Life Under Fire

by Jason Fox

I can’t remember how many times during those thirty-two weeks of Basic Training I could have walked away. There were days when I was brutalized by the elements. On other occasions, the physical demands required of me were intimidating. We were sometimes ordered to tackle an endurance course of tunnels and pools while wearing Fighting Order – 21lb of equipment plus a 9lb weapon. The experience was horrendous. At other times we executed fireman’s carries where we hauled our oppos, plus kit (theirs and ours), across two hundred metres of mud. The clock was running and anyone that failed to beat the required time of ninety seconds was beasted afterwards. On my first attempt I was paired with a mate called Matt who was six foot five and weighed a ton. I picked him up, but my mind wasn’t set right. There had been a flash of self-doubt in the build-up and it quickly told. I didn’t cross the line in time and the physical training instructor dressed me down: I was ‘pathetic’; I’d shown weakness and was letting myself down. The bollocking got to me. I was upset with myself and I definitely didn’t want my friends and peers thinking I wasn’t up to the job.

  I’m not going to pass if I can’t get that bloke down the course, I thought.

  The possibility that I might not make it as a Royal Marine worried me – I was frightened of failure. My dad had already made one or two snarky comments about my chances and I’d got the distinct impression he doubted whether I could pass the programme. So I used the photograph of him in my room as fuel. I wanted to prove him wrong. I reminded myself of why I’d joined up in the first place and imagined passing out on the parade ground in front of my friends and family. The positive, psychological reframing of my situation helped me not to quit and the next time we gathered at the Bottom Field and had to perform the fireman’s carry, I tapped into the bravery already instilled in me during training. I scooped up Matt and flew down the course, crossing the line well ahead of time. The effort bloody hurt, but the results surprised me. From then on, I knew that with determination I could handle anything the Marines threw at me.

  As a motivational tool, the visualization of success was one of the most powerful in my armoury.

  #3 UNSELFISHNESS

  OPPO FIRST, TEAM SECOND, SELF LAST

  As far as I’m concerned, unselfishness is the most important value within the Commando Spirit. The idea of putting your opposite number first – with the team coming second and self last – creates cohesion within a group. In turn, cohesion builds resilience; resilience leads to success. However, the core reason for encouraging an unselfish spirit within the Marines is that it’s virtually guaranteed to develop a strong team effort. During battle situations, a considerate attitude is vital for ensuring that missions are completed successfully, with the minimum number of casualties – it’s far better to act as a group than a collective of lone wolves. A selfish Commando will only look after themselves and soon becomes a weak link.

  A selfless spirit is encouraged within everybody in the Marines from day one. There are the obvious training drills, such as the aforementioned fireman’s carry. But there are also other, more subtle techniques that ensure every individual looks out for their team. When I first arrived at training, I was pretty naive about the type of tasks that were required of a functioning adult, let alone one that was hoping to succeed in the military. Domestically, I was useless. Mum had done so much for me while I’d lived at home that even basic housekeeping duties felt daunting. What I hadn’t realized when first signing up for the Marines was that I would have to master the art of self-care. Learning to look after my kit and polishing my boots became as important as learning to fire a weapon, but I struggled under the pressure. The stress of executing basic household procedures soon overshadowed all the training and caused me to worry when I should have been focusing elsewhere.

  From day one, the recruits were thrown together in six-man rooms where nobody could afford to be selfish. We lived on top of one another; there was no room for privacy. That meant if we wanted a decent night’s kip, it was important that the group all chipped in with the domestic tasks that needed to be checked off every day. At sixteen, I was much younger than a lot of people in the troop so the older recruits, who had more domestic experience, had to help me through. I often struggled with ironing, wrestling with my shirts into the early hours until I became frustrated – I couldn’t get my head around it and the lack of sleep left me exhausted, which then caused me to suffer during some of the physical tests. Eventually one of the older lads showed me what to do and I found myself on an even keel again. But I made sure to repay that favour whenever I could. If ever I had to pick up my boots from the drying room, I always grabbed everybody else’s boots too. During moments when our room had to be cleaned and we were missing a person, I made up for it because to work as a team meant the whole group got to rest up earlier. That recovery period was vital if we were to perform at our best the following morning.

