Life Under Fire

by Jason Fox

  Creating a sense of trust was vital when instilling unity within elite military squadrons. Without it, operators were unable to rely upon one another and missions failed. Meanwhile, a trusting team was more likely to overcome adversity and emerge victorious, because they had confidence in one another.

  In that regard, the people I fought alongside understood the importance of honesty. If an operator made a mistake, they ’fessed up straight away and faced the consequences. If somebody promised they were going to do something, they delivered – even at the lowest level, where cleaning the equipment cage or making a round of teas in the mess was a task expected of all. Individuals who didn’t follow up on a promise to take on one of those jobs were beasted by the group. This happened for one simple reason: if an operator couldn’t do as they’d promised on the base, how could they be relied upon to deliver in a gun battle?

  Meanwhile, anyone caught lying to the lads during a military tour – whether that was a little white lie or an episode of barefaced bullshitting – could expect serious retribution in return. Dishonesty pissed the Brotherhood off and our justice was often swift and ugly. Unpleasant forfeits were dished out as penalties. Some lads had to endure having a hot spoon pressed into their flesh. Others had all their hair cut off. The punishments were mostly delivered with a laugh, but there was a serious message beneath the joking: no one lies. A strong sense of trust meant the Brotherhood could perform effectively, confident in the knowledge that everybody within it was working as they should.

  That attitude helped me to perform, even when I was under serious pressure or scared. Whenever I was point man during an operation, I felt confident that my blind spots were being covered by the lads around me. Later in life, that same attitude prevailed while working on SAS: Who Dares Wins, where I’ve sometimes been tested to the limit. For example, in Series Five, Ant, Ollie and I were asked to perform a backwards dive, in unison, from a ten-metre-high platform into the icy waters of a Scottish loch. The test was in place to ask every recruit still standing a question: Are you going to be there for the person next to you? Three candidates had to do it as a team, and if one person bottled it, they all failed.

  In the run-up to filming, the specifications for the makeshift diving board had been sent in to the production crew. Along the way, somebody messed up; the ledge was positioned two metres higher than it should have been. While that might not sound like too big a deal, it was actually quite dangerous. A lot could go wrong in those two extra metres and there was a very real chance that one of us might over-rotate and experience a very nasty face-plant on the loch’s surface. As it was being built, Ollie, Ant and I looked up at the platform hesitantly. None of us had ever done a synchronized backwards dive before. If one of us choked at the last second, the shot would be ruined and we’d all have to do it again. Weirdly, we were being placed under the exact same stresses as the recruits. There was no time for rehearsals; the tide would soon be going out so everything had to be nailed in one take and there was very little room for error or second-guessing. The mood was bleak at first. I knew it would take a little inner grit to push past the fear. Eventually, we gathered our thoughts.

  Fuck it, let’s do it.

  When it came to filming the jump, I closed myself off. I didn’t talk to anyone. I used fear to sharpen my focus as I prepared for the task ahead. Some of the production crew thought I was being a moody bastard, but in reality I was trying to get my head straight. I didn’t want to bail, I wanted to be there for Ollie and Ant because, at the critical moment, I knew they were going to be there for me. There was trust. The brotherhood within the show would help me to take the leap, and in many ways it wasn’t too dissimilar to a hostage-rescue job, where I knew the blokes around me were going to execute their tasks, regardless of any fears they might have.

  It worked. The three of us stepped to the edge and folded our arms. Ant spoke into the camera and delivered his pre-agreed cue line: ‘You will all turn around … and simply fall.’ And I tipped backwards, knowing the three of us were simultaneously in motion; everybody committed to action together, because it was the only way we knew how to function.

  My trust in the others had allowed me to push past my fear.

  Direct Action

  When looking to build trust with the people you’re operating alongside, offer to take on an unpleasant or tricky task. It will show those around you that you’re not a person who thinks selfishly. The act will instil a sense of trust and prove to everyone that you can be relied upon in ugly situations.

  An example of this is a ‘Bottle Tester’, a challenge established to check the mettle of any recruits hoping to make it through. The one that sticks in my mind the most involved a diving board and a bell. We were asked to take a running leap off the highest board in a swimming pool; as we leapt, we had to strike a bell suspended from the ceiling with our hand. To make it even harder, the test was conducted in the dark. The experience was terrifying. Nobody wanted to do it, but we all understood the consequences of failure. Not only would the DS have looked negatively upon anyone wimping out, but the growing brotherhood within the team would have been unimpressed too.

  The lads who were unable to pass the Bottle Tester were usually kicked off the course, because failing to execute the challenge showed you didn’t have the courage to commit – an essential quality in all military training, and especially so when entering the Special Forces. Likewise the ‘Battle Swimming Test’, where everyone involved had to jump from the high board into the swimming pool wearing webbing, 20lb of Fighting Order and a weapon. Once in the drink, everyone had to tread water for five minutes and then swim for two hundred metres. The examination was concluded with the successful removal of all kit and weapon without touching the sides, before handing everything to the assessor. It was horrible – people lost their shit doing it – but if a person couldn’t pass, they weren’t allowed to progress. The military had lost a lot of personnel on D-Day when inexperienced soldiers had run off their landing crafts and drowned. The Battle Swimming Test was a prerequisite for entry.

