by Jason Fox
‘What?’ they said. ‘Why?’
And that was exactly the type of response that had resulted in their removal in the first place. Their attitude wasn’t helping the group and wasn’t in line with the way we worked in the military elite. When Ant later went in to talk to Civilian X, he offered some consolatory words.
‘Good effort out there,’ he said. ‘Don’t feel down about it …’
‘Yeah, but it wasn’t good enough, was it?’ said Civilian X. There followed a moaning rant in which the other recruits still in place were criticized.
In the military elite, those with attitudes like the one displayed by Civilian X rarely last for long. Individuals who act in that way simply don’t make the grade. Those individuals who do make it through with an ego, or some other emotional issue, are often shaped by the humour and self-policing within the group they eventually join up with. For example, I had a bit of a temper for a while when working as an operator. The reaction of people around me soon helped to keep me in check. I was later nicknamed ‘Flash Foxy’ and it became a reminder to relax a little if ever my emotions started to flare up.
When working towards resilience, use a sense of competition and a feeling of pride as fuel. Allow these to drive you on to your goals with quiet strength, humility and purpose. But keep the ego at bay – always.
#4 HUMILITY
One of the great selling points when joining the military elite was the looseness of the hierarchy. Yes, there was a rigid chain of command; there were certain people you had to jump to, no matter what you were doing or where you were doing it. And there were a number of procedures and protocols that had to be obeyed by everybody. (It wasn’t like a Jack Ryan or Jason Bourne drama, where operators ‘go dark’ whenever they feel like it.) But specialist operators were given a far greater degree of autonomy than they were as regular Marines. As I’ve mentioned elsewhere, no one screamed at anybody when they made a mistake – not like they did in the Commandos, anyway. Elite soldiers weren’t expected to stick rigidly to a plan, either. Instead, we were encouraged to think on our feet, especially when operations went wrong. It was then up to us to execute a Plan B as best we could. We were referred to as ‘the Thinking Soldier’ for a reason.
Why was that autonomous attitude important within the Brotherhood? Well, in a leadership sense it created the idea that everybody was equal. There was an atmosphere of humility among the whole group. Nobody pulled rank. The more experienced lads expected to be treated the same as everybody else and preferential treatment was unimaginable. That attitude created a more resilient position because each working unit contained a group of leaders. Sure, within squadrons there were always senior figures; individual units had to be fronted by a team leader. But there was a flexibility within those smaller groups that wasn’t present in the regular military, where rank and authority were rigid and everyone else fell in behind. Within the elite forces, operators were built to be both leaders and team-orientated. That way, if the senior figure in a team was killed during an operation, another person could step in and take charge immediately without any drama.
This attitude also helped with planning and debriefing. In those situations, everybody’s opinions and ideas were given equal weighting because each individual had a different perspective on an enemy operation during a gun battle. A newer face in the group might notice something in an intelligence report that the more senior heads had overlooked, and that one scrap of information might prove vital.
Meanwhile, egotists didn’t do very well in the military elite. Given that the stakes were always so high, there was very little room for anyone giving it the big ‘I am’, and new operators who had a superior attitude were usually cut down to size when joining up with their squadron. Humility would be forced upon them by the group from the minute they walked through the door, usually through a barrage of piss-taking – if the gruelling nature of the training hadn’t thrashed it out of them already, that is.
This process was valuable for one reason: in a war zone, there was zero room for those individuals wanting to play the boss or hero. Instead, humility, equality and a willingness to listen to every voice in the group ensured a strong team ethic was in place. And a strong team ethic led to greater chances of success.
Direct Action
We should listen to everyone working around us. It’s easy for senior figures to think they know best, but another angle or opinion on a situation can bring extra intelligence. Meanwhile, a lofty or superior attitude among senior figures in a team can create resentment and mistrust. It’s a far better tactic to adopt a humble, but still professional, position.
OPERATIONAL DEBRIEF
❱❱ A brotherhood is a key factor in building resilience. The majority of resilient people have a support network of people around them, some of them obvious, others unseen.
❱❱ A brotherhood doesn’t have to be based upon friendship. Shared purpose is the glue that holds most teams together.
❱❱ As with the Commando Spirit, humour and positivity are vital when building a brotherhood. Negativity and defeatist thought is a destructive force within any group.
❱❱ In the military elite, hierarchy sometimes takes a back seat to different ideas and opinions. A strong brotherhood will listen to the knowledge and intel from all its members.
❱❱ A successful brotherhood is one where the achievements and successes of any individual members are celebrated by all. Competition should be used to raise the standards within a group rather than to create division. Put ego to one side.
SITUATIONAL AWARENESS
BUILDING A BROTHERHOOD
So much of what I achieved in the military was a result of being part of a brotherhood. It gave me strength and self-belief. If I could start a business with the lads I used to serve alongside, we’d probably be unstoppable. As a tool for building resilience in war, unity was both robust and multifunctional. I know because I relied upon it during some pretty dark times.
