Natural Born Heroes: How a Daring Band of Misfits Mastered the Lost Secrets of Strength and Endurance

by Christopher McDougall

  “We found it,” Chris said.

  They found what—George’s bridge? I felt twin stabs of envy and admiration. George had never specified where the bridge was or what it was called; to him it was just another handy hideout in a pinch. So Pete and Chris plotted the reference points in George’s account, and then trekked village to village, café by café, asking around for anyone who could help them locate landmarks. Gradually, they connected the dots in George’s twisting escape route until they finally found themselves on the bank of a stream, staring at a span of ancient stone. “We had a fantastic celebration,” Chris said. “We jumped in.”

  It was a triumph of sleuthing, all the more impressive because neither of them speaks Greek. Pete is head gardener at Furzey Gardens, in the south of England, where learning-disabled adults help care for fairy houses and miniature donkeys and artisanal beehives. He is fifty-four and has the graying good looks of an aging folk singer, which is handy, since he plays as a ukulele strummer and ceilidh guitarist. Between them, the brothers White had mastered nearly every humanist talent except foreign languages, so they’d pretty much pinned their hopes of communication on an introductory letter that Chris drafted and got a Greek buddy in Oxford to translate:

  We are historians researching the Resistance, the letter begins. We are hoping to find caves in this area used by freedom fighters….

  “Historians”? The truth was, we were totally amateurish, one hundred percent—and to follow in George and Paddy’s footsteps, it couldn’t have been otherwise.

  —

  The next morning, I caught Chris eyeing my feet. He looked worried, and I knew why.

  We were at the spot where it all began, the beachhead where Paddy and his fellow agents of mayhem first sloshed ashore. They could smell the island before they saw it, the musky scent of wild thyme carrying far out past the breakers. Paddy hopped out of the raft before it beached, and by the time he hit land he was in trouble. The Sliver’s terrain is among the harshest in Europe, and not just because of the vicious climbs; beneath a dusting of sand and soil lurk strips of razory rock that can shred leather like piranha teeth. Just walking those few yards through the surf tore Paddy’s boots to tatters, so he had to spend his first week on Crete hiding in a cave until sturdier footwear could be found. He wore those out in a few weeks, and continued tearing through boots at a rate of a pair every month.

  “Are you okay with those?” Chris asked, his tone making it clear I shouldn’t be.

  “There’s this idea—” I began, but decided I’d better shut up. Chris and Pete had rugged mountaineering boots, but mine were super-lights with a thin sole designed for desert sand. Ever since I found out how often Paddy’s boots were destroyed by the rocks, I’d wondered why the Cretans’ held up so much better. Maybe the difference wasn’t the footwear; maybe it was the feet. Instead of depending on leather, the Cretans relied on skill.

  Soldiers are trained to march, but George was free to tap into an older form of movement now known as Parkour, or freerunning. Freerunners don’t walk across the landscape; they bounce off it, ricocheting along in a steady, hip-hopping, acrobatic flow, treating planet Earth more like a launchpad than a landing point. Xan Fielding, one of Patrick Leigh Fermor’s comrades on Crete, encountered exactly that kind of antigravity gait as he struggled to keep up with an older, heavyset Cretan who “tripped daintily along from boulder to boulder, his body bouncing with every step like an inflated rubber beach toy.” Beefy old Stavros was so springy he seemed weightless and, Xan felt, a little sadistic. “I go much better uphill,” explained Stavros, who then found another gear as the slope got steeper and went even faster. Xan lasted thirty minutes. “After half an hour of crazy racing, tearing through scrub and stumbling over loose earth,” Xan grumbled, “I insisted on stopping for a cigarette.”

  Stavros was using the same technique that a doctor from Boston had observed more than a hundred years earlier when he served as a volunteer during the Greek Revolution. Samuel Gridley Howe was used to watching American troops tromp along in rhythmic formation, but the Greeks were hopping all over the place. “A Greek soldier,” Howe commented, “will march, or rather skip, all day among the rocks, expecting no other food than a biscuit and a few olives, or a raw onion, and at night, lies down content upon the ground with a flat rock for a pillow.”