  My unselfish attitude extended on to the training ground. Recruits were constantly ordered to keep an eye on the lads working around them. I’d alert somebody if their pocket was open, their bergen wasn’t secured properly or they looked like a bag of shit, because if one person screwed up we were all punished. A recruit with an unbuttoned pocket was once called out by the senior trainers and then verbally thrashed in front of the group. As a lesson, he was made to watch as everybody else was then physically beasted around him.

  ‘Right, you dicks,’ the instructor would scream. ‘Get into the push-up position. The reason you’re doing this is because Silly Bollocks here can’t get his personal admin straight.’

  Nobody grumbled or blamed the person responsible, though. Instead, we took it upon ourselves to become more vigilant. If we wanted to avoid an afternoon of endless push-ups, it helped to keep an eye on the state of our oppos. An admin-related thrashing always served as a stern reminder of our responsibilities.

  ‘Start looking out for each other!’ our instructor would conclude. ‘Do you understand what we’re trying to say? If you’re unselfish, this doesn’t happen.’

  The troop would respond in unison: ‘Yes, Staff!’

  From then on, everybody would keep a lookout for any unzipped pockets and loose webbing. Silly Bollocks rarely screwed up twice. Meanwhile, the rest of us became even more careful when working through our own personal admin.

  Annoyingly, I’ve since noticed that the idea of unselfishness – oppo first, team second, self last – doesn’t really extend into civilian life. Once I’d left the military, I briefly took on one or two corporate jobs as I tried to figure out what the hell I was going to do next. Almost immediately I was shocked by the selfish attitude of some of my co-workers. They skived, got caught and then blamed others for their mistakes. Whenever somebody screwed up, they rarely accepted the consequences of their actions. People seemed happy for others to pick up the slack for their shoddy work effort. It drove me mad. I knew their lazy attitude wouldn’t have gone down well with the people I’d served alongside because the military consequences of being self-centred were terrifying, especially in a gunfight. There was much more to be gained by owning up to a mistake made on a British Armed Forces tour, because to have knowledge was to have a tactical advantage. For example, in a stressful situation nobody liked being surprised to find that somebody hadn’t mentioned they’d forgotten a piece of equipment or made a procedural error.

  If that sense of shared responsibility were to become immediately prevalent in many businesses, teams and organizations, they’d become more successful overnight. Instead, the every-person-for-himself mindset has been allowed to rule the roost and nobody takes care of their oppo. As a result, mistakes creep in, people fail and performance levels diminish. But encouraging an unselfish attitude in the workplace, or in an activity or event where teamwork represents a powerful value, is always a smart move. In any environment, having someone else’s back usually means they’ll have yours. For example, if an individual offers to ‘spot’ somebody as they lift weights in the gym, there’s a good chance that person will retu
rn the favour. Implementing this one facet of the Commando Spirit should help both of them to train even more effectively and they’ll both become tougher as a result. Remember: cohesion builds resilience; resilience leads to success.

  #4 CHEERFULNESS

  IN THE FACE OF ADVERSITY: MAKE HUMOUR THE HEART OF MORALE

  Why look for humour in war? Well, there’s no point in whinging when life gets noisy or if a situation turns to shit. It doesn’t help an individual or a team if someone starts bellyaching in tough times. One of the reasons the Royal Marines are considered to be one of the most resilient elements of the British Armed Forces is because they’ve been encouraged to bring positive thought into negative moments. At Lympstone, we were trained to be the Thinking Soldier – a term that’s been mentioned regularly on SAS: Who Dares Wins as a way to describe what’s required of any recruit hoping to cut it at the very top. For the Thinking Soldier there’s no room for negative emotion, such as anger or fear. In against-all-odds scenarios he or she speaks positively rather than griping about their fucked-up luck or their mistakes, and gallows humour is often used to ease any tension. They then consider their next steps calmly, executing the plan with confidence.

