has teetered on the edge of life. It gives a fire and recklessness inside that is hard to quantify.
It can also make them fun to be around.
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br /> I was soon discharged from the rehab centre and sent back to the SAS. But the doctor’s professional opinion was that I shouldn’t military parachute again. It was too risky. One dodgy landing, at night, in full kit, and my patched-up spine could crumple.
He didn’t even mention the long route marches carrying huge weights on our backs.
Every SF soldier knows that a weak back is not a good opener for life in an SAS squadron.
It is also a cliché just how many SAS soldiers’ backs and knees are plated and pinned together, after years of marches and jumps. Deep down I knew the odds weren’t looking great for me in the squadron, and that was a very hard pill to swallow.
But it was a decision that, sooner or later, I would have to face up to. The doctors could give me their strong recommendations, but ultimately I had to make the call.
A familiar story. Life is all about our decisions. And big decisions can often be hard to make.
So I thought I would buy myself some time before I made it.
In the meantime, at the squadron, I took on the role of teaching survival to other units. I also helped the intelligence guys whilst my old team were out on the ground training.
But it was agony for me. Not physically, but mentally: watching the guys go out, fired up, tight, together, doing the job and getting back excited and exhausted. That was what I should have been doing.
I hated sitting in an ops room making tea for intelligence officers.
I tried to embrace it, but deep down I knew this was not what I had signed up for.
I had spent an amazing few years with the SAS, I had trained with the best, and been trained in the best, but if I couldn’t do the job fully, I didn’t want to do it at all.
The regiment is like that. To keep its edge, it has to keep focused on where it is strongest. Unable to parachute and carry the huge weights for long distances, I was dead weight. That hurt.
That is not how I had vowed to live my life, after my accident. I had vowed to be bold and follow my dreams, wherever that road should lead.