  Wait. Skipping all day on olives and an onion—mathematically, how’s that even possible? The calories going in can’t equal the energy going out. George Psychoundakis would sometimes shuttle between the caves for twelve hours a day on a starvation diet, yet his mind stayed sharp, his muscles strong, and his endurance unshaken. During one escapade, his only meal was hay soup, made by boiling and reboiling scrounged-up animal fodder seven times to remove the toxins. Yet even on that zero-calorie concoction, he shot off the next day to summit a peak that would stagger an adventure racer.

  The only explanation, I believed, was freerunning. The Greeks were getting free fuel and extra leg protection by relying on an ancient, elastic gait that looked playful but was deadly effective. I’d gotten my first look at freerunning back home in Pennsylvania, when I was in line at a drugstore and suddenly saw two bodies go sailing past the window. These guys had to be six feet in the air, flying by one after the other like they’d been slung out of a catapult. Moments later they reappeared outside the glass doors, this time swinging through the railings of the handicapped ramp. By the time I got to the cash register, I’d watched them hurdle, vault, tightrope-walk, and otherwise wring a crazy amount of movement out of those green bars. I hurried outside to catch them, but they weren’t leaving anytime soon.

  “You start practicing Parkour,” one of them told me, “and whole nights disappear.”

  That I could believe. From what I’d seen through the window, freerunning was anything but free; it looked like a ton of fun, but way too showy. All those jumps and vaults seemed too complicated to allow any kind of flow, like skateboarders who kick-flip their decks over and over and never get the thing to land on its wheels. But that’s because I was making a rookie mistake, my new drugstore buddies explained. You can’t judge Parkour with your eyes; you have to judge it with your body. Once you learn Parkour’s basic moves, the world around you changes. You don’t see things anymore; you see movement. Take that alley across the street, one of them said. What’s in it?

  Let’s see. A Dumpster; some busted bottles; two cars; a cement wall with a fence on top.

  For you. For us, there’s a catpass precision, two Kongs, a running arm jump, and a step vault.

  All I had to do was get some Parkour under my belt, they promised, and I’d see the world the same way. I’d look at a gnarly goat trail on a Mediterranean island, and the crashed trees and tumbled boulders would transform from stuff in the way into stuff to bounce off of. I’d handle the trail the way water handles a riverbed. I’d skip all day on olives and an onion.

  —

  That was the plan, at least. It seemed like a good one, so I threw myself into Parkour and followed it from that Pennsylvania parking lot back to a housing project in London, where an out-of-shape single mom was becoming one of the sport’s finest instructors. But now that I was on Crete, it seemed smarter to keep it to myself for a while. I didn’t want Chris and Pete worrying that I was about to walk into something I couldn’t walk out of—even though, as we squinted up at the snow packed into the high gorges, I was wondering about it myself. Theory, meet mountain.

  We shouldered our packs and set off, following Chris across the slick stones above the black sand beach. “Harsh here,” Pete commented. “See the plants, all covered in thorns? That’s because goats eat everything. Only the prickliest survive.”

  CHAPTER 9

  PHILIP II, WARLORD OF MACEDON:

  If I bring my army into your land, I will destroy your farms, slay your people, and raze your city.

  SPARTANS TO PHILIP II: If.

  WHEN THE BAKER Jack Smith-Hughes got off the boat in Egypt after his escape f
rom Crete, no one gave a hoot what happened to his boots. He was met by mysterious men from London who were intensely curious about two things: tongues and talent. As in: could the Cretans keep a secret? Were they just wild men with muskets, or could they unite into a serious fighting force? In other words, could Jack trust them with his life?

  Because back in London, in a small townhouse on Baker Street with no name or number on the door, a new kind of fighting force was being organized. Officially, it was the Special Operatives Executive, but it was better known by its code name: the Firm. Rumor had it the Firm was authorized to carry out sinister ops like murder, kidnapping, safecracking, booby traps, and sex-for-secrets intrigues. According to one story, the Firm had already deployed fake French prostitutes to stock a German army brothel with condoms soaked in flesh-eating chemicals.