  There’s a legendary tale of specialist soldiers in the Falklands War hiding behind a wall in the middle of a section attack as heavy gunfire ripped the sky to shreds above them. Rather than freaking out and rushing into their own deaths during a mad charge, they took a fag break, got a hot drink on and assessed their angle of attack – before taking down the enemy soldiers, firing at them in a considered assault. What would have happened if one of them had started moaning or gone into an emotional tailspin? Fear and pessimism is contagious. The chances of them making it out of that situation would have decreased rapidly if one of the lads had decided that survival was impossible.

  This positive mindset was first installed within every Royal Marines recruit during our Basic Training. Humour helped a person to bounce back from adversity or failure because it encouraged them to move on more quickly. When people were struggling with the workload, or we’d been presented with a series of rough tasks, the instructors often made a joke or snarky comment. It was as if they were sending a warning to the troop: ‘Right, we’re going to be throwing you lot into some pretty hairy situations. Sometimes in those hairy situations, it’s going to be pretty dark. You might feel like you’re not getting out of it, but you’ll need to find some positivity if you’re to have any chance of fighting another day.’

  Once the hard graft started, that idea was emphasized further. Don’t get me wrong: to suggest that the work was light-hearted would be wide of the mark. Instead, jokes were applied when appropriate. If anybody screwed up during Battle Physical Training they were rinsed by the group afterwards and nobody was deemed immune from a piss-taking. When the physical thrashings felt unbearable, it helped to have a laugh about it. I remember being holed up in a ditch on a mock night patrol as the rain hammered down. I was feeling cold and miserable. For a while, I half-wondered whether being a Royal Marines Commando-in-training had been the best career move for me. Unexpectedly, somebody nudged me in the ribs.

  ‘You know, Foxy, civilians pay thousands to do this shit …’

  ‘Fuck off, do they.’

  The laughing and joking started soon after and I quickly forgot about being soaked through in a muddy hole at 3 a.m.

  A positive attitude has also helped me outside war. In 2018, I worked on a Channel Four documentary entitled Meet the Drug Lords: Inside the Real Narcos, which required me to meet some pretty intimidating characters in the cocaine badlands of Colombia, Peru and Mexico. There was more than one occasion when I feared getting taken out by a hired assassin. A number of the drug kingpins I met were suspicious of my motives for being there; there was a worry I might be an undercover cop rather than a TV journalist, and I had meetings with masked traffickers where heavy weaponry was always on display. (I was unarmed throughout.)

  During one of the heavier moments in the making of the show, I was called to a crime scene where a torso had been dumped in an Acapulco side street. Unsurprisingly, the sight of a hacked-up body was grim, but as we filmed the police officers working around us, a shout went up that we’d been lured into a trap. There was a real risk that the corpse was bait – a trick designed to lure the cops into the open where they’d make an easy target for any waiting narco. I’d brought a friend of mine along for morale, the former-Royal-Marine-sniper-turned-professional-explorer-and-TV-fixer Aldo Kane. We had been mates for years and I trusted Aldo to watch my back as I interviewed some of the most feared individuals in the drug wars. I also knew that Aldo would lift my spirits during some fairly hairy situations. But moments before we were ordered to take cover from a potential sniper’s bullet, the pair of us had been arguing over a cigarette lighter.

  ‘Fuck you,’ snapped Aldo eventually, storming off to crouch behind a car for protection.

  I took shelter by a brick wall. ‘Yeah? Fuck you.’