Since overcoming my issues, I’ve used purpose and experience to get me into a good spot, but I’ve also built a resilient team around me. Those people now represent a safety blanket during turbulent times and my current brotherhood includes the team from SAS: Who Dares Wins, dudes I’ve worked with during expeditions and creative projects, friends and colleagues from Rock2Recovery, even mates from the gym. My new collective is varied. It’s constantly changing, too. Most importantly, it’s always there when I need to call upon it.
One of the biggest mistakes I made after being discharged from the military in 2012 was to turn my back on the Brotherhood. At the time, I hadn’t realized its importance. Because so much of the support its members provided was intangible, I underestimated the positive effect they’d had on me during some pretty heavy times. Embarrassed at being diagnosed with PTSD, I turned my back on them. I hid away. I didn’t call anyone to talk and I didn’t ask for help because I worried the Brotherhood might look down on me. Their rejection would have been crushing.
But I should have done exactly the opposite. I should have got in touch. My military family was ideally placed to offer advice and support, and during that time I learned a lesson that would change my attitude towards brotherhood for ever: in order to become resilient, it’s vital to have a team around you.
For the team players among us, this is easy work. But even the most individualistic of characters requires a like-minded other. Need ideas for locating one? Join a team. Involve yourself in a community project. Become active in new ways and with people you might not ordinarily mix with. Link up with a support group, or with people online. No matter what challenges you currently face or how isolated you might think you are, there are a number of ways to find a new tribe. At the very least, a brotherhood will push you towards your goal. But it might just save your life at some point, too.
PHASE FIVE
Supermen and Wonder Women: Understanding the Truths Regarding Men, Women and Resilience
Before we get stuck into the next pillar of
resilience, I’d like to talk about gender.
When Channel Four first announced that women would be competing on SAS: Who Dares Wins I felt a little unsure. Not because the idea seemed off the mark – it wasn’t and I’ve had zero problems with mixing the sexes for the show. As far as I’m concerned, mental strength and resilience aren’t gender-based and women can be just as tough as blokes.
My biggest issue with bringing women into the project was the actual foundations of SAS: Who Dares Wins. The programme was supposed to be a fair and accurate representation of life on Selection, but at that time women had only been invited to apply to the UK Special Forces and as yet none of them had made it through.
That’s not to say the introduction of women hasn’t been a success. It has made for some great telly and some of the female recruits have been strong enough to push on to the very end, outpacing many of their male counterparts. As a result, more and more women have applied to be on the show over the last couple of years.
Meanwhile, I was able to make several observations as to the strengths and weaknesses in men and women when operating at physical and mental extremes during filming, on and off camera. They tended to operate in very different ways but had the potential to be equally robust. Understanding those differences and how to manage them is the key to building resilience in mixed-gender scenarios.
Forget the battle of the sexes: everyone has the potential to be physically and emotionally resilient. In just about every gym in the country, you’ll find plenty of women with the stamina to run over the Brecon Beacons in a time trial or survive ‘the Sickener’ on SAS: Who Dares Wins; blokes too. (The Sickener is a gruelling test of endurance in which contestants are ordered to perform a series of exercises, such as push-ups, sit-ups and load carries, until a specific number of individuals have dropped out through exhaustion.) At the same time, I know plenty of men who are a bag of shit under pressure and women who wilt at the first sign of a challenge. It had always annoyed me that some people attributed these strengths and weaknesses to specific sexes, and I’ve become sick to death of people saying that women are harder than men, and vice versa. Those gags about man flu and blokes being unable to cope with minor illnesses feel outdated these days; likewise the comments about blokes acting ‘like girls’ whenever they’re unable to show bravery or physical strength.
That thinking was proved right when the first season of SAS: Who Dares Wins to include recruits from both sexes was aired. The men and women working through our challenges were equally resilient and since then we’ve included women in every season, in both the celebrity and the civilian versions. On a couple of occasions, women have passed through the final tests. Meanwhile, any argument that men are far tougher than women is quickly ended when looking at one of the most gruelling biological processes a female may go through in life: childbirth. As a father myself, it blows my mind that a woman can endure such an incredibly painful and unsettling experience and yet will often want to repeat it. For nine months of pregnancy, the anxiety must be incredible. I’ve often likened it to some of the missions I’ve been on, flying into a scrap worried there’s a possibility I could get hurt or even die. The thing with pregnancy and childbirth is this: women know it’s extremely likely they’re going to be in pain. And yet they seem happy to put themselves through it to become mothers.