  British officers, after all, were no strangers to sneak attacks; they’d learned from the bitter experience of their own body count just how effective black ops could be. For centuries, the King’s men had been ambushed by Scottish rebels, potshot by American revolutionaries, raided by Boer horsemen, castrated and beheaded by Pashtun tribesmen, sabotaged by Burmese jungle bandits, and bewildered by the IRA’s urban camouflage. Britain was the greatest imperial force on earth, but even giants are vulnerable to the thousand nicks of stealthy amateurs who know the terrain and ignore the rules. It was a lesson that a young cavalry officer named Winston Churchill had barely survived forty years earlier. Britain’s colonial force “can march anywhere, and do anything,” young Churchill realized as he galloped for his life from Pashtun sharpshooters, “except catch the enemy.”

  Now—finally—Churchill was ready to steal a page from Britain’s underground enemies and put a dirty-tricks squad into the field.

  —

  Churchill got lucky. He found two British officers who loved the idea of a dirty-tricks squad so much, they came up with it before he did. Colin Gubbins and Jo Holland had been friends for more than twenty years, ever since they’d met as young officers in Ireland, dodging rooftop gunfire from Michael Collins’s IRA snipers. Nothing makes you appreciate a teacher more than the possibility that he’ll shoot you, so Gubbins and Holland became rapt students of “Mick” Collins’s approach to extraordinary warfare.

  One thing that made the IRA so elusive was a neat trick that Michael Collins picked up from The Man Who Was Thursday, G. K. Chesterton’s classic espionage novel about bomb-throwing anarchists who avoid suspicion by acting exactly like bomb-throwing anarchists. “If you didn’t seem to be hiding,” Chesterton wrote, “nobody hunted you out.” So Mick taught his fighters to draw more attention to themselves, not less; the more visible they were, the less likely they’d be searched and questioned. Mick himself was Public Enemy No. 1, yet he cycled all over Dublin in a sharp gray suit, on an “ancient bicycle whose chain,” as guerrilla-warfare expert Max Boot notes, “rattled like a medieval ghost’s.”

  To Gubbins and Holland, the IRA chieftain was as much a mentor as an enemy. “Forget the term ‘foul methods,’ ” Gubbins decided. “ ‘Foul methods,’ so called, help you to kill quickly.” They were so on fire with the possibilities of irregular tactics, they’d already spent years reading up on Apache warriors and Russian revolutionaries before Churchill approached them at the beginning of the war with the task of creating a dirty-tricks squad.

  Every guerrilla band, they discovered, relied on the same cheap and devilishly effective weapon: doubt. Create enough uncertainty in your enemy and you can paralyze him. Officers will freeze when they should charge; soldiers will flinch when they should fire. “To inflict damage and death on the enemy and to escape scot-free has an irritant and depressing effect,” Gubbins realized. “The object must be to strike hard and disappear before the enemy can strike back.”

  Okay, that’s fine if you’re a Comanche slipping through your native forest and trained from birth in silent stalking. But how—and this is where Churchill’s generals smelled disaster—how does a tweedy London gentleman pull off the same thing in some village in the Balkans?

  Gubbins knew exactly where to begin. As soon as he was tapped to head Churchill’s new dream force, he went hunting for misfits. Combat vets and tough guys he didn’t need; anyone who looked like he could actually take care of himself was red meat for Gestapo spy hunters. When one candidate promised to “blow the head off the first German he sees,” he was immediately dumped. “We don’t want these sort of heroes,” a dirty-tricks trainer explained. “We want them to live and do actions.”

  No, the type Gubbins wanted was…well, it wasn’t something you could put into words. “I say Class X because there is no definition for it,” explained Geoffrey Household, a traveling ink salesman who became one of Gubbins’s early agents and drew on his adventures to write Rogue Male, the classic thriller about a British sportsman who eludes Nazi pursuers by using only his wits and, in a pinch, a dead cat. Class X wasn’t about wealth, title, or power. “We are an oligarchy with its ranks ever open to talent,” Household writes in Rogue Male. It was an invisible something, detectable only by ear. “Who belongs to Class X?” he continues. “I don’t know till I talk to him and then I know at once. It is not, I think, a question of accent, but rather of the gentle voice.”

  The gentle voice? Yes: the tone of someone who, when asked to do and die, would quite like to know the reason why. Geoffrey Household and his generation were young enough to escape the trenches of the last war, but old enough to witness the terror and carnage that comes when countries throw millions of bodies with bayonets at one another. For this new kind of warfare—and this new kind of warrior—there would be no Light Brigade charges into the jaws of death. Class X was all for service, but not for suicide. If you wanted their bodies, their brains were part of the bargain.