  To build trust within your group, find the equivalent of a Bottle Tester and execute it yourself. Take one for the team. Sacrifice a weekend so that a shared project can reach its successful conclusion. Maybe accept the responsibility of a major organizational effort, even though the workload will be painfully high. Whatever it might be, your efforts will build trust as a result. They’ll say loudly to teammates: I’m going to be there for the people around me, no matter what. Your whole group will become even more resilient as a result. In the end, every individual will be more willing to take on unpleasant tasks for the greater good of the team.

  That’s the theory anyway. But what happens in real life when someone isn’t willing enough to step up for the team or a project? As in the Special Forces, showing the courage to commit is vital in any group setting; it builds a sense of brotherhood and strengthens the unit. But if someone in the workplace or team isn’t up for showing the same levels of commitment as everybody else, it’s imperative to discuss their reluctance. If it’s an issue that can be worked on, or worked around, then great. An individual that’s unable to operate on weekends because of family commitments or a health issue, for example, might find they’re able to pick up the slack somewhere else in the group effort. In this case you can work with them. But if the motives are bound up in laziness or indifference, it might be an idea to replace that individual with someone more willing.

  #2 FRIENDSHIP (OR LACK OF)

  There were plenty of people serving in the job that I wasn’t particularly keen on. Lads I’d have hidden from had they walked into the pub: annoying bastards; weirdos; bad apples. That attitude changed in the middle of a gunfight, though. When the rounds started zipping about, I wouldn’t have swapped those annoying bastards, weirdos and bad apples for anybody else because I knew I could rely on them to do what was required – and they could rely on me. It was an unwritten code of trust between us, and one that was stitched in
to the fabric of everything we did. Friendship counted for nothing, at least not in the same way as it did in civilian life. Instead, everybody in a job like mine signed up to an attitude. The group was more important than the individual. And everyone I knew would have laid their lives down to save the people around them. That might sound weird to anyone unfamiliar with such a set-up, but it’s what kept all of us going in tough times, and such an extreme sense of loyalty is almost impossible to replicate in civilian life.

  And that’s the real reason soldiers miss gunfights when they’re away from war.

  The author and filmmaker Sebastian Junger explained this during his 2014 TED Talk entitled ‘Why Veterans Miss War’. In 2010 he’d made the documentary Restrepo alongside the British photojournalist Tim Hetherington – the film was a harrowing glimpse at life within the US Second Platoon, Battle Company, where American troops were tasked with defending an outpost in the Korangal Valley in eastern Afghanistan. The outpost had been named after Private First Class Juan Sebastián Restrepo, a medic who was killed there earlier in the war, and the footage is bleak. The assault on the outpost is unrelenting. During the fighting one soldier is killed and the impact on his teammates makes for distressing viewing. But Junger revealed that all of the blokes within the Second Platoon would have happily returned to Restrepo. Not because they enjoyed the violence, but because they valued the sense of brotherhood distilled there. Junger explained:

  ‘Some of the [troops from Restrepo] got out of the Army and had tremendous psychological problems when they got home. Some of them stayed in the Army and were more or less OK, psychologically. I was particularly close to a guy named Brendan O’Byrne. I had a dinner party one night. I invited him and he started talking with a woman, one of my friends, and she knew how bad it had been out there and she said, “Brendan, is there anything at all that you miss about being out in Afghanistan, about the war?” And he thought about it for quite a long time, and finally he said, “Ma’am, I miss almost all of it.” And he’s one of the most traumatized people I’ve seen from that war.

  ‘What is he talking about? He’s not a psychopath. He doesn’t miss killing people. He’s not crazy. He doesn’t miss getting shot at and seeing his friends get killed. What is it that he misses? We have to answer that. If we’re going to stop war, we have to answer that question.

  ‘I think what he missed is brotherhood. He missed, in some ways, the opposite of killing. What he missed was connection to the other men he was with.

  ‘Now, brotherhood is different from friendship. Friendship happens in society, obviously. The more you like someone, the more you’d be willing to do for them. Brotherhood has nothing to do with how you feel about the other person. It’s a mutual agreement in a group that you will put the welfare of the group – you will put the safety of everyone in the group – above your own. In effect, you’re saying, “I love these other people more than I love myself.”’

  That was certainly my experience, and it’s hard to accurately describe the sensations that a brotherhood of that kind can create. Physically, I found there was always a fuzzy sensation around me, as if a force field had enveloped my body. Emotionally there was trust. I understood that everybody in my unit was the best in the business, and that also gave me a life-affirming boost. The fact that I was considered their equal confirmed I knew what I was doing, too. That realization gave me a surge in confidence. On raids we often felt like a hunting party, albeit a hunting party on the trail of heavily armed prey. But when it came to enhancing resilience, the alliance we shared in the elite forces felt like an extra layer of bulletproof armour. And nobody cared if they didn’t really like the person they were walking behind as they prepared for hostile action.