  Once we’d realized the severity of our situation, the pair of us calmed down and switched on. The argument was soon forgotten. Before long, Aldo and I were laughing like school kids over our silly tiff, which helped to ease the tension of a potentially dangerous situation. There was a chance we might have been in trouble and so any residual animosity or negative thought wasn’t going to help us if somebody opened fire on our position. We needed to work as a team; we had to be tight, and humour was the best way to swipe away any animosity between us. It was also another healthy reminder of the lesson I’d first learned at Lympstone: Always try to look on the bright side of life, because moaning will never help you in a gunfight. This giggling might have seemed like madness to the film team working alongside us. But there was a method.

  It has been scientifically proven that optimists live longer. Those odds obviously change when optimists are dropped into the middle of a war, but the mentality required to succeed in such a dangerous environment is drastically improved by a ‘glass half full’ attitude. In a 2019 study, researchers from Boston University’s School of Medicine discovered that people who described themselves as optimists were more likely to live to the age of eighty-five or beyond. It wasn’t as if the study relied on a small survey sample, either: over 70,000 people were questioned about their attitudes to living. Their health was tracked afterwards and it turned out that the positive thinkers extended their life span by 11–15 per cent.

  ‘This study has strong public health relevance because it suggests that optimism is one such psychosocial asset that has the potential to extend the human life span,’ wrote one of the study’s authors, Lewina Lee. ‘Interestingly, optimism may be modifiable using relatively simple techniques or therapies.’

  The science as to why optimism helps us to live a longer life isn’t yet clear, but it goes to show that putting a brave face on things can give us all a tactical advantage in tricky situations.

  OPERATIONAL DEBRIEF

  ❱❱ Resilience is best developed in phases, if possible. Start slowly. No heavyweight boxer goes twelve rounds during their first-ever training session. Instead, they build slowly over months and months of preparation, gradually increasing the effort until they’re physically and emotionally ready for a bout.

  ❱❱ Push on through the pain; you might learn something about yourself. A physical twinge or emotional block could be a sign that you’ve reached your limit, but make an attempt to carry on regardless. The sensation might only be a psychological hurdle, one you’re able to smash through. It’s always worth testing your breaking points.

  ❱❱ In a shit situation, think positively. Whinging won’t get you anywhere, but positive thoughts reap rewards. Negativity is contagious. Stop it spreading.

  ❱❱ Visualize the rewards of success. When working through Basic Training I pictured the faces of my friends and family as I passed out as a Royal Marine on the parade ground. During moments in missions when extreme endurance was required, I imagined sitting in a pub in E
ngland when the military tour was completed.

  SITUATIONAL AWARENESS

  THERE’S ALWAYS MORE IN THE TANK

  A soldier with situational awareness has a greater understanding of the moving parts around them, such as what their teammates might be doing and the area they’re moving into. Mental alertness allows them to spot threats and notice potential escape routes or dangerous obstacles within their immediate environment. A good example of situational awareness in action would be a routine patrol in an urban environment. Is a soldier aware of the approaching pedestrians moving up behind him? What about the fast-moving car turning into the street? If the enemy were to strike at that very moment, where would they move to for cover?

  Building an alertness to threat is vital in theatres of conflict: it allows troops to dig themselves out of trouble quickly, plan for troublesome events ahead of time and dissuade the enemy from attack simply by looking battle-primed. In US Marines training, recruits are sent into a woodland environment and given ten minutes to find and mentally note several items hidden in the trees. To simulate the physical exertion of a combat situation, they then have to perform a series of burpees before listing every hidden item they’ve noticed during the drill.

  Installing a sense of alertness and an understanding of our surroundings is vital when building resilience and combat intelligence, so every chapter in Life Under Fire will deliver an endnote of situational awareness – a lesson designed to increase your operational capacity while working under pressure, or a tactic or idea for improving resilience levels.

  One theory that’s naturally instilled by the training in both regular and elite soldiering within the British military is the idea that the body has much more to give, no matter what the brain might be telling you. In reality, the mind is lazy. It wants to give the muscles and major organs a rest in times of physical hardship. But often, while the body might feel like it’s close to breaking point, the truth is there’s often plenty more fuel left in the tank.