  Gubbins knew that trying to transform these skeptical, gentle-voiced intellectuals into icy cold operators was going to be tricky, especially since he couldn’t expect much help from the military. “We’ve only fought decently in the British Army,” one disgusted general sniffed in response to Gubbins’s desire to teach “silent killing.” When the Firm sent out feelers to Edward Shackleton, an air force lieutenant (and son of Ernest, the fabled Antarctic explorer), Shackleton asked his squad commander what it was all about. “Don’t touch it,” the commander warned him. “They’re not the sort of people you want to be mixed up with.”

  So Gubbins bypassed the army and instead looked for help from “the Whore of the Orient”—Shanghai, where the world’s dirtiest gutter fighters did battle in the world’s most dangerous city. Shanghai in the 1930s was ruled by jungle law, to the extent that jungle creatures specialized in gambling, sex slaves, dope dealing, and gang warfare. As Asia’s busiest port, Shanghai bustled with so many addicts, pirates, and waterfront hustlers that by 1936 it could comfortably support an estimated 100,000 criminals. Even its name meant trouble: get “shanghaied” and you’d wake up with a bad headache and a worse surprise, often a few miles out to sea as free labor on a merchant ship. One crime boss bragged that he’d fed a troublesome girlfriend to his pet tiger; another dealt with rivals by slitting their arm and leg tendons and heaving them, alive but helpless, into the middle of a busy street.

  Into this madness strode Bill Sykes and William Fairbairn, the Heavenly Twins. Fairbairn was originally a Royal Marine who arrived in 1907 after answering a worldwide recruiting call by the beleaguered Shanghai police. His welcoming gift was a beating so savage he had to be hauled to the hospital in the back of a rickshaw; during foot patrol along the waterfront, a gang of hoodlums nearly pummeled and booted him to death. During his long recovery, Fairbairn ruefully reflected that none of the training he’d ever gotten—not as a boxer, not even as a frontline soldier—was of any use in the panicky, ferocious chaos of a real street brawl. So once he was back on his feet, Fairbairn began to immerse himself in the science of true gutter fighting. He began by apprenticing himself to “Professor Okada,” a jiu-jitsu expert who trained the Japane
se emperor’s security force. Fairbairn gradually became such a skilled knifeman and sharpshooter that his innovations are still in use by Special Forces a half-century later.

  Fairbairn’s turnaround was so dramatic that he was picked to head the Shanghai Riot Squad. During his thirty years along the waterfront, Fairbairn survived more than six hundred fights, including the time a Chinese bandit’s bullet scorched by his face and singed his eyebrows. His favorite sidekick was Bill Sykes, a slight, friendly gent who looked like he’d be happiest with a quiet pipe and a couple of grandkids. Sykes was a true oddity in Shanghai, partly because his real name was Eric A. Schwabe but mostly because he was an amateur hobbyist in a city of professional badasses. Sykes insisted he was nothing more than a sales rep who liked to hang around cops, and only went by a fake name because the real one sounded too German. Maybe. But whispers of spy service are hard to deny when you go through life with an alias and a talent for stabbing men to death with a sheet of newspaper. (Just fold it diagonally until it tightens into a point, Sykes would shrug, then drive it in right under the chin. Simple, really.)

  By the time World War II began, Sykes and Fairbairn were nearly sixty years old; their hair had gone white, and their sharpshooting eyes now needed spectacles. Still, Gubbins wanted his first class of dirty-trickster recruits to see the old-school stuff in action, so he invited Sykes and Fairbairn to a training camp he’d set up at a hidden estate deep in the Scottish Highlands. “We were taken into the hall of the Big House, and suddenly at the top of the stairs appeared a couple of dear old gentlemen,” recalled a recruit, R. F. “Henry” Hall. The recruits watched, aghast, as their would-be mentors stumbled and fell, “tumbling, tumbling down the stairs”…and then sprang to their feet in a battle crouch, each with a dagger in his left hand and a .45 in his right. The “dear old gentlemen” had gotten the drop on an entire roomful of aspiring secret agents. Pit-pit-pit—a few squeezes of the trigger and the room would be full of corpses.