Some scientists believe that women are even genetically more robust than blokes. Certainly, the Canadian-born author, physician and rare-diseases specialist Dr Sharon Moalem thinks so. In 2016, he and his wife, Anna, were involved in a nasty car accident in Toronto. Both suffered nearly identical injuries and were hospitalized for over a month, but Anna recovered more quickly than he did – two weeks sooner, in fact. In Dr Moalem’s book, The Better Half: On the Genetic Superiority of Women, he points to a number of historical events in which females have shown superior levels of resilience. In a 2020 interview in the Sunday Times, Dr Moalem said that one of these episodes took place in the early 1930s during the Soviet Ukraine famine. Millions died, but more women than men survived. Elsewhere, Dr Moalem points out that women live longer than men and they have a higher rate of survival when it comes to diseases such as cancer. They also do better over long-distance sports events such as ultramarathons. In the same Sunday Times interview, Dr Moalem argued:
‘The further the race, the more difficult the conditions, and that’s when men start dropping off. Jasmin Paris [a thirty-five-year-old vet] broke the course record by twelve hours [for the Montane Spine Race along the 268-mile Pennine Way, from Derbyshire to Scotland]. At the rest stations along the way, she was pumping breast milk for her baby while the men were flat out on the floor … One reason [for women’s success in these events] is that women have a lower resting metabolic rate, so they don’t exhaust themselves as easily. The other piece of this puzzle that I looked at was famine survival, for which women have an immense advantage. I think that’s where the ultra-endurance performance comes from.’
This idea was also suggested by a 2017 study into the differences between men and women in moments of historical hardship, such as the Irish potato famine and the Iceland measles epidemic, which both took place in the nineteenth century. Entitled ‘Women Live Longer Than Men Even During Severe Famines and Epidemics’, the report claimed that, while there was no direct evidence of why women are ‘life-expectancy champions’ in such extreme moments in history – because environment and behaviour also played a role – an examination of infant mortality did point to an interesting biological advantage in female babies: they outlived the boys. Nonetheless, in all the events under investigation in the study, women outlived men too. Having disregarded environmental and behavioural factors with infants, the study used biology as its main determining factor. (According to the report, behavioural disparities in babies were minimal, and the kids would have experienced fairly similar environments, regardless of gender.) Among the theories argued by the study’s authors was that oestrogen was known to protect the immune system, while testosterone had the potential to suppress it.
Elsewhere, one other suggestion for females being better at extreme endurance challenges has referred to slow-twitch muscle fibres, of which women have a greater distribution. These muscle fibres use oxygen for fuel, they fire slowly and for long periods of time, delivering steady energy, which is why they’re great for ultramarathon runners, such as Jasmin Paris. The scientific feeling is that women are simply genetically better at dealing with fatigue, which helps when competing in ultramarathon-style events.
So, if durability isn’t an issue, what’s to stop women from making it into the British military elite? I think a lot of the uncertainty when debating whether or not to introduce women has everything to do with the behavioural nuances that sometimes take place between the genders – the kind that can cause problems on both sides. For example, one of the toughest things about working together on an observation post is the intimacy shared by the operators on watch. Being stuck in a hole for weeks on end, surveilling an enemy compound in secret, is rough enough, regardless of who you’re stuck next to. But if someone needs to take a shit, there’s no option to pop off for a cosy sit-down with a book and a roll of quilted loo paper. The awful reality is that we have to drop our trousers there and then, and crap into a sheet of cling film. We then wrap it up and pop the mess into a bag, just in case any tracker dogs are sniffing around nearby. It’s a grim business.
The concern is that such processes might cause issues when men and women are together. As a case in point, during Series Four of SAS: Who Dares Wins, one male recruit bailed on the first morning because he wasn’t able to share a toilet with a member of the opposite sex on religious grounds. Sure, there are plenty of people that would argue they couldn’t care less about those daily events, but the chance that such an issue just might cause a problem has to be taken seriously. When working at the highest and riskiest level, the difference between success and failure often comes down to the tiniest percentage. The slightest distraction –
such as a moment of awkwardness between two people of the opposite sex – could lead to failure. However, with a little preparation and management there are ways these distractions can be overcome, as I’ll explain later in this chapter.
Channel Four did their best to recreate some of the smaller intimacies experienced by elite operators. The men and women shared living quarters with one another; the men fought women in some of the boxing sessions. But it wasn’t the same. That’s not to say the process wasn’t educational in any way. Some men dealt with the situation well, others failed. Some women rose to the challenge, others struggled. Meanwhile, it became clear that there was definitely gender equality in mental resilience. Most of the blokes were physically stronger than their female oppos, as you would expect, but when summoning the courage to jump into a frozen lake or to abseil down the face of a dam, gender didn’t come into play at all.
Interestingly, it became obvious very quickly that the two gender groups on the show were resilient in very different ways. I’ll run through them here, but note: I’ve drawn these observations only from my own experiences on SAS: Who Dares Wins – just in case anyone decides to beast me on social media with any accusations of sexism.
GENDER AND EMOTIONAL CONTROL
Let’s start with some science.
It’s been suggested that the reactions to extreme stress can highlight the emotional differences between genders. In 2015, a research study conducted by the University of Basel theorized that women react more strongly than men to negative imagery; this followed previous evidence that women displayed more facial and motor reactions than men in response to negative emotional images. ‘One possible explanation would be that women might be better prepared to physically react to negative stimuli than males,’ said Dr Annette Milnik, one of the study’s authors. ‘Another explanation would be from normative expectations, with women being expected to be more emotional, and also to express more emotions.’