  Direct Action

  I’ve stated that an extreme sense of loyalty, regardless of friendship, is almost impossible to replicate in civilian life, but that’s because the stakes aren’t usually as high outside of war. Intense experiences – such as gunfights – create intense connections between the individuals living them. In less intense situations, the bonds aren’t as strong, but that doesn’t mean they can’t exist to a degree. And let’s face it: we all have to rely on or work with others who we don’t connect with very well on a personal level.

  The trick to creating unspoken loyalties with those people is to view the bigger picture. What’s our shared objective? There are countless stories of successful partnerships where the individuals involved haven’t got on but they still worked towards a common goal. I know of players within successful ice hockey or basketball teams who have hated one another but still managed to win trophies. Creative forces in amazing bands have travelled in separate tour buses because they didn’t see eye to eye, but they still sold out stadium shows and recorded platinum-selling albums. It’s also common to hear stories about actors falling out on set, but the film they were working on then won an Oscar or broke a box-office record or three.

  In those examples, the individuals involved kept the complaining and arguing to a minimum, coming together to work hard when necessary. So why can’t you do the same? When moving towards an objective with others, you should certainly get stuck in with the people you like, but invest as much time, if not more, building a relationship with the people you don’t click with. In these trickier cases, put your personal differences aside and locate a common motivation within the group for being successful. That shared sense of purpose will help to reach your goals and locate group resilience more effectively. In essence, it’s the ‘mutual agreement’ uncovered by Sebastian Junger in the making of Restrepo. But instead of keeping one another alive, your motivation might be improved reputation, better pay or the satisfaction of seeing a seemingly impossible challenge through to the end.

  #3 PROFESSIONALISM

  Once I’d left the Royal Marines Commandos and moved into the more expert SBS, the levels of performance expected were seriously high, and failure to deliver was treated with brutal remarks. I remember messing up on my first couple of days of dive training. We were scaling up and down the side of a boat and I spun on a ladder, the tide pulling me this way and that.

  ‘Get your shit together, Foxy,’ hissed a bloke as he passed on the rungs.

  I had no idea who it was; the dude was wearing a face mask. But it showed me, in no uncertain terms, that there was no room for failure or scrappy work, even during week one. The zero-tolerance policy for any shoddy performance had a positive effect, though. I had to be professional, and I soon fell into line as I constantly strived for self-improvement. The pressure on me was always high, as it was for everyone, but it was a good pressure. As a result, I and the individual operators around me upped our game. Day by day, week by week, tour by tour, the group became stronger.

  That progress brought a buzz. The military wing I’d worked to get into was small and select; everybody knew everybody and there was nowhere to hide. Some lads might have moved around from unit to unit, but generally there was a much tighter weave between us than there had been in the Marines. For the most part the group felt like home, and it was great to see progress, either as a team or in certain individuals. All the operators felt proud of their squadrons, and while there wasn’t any specific competition or rivalry between the different groups within the military elite, there was a desire to be considered the very best – unofficially, at least. Whenever a squadron executed a mission in particularly dangerous or challenging circumstances, a sense of pride followed soon after – for those directly involved and everyone else associated with the job. I suppose it was a healthy way of pushing the limits in a very unhealthy occupation.

  The high standards expected within the Brotherhood soon helped me to push beyond any boundaries I’d previously imagined for myself. I became more confident within the group. At times I felt fearless. I was able to perform tasks that might have seemed impossible previously because I was being inspired by the people around me, by blokes I respected and trusted implicitly, operators who appeared superhuman. Driven on by thi
s sense of elite professionalism, I became even more resilient. I executed missions that seem unbelievable to me now, a lot of them involving feats of nerve. I remember feeling nervous about certain parachute jumps; edgy. But as I looked around at the other lads gathering their ’chutes together, my mindset changed.

  This is awesome, I thought.

  And then I’d remember.

  Bloody hell. We’re awesome.

  My fear seemed to dissipate. And why wouldn’t it? I was surrounded by the very best. I was protected.

  Direct Action

  Put your ego aside for the sake of the group. It’s easy to become jealous of the successes and results of our teammates within a brotherhood, but negative thought of that kind rarely produces a positive response. Rather than getting caught up in petty rivalries with our colleagues and peers, revel in their success. See their professionalism as a reflection upon your own work and use it as the fuel to drive you on to a better operational ethic.

  All too many recruits on SAS: Who Dares Wins have allowed their ego to be their undoing. One individual – we’ll call them Civilian X – seemed unable to shake their obsession with becoming number one. They tried too hard in all the wrong areas. Whenever a member of us Directing Staff gave instructions to the group, this particular individual would stand alongside us rather than with the team they were working with, and it wasn’t long before that person was thrashed for their behaviour.

  Civilian X acted as if their shit didn’t stink. I suspected that this person was considered the top dog in their profession and wasn’t used to being ordered around. Their bad attitude rubbed us up the wrong way; we couldn’t wait to bin them off.

  But even in failure there was no humility. Most recruits, having been dropped, show disappointment, but it’s always displayed with a modicum of respect for the DS. Instead, Civilian X was shocked by our decision. Having heard the news, this individual became defensive.